Of the Conceptual Confusion of the Phrase “Good without God”

Reprinted from Spinoza’s Lens (2007/8) http://www.clipclip.org/clips/detail/159809/spinozas-lens-good-without-god-r-joseph-hoffmann

Being good is not the same as being ethical ,or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life.

Let me begin with two stories. The first comes from Voltaire, who is reported to have said to his mistress, Marguerite, “Whatever you do, don’t tell the servants there is no God or they’ll steal the silver.”

Another, told by the writer Diderot in the 18th century, is about the journey of Catholic missionaries to Tahiti–a dialogue between a chief named Orou and a priest, who tries to explain the concept of sin.

Orou says that many of the things Europeans find sinful are sources of pride in his island.

He doesn’t understand the idea of adultery, since in his culture generosity and sharing are virtues. Marriage to a single man or woman is unnatural and selfish. And surely there can be nothing wrong with being naked and enjoying sexual pleasure for its own sake—otherwise, why do our bodies exist. The horrified priest delivers a long sermon on Christian beliefs, and ends by saying,

“And now that I have explained the laws of our religion, you must do everything to please God and to avoid the pains of hell.”

Orou says, “You mean, when I was ignorant of these commandments, I was innocent, but now that I know them, I am a guilty sinner who might go to hell.”

“Exactly,” the priest says.

“Then why did you tell me?” says Orou.

These stories indicate a couple of things about the relationship between religion and morality—or more precisely, the belief that God is the source of morality. The first story suggests that belief in God is “dissuasive.” By that I mean, religion is seen as a way of preventing certain kinds of actions that we would do if we believed there was no God. The kind of God religious people normally think of in this case is the Old Testament God, or the God who gives rules and expects them to be obeyed.

Not all religious people believe these rules were given by God to Moses or Muhammad directly, but most would agree that it’s a good idea, in general, not to steal, commit adultery, hate your neighbor (or envy his possessions obsessively), or kill other people.

For at least a thousand years busy theologians have tried to put these essentially negative rules into more positive form: for example, by saying that people should act out of love for each other, or love of God, and not out of fear. Most Christians would say this is the essential difference between the laws of the Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus in the New. But they are only partly right. Both books of the Bible and all of the Qur’an emphasize fear of God, judgment, and the rewards and punishments of the hereafter as goads to repentance, leading a better life, giving up your rotten ways. Even the books of the Bible that are tainted with Greek thought—like the Book of Proverbs–emphasize that “the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” So it’s mischievous to say that fear and trembling aren’t used for moral leverage throughout the Bible.

The God of the book religions, regardless of theological attempts to transform him into a God who loves the social agendas of the twenty-first century, is not a god who would understand the phrase “unconditional love.”

Modern Christians, Jews, and the Muslims who focus on God’s compassion and mercy, are required to ignore a whole cartload of passages where God reminds people, like any ancient father (and not a few modern mothers), that his patience is wearing thin. Jeremiah 5:22 (NIV) “’Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’” The answer is a deafening: “Yes.” Remember the flood? Remember the first born sons of the Egyptians? Remember the plagues and famines? Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? You love this God because you ignore his commandments at your peril. He has chosen you; you have not chosen him, and he can withdraw his favor whenever he wants. (As Jackie Mason used to say, “You look at Israel and you have to wonder if maybe the Samoans aren’t the chosen people”).

The theme of the oldest books of the Bible is very plain: God “loves” (more precisely, he watches out for) the ones who keep his commandments and punishes those who don’t. –A simple message that theology has had two thousand years to massage. In fact, the New Testament belongs to the history of that massaging process. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the first spin doctors–re-writing the script, transforming Yahweh into a compassionate conservative.

But let’s be clear that the hero of the story is a typical Near Eastern tyrant: powerful, vengeful, jealous by his own admission, proprietary (“His is the world and all that dwells within”), and though slow to anger, fearsome when his wrath is provoked, watchful to point of being sleep-deprived (Ps 121.4). This God is not a model for progressive parenting; he’s not interested in the self-esteem of his people, has not read Dr Wayne Dyer, and will not break down weeping on Oprah! for being compulsive. The message of God the Father is, “Do this or else.”

A larger question posed by Voltaire’s little story is whether the motivation of fear is ever ethical. If you do something because there is a threat of pain and suffering if you don’t, or if you hold off doing something you would really like to do—for the same reason—are you being moral?

What Voltaire is really saying—as Nietzsche, Marx and Freud would later say—is that religion is useful for keeping certain kinds of people in line. Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- century European society could be neatly divided into those who knew better and those who served the ones who did. Marx went so far as to suggest that the social deference the moneyed classes paid to religion was simply intended to convince the lower classes that religion is true—in fact, that’s exactly what Voltaire is saying: Religion is a mechanism used by the knowledgeable to keep the unknowledgeable in their place. It has social advantages—Marx’s Jewish father conveniently “converted” from Judaism to the Prussian State Church in order to go on working as a lawyer. And we all know the younger Marx’s most famous verdict on the topic: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.” Religion functions through its dominant image of God and his punishments to make people “good” in the same sense servants, dogs and disobedient wives were made to be good in the ancient world. A later era would use the word control mechanism to describe this kind of incentive.

What’s missing from this critique, of course, is the question of whether a “religious act” can ever be a “moral act.” Clearly, belief in God (or a specific kind of God) provides behavioral incentives. As a system of control based on fear, religion keeps people from “being bad,” or at least doing things considered bad by the controller. But it does this inefficiently. Clearly it offers people an explanation for why they behave in certain ways, ranging from the “Bible tells me so” to “Papa dixit”—the pope says so. As a means of consolation, it teaches people to deal with the fear and insecurity created by oppression. But it does this at the expense of self-fulfillment, wholeness. It is the security of an abusive relationship, where comfort consists in being able to predict and manipulate eruptions of violence. In fact, to look back to the sacrificial origins of religion, this was precisely its social role. Even the story of the crucifixion, which many people believe is all about love and forgiveness, is the story of a God so angry at the sinful imperfections of humanity that he transfers his violence to his only son, who becomes the redemptive victim—the buy-back price—for sins he didn’t commit.

crucifixion

Let’s call this religious approach to behavior “Being Good.” Being good is not the same as being ethical or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life. It’s a mother wagging an imperative finger at a three year old and saying “You’d better be good.” It always involves threat and reward. Two generations ago, the image would have included threats of belts or woodsheds spankings, going to bed without dinner. I guess, unfortunately, in some places it still does. But you don’t get ethics out of this. You get obedience and submission.

What about Diderot’s story, the one about the missionary and the tribal chief? If the story from Voltaire suggests that religion is dissuasive and coercive, Diderot’s suggests another reason why religion doesn’t sit well with ethics: Religion is prescriptive, and like politics, it’s local. In 2000 years of massaging the message, it has changed because human beings, the true makers of religion, have changed their minds. Most of the biblical rules about property, goods and chattels, adultery and incest were typical throughout the Middle East; in fact, as Freud recognized, the taboos against murder and incest are the earliest form of laws in some tribal societies. But the books we call the basis of the “Judaeo-Christian-ethic” weren’t written by tribes—tribes don’t write. And the body of laws we call the Ten Commandments contain lots of rules that have been quietly put in trunks and sent to the attic.

For example, we all applaud the wisdom of the commandment that says, “Honor your father and your mother.” It has a nice ring, especially during school vacations. But Deuteronomy 21.20 says that disobedient sons should be stoned in front of the elders at the gates of the city. And Exodus 21.17 says that anyone who insults his mother and father shall be put to death.

As for adultery, which belongs to ancient property law in the Jewish system, the punishment is stoning—normally only for the woman (Deut. 22.21). In Deut. 22.28, the penalty for raping an unbetrothed virgin is a fine of 50 shekels–plus taking her on as a wife. There are laws protecting the rights of the firstborn sons of unloved wives when a man has several wives (Deut. 21.15) and even laws about how long a Jewish warrior must wait (one month) before he can have intercourse with a woman he has captured in battle (21.10). According to Leviticus 19.23, raping another man’s female slave is punishable by making an offering to the priest, who is required to forgive him. There are laws covering how long you can keep a Hebrew male–slave—6 years—but if you sell your daughter as a slave to another man she cannot be freed, unless, after the master has had sex with her, he finds her “unpleasing”—in which case she can be put up for sale (ransom) (Exodus 21. 7ff.). On it goes—throughout the books of the Torah—the Law.

Sarah, Abraham, and his concubine Hagar

The sheer ferocity of the God who gives, or rather shouts these commandments to his chosen people is distant from our time. The voice is unfamiliar: Failure to do what he says results in terror: In fact, that’s the very word he uses: “I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting disease, recurring fever, plagues that will blind you….those that hate you will hound you until there is no place to run; I will multiply your calamities seven times more than your sins deserve. … I will send wild beasts among you and they will tear your children from you. … If you defy me , I will scourge you seven times over. …I will send pestilence …cut short your daily bread, until ten women can bake your bread in a single oven. … I will punish you seven times over. … Instead of meat, you shall eat your sons and your daughters.” Don’t take my word for it: read Leviticus 26. It has literary flair.

The God of the Old Testament is a three dimensional figure—far bigger than Zeus and twice as officious. (Perhaps Zeus was able to give freer rein to his sexual appetites, whereas Yahweh limits himself to one Galilean virgin?) And look though you may, you will not find these laws “repealed” in later books, at least not in the way modern laws can be amended and repealed. But it’s absolutely certain that anyone who tried to obey these laws in twentieth century Europe or America would be slapped into jail, and the defense “The Bible told me so” would not be an adequate explanation for what we routinely call “inhumane acts.” –Try posting these commandments above the blackboard in your neighborhood school or the court house wall above the judge’s bench.

One way of charting the so-called progress of western civilization is to trace how human values eventually triumph over the ferocity of religious law. The kind of morality that Diderot’s priest represents, like the morality of the Bible, and even the reductionist versions of biblical and Quranic teaching that modern religious denominations espouse, is not ethics. It is not ethics because ethics can’t be grounded in what I’m going to call “prescriptive dissuasion.”

If you say to me, “Well: no one believes these things any more,” then I say “Good for us for not believing. Then time to stop letting the Bible be the source of moral authority when the conduct of its hero is not up to our standards of civil behavior.”

If you say, “There is great wisdom and poetry in scripture,” then I say “Please then, let’s treat it like other great books that express ideas, customs, and values that have no authority over how we lead our lives.” I have no quarrel with those who want to appreciate the Bible as a product of its own time and culture—with all the conditions that attach to appreciation of that kind. My quarrel is with people who want to make it a document for our time and culture.

And I suppose my quarrel extends to people who consider themselves experts, when what they are really expert in is reading around, into, or past the text. Liberal theologians are immensely gifted at reinventing the God of the Bible in the light of modern social concerns. But the project is a literary–not an ethical one. At another extreme, which is really a false opposite, are the fundamentalists who claim to defend the literal truth of the Bible while ignoring two-thirds of the text and focusing on the convenient “literal” truth of bits and pieces.

Can the Bible make you good? If you accept the framework, beginning with Adam and Eve, and the creation of a race doomed to be perpetually three years-old and scolded into obedience, I suppose it can. Would you want to be good without the Bible: No, because even without the dominance of a sacred text, “goodness” stems from authority rather than conscience and reflection: good dog, good wife, good Nazi, good Jew.

Reduced to basic form, the temptation in the Garden of Eden is a story about a cookie jar and a sly, accusing mother. But it takes more than avoiding mousetraps for a choice to be moral or an action to be ethical. A moral act is one in which you can entertain doubt freely, where a person confronts human choices and human consequences, personal and social.

To be fair: the Bible and its cousins are important records of those human choices and their social consequences, coming from an age which is no longer relevant to us. To make it a book for our time is an abuse of the book and a misunderstanding of its importance. More depressingly for some, perhaps, there will probably be no book to replace it. Not even one by a secular humanist. But there will be wisdom, and reason and choice-making, and that will make us humanly better, perhaps even virtuous. Pray that nothing–no power or text on heaven or earth–will arise to make us “good.”

Interrogating Tradition: A Prospectus for Humanist Studies*

*Lecture given at Goddard College, October 30, 2009 launching the Goddard Humanist Studies Initiative.

In 2004 I became chair of the department of Religion and Human Values at Wells College in upstate NY, not far from Ithaca where I now live. I was intrigued by the name of the department: most colleges and universities of any size and distinction have departments of religion, or departments of religious studies, or in some cases, Harvard to name one, programs in the “study of religion,” but a department of religion and human values–how intriguing, how mysterious. What’s going on here I wondered. I asked a colleague how the juxtaposition occurred and she told me that once upon a time the idea had been to organize teaching around the conversation between the ideas and ethical practices that we normally associate with the world’s religious traditions, and those that emanate from the secular realm.

Over time new faculty came and went, the department chair who had proposed the name became a born-again Jungian and absconded, leaving her legacy behind her along with a patchwork of courses that looked very much like any other religious studies program I had known. As I proceeded to rework the curriculum, I kept coming back to the original idea and tried to sort out in my own head what was wrong with it.

The problem was that if you call something “religion and human values” it assumes that there are two independent and perhaps antagonistic streams of thought and action that grow up quite separately from each other, one mired in an interesting but fundamentally mythic or discredited worldview, the other socially responsible, scientific, rational and relevant.

But those of us who think of ourselves as philosophers, historians, social scientists or artists know that it isn’t that simple. Religion isn’t a “knowledge pool” and secularism doesn’t spring like the ever reasonable Athena from the head of all powerful Zeus. The relationship is more complicated and is more evolutionary and erratic than symmetrical.

Having spotted the problem in a curriculum that didn’t live up to its name and probably never could, I was still intrigued by the fact that if we simply dumped the name human values we would lose something of importance. Philosophy as an academic profession cared more about technical philosophy and had spent the last fifty years trying to become a science. Religious studies had bought phenomenology hook, line and sinker and now considered itself primarily a descriptive field, wedged somewhere between literary studies and anthropology. True, our best colleges offered thematic writing seminars and various opportunities to look at topics and issues from cross-disciplinary angles. But where in the college and university curriculum would “human values” get a fair hearing? Where would students learn that at a macro level, they were the beneficiaries of a long struggle for humanistic and secular learning—something the modern university quietly embodied but failed to express.

In 2006, I became a vice president of the Center for Inquiry, tasked with building up its educational offerings. I brought the “Wells conundrum” with me to the job. In fall of the same year I flew to Miami for a meeting with a donor and a dean at the University of Miami to see whether an alliance could be forged between the Center and the University with the specific purpose of creating a program in human values or humanist studies. The dean, who remains a close friend, was direct, skeptical and helpful: He said in so many words that the modern research university is an industrial, money-making entity. It is interested in rankings, faculty development, growth, and visibility. In short, it has to be competitive with institutions that look just like it.

Moreover, he said, how is a program in humanism any different from what the college or university does every day in its scores of departments, research programs, centers and consultations? Isn’t the promotion of reason and science not only among the goals a university aims to achieve but the foundation of a good university’s existence?

I have to say, I was slightly stunned. Stunned because the answer to the question (yes) is actually strongly implied in the premise. The assumption is that the modern university is humanistic, secular, committed to science and reason, or at least to certain values that make its work possible and its product worth paying for. The further assumption is that whether you are studying Romance Linguistics or Creative Writing, biochemistry or technical theater, you are the beneficiary of this implied humanism.

So I said to the dean that nowhere in this industrial competitive model is the working assumption made clear to students. For the students, the supermarket is all about choice and the product is groceries. Increasingly it is the aggregation of disaggregation and the role of the university or college is to provide maps in the form of distribution requirements and maximum variety rather than a learning prospectus. What they are missing is any careful reflection on why education is valuable to begin with, why the products of human culture are worth studying, why we need to think of the past as more than a series of ancient embarrassments that we need to fix, or why the future is not necessarily a smooth sea called scientific progress leading to a better world.

Unfortunately, unless human values, the study of the secular, and an explicit humanism can be brought forward as integral to whatever the overworked phrase liberal education means, the most visible, well programmed, highly ranked university or college in the world will not be doing its job.

I had come a long way from puzzling over the phrase to recognizing that the poor dear Jungian who tried to slot it into the curriculum had been onto something.

But what?

The term human values has been around for awhile. The Princeton University Center for Human Values was founded in 1990,

“through the generosity of Laurance S. Rockefeller ‘32, to foster ongoing inquiry into important ethical issues in private and public life and supports teaching, research, and discussion of ethics and human values throughout the curriculum and across the disciplines at Princeton University.”

Partly this was done, if you examine the history of the Center, to provide the sort of integrating counterweight to the movement of disaggregation I was just describing. The problem, however, is that the Center was conceptualized as a research and “special events” agency, and research centers devolve quickly, even with the best of intentions into restaurant menus: lectures on fascinating topics that soon begin to mirror the private interests of big-name speakers.

Without saying that this has what has happened at Princeton, I invite you inspect the most recent lecture schedule posted on the website. What you will find are lectures on “Economic Freedom within the EU,” one on “Bioliberation,” and quite a few called “title to be announced,” strongly implying that the status of the speaker outweighs any systematic effort to link topic to vision.

I am tempted to say Let Princeton be Princeton, but rather like the situation at Wells College, there is a tendency to use the term human values so generously that its key markers—humanism and secularism are hardly mentioned at all.

What Mark Schulman, the president of Goddard, and I began discussing over two years ago now is the possibility of creating a degree program where these markers are front and center-not embedded in a general studies program, not lost among the shelves of the educational Wal-Mart, not used as a counterpoint to religion or a synonym for science or just another way of talking about ethics.

But before that discussion can take place, a little positioning “beyond Princeton” is necessary–on the premise that it’s better to avoid Alice’s situation in that famous dialogue with the Cheshire cat: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?,” Alice asks. “That depends a good deal on where you want to go,” says the Cat. “I don’t much care where,” replies Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” says the Cat. For purposes of what comes out of this dialogue, direction and definition matter because we have some idea of where we would like to end up. Otherwise, as Cicero said, “Stercus accidit.”

In the first place, human values are cultural. They may lead to the writing of books, including ones considered sacred, but they do not emanate from those books.

They are not revealed but developed. The basic principle in the human sciences is that we make culture and live in it and through it. The human values are the ones that we bring with us to this process.

Because we’re in culture “like” a fish is in water, there are key elements of our life that we don’t question, analyze, or think very much about. (The story about not telling a bee it can’t fly is a case in point). We value life, we value the continuation of life—not just our own but the lives of others and the life of the planet and the environment that supports it. And we know that most other values we can name originate in that primary valuation and that the various specialized cultures (agriculture, horticulture, techno-culture) support different parts of our existence in different ways.

But we’re not fish and we’re not bees. Human values are the values that make us human. The question of human values, as we examine the various discrete cultures that touch our lives is whether there is anything that rises above the specialized value-systems that emerge in relation to the demands of each community. If all systems of culture are need-driven, if (as we think) needs differ from culture to culture, and if we are the makers and managers of culture, isn’t the fundamental value competition and everything else piety? An impressive number of thinkers have thought so.

I am not asking that question just to say No (too pious) but to say that that’s the kind of question that would arise in this program. It is the kind of question that arises for a humanist–for someone interested in interrogating and not merely analyzing tradition.

What a humanist studies program will look like will depend on its incorporating core questions about the human past, the human condition in the present, and a vision for the future. That’s not just a cliché way of thinking about a curriculum as an obligatory three-part soul but a way of thinking about its objectives. It describes three dimensions or areas of interrogation:

1) Human achievement. Take this, broadly speaking, as the historical or social-historical dimension. Humanism is not a glorification of the human past and the accomplishments of great people. The Great Man theory of history had its heyday in the 19th century and educational programs are still recovering from the model and the assured conclusions concerning what constitutes greatness. When politicians in Washington or Moscow “invoke” national mythologies or impose patriotic categories on contemporary issues, it’s the archaic-categorical version of history they invoke. Since human values is a critical and question-provoking field, the emphasis for a student is to develop skills in analyzing and interrogating a whole range of artefacts—different expressions of material culture, ideas, ideologies, religious beliefs, political opinions and social experiments. It is multidimensional and layered rather than linear and chronological.

Historical study—which would include everything from archaeology to political studies and the history of ideas—suggests that we value memory: we write things down. We pass things on—everything ranging from nursery rhymes to myths, prejudices, superstition to battle stories and folk wisdom and techniques of war. The cultural world is composed of these memories in various forms—books, poems, art, cemeteries, ruins, myths, rituals. What do we value about the past that makes memory significant? How does the study of human achievement and memory integrate our knowledge or, in some sense, help us to understand the kind of creatures we are and the challenges we confront? Are we capable of reaching a deeper understanding of human achievement than we get in the average lecture on the Crusades, or the nineteenth century novel, or a power-point on the Battle of Marathon? The interrogation of the past, to be straightforward about this, is not the memorization of data but an experimental approach to a shared global history.

2) Human Responsibility. Just as we value the past, we have also valued certain forms of behavior. During our time on this planet, we have obeyed the customs and taboos of the tribe, the rules of priests and kings, and the commandments of various gods, and the ideologies of secular states. If one thing has characterized our behavior in general right up to the present day, it is that we have seldom thought of ourselves as the sources of these norms and regulations, and we have just as often been their victims as their beneficiaries.

It is easy to understand this procession from god-given to legislative as the swell of progress from fear to understanding. And that is certainly a theory that many secular people cherish. But just as we can point to the creation of social networks and the creation of cities as a chapter in the history of human achievement, we also have to point to war, class division, sex and gender inequality, and economic exploitation of whole human populations as failures of secular idealism.

That is to say, while we are ethics-making creatures, we are also often recidivist in the way we approach the question of responsibility. If responsibility is a human value, how can we approach it without a systematic knowledge of various political, theological and philosophical attempts to ask the question that Aristotle subsumes under a discussion of happiness and the good life for the human animal? What would that systematic approach look like? What sorts of questions would we expect a student enrolled in a humanist studies program to be asking, and how would those questions be translated into action, leadership, and the education of others?

Many humanists just now are talking about the Good-without-God craze, but I happen to think that the entire campaign is capital misspent. If there is a real correlation between human good (that is, the good for human beings) and human goodness, the God-question doesn’t arise at all. It should not dominate the interrogation of human responsibility for humanists since the question of “how ought we to behave” cannot be defined antithetically to settled dogma and metaphysics that put human beings in inferior positions. Put a bit more cynically, and epistemologically: how does the humanist know he is good without God?

3) Finally, Human Imagination. Yes, the vision thing. The utopias and dystopias, Star Wars and Heavenly Reward. I tend to think that the only difference between the vision of a science fiction writer and the vision of the author of the Book of Revelation is that the latter is conscious fraud (well-intended perhaps) whereas a lot of science fiction is studiously non-fraudulent and honest.

But human imagination encompasses a wide variety of forms, and incorporates both the proposals of science and theories about our ability to imagine the future—apocalyptically, rationally, or idealistically. It may be true that we can’t depend on the Congress of the United States to imagine a universal health care plan, but historically human beings have imagined worlds without war and wars between worlds. Imagination has been used to warn, excite, scare, destroy, and to reveal possibilities that would have seemed impossible if we were simply the pawns of history and the victims of the past.

We have not only imagined creator gods but a creatorless universe whose beginnings are subject to various imaginative solutions. And we need to recognize that the sciences and not just the arts rely on this value and that it worth exploration in its own right. That sentiment is encapsulated in Einstein’s famous comment, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” A certain psychological bias, familiar to humanists, may raise a flag on this value: after all, we have imagined all sorts of things, ranging from heavenly patriarchs to savior gods to a world without Jews to monsters in the deep.

But the fact that we have envisioned a full range of possibilities and have expressed it in art, literature, science and religion doesn’t diminish the need to interrogate the value. We need to encourage an awareness in the student of human values the central role of the imagined world because as Carl Sagan commented a generation ago, “imagination will carry us to worlds we can never see but without it we will go nowhere.”

These are the categories through which I think a coherent program in humanist studies can be developed. They are broad not because generalization is a good thing but because the purpose of such a program is to stress the unity of areas of discovery that are atomized in the departmental nature of the modern university.

You’ll notice that throughout this treatise there is a strong emphasis on the interrogation of tradition. I have refrained deliberately from using the word skepticism because “skepticism” is a habit of thought whereas interrogation is an active and constructive skill. Today especially skepticism is simply identified with what is not believed, what is capable of being disproved or debunked. Education needs to do more than train the seven year old not to believe in the preposterous or to look for card in the magician’s left hand when the right one is in motion. Interrogation is the constructive assessment of what is given to us in every area of knowledge and its motive force is curiosity and the desire for truth–which is the end of knowledge.

Ideally, all higher learning should emphasize interrogation, but it is difficult to move beyond canons, bibliographies and the accumulated structure that defines the modern university and college to that further horizon. Francis Bacon did it in the Novum Organum of 1626 when he challenged the grip of scholasticism and church authority on university training at Oxford and Cambridge, the reliance on authority and tradition and the dark suspicion of new forms of learning—especially experimentation.

Goddard’s program in humanist studies will not break the grip of specialization, but it will offer a humanistically critical approach to sources and authorities. We want to give students who are not content with compartmentalized learning and information a chance to be humanists in two senses: widely read and literate in a variety of disciplines, and highly critical of received opinion and tradition through developing the art of interrogation.
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On Not Leaving it to the Serpent: Of Paul Kurtz

In ancient mythology the serpent has a bad reputation. Conniving, cunning, deceitful, and to use the term applied to him in Genesis 3.1, “subtle.” A biblical commentary I once used, of the type that did not distinguish between translation and interpretation, said that the serpent’s assault on Eve “awakens in the woman a desire for the fruit of the forbidden tree and arouses her inchoate feelings of rebellion at being denied its fruit…Her exaggerated answer to the serpent is the avenue to further temptation.” (ICB, 1971, 5)

Yes, this is theology. But at one time or another, we all behave like serpents and we often behave like Eve. In an earlier post on the subject of Paul Kurtz, I behaved like a bit of both. My biographical note on his ouster from the Center for Inquiry was seen as a “living obituary” as one blogger put it, as uncharitable, ungrateful, certainly onesided, possibly (in part) untrue.

The most subtle of all the creatures.

In biblical terms, it gladdened his enemies and filled the hearts of friends (including many mutual friends) with grief, in part because Paul and I have been extraordinarily good friends for three decades.

More recently, I have experienced that most scriptural of emotions, repentance. As Israel learned, repentance can only be experienced backwards. After the die is cast, the walls toppled, the city in ashes. That is what I feel I am witnessing now, now that the lion has slinked out of Judah. Now that a new government has arisen, “that knew not Joseph,” or rather, failed to respect the memory and work of Paul Kurtz.

I have watched with shock and disbelief at what has happened within his organization since his dismissal from senior management, from the board, and from the editorship of Free Inquiry. Partly because he has reacted towards my critique with grace and a kind of forgiveness that belies almost all the harsh things I wrote in my June article. I think the harshest thing he said was that my books didn’t sell. They don’t.

Paul Kurtz, to be fair, has never been an enemy of religion. He has been a man of old fashioned faith in the power of reason and has fought for its broader application in areas of life–especially ethics and education–where religion has often dominated public discourse.

He has reminded people (again, with almost nostalgic passion) that America was founded as a secular democracy, not as a Christian state, and that both religion and the state benefit from the wall of separation called the First Amendment.

Has he sometimes deposed (roared loudly), in moments of despair at the inroads of religious zealots and mused that religion itself might be the problem. Of course–and so have I. Has he sometimes made extravagant claims for secularism at the expense of recognizing the many important contributions religious values have made to American culture and society (as Tocqueville thought, providing a buffer against barbarism that in Europe was provided by “culture”)? Sure. I have spent (and hope to spend many more) years having that debate with Paul. I will probably not persuade him to change his mind.

The CFI summer session 2005

The point is, despite a kind of infuriating idealism and lapses of commonsense (the sorts of things I see every time I look in a mirror) Paul has been devoted to the high road in making his case for “secular humanism.” It has been a complicated case because it was never raw atheism he advocated; it was never that simple. He did not want the Center for Inquiry to be identified with the crudity and blazing saddles approach it has adopted since his departure.

Blasphemy Day: The highpoint in social critique

When the doors of the Catholic Church swung narrowly open in the 1970’s to permit a dialogue between the Church and Unbelievers, Paul Kurtz was the first to take on the dialogue, and I daresay, if the church had been serious, would have been one of the last to give up the challenge.

Le Cardinal Poupard

Kurtz, if I can resort to a usage he might object to, was a witness, an evangel. He felt that the voice of secularism and unbelief should be a certain trumpet in a society of many voices: If Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Protestants and Scientologists have voices, surely the secular humanist has something to say and a tradition to defend.

Amazing that in the two hundred years of the republic this startlingly inherent idea did not, really, have a champion before him. All the others, from Paine to Ingersoll were mere lecturers, not builders.

It was an uphill battle, if the polls are to be believed. Trends in the late nineties seemed to reverse the idea that secularism and unbelief were gaining ground–religion, especially in its conservative iterations–was robust and well. It became, as I wrote in my earlier piece, more difficult to understand where the discussion might lead.

Unfortunately, it led to the New Atheism–a brand of intellectual rejectionsim that holds (forgive my simplicity) that religious people are stupid. Because they are stupid (the tempting discourse ran) they are also dangerous and almost every moral blemish or educational pothole can be traced to their stupidity. The premise itself is inane.

The idea of a more nuanced discourse, one in which the voice of unbelief could be shaped, recognized and refined in cooperation with the most intelligent representatives of religion–that idea was thrown under the truck. Or rather, gave way to an approach to religion that can only be compared to the Bear River Massacre: “Take no prisoners.”

What has been left behind at the Center for Inquiry–regard its surviving generals–is a missionary agency dedicated to spreading an atheist gospel to an undocumented and perhaps non-existent multitude. It is beyond irony that an agency professing to value learning is now proselytizing on college campuses in a way designed to mimic Campus Crusade for Christ, visibly insecure to think (or horribly naive) that a liberal arts education would be the sufficient means for making a decision about religious and secular values. Philosophy reduced to bumper stickers, coffee mugs and T-shirts is not a short cut to reflection: it is the opposite of reflection.

It was Max Weber who in the early twentieth century called our attention to the traits of the “charismatic leader.” It was one of three ways in which authority can be “legitimated,” the other two being traditional authority (think pope or king) or rational-legal authority (theoretically a government or bureaucracy).

Weber was quite noncommittal in terms of the virtuousness of a charismatic leader: It is (he is) simply ”power legitimized [sic] on the basis of a leader’s exceptional personal qualities or the demonstration of extraordinary insight and accomplishment, which inspire loyalty…from followers.” As such, it derives from and rests almost entirely on the leader; the absence of that leader for any reason can lead to the authority’s power dissolving. Jesus, Socrates, Hitler, and Mussolini, with very different effects and agendas, represent the category.

Paul will not mind me calling him that kind of leader without, however, comparing him either to Jesus or Mussolini.

The sad fact is that organizations which have benefited from the charisma of a visionary leader often do not make the transition well to other, more consistent forms of leadership. In Paul’s case, the vision and the means to achieve it were the man. I cannot imagine it surviving, let alone succeeding, without him.

Please therefore read my unkinder comments, made earlier, as those of someone bitterly disappointed by the failure–or perhaps the hijacking–of the dream. An act of usurpation worthy of Richard II and his cronies leading to “disorder, horror, fear and mutiny.”

CFI was never Camelot, never Eden, never an earthly Paradise. It was however symbolically important to thousands of women and men who were looking, as Kurtz himself was always looking, for rational, moral alternatives to the packaged certainties that religion offered–what Bonhoeffer once described as “cheap grace.” In his time as chair of the organization, I cannot remember a single instance when the resort to ridicule and name-calling outranked the appeal to rational criticism and examination, not a single example where atheist polemic was considered an adequate response to religious extremism.

So, whether as a seductive Eve or a duplicitous serpent, I’ve at least expressed my joylessness at watching the fruit wasted. And my very deep regret at having offended a friend. Sorry, Paul: that is not what you would have wanted.

Holy Atheism: The Puzzle of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”

The origin of this little essay is a conversation I had a few nights ago when I was asked, quite unexpectedly, what books I might recommend to students seeking a deeper understanding of the world. Without much thinking, I pointed to Heidegger. Reflecting afterward, I realized that for most people Heidegger is merely “difficult” and that for many analytical philosophers (Ayer comes to mind) his writing is “rubbish.” In the right hands however, Heidegger can change minds and change lives.

Martin Heidegger is never an easy read, but he becomes more difficult with every new claim to offer a proprietary interpretation of his thought. In 1947 Heidegger published his Brief ueber den Humanismus (“Letter on Humanism”) in which he sorts through some of the tangles left behind in his 1927 opus, Being and Time and a treatise usually translated as What is Metaphysics? To come at this essay without some notion of Heidegger’s technical vocabulary, especially his complex views on metaphysics, is quickly to sink into linguistic mud. It’s equally difficult to sort through the later work without approaching it problematically. By that I mean that for all its emulsion, Heidegger was working through a very specific set of problems and a level of despair that has occasionally occupied philosophers to such an extent that paradox, aphorism and obscurity have seemed the only way to express the intractability of the problems themselves. Nietzsche comes immediately to mind, but there are tempting if imperfect analogies between Heidegger’s views and those of the negative theologians Gregory of Nyssa, Catherine of Sienna and Meister Eckhart.

The style he preferred in responding to his admirers—like Sartre–as well as his critics, such as Hannah Arendt—was never unconditionally generous, leaving the impression that Heidegger saw his particular mode of expression as appropriate to the subjects he tackled and most interpretation as being either reductionist, or erroneous.

He was not unaware of the power of double-speak as a tool in both political and philosophical discourse. In a 1966 Der Spiegel interview concerning his alleged Nazi sympathies (which finally cost him his teaching career and diminished his reputation in Germany), Heidegger said that in 1935 he had counted on the power of words to convey different meanings to two constituencies (his cleverest students and determined Nazi informants) when he praised the “inner truth and greatness of our movement.”

Hannah Arendt

His sense of how words shape reality and can thus misshape perception and meaning is a constant prickle for anyone who wants to “interpret” Heidegger. It makes equally difficult the task of determining his influence on other thinkers, especially the French philosophers in whose eyes he found grace after 1967.

What makes the “Letter on Humanism” worth discussing is that he pulls no punches about his agenda: to locate in history the source of modernity’s ills. In the politically charged climate of postwar Europe, the easy answers focused on economic, religious, technological and social evils. The cure, it was often proposed, was to restore meaning to the term “humanism” as a category that rises above the particular expressions of modern culture.

In an important article, Gail Soffer notes that “What is peculiar to Heidegger and really questionable in his critique is his diagnosis of the cause of modernity’s ills: not capitalism and its greed; not Protestant religious beliefs; not even runaway technology or the Gestalt of the worker; but rather the humanism of the Western philosophical tradition. For Heidegger, “humanism lies at the root of the reification, technologization, and secularization characteristic of the modern world” (“Heidegger, Humanism and the Destruction of History,” Review of Metaphysics (49) 1996).

Heidegger was not, of course, unaware of the history of the term humanism in early Renaissance thought or even earlier glimmerings in Christian thinkers such as Abelard and Pico della Mirandola. But he was not especially interested in this history of discussion, or at least such discussion could only be useful in deconstruction (Destruktion).

In a strictly connative sense, humanism is that philosophy which either assigns a defined universal essence to man as “a rational animal,” characterized primarily by voluntary action, or it is the denial of essence—a position leading ultimately to Sartre’s conclusion that existentialism is a pure form of humanism. Man is what he is through choice and action. The political appeal of the latter position is that a non-essentialist view of humanism leaves open the possibility for human beings to create worthy social institutions, human rights, Bildung in the humanities and “true” sciences (as opposed to mere technological expertise), and also to reject unworthy ones—such as Nazism.

In none of his writings, however, does Heidegger suggest that “man has no essence.” His message in the “Letter” is that this essence has been misconstrued: that to say “Man is a rational animal” is to predetermine what the nature of man is at a metaphysical level, and that to do so shuts off discussion of the relationship between Being and being human.

To be a knowing subject in relation to known objects is, for Heidegger, to determine the essence of man “downward.” Out of a range of possible definitions, we have chosen the ones that equate science and reason with the sufficient definition—the essence—of humanity. In historical context, we have taken the historical determinants of humanism, which Heidegger sees as a set of familiar phenomena, as being the same as the underlying essence of these phenomena. Heidegger rejects the idea that humanism as we understand the term can provide an understanding of what it means to be thrown into a world of possibilities and others. It does not provide an “analytic” that can help us to understand authenticity, mortality, responsibility. Humanism can provide no escape from the “vulgarity of calculation” or a sense of the temporality of existence.

This leads to the question of God and the matter of Heidegger’s atheism. To an extent, we are playing with language in a way Heidegger would, approvingly, have found amusing. The a-theism he subscribes to is a rejection of God–literally being without the God of history and tradition–and a quest for a non-metaphysical God. It is this aspect of Heidegger’s thought and the subject of die Kehre or “turning” (biographical or procedural?) in his thinking about Dasein that frustrates interrogation—in spite of a small embarrassment of new sources published since his death.

Bultmann

In the world of poetry and technology, God remains the subliminal (literally, beneath the limit) problem. Theologians since Ebeling and Bultmann have exploited this aspect of Heidegger’s almost mystical argot on the topic, and Stuart Elden has analyzed the subject in a useful article (“To Say Nothing of God”, Heythrop Journal, 45/3, 2004, 344-48.). It has been frustrating to students of Heidegger that this “refusal of a theological voice” (Laurence Paul Hemming, 2002) tweaks the nose of theology rather than encourages theological speculation. But, as with humanism, any unconcealed definition of God would be trivialization, and it has been the role of historical theology to offer familiar formulas and definitions in place of concealment.

Thus Heidegger has theology precisely where he wants it: trying to figure him out. His challenge to humanism: that we cannot employ it to address questions of meaning, value and authenticity. His challenge to theology, that the discovery of God cannot be something as simple as forming objective images from subjective data, mainly historical. The possibility of a God without being must be considered. Aquinas considered it. But the axiom “There is no God” cannot be derived from the possibility.

Re-reading Reinhold Niebuhr: For a Friend in Maine

Jesus did not ask to see proof of insurance coverage before he healed the blind man.

Reinhold Niebuhr

A friend of mine in Maine writes to say, “It is almost Thanksgiving. Why don’t you write something nice about somebody?”

I have to admit, I was taken aback. I have been so busy fighting New Atheists and Old Faitheists that I have forgotten the spirit of the season.

But my friend’s request is not as simple as it sounds. During the season we will be treated to stories about heroes waging war in far-off places, sometimes against conscience, for peace and security in the homeland, heroic mothers battling to keep their health insurance, assorted others who represent our seasonal tip of the hat to the poor and the victims of wealth and opportunism.

Christians did not invent Yom Kippur; their salvation-theology would not support the idea. But the holiday season, if you just dig beneath the glam, the pre-season sales, and the consumer market report for Black Friday, somewhere down there is a manger.

Repenting of the injuries the privileged have inflicted on the unprivileged (though no collection agency will be offering amnesty to its debtors) is our yearly token of contrition for our natural greed. “It wasn’t the failure of Mary and Joseph to book ahead that caused Jesus to be born in a cattle stall,” a terribly persuasive nun once explained; “it was the greed of the innkeepers.” A nice and doubtless correct exegesis of a non-existent verse.

I’m reasonably sure the word “hero” would never be used in ordinary discussion to describe the man I am writing about. He came from respectable Midwest Protestant origins and went on to Yale and then to a lifetime of teaching at Union Theological seminary.

As a young preacher, he was a community organizer in Detroit before the term “community organizer” became a disqualification for leadership on the lips of Rudy Giuliani. At great personal risk, the Klan having its financial center of gravity in Detroit, not the South, in 1924, Reinhold Niebuhr condemned it as the greatest human evil religion had ever perpetrated.

Then with equanimity he condemned Henry Ford’s repressive labor practices. He was a pacifist, a socialist, a communist sympathizer (going so far as to support the United Front agenda of the Communist Party USA), and prior to the outbreak of World War II a strong supporter of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Through the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, perhaps Nazism’s most famous Protestant victim, Niebuhr’s thought was influential in Germany, one of the first American thinkers to make headway in the closed shop of German academic theology.

Niebuhr is best remembered for the evolution of his thought about “just war,” moving from his earlier pacifist position to a robust anti-communism in his later work—and eventually to a qualified endorsement of nuclear weapons-research. But his support of war as a “last resort” instrument of peace did not arise from the same mindset that the US military establishment used to justify both cold and hot wars across the globe.

As a Christian, and he would say as a realist, he believed in the existence of evil. It was everywhere. Its grip was as plain to him as the presence of God was sometimes obscure for its shadow.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity….Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.

Niebuhr’s roots in classical Protestantism–a stream that moved from Augustine to Calvin—were not grounded in speculation but in history. His Christian “realism”—the name given to his way of envisioning the relationship between theology and the state–came from a dual conviction: first, that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount had denounced all resort to violence and coercion; second, that this perfectionist ethic (which Jesus, he thought, also enjoined on his followers) is not practical in an “immoral society” where Jews can be killed by the millions and where the state assumes godlike (tyrannical) power in its own right. Alongside the pacifist ideal, he wrote, there must be a pragmatic or realistic ethic of responsibility. Humanity being humanity, that reality sometimes requires a choice of lesser or necessary evils on behalf of the community.

The Expulsion

Manifest injustice can therefore be opposed by force, and it is sometimes moral to do so. For Niebuhr, the war against National Socialism and the smoldering leftover in the form of soviet-style communism demanded opposition. By the same reasoning, Viet Nam was an immoral war, and we can guess what he would have said about Iraq and Afghanistan had he lived to see it.

For Niebuhr, perfection is never a possibility and imperfection is always a certainty: He worried about what he termed a “heretical form” of pacifism, held by his liberal Protestant contemporaries, who have “reinterpreted the Christian Gospel in terms of the Renaissance faith in man. Modern pacifism is merely a final fruit of this Renaissance spirit, which has pervaded the whole of modern Protestantism. We have interpreted world history as a gradual ascent to the Kingdom of God which waits for the final triumph only upon the willingness of Christians ‘to take Christ seriously.’”

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama cited Niebuhr as his favorite philosopher and John McCain in an interview commented that Niebuhr was right in stressing the “cost of a good war” (Paul Elly, “A Man for All Reasons.” The Atlantic, November 2007).

Niebuhr, of course, never talked about a good war. In his Gifford lectures (1940, The Nature and Destiny of Man), he reasserts that evil resides in power and the structures it inhabits. He lost neither his faith in the ability of humanity to control such structures, nor his belief that human beings would always seek to create and exploit such structures.

Millworkers

What is remarkable about his language is that so little of it is interpretation; so little of Niebuhr requires an elaborate “hermeneutic” to make his project accessible. At a time when the previously regnant models of theology were suffused with the German “paradoxical” style of Barth and Brunner, Niebuhr was able to introduce realism, commonsense, and clarity into the discussion.

His legacy? Hard to say. To read him is to be influenced by his “larger thought,” though many can now object to the christocentric nature of his ideas. An interesting twist that–for that tag to be a disqualification for taking someone’s thought seriously. It’s a bit like bringing up the obvious point that Jesus did not ask to see proof of insurance coverage before he healed the blind man.

So too, his emphasis on “sin”—more precisely, the imperfection of “man” and the social structures he creates–strikes many people as unprogressive, somehow opposed to the American dream of social and economic perfectibility. Niebuhr anticipated the reaction to the incongruity of his thought in an age of science and secularism: “The final wisdom of life,” he said in his Gifford lectures, “requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”

The Church’s Right to Choose

Bishop Tobin

The edict of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin, denying Patrick Kennedy the right to receive communion in his Church is the latest evidence of the Catholic Church’s irrelevance in contemporary ethical discussion. It is sacramental blackmail, demanding that a Catholic legislator suspend judgment and conscience in order to promote the interests of his Church above the interests of the women and men, Catholic and not, who elected him to office. Worse, it ratifies the dark suspicions of fifty years ago when non-Catholics wondered out loud whether the dogma of the church rather than the principles of secular democracy would govern the decision-making of a Catholic president. Oddly enough, it is the Church itself rather than any Catholic politician that has renewed and perhaps answered the question.

In 1960 everyone able to vote in my Catholic family voted for JFK because Catholics (like most Jews and African Americans) were Democrats. Catholics believed in the Trinity, going to confession, the rosary, and the special license of nuns to inflict pain on adolescent knuckles.

On Sundays they were treated to hideous renditions of Mozart and Palestrina by undertrained choirs with shaky voices and priests whose anguished faces at a sung Latin mass left no doubt about the existence of Purgatory.

There was a “thing” called Catholic Culture, preserved in parish schools, loosely enforced by diocesan bishops, reinforced by the anti-communist television sermons of Bishop Sheen in Life is Worth Living. Being an American Catholic was easy because your Church and your country had a common enemy, even if no one could quite decide what to do about it. Communism was “evil” to religious America because it was atheism, the finer points of dialectical materialism being lost on the good citizens of St. Paul and Kansas City.

In 1960 John Kennedy wasn’t kidding when he said that, if elected, Rome wouldn’t tell him what to do–the so-called “Protestant Scare.” For most American Catholics, the Vatican was far away (especially for Irish Americans) and the pope had the same status as meatless Fridays: he came with the territory as the price of baptism. But in general the authority of the pope was pretty obscure and the non-existence of satellite television and the internet made his authority more theoretical than real.

There was a picture of John XXIII in my eighth grade classroom, positioned close to the crucifix, close enough to encourage the belief that perhaps he had lived at the same time as Jesus.

Nobody talked about abortion, homosexuality (of the clergy or in relation to marriage rights) or (much, anyway) about divorce, though all of these things were part of a darker culture that we knew about—usually in the form of an “unmarried” aunt who came to Christmas dinner but didn’t go to mass regularly.

Politics was easy because protestants didn’t talk much about these things either. When modern conservatives talk about a “broad moral consensus” missing in American society they are talking mainly about a religious convergence of social-sexual attitudes that existed before 1968, or thereabouts.

That’s when Paul VI spoiled our theory of the non-existence of the pope by publishing Humanae Vitae forbidding Catholics to take advantage of new techniques of contraception—the pill. It was a tough year to be an undergraduate dating a liberal Episcopalian.

From that day on, Catholicism was less and less about frequent communion, the trinity, and the virgin, more and more about hating abortion and strongly disapproving of gays—despite the irony of an emerging pedophile culture in seminaries and rectories.

Sad, that when this consensus broke down, Catholics by and large were forced into an ethical corner– forced to choose between church and conscience, between a kind of laissez faire allegiance to the principles of Catholic teaching and a strangely robust “moral” voice coming from a church in liturgical disarray and sacramental crisis.

All of a sudden, your best religious friends were not the ones who shared your tradition (tradition?) but the ones who agreed with you that abortion is murder, that homosexuality is a sinful, correctable practice, and that sex between loving but unmarried individuals of different sexes is morally wrong.

All of a sudden, the weak voice of faraway Rome and meatless Fridays seemed preferable to the New Church, a church that had decided to take its stand not at the altar but in the bedroom.

But the real problem in all of this is one our culture doesn’t yet have its head around. It is the way in which the Catholic Church has forced some of its most loyal sons and daughters, especially those in political life, to leave home.

No one knows whether, given the same set of moral variables in 1960, John Kennedy would have been the first Catholic president or could have achieved the delicate balance between convincing Catholics his religion mattered and non-Catholics that it didn’t.

But the balance is gone, thanks in part to changing social realities and changed laws and attitudes, and in part to a cultural backlash that hasn’t stopped lashing.

Unlikely as it seems, confronted with a progressive Catholic candidate in 2012, as we had in 2004, the claim of the Church’s non-interference and disinterest in American politics will no longer be convincing. We see that in the brokering of “acceptable” bishop-approved health care legislation in the U.S. Congress. We saw it in the sad final days of Ted Kennedy, in his letter of “qualified” contrition to Benedict XVI. Now we see it in the virtual excommunication–literally, being cut off from the sacrament–of Patrick Kennedy.

It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Catholic lawmakers now are expected to apologize to their church for the free exercise of conscience and the right to frame their ideas within the liberal tradition of American politics.

The issue in 1960, when the phrase had everything to do with belief and almost nothing to do with personal ethics, was whether a candidate was “Too Catholic.” For Catholic voters in the future, unless dramatic change occurs in a Church not known for upheaval, the question will be “Catholic enough?”

The Winners Are…

I don’t know about you, but if there’s one thing I’ve been chewing my nails over (sorry, Jesus) more than the Public Option it’s the results of Center for Inquiry’s “Blasphemy Day” Competition.

You hadn’t heard? BD was an event designed to bring out the puckishness in organized atheism.

And high time. A lot of people think that atheists aren’t funny. Except Bill Maher. He’s very funny. But a lot of people think you have to be a Jew to be funny–a Groucho or a Seinfeld.

A lot of people think Muslims aren’t very funny but my Iraqi girlfriend, Yasmine, tells me that “infidels just don’t get it” and that I won’t either if I keep watching re-runs of Curb Your Enthusiasm and You Bet Your Life.

The idea behind having a contest was to prove to religious people that their religion is ridiculous. Of course, a lot of religious people know that already, but there’s nothing they like better than a little God-bashing to remind them.

It takes an atheist to bring religion down to comic size. An atheist like P Z Myers who teaches at the University of Minnesota. Myers is famous for snatching a Catholic communion host and driving a spike (no, I don’t know how long) into it, along with a page from the Koran, and a page of Richard Dawkins’s God Delusion.

Believe or not, he was not struck dead, but he was charged by the Library with defacing university property.

According to Myers, the point of BD was to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal.” He says he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day. Personally, unless they include a gift-giving component I’ll stick with Christmas, but let’s wait and see how it plays out.

Meantime we have the winners. Sit down.

Ken Peters of California was first prize winner, a T-shirt and coffee cup.

His contribution, a pithy four word aphorism–”Faith is no reason.” I guess that’s Blasphemy Lite–sounds a little like Thomas Aquinas to me.

The others in no special order of offensiveness,

“There’s no religion like no religion,” submitted by Daniel Boles of Thailand, inspired by John Lennon and Ethel Merman. (Hold on to that Peace Corps job, Dan.)

“I wouldn’t even follow your god on Twitter,” submitted by Michael Hein of South Carolina, inspired by Yo’-Mama jokes.

“The reason religious beliefs need protection from ridicule is that they are ridiculous,” Michael Nugent of Ireland, inspired by a total disregard of how that slogan would look on a coffee mug.

“I survived the God virus,” submitted by Perry Bulwer of British Columbia, Canada, in a desperate attempt to prove that Canadians can be outrageous.

There were also a couple of limericks. Here’s one I didn’t understand:

“Minds harbor incongruous memes:
Religion and fairytale dreams.
Relentlessly nutty,
They turn brains to putty,
Inculcating scurrilous schemes.”

Rumour has it that some top-notch submissions arrived too late for consideration:

“Take this God and shove it” submitted by recently-deposed bishop, John McNakerney of Angel Falls, MN; “Who needs the devil when my wife still prowls the earth,” by Sol Wasserstein of Glencove, NJ, and “He only rested one day, you, you sit in that chair like it’s a throne for six,” by Ethel Wasserstein of Glencove, NJ. “Gods don’t kill people, people do because there is no God” was cited as the most confused but strangely accurate late submission.

Don’t worry if you missed the suspense and the playoffs. CFI has a new treat in store as part of its “Campaign for Free Expression.”

A cartoon contest. “We’re looking for sophisticated hard-hitting ideas and images that pose serious questions about belief and disbelief–cartoons that prod readers to think as they laugh (or maybe cry).”

The “Case” of Karen Armstrong

This is a story that will not go to sleep.

As soon as I had written about the sad and strange case of Major Hasan, now fading because it seems evident we are dealing with a culturally disconnected man, disturbed by private demons, I closed Karen Armstrong’s book A Case for God vowing never to waste another dime on her cooked to publisher’s order histories.

I do not know if this is her twelfth or thirtieth book, and it does not matter. They are the work of someone who finds it impossible to think things like religion through and as a result finds it very easy to write about religion.

It is easy to pan her prose. The conservative religion journal First Things marveled recently at her “selective compassion” but was more direct about her ignorance of history and theology:

Among people who know nothing about religion and don’t care much about factual information (an unfortunately large demographic), Karen Armstrong has become something of a sensation. But for those who think that claims about religion, ethics, or history should have some grounding in reality, Armstrong is considered an embarrassment.

And the superb Hugh Fitzgerald in The New English Review said

For Karen Armstrong history does not exist. It is putty in the hands of the person who writes about history. You use it to make a point, to do good as you see it. And whatever you need to twist or omit is justified by the purity of your intentions—and Karen Armstrong always has the purest of intentions.

This positioning is aforethought, naturally. “Religion,” bigly conceived, she seems to have learned as a nun with specific Jungian inclinations, is what God gave us in the form of religiousness with the idea of him in it.

That makes any specific denomination or faith a little too cramped to accommodate the Great Idea, the fundamentally noble truth, that all religions imperfectly embody. Welcome to the World Parliament of Religions, circa 1883. It’s all about goodness, compassion, but never about religion in a specific cultural location with specific and much smaller ideas called dogmas.

She dredges up nineteenth century ideas of the centrality of God (read: golden rule) to human experience, superimposes these features on her reading of the world religions, and then finds it remarkably easy to identify the compassion gene in each of the world’s great faiths. She is quoted approvingly by all dialogists who think that those of us who see religion as being at the heart of some of the world’s intractable problems are just plain wrong.

She is annoying and convincing, appealing to every soul that twinkles in the light of naïve ignorance.

A featured essay in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy magazine gives us vintage Armstrong in an essay called “Think Again: God.” In it she creates a series of propositions and then “refutes” them not with argumentation but attitude and cliché.

It is a doubly disappointing performance because the propositions aren’t bad, though loosely strung beads of different colours, and deserve more thought and attention than Armstrong gives them.

The answers seem almost contrived to be dismissive rather than profound, written in the “Of course this isn’t true” mode of a neo-scholastic–and (more tragically) seem to have the work of the New Atheists in view.

The entire essay, without meaning to be sly, is in the style of a Dominican lecturing her class on missing the most obvious questions in their catechism.

A few trying examples will suffice:

God is Dead. No, she says, not even if Richard Dawkins and Nietzsche say he is.

Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives.

I don’t disagree with the bit about meaning. Who could? It is seductive, and who doesn’t like a little meaning with their tea?

But the undefended suggestion that God (or belief in God) supplies ample meaning for the citizens of the modern world causes me to tremble. –Because even if this is so for religious folk, what would that “meaning” consist of if not a self-referring ego-worship as Feuerbach (whom she’s apparently never read) announced a century and a half ago? Doesn’t meaning have a little to do with reflection, wisdom, education, creating human values, including constructs like God and systems of religion?

God and politics don’t mix. Don’t believe it she says: “Theologically illiterate politicians have given God a bad name.”

It is a familiar and troubling (and increasingly popular) idea that the problem that looks like religion in the world of politics and society is not religion, but bad theology. She then quotes the electioneering slogans of presidents like John Kennedy and Barack Obama–men made nervous by faith but politically clever enough never to appear to reject it–as proof that religious faith “binds people together.”

Exactly. That binding is what got us the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, the Holocaust, 9-11 and gets hundreds of spiritually hungry and far-from-theologically-illiterate Muslims killed every year through no fault of their own by their fellow citizens in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq. Brushing these things aside as brief distractions, she strides to her next and related point.

God breeds violence and intolerance. If your pulse has raced with approval at the vintage 1971 American NRA (National Rifle Association) bumper sticker used by advocates of assault weapons to hold on to their weapons, “Guns don’t kill, people do,” you will have some sympathy for her answer, which is essentially the same: “No, humans do.” But one wonders about all those worthies, patriarchs, prophets and, yes, even nuns who heard the voice of God and did, or almost did, hideous things at his beck and call, beginning with Abraham. I suppose none of that had anything to do with religion.

Savvy religion scholars have been commenting for a decade (I know I have) on how the central myth of Christianity requires us to believe that God required the violent death of his own son in order to restrain himself from another act of more general violence against the whole of sinful humanity—a repetition of the first global homicide perpetrated against Noah’s generation. Do any of the religions she can name lack a concept of judgment, sin and retribution?

Perhaps Armstrong believes we should not take such stories seriously. But then we have to ask, what is to be done with the rubbished tales of Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition? And do we then end up with a mute and indistinct God who is not violent because he has never spoken, never acted, and may not exist. Clearly Armstrong doesn’t wish to go there. That’s where the atheists are having coffee. So she goes here instead:

As a species, we survived by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive passages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like them to treat you.

Without challenging whatever she may mean by “balance,” Armstrong, more fundamentally, misses the etiology of religious violence, which is the same as the etiology of religion.

The remainder of Armstrong’s propositions range over whether God is bad for science (not necessarily) or bad for women (yes, at least in those areas where she feels women must have the option of choice, as in the abortion debate).

In general, as we have come to expect, religion is a pretty good thing because Ms. Armstrong does not wish to write about unpleasant things and her readers are bored by facts.

But her responses are careless and uncongealed. She appeals to a “principle of compassion” as the underlying and ancient principle binding religions together. But as Joe Carter writes in First Things, “Where exactly is this ‘ancient principle’ to be found? Isn’t it the case that this principle is a modern invention, often used to provide a less embarrassing interpretation for religious claims that have been held for millennia?” Yes, of course.

This book and the many interviews, pitches and essays by Armstrong that follow from it are final documentation of what many of us have said for a long time: the inexhaustible Ms Armstrong, friend to all religion and true servant of what she thinks of as God, needs to write less and read more. And think about what she reads.

As Hugh Fitzgerald says in his brisk analysis of Armstrong’s twists and manipulation of history (dealing only with her first paragraph in his review), she smuggles in details as she sees fit, making Columbus a Jew (why not, no evidence to the contrary), and religion a psychic need, the real-world effects of which—especially brutality—can be justified as simply misunderstanding its essence.

She can roll history about, she can pull it apart, she can twist and turn it with the same delight exhibited by a two-year-old when a-too-solid block of Playdoh is finally softened up for use by grown-up hands. But the two-year-old is an innocent at play, and even if he leaves a momentary mess, he has done no real harm. Karen Armstrong is not innocent, and manages to do a great deal of harm, careless or premeditated harm, to history. Too many people read that she has written a few books, and assume, on the basis of nothing, that she must know what she is talking about.

I am not sure I ever thought that, but Fitzgerald’s warning is important. This is schlock: a mixture of sloppy history, poor reasoning, wishful thinking and amateur psychology.

Not a “case” for God but a case for not–ever–taking anything written by Ms Armstrong seriously.

Atheist Schisms: Alice and Mr Dawkins

Even though Richard Dawkins taught at Oxford for the best years of his life, he never met Alice.

Alice, you’ll recall, was happiest having tea in Christ Church meadow, getting drowsy over her books, and falling down rabbit holes where she encountered all kinds of strange creatures no one had ever seen.

The probability of having never seen Alice, whose memoirs describe smiling cats, talking caterpillars, rabbits in waistcoats and the Red Queen’s caucus race–in great detail–beggars the odds and raises serious questions about whether Mr Dawkins ever taught at Oxford at all, or if he did why he never left his room.

A natural skeptic and proud atheist would want to test the testimony, as it were. Yet there is not one recorded instance of the good professor plodding through the meadow and so much as kicking up a tuft of grass or picking up a lifeless dogeared playing card to check the sources.

This raises a question in my mind. Are the atheist fundamentalists really that skeptical, that thorough? They claim not to have seen a lot of things–miracles, resurrections, God, and the like–but given the fact that they have not even taken the time over a pretty thin volume like Alice’s biography, why should we trust them with a hefty book, full of massive improbabilities, like the Bible?

They invoke something called science, or naturalism as a proof of their knowing a thing or two about not knowing a thing or two. But I ask you: the sea monster Leviathan had to be fairly impressive, or his story would not have lasted a thousand years. Wouldn’t a real atheist want to slip on a pair of flippers and a mask and head for the Mediterranean just to be sure?

According to usually impeccable American media sources like the National Geographic Channel, Noah’s ark has been spotted on a number of rocks. Even the exoskeletons of marine animals long thought extinct have been found encrusted in its petrified planks. I suppose a scientist who can’t be bothered to find a rabbit hole won’t make the journey to Sinope to check it out. But as long as those boards go unexamined, I respectfully reserve my right to believe the flood happened just the way Genesis says it did–all sloshy forty days and every drenched zebra of it. A pure skepticism requires nothing less. We’ve got the word, we’ve got the wood: what do you fellows have?

Perhaps I shouldn’t mention the New Testament, but it seems to me a little homework would turn up “thank you notes” from at least a dozen of the five thousand men, women and children who were fed bread and fishes on that hot Thursday afternoon. These would not have been sent because thank you notes never are. They are the most massively preserved species of domestic literature after unopened tax bills. Find the family bibles of their descendants, you’ve got your evidence.

After noshing all that stodge they must have been thirsty; has anybody bothered to look for the canteens? This is simple archaeology, but over the heads of our so-called atheist fundamentalists.

What I hate most of all is when atheist fundamentalists get all pious about their atheism. Take the recent bus and subway ad-campaign that tells us “1,000,000 New Yorkers are Good without God.” You’re going to trust this statistic when it comes from guys who won’t leave their lecture rooms to see if it’s raining? 1,000,000 New Yorkers are also good without a extra slice of cheese cake, while ony 75,000 look really good in spandex: so what? 3,000,000 New Yorkers don’t believe in voting. Most are atheists. Don’t believe me? Go ask. That’s what a scientist does.

Besides, numbers games are tricky. Wait till the Baptists roll out a bus that screams “22,000,000 Jesus-believers who attend fish fries can’t be wrong.”

But back to the hot topic, the atheist schism. Hardcore and softcore atheists, big tent versus wigwam unbelievers?

I agree with some of my friends that there can’t be a schism in atheism because atheism is a big muddle, a jumble of ideas. Think of your mind as the accumulated junk of fifty years just waiting to go up for sale on card tables next weekend. Then it rains. Atheism is like that. Some say it’s a stream of thought. Some say it’s a rolling river. Like love.

At any rate, muddles and puddles can’t have schisms–that’s clear enough. So how do we know that atheism can make you as good as a believer? I have thought about this a good deal since the last bus rolled by and think I have an answer that any scientist worth his powder would agree on.

It’s based on my personal method of assessment that I call the Mercurial Goodness Index.

Goodness needs to be defined as the result of how much about God you don’t believe in. If you don’t even believe in the possibility of God (there’s a very fancy name for this in philosophy but I forget it), then you are totally good. A secular saint.

If there is a particular god you don’t believe in, then your goodness has to be calculated according to the number of things you don’t believe about him.

For example, 10 points for not believing he created the world, 10 points for not believing he created the human race, 20 points for not believing he wrote the most boring sections of the Bible, 5 points for not believing that, even if he created the human race, he did not create Republicans. Maximum 80. Only fair-weather and backsliding Christians, Jews and some Muslims can play this game. Secular- leaning Muslims who do not believe in God are required to surrender their weapons as a token of their skepticism.

Skeptical Hindus will be scored according to the number of gods they don’t believe in up to a maximum goodness score of 330,000,000 (way more than the number of good New Yorkers). They receive ten extra points if they also confess that Hindusim is a very silly religion.

Buddhists can play, but must be very quiet about it and not reveal the secret of their goodness.

I think even the most committed atheist will agree, this is the best way forward.

Booboisie Catholicism

I don’t know about you but I am still waiting for Vatican II to kick in–you know the change-for-the-better that was supposed to be the fruit of the ecumenical council (1962-1965) called by Pope John XXIII to make everything old new again.

2005 was the fortieth anniversary of its adjournment, which means that most so-called Roman Catholics born after, say, 1968 have never heard a Latin Mass, know their catechism from stories told by their mothers, went to Catholic schools populated by divorced Catholic women, and grew up thinking that the noxious hymn “On Eagle’s Wings” is the pinnacle of liturgical expression. I haven’t even mentioned a recent survey, where it was revealed that most Catholic children between the age of nine and fifteen think the most solemn part of the mass is holding hands during the Lord’s Prayer and/or the handshaking hugathonics known as the Kiss of Peace.

Rumor has it that Benedict XVI’s recent endorsement of a more liberal use of the “old” Latin mass (called without value-inflation the “extraordinary rite,” Summorum Pontificum, 2007) will awaken the deadened aesthetic sensibilities of a whole new generation of mass-goers. Now that any priests equipped to do it (not many) are permitted to celebrate in the Tridentine style, seminaries are laying on special courses (now say after me: “een no-me-nay pah-treees…”) for rosy-cheeked enthusiasts who hope to see the old mass revived in parishes around their priest-starved dioceses.

Not bloody likely. Vatican II was a colossal failure–at every level–and the time spent studying its documents, probing its theology, anticipating its bounty have all proved a waste of adult brainpower and seminary lecture time.

Its ecumenism was hollow, as proved by the recent decision to create a special Institute for unhappy Anglicans opposed to women and gay priests, gay marriage and sundry other “theological” gripes. Ecumenical dialogue with other denominations is in ever worse disarray, except perhaps with Pentecostals and fundamentalist Christians, Catholicism’s natural enemies at a theological level but their bedfellows on abortion, contraception, HIV-AIDS and sexual ethics (so-called). Its outreach to Jews and Muslims has been political, fumbling, self-serving and inauthentic.

Its attempts to reinvent Catholic theology have been stammeringly painful, testing the resolve of every paid theologian to develop new ways to say the same old thing in ways so obscure they may as well have stuck to Latin. True, Limbo has been questioned, but heaven and hell are still for sale, as are indulgences, the intervention of saints, the infallibility of the pope, and the doctrine of the real presence. Mind you, I do not mean to impugn any of these doctrines; but am I the only one who reads modern Catholic systematic theology with a cartoon balloon over my head filled with an enormous

In terms of church attendance-the once-proud symbol of Catholic allegiance–it has been in decline since 1970–and why not, we have to ask, considering the endless loop of sermons about how loving God is all about hating abortion.

H. L. Mencken died in 1956, a decade before Vatican II had had a chance to work its special destructive magic. Years before that, in 1923 (think Scott Fitzgerald, Bentleys, raccoon coats) Mencken wrote an article in The Smart Set called “Holy Writ” that might have alerted the Church to the perils of the literal in reforming ancient tropes and gestures.

The occasion of the essay was a new translation of the Bible into French, designed to get rid of the contrived antiquity of the language then used for all Bible translations. Whoever did it, Mencken said with characteristic understatement, “is chiefly responsible for the collapse of Christianity in France.”

Contrariwise, he says, “the men who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous, and often unintelligible English gave Christianity a new lease of life….The Bible they produced was so beautiful that the great majority of men could not fix their minds on the ideas in it.”

For Mencken, this inaccessibility was a good thing: it raised the text above both the theological idea-men and the critics of tradition, so that even “the assaults of Paine, Darwin and Huxley” have not been effective against it. “They still remember the twenty third psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, and they are still moved beyond compare by the sermon on the mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unashamed in the story of the manger.”

No friend of elitism, the chattering classes, politicians nor the nincompoops who worked at factory jobs, Mencken saw the language of the 1611 (King James) Bible as the high-browiest thing about a protestant culture that without it would be as crass as its native sons. He teasingly alludes to the state of an atheist, who by comparison with a Bibled Methodist is infinitely more crass.

When he turns to the cradle Catholicism of his native Baltimore, Mencken finds something different to praise. The good of Catholicism is not in the Bible but in its keeping the Bible away from people, and keeping people away from the technical theological disputes that occupy only a small segment of the learned clergy.

What keeps the Catholic in the pew Mencken thought was not theology or lectures on doctrine but spectacle. The Catholic church exceeds the Protestant as he saw it “because it has always kept clearly before it that religion is not a syllogism but a poem.” “A solemn high mass must be a thousand times as impressive to a man with any genuine religious sense…as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God.”

Mencken enjoyed toying with the contrast between the major streams of American religion. Protestantism failed not only because he had a personal dislike for “American bible searchers,” largely Baptists and Methodists, whom he often called vermin, but because their religion purported to be logical.

The Protestants, he claimed “transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise” by putting their sermons front and center and eschewing liturgy. On the contrary, “Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was little employed in the early church and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today.”

But Mencken knew the end was near, even in 1923. He observed the lengthening of the sermon by Catholic bishops and priests (blather), the loss of the aesthetic, mumbled prayers, ignored rubrics, the twenty-five minute mass–as though Latin was a cage to be gotten out of.

He associated this tendency with the Irish, who wanted more gab and less godliness. He warns of the “folly” the American church is falling into by trivializing what a later generation of theorists would call “mystique”: “A bishop in his robes playing his part in a solemn ceremonial is a dignified sight, even though he may sweat freely. The same bishop bawling against Darwin half an hour later is simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable saloon keeper in South Bend, Indiana.” Darwin’s place, no doubt, has been taken by the Abortion Provider, but the bawling hasn’t changed.

Mencken had some advice for the Church back then, especially with respect to liturgical decline: “Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will propose to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.”

What he didn’t foresee is that the work would be done by the bald headed sons of the saloon-keepers.