January 6, 2012

“Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.” Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1959)

“The reach of naturalistic inquiry may be quite limited (Chomsky 1994)

“We will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” (Chomsky 1988)

 

THOUGHTFUL response from a reader asked me why I had stopped commenting on the excesses of “religion” and turned my attention to damning the excesses of atheism.

I haven’t. But it’s a good question. I replied that it would be like asking Luther why he stopped momentarily condemning the abuses of the Roman Catholic church and turned his attention to the marauding protestants. For everything nasty Luther had to say about the pope being the anti-Christ and Rome the whore of Babylon, he had equally vicious things to say about the religious militants in a treatise eirenically titled “Against the Thieving and Murderous Hordes of Peasants.” Who were these “hordes”?

They were Luther’s supporters in the protestant cause, disillusioned that he haden’t taken his revolution far enough. So others, like Thomas Müntzer, took it for him. Similar (harder to prove) theories have suggested the same dynamic at work in the transition between Jesus and his followers, and a definite comparison can be made in the transition from earliest Christianity to the studious nastiness of some of the Church fathers, the founders of “orthodoxy.”

Polemic–rhetorical sling-shotting–wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before. It just spreads more quickly now.

I am not anti-atheist. I am anti-excess, and everything about the Dawkins revolution has spelled excess. No matter who tries to persuade me that I am making this excess up in my head, it’s excess. Fueled by the repeated assertion of its promoters that it is (secularly) providential, righteous and true (just as all zealotry convinces itself), it is excess.

Sometimes, as Caspar Melville (editor of the New Humanist) mildy suggested in a Guardian article in 2010, it’s useful to hit the right targets–namely, an aggressive religious fundamentalism–hard, and in that regard “irascible, rhetorically florid, sweeping, intellectually arrogant New Atheism certainly has its place – some arguments are just asking for it.” (Funny, those adjectives remind me of a few things said recently about yours truly: how can it be?).

But I know Caspar to be a smart guy, someone who still sees the humanities in the word humanist, so in reponse to the famous Dawkins dictum (spoken to Laurie Taylor way back in 2007)–that there is no more reason to pay attention to theology than to fairyology– I wasn’t surprised to find Caspar saying this:

Entertainment value aside it is surely false, as well as politically unwise and, well, pretty impolite, to say that “all theology” is irrelevant (some of it is moral reasoning, isn’t it?), still worse to say that “religion poisons everything”, or that without religion there would be no war, or that bringing a child up within a faith is tantamount to child abuse, or that moderate religious believers are worse than fundamentalists because they prepare the ground for extremism, or that “all” religion is this, or that, or “all” faith is misguided, or to suggest that those who believe in God are basically stupid, or that science, and only science, can answer our questions….The picture of religion that emerges from New Atheism is a caricature and both misrepresents and underestimates its real character.

ET me stay with that last point for a minute–the belief that only science can answer all of our questions.

No one with a semblance of a brain would ever suggest that science can’t do a lot, hasn’t done a lot, and that the world science has explained for us doesn’t leave a lot of room for traditional religious beliefs, stories, and explanations of physical reality. It is a leap into nowhere, however, to say that accepting this as a fair description of the current state of knowledge requires someone to say, “Look, somebody who thinks the way I do doesn’t think theology is a subject at all,” as Dawkins does to Taylor.

First of course, we need to find out what the speaker means by “theology.” Then we need to know what he thinks qualifies as “subject matter.” Presumably English literature qualifies because it exists. But so do the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Pali texts, the movements those texts have produced and the cultures and ideologies they have influenced. –Not to mention alphabets that were developed largely for the preservation of sacred writings.

What aspects of those topics, given the facile dismissal of theology, can be recognized as subject matter? Have the revolutionaries acquitted them of all responsibility to subject matter in the denial of the existence of God? Can the numinous collapsing of all empirical religious traditions into the word “religion” (equivalent to the equally mystical collapsing of all scientific inquiry into the word “science”) be justified on the basis of a prior assumption–because that’s what it is–that gods don’t exist? If so, life is simple and the mortgage is paid.

But, if so, equally–if the texts and traditions of the world’s religions are really no different from stories about fairy tales and leprechauns–then attacking and ridiculing them is just as pointless as systematic exploration of their meaning–which is one of the things theology does. Is the ridicule justified because while nobody believes in the story of the Frog King or Thumbelina (does anyone even know those stories any more?) a few do believe that Jonah was swallowed by a ravenous fish and (a few more) that Jesus walked on the sea of Galilee? I’d rather buy Plantinga’s argument for epistemic defeaters than that rationale for why ridicule is justified but explanation isn’t.

Or does “subject matter” mean a certain kind of theology?Or does it mean (I think is often does in new atheist harangues) apologetics–which is unknown in many religious traditions? The analogy to fairies and leprechauns makes it difficult to know. If you say the analogies are all wrong, remember: I didn’t make them.

Predictably, I am going to say that the best theologians–those who still mistakenly think they have a “subject matter”–are aware of the sovereignty of science over theology in terms of explaining everything from the cosmos to human origins and nature. And they have seen it this way for a long time. Even many not very good theologians see things this way but pretend it’s none of their business.

The history of religion in the last two hundred years has been a history of religion redefining itself–a bit like Britain when it went from imperially great to little England. Yet religion has done a pretty good job of doing just that: the “war between science and religion” is treated in history-of-culture classes as a topic in nineteenth century studies, especially in the work of Cornell’s first hard-headed, science-first president, Andrew Dickson White. But if you look at the section headings of White’s famous book on the subject, you’ll see that he had a broad and humanistic definition of culture in which science played a magisterial, not an imperial role. He was as impressed with the results of the higher biblical criticism as he was with development in chemistry and medicine.

Too many vaguely religious people aren’t aware of the “magisterium issue,” to use Stephen Jay Gould’s linguistic stab at declaring a truce. Religion and science are compatible (to the extent it even occurs to ordinary people to wonder) because they don’t know much about either, and because they are encouraged in this superstition by dumb priests and ministers, the self-interest and reflexes of many churches, and the at-best tepid curiosity that characterizes their day to day life–whether in relation to politics, religion, world affairs, or national education policy. (And don’t mention vote-grubbing politicians who try to out-right-to-life their way into office by appealing to the worst instincts of NASCAR America. This may be the year that foetuses are declared citizens of the United States at seven months.)

What is the effect of this dumbness, this complacency? Loud, that’s what. Getting attention for your “message” by forcing people to pay attention to hate ads, grotesquery, libelous caricatures of ideas, and repeated falsehoods–all of it communicated in a kind of pidgin that can only be described as Dumbglish: these aren’t tactics that diminish and cheapen the American spirit. This is the language that American culture seems to require to wake it up. It flows like poison soup in the veins of the internet. This is where the American spirit is.

After some thought, I have to concede that maybe the shouting is necessary. Most people don’t pay attention to much of anything–not what politicians say, or what bishops teach, or what Atheists.org billboards shout at them along the highways.

The failure of the culture to inspire has led to the failure of people to be curious and a general acceptance of the status quo in most things–especially religion. Why should people want to know more about anything when they have a thousand bucks in the bank, an iPhone, and a new MacDonalds opening up down the street? Starbucks is for people with jobs.

American culture is not hardwired to evoke curiosity about science, religion, or anything else. It’s designed to breed complacency. If Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily in the onslaught of the latest economic data.

AN indirect proof of that is an unbroken succession of wars, thousands of American dead, a broken Middle East, an Arab spring that looks like winter, and nary a protest movement to remind us that man is a moral animal [sic, or lol] who ought to oppose such things. Bishops made noises and a few liberal protestants and Jews occasionally marched. Atheists, as usual, weren’t quite sure what to do because while many hated George W. Bush they hated Islam more and so–like Christopher Hitchens–they backed the wars. They were, in a phrase, paralyzed and morally invisible. No William Sloane Coffin emerged, no John Howard Yoder, no Elie Wiesel. Complacency.

Rather than say Europe isn’t far behind in this, I’m going to say Europe is far ahead. Complacency is what killed European Christianity. The fruits and comforts of the industrial revolution killed it. Not education and science; not curiosity; not Darwin’s dangerous idea. Just the creeping rot of not really giving a damn about anything.

The Christianity that Kierkegaard tried to resuscitate in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1843) became the Denmark where only 31% of the population believe in God but 82.1% are members of the Evangelical Lutheran (the State) Church.

How can this be? It can be, according to Richard Norman, because religion ”is a human creation … a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected….Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That’s why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion.”

It follows as the night the day that Danish religion is not American religion. British religion is not American religion, and I’m loath to say British atheism is therefore not American atheism. This cultural specularity has always been true, as when long ago German Christianity was not Roman Christianity.

HE opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation, and if the argument against moderation is that it has nothing to show for itself, the counter- argument is that excess has much, much less.

The classical aphorism, σπεῦδε βραδέως, “make haste slowly” is a good motto for what needs to be done in the conversation between science and religion. It was the motto of the Emperor Augustus who as a military commander deplored rashness. Suetonius says that he would often tell the generals, “Better a safe commander than a bold,” and “That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.”

In the final tally, as long as rashness rules and shouting scores, the atheists worry me at least as much as people who believe in souls. Realizing that he is now a template for what I consider atheist rash, as in red and irritating, consider this of P Z Myers reviewing the conservative philosopher Alvin Plangtinga

I’ve read some of his work, but not much; it’s very bizarre stuff, and every time I get going on one of his papers I hit some ludicrous, literally stupid claim that makes me wonder why I’m wasting time with this pretentious clown, and I give up, throw the paper in the trash, and go read something from Science or Nature to cleanse my palate. Unfortunately, that means that what I have read is typically an indigestible muddled mess that I don’t have much interest in discussing.

After a scissors and paste attack on the philosopher punctuated by non sequiturs and hooplah that makes no sense, Myers says simply that it is all “muddled lunacy.” As a matter of fact, I don’t like Plantinga much either. The summary Myers attacks (fortunately for him) appeared as a piece in a religious periodical. But Plantinga deserves much better, even if only because once upon a time academics who despised each other didn’t mistake emotionalism for argument. A vestige of this is that not once in his summary does Plantinga call the proponents of naturalism “stupid.” The legacy of the Dawkins revolution will be to make this completely emotional, unquantifiable term and all of its sisters and cousins and aunts permissible discourse in the defense of science. I know, I know: I have had my lapses in calling screed-writers screed-writers in screeds of my own.

 SO let me revert to someone else. Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his famous 1997 Natural History article a couple of paragraphs which would have caused his immediate expulsion from the atheist camp as an accommodationist or worse if he had written it in 2007. He died in 2002. With him at the Vatican meeting on NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) in 1984 was Carl Sagan, who had organized the event.

…I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the historical paradox that throughout Western history organized religion has fostered both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heart-rending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in the occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held such secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held similar power more briefly in Old Testament times, they committed just as many atrocities with many of the same rationales.)

Stephen Jay Gould

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.

Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.

I stop what will be described as a tangent, a screed, a hateful assault, another outburst close to tears at Gould’s words. The year he wrote this article (1997) was also the year of Carl Sagan’s death. Sagan perhaps did more to make science magical than any other scientist of the twentieth century, though his primary celebrity was where it belonged and was most needed: in the United States. Gould commenting on Sagan’s death had this to say: “Carl shared my personal suspicion about the nonexistence of souls—but I cannot think of a better reason for hoping we are wrong than the prospect of spending eternity roaming the cosmos in friendship.”

That is the language we need.

 

 

I’d like to thank the Academy.

Jerry Coyne has just awarded me the Mooney Prize for “Accommodationist of the Year” and pays a lot of attention to why, he says, no one is paying attention to me.

He defends his fellow atheist headlights and several sidelights by calling Eric MacDonald “Venerable” (which I thought was a title only a pope could bestow on a saint-in-waiting) and to Jason Rosenhouse as a promising young atheist blogger. He has more trouble finding a name for Greta Christina so he just asks, “Has he read her?” Yes, he has.

Since Jerry seems to have the power to hand out titles (who knew?) I will take him at his word that the chums he defends are everything he says they are. And more. He even seems to have access to my insanely jealous private thoughts (“Why not me… Dear God, why not pay attention to me.”) This maddening envy should have been obvious to me, but wasn’t until Jerry pointed it out.

I thought I was attacking the newbies because they are turning atheism into a private joke, or blague privée as we pompoustuans prefer to call it.

But there is no petulance here. –Nor in Jerry’s comments, where he reminds me that he has written two books. One of which, Speciation, “has become the standard text on modern views about the origin of species.” Damn, I wish I’d written that.

He also quotes the Venerable Eric’s humble and charitable response to a note I left on the Venerable’s blog:

“I feel so embarrassed for you, and for the pitiful criticisms you try to make. It won’t do simply to snipe at us. You must respond to what we say, and if you do not have the time to do that, then you should just get out of our way, because your criticisms invariably miss their mark and we have places yet to go.”

It is not everyday you see largess like this in action. And don’t think twice about it: I will be glad to get out of your way–if you just let me know which way you are marching. So far it isn’t clear. (Btw, loved the Robert Frostiness of that last line.)

I know zombies can sometimes also be unpredictable in their clamber for human flesh. What are new atheists after? Where are you heading? A Christian would say to hell, but based on Jerry’s–not to forget the others’ posts–I tend to think nowhere. And that’s pretty clever. It keeps people off guard when you do the God-snatch at the end.

I’m sorry if this seems pompous and incoherent. Accommodationists are a little like theologians that way, I guess. I sometimes find it hard to finish my thoughts in a jealous rage.

I will try to do better in 2012. I plan to study the blog sites of all the headlights and sidelights and use them as models of how it’s done. Whatever it is.

Further reading:

The Surefire Atheist Rapid Response Manual (December 2011)

Atheism’s Little Idea (November 2011)

 This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Greta Christina, Jason Rosenhouse, Jerry Coyne, new atheists, Ophelia Benson, p z myers, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Richard Dawkins, zombies. Bookmark the permalink.

UPDATE: Apologies are due to Greta Christina who was in fact ranked by an atheist website as one of the top ten popular atheist bloggers. rjh

 

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”

 

HO remembers their Huckleberry Finn? In chapter 19, Huck, Tom and Jim, afloat on the Mississippi River, meet up with two grifters, the Duke and the Dauphin, who claim to be exiled European royalty.

Their scam is going from town to town performing makeshift “scenes” from Shakespeare’s plays, then escaping with their lives when the rube public hear declamations like this:

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature’s second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.

After spending a few hours with the scoundrels, Huck reflects,

It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble.

But (in one of the great mysteries of the book) Huck continues to aid and abet, pastes their playbills on buildings in towns along the river, enjoys swapping tales with them on the raft, and even saves their skin when they have a close shave.

The Duke and the Dauphin are Mark Twain’s contribution to a a literary stereotype that goes back to plays like Our American Cousin (an English drama of 1858) that pit a pampered and brainless British aristocracy against the dull, stammering but basically honest Yankee (Lord Dundreary and Asa Trenchard, respectively, in the play): Americans are naive, optimistic, uncultured, energetic and gullible; the British are cunning, cynical, indolent and intellectually dissipated. America is a good place to make a buck by selling wares that His Majesty’s subjects either can’t afford or simply don’t have much use for.

Things like atheism. I recently cited the statistics for religion in Britain. If you are the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is not an encouraging thing to note that only about 36% of Britons claim to be religious and a higher number claim not to believe in God.

Compare these to statistics for atheism in America. The most recent ARIS report, released March 9, 2009, found that 34.2 million Americans (15.0%) claim no religion (“nones”), of which only 1.6% explicitly describes itself as atheist (0.7%) or agnostic (0.9%). If you are an atheist-front organization, also not an encouraging picture, no matter how you fiddle the stats to make “No religious preference” or “Sorry, really in a hurry” survey-takers into atheists. Nones further have to be adjusted for mothers whose safety clasp just failed on their child-seat doing a drive-by after school pickup, and shoppers standing in line at the exchange counter on December 26th.

If I were an atheist strategy specialist there is at least one biblical story I would need to believe was literally true: the saga of David and Goliath. I’d want to know how a very little movement can bring down a cultural behemoth like American religion by throwing a few stones.

This led me to reflect on how the new atheism arrived in America and who is in charge of pasting the playbills on the storefronts.

OT to deny the contribution of several authors to the “movement”–Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens–I think it’s safe to say that the style of the new atheism extrudes from the work of Richard Dawkins. The paradigmatic shift from detente to full scale assault against religion as an undifferentiated mass of human error and superstitious thinking belongs to him: Why should we live with ideas that we find absurd and repugnant, or indulge people who fantasize the truth of their beliefs into norms that other people ought to follow? Gloves off, me hearties: Error should be resisted, countered, argued against, corrected, defeated–not coddled.

And what is the truth? Science is the truth.

The God Delusion (2006) and the wave of comment it created is now yesterday’s news. To remind myself of how I felt in 2006 while reading it, I talked myself (under the influence of several spirituous incentives) into re-reading it, and, much to my surprise, I liked it better the second time around–as a book rather than a best selling icon. It was a better book than Daniel Dennett’s really very sloppy Breaking the Spell, which I reviewed soon after it appeared in 2007. But then I forced myself to re-read a few of the reviews I had archived over the past several years, and this one by Murrough O’Brien from The Independent flagged itself. Just after pointing out Dawkins’s abuse of Bertrand Russell’s famous “Teapot Argument,” O’Brien notes.

Some of [Dawkins's] arguments are old atheistic chestnuts, and how merrily they crack in the roasting pan. The palm for outrageous question-begging goes to the Who Made God “argument”. Dawkins squirts this sachet of puerile pap (most of us had outgrown it before hitting double figures) over the whole book, to inadvertently comic effect. He writes: “The designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” The short response to that is a simple “Why?” The long one goes something like this: the question “Who made God?”only makes sense if one assumes that the Divine nature is subject to a kind of inverted evolutionary process by which the complex is preceded by the still more complex, but why on earth should we assume this? Why should God be subject to any version of a biological theorem? Why not the laws of physics, or of chemistry?

But then the real punch, trilitorally speaking, of The God Delusion was panache. Dawkins was an extrovert and spellbinder compared to Dennett, with his Darwinesque looks, and the singularly incoherent Harris, whose work Scott Atran, a serious researcher and cognitivist, called playacting at science and politically pernicious while also getting basic anthropological theories backwards, like his famous wowser concerning the work of Franz Boas.

The real success story of the new atheism is that it was bought and sold after being intellectually panned by almost all the cognoscenti who weren’t atheist activists. In fact, as the circle closed around a tightly knit cadre of God-opposers, opposing God became virtually the sole criterion for what, in their parochial view, counted for anthropology, archaeology, sociology and the study of religion–about which all of the four (check the footnotes) were blissfully ignorant.

And I mean that in the most damning sense. Virtually all of the credible reviews alleged it of Dawkins, and the others didn’t fare much better outside the atheist camp. The reflexive answer was to accuse anyone who opposed the unscientific, malformed, and totally ignorant premises of these books of being “faitheists” and to say that dispute would be treated as treason against the higher purposes for which the books had been written.

If that didn’t stick, sane voices were denounced as jealous voices, as though reputable scholars wished they had written historical and philosophical travesty under their own names.

The repetitive accusation against Dawkins–that he was attacking a straw man, a sort of tertia res religiosa that did not exist–became the new framing device for every critique of new atheist tactics: its critics (despite manifold evidence to the contrary) were attacking a form of atheism that did not exist. Sensible, if complex views like those of John Gray on the origin of humanitarian impulses, were conveniently set aside in favour of a new recipe for a scientific-evolutionary morality that floats above historical causality: Wrote Atran,

There is an irony of history that completely escapes Harris and other new atheists in their evangelical quest for a global morality rooted in scientific truth. As philosopher John Gray of the London School of Economics convincingly argues, it is universal forms of monotheism, such as Christianity and Islam, that merged Hebrew tribal belief in one God with Greek faith in universal laws applicable to the whole of creation that originated the inclusive concept of Humanity in the first place….Harris’s own messianic moral absolutism, based on devotion to “truth,” leads to some rather nutty proposals that defy common sense and are justified by made-up history that is patently untrue.

So much for Harris’s pop-psychology, or rather MRI-enhanced pop-psychology. Dawkins and Dennett were serious academics working out-of-field but who seem honestly to have believed that the methodologies developed in other disciplines were easily mastered and just as easily dismissed–a cavalier attitude toward critique that bordered on Dominican hubris at best and anti-intellectualism at the deep end.

Always guided by the nature of the game, Hitchens, the only true intellectual and by far the best-read of the group, was in it for the ride. All four looked as though they had powered their way through their task by reading the Cliff’s Notes to Thomas Aquinas and David Hume, and in some cases not even those carefully enough.

From any objective reading of the serious reviews, their mission to God’s kingdom was an epic fail in terms of what they brought home from the journey. It was all finished, critically speaking, in 2006 when Terry Eagleton said,

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?

Dawkins’s precedence in ignoring the opposition by denying they constituted serious opposition became a trademark of the movement he put into place. But despite the discounted value of the books as credible intellectual proposals, there were plenty of people prepared to spread the mission stateside, where Dawkins’s accent, his unabashed science-thumping and his wares were more valuable than in Blighty, where people had been giving up on God (in droves) for decades without his help.

What hath anti-God wrought: The new atheism, which was really an American phenomenon, like Spam.

 

One can’t simply blame Richard Dawkins for creating the kind of poster-pasters his leadership had produced in Gotchaland. He didn’t ordain them, exactly. That would be like blaming Jesus for founding the church. Is a rock star guilty of the excesses of his fans? Of course not.

But it is undeniable that new atheism would never have congealed, to the extent it ever congealed, if American neo-Darwinist soldiers and a few strays hadn’t taken on the fight. Dawkins, as Garry Wolff commented in 2006, was very old news in England when he decided to try plowing the fundamentalist pastures of America. And soldiers there were, just waiting for the right fight and marching orders. And a good thing too: Dawkins himself came off relatively unsullied by these battles, while his American promoters didn’t mind a little mud.

Headlights:

Jerry Coyne. Coyne is a biology professor at Chicago. His only book, Why Evolution is True (2009), is his contribution to the anti-intelligent design debate and carries endorsements from Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Pinker and others in the atheist-neo-Darwinist klatch. Dawkins reviewed the book for Atheist News in 2009. Hardly anyone would fault Coyne for his attempts to combat the anti-evolution fever that grips the establishment that is failed American science education. I for one think Jerry Coyne has struck a blow for rationality and common sense by writing this lucid book. It’s a shame therefore that Coyne buys into the Dawkins incompatibility model that makes religion the sworn enemy of science and science the salvation of the race. It is frankly embarassing, after two hundred years of the scientific study of religion, to hear a scientist saying things like this:

In the end, science is no more compatible with religion than with other superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don’t talk about reconciling science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it’s the most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially powerful.

Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did. Why does the perfectly reasonable opposition to religious craziness have to descend to this caricaturing of the history of religion? And some information: the University of Chicago Divinity School, one of the most venerable in the nation–after which the Chicago School of Religionswissenschaft got its name (and turned Europeans green with envy at its methods)–one notably lacking in Irish elves–is located at 1025 E. 58th Street. Any number of evolution-accepting scholars–including Martin Riesebrodt would be happy to have a chat and set you straight. Of course, if you really believe that a degree in biology trumps every other discipline, then why bother?

P Z Myers. Winner of the 2009 “Humanist of the Year Award,” a lapse of judgement for which the American Humanist Association will burn like cotton floss in a non-existent hell for their abuse of the word humanist,

P Z Myers is cut from the same neo-Darwinist fabric as Dr Coyne, but without the credentials. That means he is anti-intelligent design, pro-evolution, and happy to be known as the Don Rickles of the Dawkins theatre troupe. He’s the purveyor of the award-winning science blog Pharyngula where he specializes in calling people who don’t agree with him stupid and moronic.

To his credit, Myers has published no book of popular or scientific merit though if his rep holds up as the sun goes down on new atheism he does have a collection of his favourite anecdotes and outrages coming out in 2012. But this does not stop him from being the voice to which most of the young neo-atheists pay heed. I was reminded last year, after being told by P Z that I needed to be more respectful to the cause, that he deserves to be called Dr Myers. I had asked why someone who teaches in a university could not distinguish between free speech and inciteful behaviour–like that associated with Koran-burning Florida yahoo Terry Jones.

Myers, who describes himself as a moral nihilist, writes like this:

There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion. Webster Cook smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn’t eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it. This isn’t the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. …. It is just a cracker! So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls.

So, God love him, P Z Myers got the chance to kick the pope in the balls by spearing a consecrated host (eucharist is the name of the sacrament you fucking ex-Lutheran moron–whoops, just resorting to idiom) and a few other factotums. For this he is famous. And humanist of the year.

But let me just say this about the evolutionary, neo-Darwinist, religion sucks, anti-intelligent design phalanx of new atheism: If ever atheism got dumber and less impressive, it is in the work of this dissolute insult- monger. If there were ever an occasion for a serious scholar like Dawkins to say, this is over the top, P Z Myers is that opportunity. So far–nothing. The clowns are now the whole circus.

Greta Christina. I’m not sure whether Greta is a headlight, because there can only be two and she will see any reference to three as some sort of weird sexual joke. That’s the problem. She sees everything as a weird sexual joke. Ranked as one of the Top Ten most popular atheist bloggers, Christina exemplifies in her work the increasing influence of LGBTQ trend toward identifying atheism and humanism with victimization and social marginalization. She can be amusing, but needs to take on some serious issues, such as why radical feminism and lesbianism are often perceived to be anti science when new atheism is purely devoted to an evolutionary model that, frankly, is not friendly to special pleading for biological exceptionalism based on sex. Didn’t understand that sentence? You need to.

Sidelights.

Mark Twain just needed Huck and Tom to paste the handbills to the walls. Dawkins has a small retinue of Americans who will do him favours and not ask for money.

Ophelia Benson, host of Butterflies and Wheels, has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen. I still regard her as a fair-broker who needs to rise above the temptation to turn the whole kit and kaboodle over to the grousers who loiter around her kitchen table. I mean campfire.

The ex-Revd Eric MacDonald touts his website as being devoted to death with dignity. I’m for it; a close colleague and collaborator of mine, Gerald Larue, was one of the founders of the Hemlock Society. Unfortunately MacDonald has become just another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers. His constant theme is that theology is not worth the trouble. That’s an odd enough thesis for an atheist. More troubling is the fact that MacDonald doesn’t seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion and pretends that there is no difference between what he read as a young priest (mainly liberal post-Tillichian pap) and what’s being taught to PhD candidates in Religion at Harvard. It’s all ignorant bravado, but unfortunately some people read him, people like…

Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician qua neo-Darwinian atheist who teaches at James Madison University in Virginia. Rosenhouse [sic] essentially does book reviews of things that cross his path and passes judgment on what he doesn’t like, usually anything that rises an inch beyond cultural Judaism. Of Rabbi Alan Lurie’s recent HuffPo piece on religion, Rosenhouse opined,

We’re really not on the same page here. I agree with him about the art, and I’m not sure what he means by ‘the histories,’ but I find nothing to admire in the remaining items on his list. I am not only unimpressed by the world’s various alleged holy texts, but I frankly dislike the whole idea of a holy text. Most religious rituals and practices leave me beyond cold, I think the world’s ‘mystical teachings’ should be discarded in toto, and I think better uses could be found for sacred spaces.

To which I say…Go on. Suggest already. KFCs, meth clinics, museums, failing public libraries, Starbuck’s. You choose. America, as we know, is awash in sacred spaces so the fewer of these antiquities the better. Let’s use the real estate for what we really hold sacred. I sometimes wonder why people whose only contribution to blogdom consists of sentences like “Most religious rituals leave me beyond cold,” find themselves titillating? Can’t he do this on Facebook and get a thousand likes to boot?

S0 many other poster-pasters, but time is up and I hope my case is made.

The new atheism was as American as apple pie, which was invented in fourteenth century England. Just try finding apple pie in twenty-first century England.

HERE is a final question. Why does this matter? Why, more specifically, does it matter to me–why does someone who considers himself an unbeliever care about this subject at all? –So what if the ranters are ranters, that they pay no attention to serious religious studies scholarship, ignore the realities of two hundred years of academic inquiry into the foundations of religious thought and dismiss tons of modern scientific investigation into the nature of religious belief as worthless?

Jason Rosenhouse says, presumably with a straight face and clear conscience, he doesn’t know what “scientism” is. Naturally his question, in the ringaround-the-rosey style of this support group, is enthusiastically echoed by Coyne.

Let me offer my assistance. Scientism is a form of nominalism (q.v.) that collapses important methodological differences and qualities into a single term (“science”) as though the term had an existence apart from the methods that comprise it. Scientism is the belief that “science” is a supervening mode of knowing that can be imposed willy nilly on other disciplines whose methods have had a different organic evolution, yet methods normally just as true to their subject matter as biology or physics, for example, have been to their own. Most of the concrete results in historical studies biblical studies, the history of religion, textual studies (paleography), linguistics and assorted disciplines have been based on methods specific to their objects.

To deny the authority and validity of specific methods without knowing them is just as heinous an offense against reason as a fundamentalist’s rejection of a theory–like evolution–that he doesn’t fully understand. That is what scientism is and what it means and why it must be rejected. As Wittgenstein was finally forced to conclude, the belief that science is the final arbiter of what constitutes truth (or true propositions) is as “glaringly metaphysical” as the premises of traditional philosophy.

The willful ignorance of the new atheists matters because it makes almost impossible the work of serious religion scholars who have no commitment to belief, but who happen to feel that the study of religion belongs to and is inestimably important to the study of history and culture.

In the long run, real science acknowledges failed experiments and the humbling contribution of being wrong as a way of moving toward the right answers. It can’t rest like a medieval pope on its teaching authority. The “scientism” of the new atheists consists in a failed experiment in the misapplication of method. Richard Dawkins has been fond of saying that religion is the trivialization of complexities, a default position favoured by “dims” who just don’t get science. The scientistic worldview favoured by his promoters has relied heavily on the trivialization of appropriate methods for understanding religion. Given the starting point of his argument, there can be no other outcome.

The way forward in any useful critique of religion does not depend on activism disguised as judgement, opinion hiding behind tangential scholarly pursuits, or defenses of science and reason that are inherently unreasonable in themselves.

The scholars of the history-of-religions school realized, in the nineteenth century, that most religions were organized in cyclical patterns. The arrival of a new year was the pivot for these liturgical rotations and was always commemorated by fasting and reflection (symbolic of the passing order) followed by feasting and celebration at the hope of what the new year would bring.

The early Mesopotamian creation epics were essentially new year’s hymns about the destruction of the old order and the making of a new world. It has been theorized that the book of Genesis, or some prototype of its first chapter, embeds a similar Hebrew liturgy. The Jewish feast of yom kippur was organized on a sabbatical pattern to stress the need for renewal (kaphar: atonement). The secular evolution of the idea gives us the notion of new year’s resolutions.

More solar than lunar in their preferences, the Romans developed several solstice rituals, the best known being Saturnalia, the festival of light (associated with the quest for knowledge, symbolized by candles) and the feast of the dies Natalis in honor of the “birthday” of the Unconquerable Sun.

Christmas day, as most people know, is essentially the literal christening of the familiar Roman feast by fourth century emperors, and retains many of its new year’s elements–especially those (like the star in Matthew’s gospel or the angelic voices in Luke’s) associated with the lord of the heavens.

The “pagan” beginnings of Christmas are not news; the protestant reformers of the sixteenth century were so much aware of the associations that they wanted to abolish the holiday completely.

In puritan New England, it was forbidden to celebrate it and the fine for violating the prohibition was five shillings. In 1680 the only holidays permitted in the New England calendar according to Stephen Innes were the sabbath,election day, Harvard commencement day, and “periodic days of thanksgiving and humiliation.”

New year’s poems come in many shapes, but none is more subtle than Ranier Rilke’s hymn to Apollo. Here it is in the original German, with a translation by Stephen Mitchell:

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

———–

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. (S.M.)

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Christmas, history of New Year’s, new Year’s Day, R. Joseph Hoffmann. Bookmark the permalink.

Happy New Year!

Religious folk have the advantage of hearing their sacred texts read out, as in a story, during a liturgical year. Unbelievers and humanists have no such advantage, because we believe that no story is so sacred that it demands endless repetition.

Bertrand Russell’s life as a philosopher, logician-mathematician and social reformer can be summarized in one biographical detail: In 1894 he married the American Quaker Alys Pearsall Smith, one of a generation of wealthy buccaneers who propped up British aristocracy through “economic” marriages from Kensington to Blenheim. ”Their marriage began to fall apart,” says Wallenchinsky matter of factly, “in 1901 when it occurred to Russell, while he was cycling, that he no longer loved her.” What could be simpler?

A few texts of the atheist tradition deserve to be enshrined in memory if not in a tabernacle. As we approach January 2012, here is one of Russell’s best.

To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:

“The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.

“For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge germ springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death’s inexorable decree.

“And Man said: ‘There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.’ And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him.

“But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God’s wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula.

“Yes,’ he murmured, ‘it was a good play; I will have it performed again.’”

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch — as such creeds may be generically called — is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.

But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still urging that naked power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates, God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be.

But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own conscience?

The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false “recognition of facts” which fails to recognise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.

Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.

But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.

But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.

Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart.

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world — in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death — the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature.

HE more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy’s country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.

But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be — Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity — to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life’s fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things — this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible forces, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need — of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

 This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged atheism, Betrand Russell, christianity, freethought, freethoughyt, new Year’s Day, R. Joseph Hoffmann, religion, science, unbelief. Bookmark the permalink.

 

AM in China this year.

I love China. Food, people, culture, history. Public toilets, not so much. When I was in America I loved “Chinese” food. Now I love Chinese food. There may be things to criticize about China, but on average, I think it’s one of the finest countries on earth. That is an opinion, not an assertion. Believe me, I know what counts against my opinion.

Once I thought that America was the best country on earth. Then I turned fifteen. Between John Kennedy and Barack Obama, forty five years if you’re counting, there isn’t much to brag about.

But America is no longer the finest country on earth.

That’s because Americans on average are becoming dumber and dumber. The political system has become the equivalent of a hamster’s treadmill: vote ‘em in on a whim, vote ‘em out on a notion. Then vote no confidence in the congress you just elected. It’s a system designed for a country of 2.5 million disgruntled colonials made nervous by authority and power, not a country of 300,000,000 unhappy taxpayers. On November 6, 2012, a new president will be elected. On November 7, 2012, the 2016 presidential race will begin. This is no way to run a democracy. It’s a way to run a trifecta.

The educational system is broken. Not just broken but as Rosanna Pittella has shown broken because it was legislated and reformed step by step to be the broken system it is. The question isn’t just, Where is the next generation of engineers going to come from? It’s can we maintain the sixth grade reading level of high school graduates or should we aim lower?

Higher education used to be the exception, especially graduate education. And while congress, looking for cold comfort, will always point to the American university system as a world-beater, that is not what most people mean by ‘education’ and more and more colleges and universities are following broken business models that ensure the mediocrity of their faculty and teaching programs. And (not to be cynical) it is possible that the best universities are the best because they are following better models: compare ‘recruitment budgets’ at Harvard, MIT, and Cal Tech to those at Mercy College or Meadville.

So don’t worry too much about the evils of a one-party state when the glories of a two party system are far from clear on this side of the Pacific. Some things are worse than limited choice.

HAD lunch with a qīn’ài de tóngshì (“dear colleague”) today in the linguistics faculty of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has recently come back from two years in Boston. I had just had my first taste of duck feet and was, as instructed, spitting the extraneous bits (most) into the plate. The taste, and texture, needs getting used to, so we started talking about lobster, bad marriages, and then Christmas.

I’ll bet, he said, you’ve heard more Merry Christmases here in China than you ever would in America. I spat and thought.

Yes, I said. It’s true. My students have all wished me Merry Christmas. I have wassailed them back. I have watched their gentle, intelligent faces go from non-expressive to inexpressibly happy just at the sound of the phrase, like some supernal “Hello! Very glad to see you.” In notations to final exams, they have Merry Christmassed me, and in power points, often with angels, Santas, or nativity scenes as their last slide. No Happy Holidays, no Seasons Greetings, no Let your Light Shine this Solstice Season, no Axial Tilt is the Reason for the season (a joke that is both “in” and wrong at the same time) . While writing this, a third year doctoral student in animal ecology sent me a Merry Christmas showing two goitered gazelles in China’s far north. Beautiful creatures, beautiful gesture.

 

My friend paid the tab, beamed “Merry Christmas,” and we parted. The shopping districts are festooned with lights; Christmas music is blaring from every speaker. At first I thought I was imagining that people seemed happier, friendlier, even kindlier–but No: Christmas in China is the real thing, and American merchants would kill to have a share of their shopping extravagance right now.

+++

 

I have never been the kind of person who wanted non-Christians and atheists to feel uncomfortable at Christmas. But living in an “officially” atheist state has taught me a few things that atheists and even happy holiday inclusivists need to consider.

Prudence: China is a country of well over one billion people. Perhaps 30% regard themselves as belonging to a “traditional” or ethnic religion, though good statistics are hard to come by in this under-researched land. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism (prevalent among the Han) command general respect as conveyances of traditional Chinese values. These include “essentials” like filial piety, duty, honor and intellectual rigor–the primacy of knowledge and a respect for scholars.

Christians are at about 3% of the population (about 4,000,000), but the statistic is far from certain. At various points in Chinese history, Judaism and Islam, but not Christianity, enjoyed favoured status. Some Chinese worry that Tibetan Buddhism overstresses “holiness” the importance of doing without, and thus can’t be reconciled with the new Chinese economic program (the world’s second largest economy, after all). But other values, like harmony and proportion, are vigorously accepted by most Chinese, young and old.

Chinese indifference to religion is not an indifference to particular religious values that are regarded as markers of China’s civilization: filial piety is real piety, just as it was in the first-century Roman empire out of which religious hierarchy, with its stress on obedience, developed. Chinese concern about religion is a worry that religion can be used as an instrument of dissent and insurrection against these values and the (ever-changing) political status quo; accordingly, since 1949 missionary Christianity has been tightly controlled. (The evangelical house church movement–zhōngguó jiātíng jiàohuì–in my opinion an especially repugnant intrusion into the Chinese spiritual realm–has recently come under scrutiny.) Going back two thousand years, China’s approach to religion has been prudential and “indigenous” (what in religious terms is the good of China?) rather than arbitrary, while in the west it has been driven by a power struggle between the temporal and spiritual domains, and by necessity, protectivism and intrigue on both sides.

MATURITY : From a distance, American atheism’s war against Christmas looks puerile. I also happen to think it is puerile, driven by passionate collective intensity rather than by cool-headed logic. True enough, given the persistent failure of religion to mind its own business in political seasons, it is hard to believe that the First Amendment to the United State Constitution was designed to ‘fix’ potential encroachments by religion on the state. Some pushback, though not necessarily “atheism,” is needed to keep religion in its Constitutional place. But it’s also hard to imagine that anyone thinks “In God we Trust,” banal as the newly reiterated “national motto” is, or “One nation under God” in the Pledge are serious encroachments on the public good. –The latter should be excised because it breaks the rhetorical flow between nation and indivisible. (Frankly, I think indivisible should go too. It reminds me of arithmetic.)

China however has been around as a continuous civilization for four thousand years. It has had its dynastic wars and bloody rebellions, like the nationalist movements of the early twentieth century and the civil war ending in the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. But in broad perspective, China’s encounter with Christianity is ancient, more than 1300 years old–as old as the earliest introduction of Christianity to Scandinavia. Christianity arrived in the 7th century with Nestorian missionaries to the Tang dynasty. It was banned by emperor Wuzong, along with Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, in the 9th century, re-established in the 13th by the Mongol emperors, some of whom were eclectically and some fiercely Christian themselves. Under the Ming emperors, western Christian influnces in China underwent an uneven patch until in 1582, the Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci (Li Madou or Taixi to the Chinese) arrived in Macau and made his learned way slowly but steadily toward Beijing.

A linguist, cartographer, astronomer, musician and mathematician, Ricci was one of the first Europeans to master the Chinese language and classical script. He translated Euclid’s Geometry into Chinese and astonished the emperor by precisely predicting a solar eclipse. He became a paid scholarly adviser to the court of the Wanli emperor and was permitted to build a church (now, much modified over the centuries, a cathedral) near the Forbidden City. I will be in the cathedral on Christmas morning where every Sunday at 6 AM a Latin Mass is celebrated. China has never forgotten Ricci, perhaps the single greatest conduit for western learning to China before the colonial period.

ECAUSE it has a deeper and more holistic understanding of culture, China is not lost in the feckless secular versus religious divide that afflicts western discussion. There have been many enlightenments, not only one, and many of them were fueled by religious and philosophical movements, in a land where those two terms have a symbiotic relationship.

I have often tried to explain to Chinese academic friends that many American atheists and secularists deplore religion as being anti-learning, anti-science, and anti-education. They can’t quite understand this: It would be enough, they say, to point to the scholar-priests–the clerks, from (clerici=clergy)–of the Renaissance like Ricci, but the sharpest rejoinder is one I have been repeating for two years now on this site–something no Chinese or Indian professor would need to be reminded of: Where do you think the books came from? Even in China, with its rich literary history, the basis for both the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets was the Syriac alphabet of the Nestorian Christian teachers. Christianity did not invent the dark ages, but it did preserve, east and west, glimmers of intellectual light in its love for the word made flesh: the written text.

 

OPENNESS: China now suffers from its economic miracle. The pace of development is too fast. The scope of construction (and thus demolition) is immense. In Beijing we suffer the consequences of dust and fumes every day, even inside our apartments. The air is not good. The traffic is terrible and likely to get worse, as China has moved from an “Everyone with his own bicycle”- policy only two generations ago to today’s “Every family with a car.”

To hop off the subway at Xidan or Fuxingmen station is to enter a world of Extreme Shopping so vast and crowded that it will send you running for the nearest corner of the nearest, ubiquitous, Starbucks for a little peace. Divorce is on the rise. Property prices are so high in Beijing that young workers and junior professionals can’t compete with nouveau riche executives and profiteers for space. The educational system is cramped. Competiton for jobs, as everywhere, is vicious. When in 1982 China officially opened its bronze doors to the outside world, it took a risk that few other countries have ever taken. ”Openness” is not organic to China’s development and some would say not a feature of the “Chinese personality,” a reality that is reflected in its control of information and news. Openness is the unavoidable consequence of its modern history, a concession to planet- sharing. At the same time, China’s openness is real: Mother China is a Chinese mother after all: she would never do anything she did not think she could do well, so she is determined to win at this game.

The Chinese therefore are open to western history, western ideas, and western values–especially open to learning English–any form of English. The teaching of English proceeds here at a frenetic pace, with every student from the streets of Shanghai to the plateaus of Tibet required to begin the study at age 10 and carry it through in high school, college, and graduate school. The practical effects are not entirely visible: the rationale for learning English is often presented in dominant-power terms (English is a world language so you’d better learn it if you want to get ahead). Officials do not seem to realize that this pretext combined with pervasive laments about threats to national culture and the rapacious designs of the West, especially America, do not provide a coherent incentive to learn a foreign tongue. The result is that English is often not pursued enthusiastically, taught well, or learned well.

By the same token, however, my impression is that Chinese students are eager to know the history of Europe and America, to make comparisons and chalk up differences. They find it remarkable that teachers in the west are considered low-status professionals, since teachers in China are revered and respected at all levels. The phrase “dear teacher” (Qīn’ài de lǎoshī) is virtually one word. Many are vaguely aware of differences in instructional methods in China and America, and many would like to see some elements–not all–of the famed “student centered” approach (as distinguished from the teacher-authority, rote memorization style) introduced to China.

As a result of its own long history, Chinese students could not accept–and would not understand–some of the parochial and special interest histories now occupying blog space in the United States. They would want to know about the Inquisition and the condemnation of Galileo, maybe the Scopes Trial–the festival dates on any atheist calendar. They are shocked to learn that some Americans in high places do not “believe” in evolution or know very much about cosmology, but believe that a sky god created the universe in six earth days.

But as the world is much bigger than America, they are looking for a comprehensive picture of how western values have been transmitted, and inevitably this is in part a history of classical civilization, Christendom, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment and the modern period–a history of ideas. These are also periods that are not taught well by badly prepared and sometimes intellectually vacuous teachers, or known well by American students. In 2010, only 12% of American high school students scored at “proficiency” level on the history section of the National assessment of Educational Progress; only 2% could identify correctly what the significance of Brown vs the Board of Education was with the answer in front of them. America has become, in a word, a country of historical illiterates content to live in a monoculture of expanding technology and shrinking ideas.

For the Chinese student interested in western studies, no phase in the evolutionary history of western society becomes the whole picture. That is because the Chinese are used to dealing with puzzles and complexity, but they do not like oversimplification, a legacy of the Confucian tradition where appearance and reality occupy different levels of meaning but not different spheres.

The art of asking the right questions is as significant as getting the right answer, which may indeed be another question. Americans by contrast seem to be enthralled by either-or judgements and prefer black and white to the full palette of real history: religion or science, faith or reason, secular or sacred, liberal or conservative–a modal planetary view that almost requires oversimplification, a “bottom line.” The idea of many traditions thriving together has never been able to capture the American mind. Blame it on Abelard, or maybe Nietzsche

And roundabout this is also why no ground is to be gained, no heavenly powers offended or assuaged, and no political points scored here by saying “Happy Solstice!”–secular versus religious problem solved. It just makes no sense. It’s Christmas. It doesn’t matter what it was two thousand years ago: it’s been Christmas for a long time. It has a special meaning within a particular historical context. It is about peace, love, brotherhood, charity, generosity and new life–which are secular as well as religious values. If Christians see these symbolized in the birth of a child in some distant Roman province a little more than two millennia ago, the Chinese “get it.” What they might not understand is why a festival of joy and goodwill should have to be tiptoed around, apologized for, celebrated apart from the the cultural values it has embodied for at least 1800 years.

Musing in the year 110 or thereabouts, the Syrian bishop and martyr Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Christians at Ephesus (Turkey),

Hidden from the prince of this world were the virginity of Mary and her child-bearing and likewise also the death of the Lord — three mysteries to be cried aloud — the which were wrought in the silence of God. How then were they made manifest to the ages? A star shone forth in the heaven above all the stars; and its light was unutterable, and its strangeness caused amazement; and all the rest of the constellations with the sun and moon formed themselves into a chorus about the star; but the star itself far outshone them all; and there was perplexity to know whence came this strange appearance which was so unlike them.

From that time forward every sorcery and every spell was dissolved, the ignorance of wickedness vanished away, the ancient kingdom was pulled down, when God appeared in the likeness of man unto newness of everlasting life; and that which had been perfected in the counsels of God began to take effect. Thence all things were perturbed, because the abolishing of death was taken in hand.

In 386 John Chrysostom (the ‘golden tongued’) preached as though seamlessly from Ignatius what is regarded as the first Christmas morning sermon. He said,

Come, then, let us observe the Feast. Truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the Nativity. For this day the ancient slavery is ended, the devil confounded, the demons take to flight, the power of death is broken, paradise is unlocked, the curse is taken away, sin is removed from us, error driven out, truth has been brought back, the speech of kindliness diffused, and spreads on every side, a heavenly way of life has been implanted on the earth, angels communicate with men without fear, and men now hold speech with angels. Why is this? Because God is now on earth, and man in heaven; on every side all things commingle.

Unlike Santa Claus, this is powerful mythology, but its fundamental matrix is the belief that goodness and new life are horizontal possibilities for every one in this season of renewal and re-dedication. You can learn a little about this spirit in China.

 

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged agnosticism, American politics, American secularism, arts and culture, atheism, China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Government, Christmas, Graduate University, Humanism, Nestorians, R. Joseph Hoffmann, war against Christmas. Bookmark the permalink.

HERE is no reason to eulogize Christopher Hitchens except that, had he stuck around to read the tributes, some of what is being said might have amused him. So we will read each what the other writes knowing he would have said it better, except he probably wouldn’t say it at all.

Hitchens in many ways belongs rhetorically to another era, which is why the twentieth and twenty-first century, what little he lived in it, is privileged to have known him. His verbal style was self-conscious, but seemed effortless, driven by the “true wit” (what Alexander Pope described as “nature to advantage dressed”) that was perfected in Restoration and eighteenth-century England coffee houses and left Thames-side by the sober English migrants who came to America to escape the kind of ridicule his sort had represented back home. Hitchens’s choosing to live in America, the world’s second most religious country, was proof that original sin will follow you wherever you go.

It has always struck me as odd, but encouraging, that Hitch found so many fans in America. He was personally everything the American Everyman was supposed to detest: He was a creature of the Balliol junior common room and assorted Oxford clubs, an intellectual elitist, an omnipartisan despiser of political folly and individual power-holders, sharp-tongued and aggressively literate. In his New Yorker remembrance, Christopher Buckley writes,

“When we all gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a few years later, to see William F. Buckley off to the celestial choir, Christopher was present, having flown in from a speech in the American hinterland. (Alert: if you are reading this, Richard Dawkins, you may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph.) There he was in the pew, belting out Bunyan’s “He Who Would Valiant Be.” Christopher recused himself when Henry Kissinger took the lectern to give his eulogy, going out onto rain-swept Fifth Avenue to smoke one of his ultimately consequential cigarettes.”

The best way to remember Hitch is simply to admire what he did–what almost no one else could do. Because he was the touchstone for a certain kind of eloquence, all of the obituaries are affecting to reproduce that eloquence. I expect he would find that amusing too. His brand of rhetorical power is difficult to describe, so difficult that I saw yesterday his ease of expression compared to Norman Mailer’s. Whereas in fact their styles represent two entirely different kinds of combativeness: The “sports mad Mailer” as Hitchens called him, was a boxer who happened to write, and Hitchens was a writer who happened to fence. The latter’s contempt for going mano-a-mano (to quote a former US president described by Hitchens as “abnormally unintelligent”) was common sense; why do that when you can put a sword between you?

Less well known is Hitch’s passion for getting his facts straight. While he’ll be remembered as an interpreter, he was passionate about getting the basics behind the interpretation correct. I told him once he would have made a good thirteenth-century theologian, except that he quoted the texts too literally. In 2007 he was in a “discussion” with Alister McGrath who had accused him of misquoting a famous statement attributed to Tertullian, “Credo quia absurdum est” (“I believe because it is absurd”). He was genuinely agitated over the prospect that McGrath might be right; and the statement is sometimes thought to be important because it’s considered foundational for “fideism,” the belief that faith provides a kind of epistemological certainty. We had had dinner and he asked me if I could track down the quote for a response. Tertullian’s exact words are “Certum est, quia impossible” (“It is certain because it is impossible”), but the passage is problematical–just the kind of thing a theologian could pounce on, I warned him. “It will do.” he said. “Almost as good. I got him.”

HRISTOPHER HITCHENS was our Dr Johnson–though “our” is not an inclusive term. Not accidentally, he knew almost every detail of Johnson’s rich and lexical life and one of his famous statements about his diagnosis of cancer is actually a spin on Johnson’s comment on a condemned prisoner: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” A week ago, as fate would have it, I reposted his review of Peter Martin’s superb book on Johnson, which is one of his finest critical pieces for the Atlantic. Johnson, as much a Christian as Hitchens was an atheist, did not write “novels” and was anxious about French anti-clericalism sweeping into England. His picaresque novella called Rasellas, about the adventures of the “Prince of Abissinia” contains the following narrative meditation:

That the dead are seen no more … I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.

Hitchens was a caviller at such ideas. The final hypocrisy is to live your life as though you will be seen and heard from again. There are no second acts in American politics or anywhere else. He was also content with the life he led, with its inconsistencies and nasty habits, and with the offence he gave, in the name of sanity, to the ignorance he saw surrounding him. That last sentence does not mean he thought he was fighting a moral battle, except insofar as his atheism was a steady compass, especially in the last decade, in a world where traditional morality had become a dark and superstitious sea. America, with which he had a pragmatic relationship rather than a love affair, was the last testing ground for the possibility of a new enlightenment, a place where the monsters of unreason reared their heads every day and needed to be beaten back.

Not altogether unrelated to the death of Christopher Hitchens, I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about life, death and elegies. A few weeks ago, I came across a poem I had hand-copied in my middler year at Harvard Divinity School onto yellow legal paper. Even the paper tells me how old I am, but the thought lives on and it says something that Christopher Hitchens has said just as well in prose about the blunt, rude ordinariness of death. Death is nothing special.

HAT I expected was
Thunder, fighting,
Long struggles with men
And climbing.
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake
And I should rest long.

What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away,
The lack of good to touch
The fading of body and soul
Like smoke before wind
Corrupt, unsubstantial.

The wearing of Time,
And the watching of cripples pass
With limbs shaped like questions
In their odd twist,
The pulverous grief
Melting the bones with pity,
The sick falling from earth—
These, I could not foresee.

For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust;
That, hanging solid,
Would dangle through all
Like the created poem
Or the dazzling crystal. (Stephen Spender)

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged atheism, Christpher Hitchens, death and dying, English writers of the twentieth century, God is Not great, language, new atheism, R. Joseph Hoffmann, religion. Bookmark the permalink.