This is where I get godless in a big way. But seriously, I’m not mad at the Deity; I just don’t believe in Her.

Kavanaugh, Young and Old

01 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Justice, Politics, Religion

Tags

Biography, Brett Kavanaugh, Hypocrisy, Inconsistency, Morality, religion, SCOTUS, Sex, Time

Is it still hypocrisy if your contradictions are separated from one another by decades of your own life? If a moment of ‘yes’ and another moment of ‘no’ have enough time between them, does that mean your off the hook for the difference between them? Could life changing decisions be sufficient to ensue the past doesn’t count against the present? Might someone be excused for having it both ways if they do so in very different chapters of their own biography? Alternatively, supposing time and transformation could be enough to excuse great inconsistencies, might other matters prove sufficient to counteract them? Is it at least possible that time makes the difference in some instances and not others?

It’s common enough to hold moral contradictions against people; it’s also common enough to excuse them when the contradictions can be explained as a clear change of heart. But what if that change is a little too pat? What if it follows a course that’s just a little too obvious?

I am of course thinking about Brett Kavanaugh.

Again.

Watching Brett Kavanaugh struggle to explain his conduct in high school to an audience tasked with judging his fitness for office, I couldn’t help thinking about this very question. If his appointment is confirmed, Kavanaugh will take his place among the many conservative Catholics to hold a position on the Supreme Court of the United States. He will take his place in a judicial voting block that has consistently re-enforced the authority of the state over moral and spiritual matters and the role of Christianity in defining that authority. We can expect him to minimize gay rights and to hammer the final nail in the coffin for women’s reproductive rights as we know them today. If Kavanaugh takes a seat on that court, this will happen regardless of any transformations coming to Congress, even regardless of any possible changes in the White House. This man is poised to impose the moral order of a conservative Christian world view on us all, all of which makes it more than a little ironic to see Kavanaugh sitting there trying to explain the sins of his youth, the very sins he was once proud to proclaim.

I really do wonder what the teenage Kavanaugh would make of the old man now denying all the sexual conquests he was so proud to put in his yearbook?

To say that Kavanaugh partied a lot is to completely miss the point. His high school yearbook alone gives us plenty of evidence that Kavanaugh didn’t just drink and have sex, but that he approached these activities in terms of a toxic masculinity all-too pervasive in some circles. Kavanaugh may have told the world that he refrained some sex until well after high school, but in his yearbook, he wanted the world to know that he’d gotten laid. The story he told in that yearbook didn’t merely recount a sexual encounter, it did so in a manner degrading to the young woman in question. This isn’t merely the excess of a boy enjoying his own life; it’s the cruelty of a young man for whom at least a part of that joy seems to have come from his ability to hurt others, to dominate them.

The problem is plain enough. This is a man who will assert moral authority over our own lives. Make no mistake, that is what he has been put foreword to do! He will assert this authority amidst a number of important questions about his own personal morality.

At least one important defense of Kavanaugh’s character has been the notion that this occurred so long ago that it just isn’t relevant now. Is it really fair, his defenders ask, to impose consequences on the career of a man for things he did so many years ago? There is of course a trace of irony here in that Kavanaugh will almost certainly use the power of the Supreme Court to impose consequences well into the distant future on women for things they’ve done (or in some cases, things done to them) early in life. That’s a problem for Kavanaugh and those who support him. One of many.

The question I mean to raise here is this; is really a clean break here?

If Kavanaugh really had made a clean break with his predatory past, (and let’s be clear, the conduct contained in the yearbook alone is sufficiently predatory in itself to raise questions about his character), …if Kavanaugh really had made such a clean break with his past, then I for one would expect a more honest account for it in the present. When Kavanaugh pretends that his reference to Renate Alumnus was a gesture of respect (a gesture that neither he nor his buddies bothered to convey directly to her), he is lying. When Kavanaugh pretended the notion that this was a reference to sexual conquest is all in the minds of left-wing critics, he dismisses her own reaction to those very words. When he suggested this was all in the imagination of sick critics on the left, he implicated her own reaction to his words. He blamed her too for getting the actual point of his yearbook entry. In effect, Kavanaugh’s testimony in the hearing last Thursday carries foreword the very cruelty that put those words in his yearbook to begin with. When Kavanaugh feigns disgust at the imagination of senators questioning him about the meaning of this and other comments in his yearbook, Kavanaugh shows us that he isn’t at all prepared to own up to the man he once was. Which is one very good reason to question the notion that he is now someone very different.

A different man wouldn’t be afraid to own up to the actions of a childish former self, but a man still caught up in that very childish mindset might.

Of course we can see already ties to the Kavanaugh we see today in the one that wrote all those things in his yearbook. That wasn’t just a young man looking to have fun; that was a rich kid and a star athlete who attended Georgetown Prep, and who would later attend Yale as a legacy student. This kid had a Hell of a head-start in the world and he knew it. You can’t tell me the kid then sowing his oats and bragging about it in his yearbook didn’t have some sense of the future that lay before him, some sense of the role that his faith would play in that future and the potential power that lay within his grasp. Kavanaugh was going places, and his role in the Catholic Church would play a strong role in getting him to those places.

If Kavanaugh really did go to church back in 1982, as he assured us all during the hearing he did, he doesn’t seem to have made much of an effort to live the life envisioned in that church. Still, he had the good sense not to burn his bridges. That faith would serve him well one day, even if he wasn’t all that worried about it while working his way through those 100 kegs he also bragged about.

I can’t say how much of this Kavanaugh consciously thought out, but it’s an awfully common story-line. It’s taken for granted at some ages that some people will not live the life of the faith they profess, and that others won’t expect them to. It’s taken for granted that some people needn’t show common decency to others, let alone great piety, but that doesn’t stop them from endorsing either virtue when doing so won’t obligate them in any real manner. The day sometimes comes when such folks put away their excesses and take up a more conventional role in society, perhaps even a powerful one. In Kavanaugh’s case, this has meant (and will continue to mean) that he will enforce the terms of his own faith on others. It would be easy enough to say that he simply changed; decent enough to say that we should give him the benefit of the doubt as to the matter. And yet, the story remains just a little too pat. A little too convenient.

…and the inconsistently just a little too meaningful.

It would be one thing if the difference between the teenage version of Kavanaugh and the middle-aged man of today held no common thread between them. But is it really that hard to see in a boy who regards a sexual encounter as cause to humiliate the woman he had it with and one who would tell women everywhere that they must simply live with the consequences of their own sexual activity? Is it really that hard to see the connection between a young man for whom an accident of his birth played a key role in his education and one who would insist we should end affirmative action out of concerns over its fairness? Is it really too hard to see in a young man who brags up his party-life the same sense of entitlement shown in an older man who would lie to Congress about his role in the Bush administration or refuse to answer the questions of the opposition party at his most recent hearing? Is it so hard to see the sense of untouchable self-worth in both actions?

Kavanaugh may not be the party boy of his of yearbook, but his sense of his own power doesn’t seem to have much changed. He is still an elitist, and he is still happy to impose his will on others. If conventional (Catholic) morality now guides his actions more than it did back in his high school days, that morality is also now far more critical to the power he would wield over others. What Kavanaugh might once have taken through his own physical strength, he now takes by right of high office and pretense of moral purpose.

In the end, this isn’t even a story about hypocrisy; it is a story about a life blessed with privilege, and a man fully prepared to abuse it.

***

Both pictures were taken from the Wikopeadia page on Kavanaugh, 10/1/18: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh

On Chick Tracts

25 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Childhood, Religion

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Apologetics, Childhood, Comics, God, Jack Chick, Jesus, Pornography, religion, School

I still remember the first time I encountered a Chick tract, but I can’t remember if it was the 4th or the 5th grade. I think I might have been hanging around after school for some reason. I do remember quite clearly that it was one of several that had been left scattered about the boy’s bathroom at my school.

This particular pamphlet contained a pretty generic story of a sinner who died and went to Hell. The pamphlet ended, as always, with a message of hope; we didn’t have to end as the character in the story did. Through Jesus we could be saved. In my charitable moments, I like to think that message of hope is the real point of these pamphlets, but frankly I think that might be giving a little too much benefit of the doubt. On that day it was clearly the message of fear that left its biggest impression on me. I remember the feeling of horror coursing up and down my spine as I read about the suffering of sinners damned to a lake of fire. The mere thought that this could be the world I was born into was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck and keep it there. The suffering itself and the cruelty of the being who would inflict it stuck with me for days, as did the cruelty of anyone who could say of such a thing that the source of it was good and worthy of praise.

It’s more than a little fitting that my first encounter with a Chick Tract was in a bathroom, because my whole world got a little creepier that day and I don’t think it’s recovered since.

I grew up in a household filled with the ideas of Spiritualism and Theosophy, essentially the forerunners of modern day New Age thinking. I’d heard of people who believed in Satan. I’d heard of people who believed in Hell. In retrospect, I must certainly have known many who believed in the things talked about in that pamphlet, but I hadn’t ever really talked to any of them about it. What I heard of God and Jesus was all love and kindness, and so those who literally believed in Hell were (much like Hell itself) a remote possibility to me. To my family, such people were largely a whipping boy, an image of someone who gets it wrong conjured up mostly for the purpose of telling a story about how more enlightened souls get it right.

The Chick tract was the first time such people became real to me. They became real to me in the most caricatured form imaginable. On that day, the worst things said of organized religion by the adults around me had not come close to the pure malice of the story I held in my hands. Someone had left this with the intent that children would find it and read about it. Whoever that person was believed quite firmly in Hell, and they believed in it strongly enough to want to share that message with others.

…with children.

It didn’t escape me that the chosen mode of delivery was less than honest. Leaving pamphlets in a children’s bathroom is more than a little underhanded, and this fact was the icky icing on a whole cake of ugly. So, there I sat with this pamphlet, trying to wrap my mind around the twin horrors of this vengeful God and the fact that some people actually do believe in Him, and whats more that they love him. Suffice to say those horrors outweighed the significance of any hope the pamphlet might have had to offer. The vision of Jesus might have been the end of the story, but it’s most memorable moment for me (and I suspect others) had clearly been the lake of fire.

Could the world really be so perverse? Could people really be so morbid as to think this way? Those are the questions I kept asking myself after encountering that first Chick Tract. It’s all I could think of for some time afterwards. Eventually, I managed to put the whole thing behind me, but not entirely. It was a bit like some of the dirty stories my friends were beginning to tell at that age, or images of odd porn that somehow crossed my path. I hoped one day to make sense of all these things, but for the time being I found them simply disturbing and I preferred not to think about them much. To me, that pamphlet had always been a kind of pornography.

It still is.

I understand the author of that pamphlet, Jack Chick, has recently passed away, and it reminded me of that day back in school. I don’t wish to celebrate his death, but I’m also quite aware that his passing will stimulate a surge in public interest regarding the man and his work. I take no pleasure in his passing, but I do think his life’s work is worthy of a comment or two, critical as mine most certainly will be.

The next time I had cause to consider Jack Chick’s particular brand of pornography came in the mid 80s when I and my friends took to playing Dungeons and Dragons. “Dark Dungeons” would be Jack Chick’s main contribution to the Satanic panic of the era. I don’t recall when I first became aware of it, but the story-line always struck me as both laughable and deceitful. I didn’t really become fully aware of Jack Chick himself (or of his operation) until I joined a few discussion boards back in the early 2000s. It was odd to me, a bit like learning the name of a creepy caller. This was the man who had written that story from back in my childhood. He was the author of those morbid images, and he was the source of that sick feeling I had upon seeing them.

Good to know.

…but also a little disconcerting.

I recall only one other Chick tract with any degree of significance to me. It was about Navajo Medicine Men. Chick portrayed them as Skinwalkers, thus conflating healers with monsters, and of course ending the whole matter with a familiar pitch to Jesus. It was no more insightful than the hack job Chick did on D&D.

I’ve encountered a few more of Chick’s pieces over the years, but not many have really stuck in my memory. The formula is simple. Some worldly interest will lead a person down a very dark path toward Satan, death, and Hell itself, but Christians will offer them salvation. In the end, the reader is invited to accept Jesus and be saved. I understand others have been doing the work for sometime now, but the essential formula remains largely unchanged. I always wonder at the choices Chick and his successors make in these stories. Do they really believe the details of their claims? It’s one thing, for example, to believe that Dungeons & Dragons is a bad influence on kids, and quite another to believe that it is literally run by a cult as a means of initiating children into arcane magical rites. This is what fascinates me most about such work today. It isn’t testimony to faith, but rather the myopic interest in sordid stories about actual people real world world institutions. What kind of mind spreads stories like this? And how did they decide to produce them? With or without evidence, I can’t help thinking the bottom line is the same. Someone is getting off on these narratives. Whatever their interest in selling the hope of Jesus, someone is reveling in the vision of sinfulness a little too much.

Don’t get me wrong; I have no particular reason to condemn anyone for pursuing their prurient interests, at least if you can do it without harming anyone. What bothers me in this instance is the bad faith and the lack of self-awareness, the sense that someone could play so happily in the very imagery they seek to condemn in others. Perhaps more to the point, what bothers me about Chick Tracts is the sense that this is a pleasure taken in sordidness of others’ lives, a kind of hope that other people might really be worse than you could possibly know, and of course a hope that they will suffer in the end. This sort of thing is not unique to Chick publications, unfortunately, and one can often find preachers indulging in a kind of proxy porn. I suppose that was Chick’s particular genius. He found a particularly vivid way to present that kind of material. Whether that is to his shame or his credit is of course another question. For me the answer is clear enough.

I wish I could find something better to say about Jack Chick than this. It is of course tempting to follow an age old wisdom and say nothing at all, but Chick’s passing reminds me of that moment all those many years ago in which I first found one of his publications. Don’t get me wrong. Worse things have happened to me than the discovery of that creepy pamphlet. Even still, I can’t help thinking it wasn’t a particularly positive experience. For me, that will always be Jack Chick’s legacy.

It isn’t a good one.

Good Without an Apology

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Philosophy

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Apologetics, Argumentation, atheism, Ethics, Morality, Narrative, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Unbelief

Saw this in Cedar City this summer (I think Moni took the picture.)

Atheists can’t provide a sound basis for their morality.

…it’s the kinder gentler version of “atheists can’t be moral,” which is a common theme among Christian apologists. To be sure, some folks go back and forth between the two messages, but at least some apologists do seem to keep a clear distinction between the claim that atheists cannot be moral and the claim that whatever morals we may have, we simply cannot justify them in rational terms.

Some folks express this position in the form of an architectural metaphor; we have no foundation for our ethics, so the argument goes. Alternatively, we cannot ground our moral principles in a sound basis of judgement; our morals aren’t based on anything objective, and so on. The sheer physicality of this rhetoric is always striking to me.

I know.

Metaphors happen.

Still, I can’t help thinking some of those using this language could stand to think about those metaphors a little bit. It would be nice if they at least recognized them as metaphors. As often as not, I suspect many of those producing such messages take these terms rather literally.

All that aside, lately, I’ve been thinking about this less in terms of the argument at hand and more in terms of the narrative about that argument. Questions about the nature of morality go back a rather long way in the history of western philosophy, to say nothing of countless other contexts in which people could ask about what people ought to do and whether or not they can provide a sound reason for their answer. This is not just one ongoing debate; it is many, and while that debate rages on with no likelihood of a clear winner, this story of the unique moral failure of atheism flourishes in its own right. The notion that atheists can’t provide an adequate account of the nature of morality may be a contention to be argued in select circles. It can also be a story told about the difference between us and them.

…in this case, I’m a them. Damn! (Othered in my own blog post.)

***

First an anecdote!

This theme reminds me of a time a college friend took me to see Gary Habermas speak at his church. Habermas is a renowned apologist, so I was expecting to hear an interesting argument in favor of Christianity. Suffice to say that I didn’t. I don’t know how to convey just how unimpressive Habermas was on that occasion. I could hardly believe my ears. To this day, I wonder if I missed something important or if Habermas was just having an exceptionally bad day? I don’t know.

The whole performance got a great deal more interesting though after Habermas stepped down, and the regular pastor for this church took a moment to add a few thoughts of his own. The pastor himself struck me as a fairly nice guy. I couldn’t help but like him, but there I sat listening to him try to put Habermas’ presentation into perspective for his audience. What impressed the pastor was the notion that someone could field a complex and sophisticated argument in favor of the Christian faith. He ended his own comments by saying how good it felt to know that people of intelligence could defend the faith, that smart people did in fact believe in Jesus and that they could justify that faith.

So, there I sat thinking on the one hand that Gary Habermas might be a smart guy, but we sure as Hell hadn’t seen anything to prove it on that particular day. More importantly, I couldn’t help noting how much had been lost on the pastor. He had nothing to say on the topic at hand, or the arguments Habermas had made, nothing at all. The mere fact that Habermas had fielded an argument in favor of Christianity was what interested the pastor. Such an argument did exist, and its existence was a comfort to him. It should also, he thought, be a comfort to others attending his church.

This is what I mean by the narrative value of the argument. Habermas and people like him continue to make their arguments, and people like me continue to be unimpressed by them. Still, the arguments seem to hold a value in believing circles, a value almost entirely unrelated to the soundness of the arguments themselves, much less the impact of those arguments in contested circles. An apologist may fail to engage unbelievers entirely and still count as a success in believing circles. For some, it is enough to know that smart people defend the faith.

Toward what end is another question.

***

So what? Conflict is a common source of good narrative material, and conflict over religious beliefs is no different. We unbelievers have been known to tell a story or two out of season ourselves, but I don’t think we’ve established quite the market for selling to the non-choir, at least not yet. A few unbelievers may be working tales of battle into a profession of sorts, but we are generations behind the business of Christian apologetics. So, our narratives are generally more fluid, the pay-off less certain, and the likely consumers for such stories less obvious. When an atheist fields an argument against a believer, it is still reasonably likely that the believer is the actual person we are trying to communicate with. Christian apologetics, by contrast is full of people framing arguments in terms of a confrontation with unbelievers only to produce them for the benefit of other believers. It is in effect a business aimed at producing stories like those told by the pastor above, stories of reassurance.

Let’s come back to the notion that atheists can’t justify our own ethical principles. What does this contention provide when it’s construed in terms of narrative themes? I think the payoff is very clear, namely in the implied contrast. If we non-believers can’t justify our moral principles, so the argument seems to suggest, those who believe in God can. As much as people working this argument may be trying to tell us about the failures of unbelief, they are also claiming a victory for theism, or at least for specific variations of theism.

What is wrong with us, so the story goes, is we cannot justify our moral principles. We may be moral people, but our morality is lacking something, and that something is important. Don’t get me wrong; this story a damned site better than the argument that non-believers are inherently immoral, but this particular concession that we are moral without a sound reason damns us with faint praise.

What’s so infuriating about this is the difficulty of the issue. It really is very difficult to establish a rational justification for ethics. We can often establish reasonable connections between certain basic value judgements and more specific propositions (Kant’s categorical imperative could be used for example to suggest that one ought not to lie to someone else as that would entail reducing them to the status of a means to an end), but providing those basic value judgements with a non-circular justification is damned difficult. I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s certainly difficult, and always subject to contention. Is morality deontological or consequentialist? Universal or some variety of relative? These are all pretty difficult questions, and belief in a god simply doesn’t provide an obvious solution to any of them.

When apologists pretend that atheists are uniquely unable to handle the matter, it always strikes me as a rather premature declaration of victory. As often as not, they seem to confound two or more sub-themes in these discussions. When for example a theist claims their oral principles are objective because they have been mandated by God, I find myself at a loss for words. Even an ultimate subject is still a subject, and a morality derived from the will of a subject, even an ultimate subject, is still a subjective ethics. …unless of course one can demonstrate that the subject (God) has Herself based her judgement on something objective. Or perhaps, there is an objective reason why we as subjects are obligated to do what God (that uber-subject) wishes, but that would be stretching the meaning of objectivity a bit thin. I can certainly understand someone expressing skepticism at any of the attempts to establish an objective or absolutist form of ethics, but atheists simply are not uniquely implicated in this problem. I’ve known Christians who handle this issue very well. They are not among those proclaiming to failures of atheist ethical theory to the faithful in their churches.

***

In the end, I think this theme has two significant practical implications:

First, it reverses the point of morality, at least for purposes of the narrative in question. One might expect that the value of ethical behavior would in some sense be found in the behavior itself. Those hawking the notion that atheists are unable to demonstrate a sound basis for our moral judgements are, in those moments at least, shifting the focus of the work at hand. They are in effect, presenting the intellectual justification for morality as an end in itself. The point of morality is in such stories a bit intellectual exercise. I might do right by my neighbor, so the story goes, but I don’t really know why I should do so.

And thus doing right by my neighbor becomes just a little less important.

Second, this theme seems to produce a kind of moral hierarchy. There are those of us who do right, so the story goes, and those who know why we do right, or at least why we should do so. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this kind of division of labor appearing as a theme in apologetics, but it is fascinating to see the way it takes shape in this rhetoric. The authority of the faithful seems to colonize the world at large in these stories, and those of us who are merely moral (at best) are just a little less than those that know why we should be so. Our actions are just a little less significant than those who claim to know the objective basis for moral principles. We can say no, as I surely do, but that’s to be expected of us. The faithful know.

But of course this isn’t simply a claim to authority over the rest of us, and it isn’t even a claim that privileges the perspectives of priests and pastors, much less the avergae everyday believer. It is a claim that privileges the perspectives of apologists. Simple pastors like the man I mentioned in the story above can do their best, but it is up to the smart people who defend the faith to do the real work of ethics. The rest of us, believer and unbeliever alike can be moral, sure, but our morality will always be missing something.

Which of course makes Christian thought into a rather esoteric enterprise.

And no, that doesn’t strike me as a good thing.

Let Us Not Praise the Prosperity Gospel With Faint Damn: It’s Worse than its Theology!

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Christianity, God, Jesus, Joel Osteen, Matt Walsh, Prosperity Gospel, religion, Spirituality, Televangelism

2016-08-05 (3) “Joel Osteen’s Fake, Heretical ‘Christianity’ Isn’t Any Better Than Atheism.”

That’s the title of an article from blogger Matt Walsh published yesterday on The Blaze. If Matt Walsh ever does have a thought worthy of publication, he will no mistake it for a bad cold, and there is certainly no chance The Blaze would publish anything that challenges the grade-school level reading skills of its founder, Glenn Beck. Still, sometimes even soft-heads and soft-targets merit a response of some kind.

I can think of all kinds of criticisms that Joel Osteen deserves, but this is a case of praising with faint damn. No better than atheists? It’s amusing to be the on the as end of a justazzy equation for a change, but one could do worse than to do no better than an atheism. The problem here is of course that Osteen certainly does worse than we generally do in at least one very significant respect. Just as every other televangelist I can think of, Osteen rakes in millions off the gullibility of his followers. There is no telling how many elderly couples are going right now without basic comforts or even important medication because they choose to contribute to Osteen’s cause or those like it. I know of no comparable movement within atheism, certainly none with anywhere near the impact of the many financial empires sailing under the banner of Christianity. So, it’s damned odd to find out that what’s really wrong with this Huxter is that his message is just like ours, which it simply isn’t. We have our faults, to be sure, but this doesn’t seem like one of them. Hell, it’s not even close.

But let’s be clear. I would find his message would be no less disturbing if Walsh’s title didn’t involve a swipe at people like me. Once again, people like Osteen consistently make their money off the backs of people who cannot afford it. But Walsh’s problem with Osteen isn’t the exploitation of people of others in the name of God; it’s his theology. Ironically enough, what Walsh takes issue with is Osteen’s advocacy of something called “the Prosperity Gospel.” Loosely speaking, this is the notion that God may convey blessings in the form of material wealth on his faithful. So, you can see that questions about the relationship between money and spirituality are at the heart of Osteen’s ministry, but Walsh’s never seems to address just how serious these questions really are.

Walsh is concerned that Prosperity Gospel is teaching people to value wealth in this life too much. Indeed, Walsh suggests people would be better off hungry if that’s what it took to get them to the right message of Christianity. What Walsh misses is the fact that doctrines like the Prosperity Gospel can get people to hungry status just as effectively as any doctrine he imagines to be more scripturally sound. Osteen’s message of wealth is lost in one very important sense on Osteen’s own followers, they aren’t going to get wealthy off his message. Indeed, a good number of them are going to lose a portion of whatever they do have buy pouring it into his empire. Far from being ‘no better than atheism’, this is a problem that resides almost entirely within the halls of big business evangelism.

Walsh begins his criticisms by pressing Osteen’s ambiguous use of language. He thinks Osteen’s blend of self-help nonsense if largely meaningless. Walsh likens it to a kind of ‘verbal smoothie’ filled with meaningless cliches. Fair enough on that account (I do not disagree in the slightest) but what would make things better? Walsh wants to hear more about Jesus:

But there are some words that never seem to make it into the smoothie. If you listen closely to all the self-help mumbo jumbo spewed by these heretics, you may notice the glaring absence of certain crucial terms; terms that any pastor ought to be shouting proudly and with great regularity. For one thing, you won’t hear ”Christ.” Neither will you hear “sin.” Or redemption, sacrifice, atonement, repentance, Bible, etc. Prosperity preachers are notoriously hesitant to share the spotlight with Jesus. They’d rather keep all the attention centered on the self — their own selves, specifically – and some vague “god” character, who, according to their mythology, is a genie-like figure who shows up to grant wishes before returning to his magic lamp.

This is really fascinating, actually. The Prosperity Gospel is a message calculated to present donations to the church as a means to financial success. It enables preachers to imply a quid pro quo without stating it outright, and that makes it a highly effective tool for con artists. One con-artist after anotherhas used it to separate people from their money, even from their life-savings. With all that could be said about this particular message, what Walsh thinks is bad about this is that they don’t mention Jesus enough.

But what if they did?

More importantly, what about when they actually do?

The Prosperity Gospel was all over the ministries of Jan and Paul Crouch, and it never crowded the name of Jesus out of their conniving mouths. There is a good deal of Prosperity Gospel in the messages of Pat Robertson as well, and that doesn’t stop him from invoking Jesus. Jim and Tammy Fae Baker never had any trouble mixing Jesus into their own version of the Prosperity Gospel. I could go on of course, but the point is obvious enough. The name of ‘Jesus’ is all over the Prosperity Gospel. In fact, the connection between devotion to Jesus and hopes for material blessings are at least as old as the Puritans. Contemporary New Age spokesmen and countless motivational speakers (even some secular ones) are merely a minor variation on this old theme, but few have had more success with that theme than those who kept Jesus front and center in the message. The Prosperity Gospel is a message that flourished in Christian churches long before it ever escaped the pews for more ambiguous theological settings.

Walsh has his own scriptures, to be sure, scriptures he thinks will refute the interest in wealth, but of course the Prosperity crowd has their own. They can go back and forth all they like, but neither will resolve anything to anyone except themselves. And here is where atheism may well matter after all in this equation, because I for one don’t give a damn what the scriptures have to say about it. What I see when I look at someone like Osteen is a con artist depriving countless people of essential financial resources so that he can enjoy wealth they can only imagine. That the Prosperity Gospel uses the image of wealth to part people from what little they have is the problem with people like Osteen. I have known many Christians who could see that problem. There is little evidence that Walsh does.

Simply put,the problem with the Prosperity Gospel is NOT one of theology; it is one of economics. I’ve known many community pastors and priests worthy of respect, but I’d be hard pressed to think of a televangelist who struck me as anything else but a thief. The former deal with real people and their problems, some wonderfully and some disastrously. Televangelists provide the face of money-making machines. These people are in business, and unfortunately they are in business with the full benefits of non-profit status. It simply should not be an option to sell false hope, and we ought not as a nation to sit idly by as people like Osteen and countless other huxters make themselves filthy rich off the waning judgement of people heading into retirement.

It is the cover of spirituality that makes Osteen’s con possible. His message may no better than atheism to the likes of Walsh, but it is not atheism that empowers his exploitation of others. To find the source of that empowerment, we have only to look at those who quibble over matters of theology while saying little to nothing about the outright larceny that is modern televangelism.

The Proof of Burdens

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Philosophy, Religion

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Agnosticism, Apologetics, atheism, Debate, God, Philosophy, religion, Rhetoric, Unbelief

IMG_20160605_113520 Does God exist? In discussions between atheists and believers that question always seems to be on hold, because we seldom get past the other question, the one about who has the burden of proof in that debate. …and yes, these discussions are usually debates, at least in a very general sense of the term. So, we start with a simple (seemingly perfunctory question) who is going to prove what, but the burden of settling that very question proves to be our undoing. It seems absurd, really, like reading the preface to a book that turns out to last until the final page. Still, there is no point in wishing the whole thing away. There is a reason we keep getting hung up on this question.

Oddly enough, it matters.

One of the things that makes this question interesting is that this question resides at the intersection between reasoning and social practice. It’s one of many ways in which what we do when we talk to each other spills out a little past the range of what we actually manage to say in that conversation. What makes that especially interesting is that these are precisely the sort of conversations that are supposed to be maximally transparent. Were there something about a poem or a theatrical performance that escaped our immediate ability to describe its significance, well that would be just as many might expect, but in the realm of theoretical discussion and debate ineffables are horribles.

Bad burden of proof!

You spoil everything.

The topic of burdens of proof is often folded into questions about the meaning of ‘atheism’. Here, the question is whether or not atheism denotes the mere absence of belief in God or a belief that God does not exist. The first is usually considered the weak atheist position and second the strong one. While many in the atheist community will opt for one or the other as the best term to denote our own individual stance, Christian apologists often object to the use of ‘atheist’ in the weak sense at all. Countless Christian bloggers insist that the term ‘atheist’ ought not to be used for those who merely lack belief in God. So, we end up with two different vocabularies and a lot of bitterness between them.

The crux of the theist objection is usually a sense that atheists using the term to denote a mere absence of belief in God are effectively disavowing any burden of proof. Using the term in this way enables people to take a stance that will reject belief in God unless given sufficient reason to change his or her mind. They do not hope to provide a proof themselves to the effect that God does not exist. But is this fair? Apologists often suggest that those unsatisfied with arguments in favor of God ought to consider ourselves ‘agnostic’ instead of ‘atheist’. That many of us call ourselves ‘agnostic atheists’ doesn’t seem to help matters. So, countless Christian apologists insist that the only acceptable default position in this instance is ‘agnostic’ and that those of us adopting the label ‘atheist’ on the basis of no more than an absence of belief in God are shirking our responsibilities to any discussion we may have on the subject.

***

Alright! All that’s old hat for most us, right? So, why am I thinking about it lately? Actually, I have a range of observations on my mind. They may not be entirely new to others, but (thinking my keyboard), I am trying to explain them in a way that is at least a little new for me.

***

First, I still think much of the debate leans far too heavily on vocabulary, and as part of that tendency, an awful lot of people engaged in this topic resort to prescriptivist readings of ‘thuh dictionary‘. The term ‘atheist’ can be used to denote either of the positions mentioned above. It has in times past even been used to denote a lack of morals. We could probably find a few other uses of the term if we look hard enough, but my point at present is that there is only so much value that we are going to get out of debate over what the term itself means. If someone wishes to use the term atheist to mean the rafters of an abandoned structure, then we can probably say that’s a little too ideosyncratic to be all that helpful, but if someone uses one of its conventional meanings to describe himself, a reasonable discussion ought to take it from there. The refusal to accept that kind of self-application is I think little other than an act of social aggression and indication of bad faith, …to wit, a sign that one might want to end the conversation soon.

Second, a burden of proof (BOP) is not the sole responsibility driving a debate of this type. I have often seen apologists speak of the issue as though the entire debate begins and ends with the assignment of a BOP. More to the point, folks often seem to assume that a party without a burden of proof has no responsibilities and thus enjoys an unfair advantage in the discussion.

Here, I think formal debate (especially collegiate debate systems) may be an instructive analogy. In CEDA debate, for example, the burden of proof is commonly placed on the affirmative side (i.e. that which advances a resolution). Theoretically, this means that they must produce a compelling case for that resolution whereas the negative side may win either by advancing a case of its own or by simply picking apart the affirmative side. Does that give an advantage to the negs? Yes. But along with that, affirmative position gets the privilege of tacking the first crack at the issue. Yes, this means they speak first. It also means they get to define key terms and values. The other side may certainly take issue with any aspect of the case, including those terms and values, but it may not simply ignore them and construct a case using a completely different vocabulary and value system (at least not without first presenting a compelling reason to reject those of the affirmative side). Simply put, the negative side of such a debate carries a burden to respond to the case laid out by the affirmative position.

I’ve always felt that a similar burden applies in debates over the existence of God. If I am talking to a theist, I can of course say all manner of things about God (or rather ‘God’) as I understand the term. Heck, I could probably even try to prove that God doesn’t exist. The problem of course is that in doing so, I will have to have to define that God, and since I don’t believe in Her, it would be fair to ask where I got my definition? I can’t answer that question on the basis of metaphysics, because I can’t point to an underlying reality as the entity I wish to reference with that term. The basis for my answer must be drawn from the way other people talk about ‘God’, and it would probably be helpful if those people were folks who believed in Her. I can of course take a crack at it. I can use conventional definitions as I understand them, but this would put any believer who wished to take issue with my proofs in the ever-so-easy position of simply advocating God according to a different definition of the term. He wouldn’t even have to show that there was anything wrong with my own definition.

…suffice to say, I think such conversations go much better when the discussion is taylored to the views of the person I am talking to. I may expect him to take the lead in establishing a reason to believe as he understands Her, but I am also accepting responsibility to address that reason in terms he uses, or I find those terms unacceptable, to produce an argument to that effect. The responsibilities of each party in such a discussion are not uniformly equivalent for both parties, but neither have they been unifomrly dumped on one party alone. Is this the only way that we can set-up such a discussion? Definitely not. Is it a reasonable approach to the topic? Well, I certainly think so.

Third: The fact that we (yes, even atheists) commonly speak of God using the conventions of a proper noun is a problem. This presupposes a level of familiarity that seems out of place with an entity whose existence is in question and whose nature is unknown. I can certainly understand how this manner of speaking would work for theists, but debating the subject in those terms does have the effect of injecting a circularity into the subject. It’s at least a little odd to presuppose direct familiarity with the very entity whose existence is in dispute.

Fourth: Speaking of names, and labels, there is an aspect to the label of atheism of atheism that I think apologists often miss. Specifically, it is the reason for my own preference for using the term ‘atheist’ as opposed to ‘agnostic’. What does it mean when you don’t have a reason to believe in ~~God~~ a god? Often I am told that if this alone, absent a specific reason to disbelieve in such an entity, the mere absence of a good reason to believer in one should leave me in an agnostic position. No reason good reason to believe and no good reason to disbelieve should leave me in a default stance, and many take it as obvious that that default stance is best viewed as agnosticism. It’s a pretty common argument. Suffice to say that I don’t find it convincing.

One concern I have here is that ‘agnostic’ too is an ambiguous term. Many take it as obvious that an ‘agnostic’ is simply someone who doesn’t claim to know whether or not a god exists. But of course that is simply the soft version of agnosticism. The term ‘agnostic’ is also used to refer to people who claim the existence of such an entity is inherently unknowable. I would not want to be associated with that position. Admittedly this problem is easily resolved with a single point of clarification, but frankly, I think the same is true of the term ‘atheist’. Either way, the vocabulary is going to take some clarification.

So, why do I prefer atheist? Because these labels do not merely refer to a stance in a debate. This brings us back to the notion of a burden of proof as something that connects our discourse about the world to our social actions in that world. We can say of a debate or a meditation on a claim that it ends in neutral position, that one is left without a compelling reason to believe one way or another. But of course the labels we used to denote our stance on these issues are not limited in their significance to the stance we have taken on any given intellectual question. They also give some sense of how we relate to the themes as they arise in our daily conduct.

It’s kind of funny. Questions about the existence of God can be raised in such an abstract way. In most debates, we hardly know what a yes or a no will mean in terms of our daily lives, but of course that’s only if we stick to what is considered in such an argument. In the real world, or more to the point, in our daily lives, we know very well what these things will mean, at least for ourselves. The answers appear when folks take hands to pray at the dinner table, when they invoke God in support of a political candidate, in opposition to abortion or the teaching of evolution. They appear in countless moral decisions, and countless explanations for the decisions make in their daily lives. It isn’t that any of this flows neatly from an efficient cause argument or Pascal’s Wager, but it’s part of what God means to believers (and yes, I’m back to personal-pronouning the deity). In a very real sense, it is for many, precisely what is at issue in those debates about the existence of God. It may well be that we can never really get from Paley’s watchmaker or Anselm’s being than which nothing greater can be conceived to the dictates of any particular believer’s personal faith, but it would be foolish to think the issue ends at QED.

It doesn’t for atheists either.

The time comes when you are asked to bow your head for a public prayer, to vote a political agenda predicated on the basis of scripture, or to refrain from this or that sexual act because of something else supposedly in a holy book somewhere.These moments do not wait patiently for us to resolve the intellectual questions we ask in philosophy class or to finally produce that one proof that settles the (non-)existence of God one way or another. We may not know if there is a god, or if that god really wants us to speak to him on Sundays, but sooner or later we are going to have to decide how we will act in this and countless other instances where folks typically invoke the the name of a deity. When such questions arise, we expect theists to act in certain ways, even those who may not be able to provide a single reason for their beliefs. A believer who has never once thought about to prove the existence of their god, one who may even be hostile to the notion that such a proof is valuable, will simply act on the basis of their beliefs, and it will be accepted that their behavior is partly a function of their belief in a god.

In such moments, I find the absence of God to be oddly significant, and I don’t think I am alone in this. Countless times I have stood respectfully by as a room full of people talk to someone I don’t believe to be there. I may have no particular proof that this person doesn’t exist, but I know very well that he has no current place in my worldview and that I will not be taking him into account in my behavior. I will not be consulting on moral questions. I will not be voting on the basis His will. I won’t even be experiencing nature on the basis of Her presence.I most certainly won’t be talking to him as the others do in these moments of prayer. At such moments, I am not suspended in indecision. Agnosticism has no bearing on these matters. And that is why the term ‘agnostic’ doesn’t resonate with me, and it never has. However one might characterize the default judgement of debates about the significance of god, in my daily live I am an atheist.

Fifth: It isn’t just self-described atheists who treat the mere absence of an affirmative belief as sufficient reason to invoke the term. In politics, one need to do no more than to oppose an explicitly Christian policy to find his stance labeled as atheism. Take for instance, David Barton’s claims that Barack Obama is really an atheist (a ‘Christian atheist‘) because he acts as if God is not alive. How often have pastors denounced the inability to lead prayer in the public schools as an atheistic policy? How often have apologists described modern evolutionary theory as atheistic because it did not incorporate references to god within it? Conservative Christians routinely rail against the atheism in policy debates when speaking of positions which seek only to remove active reference to God from public institutions. It’s easy enough to dismiss this sort of thing as a mere mistake, especially when so many who do believe in a god actively support some of these same policies and sciences, and yet there is a sense in which they are right. One can use ‘atheist’ to refer simply to the absence of god in a life, a belief, or a policy. How that relates to the sort of atheism that emerges as an intellectual commitment is a different question. I don’t expect many conservative Christians are asking it, but then again, perhaps they are not the only ones who seem to miss this question.

***

What makes this issue, or this cluster of issues, so difficult to resolve is the occurrence of a subtlety in the midst of a polemic storm. It’s not really a problem of vocabulary so much as it is marking relationships. Sign systems are full of instances in which one or another category becomes a sort of default value, and then problems arise when we have to sort just how much the default really tells us about any given case. It’s a bit like pronouns wherein the common fashion of using ‘he’ to denote a person whose gender we don’t know or don’t care about can well cause confusion (or worse!). What do you do when evidence and reason don’t quite resolve an issue one way or another? The answer isn’t quite a function of logic itself, but neither is it an entirely arbitrary choice. It’s a sort of judgement call. We have just enough leverage to reason over the issue, but not enough to resolve it achieve a reasonable solution of the problem.

Creeditize it! …or Don’t.

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Native American Issues, Politics, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

College, Creed, Dogma, Education, GOP, Islam, Moderation, religious freedom, U.S. Constitution

US-Constitution Last week a man named Trebor Gordon, Pastor for the Harris County GOP, tried to block a Muslim, Syed Ali, from serving as a precinct chair for the Republican Party in Harris County, Texas. As reported in Gawker, Gordon objected on the grounds that Islam is not consistent with the principles of Republican Party politics.

A video of Gordon’s efforts can also be found on Youtube. Gordon’s argument, as quoted in Gawker is as follows:

If you believe that a person can practice Islam and agree to the foundational principles of the Republican Party, it’s not right. It’s not true. It can’t happen. There are things on our platform that he and his beliefs are total opposite.

“There are things on our platform,” Gordon went on to say, that he (Syed Ali) is, he and his beliefs are in total opposite.”

You may suspect this is the beginning of a GOP-bashing rant. Well, not today. I actually found the response to Gordon’s efforts rather encouraging (especially that of Dave Smith). Granted, I would love to live in a world where people just don’t act like he does, but in the real world, I take it as a good sign that the Gordon was voted down, by other members of the local GOP mind you. It’s a welcome reminder that there are sane and responsible people in the GOP. On this count, at least, I think they done right.

What fascinates me about this incident is something about the particular argument Gordon used. Well, actually two things. First, I’m always fascinated by the use of architectural metaphors in ideological matters, particularly in the rhetoric of conservative Christians. They will often tell us that atheists lack a moral foundation for our behavior. They will also speak quite often of Christianity (or belief in God in general) as providing the foundations (or alternatively, the ‘foundational principles’) of our country. There are of course endless permutations to this theme, and they are all highly problematic.

On one level I get it. These metaphors do communicate a sense that the ‘foundational’ beliefs or values in question are in some sense more important than others, or that the other beliefs and practices are in some sense dependent on the foundational ones. If you like the First Amendment, this argument seems to suggest, that part of our government comes (in some way) from Christianity. I get that much at least, so the trope isn’t entirely opaque, but I do think it’s rather telling that so much of this rhetoric takes place within the scope of this particular metaphor. I also think it’s quite telling that people making such arguments are often ill-prepared to flesh out the metaphor in literal terms. The same person who is quite sure that Christian values and beliefs are the foundation of our republic is often at great pains to explain what those values are and just how they actually generate the rest of the features of the republic at large. Take a way the architectural metaphor, and an awful lot of these folks struggle mightily to flesh out the details of their argument.

…or even to deal with them in any way whatsoever!

Now Gordon isn’t talking about America as a whole in that speech. The foundation he references in that speech is something belonging to the Republican party. Still, I do think it worthwhile to note that he has fallen into the pattern of a much broader fashion of speaking about religious and political ideas. To say that he leans a bit heavily on the architectural metaphor is putting it mildly. It is Smith that references the relevant features of the U.S. Constitution (namely the proscription against religious tests). Gordon has only his talk of foundations. THAT is exactly what I am talking about. The rhetoric of foundations consistently helped people to side-steps relevant details rather than to illuminate them.

…which brings me to a second and (to me) much more important aspect of Gordon’s approach to the issue. He has effectively taken the GOP platform to function as a creed of sorts. It isn’t enough to actively support that platform, according to Gordon. One must not, so it seems, hold views in opposition (or even potentially in opposition) to that platform. All of which is a very interesting way to speak of a party platform.

By ‘interesting’, I might mean ‘ridiculous’.

A party platform is itself the outcome of a political process. It has winners and losers even within the party, and many of those who lose out on battles over the construction of that platform can be expected to go on and support the party anyway. That’s how the process works.One doesn’t normally turn around and use that platform as a plank-by-plank litmus test of acceptable beliefs for party members, even party leadership. Creeds are used in precisely that manner to define membership in a religious community. Party platforms are not.

A party platform may represent the goals of a party in its relation to the outside world, but one wouldn’t normally assume that it represents the precise views of each member. To be fair, Gordon isn’t simply suggesting that a Muslim will be in disagreement with one or two items on that menu. He seems to be suggesting that a Muslim must be in disagreement on some very important points. What are those points? Well that takes us back to the whole ‘foundation’ metaphor.

An additional problem here would lie in the abstract nature of the argument. Gordon isn’t asking whether or not this particular Muslim, Syed Ali, is opposed to the key tenets of the party platform. He is arguing that a Muslim must do so. It’s in their nature, so it seems, or perhaps it’s in the nature of their professed beliefs.

It’s a kind of theology by proxy, an all-too-common one at that. Folks often assume they can draw inferences for believers (or even non-believers) on the basis of an assumed premise or two. This type of argument parallels the reductio ad absurdum, but it fails insofar as it ignores the embedded nature of the beliefs in question. A reducto ad absurdum can show us the inconsistency of combining different beliefs, but it can’t tell us much about how any particular individual relates to the people and institutions around him. Gordon isn’t arguing against Islam in general. He is arguing against a specific Muslim, and that makes the specific views and behavior of that specific Muslim directly relevant to the issue at hand. But Gordon doesn’t addres what Ali actually thinks. It is enough to know that he is Muslim. To call this approach dehumanizing is putting it mildly.

***

…which illustrates another point. People tend to turn mission statements, party platforms, etc. into creeds precisely when they don’t like the people they assume to be unable to vouch for the creed in question. I used to see this when I was a participant at Christian Forums where the members were at times expected to vouch for the Nicene creed and/or the Apostles Creed if they were to be considered Christian. Among other things, being recognized as Christian provided access to large parts of the forum denied to non-believers (who were largely confined to ‘open debate’ sections of the forum). I never had much problem with this as I just say ‘no’ to gods, but I lost track of the number of liberal Christian friends who had to explain countless times how their actions or beliefs could be squared with the creed(s). That conservative Christians did accept the creed, even though their own actions and statements could as easily be taken to suggest otherwise seemed to go without question. In the case of Christian Forums, where a creed was an explicit part of the forum policy, that policy provided endless grounds for personal back-biting and mean-spirited bickering, almost always at the expense of those more socially vulnerable than theologically off-base. Seeing the number of people hurt by that process did a lot to confirm my suspicions about how ugly religion could get. It also helped me to see that the problem had less to do with what people believe than how questions about beliefs are handled with in a larger community.

***

I wish I could say that secular folk are immune to this kind of behavior, but I can’t. I once joined a secular forum in which I had to press a button vouching for the fact that I didn’t believe in a god. After some hesitation, I pressed the button. After all, I don’t believe in a god, but I always regarded the policy as remarkably petty and quite dogmatic in nature. It was an ironic dogma to be sure, but I reckon when you start deciding who is and who is out of the club on the basis of what they do or don’t believe, you are well into dogmatic territory whatever the content of the beliefs in question. I had similar views when the old Internet Infidels website decided to allow believers to act as moderators. (I was a low-level moderator on that website at the time.) Many objected to the move on the grounds that a believer couldn’t possibly agree with everything in the mission statement for the site. I found myself thinking, “neither do I.” Simply speaking, there were a couple items on the mission statement that I didn’t agree with. I joined because of teh ones I did agree with, and (more importantly) because I wanted to help facilitate the discussions then taking place on that forum. No-one had asked me if I agreed with each item on that mission statement, and no-one had done this for the rest of the staff either. So, the argument that a believer couldn’t serve as a moderator for the site always struck me as an odd misunderstanding of the nature of both forum moderation and mission statements. It also struck me as an ugly double standard. Making these arguments in public debates on the matter didn’t exactly make me popular, but I always found it odd that so many critical thinkers were apparently quite comfortable with the assumption that everyone on staff had to agree with every point in the mission statement.

Textbook dogma!

***

In life offline, one of my more frustrating experiences with policy-driven dogma came while I worked at Diné College (a tribal college) on the Navajo Nation. Faculty were expected to adopt an educational model known as Diné Educational Philosophy (DEP). It was a fairly elaborate theory, requiring us to divide our lessons up into four steps (generally portrayed as four individual quadrants of a circle), each of which was thereby linked to some aspect of Navajo cosmology. It was easy enough to do this, of course, and some of the Navajo faculty could do this brilliantly (and authentically). The rest of us, were doing it by the numbers of course, and the students knew it. I still recall the day one of my more traditional students shrunk in his seat as I drew a circle on the board and raised the topic. “Please don’t!” was all he said. He was absolutely right to do so. The man had been enthusiastic just moments before, but moments before I had been talking American history. Now I was speaking about Navajo philosophy and that was a subject he didn’t need to hear about from a white guy. It might have been my job to address the issue, but that didn’t make the moment any less ridiculous.

One of the more frustrating things about DEP was that its proponents often described western educational theory as top down and western religion as dogmatic. It seemed to be a forgone conclusion that Navajo thinking wasn’t any of these things. There was certainly some justice to this. After all, it was the white people that brought missionaries to the reservation and at one time instituted educational policies amounting to little more than government enforced kidnapping. There were so many respects in which I could see Navajo approaches to education were more flexible and less dogmatic than mainstream approaches; they just weren’t respects that had much to do with the official policies of the college. An educational policy incorporating explicit ceremonial themes mandated by administration, taught to faculty (who were mostly outsiders) and then imposed on students in the classroom was by definition a top down approach, and when that policy (along with its ceremonial themes) becomes obligatory, it is a dogma. If I was ever prone to think otherwise, I lost any grounds for doubt one day in a meeting as two of the Navajo faculty argued over the specific implications of a corn stock metaphor in DEP. One of them, I thought quite sensibly suggested that there was room for different approaches to the subject. The other insisted that we all must be on the same page when it came to that theory. The rest of us, being white, had little to do but wait to see how the indigenous faculty sorted the matter out.

I don’t mean to suggest that all the classes at Diné College were taught according to a set dogma. I do mean to suggest that this was official policy, yes, but that’s one of the beauties of actual human behavior. Sometimes the practice is way better than the theory behind it. People pursued a wide variety of approaches in the classroom, and (at least when I was there) many of those approaches simply didn’t match the vision enshrined in that narrow policy. My own approach was a bit more Socratic. I adapted my lessons to the classroom by asking my students how things worked in their world; they told me, and I worked their answers into the lessons. My students’ mileage will vary, of course, but I at least found that process to be interesting and rewarding. The official policy of the college didn’t help much.

***

So anyway, my point is that people often turn a range of bureaucratic communications into an obligatory set of doctrines. Mission statements, party platforms, educational procedures aren’t necessarily things that should call for total agreement from those working with them. They outline goals. People in an organization can generally be expected to work toward the goals in such documents, but the notion that someone must agree with every point in such a document is an odd (if rather frequent) inference. Those taking such an approach often do a great deal of harm in so doing, and I generally make it a point to oppose them whenever and wherever possible.

***

Bringing the issue back to the relationship between Islam and American politics, I think Gordon’s approach touches on a particularly disturbing example of this sort of behavior. It has become relatively common to hear that Islam is not consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Ben Carson seems to have used this as an argument against allowing a Muslim to become president. Others have used this as an argument against allowing Muslim refugees into the country (or into western nations in general) and/or against the notion that Muslims are protected under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. The thinking here seems to be that aspects of Islamic doctrine are inconsistent with basic principles of American government (including perhaps the establishment clause). Those pushing this argument will often produce texts from the Quran or related documents suggesting obligations contrary to American law and/or the Constitution itself. But of course that misses the point. The Constitution protects the right to believe any number of things, including those contrary to the constitution itself. It even protects a range of practices, at least those consistent with the constitution itself and the social arrangements made under its authority. That there are limits to these protections is clear enough, but those limits simply do NOT become an excuse to deny people protections altogether.

And of course once again, this approach amounts to a kind of fundamentalism by proxy. I have no count that there are Muslims who want to do things contrary to the law and the constitution. I also have no doubt there are Muslims who respect the law at least as much as the rest of us. How do you tell the difference? I reckon the answer to that question depend on what they say and do, not what a critic can spin off a cherry-picked line or two from the Quran for purpose of fielding an argument. In any event, the possibility that someone may believe (or want) something contrary to the Constitution simply isn’t an excuse for excluding them once and for all from the entire body of constitutional protections.

(Were it otherwise, Gordon might be in trouble!)

The notion that people must demonstrate consistency between their beliefs and the provisions of the U.S. Constitution is (once again) how people treat a creed, not a plan of government. The Constitution too, it would seem, is among the many things people tend to treat as a Creed even though they shouldn’t.

“The Faith of Christopher Hitchens” …In Which I Read Snake Oil

21 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Books, Religion, Uncategorized

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Anthony Flew, Apologetics, atheism, Charles Darwin, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Death, Faith, Larry Alex Taunton

I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t the fate of prominent atheists to end up with Christian apologists for spokesmen. Okay, I don’t literally believe in fate (either), but let’s just say the pattern is starting to look a little too common.

Yesterday, I came across this charming little tweet from professional bigot, Matt Barber.

MattBarber3

Barber’s link connects us to an article discussing an account of Hitchens’s personal life, as related in The Faith of Christopher Hitchens by Larry Alex Taunton. Who is Taunton? He is one of the Christian apologists whom Hitchens debated in his later years. According to Taunton, the two had become close friends in those years, close enough for him to be present throughout much of Hitchens’s struggle with terminal cancer. According to Taunton, Hitchens gave serious thought to converting in those years. Taunton doesn’t say that Hitchens did convert, but he spends virtually the entire book exploring the possibility that Hitchens might have. The author of the article in Barber’s link, Al Perretta, contributes his own 2 cents by telling us that Hitchens own preemptive remarks about the possibility of a deathbed conversion indicate just how much he was thinking about it. If Taunton is content to imply the possibility, Perretta wants to make damned sure we get the hint. And then of course, we have the likes of Matt Barber who sees in the whole thing an opportunity to taunt unbelievers.

It’s a bit like a game of telephone. What Hitchens actually said and thought in private moments before his death we will never know, but we do get to see how Taunton’s account of it takes on ever more polemic significance as others proceed to recount the story. Honestly, I don’t doubt that Taunton and Hitchens were close friends, but I do think Taunton serves his friend poorly by using him in this manner. Damned poorly! Taunton may think his efforts restrained, even respectful, but he has made Hitchens into a commodity of sorts, a chip those in his own camp will now use shamelessly to promote their own views. Whatever respect Taunton may think he has paid Hitchens in writing this, it’s fairly gone by the time we get to the likes of Barber. I somehow doubt Barber will prove to be unusual.

The story is hardly without precedent!

***

I remember when Anthony Flew changed his views on the existence of God. As an active participant in Christian Forums, I lost track of the number of times someone came into the open debate forums to announce Flew’s ‘conversion’. More than a few would-be apologists really seemed to think this odd sort of authority argument would (or should have) swayed a number of unbelievers. A popular atheist had changed his mind. Shouldn’t we do the same?

The full story in Flew’s case would prove far more complicated than the conversion narrative continually promoted by Christian apologists. It doesn’t appear that Flew ever came to believe in the God of Abraham, though he did seem to adopt a Deist position on the existence of God, but this distinction was often lost in the words of sundry believers proclaiming the miracle of Flew’s conversion. Questions remain to this day about just how much some of Flew’s final work, There is a God, really is the work of Flew and how much of it is really the work of Christian apologists. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that something was wrong in Flew’s very public change of position. Flew, a lifelong atheist thus spent his final days voiced, as it were by Christian apologists, his final position on the existence of God communicated by others, many of whom were all to happy to treat Flew’s newfound Deism as a victory for Christianity itself.

Had the Anthony Flew whose writings we all knew become a Christian, he certainly would have made a far more eloquent Christian than his latter-day friends made him out to be.

This sort of response may seem harsh, even disrespectful, but Flew’s final days certainly produced a number of red flags. We don’t normally learn the views of professional philosophers from their long-time debate opponents, and a professional philosopher writes his own material. For reasons which may or may not be understandable, this did not happen in There is a God, and it isn’t entirely clear that he understood the full contents of that work. Whether or not Flew was clear about what he was doing in those final days, most of us will never know. That many in the Christian community were all-too happy to milk Flew’s shift of position for all it was worth and more is plain to see. Flew’s “conversion” left us all with more of a scandal to ponder than a novel argument on the age-old topic.

As with many public debates, I often found the terms of this one rather oddly skewed. I have often wondered if it is really appropriate to call the mere decision to believe in God a ‘conversion’. When people convert to a faith, they do a lot more than simply change their mind about the truth of a claim. They say prayers. They go to church. The embrace doctrines. They nest, as it were, in their new worldview. For his part, Flew seems simply to have decided that a God of some sort was an essential part of any explanation for the world as we know it. Yet, Christians still proclaim the truth of Flew’s conversion, seemingly immune to the fact that he didn’t end up in their camp either.

***

…and of course there is always Lady Hope!

My first exposure to this story came in some college classroom, a history class I believe. We were discussing Charles Darwin when someone interjected the comment that he had recanted toward the end of his life. The comment hadn’t been at all relevant to the discussion, and the instructor simply didn’t bite. So, we were back on topic in no time, and I found myself wondering what little story I had missed.

That little story was the story of Elizabeth Cotton, or ‘Lady Hope’ as she was called. She claimed to have spoken to Darwin near the end of his life wherein she found him reading Hebrews. Darwin expressed regrets about his scientific publications according to Cotton and discussed plans for holding a congregation in his summer house. If her account is true, then Cotton appears to be the only person to whom Darwin expressed these views. He didn’t tell them to his wife, a devout believer who might well have been quite relieved to hear of his newfound faith. Neither did he communicate them to any of his children or colleagues. But he did communicate these views to Elizabeth Cotton, according to Cotton anyway, and this fact was interesting enough to earn her a little bit of fame among Christian speakers near the end of the 19th century.

***

So, you see this latest bit about Hitchens is hardly without precedent. It seems that when unbelievers become believers, Christian apologists are often the first to know. Hell, sometimes they are the last to know as well. And sometimes they are the only ones to know at all.

I gather the rest of us are supposed to take their account on faith.

***

FaithofHitchens So, how does Taunton pay his respects to his former friend? Consider the quotes he uses to open the earliest chapters of his book:

“Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear that it is true.” – Blaise Pascal.

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins have you never had the courage to commit.” – Oscar Wilde.

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” – C.S. Lewis

“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.” Shakespeare.

…you get the idea.

These are the pithy little one liners that Taunton uses to frame each of his opening chapters. Yes, the point of each quote is every bit as obvious as it may seem.You might expect a book about a deceased friend to use quotations illustrating something admirable about him, even to outline qualities one might find worthy of praise. Taunton is of course using these quotes to take Hitchens apart.

In “A Requiem for Unbelief,” Taunton relates his personal history with Hitchens and explains his decision to write the book. He describes Hitchens’s life as one of rebellion against God (thus establishing from the beginning a narrative that refuses to take Hitchens’s atheism seriously). Taunton also describes Hitchen?” With this remarkably disrespectful tribute to an old friend, it is no surprise that Taunton would lead the chapter with a quote suggesting that people such as Hitchens must know deep down that he is wrong.

The notion that atheists really believe in God after all is a pretty common theme among Christian apologists. Taunton clearly means to use Hitchens’s life to provide an example of this, an anecdote to show us what so many apologists take for granted, that deep down the most strident atheist is really a frustrated believer of some sort. Thus, Taunton transforms Hitchens’s life into contemptuous dismissal of the very views Hitchens proclaimed throughout that very life. Hitchens didn’t really mean what he said, so Taunton would have us believe, and no-one knows this better than Taunton.

Next Taunton proceeds to tell us that Hitchens’s atheism is rooted in youthful rebellion (hence the line about courage to commit sin) and goes on to explain that Hitchens’s love of learning was little more than an effort to improve his skills in verbal sparring (hence the suggestion that an education was wasted on him). He then borrows from Hitchens’s own allusion to ‘keeping two books’, so to speak, to set aside virtually everything Hitchens ever said in public. Taunton extends this metaphor to suggest quite simply that Hitchens’s public atheism was a false front and that he held other thoughts in private. Who would know those private thoughts?

Taunton, of course!

Taunton’s friendship with Hitchens thus becomes an interesting authority claim, a basis from which to shred everything Hitchens told us about his own life and thought.

…and if your getting a little ill at this point, then I’m right there with you.

This is not the sort of book one writes about a friend. It isn’t even the sort of book one writes about a respected opponent. It is the sort of book one writes about an individual one has already dismissed. It is also the sort of book one writes about a bit of personal capital, an investment ripe for returns. In these opening chapters, Taunton sheds sleight on Hitchens character at every turn. The exercise is as crass as it is dishonest.

Toward the middle of the book Taunton’s narrative softens, but why shouldn’t it? He has already dismissed everything Hitchens ever fought for with a few condescending narrative themes. Having established the sad truth about Hitchens’s personal motivations, Taunton can afford to be more subtle in the later chapters. Following 9-11, Taunton wants us to believe Hitchens embarked on a long trajectory toward faith in God. He began to struggle with moral principles and to explore scripture. This, Taunton seems to suggest was the root of their friendship, and the basis for their many private conversations about Christianity.

Taunton recounts many of these discussions in extravagant detail. One could perhaps wonder how he remembers those details so vividly, but I’m more interested in the transition from argument to story-line. The conversations with Hitchens that Taunton describes are full of disputation, point and counter-point. They are discussions in which two men contest with each other over what is and what isn’t true. But of course, these arguments come to us within the larger frame of a story told by Taunton himself. Not surprisingly, the course of each argument flows nicely into the story-line Taunton has chosen to provide us. It is a story-line that resolves each of the disputes quite unsurprisingly in Taunton’s favor.

Taunton’s single-minded handling of the issue is hardly subtle. He consistently gives himself the final word and of course Hitchens concedes a number of things to Taunton, but only in these private conversations. Hitchens accepts arguments without rejoinder, at least in the chapters of Taunton’s book, and he takes correction without rebuke. The final chapters of this work are a record of debates clearly dominated by Taunton, at least according to Taunton himself. And of course each of these arguments provides another step in the story of Hitchens’s transformation toward a believing Christian. Taunton stops short of claiming the transformation actually occurred, though he wants us to believe it may well have, that Hitchens might have made it to the one true faith as Taunton understands it. Hell, Taunton even assures us that Hitchens would never have converted to Catholicism. If he converted, Taunton would have us believe, it must have been to the right kind of Christianity.

If Hitchens never said anything about his conversion, what are we to make of that? Perhaps it means he didn’t convert at all, but perhaps, the story-line here seems to suggest, it is because he can’t. Hitchens was too committed to his own public personae, or so Taunton would have us believe. he couldn’t afford to tell us if he really believed in God after all. He was already too invested in a godless public personae. So, Hitchens couldn’t tell us how he really felt.

What are we to expect of a man who kept two books?

One of the more striking features of Taunton’s narrative is the pe-emptive arguments he lays out in the course of the book. Hitchens lack of an explicit statement of faith is easily explained by his allusions to keeping two-books of his own life. Will atheists object to this account? Well of course, but that is just because we are fighting over Hitchens body, as Taunton describes the issue. Atheists skeptical of claims that Hitchens either embraced Christianity or came damned close to it are just too busy keeping score. It’s hard to imagine a more blatant example of projection than that, but it seems to be par for the course in this book.

Taunton seems to regard his friendship with Hitchens as unimaginable in the eyes of many, especially in the eyes of unbelievers. That he also takes Hitchens’s willingness to become friends with a Christian to be evidence of interest in conversion suggests that if anyone has trouble wrapping his mind around such a friendship it is Taunton himself.

It seems clear enough that Taunton doesn’t really take the possibility of a meaningful life as an atheist seriously. We can’t even tell a child from a piglet, as he suggests. Our worldview denies the possibility of meaningful moral scruples, according to Taunton. So, if he encounters an unbeliever with a profound sense of moral values – if Taunton allows himself to see this in such a person – it can only mean one thing, that that atheist isn’t really an atheist after all. He is a Christian waiting to get out. Short of an actual conversion, this is the best Hitchens could ever be to Taunton. And so Taunton’s own inability to imagine his own friendship becomes proof positive that his friend’s character must really be as Taunton would make of it.

***

Hitchens, it would seem, wasn’t really an unbeliever, and the only people who know it are the Christians whose faith he denounced publicly throughout his entire life. All in all, it’s a pretty shameless production. Once again, we find an unbeliever really does believe in God after all, or very nearly so. The trouble is that he only told a believer about all of this, at least according to the believer.

Taunton may think this is a novel story.

I think it’s a rather tiresome cliché.

When Arguendo Argues Itself Into a Somehow

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Religion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Apologetics, atheism, Belief, game of thrones, God, Jesus, religion, Stories, Villainy

Pop-apologists love to tell stories about how much atheists hate God. It’s a powerful claim, not because it’s accurate, but because it’s a bit like wishing us into the cornfields. All at once everything we say and everything we think is effectively removed from consideration and we sit mute despite our best efforts well beyond the eyes and ears of the one who put us there. You can try to reason with people who make this argument, but to them you might as well be out in the cornfield after all. They put you there with this story, and you can’t get out.

The pretext for putting us in that cornfield is often our commentary about moral qualities of God’s character. We tend to be critical of the big guy. These are themes well known by now to both atheists and religious apologists, as well as any number of people in between or off to the sides. That such comments are made for the purpose of argument seems obvious enough to me, but arguendo would seem to escape some folks, and so a comment or two on some of ‘God’s’ more unsavory activities quickly becomes evidence that those making the comments know very well that God is real and simply hate him.

And that’s the trouble with quote marks. Sometimes they disappear!!!

Anyway…

Maybe the whole argument is like a silence spell in a game of Dungeons&Dragons. All your thoughts about epistemology and metaphysics, logic, reasoning, the history of science or religion; all of these are suddenly translated into a single simple theme, the expression of brute rage. No matter what we actually say, or how we actually feel while talking about the subject, this notion that atheists just hate God translates the whole thing into rage. I can’t help thinking some apologists do it for just that very reason. Whatever the logic of it, the claim that atheists just hate God is a damned good way to end the discussion.

…even if one really means to continue talking about it anyway.

There is of course a self-fulfilling quality to all of this. No-one wants to be wished into the cornfields, metaphorically or otherwise. So, if you weren’t mad at God at the beginning of such a conversation, you may well find yourself mad at the person who said you were. Hopefully, this doesn’t rise to the level of brute rage, but it can certainly be frustrating. It’s at least enough to make a man brute miffed, stark-raving irritated, or even amused off at the source of the claim. Show that irritation, and you may well have the source claiming this is proof he was right about your motives all along.

I suppose it’s probably best to just go on about your life in such cases, really. It’s only a cornfield-banishment if you let yourself care about the brat who put you there. Otherwise, the demon kid is just an adult-child with his hands over his ears and you have a whole world in which to wander and explore. Who know? You may even find some corn to cook!

As often as not, we try anyway.

…to talk to the brat, I mean.

As often as not, when we try, the stratagem of choice will be to work our end of the dueling petitio. It seems obvious enough, so the thinking goes, that the person putting us into the apologetic cornfield construes our rejection of God in terms of an implicit assumption that He (God) must exist and that we must really know that after all. Since that is the point of explicit disagreement, this whole angle is a question good and begged. “Okay fucker,” so our inner monologue goes, “I can play that game too!” And out comes an argument in the form of an impatient reminder; “I don’t hate God; I simply don’t believe in him.” A frequent variation of this argument takes the form of an argument to the effect that one cannot hate someone or something one doesn’t believe in.

art-thrones-joffrey-620x349 I used to think that made sense, but then Joffrey happened, and I learned very clearly that I can indeed hate someone I don’t believe in. Seriously, I have spent more time hating that little bastard than I ever spent on any real person. Neither Adolf Hitler nor John Chivington from actual history have been given nearly so many fucks from me as that perfectly fictional little piss-ant. Neither my old playground Nemesis, Scotty, nor the bastard who embezzled money from my Dad’s business when I was a teenager ever got my goat quite so effectively as that perfectly pathetic little bit of unreal royalty has. (Admittedly, Jofrrey has the advantage of being a recent pebble in my viewing-shoe, but presently anyway, he rouses more irkitude than any other.) So, yes, the bottom line here is simple. I can hate a person that doesn’t exist. I really can.

Oh geez! I hope I’m not the only one.

Well, I reckon I’m not. A quick look around the net seems to confirm that little creep got under a a good many people’s skins. It may be a charitable (or at least a convenient) assumption on my part, but I don’t think all the Joffrey-haters are under the delusion that he’s real. My capacity to hate people who aren’t real does not appear to be a super-power. Others too have this ability.

So is Joffrey unique? Could he be a sort of fictional singularity of hatred-arousing super-villainy? I mean, I don’t really hate Darth Vader. Never did. (The way he choked that guy with the force was actually kinda cool.) Snape and Voldomort hold my attention long enough to enjoy the story, but neither really makes the hair stand-up on the back of my neck. Angel Eyes from the Good the Bad and the Ugly? I kinda like him. Actually, I like a lot of villains. (Maybe that’s a problem.) Even Sauron is hard to really hate. That guy is more like a force of nature. He has to be contended with, but he isn’t human enough to be all that mad about him. You want him defeated, yes, but you don’t find your face screwing up with rage at the mere mention of his name.

See, …Sauron. You didn’t cringe, now did you?

Then again, there is Felix Unger. I know that’s probably one for the over-40 crowd, but seriously, you kids need to get off my lawn anyway, so I’m using him. He’s not quite a villain I know, but man could that character set me to gnashing my teeth. Don’t get me wrong, Tony Randall was great, and he was particularly great at making me hate that fricking Felix Unger. Also there is Frank Burns from Mash. Wasn’t that guy’s mere presence in a scene just like fingernails on a chalk-board? (Which brings me to a question; do young people understand how bad that chalk-board sound was? I haven’t heard it in well over a decade and I still hate it. Almost as much as I hated Frank Burns. I expect some folks have escaped this sound entirely, and maybe I should find a more current metaphor for a truly cringe-worthy event. …maybe something like Joffrey.) Anyway, the point is that you can hate fictional characters.

Definitely possible.

So does that count as a point for God’s apologists? No. It just means the world is, as usual, more complicated than we often imagine it to be. It is PARTICULARLY more complicated than we imagine it to be when we go to war with people who think wrong things (especially if they are doing it on the internet. …those fuckers!) To put it another way, if God was created by man, as some of us believe him to be, then perhaps He is the original Satan, because He has definitely rebelled against his creators. He keeps doing things we don’t want Him to, and when some of us want Him to just go away, he keeps popping up, in our dreams and stories anyway. No, not because He’s real, but because our own stories have endowed Him with with far more meaning than we can effectively dispatch in a single saying of the nay.

Just to be clear. I’m not really talking about God. I’m talking about ‘God’.

Polemic games aside, I do think this touches on a larger issue, maybe even a couple of them. There is something in the power of stories. I don’t mean some mystical force that bends steel or shoots mind bullets at people who piss you off. I mean that stories have a way of holding our attention more than we sometimes want them to. This is why people watch soap-operas. It’s the reason why any reality shows last more than the time it takes to pitch them. And its the reason why every single one of the dark-violent soap operas now filling cable television will replace every resolved plot point with a new cliff-hanger, and they will do it every fricking time! (I’m convinced Joffrey is behind the lot of them. Seriously, what IS that kid doing now that his character is gone? Has anyone checked? Oh! Well, nevermind.) My point is that you will come back to watch a story (even a story that sucks) if it presents you with an open question. That bit of suspense keeps us coming back to great shows like the one that formerly bothered us with Joffrey. It will also have us watching 5 separate episodes of MTV’s real world after getting home from work, and grumbling the whole time.

“What could be dumber than this damned show?”

(Looks around the room.)

“Oh!”

burns All of which brings me back to the uncomfortable curve of the matter. I think an awful lot of unbelievers struggle with the hold that religious narratives have on our imaginations. I know my own religious sentiments stuck with me for years after I ceased vouching for their truth. This bothered me sometimes, but I began as a reluctant atheist anyway, so perhaps it didn’t bother me too much. I don’t know when, but sometime in the last couple decades many of my old religious thoughts fell away. Just the same, I remember what it was like to disbelieve and yet to feel moved by the same old religious narratives.

It doesn’t help of course that these narratives are still told in our presence, that others press upon us the need to vouch for the truth of those stories, and some even see fit to damn us for not believing them, but if you take all that away, it doesn’t necessarily mean we are free to skip our way on down to the god-free world to secular smiles and gooey gumdrops. Those stories are all over our minds, and they don’t go away just because their most flat-footed story-tellers are in the other room.

This fact may be more true for those of us that grew up in religious households, but I don’t reckon it’s untrue of others either. Religion provides so many recurrent themes to the cultural landscape around us that you just can’t escape it. And some of these are pretty good stories. Some are shitty-stories (e.g. God is not Dead), yes, but some are pretty damned moving, even to a non-believer (e.g. Amazing Grace). We may object to some of the implications. But that doesn’t mean the stories aren’t compelling, that we don’t feel the dramatic tension when the stories are well told, or that we won’t find ourselves rehashing a theme or two borrowed (perhaps without our realizing it) from religious circles.

Just as with fiction, religious themes may well hold someone’s interest without any literal belief in the characters and events described in them.

I should add that it isn’t entirely clear that atheists hate God, even as a concept. I’ve been focusing so far on villainous themes, because creeps and bastards are uniquely compelling (even godly ones). But of course, characters in a story move us in other ways too, and this is as true of divine stories as it is of sit-com plots. In the argument from evil, God is a downright bastard, to be sure, and I think sufficiently bastard-like to merit a conclusion or two about his character. Still, the peace-love-dove version of Jesus still evokes a warm and fuzzy something or other deep down in my non-soul. I don’t believe in either of these gods, of course, but the point is that each is moving in its own way. The gods of Greece and Rome can still get my interest, as can those of the Vikings. The shear inscrutability of Krishna can draw my attention as well as anything. All of these figures have compelling attributes, not because they are real, but because they are at times part of stories told really well.

Simply put, religious themes do not cease to occupy our attention simply because we stop believing in them. Our attention may be drawn to them by others, but our own thoughts will frequently come back to those themes without any external prompts. They occupy too much of the thought-world around each of us to be simply banished to the cornfields. In that respect, gods may have an advantage on atheists. We can be put in that cornfield by anyone malicious enough to go for the debate equivalent to a quick fix. Gods can’t. You put them out of your metaphysics, and they pop up in your poetry. Kick them out of your ethics and they sneak back into your favorite morality tales. Some may find in all of this an opportunity for a gotcha game, a chance to declare a debate victory of sorts, but that’s a scene closer to the spirit of Frank Burns than a Matlockesque moment of truth. (Yes, I wrote Matlockesque. Deal with it!) Still, we shouldn’t let the faux-apologetics cause us to lose site of something very human here; we don’t have to believe stories to be moved by them. I reckon those theists whose thoughts I value can see this as well as any atheist. As for those who continue to play the you-just-hate-God game, perhaps I shall put them in a cornfield of my own.

…better yet, rye.

Apologists keep telling us that God doesn’t go away when we cease to believe in him. I think its closer to the truth that ‘God’ doesn’t go away when we cease to believe in him. Some people will never notice the difference.

At this point, I reckon that really just shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Decalogic Schmecalogic!

08 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Native American Issues, Philosophy, Write Drunk, Edit Stoned

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

atheism, Charlton Heston, Christianity, Decalogues., Memes, Morality, Native Americans, religion, Ten Commandments

Maybe you’ve seen it yourself. One of the many pieces of spirit-kitch floating about the net these days is a little gem called The Native American Ten Commandments. It might as easily be labelled an Indian Ten Commandments, or even the Native American Indian Ten Commandments.

…cause extra syllables make it all better.

Either way it’s just the sort of thing that goes with overly staged old photos or pastel-tinged paintings involving beautiful people and lots of feathers. To the left, you can see a poster version of the list. It is short on feathers, but totally cosmic, cause, well, Indians are good for that sort of thing.

…of course.

That’s just one version of the native decalogue. Here is another! The list looks about the same, but the order seems to be different. Apparently, the order of this list isn’t as important to the Great Spirit as it is to the God of Abraham. I know, I know. Some of you are already saying these are the same thing.

Well maybe.

But seriously, I don’t think so.

See, one of the many things that I typically admire about indigenous peoples is that they aren’t the sort of people who normally produce this sort of nonsense.

…or at least they weren’t historically. (Progress ruins just about everything.)

So what’s wrong with a decalogue of commandery goodness? Well we could start with the commandment theme. It contains a whole host of culture-specific assumptions about ethics most of which seem screamingly out of place here, not the least of them being that ideas about how one ought to behave come from some being of cosmic authority. This one of many respects in which the politics of kings comes screaming through the metaphors of modern Christianity. Ten commandments construe morality in terms of fealty to a liege-lord who gets to tell us how to behave. Whatever else the Lord is, he’s also a Lord, which is to say neither a Democrat nor a Republican. He tells us what to do, and doing His will is what defines our own morality. That is the logic of the Ten Commandments. This logic gets softened a bit in the Native American variant. We don’t exactly know who is commanding us. It might not even be the great spirit. One imagines, perhaps an elder who wishes us to show respect for the Great Spirit, which is at least a little more egalitarian than a God who starts his list of does and don’ts with a demand that we pay more attention to him than anyone else. So, yeah, it’s a little more egalitarian.

A little!

Tossing the commandment format out altogether would be a lot more egalitarian.

…and as far as I can tell, a lot more authentic. Maybe I’m missing something, like the history behind this particular decalogue. I wonder who produced it, and just what they hoped to accomplish with it. Suffice to say, it doesn’t strike me as having much connection to the traditions of any particular Native American people. It’s language and its metaphors are those of a generic pan-Indian culture, and in this case a pan-Indian culture as envisioned from the viewpoint of an outsider.

Do I object to the principles at stake here? Not particularly. Some of them sound rather cool. It’s the total package that sets off the red flags for me, not the least of reasons being its rather non-native packaging. What bothers me about this is the fact that some people don’t approach ethics in terms of a list of rules, much less imagine them to be the product of a cosmic legislator. The Native American decalogue invites us all to appreciate a kind of difference, but imposes an artificial similarity on the subject even as it pretends to acknowledge that difference.

And why ten? Seriously, can’t your ethics come in five or eights, or maybe even thirty-twos. Actually, I’m not a huge fan of listey philosophicals in general. The numbers always seem arbitrary, and along with that goes a lot of potential for contradiction, and very little potential for substantive understanding. It’s the matter-of-fact nature of such lists that seems to me an invitation to the most mechanical of moral sensibilities.

If there is a good place for such lists, I suspect it’s in less cosmic subject matters. They seem quite appropriate for a professional code of ethics, not the least of reasons that folks don’t usually expect a professional code of ethics to be complete. If your morality is dictated entirely by your job, then most folks would say you work to much. Then we just say; “Thou shalt get a life!”

…and thou better get on it, dammit!

Yes, I know I’m misusing ‘thou’. It’s not the worst thing I will do all day, not even in this post. Trust me!

Anyway, I don’t really mean to pick on native Americans here. They aren’t the only ones to fall for the lure of the decalogue (or perhaps to have someone else fall for it on their behalf). Apparently, there is a Ten Commandments of Colour Theory. Ted Talks seem to have their own, ..um, TED Commandments. Unnamed sources tell me there is a Ten Commandments of Journalism. Actors have their own Ten Commandments. So do bartenders. I would not have guessed, but it appears that even Propagandists have Ten Commandments. Even Nudists have Ten Commandments. Writers have one just for social networking. Is there a secret to a successful marriage? Yep, ten of them. Typography has its own decalogue. Apparently millennials have their own Ten Commandments. Following these Ten Commandments will lead to weight loss. …surely. Computer programmers have a decalogue, though presumably they will work on it sometime next week.

As I understand it, a list of Ten Commandments for Atheists has been floating around for awhile, though I assume the commandery parts of these Commandments is meant to be taken with a grain of salt. Actually, it seems there are a few decalogues for non-believers out there. Richard Dawkins seems to have produce one such list in The God Delusion. Penn Jillette has one too. I don’t remember reading it, but I’m told Bertrand Russell produced such a list long before him. Hitchens has his own list, so now his face appears on memes beside such a list. The guy at Daylight Atheism on Patheos blogs is not to be outdone. Oh look! The Atheism Reddit seems to have a Ten Commandments.

…it looks like someone else made that up.

…probably not a fan of the atheist reddit.

Hey, there is a Ten Commandments of Logic! Hm…

There is a Ten Commandments for Musicians. Better yet, Captain Beefheart once produced a Ten Commandments for Guitar Playing. Classical Musicians have their own Ten Commandments. Drummers have a list of Ten Commandments, but honestly, I think they have machines for that now.

How many commandments do RPG Gamers have? Ten. It appears that Gamemasters have ten of their own. Do game designers have ten commandments? Of course. But there is a different one for educational game designers. There is even a Ten Commandments specifically for video game menus. Game Inventors have one of their own.

Do Republicans have their own Ten Commandments? Yes, but apparently they didn’t write it. Or this one. Liberals don’t seem to have written theirs either. Elizabeth Warren once issued 11 Commandments for Progressives, cause apparently one of them is breaking the frame. Mostly, Republicans and Democrats argue about the Ten Commandments, but let’s not get into that.

…today anyway.

I can only hope that I’ve broken at least three of them, but you can damned well bet that there is a Ten Commandments for bloggers. Actually, there seems to be two of them. No, Three. Make that four. Okay, five. Six? Okay, that’s really enough. No really, stop it! Seriously, stop it! I said STOP!

Someone here says that cats have a Ten Commandments, but they only follow it when they feel like it. Dogs have their own take on the Ten Commandments. I would look for a Ten Commandments of tropical fish, but I imagine it would just go like; “1) Gloop, 2) gloop, gloop.” Horses have a Ten Commandments. There is a Ten Commandments for pets in general.

Oh Hell, I haven’t even got to all the interesting or well known decalogues! This could take all day. …maybe even ten of them. But you get the idea. What’s fascinating about the proliferation of decalogetry, at least to me, is the seeming arbitraryness of the whole thing. Even within the Abrahamioc religions, the Ten Commandments have less to do with actual scripture than pop-Christianity. Compared to its source material, the Ten Commandments are simplified and trimmed of questionable content (one might even say that ‘politically correct’, but of course that phrase is only to be used in attacking liberals). Still, the notion caught on, and caught on so well it just keeps generating itself, time and again. Some of its children are meant to be taken more seriously than others, but an awful lot of people seem to fall quite easily into the notion that ethics begins with a list of ten principle to be declared into existence by someone (with or without the authority to do so).

In fact, maybe I’ll have a go at it myself:

The Ten Commandments of Decalogue Building

1: The Number of Commandments Shall be Ten.

2. Ten shall be the number of the commandments.

3) Thou shalt not have 11 Commandments, nor 9, except that…

4 – No Monty Python References!

5 ~ Numbers 2 through 5 are bullshit. Start over!

2b -> …or not to be. That is the question.

3b, Okay, I’ll let you get by with that one.

4b That which is numbered shall be commandments. Simple oughts and issez shall not count in the counting except insofar as one reconstructs them into shalls and shall nots, or even to fuck offs.

5c = No, not fuck-offs, dammit. Do this right!

6 This is hard.

6.2 –You’re wasting time. Do that one over!

6.3 …Okay, …No matter the subject, all that is deemed worthy of the counting shall end in an exclamation mark

6.4 …

6.5 !

7)) All commandments are to be read in the voice of Charlton Heston. Of course!

8:: The decalogue will not be televised.

9 You’re off topic again.

(10) I really can’t do this.

11 Cause my rules go to 11.

Today’s Kinda Loaded Question – How Do You Read a Bible?

31 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, History, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

atheism, Context, contextualization, Interpretation, Jesus, religion, Scripture, The Bible, The Holy Spirit

I always wonder what it means to ‘read the Bible’. The question comes to mind when people tell others to read the Bible; when they say they’ve read the Bible, and when they ask others if they’ve read the Bible. These questions and comments often seem intended to pack an extra bit of punch; something of value always seems to rest on them. But the phrase ‘read the Bible’ could mean anything from reading random passages to a kind of epic cover-to-cover journey. It could also mean reading specific (and very deliberately chosen) sections at length. Hell, it could mean a few other things too, but for me those are the ones that come to mind.

We could also talk about different versions of the Bible. It certainly matters what translation you look at.

The random passage reading approach is always interesting to me. People using this approach open the book randomly and read what’s in front of them in the belief that they may be led (perhaps by the Holy Spirit) to some significant passage that will help them resolve a question or a problem of some sorts. It’s a fascinating approach to reading, one which gives the process more than a little trace of divination.

…a bit like palm reading or crystal gazing.

Which reminds me that I’ve been told many times one must be guided by the Holy Spirit to interpret the Bible correctly. Whatever else this claim means, it usually also means that my own heathen reading skills won’t account for much on Biblical topics, at least not in the ears of the person telling me this. This may be a trip down the fallacy highway with stops in the Cities of Petitio and Ad Hominem-Circumstantial. It’s also a world in which spiritual powers and personal authority cut right across basic reading and reasoning skills, and parsing a simple sentence becomes an act of communion.

Do we want to get into the whole question of sola scriptura versus the authority of the Pope or some other religious authority?

No.

I mean, we could, but seriously, let’s not.

I sometimes wonder at the degree to which the simple physical act of opening the book could skew this divination-reading approach to the topic. I mean just how often would you land on one of the first or last pages when you try this? And if you did, would it be due to a conscious effort on your own part or guidance by …you know who?

Ah well!

What actually started me down this path was a slightly more mundane question. Do you read the whole thing or do you simply read parts? People often claim to have read the Bible. I think some folks are just bluffing really. It’s a big damned sleeping pill of a book, and I somehow doubt that some folks could actually make it from cover to cover. A much more interesting question though would be whether or not it’s actually worth it to do that? To just read the Bible cover-to-cover.

Now a serious Biblical scholar might get something out of such a reading; he presumably already knows a lot about the context behind the text. I’m talking about your average Jane just sitting at home with as much knowledge of the text, it’s language, and its relevant histories as regular life gives your average Jane. Okay, I know the average Jane is itself a tricky concept, so let’s just say that in my mind she’s a middle-class American with a high school diploma (and perhaps a college degree). She watches a lot of TV, and she’s been to church a few times in herlife; perhaps she even goes regularly. You can skew this Jane-image in whatever direction you like. The point I’m trying to make is that their daily lives haven’t prepared most people (including I’ll warrant most people who claim to have read the Bible) to understand what they are reading as they go skipping along the pages of scripture. Without giving necessary consideration to the linguistic and literary traditions encompassed in the book as well as the (often murky) historical context in which the texts were written and/or translated, I don’t see how any substantive understanding (inspired or otherwise) could come out of the epic cover-to-cover reading quest. People have enough trouble getting the cool parts from Shakespeare. I somehow doubt this even older text is more transparent on first or even a third pass. No, I can’t see reading the Bible working without a lot of side reading as you go.

And somewhere in there, I can’t help thinking this ceases to be about ‘reading’ and starts to become an exercise in ‘studying’.

I’m not just saying you can do some extra study to get more out of the Bible. What I’m saying is that the exercise of simply reading that text is a rather meaningless ritual without the studying. …Okay, so perhaps the ritual does have meaning (Holy Spirit and all that) but if it does have meaning, that meaning has little to do with what we conventionally understand to come from the act of reading. I am accordingly unimpressed when people tell me that they have read the Bible cover-to-cover. When people tell me they have read the Bible, I figure this is either a hollow exercise or an occult activity with principles quite different from those of conventional reading skills. When someone tells me that they study the Bible, well that might be interesting…

It might be.

An evangelical Christian might be tempted to think that this meditation is a trap of sorts, because of course that process of study leads one to an awful lot of perfectly mortal sources of authority. How can one truly learn the word of God if doing so requires one to make decisions about alternative translations, assess the historical context based on books written by mere mortals (some of whom may not even be Christian!), and make a number of choices oneself about how to frame the context of understanding any particular passage. Far from a discrete project, the effort to study-up on the topic if a potentially infinite regress. Most believers aren’t going to want to do that any more than the rest of us. In any event, this process will never lead to anywhere near the conviction that this or that moral principle is the absolute and unvarnished word of God. For myself, I’m comfortable with that, and I suspect there are a few liberal Christians that could say the same, but I don’t think the notion that the Bible is the infallible word of god survives this process. More to the point, I don’t think that notion survives any serious attempt to think about what it takes to understand an historical text like this.

That’s my spirit-unfulfilled 2 cents.

northierthanthou

Category Archives: atheism

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Today’s Kinda Loaded Question – How Do You Read a Bible?

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