In Cheeto We Trust

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by danielwalldammit in Irritation Meditation, Politics, Uncategorized

Tags

Church and State, Declaration of Independence, Donald Trump, God, In God We Trust, Jesus, National Prayer Breakfast, Pledge of Allegiance, religion

Whenever I’m tempted to simply accept the seemingly innocuous gestures of civil religion here in America, someone or something comes along and reminds me that it simply isn’t safe to do so, that the boundary between church and state is worth defending, and that the potential for compromise on this issue is a well-poisoned well.

Case in point?

This bit of Cheeto-driven drivel, right here!

CheetoBreakfastPrayers

This pathetic tweet is an artifact of the National Prayer Breakfast. It’s an occasion when the President bows to the authority of political Christians, and vouchasafes their victories in the early days of the cold war. Whatever else this event is, it’s a good reminder that the cold war was always about internal politics as much as confrontation with external enemies. It’s also proof that little has changed under the sun (except perhaps the ratio of black carbon in the atmosphere, which is of course a heresy to the breakfasting prayer-mongers Trump spoke with today). Seriously, this event is the legacy of people who wanted Jesus to roll back the institutions of the New Deal, people who wanted to take away the social safety net and leave us all with nothing but Jesus and our own boot straps to help us in times of need. “In God we trust?” The subtext of that message is that government isn’t going to help you all.

That was always the point.

…which is why this message may be particularly relevant coming from an administration Hell-bent on tearing up every government agency that Americans rely on to keep us safe and prosperous. When the Manchurian Cheeto is done, we may well have nothing more than Jesus to keep poisons out of our water supply, remove the Russians from our computers, and hold the crooks at bay in the multinational cartels we now call banks. Jesus is already what the Republicans had offer the people of Flint and Puerto Rico. It’s what they offered to Southern Californians as a good chunk of the state burned down. It’s all we’ll be left with when the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast see Donald Trump deliver up the national disaster they’ve been praying for all these decades.

For all their flag-waving and Bible-thumping, those behind the National Prayer Breakfast are neither patriots nor Christians, and they certainly aren’t conservative in any meaningful sense of the word. What they want for this country is a disaster, and Donald Trump is delivering that disaster. He is the answer to their prayers.

The hypocrisy orgy known as the National Prayer Breakfast gives us a lot to gripe about. Donald Trump was fully immersed in the spirit of the occasion. He shared a good number of thoughts about the importance of faith in America, and in the American people. All utter crap of course, but he shared it all just the same.

For purposes of brevity, let’s just stick with the tweet, that portion of the wretched breakfast he chose to put into the only literary form the man and his fan base truly appreciate. He makes three points in this tweet, each of which is supposed to tell us something about the importance of God to the United States of America. Each of these points is damned misleading, which I suppose is a step up from the outright falsehoods we normally fall from this fountain of false facts, fake news, and utter foolishness. Still, a moment on each point will go a long way towards illustrating why Donald Trump is wrong about the role of God in America, and why the political Christians who eat this message up are wrong as well.

The first thing to notice is what is not mentioned in this vapid tweet, and that is the U.S. Constitution. It is the U.S. Constitution, and religion clauses of the First Amendment, that make the role of religion in our government such a hotly debated topic. One of the most fascinating things about those who want us to think of America as a Christian nation is just how hard they work to leave the Constitution out of the discussion. That document doesn’t help them, so they have to work around it. They have just one problem. Simply failing to mention the U.S. Constitution is too obvious. It sets up a great big red flag and invites those of us on the secular end too many obvious entry points to push our own point of view. They can’t just not say anything. That won’t work. So, they typically do what Trump does here. They cite the Declaration instead.

Like Jesus sent to atone for the sins the humanity, The Declaration of Independence serves to atone for the silence of the Constitution on the subject of God. (Yes, the Constitution mentions God in the date. If that impresses, you then I have an acre of arctic ice-pack to sell you.) The Constitution simply doesn’t say what Evangelical Christians want it to say. It does not invoke God as the authority for creation of the U.S. Government. (It locates that authority in the people.) It doesn’t say that you have to be Christian to hold office. (In fact, it expressly forbids such a standard.) And of course it contains a clause holding religion at bay right there alongside the right to practice religion. We can debate the proper interpretation of the establishment clause, but its mere existence is an annoyance to those who would clearly rather live in a theocracy. You can read the Constitution all day, but it won’t give you the license to tie Jesus to our politics that Evangelical Christians want out of the document. So, they typically talk about the Declaration of Independence instead.

Just like the Cheeto-in-Chief did today.

Of course those pushing the America-as-a-Christian-nation theme typically misread the Declaration itself, often confusing this reference to a Creator (written by a man widely regarded as a Deist) with a direct reference to Jesus himself and nearly always confusing this piece of propaganda with a clear plan of government. They ignore the clear parallels to logic of Hobbesian thought and other connections to Enlightenment philosophy in order to cast the language of the Declaration in terms closer to those of scripture. Most importantly, they reverse the point of the argument. Jefferson wasn’t using rights to prove the existence of a creator. He was using a reference to the Creator to explain the existence of rights, and no, there is nothing in the relevant passage of the Declaration that suggests the rights will cease to exist if we take the Creator out of the picture. All of this is lost on those consuming messages like that Trump delivered today at the National Prayer Breakfast. When they reference the Declaration, they see it as an argument for belief in God (which they assume means Jesus), but they are dead wrong in more ways than they could possibly count.

Simply put, the Declaration doesn’t mean what Donald Trump pretends it means. Neither does it mean what the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast want it to mean.

I doubt there is much in the Bible that means what they want it to mean either.

Or the Constitution that matter.

The whole shell game is crap! People ought to stop talking about the Declaration when they mean to address questions about the Constitution, and they ought to stop reading either one as though it was the script for the youth pastor in a particularly uneducated part of the country. Most of us are smarter than that, but that doesn’t stop some people from recycling the same old garbage, which is what Trump did today. The whole con has been painfully obvious for decades. That should be as obvious to Christians as it is to the rest of us.

But not to the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast!

As to ‘In God We Trust’? That motto was adopted by the nation in 1956. It was part of the same movement that led to things like the National Prayer Breakfast, which makes it an interesting point for Trump to make. In doing so, he is simultaneously invoking a principle many assume to be a timeless part of American history and also giving a nod to the faithful who know the history of the prayer breakfast, people who understand the aggressiveness of their own political agenda, people who understand how divisive that phrase was always meant to be. It may sound like a nice an unifying message, if that is, you don’t give a damn about those who don’t trust god after all. In effect, the motto says of the rest of us that we aren’t really part of America. We don’t really count.

That is of course precisely the point. Always was.

“One nation, under God?”

Same story. This too was also added in those days shortly after Ike had been reluctantly cajoled into making public professions of faith in the official service of the nation. It too has always served as a clear reminder to the rest of us that we do not really belong. One nation under God? If you don’t believe in God, that little utterance, that bit of prayer stuck into the middle of an oath, gives the lie to the whole charade, it drops you right out of the narrative in the very moment the thoughtless celebrate unity at your expense.

Again, that is the point of the ritual.

So, there we have it, one twisted effort to dodge the Constitution on the subject of church and state, and two tokens of divisiveness wrapped in a cloak of unity. Whether he means it or not, whether Donald Trump is capable of ‘meaning’ anything in the conventional sense of the word, this is the message he offered America’s political Christians today. He endorsed their most aggressive agenda and made a point to isolate their enemies. Small wonder that these folks love him despite his obvious insincerity. Today Donald Trump offered the religious right the power to which they feel entitled, and he did it in precisely the same deceitful tones they have always known and loved. That’s our President; completely without substance, and utterly disingenuous.

The religious right wouldn’t have him any other way!

On Chick Tracts

25 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Childhood, Religion

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

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

The God of Chick Tracts always struck me as something of an asshole.

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.

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.

When Arguendo Argues Itself Into a Somehow

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Religion

≈ 3 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.

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.

Sartre Was Right, But Hell Sometimes Has an Endearing Quality

30 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, atheism, Religion

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Alaska, atheism, Jesus, Philosophy, Prayer, Recursion, religion, Secularism, World View

Atqasuk

So, awhile back I’m sitting at a booth for the place I work at a largish regional conference. I’m the last guy on the planet that you want to be selling anything (trust me!), but the others are busy with an event of their own. Anyway, I’m sitting at the booth answering questions, handing out stuff, and just generally putting a face behind the table…

…in walks a sweet lady and we talk. She knows some people from up where I live. I don’t recognize most of the names and quietly kick myself for being an antisocial bastard, but otherwise the discussion seems to go well. She is friendly, and I am in a good mood. She eventually decides to move on and we say our goodbyes.

Then she tells me she loves Jesus.

I nod and I smile.

And then she asks me if I love Jesus too?

Kaktovik

If I answer her with a ‘no’ that can as easily be taken to mean that I think Jesus is a jerk as that I simply don’t believe in him, which is just a bit more harsh than I would normally wish to come across, even if I weren’t the current face of my workplace. This is why the complex question is commonly thought a fallacy, but saying that here isn’t going to help me at all, because this woman is just not going to understand the problem. I’m trying to be honest and nice at the same time, and she’s NOT making it any easier for me.

This is hardly the first time my lack of faith has stuck out like a well hammered opposable digit. The North Slope of Alaska is the Bible Hat of the country and ungodly folk like me are not too common around here. So, I am trying to wrap the conversation up as gracefully as my bull-in-a-china-shop personality can manage, but honestly, professing faith in Jesus is a little more courtesy than I can muster in good faith, so I explain that I am not Christian. I do it as nicely as I can, and it’s certainly nicer than just saying ‘no’, but well, anyway…

So, the woman says she’s going to pray for me. I am generally happy to take goodwill in whatever form it is offered, so I thank her for this, imagining her doing this kindness on her own at some indefinite time in the future. That’s when she reaches out her hands and adds that she is going to pray that Jesus will come into my life. That’s when I realize she means to do it right then and there, which casts kind of a new light on the subject. Apparently, I am to play an active role in this ritual, minimal as it may be, the point of which is explicitly designed to change my life.

There she is with hands outstretched waiting for me to take hers and commence praying for Jesus work a miracle. And once again, this is a bit more than I am willing to go along with.

One might even say that I was tad uncomfortable.

Wainwright

I wouldn’t call this a teachable moment so much as a learnable moment, because this is hardly the only awkward clash of worldviews to fall into my life in the last year or so, but it’s a good starting point for thinking about them. Both my would-be prayer-partner and I are trying to negotiate a significant difference in world view. Each of us is trying to be decent about it (at least I think we both are). The trouble is that each of us gets our ideas about how to treat people with different views from within our own world-view, so each of us has only the vision of fairness and respect that our own way of looking at things has to offer.

I’ve been as nice as I can be really, short of professing faith I don’t have or inviting faith I don’t want. To ask more of me is an imposition, as I look at it, and I have been as polite as possible about the boundary this woman is testing. Seems fair to me, but of course she has her own views on the situation. If I don’t know the Love of the Lord, surely the most decent thing she can do for me is to try and share that love with me! What decent person would reject such a wonderful gesture? And who could possibly regard her efforts to share the Lord as an imposition? I may sound sarcastic, but in this paragraph at least I do not mean to be. I can easily see the logic of her behavior, or at least a logic that would make that behavior reasonable within the context of the views which have produced it.

Barrow

I could come up with less charitable interpretations for both my own behavior and hers, but I’d prefer to afford the benefit of the doubt here and ask that others do the same.

The general public entertains a broad range of ideas about the nature of belief and how to get along with people whose beliefs differ from out own. Some of these meta-beliefs provide us with practical solutions to potential conflicts, and some of these meta-beliefs water down the meaning of the beliefs people profess to have. In either event, much of the way we handle different beliefs is itself a question of sharing at least some of these beliefs about how to handle the difference. Simply put, folks get used to compromise. So, it can be rather disconcerting to meet someone who doesn’t accommodate our own sense of fairness, someone who doesn’t share in the same scripts about how to find a compromise. And that is of course how a godless fellow and an evangelical Christian end up sharing a really awkward moment over the prospect of an impromptu prayer.

Neither my would-be prayer partner nor I meant to be jerks. And still the conversation wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Ah well!

People are hard.

Jesus H. Attitude-Dancing Christ, MSN News Blurbs Can Be Damned Irritating!

01 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Irritation Meditation, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Bullshit, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Journalism, MSNBC, News, Skepticism, The Cross

Don’t the folks at MSN know that I’m busy? Don’t they realize I have better things to do than rant about the slippage between their storylines and their headlines? Or is it some kinda clever plot to drive me bonkle-wozzies before the end of summer?

I mean, seriously, take a look at the teaser line for that story on MSN. Isn’t that amazing? No, not Zimmerman, silly, or the guy whose face I deliberately cut in half with the cropping tool (I’m in a bad mood); I mean the lady in the funny hat. Check out the line underneath it.

Seriously?

Somebody has reason to think they actually found a piece of the cross to which our dear and fluffy bamble-hussy was nailed in the way back when. And if that is true, then maybe a few other claims about that old carpenter’s cat might be true too, and damn! If that’s true, I guess I better re-evaluate a few things, not the least of them being the way I talk about our Lord and Savior.

Seriously, …uh oh!

Okay, I know it’s not really alleging proof of a miracle, but what the lie does suggest is that they have serious reason to believe a piece of wood actually dates back to the historical event of Christ’s crucifiction, and THAT would be a Hell of a piece of research to produce. It really would.

But wait a minute, the actual headline on NBC News doesn’t have quite the same force as the front page teaser on MSN. The teaser is just the sort of phrasing you would use to put a claim on the table; the actual headline could as easily be used to suggest you were getting ready to throw the claim in the trash. This whole thing just got less interesting with a single click of the mouse. Still, I wonder what the Hell this is all about.

Guess I’ll have to read the article…

Oh well, it’s right here in the first paragraph.

Turkish archaeologists say they have found a stone chest in a 1,350-year-old church that appears to contain a relic venerated as a piece of Jesus’ cross.

It turns out that what MSNBC meant was little more than that they unearthed a artifact that WAS venerated as a piece of the old bad bark by a particular people in a particular time and place. The rest of the article discusses some of the comments thrown back and forth about such artifacts in centuries past, all of which is actually quite interesting, but what this piece does NOT contain is any reason to believe that it really is a piece of the most famous chunk of wood in human and (Divine) history.

Speaking of Icons, there is definitely an iconic relationship between the marketing of this article and its informative content, one that probably shouldn’t be there. Seriously MSN-NBCNews guys, it’s one thing to tell us about holy relic hyping; it’s quite another to hype a relic yourselves. …or at least those SHOULD be two-different things. The problem is at least partly a matter of slippage between the various stages of publication and promotion, but somewhere in there a potentially interesting story has been transformed into the rhetoric of carnival barking.

So, I guess this isn’t really the journalism-as-apologetics piece that the original teaser seemed to suggest it would be. Don’t get me wrong; this is actually kind of neat – in a perfectly-sober-professional-archaeologist-doing-what-those-guys-do sorta way, maybe even in a cool-find-and-high-fives-all-around-kinda-way, but definitely not in holy-carble-monkeys-you-has-found-the-holy-of-holies kinda way.

…one of these days I’ll go back to using real words in my posts.

But not today.

Today I am just blowing raspberries at the whole damned thing.

Speaking of absolutely bunk, let’s try an online poll. This oughtta be about as meaningful as all the other junk polls you get with news stories. I only regret that it will probably fail to find it’s way into anybodies talking points.

Dammit!

CORRECTION: I took a second look at this and changed a few things (including the title) on accounta I still think it’s June of 2012. Thanks to John for catching my mistake.

When Values Trump Themselves: A Rant About Self-Defeating Ethics

01 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Philosophy

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

atheism, Christianity, Ideals, Jesus, Navajo, Philosophy, Rationality, Reason, religion, Semantics

Sometimes idealization strengthens a value; sometimes it destroys it. The trick is to know the difference.

It gets more difficult to tell the difference when a value becomes central to one’s own life, or if it has become a commonplace theme in the community around her. Failure to follow a given value can become so unthinkable that dissonance reduction strategies simply overtake the effort to apply it to the miscellaneous judgement calls of daily life.

At the extreme end of caring about something, defense mechanisms become so strong that the rhetoric of rationalization simply eclipses the discourse needed to plan effective action. Thus, love becomes a foreign notion to much of Christianity, Reason and Logic brand-names jealously guarded by unbelievers, and self-reliance the hallmark of Americans themselves as dependent on others as any people ever were. In like manner, racism becomes unthinkable to liberals, notwithstanding the prominence of racial categories in our policies, and patriotism goes without saying to conservatives, even when they attack their own nation (literally or metaphorically). It is easy enough to see that talking-up a value doesn’t always mean living up to it; but things are worse than that. Talking up a value can sometimes chase any meaningful effort to put it into practice right out of the building.

***

I used to think about this a lot when I worked in Navajo country. Out there the value term with the most weight to it was hózhǫ́. This is usually translated as something like ‘balance’ or ‘harmony,’ and for many this is enough to tie the notion to themes better suited to American pop-Buddhism and New Age thought. In contrast to bilagáanas, diné (Navajos) were non-confrontational, at least according to common folk-wisdom on the subject.But it wasn’t merely outsiders that approached the concept in these terms; Navajos themselves sometimes use this approach to explain themselves to others.

This theme always troubled me, because it sure as Hell didn’t describe the people I knew and worked with. Sure I had seen plenty of situations in which I had seen diné show notable restraint or reluctance to engage in confrontation. But I had seen some spectacular confrontations in my days out there. More to the point, it had always seemed to me that conflict rested just under the surface of pretty much every item of business occurring in that area. The question it seems to me is not whether Navajos engage in conflict more or less than the average Bilagáana (white person); but rather under what circumstances will each do so and for what purposes. I think the answer to this question is different for Navajo than it is for Anglos, but I also think this requires a lot more subtlety than the oppositional stereotypes generally allow.

I had a boss out there who used to tell me that the sort of balance implied in the concept of hózhǫ́ actually entailed a trace of conflict. Conflict too had its value in this ideal, he seemed to be telling me, and so it too had its place in the balance people strove to attain. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a layer of conflict in the workings of folks who embraced this value. But sometimes I am a damned slow student. Years after I had moved on from that job, I think I finally got this lesson. I got the point while reading up on Henry Kissenger. Thinking of hózhǫ́ as a kind of Realpolitik is of course little more than replacing one metaphor for another, but I continue to think it is a helpful correction to the cosmic muffin concepts that saturated so much of the public discussion of hózhǫ́, at least when the rest of the conversation occurred in English. Even still, the distance between this value and the practices of those who hold it dear is vast, so vast that it seems often to escape the ability of folks to conceptualize the matter.

Which I suppose puts diné on par with the rest of us.

***

It used to drive me to tears, back during my brief stint as a moderator on the Internet Infidels message boards, when I would see some fellow heathen lecturing a Christian on the virtues of reason and rationality. Okay, this didn’t always bother me, but it drove me nuts those specific moments when the Christian was doing a damned good job of reasoning about the particular issue and the unbeliever not so much

Yes, that does happen.

I wouldn’t count myself an Atheist if I didn’t think that ultimately the most reasonable thing to do about gods is to just say ‘no’ to them. But the backing of reason needs to be earned in the details of a discussion, and which side will earn it is back on the table every time you decide to take up the subject. Like it or not, in some conversations about religious matters, it is in fact the believer that is doing a better job of reasoning. That really shouldn’t surprise anyone whose sense of human nature hasn’t been completely overdetermined by their sense of the battle lines in question. Yet in such moments, when the compelling argument just isn’t coming, leave it to the rotten-hearted to simply claim the cultural capital of a free thinking rational person and remind the believer that she isn’t in the club, so to speak.

That is the sort of hypocrisy I suppose I should expect in any camp, including my own, but it doesn’t make seeing it any easier. Take any given value, and you will always see a sort of tension between its motivating characteristics, the oughtness it urges on us, and its currency for those with some claim to that value. Ideally, one could expect those claiming the virtue of reason to be those who actually live up to it, but ideological movements and philosophical orientations also generate a degree of association with a given virtue. And for some, that is enough. They are more rationale by virtue of their allegiances; and little else need be said about the matter.

***

Likewise I will never accept the excuses that conservative Christians make for opposition to homosexuality. It is common enough to hear from folks that their stance on the topic is taken out of love, that they have gay friends, and that they are merely following the word of the Lord on this. (I’ll skip the example of the lady who re-assured me that she had nothing personal against gay people, because she loved Will & Grace. …okay, I didn’t quite skip it, but, well, …I can’t help myself sometimes.) Conservative Christians often cry foul when their position is described as hateful, insisting that we take their own motivations into account.

In my book, you measure goodwill by the way people treat others; and efforts to deprive gay lesbian folks of the right to marry, to adopt, or to security in the workplace make for a straight forward case of malice. Even without these concrete harms, the high suicide rates for those of homosexual orientation speak to the high costs that some folks pay for unwarranted stigma placed on certain sexual preferences. Against all this and more, the oft-repeated claims that one can oppose homosexuality while keeping to the admonition to love others starts to ring a bit hollow. The approach taken by conservative Christians against homosexuality makes of ‘love’ a mere footnote, an intellectual exercise in resolving an apparent inconsistency. It falls well short of living up to a virtue which could well be the shining light of Christian faith.

***

What has me thinking about this is a recent encounter with one of the ways this sort of problem is commonly expressed in ordinary language. I can’t think of any other way to put it, so I will just call it ‘vacuous Idealization’. What I mean to get at by coining this monstrous bit if vocabulary is a variety of rhetoric that cancels a value in practice by elevating it to a level of abstraction which is utterly meaningless.

Take for example ‘true love,’ which we are often assured isn’t selfish at all. But that’s not all that true love isn’t. It also isn’t carnal, and it isn’t fleeting. It really isn’t harmful to the one who is loved, and it most certainly isn’t conditional. True love doesn’t keep track of the time, and it doesn’t care how much money you have or how tall you are. True love is timeless, and true love is, …blech! I can’t go on.

By the time we get done with all the things true love isn’t, I can’t help wondering if anything is left in the category at all. And that I suspect is the point of ‘true love’; it is actually an empty set, with no concrete members no associated concepts to define it. Instead we get the illusion that true love has been defined by taking ordinary instances of perfectly human (and rather flawed) love and negating each of the flaws. We are left to believe that we still know what we are talking about when all of the frailties of human relationships have been tossed in the trash of love that is merely real, as opposed to that which is ~~true~~, …pardon me True.

I call Shenanigans!

Real love looks nothing like this True love that people talk about. You notice when she gets in bed without brushing her teeth. And yes Real Love hopes that her relatives will take care of her when she needs them. Real love may not care how tall you are, but she’s damned glad you don’t have any really ugly birthmarks. And if real love hasn’t made a point of principle out of your race, your nationality, your political party or your religion, then she certainly does have a way of finding people most when they travel in the same circles she does. Real love comes and goes (dammit anyhow) sometimes without warning and without leaving behind any explanation for her visit, or her departure. And sad to say, real love does have her contingencies, much as we might wish otherwise. Real love always comes with the blemishes, and the do matter, and they don’t go away.

True love is little other than the hope of some ineffable residue left when we’ve taken out all the things that come with Real love in our actual lives. But that is a hope hung on an imaginary hook. If you take away enough of the things that come with real love, you end up with nothing at all. Sadly, I am inclined to think that may be the point of this kind of rhetoric. By stripping out the foibles of real human relationships and the attitudes that go with them, one ends up with a value that is whatever you will make of it. It is something that will never happen, a virtue no-one will ever realize, nor will they ever have to.

And being thus emptied of its meaning, True Love is the perfect predicate for an imaginary subject, to wit, “God is love!”

***

On a side note, and I will just throw it out there, I do think this is one the reasons those who emphasize the divinity of Jesus most seem least likely to emulate his actions and teachings. If he is a human, with real human foibles, then the stories told about him offer a real example of how one ought to live. If he is a God, though, well then who could hope to live up to that example?

Yes, I get that this is generally thought to be a paradox in that Jesus is commonly supposed to be both. And yet it is the nature of such enigma that one can only meaningfully speak of, or think about, one of its axes at any given moment. You can say of a paradox that it is both x and y, but you cannot grasp both at the same time. And of course believers do typically come with a marked preference.

***

In like manner, I think people often approach issues of objectivity in the most self-defeating manner. It is common enough to speak of a knowing subject and known object when framing different questions about how knowledge works. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, providing one understands the two as part of a relationship of sorts. Once folks start talking about the possibility that a claim could belong entirely to one or the other, the whole model gets rather misleading.

To put it another way, I think we can speak meaningfully about objective features in knowledge, or even of greater or lesser degrees of objectivity, but if objectivity is defined as the total absence of subjective input, well then that is epistemological failure on the horizon. Bringing this a little closer to actual contexts of reasoning, I often hear (or read) commentary in which people compare reasoning with emotion or logic with rhetoric, etc., the implication being that one must choose one over the other. In the popular imagination good reasoning does not appeal to emotion, and rhetoric is always a bad.

But of course the point of much good reasoning is rhetorical; it is an attempt to convince someone of something. Far from requiring an absence of emotion, this kind of project is often enhanced by a display of emotion. If you want people to care about something, then you ought to show them that you do too. Fail to do that and watch them doodle as you talk.

The bottom line here is that the quest for objectivity becomes mysticism when it is conceived in terms of purity. If the practice of careful judgement requires an absence of subjectivity, emotion, or conscious efforts at persuasion, then careful judgement resides in a world we have never been and never will be. In fact, we don’t have the faintest idea how to get there, because the very notion is simply nonsense.

***

On a related note, let us consider the notion of Truth with a capital T. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I have been told that truth is unattainable, or heard questions such as ‘what is truth’ framed as though it were something ‘out there’, so to speak. Not surprisingly, this approach has the effect of rendering meaningless the mundane truths of daily life. Against the promise of this cosmic Truth, no mere fact could possibly hope to hold our attention. And so the quest for Truth so often becomes an escape from truths.

Countless sophomoric essays have been written about the unattainability of this grand ~~truth~~ …Truth. It sits like the Kantian thing-in-itself well beyond our mere mortal efforts to find it. Many are the ways people have found to explain our failure to find this elusive entity, hiding somewhere in the mountains of philosophical goodness. But the details are un-necessary, because the failure of this quest begins with the framing of the question.

We use the concept of truth (or falsehood) on a daily basis to help us distinguish between claims we agree with and those we don’t. There is a lot of room for disagreement over the nature of that process, and it’s a damned interesting question, but if any theory of truth doesn’t address that sort of process then it is already headed down the wrong path from the outset.

Ultimately, questions about truth are less a matter of discovering a fact in the myriad lands of facts about the world around us, than it is a question of figuring out what means to say that something is true (and how that possibility relates its alternatives). Questions of truth value often involve great concepts and momentous philosophical questions, but they also occur in the context of topics of little importance, some of them being outright dull. I know that I consider it true that the Dr. Pepper I am drinking is too warm and false that the weather is nice outside. (I live in the arctic; what did you expect?) Any theory about the nature of truth that separates it entirely from such mundane matters is less a theory about truth than a hijacking of the notion for some other purpose.

What is Truth?

If you really must go on a quest to discover the answer to this question, then don’t let that quest

***

On a related note, and because it fits the pattern, could someone please tell the boys from Chicago what time it is. It is a good song, but seriously, does anyone really know what time it is?

YES!

We know what time it is, because time is not a thing to be known independent of human reckoning. If the conventions of human discourse say it is 5:30pm, Alaskan Standard Time, then it is 5:30pm, Alaskan Standard Time.

To make the question more complicated than that is not a quest for something profound; it is a dramatic self-indulgence.

Yes, I’m a lot of fun at parties too.

***

And with that the rant is nearing its end. If you are still reading this, then you have more patience than I do, and I apologize for tramping through matters both sacred and profane as well as a good many points in between. But of course that is my point, so to speak, that in effect the two extremes may at times prove to be one in the same. When a value becomes too important, even to conceive the possibility of transgressing against it, then people remove it from conscious thought in ways that parallel the treatment of things they abhor. Such sacred values can cease to be an effective means of motivating people, precisely because they mean too much to allow for the full range of human possibilities. Worse yet, people sometimes seem to take a value down this road for the very purpose of cancelling its bearing on daily life. Either way my point is that you should be careful about just how much you care about such things, because somewhere past “a lot” lies “Fuhgetaboutit!

Jesus is the Homunculus of Human Suffering

04 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Philosophy, Religion

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

atheism, Catholicism, Homunculus, Jesus, Meaning, Philosophy, religion, suffering, Theodicy

Crucified Christ by
Matthias Grünewald

Sometimes texts and utterances become what they purport to describe. Case in point? This little meditation on the spiritual meaning of suffering, An Attempt to Explain Christianity to Atheists In a Manner That Might Not Freak Them Out by The Bad Catholic at Patheos.com. Well, it certainly became a source of suffering for me (and apparently for P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula), and I suspect not a few others trying to sift through the article for one reason or another. Whether or not the article succeeds in becoming meaningful is another question.

Honestly, the whole thing is a Gish Gallop for me, from the scholastic presentation to the major assumptions of the argument and the vocabulary its author uses. Were I to attempt a refutation, I wouldn’t know where to start. If this was an attempt (as the author suggests) to speak to atheists, I can’t help but think it is an utter failure (or perhaps an ironic joke). If its author ever seriously had an unbelieving audience in mind, then he has done just about as much as he could to avoid communicating with that audience.

There is however one thing about this piece that does catch my attention; its final paragraph (emphasis added):

This changes everything: To see the child with leukemia is to see Christ suffering in that child, suffering to bring the world back to Perfection. To experience agony is to cry out with the strain of lifting this fallen world to Paradise. We are called to recognize this, and to actualize this. This is why I am a Christian.

I say this bit catches my attention, because I find it genuinely disturbing. I also recognize it (or something like it) from a number of previous conversations with believers, many of whom have advanced the argument that life is somehow less meaningful without God. They don’t always state their position in such stark terms, but I do think the view is common enough to rise above the idiosyncracies of this particular article. So, it is perhaps worth a comment or two.

Kitch-Christ: The true meaning of suffering?

The claim that Bad Catholic makes, that to see a child suffering is to see Christ suffering within her is thoroughly dehumanizing, because it relegates the suffering of the child to a secondary role. What is moving about the suffering of a child is not her own suffering but that of Christ. The meaning of suffering has, according to Bad Catholic, less to do with the pain of particular persons than the cosmic struggle of a heroic Jesus trying to lift the fallen world into paradise. I am not even sure if it is the crucified Christ we are supposed to see in this girl. Rather, I think we are supposed to see in the eyes of a child suffering the muscular Jesus of the Lord’s Gym lifting his heavy cross up to save the world. Her suffering is meaningful precisely because of the meaning that Christ gives it.

No.

Not just ‘no’, but Hell no!

And if you want to write about a deficiency of meaning in the world then you have one right there. Never mind a world without God; how about one in which you cannot see the most compelling moments of human suffering because of the big giant Jesus standing in your way!

If the suffering of people right in front of you requires a theory making it about something else altogether, or rather someone else, then your faith does not augment the meaning of suffering; it detracts from it. And the theory that was supposed to deepen our understanding of suffering has instead blunted its very force. It is not the suffering of the little girl that matters; it is not her loss of hope, or her agony, or her tears; it is that of someone else.

As I read this utter crap, I can’t help but to be struck by a quote the Bad Catholic keeps at the top of his webpage. It is attributed to G.K. Chesterton; “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” I can’t help but think this wonderful little quote might well have forestalled this miserable exercise in tortured logic and pathetic indifference to the actual condition of suffering in another living being.

Perhaps one ought to let his sense of other living things be less a theory and more of a love affair.

The meaning of human suffering is immediate. This is no less true of others than it is for ourselves. I for one do not need to see Jesus Christ or any other supernatural entity to give a damn about the suffering of another human being, or even that of an animal.

Do you?

Photo by Kevin Carter

Jesus and the Devil Get into a Fight, …He Wins!

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Religion

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Anthropomorphism, Christianity, Cruelty, Gay Marriage, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, Jesus, Politics, Satan, The Bible

If I have to be terrified of God, then I don’t see a difference between God and Satan…

– Sonya D. Fowler, Posted on Twitter, July 29th, 2012

South Park

It’s a funny thing, even unbelievers typically assume there is a difference between God and Satan. It seems so obvious. After all we don’t confuse our friend Mike with our friend Chuck, but such friends are there to remind us of the difference between them on a daily basis. Entities such as God and Satan operate under no such constraints. Their traits change from one faith to another, even from one believer to another, or (truth be told) sometimes from morning to noon out of the same mouth.

Satan has certainly made a few significant changes in the years, graduating from a mere servant of the Lord to a principle nemesis for the Lord. For his own part, God has taken on a range of different faces over the course of human history. He still keeps an awful lot of them handy, even within the same tradition. Indeed the Christian world keeps its pretension to monotheism only by ignoring a likely case of multiple personality disorder. He is at the least bipolar.

And of course a trace of projection runs through all of this, right down to the most specific details and sources. You can tell a lot about people from what they say about their gods. And that is precisely why the quote above gives me such pause. To hear some folks talk about God, they might as well be speaking of the Devil.

When I was younger, I used to hear this phrase a lot; “The devil made me do it!” This usually came after someone had just done something they shouldn’t have, something they knew was wrong. Seems like these days people are more likely to lay their sins off on Jesus. Whenever their actions cannot be defended in reasonable terms, it is because Jesus wants it that way.

I’m not just being facetious here, not JUST anyway.

All to often, Jesus is the reason someone must suffer some indignity at the hands of a believer. Every enemy of Christendom, every native forced to endure abuse at the hands of his more forceful missionaries has certainly borne the brunt of this gambit. Yet they are not alone in learning that the Prince of Peace has ugly designs on their health and happiness. Jesus, we are told, is the reason that gay couples cannot marry; he is also the reason those of homosexual orientation must endure any number of indignities from ‘Christian’ circles. Jesus is the reason for compromising women’s health care. He is often the reason you cannot find certain books at the librar. He is the inspiration for a good deal of pseudo-science (some of which is genuinely harmful), for a good deal of pseudo-history, and even for the occasional cold cereal mishap. Jesus may or may not be responsible for some novel forms of corporal punishment and parenting practices, but if sundry Christian organizations are to be believed, he certainly approves of some highly creative approaches to that practice. Time and again, Jesus is the reason someone supplies for actions that are manifestly dishonest or demonstrably harmful to other people.

It really is difficult to tell just how far the Lamb of God is willing to take his lust for violence and cruelty, but it seems that he likes to do the really nasty work himself. To hear some folks talk, he is the reason for one or two great disasters; 9-11, earthquakes and Tsunamis ravaging Thailand or Japan. I remember when Jesus demanded a ransom to spare the life of Oral Roberts, one of His most trusted servants. But of course, such divine temper tantrums are nothing new; just ask Lot’s wife.

Has it escaped anyone’s notice that the witnesses to Jesus’ greater crimes are the ones who so consistently inflict suffering in his name? Can it be a coincidence that the same people who speak approvingly of god’s greater acts of cruelty would be so quick to commit the mortal equivalent in his name?

Jesus is not just a source of terrible headlines; he is also the source of myriad petty cruelties which will never make it far into the public discussion. I expect most of us have learned in one form or another that Jesus has taken sides in some personal dispute with friends, family, or coworkers. Lord knows, he is certainly the reason given for most of the dick moves made by the moderators on sundry Christian message boards. Indeed, Jesus seems to be implicated in all manner of grievances great and small.

One wants to say to some of these people; “dude, your Jesus is a dick!”

But of course, the real point is that Jesus could never have been anything else but a dick to some of these people; he begins and ends in their least admirable qualities. And if there is anything more to the story of Jesus than a sort of malice to be inflicted upon others, you would never know this from the words and deeds of so many who claim to be doing his will.

There comes a time in all of this, when Jesus can no longer be distinguished from Satan. For some people, He is in effect little other than a name they give to their own vices.