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

In Cheeto We Trust

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by danielwalldammit in Irritation Meditation, Politics, Uncategorized

≈ 17 Comments

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!

Fundamentalism by Proxy and the Guilting of the Godly

09 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by danielwalldammit in Religion

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Apologetics, atheism, Christianity, Doctrine, Faith, Fundamentalism, Islam, religion, Unbelief

A general suspicion of religion comes to mind easily enough. Hell, even religious people frequently exhibit this suspicion (tempered as it is with whatever thoughts they’ve assembled into their own beliefs). There is something about the whole range of religious beliefs as such that invites a degree of doubt, even contempt. It would be easy to believe religion could be refuted.

Easy.

Just like nailing jelly to a wall.

What makes this seemingly easy task so frustrating is the sense that any generalization one might make about religion will most certainly have its counterexamples, and most of these exceptions are anything but marginal. Even belief in God or gods which seems such a no-brainer falls apart when we consider various branches of Buddhism. Belief in the supernatural is rather complicated by those who think of spirits as part of the natural world. Some of us may regard the notion of spirits in a mountain top as falling outside the natural world, but it doesn’t really work to maintain that belief in a supernatural world is a defining feature of religion if that belief itself isn’t all that universal. The particulars just don’t rescue the narrative. …and so-on with any other effort to sweep the lot of religious beliefs into the same been-there-refuted-that bin. What is religion? Hard to say. Harder still if you’re answering that question in the midst of a polemic moment.

Luckily, this problem is easily solved by focusing on one set of religious traditions instead of trying to drop a truth bomb on the lot of them. Can’t nail down every faith out there with one stroke of the hammer? No problem. Just pick one. Specificity will save us all!

…except that it won’t.

Let’s say you think the God of Abraham is a right cruel bastard, and so that’s your main objection to the whole of Christianity (along with Islam and Judaism). You can even throw in a few scriptures to back this up (cause that seems to be how the Biblical game is played), and we non-believers are often happy to play along, arguendo, so to speak. The godless corners of the net are filled with various references to God’s more dickish behavior, all documented nicely in the ‘Good Book’, and wielded well, these can form the basis for reasonably compelling arguments. We can even extend the critique into any number of horrible things Christians have done in the name of the great big bastard in the sky. We can work up a real parade or horribles and say ‘that’s it1’ That’s why the God of Abraham isn’t welcome in our lives and our thoughts. We can do this. Hell, I have done it. I”ve made this argument quite a few times since going godless many decades ago. And I will say, that I think this approach can be used to skewer a particular brand of believer, one I’m pretty sure I’ve met in person more than a few times.

But what about those Christians who seem to find in the Bible a story of hope, love, and kindness? No, I don’t mean the footnote kind of godly affection that accompanies homophobic politics, paternalistic family norms, or just plain idiotic theodicies. I mean the kind of compassion that actually does put some believers in the streets fighting for the rights of others and defending the dignity of all manner of people. Those Christians do exist and they have their scriptures too, their theories, their angle on God, the universe, and even that annoying wasp nest under the front porch.

What are we to make of these Christians?

The Christian left was once a powerful force in American life, and we could do worse than to see it rise again. Don’t get me wrong; at his best Jesus is an ambiguous story for me, and not one containing a lot of factual weight, but if i was to pick a fight it wouldn’t be with the peace-love-dove set of Christians. When it comes to the things that matter most to me, I am as likely as not going to count them as allies. Damned good ones at that!

For the present, though, the question is what to make of the Christians who don’t fit the yer-a-jerk-and-so-is-yourGod narrative? How do we sort their significance in relation to the buggers who actually make life hard for those ‘sinner’s they claim to love after all. If the notion that God and his fan club are all a bunch of jerks is your go-to argument when explaining active resistance to religion, then these guys are actually kind of a problem.

…which is ironic to say the least.

A believer may have an out for this problem. She can tell us one version of Christianity (presumably her own) is genuine and the other is just bullshit. How we may ask? And scripture, she may answer, which theoretically means the whole issue stands or falls on those passages Christians are find if quoting at each other and the rest of us. A believer can insist that the right answer is contained in those scriptures (or something else in her faith), and that the rest is simply noise. Whether she is right or not about the nature of that correct view is another question, but so long as someone affirms a particular faith, this approach isn’t glaringly inconsistent. But as a man who denies the authority of scripture (among other religious authorities) I’m not really in a position to do that. Sure, I can formulate ideas as to whether or not any given interpretation of scripture is plausible given the text and its historical significance, but I can find no authority with which to say anyone oughtta give a damn about that assessment.

More than that, I see no reason to believe there is any consistency to scripture with which to settle questions about what is and what isn’t a truly Christian take on the subject. Really, I think it far more likely, that the whole mess of scripture really is just that full of contradiction because what the hell else would you expect if a giant text cobbled together from a vast range of different authors writing at different times and places?

…which reminds me of one of those teachable moments a high school student once handed me. (In this case, I was the teachee.) I can’t remember how the subject came up, but I asked an orthodox Jewish kid something about how he viewed some particular theme in the Bible. He responded by telling me that there is no ‘the Bible’. To him, that phrase denoted an odd collection of texts, some of which might bear some relation to those his own people valued and some clearly didn’t, but the notion that the whole collection could be meaningfully referenced as though it were a single book seemed rather foreign to him.

It should have been foreign to me too.

We unbelievers give up far too much ground by speaking about ‘the Bible’ in this way.

This is of course a very incomplete account of the variation, even within Christianity. The whole mess gets meta-messy when we start adding differences of opinion as to whether or not scripture is the sole source of authority on what is right and what isn’t. What do we make of those who recognize the authority of the Pope? …of the Mormon Prophets? …or even the notion that one must be filled with the Holy Spirit to interpret scripture properly? All of these can turn the tables on any attempt to arrive at a fixed notion of just what it is we are rejecting when we say ‘no’ no God.

In any event, I see no reason to believe we can find a consistent message in the myriad scriptures folks are prone to cite in the effort to decide what a Christian ought to believe. For me, there is no ought to the matter. There is only what different believers do in fact believe and the mix of reasons and choices that go into their professions of belief. (Hell, I’m not even sure how much to make of beliefs, to be honest. What counts as doctrine on Wednesday is easily forgotten on Thursday. …on Friday it r-emerges as the subject of debate.) Anyway, I don’t see any hope of resolving questions about which is the true nature of Christianity.

…or of Islam.

…or Buddhism.

…or even pastafarianism for that matter.

I’m not saying the critique of Christian cruelty is a straw man. I am saying its relevance to any given believer depends on assumptions any given Christian may or may not hold.

This is often frustrating for an unbeliever. We have the goods on Tom and Jack, so to speak, so it just seems unfair to let Alice and Eric slide on account of a few disclaimers. But of course mere disclaimers aren’t the issue. It’s the very real possibility that someone’s faith may genuinely differ from that for which we have a ready critique. Of course we can ask any number of questions to see if someone really does envision Christianity in positive terms (as opposed to those who merely parrot the rhetoric of love and compassion all the while wielding the Prince of Peace like a well-balanced weapon, but at the end of the day? Some folks escape the criticism. Some folks really do seem to see in Christ a message that genuinely inspires love and compassion.

So what’s a godless bastard to do?

Unfortunately, I think the temptation exists to force the issue, to pretend we have some way of sorting the real thing from the imitation believer after all. It should come as no surprise that this rhetorical strategy usually means declaring the least defensible version of Christianity that we can imagine to be the real thing. All other variations, and in particular the more palatable variations on belief are then the product of personal whim. The kind Christian, so this narrative goes, is the one who really hasn’t read her Bible. She is the one who hasn’t really thought her doctrines through to their logical conclusions. I expect this kind of narrative from conservative Christians, but it’s a little more odd to hear it coming from the godless. It’s odd, yes, but it’s not rare. Unbelievers often take the view that Christians liberal in theology and politics aren’t the real ones. Thus, we turn virtues into vices and snub allies away into likely resentment. (Who could blame them?) At worst, the effort to delegitimize moderate or liberal believers may well nudge one or three of them the other direction. It’s a kind of proxy-fundamentalism, a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of people whose views don’t fit the vision of Christianity we mean to attack.

A variation of this approach can be seen in the oft-repeated refrain that the only real Muslims are the militants. Those Muslims (indeed, the vast majority) who seem to get along with the rest of us haven’t got their own faith right, so the argument goes. And thus peaceful Muslims and violent extremists all falter beneath the weight of the same criticism. We can treat every Muslim as a would-be terrorist, so it seems, because those who haven’t come around to it simply aren’t doing their religion right.

Once again this approach assumes an objective limit on the range of legitimate variation within the faith in question. And once again, no such objective limit exists. You can haul out whatever quotes you want in support of it, but once again, the significance of those quotes rests on a number of assumptions, assumptions that just aren’t uniform throughout the Muslim world. So, why advocate for the bastards when we could support decent folks who just want to get through the day.

There is simply no way around it. If ever there was a term for which ‘family resemblance’ provided a more suitable account of its meaning I don’t know what that is (maybe ‘culture’). Religion as a whole can take many different forms, as can just about every individual religion. We can respond to each individual variant as we like, but there is no use shoring up the authority of those who serve as the main targets of our criticism. We certainly shouldn’t be helping the greatest assholes in God’s many fan clubs to marginalize decent people. The plasticity of religion is itself a potential objection in itself, at least to those who think it a bastion of objective morality, but that too is just another subset of believers out there. My point is simply that the variation is there, and that those of us who say ‘no’ shouldn’t be too quick to add our own voices to those seeking to impose orthodoxy on the faithful.

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.

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.

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.

Argumentation and its Narrative Payoff

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Argumentation, Comedy, Language, Logic, Myth, Politics, religion, Rhetoric, Speech Genres

ARnold Conan It’s been a long time since I read Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, but I was recently thinking the internet has surely added a lot of good material for some of its central themes. The the notion of argumentation as warfare comes to mind. In that book, they advanced the notion that a lot of the metaphors people use for argumentation are those associated with warfare and violence in general. This is certainly born out by a number of things you can see on the net.

To see what people say about argumentation on the internet, it would seem that the world of debate is tremendously violent. Everywhere one looks, one finds destruction in the wake of a rhetorical flourish. Case in point? “Pres Obama Brilliantly Destroys a Loaded FOXNews Question” in this clip. Go Bama! But wait a minute? Is that an accomplishment? How do you destroy a question anyway? Loaded or unloaded, do you bash them? Crush them? Hit them with a mega-devestating incinerator photon torpedawhomper Bomb? Not to worry, cause our man Obama gets some here. He totally destroys Trump in this speech. In this video a “60 Minutes Host Destroys Barack Obama On Syria.” “Dawkins destroys Muslim Morality” in this video. But don’t look now! “Rupert Sheldrake Destroys Dawkins Dillusion in Banned TED-x Talk.” …er (sic). Apparently the author of this book is content to merely “refute” him. (Merciful soul!) Bill Nye destroyed Ken Ham. Ken Ham took the Science guy down with him. …totally destroyed. Sam Harris kicks ass here. Ben Carson “demolishes liberalism entirely in this clip from The View. Hillary Clinton destroys things too! Oh no, Rand Paul destroyed her! He destroyed Donald Trump too! But wait a minute! Donald Trump destroyed Paul. Mutual destruction, just what I like to see in the GOP.

But wait!

Hold the phone.

In this video Cenk Uygur “destroys, degrades, demolishes, desecrates Antonin Scalia.”

Destruction, degradation, demolition, AND desecration? That’s it. Uyguyr wins the prize. he can just drop the mic now. He totally wins the violence as war meme for the day. Apparently the man is a veritable engine of rhetorical terror. Behold his verbal prowess and tremble!

***

Okay, so I know how to belabor a point, right? Well, I’m just getting started really, so please bear with me. The point here is NOT that argumentation is really a form of warfare, but rather that many of the ideas we attach to argumentation are derived from the world of violence. The metaphors we use when talking about argumentation are, as Lakoff and Johnson pointed out, borrowed from the world of war. We could use other metaphors, and sometimes we do, but when we approach this subject for some reason or another violence just keeps pushing its way to the front of our tropic tool-kit. And really, what else would we expect Violence to do? He’s a pushy bastard. That’s why we call him Violence.

What has me thinking about this today isn’t really the metaphors, per se; it’s the stories used in this case to convey them. Each of the links above provides a little mini narrative describing some argument as though it were a decisive victory in battle. Reading the links in question, we can practically hear the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan echoing in the background.

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Is this what every arguing argutizer really has in mind all along, an effort to achieve a victory so complete he can hear the lamentations of the women mourning his poor vanquished victim?

Perhaps.

But of course we want other things too. We want to show that we are smart. We want others to see our point, perhaps even to accept some truth that we regard as important. Sometimes we may want to learn ourselves, perhaps fleshing out our ideas in the effort to present them to others. We might even hope to learn more from another party by pushing them a little, getting them out of their comfort zone in the hopes that what they then tell us will be a little more worth listening to than what they say when the world feels like a warm moist hug.

Sometimes an argument leaves us with a narrative about conquest and destruction. That’s fair to say. But sometimes it leaves us with narratives about personal transformation, mural respect, learning, realization, …and, oh the fluffy! It burns!!! I’m really uncomfortable pleading the merits of such wholesome and earnest values, but honestly, they too play a large role in the construction of argumentation. Often these values are the more serious reasons for engaging in argumentation. Officially they are the reason we produce arguments in the classroom, for example, though someone might be excused for thinking the real reasons may at times be closer to those of argumentation as warfare. (I’m reminded of references to the ‘silverbacks’ in scholarly halls, people who contribute great thoughts to be sure, but also folks who are prone to pounding their chests and roaring at others whenever they feel the need.) One often feels a certain tension between these motivations, at least I do.

Increasingly I am inclined to think of the tension between different rhetorical styles in terms of the narratives folks hope to tell about the arguments in question. Whether successful or not, at some point an argument passes into discursive history. It then rests in the background of subsequent discourse, taking on the form of the texts, ideas, quotes, and general resources others may use to communicate. They may recount an argument (or perhaps resurrect it in dead horse form just for the purpose of kicketation). As often as not, arguments make their appearance in later discourse in the form of stories like those referenced above. We talk about how Chomsky blew Skinner away on the nature of language (or perhaps he didn’t). We speak of the conflict (‘shedding more heat than light’ as one of my professors put it) between Masrahl Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. Sometimes we simply say that one theory replaced another or that a given approach has become the standard in the field. Whatever else happens in such commentary, it transforms the point of an argument into a moment in a narrative. In many cases, I’ll warrant, this is hoped-for pay-off in producing an argument, that it will pass into the positive themes of a story. Maybe that story will be about how Bob kicked Joey’s ass on a random topic, or maybe it will be a story about how this or that idea came to be the dominant approach to a given subject.

Dominant? I’m back in the language of violence again. er, …perhaps the received wisdom in a given field? Anyway…

My point is that much of what people do in the course of pursuing an argument can be thought of as an effort, not simply to prove the truth of a claim as logicians might tell us, but to lay the groundwork for any number of stories one would hope to see told at some later time. Why do I think this is important? Not so much because it helps us understand the production of any particular argument, and certainly not because it helps us grasp the nature of academic argumentation (or any argumentation conforming to the normative ideals of my logic texts). What strikes me as important about this is that it helps to understand conflict with argumentative styles falling outside those norms. It helps precisely because it denies the centrality of those norms and reminds us that the effort to provide an objective case for the truth of a claim is just one of the many reasons someone might field an argument. He could also do so because he wants to hear the lamentations of your women.

I’m still belaboring the point, aren’t I? Thus far, it feels like I am painting too much in broad strokes, but wait! Oh! There’s another good metaphor for argumentation. Painting!!! Wouldn’t rhetoric be that much more colorful and that much less painful if we could construe arguments in terms of visual media? To make it work though, it needs to be generative. We need to be able to spell out the details of argumentation in painterly terms. Perhaps we could a prepare the canvas in reference to issues of context or outline a theory. Hey! We do ‘outline’ theories. We also sketch out the details of a position, make too fine a point of some things, and even speak of prevarication as erasure. Argumentation as art works. …but apparently not as often as warfare.

Artsy asides notwithstanding, what has me up at this undogly hour is the prospect of looking at the transition from an argument to a narrative in more detail. What happens when a genre defined in terms of premises and conclusions passes into the form of a genre defined by characters, plots, and events? What happens when relevance and logical support is transformed into dramatic tension? Are there regular patterns? If so, can they help us understand some of the details happening on either end of that transition?

There is plenty of interesting material out there. Election year political debates are a great example of this. Candidates do not approach these debates as an academic might. They are not trying to prove a point so much as provide an audience with a reason to vote in a certain way. The candidate with the most compelling argument for a given policy may not be the one who impresses voters the most. A large part of what determines this will be the way the arguments play in subsequent speech. A candidate, for example, who handles the details of a legal issue thoroughly may find himself resonating far less effectively than one who fielded a better sound bite in the same debate.

Obvious example is obvious.

Less obvious material? Internet trolls could perhaps provide us with a fair number of examples, but I think pure trolling is just the tip of the ice-berg. That kid who was too busy laughing at your avatar pic to care that your argument was sound will probably be as proud to tell the story of the encounter as you are, perhaps more so. Likewise the old fart who, hey that’s me! (Nevermind that example, we’re moving on…) If I’m ever tempted to use the phrase ‘social justice warrior’ in contempt it’s when I meet someone who seems more intent on claiming moral high ground over certain issues than addressing any number of objective concerns. You could absolutely prove a point to such a person and the only story they will tell about you is that you proved yourself to be a bad person for doing it. But of course one also encounters plenty of people happy to sneer and smirk at the the discomfort of others, especially anyone stupid enough to give a damn about the underprivileged. To let such a person know that you care about any given issue is little other than to tell them how to hurt you. They too will tell a tale about any argument you have with them. Your own tears (real or imagined) will figure prominently in the stories they hope to tell about you.

Such games aren’t limited to the net, of course, but the anonymity of online discussion seems to bring it all out so much more. It’s part of a general pattern of behavior one sees in public disagreements, especially those involving people from very different walks of life. All too often both parties in an argument will come away thinking they have won. In each case, what they actually come away with is a story that relates their victory. It would be easy to think this is because people simply don’t see their own errors, to think that only one of the stories about a given argument would be authentic, but that’s not usually the case. As often as not, the difference occurs because each side had a different sense of the win-loss conditions to begin with.

Yes, the notion of ‘winning’ an argument is already a problem.

The problem isn’t always that other speaking styles compete with those we might think of as more sound argumentative practice. Sometimes the alternative approaches are genuinely interesting in themselves. For example, sometimes an argument is encased in a legendary narrative, which of course makes possible a kind of indirection or an argument by allusion. One may simply refer to the story as a means of suggesting an argument about real world matters. My favorite example of this remains the separation of men and women in Navajo lore, though I suppose one can also see it in conventions of scriptural quotation among Christians (where it almost always takes on the quality of an authority argument). In each of these cases, the significance of an argument appears to be filtered through the significance of a set narrative that defines and shapes its meaning in ways you couldn’t get from a direct analysis of the argument itself. That argument appears as a brief moment in a stream of storytelling, and for some at least its possible significance will always be tied to that very narrative.

When I used to post on Christian Forums, I recall a number of instances in which the arguments of atheists were described in terms of malevolent supernatural power. Realizing I was among the demons described in these narratives, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of anger and irritation. I also found it fascinating. These were people who measured arguments in terms of spiritual warfare. They measured such arguments in terms of powers not premises and faith instead of relevance. This is argumentation as war, to be sure, but in this case, it’s a war between demons and angels. Where I might havedescribed an argument on that forum in terms of proof and evidence, to the practitioners of spiritual warfare those same arguments became stories of a struggle with evil. In the abstract, that isn’t really too surprising, but I must say that it was odd to see just how that general theme played out in the details.

The Storify app would seem to be relevant to my thoughts at the moment? …Still not gonna use it!

Comedy strikes me as a particularly perplexing example of this problem. Stand-up comics produce arguments all the time, but of course their primary job is still to make people laugh. Often we laugh because the argument seems to make a good point in a clever and interesting way. At other times we may laugh because the argument is clearly absurd or irrelevant. The shear audacity of an obvious fallacy can be damned humorous if one isn’t expected to take it seriously. In such performances, our priorities shift and we may approve arguments which might otherwise seem foolish or genuinely asinine.

My tendency in such cases has always been to assume the comic doesn’t really mean it, but as I get older (and as some of my favorite comics do the same) I find at times these jokes are meant more seriously than I might have hoped. Victoria Jackson would be one particularly morbid example of this problem. What might have been a funny act, at least to some, appears less an less to be an act at all. Honestly, I think the same of Ted Nugent. I know he’s not a comic, but in his old television appearances I can’t help thinking his tone was tongue in cheek, that he at least realized he was taking some liberties with reason. I don’t see that when he speaks anymore. I see the same reckless leaps of lack-logic in Nugent’s speech, but he no longer seems to be in on his own joke. Its as if his reasoning has become so committed to the service of a personal narrative that it couldn’t matter anymore when he is wrong, not even enough for a wink.

How did I get onto Nugent?

Nevermind that!

My point is that in comedy argumentation and jokes are bound up together in interesting ways. Which takes priority over which just isn’t always that clear. Sometimes the strength of an argument carries the joke itself, and sometimes it’s the lack of that strength that makes us laugh. So, which is it in any given case? That’s not easy to tell. The guy laughing beside you may be thinking ‘that is so true’ even as you are busting a gut because it’s completely ridiculous. In either event, we are less likely to evaluate the work of a comedian in terms of the cogency of his reasoning or the truth of his assumptions than the cleverness of his words, his timing, projection, etc. With some clear exceptions, we can see this in the stories people tell about the work of comics.

On the other hand, the work of a good comic does bring us back to the argument as war metaphor. If an act is done right, we might well say of the comic that he killed it! I wonder if stand-up comics ever want to crush their audiences, to see those who came to a show driven before them, and to hear the lamentations of their women?

I’ve probably overdone that line, haven’t I?

Yes, I have.

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

Tag Archives: religion

Kavanaugh, Young and Old

In Cheeto We Trust

Fundamentalism by Proxy and the Guilting of the Godly

On Chick Tracts

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

The Proof of Burdens

When Arguendo Argues Itself Into a Somehow

Argumentation and its Narrative Payoff

Decalogic Schmecalogic!

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

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: