Suppose there were nothing. Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Thus nothing is self-forbidding.
Therefore, there must be something. QED
—Jim Holt
Why Does the World Exist?
On Christmas eve, Politico published a terrible bit of journalism, Oh Come All Ye Faithful? Its contents are summed up in its subtitle, “Obama rarely seen in church, but advisers say his beliefs remain strong.” A lot of people seem to be hung up on the article because there is an implicit criticism. But I think it is offensive on a whole different and more general level. But it is something of a criticism.
In particular, the article provides a bit of quantification of the religiosity of president. For example, it noted, “In all, Obama has gone to services on about 6 percent of the Sundays of his presidency and just once on Christmas Day, in 2011, which also happened to be a Sunday. George W Bush, by contrast, went to church on close to 30 percent of Sundays during his eight years in office.” One could — in fact, should — counter this by noting that there was nothing especially Christian about Bush. He was a big Tim Tebow (Matthew 6:5) kind of guy in the way he constantly broke with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:
But this is the definitional American religious disease. It is one of the reasons I have so low an opinion of religion faith in this country. It seems so much about posing. Christians are fond of talking about their “personal” relationship with Christ, but it always strikes me that this personal relationship is awfully public. And nothing is more public than politicians who constantly talk about their faith. I am convinced that such acts not only speak to the hollowness of their faith in God but also in their faith of the belief of those listening.
A great comparison has always been between Carter and Reagan. Carter is a man who takes his religion very seriously. As a result, he did not talk about it very much. Reagan was a prototypical cultural Christian: for him, religion was a cultural signifier and little else. But he — and not Carter — was the man who made ostentatious religious displays critically important in American politics. It shows the shallowness of American Christianity that the vast majority of Christians think this is a good thing.
But that gets to the heart of what is so offensive about the Politico article. What it is really concerned with is pacifying the nation. “Don’t worry America!” it says. “Obama is a true believer who uses the Iron Age writing of our holy book in solving our Space Age problems!” It greatly disturbs me that Obama can only be trusted to make the right decisions if he’s getting those daily devotionals on his BlackBerry. And for reassurance, Politico asks people like Joel Hunter, “a Florida megachurch pastor.” He is one of “Obama’s two closest religious advisers.” I don’t think that any association with a megachurch would qualify one as a great theological thinker. His other “adviser” is a Pentecostal minister. For those who don’t know, Pentecostals are very much part of the “born again” movement. Think: Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
You don’t need intelligence. You don’t need skills. You don’t need empathy. All you need is a good, very public, relationship with an Iron Age myth. That’s what makes a great president. Just ask Politico.
The Jains preach a doctrine of utter nonviolence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition. You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the “true” spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently — though isn’t it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed? Of course, many Christians believe that a harmless person like Martin Luther King Jr, is the best exemplar of their religion. But this presents a serious problem, because the doctrine of Jainism is an objectively better guide for becoming like Martin Luther King Jr, than the doctine of Christianity is. While King undoubtedly considered himself a devout Christian, he acquired his commitment to nonviolence primarily from the writings of Mohandas K Gandhi. In 1959, he even traveled to India to learn the principles of nonviolent social protests directly from Gandhi’s disciples. Where did Gandhi, a Hindu, get his doctrine of nonviolence? He got it from the Jains.
—Sam Harris
Letter to a Christian Nation
I have this tendency to be most critical of the groups that I’m part of. You see this a lot in terms of my thinking about the Democratic Party. But I dare say you see it most of all with my thinking about atheists. And there is a lot to dislike about the modern atheist movement. I am an atheist in the Arthur Schopenhauer tradition. Much of modern atheism is intellectually vacuous. But as popular movements go, it is still pretty good. There isn’t likely to be a mass movement that I have any less criticism of.
Probably the best aspect of modern atheism is that there is a strong current of humanism in it. I think it is the case that people like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are admired despite being torture proponents, not because of it. What’s more, I don’t so much see myself as part of the atheist community in the sense that I read atheist blogs and go to atheist conventions. I see myself as a member of the growing numbers of people who just aren’t religious. And by and large, this is a mighty fine group.
As regular readers know, I found the recent release of the torture report as upsetting as it was unsurprising. So I was somewhat pleased to read Steve Benen’s The Week in God today. It’s focus was on a new Washington Post/ABC News poll on attitudes about torture. It confirms the results of a 2009 poll by Pew. As you’ve probably heard, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of torture. Of those polled, 59% were just peachy with what the CIA did; only 31% had a problem with it. Obviously, that was not what pleased me.
This poll subdivided people by their religious affiliations. So Benen put together the following graph that sums up the main categories:
Benen pointed out that people with “no religion” were pretty much the only group in the report that were against torture. I wish the numbers were better than they are, but they are far better than average. And the major Christian groups are all worse than average. It’s disgusting, but again, unsurprising. It goes along with my primary complaint against modern American Christians: their religion is all culture and no theology. The one thing they absolutely believe is that people like them are “good” and people not like them (eg, Muslims) are “bad.” Thus they don’t really care. After all, it’s not like anyone is suggesting burning the evildoers alive. (Not that they would be against that either.)
As much as I’m pleased that we non-believers demonstrate more humanity than average, this information is profoundly disturbing. We are, after all, an almost 80% Christian country. And the only takeaway from that is that Christianity is “right” and that Christians are oppressed whenever someone says “Happy holidays!” to them. We live in a sad world.
I wasn’t going to say anything. I was invited to go to a Christmas play. It was at a church, but it was no big deal. It was a fundraiser, but I wasn’t paying. I figured it would be a bunch of kids in sheets like, A Charlie Brown Christmas. Instead, it was a fairly professional affair. The choir was quite good — as were a number of the featured singers. Some of the acting wasn’t bad, and one of its attempts at comedy worked pretty well. The orchestra was good at times, but the flutes, and even more, the trumpets were out of tune — especially in the first act. But overall, not a bad production at all.
But in the middle of the second act, the senior pastor of the church came up on the stage to talk about Jesus. For a good five minutes, I could pretend that it was all part of the show. But he continued on and on — for a total of twenty minutes, it seemed to me. It became nothing but proselytizing — for Jesus, but more to the point, for his own little fiefdom, the church I was sitting in. And I can see why! The church consists of at least three sizable buildings. This production was presented in the main church that holds roughly a thousand people. And it is packed with equipment — hundreds of thousands of dollars of audio equipment, as far as I could tell.
When the show was over, he stopped everyone from leaving to spend another five minutes pimping for his church. This man had destroyed any goodwill that I had acquired toward the Christian faith. In general, I push back against people who claim that religion is all about money. I truly don’t think that’s true. But in this case, the good pastor was not a fisherman of souls; he was a fisherman of cash — indirect though it may be. It was disgusting.
At one point during his main performance, he had all of us in the audience pray and ask God to come into our sinful hearts. And he said something about how if you ask Jesus to make his presence know, he will. Okay: typical evangelical nonsense. But it occurred to me at that point that it is pretty easy to stand up there on stage and talk about all the blessings of God when you are doing pretty well in a material sense. I thought of Satan in the Book of Job. Let’s take everything away from Pastor Cundall and see if his faith is as strong as Job’s. My guess: no.
It was also at this point that I really began to think about something I had noticed earlier, but put in the back of my mind. In all the cast and audience, the only non-white person I saw was a single Asian. I didn’t see any Latinos and I didn’t see any African Americans. This is a lily-white church in the middle of a country that does everything it can to bless lily-white people. And I was reminded how one of the big themes in the first act was bowing down to God — and by extension authority. And the scene right before the pastor’s talk involved shepherds being very slippery with the concepts of king and God.
For the first time in my life, I really saw a church as primarily a system of control. Its primary function is to perpetuate and empower itself. But secondarily, its function is to quiet dissent in the larger world. The church depends upon the existing secular power structure for its existence. This is quite a different way for me to think about the Abrahamic religions. Generally, I focus on their lack of theological depth — at least the way that most of them practice it. And there was lots of that on display, including the truly offensive idea that all you have to do is “believe” in Jesus and you are saved — like Christians are children watching Peter Pan trying to make Tinker Bell come back to life.
But I’m beyond that now. I can understand the need of many people to infantilize themselves in the face of death and the cosmic unknowable. But these are just the parishioners. The institutional nature of churches is evil. Garry Wills is right that the Catholic Church should get rid of priests. The Quakers have been right all these centuries. The church I found myself in tonight is more like a corporation than anything early Christians would have understood as a church.
I’ve always really liked Bill Maher. He’s a great comedian. In recent years, he’s become much more of a political cause célèbre on the left and in atheist circles. But I’ve always liked seeing him at his concerts where people start cheering and he would settle them down and say, “It’s not a rally.” Indeed, it isn’t. And Bill Maher, while certainly bright and reasonably well informed, is no political analyst. He tends toward libertarianism of the “glibertarian” variety. But by far, he is most clueless when it comes to religion. But maybe I’m being too harsh, because pretty much all of the prominent atheists are pretty clueless. As an atheist, I find them offensive when I don’t find them simply silly. I really wish they would take the name “antitheists” and leave the rest of us alone.
Maher wrote an article last week, Pope Frank: Papal Pleaser. I hate to find myself in the position of defending the Catholic Church, but it seems to be one of the burdens in my life. They believe in a bunch of hokus pokus. But they also do a lot of good scholarship and I appreciate their theology — or at least I appreciate that they have a theology that they take seriously. A good critique of Catholicism (and Christianity more generally) can be found in Garry Wills’ writing, like Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition But people like Maher know little of what they complain about.
Maher can’t even get past the first sentence without annoying me:
Not really. Many Americans seem to think that the papacy started with John Paul II. All right, that’s an overstatement. But I was amazed for decades that most Americans considered John Paul II a good and even liberal pope. He was anything but. I think it’s his face. He seemed like a friendly guy, but he was as regressive as Pope Benedict XVI who followed him. Pope Francis is exactly in the tradition of Pope John XXIII. So he is very much my father’s Holy Father. (Although my father is a Catholic in the same way that Graham Greene was.)
This is all very Franciscan of him. And what is important is Francis is showing some humility. Too often, Christians confront tragedy with, “God works in mysterious ways!” They don’t try to second guess God when he sees fit to kill 300,000 people with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But when it comes to whether gays or heretics go to hell, such Christians know. The funny thing is, I suspect that John Paul and Benedict would have said the same thing had it come up. But they weren’t the kind to push it. Francis is the kind to push it and that’s a good thing.
Affirmation of the big bang and evolution is nothing new. The Catholic Church does not have a literalist view of the Bible. (In general, they don’t much encourage the congregation to read it because — and they are right about this — it is a difficult book.) So as early as 1950, the Catholic Church accepted evolution. And in general, they have followed along with the scientific consensus. Again, I feel odd being in this position, but compare this to most American protestants who are science-hating fideists. Regardless, Maher is making a big deal out of ways that Pope Francis is supposedly going out of his way to appear liberal, but that just isn’t the case.
I appreciate the joke, and so would Pope Francis. But much more than Francis, Pope John XXIII was especially known for his sense of humor. I’m actually rather fond of this one: “In reply to a reporter who asked, ‘How many people work in the Vatican?,’ he reportedly said: ‘About half of them.'” It’s even funnier in Latin.
The problem is not in the pope, it is in Bill Maher — and many other American liberals, I dare say. And this is delusional. Maher thinks the pope is crazy for some of the things that he does and believes? I think Maher is crazy to think that the Roman Catholic Church would put someone in charge of itself who would dismantle the church as Maher would clearly prefer.
Pope Francis is not a liberal in the sense that I’m a liberal — at least on religious issues. But he is a liberal in the sense that he is liberalizing the church. (Also and critically: he is a liberal on economic issues, but that is a matter for another time.) But this liberalism has mostly to do with fighting corruption in the Catholic Church; holding people accountable for the cover up of child rape; perhaps even reform on divorce. But we won’t see it change on birth control, much less abortion. We won’t see it change on the acceptability of homosexual relations. We won’t see female priests or even married priests. This is the Catholic Church — it moves slower than glaciers in a non-global warming world.
So finally we get to what Bill Maher is upset about. The pope didn’t make a bold stand against exorcisms. Boo hoo! With all the problems in the Catholic Church and all the challenges that face Francis, I find it hard to believe that Maher really thinks a fight on exorcisms is a good use of his time and resources. I get it: exorcisms are ridiculous. The problem is that Jesus did them throughout the Synoptic Gospels. So to get rid of them would be to get rid of the priesthood. And as with Garry Wills, I’m all for that! But it is totally unreasonable to expect such a thing from the head of the Catholic Church.
Actually, Maher isn’t completely right here. Rituals (secular and nonsecular) can help people. I would recommend that Maher spend some time reading the extensive literature of the positive effects of placebos. In this statement, we get what I consider typical New Atheist hubris: ignorance posing as authority based upon science he doesn’t fully understand. As for the other comment, I suspect he’s right: Francis is staying on script because this is not a fight that is worth starting. And that raises the ultimate question: why did Maher even write his blog post?
Maher ends with a good line that nonetheless makes me bristle:
My guess is that Pope Francis really is a believer, but not a stupid one. I’m sure he feels God’s love, even as I am pretty sure it’s just a harmless delusion. I kind of doubt that he believes in demons taking over people — or even the existence of demons. He’s a sophisticated man. But I find it hard to accept that it is all a charade.
The problem with the comment is the old atheist’s scoff at the difference between “religious” and “spiritual.” This is a problem I have a lot when discussing ontology with fellow nonbelievers: they pretend to be ignorant about things they can’t possibly be ignorant about. When people claim to be spiritual rather than religious, they mean that they have thoughts about the nature and cause of existence but they don’t follow any dogma. And that makes the “spiritual” people — silly as they often are — infinitely more benign than religious people.
Regardless, Pope Francis is a force for good in the world because he is moving the Catholic Church in a positive direction. The question is not whether Francis is doing everything that we would hope he would do. The question is whether we are better off with a Catholic Church led by Francis or Raymond Burke. Bill Maher’s article is just an excuse to complain about one of the many silly aspects of the Catholic Church. That’s fine, but he shouldn’t use it to slam Pope Francis, when even Maher understands (and I assume agrees with) what the pope is doing.
H/T: Infidel753 (I stole a small part of my comment there.)
I just watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 classic, The Gospel According to St Matthew. Leave it to a gay atheist Marxist to create the most reverential portrayal of Jesus that I have ever seen. What’s most remarkable is how true it is to the source material. And that is probably the key. Pasolini doesn’t bring his own belief to soil it. Even if one were to grant that the gospels are true, there is too much folklore that goes along with them. For example, the widely held belief that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, even though there is nothing in the Bible that says that. But I also think Pasolini’s choice to present a single gospel was the correct one, because it doesn’t offer up opportunities to pick and choose.
Because everyone knows the story, the film doesn’t need to worry much about transitions. As a result, it is very fluid. The down side of this is that there is relatively little dramatic momentum to the story until the third act. But that is true of the Gospel of Matthew, and indeed all the gospels. They are highly episodic. It isn’t hard to understand why people so easily accepted that Matthew and Luke were based upon some lost (“Q”) document of sayings of Jesus. That’s how they come off: a very thin plot to hang the sayings on. So it was necessary for the film to have this form.
Even still, The Gospel According to St Matthew is really compelling. Pasolini is not normally considered an Italian neorealist, but his early films do at least have that sensibility. And this one is very explicitly so. But given that it is still a historical drama, it misses out on some of the best aspects of the movement — most especially the natural street scenes. But the actors are amateurs and the camera work is easy, even careless at times. It might seem amateurish if it were not constantly interesting to look at. Also: Enrico Maria Salerno, who does Jesus’ voice, is an incredible actor.
Another aspect of the film is that it includes far more humanity than comes across while reading the gospels. I think this is to be expected, given Pasolini’s humanist instincts. The best example of this is the scene where Jesus repudiates his mother. I have always felt that it lays very flat on the page. If anything, Jesus comes off as a monster. But here it seems more like something that Jesus feels he must do as part of his ministry. And his mother, although hurt, understands. There are many other renderings such as Judas’ emotional reaction to Jesus’ death sentence.
One thing I really like is what a scold Jesus is. He spends half the movie quite angry. It’s rather nice for a change. As I said, most people’s conception of Jesus is based in large part on folklore. Maybe they’ve gotten the wrong idea from “prince of peace.” But in the gospels, Jesus is mostly pissed off. And in the film, he only manages to smile a couple of times — usually when observing children. His demeanor changes in the third act, just as it does in the gospel.
It’s sad that a film like this does not do it for the modern American Christian. But perhaps it is not surprising. It’s heavy on theology and light on blood. No wonder Americans would so love The Passion of the Christ. Is that really what they get from Christianity? Mel Gibson claimed that he was most impressed that Jesus could suffer so much. I really think that’s a psychopathic reading of the Bible. And that seems to be the American reading of the Bible too.
But not surprisingly, smelling money, the owners of The Gospel According to St Matthew put out a shortened colorized English dubbed version of the film. I have no problem with the dubbing. For one thing, it was dubbed originally in Italian, as was typical of Italian films of that era. And the English dubbing is very good as far as I could tell with a spot check. But 45 minutes were taken out of the film. No doubt little of consequence was taken out; Pasolini paced the film deliberately; but I think that’s an important part of its temperament. Of course, I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t watched it. But the worst thing — the totally unacceptable thing — is the colorization. The film looks good in black and white. The colorization takes away all the lighting subtlety and leaves just the most annoying pastels imaginable. Added to this, the black and white print is not presented in progressive scan — so it doesn’t fill widescreen monitors. It’s just shameful.
Nonetheless, the film is quite an experience. And it is a loving tribute to one of the world’s great religions, as could only be done by a non-believer. If you are into film, it is worth checking out. And if you are a Christian, I really think you ought to watch the film. It is the closest you are likely to get to a direct rendering of a gospel on the screen. And you might learn something too.
Steve Benen brought my attention to the fact that Rick Santorum is back with his own charming form of right wing populism. He’s pushing a standard conservative Christian line that “separation of church and state” is not in the US Constitution. And he offers up a twist, “But it was in the constitution of the former Soviet Union.” Get it?! People who don’t want their government mixed with a healthy dose of church are dirty, stinking commies!
This line of reasoning has things exactly backwards. In the 1950s, the United States went Christian crazy because the Soviet Union was our enemy. The Soviet Union was nominally atheistic, but that wasn’t why they were our enemy. Regardless, that’s how we got “under God” crammed into the Pledge of Allegiance. (Here’s an experiment to try: check out the rhythm of the pledge with and without “under God” and see if you don’t think the extra words make it more clumsy.) The communist government could have been just as awful with religion. In fact, it could have been worse. Just look at our “friend” Saudi Arabia.
Another aspect of this is the childish assumption that if we don’t like a particular country, we must hate everything about it. For example, it’s not enough to hate North Korea for its oppressive slave-labor approach to its people, we must hate its flag as well. (For the record, the North Korean flag is not great, but no worse than the flags of most countries.) The truth is that the Soviety Union had a great constitution — better than our own. But as we’ve seen throughout our own history, a constitution is only as good as the government that upholds it. Regardless, it was not the Soviet constitution that was the problem with that country.
Benen pointed out the obvious fact that the phrase “separation of church and state” was a convenient condensation of an idea in the Constitution. Leo Pfeffer put it well, “[I]t was inevitable that some convenient term should come into existence to verbalize a principle so widely held by the American people…” But people like Rick Santorum really are childish and silly. They want to point at the Constitution and yell, “See: that phrase is nowhere to be found!” The more rigorous of them will claim that the phrase came from a letter by Jefferson, which is true. But regardless, everything they know about the subject they learned from disgraced “historian” David Barton. These are not serious people.
The real problem with Santorum is that he thinks there are certain things that everybody agrees on. This is the assurance of a Christian who lives in a country that is nearly 80% Christian. I’m sure that Santorum would quickly change his mind if there was a Muslim awakening and the religion that would be allowed to mix so liberally with government was Islam. Benen asked what religion Santorum would use. After all, Santorum is a Catholic. But I’m sure that he would just want some kind of generic Christianity — not a specific denomination. And if that doesn’t show the total lack of a theological basis to American Christianity, I don’t know what does.
It reminds me of the attempt earlier this year to make the Bible the official state book of Louisiana. The legislators wanted it to be “any copy” at the same time they claimed it wasn’t a religious statement. There are dozens of English translations of the Bible. And that doesn’t even consider that there is no consensus as to what should constitute the Bible in its original languages. And the Orthodox Tewahedo Bible contains books that aren’t even in the traditional Bible. But efforts like this are designed to carve out a generic Christian identity.
When Rick Santorum and so many others like him try to push their religion on the rest of us, it really isn’t even about religion. They are just trying to oppress us with rules about how we ought to live our secular lives. It’s a great irony that he would bring up the Soviet constitution. He’s an authoritarian. Like Stalin before him, he wants to ignore our Constitution and its traditions to push his own limited view of what other people can think and do. But it isn’t surprising. Authoritarians have always hated other authoritarians who didn’t share their particular plan of oppression.
“Amazement that the universe should have come to contain a being with the unique property of being me is a very primitive feeling,” [Thomas] Nagel observes. Like him, I cannot help feeling somewhat astonished that I exist — that the universe has come to produce these very thoughts now bubbling up in my stream of consciousness.
Yet the astonishment I feel at my improbable existence has a curious counterpoint: the difficulty I have in imagining my sheer nonexistence. Why is it so hard to conceive of a world, without me, a world in which I never put in an appearance? I know, after all, that I am hardly a necessary feature of reality. Still, like Wittgenstein, I can’t think about the world without thinking of it as my world. Although I am part of reality, reality feels like a part of me. I am its hub, its epicenter, the sun that illumines it, the baby to its bathwater. To imagine that I never existed would be like imagining that the world never existed — that there was Nothing rather than Something.
The feeling that the “something-ness” of reality depends on my existence is, I know, a solipsistic illusion. Yet even when it is recognized as such, it retains a considerable grip. How can I loosen its grip? Perhaps by holding steadily before me the thought that the world got on quite happily for many eons prior to that unlikely moment when I was abruptly awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, and that it will get on quite happily after the inevitable moment to come when I return to that night.
—Jim Holt
Why Does the World Exist?
I came upon an interesting website, Select Smart. Basically, it has just about every kind of quiz you could imagine. For example, it has the Spiritual Belief System Selector. In twenty questions, it rates you on 27 philosophies and religions. I scored very high in secular humanism, unitary universalism, liberal Quaker, Taoism, and New Age. I scored zero on Eastern Orthodox, Orthodox Judaism, and Roman Catholic. But I managed to get 12% on Islam. I question how accurate it is, but it definitely nailed me on what I matched best.
The reason I found the site was that I was looking for a test for paleoconservatism. The site has a whole bunch of political tests and they all have the same 24 questions. In addition to this test, you can check nine others: paleo-libertarian, conservative, libertarian, neoconservative, centrist, Third Way, liberal, left-libertarian, and radical. On the three libertarian categories, I scored just as I expected: paleo, 33%; normal, 45%; and left, 54%. I got my highest scores on liberal and radical, where I got 79%. (There is a confusing question about a no-fly zone in Iraq that if eliminated would make me score higher on radical and lower on liberal.)
What’s interesting is not so much the results, but what the writers thought defined the different political ideologies. For example, only the left of the libertarians believed that abortion should be legal at the state level. That isn’t even Roe v Wade territory. And as a former libertarian, it pains me to say, but that’s correct. In general, libertarians — despite all their rhetoric about personal choice and freedom — are anti-choice. Similarly, only the left-libertarians think that the religious right is a threat to civil rights. I suspect that is because most libertarians in the United States are, in fact, conservative Christians.
The most striking thing on the test is the question, “If your state flag included design elements from the Confederate flag, would you prefer to remove those elements?” This is given a negative for paleoconservatism, paleo-libertarianism, and conservatism. I assume this goes along with quite a lot of research. For example, the neoconservative answer is true. In fact, I score higher on neoconservatism than I do on straight conservatism. Neoconservatives are nutty (and ignorant and stupid) when it comes to foreign policy, but they aren’t as crazy when it comes to ordinary domestic policy. I think what has gone on over the last fifty years or so is that the conservative movement has become far more neo-Confederate. It’s a very disturbing development.
What’s perhaps most interesting in the tests is how centrist and Third Way stack up. They aren’t as close as you would think. And the main way that they are different is that Third Way is much more socially liberal. The centrists are actually closest to the neoconservatives. That means that the Third Way folk are just what I’ve been complaining about for years: economically conservative and socially liberal. They are, in other words, the anti-populists. That’s what makes their claims to be speaking for middle-America so funny. Third Way is the most elitist political movement in the nation. And the best part of that elitism is their absolute conviction that they speak for “the middle.”
Anyway, if you aren’t doing anything, you might click over to Select Smart. You can find out your religion, political ideology, personality type — you name it. It’s all nonsense. But it’s fun!
In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould published an essay, “Non-Overlapping Magisteria.” In it, he posited the idea that there was no conflict between religion and science because they dealt with different things. For example, religion was concerned with questions of morals and existence — issues on which science had no opinion. One could question this on the moral front, where science actually has a lot to say about many of our morals. But the obvious counterargument is that religion isn’t really concerned with morality as we find it but rather morality as we ought to find it. On the issue of existence, science really does have nothing of value to add, although sadly most atheists can’t seem to understand that.
I’ve always seen Gould’s essay as more a plea to religions to stay on their own ground. One of my great frustrations in dealing with theists is their reliance on Iron Age myths for their science. So they think that Genesis is literally true. But claims like humans being created originally in their current form and the Grand Canyon being formed by the great flood are not religious claims; they are scientific claims. Not only do these fanciful stories soil science, they also make religious people stupid in a theological sense.
Recently, the atheist community has begun to attack the idea behind Non-Overlapping Magisteria. In fact, they are so outspoken about it, I had assumed that I had missed something — that there was some critical flaw with the idea. But then I came upon the following video by Hemant Mehta. In general, I like his work. But on this video, he shows his smug atheist colors. I take special offense to one line, “If you are a devoutly religious person, and one who accepts the scientific method, something’s gotta give.” Ugh!
I am greatly concerned about the way the atheist community fetishizes the scientific method. They seem to have learned about this in high school science class and decided it was The Truth™. I noticed this same thing in the first episode of the new Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson said that even though Giordano Bruno was right about stars just being other solar systems, he wasn’t a scientist. Why? Apparently because he never proved that it was true. He just had an intuition. This is an enormous error of thought. It mistakes the scientific process for what any given scientist does. What Bruno did was no different from what Einstein or Maxwell or Newton did.
What Mehta is getting at is that people who accept the “scientific method” only believe things that have been proved. This is patently false. What it means in practice is that atheists believe in the current state of science. Hooray for that! But most issues are not this clear. When it comes to the murky waters of economics or child rearing, do atheists really use the “scientific method” or do they just go with their gut? We all know the answer to that regardless of what some iconoclastic atheist might say.
There is one issue on which science has no opinion: ontology. And here I’m not just talking about the fact that science has no answers. Science is not designed to answer questions that exist outside the realm of existence itself. But I’ll admit: maybe some day science will have answers. But given the fundamental paradox of existence, it seems unlikely. But until then, science has no answer. And to expect people to simply have no opinion on such a fundamental question until science does have an answer is just silly.
I think that the Non-Overlapping Magisteria concept is just what we need today. I’ve already mentioned how religions soil science by applying their Iron Age myths to scientific questions. But atheists have a strong tendency to soil religion by applying scientific answers to theological questions. The ultimate example of this is Lawrence Krauss’ facile ontological answer, “Nothing is unstable.” It’s a perfectly fine scientific answer to why universes form. Similarly, the big bang is a perfectly fine scientific answer. And if we ever manage to show that our universe is part of a multiverse, that too will be perfectly fine scientific answer. But people who are interested in the ultimate question of why anything exists at all will not be satisfied with these answers.
From my perspective, there is one and only one question that is beyond the conceivable reach of science. But it is the biggest question there is. And atheists do themselves no good by pretending (1) that the question doesn’t matter and (2) that eventually science will answer it. And the idea that science has answered it is just fatuous. Atheists need the idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria. Stephen Jay Gould was a lot smarter than the leaders of the New Atheist movement.
See also: Non-Overlapping Magisteria Helps Theists and Atheists
The marketplace Greek of the New Testament — koine (“common denominator”) Greek — is not elegant. When Alexander the Great conquered his huge patchwork quilt of different peoples speaking different languages, the only way the defeated could communicate with Macedonian officers, and with other parts of the empire, was in fumbling attempts at the rulers’ Greek. When the Romans succeeded the Greek imperial forces, they had to use the language in place, not their own Latin. As Cicero said of the Roman empire, “Greek is read in practically every nation, while Latin is hedged within its own narrow confines.”
In koine, as in any pidgin language, niceties tend to be lost. Words are strug together, often without connectives to get across a basic meaning. Most of the gospels are written in this basic language, used equally by Romans like Pilate and by Aramaic speakers like Jesus and his followers. Sentences sometimes fumble clumsily at meaning. “What to me and to you, woman?” says Jesus to this mother (John 2.4). “Nothing to you and to that just man,” says Pilate’s wife (Matthew 27.19). “The law and prophets up to John” (Luke 16.16). “I must be at my father’s” (Luke 2.49) — his father’s what? Commentators quarrel. Definite articles, used according to subtle rules in classical Greek, come and go confusingly in koine: the Lord’s Prayer open with an address to “Our Father in the heavens,” but a little later in the prayer we get “in heaven and on earth.” Tenses shift randomly.
When the meaning is obscure in such a simple language, it is less often because of any sublime meaning conveyed than from mere linguistic clumsiness. Grammar can be muddled, if not neglected altogether. The Book of Revelations is especially ungrammatical — Nietzsche, a trained classicist, said that if God wrote the New Testament, he knew surprisingly little Greek. Except in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the complex sentence structure of classical Greek is rarely evident. We get a simple stringing-on of independent clauses (parataxis) linked repetitively with the boring kai (“and”). Dialogue has no elegant variation. It is a matter of “And X say… And Y says… And X says…”
Most of the words used are common. The infant Jesus is laid in a hay trough (phatne). But translators know that people expect a “biblical English” in the gospels. They make the hay trough more dignified by using a foreign word (French manger, for food) instead of “hay trough.” When Jesus answers Pilate, “So you say,” they try to find a more elegant form of answer — though “So you say” exactly replicates the Greek. Translators try to give more churchiness to the evangelists, to teach them their linguistic manners. Jesus should not say to his mother, “What to me and to you, woman?” So they do not let him. Almost every translation into English tries to hide the “faults” of the New Testament. They straighten out the grammar, make the tenses more uniform, break up the repetitions.
—Garry Wills
What Jesus Meant