Category Archives: Spiritual/Religious

When Atheism Blinds Us to Nuance

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Bill MaherIf you wonder why I have difficulty with the mainstream atheist movement, you need do no more than watch Friday night’s Real Time With Bill Maher. Along with Maher was Sam Harris and the two of them got into an argument with Ben Affleck about how Islam is a uniquely terrible religion. The basic logic — and sadly, this is the depth of the analysis — is that there really is something “wrong” with the religion.

My position has always been that there is nothing any more evil in the teachings of Islam than there is in Judaism or Christianity. And it always strikes me as very bigoted to focus on the wrongs of “their” religion rather than on the wrongs of “ours.” But the bigger problem with their discussion was that it came down to whether we should label a religion based upon the behavior of some or even most of its proponents.

Sam HarrisWhat was interesting was that Maher is clearly very emotional. His position is not, as he claims, based upon rational thought. He has something akin to an irrational hatred toward Muslims. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have his reasons. The problem is that racists have always had reasons for their claims. Americans have long claimed that African Americans were ignorant. Of course, the extent of their ignorance was a function of racism, not the other way around. I think much the same can be said about radicalism among Muslims: it is a function of western policies that have harmed Islamic peoples all over the world.

Harris makes the same racist argument, but with the patina of calm and intellectualism. And he repeated the argument that he and Maher were against the religion of Islam, but not the Muslim people. That’s just sad. That is pretty much exactly what Christians say about homosexuals: hate the sin, love the sinner. In this case, Harris says that he hates the religion, but he has nothing against the people who follow it. It makes no sense.

There is another problem with the argument that Maher and Harris are making. It is basically the “greatest threat” argument that conservatives so love. Whoever we are fighting is the greatest threat that we have ever faced. First it was the Soviet Union. Then we floundered around until we finally got “terrorism” — specifically Islamic terrorism.

But I can’t help going back to the IRA. Yet all the time that terrorism was being used by Catholics in Northern Ireland, no one went around making general comments about Catholics. And this is despite the fact that a lot of American Catholics were sympathetic to the Catholic minority’s struggle in that Protestant majority country. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the focus of much of the atheist community on Muslims is racist.

On the other hand, I don’t accept Ben Affleck’s claim that ISIS isn’t a Muslim religion. No one follows the Koran perfectly, just as no one follows the Bible perfectly. That’s not the way that religions work. And that is the point from my standpoint. Anyone can use any religion or religious book to justify whatever they want. In this way, both sides are trivializing what the Islamic religion is.

Although Christians like to claim that the Nazis were atheists, they were explicitly Christian. Did they act like what I think Christians should act like? No. But I think that is what Affleck was getting at when he asked Harris, “Are you the person who understands the officially codified doctrine of Islam?” Harris didn’t understand what Affleck was saying, of course. Not that it’s hard: what does it even mean to say that Islam is some pox on the world. Catholicism brought us the burning alive of heretics and Francis of Assisi. One can find justifications in the Bible for torture and living a life of poverty working for the good of others. The same is true of the Koran.

As with most things political, I wonder about motivations. It just so happens that the ideas that Bill Maher and Sam Harris push are conducive to American imperialism. Given the arguments that they make aren’t especially coherent, I think they are based upon the same kind of emotionalism that is the basis of the usual thoughtless “America right or wrong” patriotism. The idea that the problems in Iraq are really based upon some secret sauce in Islam, and not economic, political, and social conditions in those countries is submental. It’s one thing coming from conservatives who make these kind of “Good vs Evil” arguments about everything. But Harris and Maher would never make this kind of argument about the situation in Ferguson. But in Iraq, they are blind to a nuanced view. And I think it is fundamentally a problem with their atheism. For those of us (atheist and non-atheist alike) who don’t have an ax to grind, there is nothing special about the dysfunction in Iraq.

Religious Discrimination in the NFL

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Husain AbdullahWhat do you know? I have an opinion about football! When I was a kid watching the NFL (don’t faint), players would celebrate when they made a touchdown. And at some point, the NFL decided that it was out of hand. I can see what they meant. There was a lot of showboating and it could be a bit much. It also doesn’t show respect to the other team that, after all, must feel bad about allowing the touchdown. Indeed, when a player does such showboating, the penalty he gets is for “unsportsmanlike conduct.”

Little did I know that just like there is a delusion exception in psychiatry, there is a showboating exception in the NFL — for religion. Well, it isn’t really showboating. Players are allowed to kneel down on one knee or make the cross or whatever. It isn’t extravagant. Just the same, it does shove God in the face of the opposing team: God blessed me and made you look like a jerk! But that’s the way we are about religion — we make exceptions for it and I don’t especially care. The NFL says it is okay to thank God for a touchdown, as long as you aren’t too ostentation about it. Fine.

Well, Monday night’s game between the Chiefs and the Patriots had a bit of a dust-up. Husain Abdullah is a safety for the Chiefs and he is a devout Muslim. After intercepting a pass, he ran it back 40 yards for a touchdown. It’s only the second of his career and it is a very big deal. And as a religious man, Abdullah knows that God is never too busy to pick sides in a football game, so he kneeled down and touched his head to the ground. This is apparently a standard Muslim thing. I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter if he made the whole thing up.

There was no showboating here, in the traditional non-religious sense. He was very fast about it. I’ve timed it, and to two significant digits, it took 1.1 seconds. If Tim Tebow had ever been that efficient, the whole atheist community would have shouted with joy. But regardless of how ostentatious and annoying Tebow was, he never got a penalty. But Abdullah did. He got a 15 yard penalty for the aforementioned “unsportsmanlike conduct.” Not that it matters. The Chiefs crushed the Patriots. That’s what happens when God is on your side.

Clearly, this is wrong, however. And the NFL has said so and they are not going to fine Abdullah as they normally would. It is also very likely that the official who called the penalty didn’t know that Abdullah was doing his religion’s equivalent of making the cross. Or maybe he did and like most Americans, he just hates Muslims. I don’t know. It does seem a bit odd though. Click over to SB Nation, Husain Abdullah Was Penalized for… Praying? It’s kind of hard to miss that it is a “thing.” It isn’t just random celebration.

But it raises an interesting question. I’m not a religious person, but I hold certain ideas with just as much reverence as any religious person does. Why would I not be allowed to come up with my own ritual to express that? Why would I be dependent upon some official knowing and accepting what I had done? And for that matter, what is Rod Tidwell’s touchdown dance at the end of Jerry Maguire if not a religious expression? Why does the fact that it’s idiosyncratic make it unsportsmanlike?

The NFL has much bigger problems than this. But it does seem to me that they need to nail this down. The best thing is to get rid of the religious exception. The truth is that praising God for a touchdown is offensive to all gods — regardless of whether they exist or not. Or the NFL should allow any kind of celebration. They could put a time limit on it — five seconds perhaps. But the current situation is ridiculous and totally offensive to minority religions and non-religions.

H/T: Amanda Taub

Tribal Atheism

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Seth AndrewsOver the weekend, I heard a talk by Seth Andrews. He’s a prominent atheist who runs The Thinking Atheist podcast. He is very good, which is not surprising. He had worked in Christian broadcasting before becoming an atheist. And he has a gorgeous radio voice and he’s pretty smart and knowledgeable. But I made the mistake of listening to more of his work. None of it is bad. It is just that he presents an extremely common and troubling outlook on life.

Again and again, he talks about atheism in terms of science and what we can prove. Most annoyingly, he claims to base his life on rational thought. It is such an arrogant view. And untrue! We humans are very strange and how we make decisions is only very slowly coming into any kind of focus. But what we do know is that we aren’t nearly as rational as we think we are.

Belief in God, at least today, is more silly than irrational. Most people believe in God for the same reason they vote Republican or root for the Raiders — it’s a cultural thing and they really don’t think much about it. The houses built by fundamentalist Christians are generally as sound as those built by atheists. So theists may be misguided in their belief in specific myths, but they aren’t irrational in a general sense.

I never believed in God. From a fairly young age — from about the time I understood what death was — I wanted to believe in God. But it always seemed too stupid to believe in. Even at the age of ten, I could not see any more reason to believe in Jesus than to believe in the Greek myths I read about in school or the Norse gods I saw in comic books. So perhaps I have a different approach to atheism. I didn’t start off in one culture and move to another. So it isn’t necessary for me to make religious belief or non-belief into a tribal issue. And I believe this is what Andrews has done.

Hemant MehtaThat doesn’t mean that Andrews is bad. He’s actually charmingly inclusive. One thing I really like is that when I listen to him, I feel like I am an atheist. Too many in the atheist community make me feel like I’m a heretic. But a big part of why Andrews includes the great range of non-believers is just that he is so focused on his former Christianity. And I’m glad he clawed his way out of that tribal association. But let’s not go too far in claiming the intellectual high ground.

Much better than Andrews is Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist. Of course I would think that: he is a former math teacher. But as much as I like him, he exhibits some of the same issues. For example, I came upon the following video, “Atheists, where did the universe come from?” I was very exited to see that title, because too few atheists will even engage with the question. But I was really unhappy with his answer:

I don’t have a problem with the answer, “We just don’t know!” That’s a perfectly fine, if incredibly boring, answer. But he makes a critical mistake in framing the question as he does. He says, “Scientists can come up with theories of what may have been there [before the big bang], but the truth is, right now — and maybe forever — we won’t be able to answer that question definitively.” This makes the same mistake that theists make when they claim that God created the universe: it just pushes the question back a step. What if scientists proved that our universe is just part of a multiverse? That would be no more final an answer than the Big Bang is.

When it comes to this ultimate ontological question, I find science and theology equally useless. But theologians understand that the existence of “God” is a real problem — that it must exist in a form that we cannot comprehend because of our being locked into this universe. Scientists largely don’t see the real problem. They are like mechanical engineers thinking that they might figure out the structure of the periodic table by building better bridges. They won’t, because they aren’t even approaching the question.

I understand that we ask the kind of questions that we have tools to answer, and we really don’t have the tools to answer this question. But what a great opportunity this provides! There ought to be common ground here among scientists and theists. The scientists ought to look out at the universe as the theists look out at “God.” Because it is the same thing: the great unknown. I understand that theists are, in general, annoying in their dogma and fear of anything that might counter it. But they aren’t any more irrational than anyone else. What’s irrational is the universe.

I think that people who claim to be science-based and rational are generally people who don’t understand science all that well. Science is a fantastic tool for learning things about the universe. But it is, thus far, limited to the universe. And math has shown us that logic itself is not necessarily consistent if you push it far enough. Thus I see no contradiction between science, atheism, mysticism, and macro-scale rationality. Who wants to join my tribe?

Christianity Doesn’t Have Early Sources

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Rylands Library Papyrus P52I think the Bible is fascinating. It’s like the Iliad, but it consists of a bunch of short stories rather than one long, gorgeous narrative. And it isn’t nearly as interesting. But I do love the Bible in the same way. Ancient literature is awesome! It’s always interesting to see what stories different peoples tell themselves because of what it says about them. Just look at what postmodern literature says about us! Look at Waiting for Godot, which is a modernist work. It says that we are a people coming to terms with the fact that we have only each other to rely on and there is no God (or anything else) that will save us. Then comes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a postmodernist work. It says that we’ve given up on finding any meaning and we are going to just have fun playing word games and solving Sudoku puzzles.

Of course, not all of us feel this way. In fact, in America, the vast majority of the people have regressed and hang onto ancient religions to provide (mythical) structure and (mythical) certainty. I don’t especially have a problem with this. I know there are nice old people at Unitary churches throughout the nation who have concrete ideas of morality. They are better people than I am and I hope that I can become more like them over time. But they are a small minority. A very large fraction of Americans are people who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God.

Let’s start with the language that God speaks: Greek. I still find it interesting that most American Christians never much think about the fact that they only know their religions through a translation. And which translation? That in itself shows you how cultural Christianity is. Protestants tend to like the King James translation. Catholics tend to like the Douay-Rheims translation. I tend to perfer the New American Standard translation because it is said to be the closest to the original Greek. But increasingly, I go with King James, especially when it is a well known passage. But just what does it mean to go back to the original text?

Consider Theseus’ paradox: if you have an ax and over the years you are forced to replace the handle and the head, is it still the same ax? The same issue is discussed in the movie Blow Up. At the end, the main character is left with his final enlargement. But without the sequence of “blow ups” it is meaningless. It only has meaning in context.

Well, the earliest complete Bible we have is the Codex Sinaiticus, which is from roughly 350 CE. That is over three centuries past when old Jesus is supposed to have been killed and rose up and all that stuff. What’s more, it is missing much of the Gospels. Of course, the biggest thing that is missing from it is the end of Mark when Jesus shows himself to everyone. This is because that wasn’t originally in Mark. It is a later interpolation.

But do you see that little fragment there at the top of this article? That little piece of papyrus that measures 9 square inches? That’s the Rylands Library Papyrus P52. It is a fragment from John 18. And it is dated at roughly 125 CE. That’s roughly a century after old Jesus is supposed to have been killed and rose up and all that stuff. This is the oldest New Testament Bible fragment in existence!

In fairness, it’s a pretty damned good fragment. It is from when Pontius Pilate is interrogating Jesus. But the front of it only says:

the Jews, “For us
anyone,” so that the w
oke signifyin
die. En
rium P
and sai
Jews?”

I just think it is odd that Christians think their religion can be traced all the way back to this guy Jesus. I have no problem with people being mystical and thinking that the “feel” Jesus. Who am I to say? But a religion that has only 41 words (several only fragments) a hundred years after the events that are central to the religion? That strikes me as very weak tea indeed.

The Saviour and the True Meaning of Love

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The SaviourFollowing is the complete video of the 2005 short film, The Saviour. It is written and directed by Australian filmmaker Peter Templeman. And it is a good example of something I tell people all the time: short films are generally far better than feature films. I think there is a simple reason for this. Most feature films don’t have 90 minutes of content. They are padded. What’s more, feature films are expected to make money. So they are far more commodity than art. Short films are generally works of love and so are artful or at least reflect the filmmaker. And they are as long as they need to be. No one ever pads a ten minute film with five minutes of nonsense just to reach that magic 15 minute length.

The Saviour is a magical film. I suppose that everyone will see it in their own way and I highly recommend watching it before you read what I have to say. I don’t believe in “spoilers,” but The Saviour is the kind of film where you really ought to make up your own mind before allowing me to poison you. The basic story is that a young Christian missionary has had an affair with a married woman he is trying to convert. She has cut it off, and he is obsessed. He believes he will save her from what must be a bad marriage, given that she was willing to commit adultery with him.

So, have you watched it? It is 16 minutes of your life that you won’t regret.

Continue reading →

Christians, Frogs, and Luigi Galvani

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Luigi GalvaniOn this day in 1737, the great biophysicist Luigi Galvani was born. He is, of course, the guy who showed that applying electricity to the legs of a dead frog would make them twitch. This not only showed that electricity was used within the body to send messages, it also inspired the greatest Romantic work and some of the best horror films of the last century. You are allowed to consider this a more important contribution to humanity.

Galvani was born to what might be called upper-middle class parents. His father was a goldsmith. So at 15, the future scientist went off to college to become priest. But his parents didn’t like that idea at all. It was most likely that they wanted him to have a more profitable trade. So they talked him into studying medicine. Even so, he remained devote his whole life. But despite living almost three centuries ago, he was more open minded than most American Christians today.

Consider the implications of his work, which were more than simply electrifying frog legs, even if today it all seems like “common sense.” The same thing happens in frog legs and human legs. This means that there is a continuity between amphibians and humans. If God had really created all the animals individually, you would think he wouldn’t have made them all work the same way. Not that apologists couldn’t argue that.

But I don’t think there is any doubt that if Galvani were alive today, in the intellectual environment of American Christians, people would be appalled. How dare he say that the same processes that go on inside a frog go on inside human, the creature that God created the universe for?! Of course, they do accept it today for the same reason they accept the electric light and central heating: it is useful. If they could ever be made to see that modern medicine is based on the foundation of evolution by natural selection, they might accept it to. But we aren’t likely to see that any time soon.

Happy birthday Luigi Galvani!

Church: What Is It Good For?!

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Christian UniversalistDigby brought my attention to a Pew Research Center poll, Shrinking Majority of Americans Support Death Penalty. This isn’t exactly news. But the report contained a graph on the attitudes of different kinds of religious people. The bottom line: white Christians really like the death penalty — whether Protestants or Catholics, they have higher approval than the population as a whole. Black and Latino Christians, however, are just the opposite — they support the death penalty at much lower levels than the population as a whole.

I shouldn’t be surprised that American Catholics should go against the Church on this issue. American Catholics go against the Church on pretty much every issue you can name, most notably same sex marriage, abortion, and most of all, birth control. Protestants are so fractured that it is impossible to say what they are supposed to believe. But it is safe to say that religious people believe what they want and don’t give a lot of thought to what their churches claim.

Although I am a staunch opponent of the death penalty, the fact that Christians don’t listen to their churches is largely a good thing. We don’t want angry Christian mobs stoning adulterers. But the whole thing makes me wonder what people are getting from their churches. As I’ve written about excessively, popular religions are shockingly useless at answering ontological questions. So that leaves them only with the churches’ moral teachings. And on that front, most Christians have apparently decided that their churches are equally useless.

What is especially interesting here is how people make moral decisions based upon their life experiences. I don’t believe for a moment that white Americans are more vindictive than black Americans. But for most white Americans, police abuse of power is not really a thing. The worst they need worry about is an officer giving them a speeding ticket. What’s more, white Americans are less likely to have much direct experience with the milieu in which poverty leads to desperation and desperation leads to violence.

This is a good thing to remember the next time a Christian asks you how a civilization can have a moral code if it isn’t given from God. The truth is even Christians don’t have a moral code given by what they think is the word of God. Even those who take their holy books very seriously have to deal with contradictions. And what they always do in these circumstances is pick whatever belief feels right to them. And that is what we all do. So what exactly do people get from their churches, synagogues, and mosques?

I think religious people get one thing: a sense of community. And this has obvious good aspects. Humans are social animals and we can only survive by working together. But there is a bad side to this. The same things that bind us together also tear us apart from those outside the group. This is one of the problems with the New Atheist movement: people spend most of their time dumping on believers. And the same thing happens among the believers. This is why I’m so fond of the universalists. Are they a religious group or just an open minded collection of people who like potlucks? Regardless, even they have their limits. We couldn’t have a society if some things weren’t outside acceptable bounds. And people ranting Fox News talking points can ruin a good potluck.

Update (8 September 2014 7:47 pm)

In an article today, Scalia’s Utter Moral Failure: How He Destroys Any Claim to a Superior System of Justice, Digby quoted the devout Catholic justice:

While my views on the morality of the death penalty have nothing to do with how I vote as a judge, they have a lot to do with whether I can or should be a judge at all. To put the point in the blunt terms employed by Justice Harold Blackmun towards the end of his career on the bench, when he announced that he would henceforth vote (as Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall had previously done) to overturn all death sentences, when I sit on a Court that reviews and affirms capital convictions, I am part of “the machinery of death.” My vote, when joined with at least four others, is, in most cases, the last step that permits an execution to proceed. I could not take part in that process if I believed what was being done to be immoral.

See what I mean? When his church says “Same sex marriage is wrong!” he’s on board because he’s a bigot and that’s what he wants to believe. When his church says “Thou shalt not kill!” he’s not on board because it isn’t what he wants to believe. He is a vile man who history will judge very harshly. And he knows it.

Hemant Mehta and His Seventy-Eight Questions

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Hemant MehtaHemant Mehta is known as The Friendly Atheist. And he really does seem very friendly. Look at that face! If that doesn’t say “earnest nice guy,” I don’t what does. This may sound like I’m being sarcastic, and if so, I’m sorry. It is just an indication of how much he’s charmed me.

The truth is that most atheists do come off as, well, jerks. And I say this as more or less one. (I discussed this in a recent article, Time as a Construct of Consciousness.) What bugs me the most about atheists is the degree of their certainty when their own understanding of ontology is at best childish and often simply absent. Humility is a really important aspect of being a decent human being.

Mehta really struck me in a point he made in one of his videos, Nine Things Atheists Should STOP Saying. The ninth one was, “You can’t just pick and choose what you want to believe.” This is the idea that Christians are being silly when they accept the Bible when it tells them God loves them but blow off the vile parts about slavery being just fine and the need to stone our LGBT friends.

As Mehta pointed out, this is just the opposite of what atheists should want. It is better to have liberal minded Christians than fundamentalists. But there is a deeper issue. It just doesn’t make sense to say that if you are a Christian, you must be a Biblical literalist. Who says?! There are lots of ways to rationalize buffet Christianity. But above all, most Christians think the Bible is “divinely inspired” not “the literal word of God.”

But this is the essence of what I’m talking about with the arrogance of the atheist community. Only someone who has a really primitive conception of religion would think that the Bible must be read literally. We all understand that Ken Ham is such a person. But atheists pride themselves on being rational and smart. Making straw man arguments against liberal Christians is neither rational nor smart.

None of this is to say that atheists can’t have a whole lot of fun mocking the theists of the world. This is part of being in a group. The theists do it to the atheist; the atheists do it to the theists; and I do it to both. (Because I’m better than they are!) And Mehta is really good at this as well. And he’s damned charming while doing it.

Here is his video, Seventy-Eight Questions for Christians:

For the record, the standard Christian answer to the best questions here is, “I don’t know. I am not God. But I know that God is good.” I find such answers extremely frustrating. Consider the question, “Is Anne Frank burning in hell for the rest of eternity?” If she is not, then the whole heaven thing is a bit more complicated than Christians have made it out. If she is, doesn’t that make God undeserving of worship? By refusing to engage with such questions, Christians are refusing to take their religion seriously. Of course, the very worst Christians — the literalists — would have no problem with the question. “Yes!” they would tell you. “She had her chance!” On the other side, the very best Christians — the Universalists — would also have no problem with the question. “No!” they would tell you. “Everyone goes to heaven!”

One question Hemant Mehta didn’t ask was, “If Hitler had a spiritual awakening in his bunker, is he now in heaven with God?” But that’s just because he’s too nice. “Friendly,” you might say.

Wheaton Hates Women Loves Wars

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Wheaton College - For Bigotry and Its Kingdom

I recently found out that one of the neighborhood boys is attending Wheaton College, the Christian school in Illinois. Wheaton has been in the news a lot recently because of their fight against providing birth control in insurance coverage for their employees. They don’t even like the idea that the insurance companies pay for the birth control themselves. This isn’t a problem for the insurance companies because, as we all know, birth control is a whole lot cheaper than pregnancies. But according to Wheaton this is like given women a “permission slip” for contraceptives.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Is that the most paternalist idea ever? Yes. What is clear here is that the folks at Wheaton College are freaking out because the “permission slips” are for sex without consequences. And that just isn’t okay to the followers of the sexually repressed St Paul, the founder of Christianity. As a result, the government is doing back-flips so that Wheaton College (and other similarly backward theists) can tell the government about not wanting to cover birth control and then the government can tell the insurance companies. All to keep the folks at Wheaton feeling godly.

But Wheaton is actually a “liberal” Christian college. The scientists there actually believe in evolution. They apparently are of the Catholic persuasion of thinking natural selection works but God at least created the whole thing and is tinkering behind the scenes. (I don’t have a problem with that. If you are going to be a theist, that’s about the most intellectually coherent way to go.) Of course, the college is not Catholic as is indicated by the firing of Philosophy professor Joshua Hochschild for converting to Catholicism.

In addition to this, the college is also quite aggressive in its hostility to same sex relationships. This caused some alumni in 2011 to start OneWheaton. It was specifically in response to Wheaton’s “Sexuality and Wholeness” series of sermons that taught that following Jesus and being in a same sex relationship were not compatible. Because as you may know, Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, but not if they are one of those homos.”

What most strikes me about Wheaton College is that my neighbor is in ROTC there. I understand that the military is an unfortunate necessity. This is because human beings are awful. But Wheaton College is so interested in its status as a Christian college. They’ve decided for reasons I doubt they even understand that the moment a spermatozoa passes across an egg membrane, a soul pops into it. Thomas Aquinas didn’t think that, but who cares what one of the greatest theological thinkers of all time thought? Regardless, the college is apparently more interested in potential human beings than actual ones. Allowing employees to use hormonal birth control is unacceptable! But training students to be killers is just great!

This is one of the big reasons that our 80% Christian nation is so screwed up. Our Christians are more interested in politics than they are theology. They are more interested in apologizes for the power elite and gaining power themselves. And maybe that’s fine, because Jesus already blessed the poor in spirit, the mournful, and the gentle. I guess the Christians like those at Wheaton think they are taken of. They must think that “God helps those who help themselves,” even though it isn’t in the Bible. (It is in the Quran.) But that is as it should be, because for modern American Christianity, the Bible is at best of selective interest.

Saint Winifred and Cadfael

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Saint WinifredI’m a big fan of the Cadfael television series. It is about the 12th century Welsh monk, Brother Cadfael. He came to the church late in life after having been a soldier. So he is pretty much the only monk who knows the ways of the world. And his position at the abbey is as an herbalist. But his position in the series is as Miss Marple—an amateur sleuth who solves the murders that inevitably happen during each episode.

The other night, I watched the episode, A Morbid Taste for Bones, which is based upon the first novel. It involves Shrewsbury Abbey’s acquisition of the bones of Saint Winifred. It’s a fabulous episode because there is much about the general corruption of the church. And most other episodes make at least some reference to the bones of Saint Winifred and the fact that pilgrims come to the abbey to be healed by the saint. The only problem is that it ain’t Saint Winifred’s bones that are in that ornate box.

I won’t “spoil” the episode for you, because the plot is rather clever. But it is interesting that throughout the rest of the series, Cadfael is the only one that knows this secret. And he’s fine with it, because from his perspective, Saint Winifred’s magic or whatever doesn’t need to be constrained by distance. You also get the impression that Cadfael think it is all a bunch of hocus pocus anyway. That’s the great thing about such stories: the anachronisms. So we can all feel very good about ourselves that we don’t believe in trial by ordeal. Throw a suspected witch in a lake with a millstone around her next and if she sinks, “Witch!”

After watching the episode, it got me wondering if there really was a Saint Winifred. And not only is there, she appears to have been an actual person. If you’ve spent any time studying the saints, you will quickly find that a lot of them are nothing more than folklore. And it is getting kind of pathetic as more recent saint candidates like Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa have what can only be termed “coincidences” in place of “miracles.”

Saint Winifred was probably a Welsh nun who lived in the 7th century. And according to legend, when she was young and nubile, a man by the name of Caradoc wanted to marry her. But when she told him that she was going to be a nun, he raped her and cut off her head, because nothing says “Can we still be friends?” like a good decapitation. Her head rolled down hill and where it stopped St Winifred’s Well sprung up—kind of the Welsh equivalent of the Fountain of Youth. After the incident, he uncle, Saint Beuno put her head back on her body and she came back to life. And there are other stories like her pilgrimage to Rome.

The only actual writing about her occurred four hundred years later. In it, there is much said about a scar on her neck. Now that could mean that the basic story is correct, but she was only wounded an survived. Or it could be that since the writers took it as a given that she had been decapitated, they figured she would of course have a scar. You can imagine a Welsh man seeing the decapitation and thinking, “Oh, that’s gonna leave a scar!” Although you would think that if God could heal a decapitation, he could manage to do it without a scar.

Regardless, I thought it was pretty interesting that Edith Pargeter introduced this historical character into her novels. But it apparently isn’t the only one. The two abbots were actual people, as was the corrupt and power-hungry Prior Robert. None of this is a reason to watch the series or read the books. Mostly it is all interesting because the Cadfael character is so great. But the historical setting adds a great deal to the enjoyment.

A Soul Is Not a Personality

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Matt WalshChristians and other theists believe in the soul. Or at least they claim to. But even fairly sophisticated believers have what is an incredibly simplistic idea of the soul. One of the most extreme ideas of this comes from the Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe that there will be heaven on earth (quite a reasonable reading of the Bible), with everyone living in the idyllic conditions we know so well from The Watchtower. But it is just silly to suggest that the essence of our being is our personality. How can it be when chemicals can fundamentally change how people behave?

This came up this morning when I read Andrea’s article at Nice Atheist Girl, Suicide Deconstructed. It is a response to Matt Walsh’s incredibly presumptive article, Robin Williams Didn’t Die From a Disease, He Died From His Choice. Andrea does a good job of dealing with him on the issue of suicide. I just want to talk a bit about this bit about his simplistic theology:

I can understand atheists who insist that depression must only be a disease of the brain, as they believe that our entire being is contained by, and comprised of, our physical bodies. But I don’t understand how theists, who acknowledge the existence of the soul, think they can draw some clear line of distinction between the body and the soul, and declare unequivocally that depression is rooted in one but not the other.

This is offensive on so many levels. For one, the implication here is that Robin Williams died because of a defective soul. But it doesn’t matter. Walsh is a small minded commentator whose brain was apparently born without much in the way of empathy, who writes articles like, “I’m Spoiled and Lazy but Walmart Should Pay Me More Money Anyway!” What does matter is that he thinks there is that secret sauce of the “soul” that makes us who we are.

The Greek idea of a soul was that it was our essential nature. But when added to the idea of immortality, the idea get distorted. It is the thing that will live forever if one is a good little girl or boy. But how can that have anything to do with personality? People can be given drugs that totally change their personalities. People can be given experiences that totally change their personalities—for example, childhood abuse. Just on the simplest level, nice people are sometimes turned mean when they drink.

I think this idea that one’s consciousness will be transported to heaven on death is simple wish fulfillment. It is the basis for most religious belief: people are afraid of death. But this is religion as comforting fairy tale. It provides no kind of insight into the nature and paradox of existence. That is bad enough.

But Walsh’s argument curses not only the vagaries of brain chemistry but also the vagaries of the soul. This is an implicit indictment of God. Why did God give Williams’ that soul? And the Bible-as-user’s-manual doesn’t work either. I don’t know Williams’ spiritual thinking, but I assume he was not a Born Again Christian. So why did God give him a soul and brain chemistry that didn’t allow him to find comfort in the One True Word™? This leads us to issues of free will that I absolutely don’t have time to go into, other than to say that I don’t believe in free will and I don’t understand why anyone does.

The thing is that I don’t think Walsh has ever thought much about what the soul is. He’s just a typical cultural Christian who knows his side is right and when he dies he’ll go to the nice place with all the candy and ice cream he can eat. And that’s fine! I hope he’s happy. The truth is that I don’t think he has any more choice about being a shallow arrogant jerk than Robin Williams had with being depressed and finally killing himself. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that Williams’ death was sad and Walsh’s thinking is childish.

Congress Won’t Congratulate New Pope

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Pope FrancisEvery Saturday, Steve Benen over at Maddow Blog does a nice roundup of religious news (focused on, but not exclusive to, its relationship with politics), This Week in God. The format is always the same: there is a feature story and then a bunch of short paragraphs about single news items. It is often fun and always informative. Steve Benen is a legend in the world of liberal blogging, but I actually find this little feature to be his greatest service to the world.

This week, he focused on a story that is actually not new to me: the continued difficulty of the House to pass its de rigueur “Congratulations on being named Pope!” resolution. You see, there’s never been a problem before. The widespread priest sexual abuse scandal that broke primary under Pope John Paul II, did not cause the House to balk at congratulating Cardinal Ratzinger on his election to Pope Benedict XVI. But what’s a bit (Okay, a lot!) of child rape between men? Am I right?! Anyway, congratulations to the Pope was a formal thing and it didn’t mean that Congress approved of everything about the Catholic Church or the Pope.

But somehow, it was different when Cardinal Bergoglio was elected to be Pope Francis. You see, he immediately started in with all that Jesus stuff with that nonsense of “he who is without sin” and humility and caring about the poor. Many members of the House will have none of it. Turning a blind eye to child rape is one thing, but expressing liberal ideas is quite another. This new Pope seems so, well, liberal. It’s like he’s actually read the New Testament!

Remember when Jesus quoted God (They were apparently inseparable!) saying, “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me”? Neither can much of the House of Representatives. And the resistance to the Congressional Congrats! card is coming almost exclusively from the supposedly pro-God party. Of the 221 co-sponsors of the House bill, 202 are Democrats. Now you might think, “No problem, a bill only needs 218 votes to pass.” But you must remember the Hastert “Rule”: votes are only allowed if the majority of the Majority wants it. That requires 118 Republicans, and since only 19 of them signed on to sponsor the bill, it’s pretty certain that there aren’t 118 Republicans who are willing to congratulate the new Pope.

So the bill was sent to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where it could very well die. Benen explained the situation:

The unnamed Republican, who supports the resolution, said GOP lawmakers have complained that Pope Francis is “sounding like Obama” because he “talks about equality.” What’s more, the Pope has blasted “trickle-down economics,” rhetoric that many conservatives consider “politically charged.”

A Religion News Service report added, “[N]early half of all simple resolutions introduced in the last two years were passed, so it’s notable that one praising Pope Francis couldn’t even make it out of committee in this Congress.”

Ain’t that just like the Republicans? Religion is only real if it allows them to hate on the people they want to hate on. But they are right: what the Pope has said is politically charged. Everything every Pope has ever said is politically charged. My biggest complaint about John Paul II was the fact that he was forcefully telling the people of Africa that they shouldn’t use condoms. Of course, the Republicans wouldn’t see that as political, because it doesn’t get in the way of what they see as the purpose of politics: to take money from the lower classes and give it to the rich. But there could be no more political act than promoting a pandemic. Or allowing child rape to continue.

I have hope that after the midterm elections, the House will allow a vote on the resolution to congratulate Pope Francis. But that probably just shows what a terrible optimist I am.