This is the tenth official installment in the Alpha course series, in which I recall my experiences as a Jewish-raised dude and now a Gnu Atheist who took the Alpha course with his Christian wife. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
The course is starting to wrap up, and it feels that way. Tonight's class is a treat, though, because we'll get to see the magic healing power of Jesus. Enjoy....
Broccoli Chicken Ziti, and Oreos for dinner. Pretty awesome.
A guest spoke up with a promo for the church's men’s group.
Apparently this is a well-attended group in the church.
They are looking for men to have a not-gay relationship with Jesus.
Two songs: “Here I Am to Worship” and “Amazing Love”
DVD on “Does God Heal Today?”
Gumbel insists he was “very cynical” about healing at fist.
What a strange use of the word “cynical.”
I expected to hear “skeptical,” but he repeatedly used the word “cynical.”
Says healing is part of God’s character. Yes, he means faith healing, as in people are sick and suddenly get well as a direct result of prayer.
Talks of healing in the OT but Jesus of course is healer-in-chief.
Good part of M-M-L gospels is healing.
Apostles and disciples charged to go out and heal.
Stories of healing helped build the church, as I know from Bede.
Talks about the process of healing, the “how to” bit.
Showing love to the person needing healing.
Healers sometimes get “words of knowledge” in which they pray and then get revealed messages. Then they announce the messages and call out to see if anyone matches.
The prayer over the person to be healed asks God to relieve the discomfort of the person and looks to mention underlying “spiritual” causes.
The theory of pain here is that people will present physical ailments if they are not spiritually healthy
Points out that not everyone gets/feels healed.
Someone in our group came up: she had received words of knowledge:
A headache.
A bone in the leg.
A hole (or was it a hole in the heart/chest?).
Purple.
In small group, we had at least one person who said he or she could identify with a word.
Purple, for example, was recognized by one person as referring to her recent vein surgery and the post-surgery pain.
One person mentioned that her bone had hurt her since childhood.
One person had a headache.
Someone had gout.
Etc.
Each person with an ailment sat in the center.
The group gathered around and put their hands on the person.
They all shut their eyes.
One person started off by saying prayers.
Not everyone spoke up, but usually the group leaders did.
Clearly, they had been coached/trained on praying in a certain way.
They would pray to God to relieve the pain and then talk about connected areas. it would be like, “Dear God, please heal ABC’s bone. Help this bone in her leg feel strong and comfortable. You have made our bones and made us. You have made us strong to serve you and to live in your honor. Help ABC to take strength in your power...etc.”
After the prayers, people would sit back down and the person prayed upon would say that s/he felt the power of prayer and that s/he felt better.
I did not participate in the prayers. I observed.
Again, it was interesting to be the outsider.
I felt self-conscious, sure, but I couldn’t believe that a group of grown men and women were standing around making incantations for magic cures to health problems.
One person prayed in this entranced, whisper, made all the more creepy with invocations that the Holy Spirit should “fill” the woman being prayed for.
If I was supposed to be impressed, I wasn’t.
When my wife and I were in birthing classes before our first child was born, we learned about ways to relax and to manage pain.
For example, I would suggest that my wife relax her face, then her neck, then her arms, and so on. Other times, we would hold an ice cube and, with closed eyes, focus on the sensation in our palm.
My point is that the mind is powerful and can be trained to help minimize and manage some ailments.
Now, healing an amputee would be pretty darn good. Repairing burns (unaided, of course) would also be decent. What about reversing male pattern baldness?
At the end, one of the participants apologized to me in front of the group.
He said he had been defensive many weeks ago. I guess he felt I had challenged him.
It was awkward. I mean, I had no recollection of the specific incident, and I never registered any offense on my part. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if people were offended.
In any case, I accepted the apology, and moved on.
Seriously, I don’t care about defensiveness or hurt feelings. If we’re going to argue, let’s just do it and we’ll all get whatever bruises occur.
Let me get this straight: You believe that Chimp Jesus is both fully God and fully Chimp, but you think my worldview is inconsistent?
Following the recent purge of dissenting voices over at Uncommon Descent, cock-of-the-walk lawyer Barry Arrington implies that materialists either don't know or don't care about the supposed inconsistencies in their worldview:
Do Materialists Believe Rape is Wrong?
I have a question for our materialist friends. Let’s imagine a group of chimpanzees. Say one of the male chimps approaches one of the female chimps and makes chimp signals that he wants to have sexual relations with her, but for whatever reason she’s not interested and refuses. Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will?
If you answer “no it is not morally wrong,” imagine further a group of humans. On the materialist view, a human is just a jumped up hairless ape. Is it morally wrong for a human male to force a human female to have sex with him against her will? If you answer “yes, it is morally wrong,” I certainly agree with you. But please explain why on the materialist view it is not wrong for a hairy ape to force a female to have sex with him, but it is wrong for a hairless ape to force a female to have sex with him.
The whole topic is disingenuous. After provoking the remaining materialists able to post, Arrington later says: "I am glad materialists rarely act as if what they say they believe is true. Instead, the vast majority of them coast along on the ethical system bestowed upon them by the Christian tradition while at the same time furiously chopping away at the root of that system. Ironic, huh?"
Arrington's play is, of course, what we know it was all along: to show the befuddled materialists/atheists that they don't actually believe materialism or atheism. Deep down, materialists and atheists are rebellious children who really do believe in God and Jesus and Mohammed and really want to be reconciled to their Maker.
Succumbing to acute SIWOTI, I finally commented
“Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will?”
I’ll say “yes” because if I believed one animal was harming another and it was in my power to stop it or to prevent it beforehand, I would do so.
Thus it is “morally wrong” from my perspective. Whether it is morally wrong from the perspective of the chimp, and whether another chimp has a “will” to be violated–or even a sense to think it has a will–is something I don’t know.
I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that materialism is not a basis for morality. The surprising thing is that people seem to think materialism’s amorality is surprising.
You might want a follow-up question: Since you do not base your moral values on materialism, on what do you base them?
This comment received almost no response. I later commented:
“Again, the question is: Why do materialist have different moral expectations for chimps than they do for humans when, on their premises, chimps and humans are pretty much the same thing? Care to take a shot at that?”
Materialists have different moral expectations for chimps than for humans because materialists base their moral expectations on something other than materialism.
Chimps and humans are “pretty much the same,” as you say. But they are not exactly the same. Their brains work differently. Their societies work differently. Their tools and technologies are different in number, power, and scope. Their sense of self and species-identity lead to different behaviors and natural attitudes.
Since materialism is amoral, as I think we all agree, and cannot be the basis of sustained communal living, then materialists must base their moral expectations on something else. I can’t speak for all materialists or for anyone but myself, but I think it is broadly true that materialists base their moral expectations on learned and reasoned ideas of human-specific “good” in human-dominated societies.
This comment generated two responses, neither of which was central to the Arrington's original post. I responded to the second remark directed to my comment with this:
“Generally, materialists seem to be satisfied in explaining away morality through sociobiological evolution.”
Maybe, but the point is that materialism is amoral. It is not a basis for morality, yet it does not preclude morality either.
In any event, the questions of the OP have been answered:
Do materialists believe rape is wrong? Yes.
Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will? I answered “yes” in comment 40 and explained why. However, I explained there and in comment 66 that our view of moral chimp behavior is entirely separate from our view of moral human behavior.
If the point of the OP is that materialists are inconsistent to give chimps a free pass on rape but not humans, then that point has been demonstrated false because of (1) materialism’s neutrality w/r/t morality and (2) the difference–already mentioned a few times–between human assessment of its own species versus other species.
Other questions, such as objective morality, are peripheral to the topic introduced in the OP, and so should be dealt with separately. In post 40, I suggested this question as a potential OP: “To materialists: Since you do not base your moral values on materialism, on what do you base them?”
It's tiring and disheartening to have god-botherers repeatedly assert materialists don't really understand what materialism and atheism mean. This argument is the converse of the old standby: "If you really understood Christianity, you would believe. Since you are not a believer, you must not really 'get it.'"
We get materialism. We understand it. We know what it "implies" and doesn't. Same with atheism.
Yes, whoever did the burning was stupid and wrong. However it happened, it is inexcusable. But to kill and threaten people with harm over it? I don't understand.
Listen, I own a copy of the Torah. If you have a copy, please feel free to burn it without fear of physical retribution from me. I think it's a waste of a book and a waste of fire, but go ahead.
I have a nice copy of the Tanakh. I have an interlinear version (Hebrew-English) of the Psalms. I have the Tanya. I have an English version of the Koran. I have the Analects by Confucius. I have the Tzo Te Ting. Burn your own copies, if you must.
I also have books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris--yes, atheist books. I have a Charles Darwin collection and Prothero's book on evolution and fossils. I have a Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Einstein's Ideas and Opinions, and several scientific and non-scientific works of Richard Feynman. Drive a hot spike through copies of these. You have my permission.
I have a complete Plato, a selected Aristotle, a full Shakespeare, and complete works of Chaucer and Milton. Incinerate your versions, accidentally or on purpose.
I have several novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Milan Kundera, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Mann, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, Albert Camus, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Bronte, Marcel Proust, Cynthia Ozick, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and others. These works are yours for the flames.
I have poetry collections by Byron, Donne, Frost, Whitman, Olson, Oppen, Neruda, Homer, Keats, Yeats, Jabes, Machado, Rimbaud, Langland, Walcott, Williams, Zukofsky and more. Brand them, shred them, discard them.
I have books on Auschwitz and Anglo-Saxon England, on the history of ancient Israel and the history of Jews in America. I have books on wikinomics and personal finance; on German, Yiddish, Swedish, and Chinese; on reading, writing, visualizing, and decision-making; and on architecture, Picasso's art, Coltrane's jazz, and medieval illuminated manuscripts. Take them, take them.
I have books by Derrida and Foucault, Hume and Max, Marcus Aurelius and the Venerable Bede, Boethius and Churchill, Lincoln and Jefferson, Herodotus and Virgil, Aquinas and Augustine, Maimonides and Keith Richards. I would be heartbroken if you thought it was cool to burn these books, but you may do it if it gets your rocks off.
Destroy it all. I love all my books, but I won't call for your death. I won't threaten your family or your countrymen and countrywomen.
Whatever you do to books will not stop me from reading. You won't prevent me from learning. Whatever symbolic point you might be making does not affect me. You burn because you fear, because you are consumed. Your fire doesn't touch me.
Go on and incinerate books in full knowledge of your safety. Your burning only pollutes the environment and symbolizes your final impotence.
This is the ninth official installment in the Alpha course series, in which I recall my experiences as a Jewish-raised dude and now a Gnu Atheist who took the Alpha course with his Christian wife. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
At this point in the course, people are supposed to feel confident in their Jesus love and in Christianity. So much so that they may be ready to invite family and friends to join them at church. The focus of tonight's session, then, is to get people thinking about bringing their circle of associations into Jesus world. In other words, the message is "don't bring God into your home, bring your home to God."
Screw that. My notes for tonight's session:
We started with dinner, a meaty lasagna and salad. Brownies for dessert.
A few people in our group were missing. One man and his wife were not there, which was significant because the week before, the woman had said she was about to go for a biopsy. Those of us in attendance were concerned to know how the test went for her.
Two of our group leaders were absent, both attending to very ill mothers.
Two songs, “Amazing Grace,” with “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” brought in, and another familiar tune whose name escapes me.
Tonight's DVD talk opened with Gumbel talking about his first attempts to share his new-found Christianity with others.
He talked about going from over-zealous to fearful in talking about Jesus to people he wanted to bring into the church.
The rest of the lecture covered how to present the Christian message to others without seeming to pressure them.
He talked about being personal rather than intellectual or argumentative.
People don’t convert or get won through debates, he said.
They open up to Christianity through personal connection and testimony.
They may not be open to the resurrection, but they will not be able to dispute your showing how you are now much better and better off as a Christian.
They will not be able to dismiss your claim to have felt the Holy Spirit fill you.
In addition to being personal, Gumbel recommended being persuasive.
People will have questions and maybe even objections.
Have answers, but don’t be afraid to say you don’t know and will get back to the person.
The key, Gumbel says, is love.
The Christian wants, in love, to persuade others to Christianity.
Next, Gumbel talked about inviting people to come to church or to a Christian event or to an Alpha course.
The line of thinking here is that many people will be touched by seeing others engaged in joyous worship of God/Jesus or by participating in discussions of God/Jesus.
I stated to drift away at this point.
The last argument I remember is Gumbel’s advice to pray for people to become Christians.
He related a story of a kind of daisy chain of praying for people to become Christian--and those people later converted!
I would not be very comfortable for people to pray for me specifically to become Christian.
It’s their right, of course, but I wonder if they would mind if I expressed a daily wish that they became atheists.
The reciprocity I’m identifying here indicates the larger problem I have with the whole approach to tonight’s topic.
While it’s good and loving and proper for people to share their Christianity, and to seek to bring more people into the church, it’s not clear that they consider it equally good and loving and proper for others to try “converting” them.
For example, I have a personal testimony and experience on becoming an atheist.
May I share it with them?
May I lead them to the atheist blogosphere, the Atheists’ Alliance, the Secular Coalition of America, and the local meet-up groups?
In other words, are they OK with doing unto them what they say is OK for them to do to others?
This problem of everybody proselytizing everyone else all the time is, I think, the real and best reason for religion to be a private affair.
In a society that values individual liberty, one set of religious beliefs cannot be granted special privilege to occupy public space.
One group cannot promote their religion at city hall while another group is prohibited from doing the same thing.
So...the most peaceful solution is to have people come to their own conclusions on religion and to limit public displays of worship and evangelism.
None of this came up in small group.
Instead we talked about an end-of-Alpha event in which we are asked to bring a friend.
Get it? Tonight’s topic is perfectly suited to what Alpha’s about: making Christians.
Otherwise, discussion was unremarkable--even thought there was probably more discussion from everyone tonight than at any other time before.
The one idea that occurred to me, particularly as I heard the “new” Christians speak, was that people seemed to feel some relief at having made a decision that they could live with.
I imagine that my new atheism gave me the same glow that the new Christians have.
It’s nice to have come to a point where you say, “Yes, this is right. I know what this is about and I can now move forward.”
I think “Is there a God” is an important question, and one must either determine whether it’s “yes” or “no” and then go with it.
One cannot handle “I don’t know” indefinitely.
We closed with some personal thoughts on thankfulness--it being Thanksgiving week.
I offered no praise nor any thanks to God/Jesus.
Instead, I noted the maturation of my young children, the elderization of my parents, and the middle aging of me--and I declared myself bittersweetly thankful for change.
Is it rational to believe that a nation of former slaves, the Hebrews, experienced a mass Divine revelation at Sinai?
Frankly, I don’t know. I do know, however, that the so-called Kuzari Principle is insufficient as a basis for said belief. I have written many posts on the Kuzari Principle and I have answered many challenges. Let me briefly summarize these posts:
Going Nuclear on the Kuzari Principle – An extended treatment of Rabbi Gottlieb's call for false NETs and a presentation of a real NET: the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.
On Evidence and Hypotheses – A discussion on identifying evidence as evidence, with further points on using evidence in hypotheses.
How the Sinai Story Originated and Developed – An opinion explaining the Sinai story as “a fabrication using pre-existing narrative elements which may have been factual at some point in the distant past.”
Here is the full proof, which I will comment on afterward:
(rKP1) A myth will not initially find any traction with a culture who know it to be historically inaccurate, although once it has been adopted and becomes culturally significant, then a culture will not abandon it merely because of its historical inaccuracies.
(rKP2) The generations of a g-chain will not accept a g-narrative about them unless:
The generation is the first in the g-chain and witnessed the events for themselves, or
The generation received the g-narrative as an inheritance from their parents, although each generation after the first may have members outside of the core of the g-chain who adopt the g-narrative as they join or merge with the community and adopt its history as their own, or
The entire generation becomes convinced, presumably only with a large amount of evidence, that a g-chain that was supposed to have reached them was broken – this doesn’t seem to be the case with the small number of Jewish g-narratives, all of which seem to stretch right back into the mist of Jewish pre-history.
(rKP3) G-narratives can be subject to slow corruption and exaggeration. Thus, the fact that a g-narrative is widespread among a contemporary generation of a g-chain is no reason to believe that that g-narrative presents an accurate history.
(rKP4) The original g-narrative, before any corruption or exaggeration, must have been sufficiently impressive in and of itself to have initiated a sustained desire to transmit the story down a g-chain.
(rKP5) There are a small number of remarkable and widespread g-narratives about the Jewish people, about mass revelation and divine deliverance. These narratives are still transmitted to the majority of Jewish children by their parents at events like the Seder Night, in which Jewish parents recount the exodus from Egypt for the benefit of their children. This ritual retelling is even conducted by a very large number of Jews who no longer believe in the historical accuracy of the narrative.
(rKP6) Given (rKP3), the fact that these g-narratives are widespread among the living members of the Jewish g-chain is no reason to trust the historical accuracy of the stories.
(rKP7) But, given (rKP2) and (rKP4), the fact that these g-narratives are widespread does provide good reason to believe that the story wasn’t initially adopted by a generation to whom the story didn’t actually happen, and that the story is grounded in fact even if it’s been distorted, and that the facts, in and of themselves, were sufficiently impressive to generate the very long lasting feeling of cultural obligation to pass the story on down the g-chain.
(rKP8) We have no reason to believe that the details of Jewish g-narratives are historically accurate, but we do have reason to believe that they are grounded in extraordinary facts witnessed by an entire generation of the g-chain.
(rKP9) Therefore, we have good grounds to believe that an entire generation of the forbears of the Jewish people, or an entire generation of a tribe that would later amalgamate into an emergent Jewish people, were collectively witness to an extraordinary sequence of supernatural events, and events that would have been collectively understood as Divine revelation
In discussions with Lebens, I pointed out immediately that rKP1 made me uncomfortable. We have no reason to think it's true and we probably have better reason to think it's false. Some clarity may be gained by defining the term "myth," but otherwise I don't know what to do with rKP1.
At this point, Lebens wanted to shelve the issue of rKP1's possible vagueness (and falsity) and move to whether, given rKP1, the whole rKP argument worked. I appreciate his desire to move on, but I think it's a mistake to do so. I have had many conversations with Kuzari proponents, and I've always been struck with the willingness for vagueness on terms such as "myth" and "acceptance." To me, any argument using Kuzari should require specificity because myth evolution and cultural development are complex forces. If we cannot be sufficiently clear in our terms, how can we hope to say anything true and useful?
One quick example to illustrate: If I talk about the role of the King of England, that role is very different in the twentieth century ( I know we are now in the 21at century) than it was in 1520 or 1214. The term means very different things across the three dates. Consider, then, how we might assess whether a myth, story, or meme gained "traction" (see rKP1) in an ancient Near Eastern culture? Any point we want to make about "traction" would need to consider what the term meant in that world and then meant later. Thus, if "traction" meant something like "repeated approvingly by the priesthood" and then later developed into "a tenet of orthodox belief," we would want to know--the validity and soundness of our arguments would depend on it.
Throwing my discomfort with terminology and anachronism aside, let me use the following table to introduce my view of the rKP. The right-hand column offers my "translation" of Lebens's revised Kuzari argument. I have translated it to make clear my understanding of rKP's essential arguments. I have translated "myth" as "meme" because I think "meme" has less semantic baggage and actually names the essential part of what "myth" seeks to convey.
Revised Kuzari Premise (Lebens)
Larry's Translation
(rKP1) A myth will not initially find any traction with a culture who know it to be historically inaccurate, although once it has been adopted and becomes culturally significant, then a culture will not abandon it merely because of its historical inaccuracies.
A meme will "stick" if it contains some historical factuality.
(rKP2) The generations of a g-chain will not accept a g-narrative about them unless:
The generation is the first in the g-chain and witnessed the events for themselves, or
The generation received the g-narrative as an inheritance from their parents, although each generation after the first may have members outside of the core of the g-chain who adopt the g-narrative as they join or merge with the community and adopt its history as their own, or
The entire generation becomes convinced, presumably only with a large amount of evidence, that a g-chain that was supposed to have reached them was broken – this doesn’t seem to be the case with the small number of Jewish g-narratives, all of which seem to stretch right back into the mist of Jewish pre-history.
A special meme will stick if it has some historical witnesses, if it is told to children by parents, or if it is subject to whatever rKP2c means.
(rKP3) G-narratives can be subject to slow corruption and exaggeration. Thus, the fact that a g-narrative is widespread among a contemporary generation of a g-chain is no reason to believe that that g-narrative presents an accurate history.
Special memes can change in their content.
(rKP4) The original g-narrative, before any corruption or exaggeration, must have been sufficiently impressive in and of itself to have initiated a sustained desire to transmit the story down a g-chain.
Special memes must be originally impressive.
(rKP5) There are a small number of remarkable and widespread g-narratives about the Jewish people, about mass revelation and divine deliverance. These narratives are still transmitted to the majority of Jewish children by their parents at events like the Seder Night, in which Jewish parents recount the exodus from Egypt for the benefit of their children. This ritual retelling is even conducted by a very large number of Jews who no longer believe in the historical accuracy of the narrative.
Some special memes are still transmitted today.
(rKP6) Given (rKP3), the fact that these g-narratives are widespread among the living members of the Jewish g-chain is no reason to trust the historical accuracy of the stories.
Widespread prevalence of special memes doesn’t tell us about their historical accuracy.
(rKP7) But, given (rKP2) and (rKP4), the fact that these g-narratives are widespread does provide good reason to believe that the story wasn’t initially adopted by a generation to whom the story didn’t actually happen, and that the story is grounded in fact even if it’s been distorted, and that the facts, in and of themselves, were sufficiently impressive to generate the very long lasting feeling of cultural obligation to pass the story on down the g-chain.
Widespread prevalence of special memes does tell us that they were accepted--in whatever form they originated--by a first generation.
(rKP8) We have no reason to believe that the details of Jewish g-narratives are historically accurate, but we do have reason to believe that they are grounded in extraordinary facts witnessed by an entire generation of the g-chain.
Widespread prevalence of a special meme gives us reason to think that the first generation found the special meme sufficiently impressive.
(rKP9) Therefore, we have good grounds to believe that an entire generation of the forbears of the Jewish people, or an entire generation of a tribe that would later amalgamate into an emergent Jewish people, were collectively witness to an extraordinary sequence of supernatural events, and events that would have been collectively understood as Divine revelation.
The first generation witnessed something impressive.
Is this a "better" Kuzari-based argument than others, such as Gottlieb's? It depends on one's criteria for better. To me, it's great omission is that it doesn't account for memes that change their importance or their meaning over time. My earlier Kuzari posts addressed this matter. Some memes acquire a place of centrality years after they first "stick," and this acquisition can happen for any number of reasons. With respect to the Bible, I recommend my reading of James Kugel's How to Read the Biblebecause the book focuses on how Israel's ancient library of texts became the Bible.
Personally, I think Gottlieb's argument is more forceful:
In modern language the principle that the Kuzari uses is as follows. I beg you to look at it, hear it, and pay close attention to all of its details. Let E be a possible event which, had it really occurred, would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence. If the evidence does not exist, people will not believe that E occurred. [Emphasis in original]
If you buy Gottlieb's argument, Jewish belief about Sinai almost must be correct. If you buy Lebens's argument, the most you get is that the witnesses thought they had seen something miraculous. Of course, how much should we care about what illiterate, scientifically ignorant former slaves thought about miracles? I do not use the descriptors to belittle these people, but to set some context on what we are being asked to accept and to rationalize.
So, rKP doesn't work for me. It's a series of assumption after assumption that gets us not to reasoned belief but to a question of trust: do we or do we not believe according to what the Torah tells us illiterate, scientifically ignorant former slaves believed?
In rKP, the Kuzari Principle is neutered, but I think Lebens understands that it must be so. He says:
As far as I'm concerned, that is the only power that the Kuzari argument could possibly hope for: the power to justify our belief in Sinai, or something like Sinai, without direct historical evidence. But you'd still need something like 'indirect' historical evidence; i.e., evidence about how myths were formed in ancient times. I'm not claiming that we can arrive at justified historical beliefs a priori. I look forward to continued discussion with you, and to your answers to these questions. I'm certainly far from convinced that the Kuzari argument is even as strong as I suggested in this post.
Neither Gottlieb's not Lebens's Kuzari justifies belief in Sinai, in my opinion. I still hold to the view from my piece on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
With Sinai, we have one report given from one perspective. We don't know the report of the people closest to the mountain. We don't know the observations of witnesses in the very back. We cannot hear the voices of the women, the outsiders, and the opponents. We have no documents from the nations closest to Sinai telling us about something most unusual having happened. The strongest inference we can draw from Sinai is that something--a natural event or some other fantastic occurrence--may have happened out in the wilderness. We may even be able to justify saying something must have happened. We cannot, however, say with any confidence that Sinai happened. Kuzari changes nothing about this because even if the principle itself is 100 percent true, it doesn't tell us anything about what exactly happened at Sinai, how, to whom, over what time period, and at what stakes. It's a believer's reason to believe, a "nice to have." But it's not especially compelling to a neutral observer.
And that's why at this point it's best to leave the discussion because, with Sinai, the one thing we have not talked about is the one thing we should have been talking about all along: The actual evidence that we have for the actual people we think correspond to "Biblical Israel." Although this has been a fascinating discussion on logic, belief, and classification of events, we cannot get very far without a collection of real evidence and data. I have already shown that the pro-Kuzari side is not forthcoming when it comes to direct, positive evidence. We cannot derive a clear picture of Biblical Israel, Sinai, or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on a principle. If we truly want to understand the events and these people, we need to study the writings and the physical data, and we need to remember not to get carried away by the existence or non-existence of evidence. The evidence often means what we want it to mean, and the non-evidence doesn't tell us much of anything.
I also think that Kuzari proponents need to go beyond new Kuzari syllogisms. My challenge from an earlier posts still stands:
If the Kuzari discussion is to continue and be productive, it now falls to Kuzari's champions to delve more deeply into the reality of the Torah--the reality of the Torah as a cultural document that emerged in historical time in certain cultural contexts.
Sam, I'm interested in your thoughts. Do you think that Kuzari-oriented discussions will benefit from bringing in historical data, biblical criticism, and sociological studies?
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
It's rare enough to hear poetry in public discourse, but who ever expects to hear the poetry of Philip Larkin? His "This Be the Verse," excerpted above, is bouncy, brazen, and brutal. Hardly the fare of mainstream media and so-called polite society.
Another poem, "High Windows," flows along the same vein yet is richer and more complex:
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Larkin's verse invites conflicting readings. In the first stanza, does he mean "I know this is paradise" seriously, or is he being ironic? Personally, I pick irony: this is not paradise, even if a young guy is fucking a young girl and she's on the pill. Larkin then widens the poem's scope as he imagines the hand-off of generations. The older generation envies the freedoms and lack of concern that mark youth. The young play upon the machinery that former generations used for work. That machinery includes moral strictures as well as technology. These machines are not discarded, but they are not employed today as they once were.
Yet "the long slide" is a multivalent pun--with quasi-sexual connotations as well as meanings of deterioration--and a downward, dark image. We are told it leads "To happiness, endlessly," but the happiness is uneasy. Another, contrasting image is more positive; this is the slide upward, from the "high windows" to the glass to the infinite blue of the sky. I cannot fathom Larkin here saying anything other than the world is crap. He abandons both the imagined sexual freedom of the young and the imagined envy of the old. He drops the present and the past together. He rejects harvesters and slides for nothingness and nowhere-ness. This world here and now is not paradise because paradise completely privatizes sex, work, happiness, words, thoughts, and time.
Esolen's purpose is to "reconsider the wisdom" of the sexual revolution--as if the sexual revolution were more a political conspiracy than a broad cultural shift--and then use this reconsideration to think more about "The recent controversy over whether a church, or indeed a single individual, may be compelled to purchase health insurance that provides free coverage for contraception, abortifacient drugs, and sterilization."
Larkin's poem is the only reason to read Esolen's full piece, since Esolen give away everything essential in the first two paragraphs:
The sexual revolution = unwise and harmful.
The recent changes requiring employers to offer health insurance that covers contraceptive services = unfair and immoral, and perhaps unconstitutional.
Obviously, I think Esolen is on the wrong side of these issues. For instance, he blames the sexual revolution for crime, transience, and infidelity. He must believe these social issues did not exist before women started using the pill--or at least he shows no awareness of how such social ills changed in scope or quality following the sexual revolution. For that matter, Esolen makes no attempt to define the sexual revolution in its historical dimensions; we are left only to boil the term down to something about contraception and promiscuity. Just trust that the sexual revolution was and is bad: that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
In addition to intrinsic badness of the sexual revolution, Esolen sees the HHS mandate as a violation of the US Constitution and civil liberties, but this view is hardly more than a ploy for grandstanding. The mandate supports consumers across the entire spectrum of opinions on contraception. Esolen apparently sides only with corporations and wants individuals to incur the full cost of legitimate medical expenses. One suspects that the people usually burdened directly with these costs can least afford it.
I can forgive Esolen's shallow political pandering--he writes to and for an audience that already agrees with his positions, making their analysis and defense unseemly--but my main complaint is his abuse of "High Windows." Here is his characterization of Larkin's paradise:
Paradise—a perfect garden of delights, with young people rutting and hallooing down the slide to happiness without end. And yet this vision of carefree nature rests upon a strange submission to technology, and a depersonalization of human love.
Larkin might agree with this characterization. Indeed, it's part of the poem's point. Yet Esolen seems to think he's uncovered flaws in Larkin's reasoning. Not so: the "strange submission" is exactly what Larkin notices. There's no machine for happiness, Larkin says, except to look up at the sky and let the old, petty strictures fade into nothingness.
Esolen doesn't know what to do with the "outdated combine harvester":
The bond of marriage that sets a couple truly free, that gives a man and a woman the confidence to devote themselves forever to their mutual good and that of their children, is simply dispensed with. It is relegated to irrelevance, like “an outdated combine harvester.” But that analogy, startling and effective though it may be, is downright strange. Larkin uses it to suggest something ungainly and absurd, but his ironical contempt seems to have prevented him from noticing a contradiction. For there is nothing inherently silly about a combine harvester. It is a tool for reaping the goods of the earth. It does its work quite well, and only becomes “outdated” when a new combine harvester is invented that will do that same work better. The work of a harvester depends upon fertility. The work performed by the “bonds and gestures” of marriage is also oriented toward fertility, like the free and glorious fertility of a beautiful garden—a paradise. But in this poem the whole idea of reaping a good harvest is replaced by reliance upon pills and a diaphragm. It is therefore an artificial and sterile paradise, dependent upon tools that bring to pass a willed infertility. What’s the use of a harvester, when there is no life?
Esolen converts the combine harvester into a symbol of marriage, outdated and unnecessary in the new world of sex without children. With horrific creepiness, Esolen asserts the time-worn paradox that the "bond of marriage...sets a couple truly free." Yes, Ehe macht Freitag, marriage makes freedom--ah, but who defines marriage, and by what right? Esolen may appeal to Yahweh or Baby Jesus or Allah or the Dalai Lama, but what is the proper process for determining which appeal rules in the US? Thinking people should recoil when they anyone, Esolen included, tells them what sets people "truly free." How often have people paid with money, possessions, family, and lives for the true freedom offered by some church or charismatic leader?
The strangeness of the combine harvester is quite deliberate. Larkin is wonderful for unusual images and rhymes: he rhymes "fangs" and "meringues" in one poem. That undercutting strangeness gives "High Windows" it's depth. At no point does Larkin fully celebrate sexual freedom or discard depression-era austerity: both are avatars of the same quotidian idiocy under which people live.
Larkin would similarly explain to Esolen that Christianity is a third avatar, offering a no less "artificial and sterile paradise." When Esolen mistakes Christianity for a moral high ground, his finger pointing to the long-dead Larkin comes off as insincere and self-serving:
Where is that promised paradise of no one and nowhere and nothing, Mr. Larkin? Visit a prison, and ask the men in the cell blocks to recount their sexual histories, and those of their mothers and fathers. Visit a hospital, and see the faces of women who have determined to violate their inmost natures as the givers of life. Visit a neighborhood—if you can find one; for your paradise has placed transience and infidelity at the heart of the most intimate of human relations. You with your quaint erudite use of obscenity! The streets of your nation and the sullen youth who roam them make you look like a monocled Edwardian with a taste for French novels.
And this is the world we must protect, even at the cost of our Constitution and our civil liberties?
To be fair, this Christianity remains unnamed. Yet Esolen unmistakably parrots standard talking points out of Christian conservatism. By doing so, he tries to distance himself and his political values from the world he blithely criticizes. This world is yours, too, Esolen: your prisons, your hospitals, your neighborhoods, your streets, your sullen youth. Your paradise is a fiction, and your promises of paradise are exhausted. For centuries, you or someone in your chair has sold a certain combine harvester by lamenting the decline of the world and the imminent redemption of the pure. The outdated combine harvester of Christianity offers no nourishment and no happiness today, even as a converted slide.
I don't say this lightly, or to be controversial, or to be confrontational. I say it because it seems so, and because "High Windows" explains why.
For Santorum, the laws of faith and family--his laws--make freedom.
Rick Santorum seems like a front-runner. Not so presidential as Mitt Romney, Santorum nevertheless comes across as aware of and unfazed by the executive role. At one time, I thought he might be too crazy to be a serious candidate, but now I think he has a real shot at being the Republican nominee. It's going to be either Mitt or Rick, and my bet's now on Rick.
But if his views are any indication--and they may not be--Santorum is dangerous. His positions are "philosophically reasoned prejudice, based on centuries of Roman Catholic natural law." The quote comes from a recent piece on Santorum in the New York Times. From that article, we get one example of how Santorum applies natural law to his positions on social issues:
“Human beings have a purpose, or ‘end,’ a telos,” Santorum writes in his book. According to the tradition of natural law, every part of our bodies has a telos too. In the case of our genitalia, that natural end is heterosexual sex for the purpose of procreation. It follows that marriage between a man and a woman “is fundamentally natural,” Santorum writes.
Readers of this blog may hear echoes of Edward Feser, who must be positively delighted at Santorum's ascent. Readers of this blog will also know that Santorum basically makes up what the telos is. Santorum will get lots of agreement that the natural purpose of human genitalia is reproductive sex, but most thinking people will quickly realize three issues:
It is not a fact that the natural purpose of human genitalia is reproductive sex. Even with a nice argument, it's not a fact. Even if the Catholic Church teaches what the natural purpose is of genitalia, it's not a fact. The fact is that human genitalia serve several purposes. On the point of purposes, I can do no better than recommend you to Leah at Unequally Yoked. My take is that only belief confers purpose on anything. If you think wet is the purpose of water, then it is so.
The connection between reproductive sex and the social institution of marriage is arbitrary. Even if the telos of cocks, balls, and pussies was only reproductive sex--that would have no bearing on marriage. At best, it would dictate that when when people has sex they would do it heterosexually and with the intent of producing children. Beyond that dictate, anything goes.
Something that is "fundamentally natural" is not fundamentally good or right. Neither is something bad or wrong that is not fundamentally natural. This issue is, of course, the naturalistic fallacy.
After considering these three issues, Santorum's next statements appear ridiculous:
“The promise of natural law is that we will be the happiest, and freest, when we follow the law built into our nature as men and women. For liberals, however, nature is too confining, and thus is the enemy of freedom.” Later on, he elaborates on his jaundiced view of freedom with a quotation from Edmund Burke: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their appetites.”
Yet Santorum himself continues to gain support, and he cannot be dismissed. He delivers his message with a distinctly American idealism and coolness:
Santorum is not a fundamentalist frothing at the mouth, screeching out biblical commands (he cites “Divine Providence” often in his writing, but rarely turns to scripture). When liberal students booed after he expressed his views on same-sex marriage at an event in New Hampshire, he did not shout them down, but tried to engage them in a philosophical discussion.
Each point that Santorum makes follows logically from the preceding premise. Along with Catholic public intellectuals like Robert George, a political theorist at Princeton, and the political commentator and the Lutheran minister-turned-Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus, Santorum embodies the renaissance of Catholic natural law in American political life—and the apotheosis of its seductive effect on conservative Protestant evangelicals.
I am grateful for this NYT article. It's profile of Santorum and his views is interesting and important. But it never talks at all about Santorum's performance as a leader. I'd really like more details on his leadership and the relationship between his personal views and the diverse constituencies he must represent.
So while I agree with the NYT's conclusion that Santorum is dangerous, I think they fail to provide the most useful content to their readers. Here is how the article closes:
Natural law is a noble tradition that has shaped Western jurisprudence, but in the hands of conservative activists like Santorum it has become a dangerous cult of first principles. Santorum’s positions are perfectly logical if you accept his founding presuppositions — but, in his view, those presuppositions are not open to question. The genius of this emphasis on foundational assumptions is that if you can dismiss your opponent’s first principles, if you can accuse him of denying humanity’s “natural purpose,” you can claim to win the debate without ever considering the content of his argument.
This tactic destroys the possibility for real political dialogue, since one need only engage with those who share one’s own presuppositions. Despite Santorum’s calm debating style, his preference for home-schooling his children and rants against modern higher education suggest he has little genuine interest in open argument and free inquiry. Thomas Aquinas would not approve of such separatism: the theologian honed his most important ideas while in the thick of 13th-century heterodoxies, debating radical followers of Aristotle at the University of Paris.
The pundits are right about one thing: Santorum is the rock-ribbed anti-Romney candidate, the antidote to the bogeyman of “flip-flopping” and moderation. A half-century ago, evangelical voters worried that a Catholic president would take orders from the pope. Now they are worried instead about Romney reporting to a sinister Mormon cabal in Salt Lake City, while Santorum’s Catholicism has made him the candidate of universal “moral truth” and “divine reason:” the philosopher-king who can reclaim American liberty in the name of moral law, and package the Christian Right’s agenda in a respectable guise
If the NYT is correct, as the Republican nominee or as president Santorum may be no less a polarizing figure than President Obama. Santorum's views are parochial, if not scary. Yet he is gaining charisma where Romney is growing mold. Do not doubt that Santorum will be able to mainstream his views and gain fervent support.
And remember why the philosophical tradition of Aquinas faltered: Ockham showed it was impossible to make the leap from nature to the divine; that is that the reality of final causes was unable to be proved without revelation (He was a monk, after all). Later, the new science drawn from Bacon confirmed the superfluity of divine and supernatural explanations.
The 2012 presidential election may revive this centuries old philosophical clash. If Aquinas can be pressed into service for a modern conservatism he would not understand, Ockham can make a reluctant comeback too.
This is the eighth official installment in the Alpha course series, in which I recall my experiences as a Jewish-raised dude and now a Gnu Atheist who took the Alpha course with his Christian wife. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Since most of us in Alpha saw one another just a few days before at the overnight getaway, there was both interest and fatigue. Personally, I wanted to see everyone and say hello. I was curious about how people “re-integrated” into the world, but I also didn’t expect to see or hear anything new. I didn't.
Dinner was chili with hots, and ice cream sundaes. Two songs sung.
The DVD talk was on “How Can I Resist Evil?”
By the end of the talk, we had used words like “evil,” “temptation,” and “sin.”
However, we were really talking about resisting temptation and not resisting evil.
To my mind, "evil" was presented as a given and not well-defined or examined.
This was a weak talk.
Gumbel asserted that evil did exist.
Why? Because if evil exists then we can make sense of the horrible things that happen in the world.
Amusingly, a follow-up assertion was that any philosophy or worldview that didn’t posit spiritual forces of evil has a great deal to explain.
I don’t need to show in detail how stupid this line of thinking is, do I?
Another reason we know evil exists, says Gumbel, is Church tradition.
No, he doesn’t mean how evil the Church has been.
Instead, he means that Church fathers believed that the devil was real.
The third reason, according to Gumbel, is that the Bible asserts the existence of Satan. Jesus believed in Satan.
Sigh.
Gumbel went on about how the devil worked to separate people from their God.
Gumbel went to the Garden of Eden story, but only one of them.
He enjoined everyone to remember that the side of God was the side of forgiveness and freedom, while the other side (there’s only one other, apparently) is the side of destruction.
He then went to a famous bit in Ephesians (attributed to Paul but not certainly authored by him) about arming oneself with/in God.
The main supports against evil are, Gumbel says, the Bible, prayer, and the church community.
At small group, we began with impressions from the overnight getaway, and if anyone felt tempted afterwards.
People shared some personal stuff.
For example, one woman is going on Friday for a biopsy. She’s scared.
Another person talked about being tempted to go out with his buds--perhaps he was/is an alcoholic?
We also talked about being able to talk with others openly about Christianity.
People generally feel discouraged from being “open” believers, at least the new ones.
I happen to see plenty of folks who have no problem with religious sayings on their cars or on Facebook.
I am today announcing a new moderation policy at UD. At any time the moderator reserves the right to ask the following question to any person who would comment or continue to comment on this site: “Can the moon exist and not exist at the same time and in the same formal relation?” The answer to this question is either “yes” or “no.” If the person gives any answer other than the single word “no,” he or she will immediately be deemed not worth arguing with and therefore banned from this site.
We will start with Petrushka to demonstrate the application of the policy. Petrushka, can the moon exist and not exist at the same time and in the same formal relation?
In other words: at any time, I can choose not to ban you straight out or to ignore you. Instead, I can give you an arbitrary test, which you will undoubtedly fail. Then, it will be your fault that I banned you.
From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing. These decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which wealth became highly concentrated (dramatically so in the top 0.1% of the population), yielding concentration of political power, hence legislation to carry the cycle further: taxation and other fiscal policies, deregulation, changes in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge gains for executives, and so on.
Meanwhile, for the majority, real wages largely stagnated, and people were able to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far beyond Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated bubbles since the Reagan years, creating paper wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst (and the perpetrators were bailed out by the taxpayer). In parallel, the political system has been increasingly shredded as both parties are driven deeper into corporate pockets with the escalating cost of elections, the Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats (now largely the former “moderate Republicans”) not far behind.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has been the major source of reputable data on these developments for years, is entitled Failure by Design. The phrase “by design” is accurate. Other choices were certainly possible. And as the study points out, the “failure” is class-based. There is no failure for the designers. Far from it. Rather, the policies are a failure for the large majority, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movements -- and for the country, which has declined and will continue to do so under these policies.
One factor is the offshoring of manufacturing. As the solar panel example mentioned earlier illustrates, manufacturing capacity provides the basis and stimulus for innovation leading to higher stages of sophistication in production, design, and invention. That, too, is being outsourced, not a problem for the “money mandarins” who increasingly design policy, but a serious problem for working people and the middle classes, and a real disaster for the most oppressed, African Americans, who have never escaped the legacy of slavery and its ugly aftermath, and whose meager wealth virtually disappeared after the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, setting off the most recent financial crisis, the worst so far.
Ah, but it's Valentine's Day. This, for my lovely wife:
This is a special, mini-series within my larger series on the Alpha course. I am a Jewish-raised dude and now Gnu Atheist who has taken the Alpha Course along with my Christian wife. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Part IV, Final Thoughts
On the second day of the Alpha retreat, after the morning events and concluding pleasantries, my wife and I packed up and headed home. I left with mixed feelings about the whole getaway and about Alpha. Clearly, many people participating in Alpha had personal hurts and trials to work through. They saw the group and its Christianity as helpful, as “safe” places to be themselves.
The group is safe because everyone has the same shared experience of Jesus, God and Holy Spirit. One’s personal senses of failure, weakness, or shame become released in a controlled environment of love and support. I can talk about how selfish and anxious I really am, and my prayer partner will call to God on my behalf.
What’s more, the worship is more active and personally fulfilling. People are not simply singing and reciting stock prayers. They are not merely sheep led by a pastor. No, they come to invest themselves emotionally in the act of worship. They come to release passion and to exercise emotional muscles that they cannot in public or even in one’s family. This church is perhaps the one place on earth where they feel encouraged to surrender to their passions. They get to surrender to their passions without restraint, and to express them openly. And they get to do it in a group, thus making it “normal” behavior. The whole thing is probably quite healthy.
What is the triune god, really? It’s an elaborate metaphor for our personal psychodrama. It’s a general code of conduct, yes. It’s a call to do and say--or not do and not say--certain things. But mostly, I think, it’s a screen upon which one unfolds and inspects a tightly wound psyche. Besides religion, there is no grass-roots social mechanism for helping people connect face-to-face with a community of people who also feel screwed up in the world. God-language provides the vocabulary and concepts for capturing that screwed-up-ness.
But I have some reservations about the whole Alpha thing, and this overnight thing in particular. The friendly face of the course doesn’t hide some rather nasty views on homosexuality as immoral, on eternal damnation, and on the supposed goodness of God. As usual, I find God (and Jesus and the Spirit) superfluous. In principle, the personal sharing and healing could have happened without reference at all to God or Spirit or anything like that. Any group devoted to sharing and talking could have accomplished the same thing--talking about fears, self-doubts, and so on--with equal or better long-term success.
Most of all, though, I realized (or remembered) that I needed to stand together with my wife. I want to stand with her. She wants to be a Christian. Fine. It’s her life and her call. I’ll help her be the best damn Christian she can be. I don’t need to be a Christian myself. I don’t need to agree with her about Christianity, and I don’t need to say I agree. Regardless of what I think or don’t think about Christianity, I support her. I respect her. I will not do anything to violate her right to think for herself and to form her own opinions. Likewise with all the folks in my group. I will never stop being an atheist. I will never stop critiquing religious doctrine. But I do genuinely support the people.
It was a success, I think, that I “came out” as an atheist. I had never done this before in a face-to-face group setting. But it was a failure that there was not quite an environment created whereby a Christian-atheist dialogue could take place. I have said I don’t want to be a “token” atheist, but I am now out as a real atheist. I have claimed a place in my group, and I have forged bonds. It will be interesting to see if anything changes over the next few weeks.
You like your religious beliefs and your religion. You like the stories--most of them, anyway--in the holy texts. You admire the central characters. You enjoy hearing and singing the devotional songs. You have a nice time at your place of worship, and the people there are very nice. You relate to them. You know the clergyman is pretty smart. He explains so clearly where the religious doctrines come from, and how they apply to the live we lead today. It is amazing, that the wisdom of old can resonate with each one of us. What's more, the sayings and the stories apply differently to such a variety of situations.
But you also have doubts. You pray, and you believe, but you have a twinge. How is God actually working in your life, how does that happen? When you look at your life, at the day by day of it, at the way the world works, how is it that God is so absent?
You have doubts. You wonder whether the religion's doctrines on gods and heaven and sins...are wrong. Maybe God didn't send Joseph down to Egypt or speak to Israel at Sinai or grant them victory over Jericho. Maybe Jesus wasn't the Son of God or the savior of humanity's sins or the conqueror of death. Maybe Mohammed wasn't a prophet. Maybe Joseph Smith made a mistake. Maybe Paul of Tarsus was a zealot. Maybe L. Ron Hubbard was only kidding. Maybe Mary was a regular mother.
My message to you, believers, is to embrace your doubts. I am not saying you should become an agnostic or an atheist. I am not saying to doubt everything or to believe everything. That's not at all what I want. Instead, I want for you to accept that it is right and good to have doubts. It is right and good to explore them, to understand them, to seek answers to them from various sources. It's not a bad thing to enjoy doubt because doubt helps you to look for more information, and the more you look the more you will see.
I'm saying it's OK that your religion does not have all the answers, and I'm saying that your life is fine. Life can be a struggle. It can be unfair. It can be maddening. It can be lonely. It can be scary. Your life has all sorts of stresses, setbacks, and sonofabitches.
But your life also has greatness. It has you, first of all. You're pretty neat. It has a sun, a sky, and stars. It has the most amazing animal and plants all around. It has color, sound, and texture. It has friendly people, wacky people, kind people, generous people, smart people, and super people. Your life has its own story and possibilities. Your life has love, laughter, interest, music, value, potential, significance, and consequence. It has all these things, just by virtue that you are here.
Embrace your doubts. Don't think that doubts are bad or shameful. Don't be afraid or embarrassed about them. Don't ignore them, but explore them.
Investigate your unbelief as much as you have investigated your belief. Give yourself permission to follow every question.
Dear believers, this is my message. What is yours?
This is a special, mini-series within my larger series on the Alpha course. I am a Jewish-raised dude and now Gnu Atheist who has taken the Alpha Course along with my Christian wife. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Part III, The Day After Yesterday evening's session left me amused, perplexed, and sad. The whole scene was amusing for its kitsch and its fervor. With the lights down low and prayer groups forming and disbanding like bubbles in broth, I was reminded of the Witches' Sabbath from "Young Goodman Brown," a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I was also puzzled by the whole thing: how was it that folks were buying into this silly set of practices? How was it that people gave themselves over in all sincerity to what was so obviously contrived? Finally I was saddened. Although I couldn't hear all the prayers, and although I wanted not to eavesdrop or invade anyone's privacy, I strongly sensed that many people were praying to be healed. They wanted to recover from grief of loss. They wanted to overcome hard times. They wanted to fell better or happier. They wanted help for loved ones. I was sad in empathy and sad knowing that prayers weren't the answer.
I went for an early morning run the next day. After a good breakfast, everyone went to small groups to talk about the night before. People generally felt good. They felt closer to one another. The night had been about bringing down personal/social barriers, and the morning small group was the start of a re-building, where the new intimates sought to re-affirm themselves to one another--to assure everyone that what they felt was real.
Before our group adjourned the session, I spoke up. I needed to because the transition process beginning here concerned how people would go out into the world as Spirit-filled Christians. Conversation had turned to how the world seemed hostile to devoted Christians and to public displays of Christian devotion. I shared my feelings because I did not want to be the representative of that hostile world, as they perceived it.
I told them I was an unbeliever, in case anyone had not figured it out. I said I had been born to a Jewish home. There were periods when I believed and even believed quite intensely. I shared with the group that based on what I had learned and experienced, I had come to accept there was no God. I used the word “reject” to describe my relationship to God and religions.
But I affirmed my 100-percent support for my wife. My job as her husband, at least by my understanding, was to stand by her and with her. I promised to walk with her on any path she chose. Then I said I felt the same way about everyone in our group, that I did and would support them.
We went back to the big group and listened to music, and then we viewed the fourth and final DVD of the weekend. The main idea here was that people should aim to live their lives normally but as Christians. Don’t just be a banker but be a Christian banker, bringing Christian values to everything. We are, Gumbel said, ambassadors of Christ.
Gumbel made several comments about how difficult it is to be different--in this group, believe me, I could relate! As Christians, Gumbel said, we should use good speech and not harmful speech about others. The final appeal made by Gumbel was something to the effect of putting Jesus first in all things to be successful in them. If your goal is to make a lot of money, you may succeed but you won’t be happy. But if your goal is to make a lot of money to help the church feed and clothe the poor then you will be both successful and happy.
After the DVD, all the groups got in a big circle to talk about the previous evening. People recounted their experiences. One woman said she received the peace of mind about her late husband that she’d been waiting 13 months for. A man said that he had felt heat and tingling last night and that it couldn’t have been anything but the Holy Spirit.
Then the pastor led a communion service. I was the only person who did not get up to take a piece of bread and a sip of wine. After putting some money in the collection baskets (plural), we broke for lunch. Others stayed behind to get more prayers. Lunch was awesome. We drove away from the conference center at about 1:30 pm.
This is a special, mini-series within my larger series on the Alpha course. I am a Jewish-raised dude and now Gnu Atheist who has taken the Alpha Course along with my Christian wife. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Part III, The Aftermath The long session of the evening was a remarkable experience. I was the only one who had declined to participate in the praying. I stood by my chair and observed the leaders as they put their hands on people and implored God/Jesus/Holy Spirit to come into the people's lives and to help or heal them. It was a lot of this kind of unburdening that was being asked for. Some of the people were emotional. Then the small prayer groups started, and again it was a lot of touching. I left the session drained from everything that had happened during the day.
Everything about the day had been choreographed: the sessions, the meals, the hike/free time, the extended worship. I don’t mean “choreographed” to sound critical, necessarily. Jewish prayers are similarly set up to lead the praying person to increasing levels of passion and focus. The idea is to work the penitent into the proper mindset, with worldly/vulgar distractions cleared away. Clearly, the Alpha playbook is to excite people over the course of the day and build them up to a mental/emotional freneticism by the time they get to appealing for the Holy Spirit to come.
I don’t make the connection with Judaism lightly. This whole Alpha Saturday reminded me of Yom Kippur day services. Gumbel has some Jewish background, so I wonder if there’s more to this connection. Regardless, this was an intense day, as it was designed to be. Is it a pressure environment? Is it a coercive environment? I think perhaps. I was the lone person to refuse a prayer. I was the only one, so far as I can tell, to look and observe not only the construction of the environment over time but the emotional endgame being played. If you were one who thought at all about being a Christian, you could hardly do anything except be swept away in the moment. You were guaranteed to feel as though something magical was happening.
Although I wasn’t swept away, my heart was racing. I was anxious as hell about what was going to happen. Were people going to break down? cry out? speak in tongues? We’re they going to approach me? What would I say? How would it be taken?
And why was I not swept away? Well, I was never sold on the arguments for the Holy Spirit, or Jesus, or God. I also remembered early on, even though it had no part later, that all of the assertions being made by Gumbel and the pastor people--no matter how congenial or nice the assertions were in their presentation and substance--were incapable of overcoming facts. Later, I recalled having felt similarly emotional at other times in my life. My wedding day, for instance, was the one time in my life I felt I might faint. So, my understanding of what happened was that some mentally/emotionally/physically tired people underwent an intense and anticipation-laden experience of joint excitement. I imagine that Scientology pairs come out of their sessions feeling as exhilarated as folks did on this night.
Barham's "Medicalizing Normality" is an ugly and irresponsible piece on proposed revisions to the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), scheduled for publication in 2013.
I have been monitoring the DSM-5 because Autism Spectrum Disorder is up for revision. My son was diagnosed with Autism when he was two years old. Now almost four, he has made wonderful advances thanks to school services and support. Despite these advances, if he were to stop receiving therapy today then he would suffer intellectually, emotionally, socially, and more. His present and future happiness would be at risk, even with a loving and supportive family.
Barham, however, sees the revisions as taking the US further along the path of "labeling essentially normal kids as sick." This is his thesis, and it's ugly enough--as I'll discuss shortly--but Barham's underlying (emphasis on lying) point is that "the trend toward medicalizing normality is a doomed effort to cure with science what is essentially a spiritual disease."
Pause on this quote for a moment because it really is disgusting.
Barham is not arguing on behalf of healthy people. He cares nothing for the tolls that illnesses exact on people, let alone their families. Any benefit that "science" delivers to autistic people and their families are only so-so to him. But what matters to Barham? What does he see as the most pressing issue for every child, woman, and man? Why, the biggest and baddest problem of all is that people don't believe in magic:
Why do we, as a society, seem to have this deep-seated need to medicalize normality? Why do we think we can—never mind should—take scientific control over every aspect of the human condition, including normal suffering, sadness, and even mortality itself?
I submit that this trend is partly a reflection of our widespread loss of religious faith. When most people believed in a divine order of things, human frailty and the inevitable suffering involved in human existence were much more readily accepted. Now, as so many have nothing else to believe in, and as they see no other point to human life than the maximization of pleasure, it is not surprising that they expect science to exempt them from all the less pleasant aspects of the human estate.
What?
First of all, there really is no trend to medicalizing normality; it's been there for a long, long, time--and not just in medicine. That term "normal" is suspect anyway, but my point is that medicine, science, and religion--yeah, religion too--have all sought to define and prescribe the bits and pieces of human experience: grief, friendship, love, sex, jealously, anger, and so on. These experiences and attitudes have all been religionized and medicalized over and again throughout the course of history. They all get -ized because we people are interested (maybe too much) in the things that happen to us.
So spare us the sanctimony, Barham: what's wrong with maximizing pleasure? With maximizing happiness? With living longer, with being pain-free, with having healthy and close relationships with others?
Secondly, the opposite of "essentially normal," whatever that is, is not "sick." The opposite of "essentially normal" is "essentially abnormal," and the opposite of "sick" is "healthy." If there is a legitimate danger for Barham to write about, it's the danger of treating healthy people as if they were ill. In his article, Barham's examples are people who were mistakenly thought to be less healthy than they actually were. It happens, and it is a problem to mind carefully.
My experience in distinguishing unhealthy behavioral conditions comes from not only my son's Autism but also my wife's depression. In both cases, the standard we use is whether the behavior or emotions have a sustained negative impact on functioning in daily life. Is it a perfect indicator? No. That's why we consult with physicians. But I would rather be able to get help when I need it than worry about being mis-labled.
Barham apparently lives in a world where people are "normal" or "abnormal." I bet he considers himself normal. His friends, too. How convenient. But the world of normal is gone. The world of normal is the world where you get to crush me, in the name of your god, into your template. You get to feel moral while forcing me to play with G.I Joe "action figures," pushing me to my knees before a pulpit, deciding what makes a legitimate course of study, dictating who I can and cannot marry, defining what demographics are proper for my neighborhood, and so on until I die. The world of normal is the world where your authority is accepted unquestioningly.
Fuck your normal, fuck your world, fuck your authority, and fuck you too.
Barham's hierarchy of ills makes our "spiritual" sickness the most important one of all. Forget about that diseased internal organ. Screw your pain and discomfort. Got a mental disorder? It's not a priority. Barham scoffs at medicine and science for their vain attempts to lessen pain and prolong life. Medicine and science are alright, he says, but it's more important to address our all-pervasive spiritual ailment. I don't know why he doesn't come right out and say explicitly that we need Baby JesusTM to make us whole and happy.
Fortunately, we don't need Baby Jesus or religion. There is no spiritual ailment. Spiritual ailment is merely another way of saying "people aren't listening to me." Barham's Uncommon Descent-like site offers no content to take seriously.
On the other hand, we should take seriously that plenty of people would agree with Barham that "science" (and government) want to control absolutely every aspect of human daily experience. Many already pin science and government as nefarious partners in a liberal/communist plot to enslave all humanity. And many want to push religiosity on us--not to help anything at all, but rather to promote their parochial version of happiness above all others. They want people to be happy, after all, but only on their terms.
However, those of us on the side of reality, equality, equity, and individual liberty must continue to correct disinformationsists like Barham and to better them with facts and reason.
