God's Violence and How to Avoid Facing It

Which dummy is speaking?

I recently posted on the human cruelty sanctioned by God--and, indeed, indirectly perpetrated by Him--in biblical passages such as Joshua 6:20-21.

Some of God's defenders point out that God can do what He likes with human life, as all life "belongs" to him. This apology is special pleading par excellence. As a student of literature I note that no other single character in all of fiction or history has been praised for violently and indiscriminately taking back what he has freely given.

Other God-defenders insist that those who were killed--including non-military, children, the old, the ill, and even livestock--deserved what they got. They did something, or didn't do something, and so God was morally justified to make Israel his instrument of genocidal brutality.

Biblical scholar Peter Enns suggests, following one of his mentors, that difficult passages such as Jericho can be rendered less problematic if the Bible is understood as God letting His children tell the story. He explains:

The Bible is what happens when God allows his children to tell his story–which means the biblical writers told the story from their point of view, with their limitations, within the cultural context in which they wrote.

When children tell the story of their father or mother, parents are typically delighted by how much they get and the childlike way that they see the world. But they are also well aware that children miss a lot when they tell the story, and invariably refract the complexities of family life through their own youthful vision.

It’s not a perfect analogy, I know, but roll with it: Think of how young boys talk in the schoolyard about how great their father is. They are ways of telling the story to make sure everyone knows they have the best dad around.

No, it's not a perfect analogy. And, uh, it's hard to roll with. I'll summarize some of the difficulties I have with Enns's approach, but here's a bit more of his explanation:

When God lets his children tell the story, the way that story is told is deeply and thoroughly influenced by the “rules of the schoolyard”; in the case of the Old Testament that means ancient tribal societies that valued in their people and in their gods such things as taking land, vanquishing (i.e., killing or enslaving) their foes, and generally bragging about who has the best gods and the best kings.

That is how people thought, and this “rule” is stamped all over the Old Testament. This is a way of understanding why the Bible behaves the way that it does. It bears the marks of the limitations of the cultures.

Bear in mind this is only an analogy, but if we want to extend this to the New Testament, we can think of the teachings of Jesus as a more “mature” telling of God’s story. Jesus tells the story in a way that is more in line with who God is (“you have heard it said, but I say to you…”). Such things as land acquisition and killing and enslaving enemies is no longer part of God’s narrative.

It’s like a boy who grows up to be an adult, gets a job, and has a family of his own. Now ask him to tell his father’s story. The son’s life experiences have brought him to a deeper knowledge and appreciation of his father’s experiences, and the story will reflect that.

What problem does the "schoolyard rules" approach solve? Well, it suggests that God really didn't do as much killing as the Bible says. It also indicates that He wasn't in full support of all the killing perpetrated by the Israelites.

OK, so maybe God ain't so bad. But wait. God's exoneration comes at a heavy price, for now we have to wonder how credible "His children" actually are. What else did they exaggerate? Could they have outright fabricated a story or even several stories?

Other problems: Did God approve of some killings and not others? Which ones? Was he OK with the killing of children but not livestock? How do we know?

More problems: Did God let His children tell the whole story or just parts of it? How do we distinguish God's telling from His children's telling, since they both use human language? Is it merely a matter of using the schoolyard rules approach when God does something that makes us uncomfortable?

Even more problems: Are other holy books from the world’s many cultures also re-tellings by God’s children? When re-tellings contradict, how do we adjudicate between them?

These are serious issues. Now take a look at the second section I quote. We see clearly that Enns has the ultimate concern of dropping the "OT" and getting to gentle Jesus. Jesus offers, Enns implies, a truer (what else could "mature" mean?) account of who God is and what He does.This approach reflects a longstanding Christian paradigm wherein the Hebrew Bible prefigures the New Testament. In other words, nasty genocidal God points the way to fatherly God sacrificing himself/his Son out of...love. Yes, love.

Hold on, for Houston, we have more problems. The teachings of Jesus are themselves re-told by the gospel writers. Are these to be viewed also by schoolyard rules? Should we then apply the same questions of credibility, structure, and speaker identification to these teachings?

Sigh.

Despite his cautions on using the analogy, Enns provides no clear statement of how it unambiguously succeeds. We're given the idea that it helps us to accept God's violence but this idea gets us nothing but momentary, visceral relief. Indeed, if we think about it, God's exoneration is passed off to the Israelites. Those kooky Jews were telling tall tales.

I suspect that momentary, visceral relief is all many believers want. Many will not pursue thinking about schoolyard rules and what their truth would entail for the Bible, biblical criticism, and belief.

Sometimes I wonder why people don't just make it easier on themselves and become deists. That way, they could just believe in a supreme being and dispense with having to maintain the authority of the Bible/New Testament.

If you want to believe in the Bible/New Testament, you simply have to accept that God is a huge douche and Jesus is a surly prick--these aspects are inextricable from the characters. Against the plain readings of the Bibles in their original languages and in their many conjoined historical and linguistic contexts, you cannot maintain uniform conceptions of God the loving father and Jesus the meek savior. The conceptions don't hold.

Kill 'Em All: God's Prerogative

The Biblical World notes an interesting discussion over Israel's capture of Jericho.

The story is well-known for the part where Joshua and the Israelite circle Jericho, blowing trumpets until the city's walls come tumbling down. My kids used to have a Veggie Tales video that framed the story as one of "doing it God's way, not your own." The vegetable Israelites trusted God by obeying the bizarre orders of Joshua. They brought down veggie Jericho and immediately made their way to the Promised Land.

Not recounted in the kid vid, and hardly ever in polite company, is the actual Biblical story. For example, here's Joshua 6:20-21:

20. And the people shouted, and (the priests) blew with the trumpets; and it was when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, that the people shouted with a great shout, and the wall fell down in its place and the people went up into the city, every man opposite him, and they took the city.

21. And they completely destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

This is, of course, an orgy of genocide and slaughter. It's indiscriminate--excepting the household of Rahab the harlot, whose aid of Israel is rewarded by their being spared. And it's all God-sanctioned: consider that what arouses God's anger is the later actions of one Achan, who does some looting in Jericho and sets back Israel's army. Achan pays for the crime with his life.

Now, some apologists bleat that Jericho had been warned beforehand. The city foolishly decided to oppose Israel; therefore, God was moral and Joshua was moral and Israel was moral to fuck up absolutely everyone and everything in Jericho.

Today, however, we can hardly accept such a feeble excuse. We know it's unfair to expect a city to surrender to an invading force. There's no way to reconcile the specific events recounted in the this chapter with an all-powerful, all-smart, human-loving deity. Surely such a God could have found a safer, saner method for achieving his divine purpose? For example, why not whip up a wall of sand--Exodus-style--on either side of Israel as they simply pass through Jericho unharmed?

But no, the God-apologists need to protect their idea of God by blaming the victims. Or, as John Piper does, the divine defenders just say genocide is fine...when God does it:

It's right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.

God is taking life every day. He will take 50,000 lives today. Life is in God's hand. God decides when your last heartbeat will be, and whether it ends through cancer or a bullet wound. God governs.

So God is God! He rules and governs everything. And everything he does is just and right and good. God owes us nothing.

"May I have another?"

Hallelujah, John! God can fucking kill anyone, anytime. He can stomp and maim until he's satisfied that He's killed enough. Heck, he can juggle the freakin' corpses and gargle their bones, and by definition it would be morally good and right.

And what's more, whatever the hell he decides to do to you, me, your little baby, your dear Aunt Sally, or whomever: we all should just thank him. He owes us nothing.

Piper's demented view is not far off from that of the odious Jewish convert, Jacob Stein. Stein believes that the Holocaust was essentially God's response to the Jewish Enlightenment in Europe.

It is true that I am implying that generally the victims of the Holocaust were sinners who were deserving of their fate however I believe that this is in fact obviously true and we will honor their deaths by learning from this.

In my opinion, the Holocaust is one of the strongest proofs of the truth of Judaism.

Stein has nothing to say about what the other millions of Nazi victims did to deserve their fate. Neither does he explain why American Jews, hardly known for orthodoxy, were spared. All he knows for sure is Haskalah-therefore-Holocaust. Bravo, Stein!

Piper and Stein agree that God uses human brutality to make his holy will known and to achieve his divine design in the world.

It's easy enough to dismiss abhorrent views such as those of Piper and Stein. Most of us, however, are unprepared to tolerate indiscriminate killing, genocide, and wanton violence. This is a good thing.

But come back to the Veggie Tales video I mentioned before. Remember what the decent little tomato and funny cucumber say: the right thing to do is what God tells you to do.

What they don't say is that God has sometimes told people to do some pretty awful and wrong things, if you believe there is a God to tell anybody anything.

Let me close with a modest proposal to leave vegetables for cooking and eating, leave God and the Bible in the fiction bin where they belong, leave moral decisions to rational minds, and leave genocide and slaughter altogether.

Heaven Can Wait

Warrant sang that heaven isn't too far away. In reality, you have to transform yourself.

Is heaven real?

No, of course not. There is a popular book claiming otherwise, but we have good reason to give the book little weight.

First, consider what something real is. It has a material existence. A microbe, a star, a color--all of these can be talked about as presences in the universe. If a color is the one questionable item in the above list, remember that it's a wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. So it is physical.

What about love? Love is traceable to chemical impulses in the brain affecting physical processes in the human body. Therefore, love too has a clear and direct connection to materiality.

What about an abstraction such as the number 4? Is 4 real? Yes, 4 can be encoded in material units: four sticks, four apples, four fingers.

Is heaven real?

Can we observe it directly and measure it? No.

Does it affect physical processes in the universe or in live beings? No.

Can it be encoded in material units? No.

Therefore, we are very justified in rejecting the idea of heaven.

But a popular book tells the story of a father, a pastor, telling the story of his son. Following recovery from a very serious illness, the son began to claim having visited heaven. The father and son both believe that the son visited.

The story is compelling. The father had been shaken in his faith. The son, so the father tells us, speaks with the authority of observation. What's more, as we so often get in stories of this type, the visitor to heaven comes back with knowledge "he could not have possibly known." We readers and hearers must take in the story and say, "Could it be so?"

Compelling as the story may be--I don't think it is, particularly--it's probably best not taken as evidence of heaven's existence. The story does nothing to bridge the gap from the idea to material reality. The human brain, awesome as it is, doesn't do a great job in helping us construct a full picture of reality or reconstruct remembered observations. Indeed, because we actively construct cognitive pictures, making us susceptible to all sorts of illusions, and actively construct memories, we ought to be especially wary of a second-hand retroactive claim about "observations" made in the mind.

Ultimately, the I've-been-to-heaven story is of a type we've seen since Moses came across the burning bush. It's 40 days in the desert. It's the light on the road to Damascus. It's Augustine opening his Bible. It's Bruce Wayne witnessing the murder of his parents. It's Iron Man escaping from terrorists in Afghanistan. The hero witnesses something amazing and becomes transformed into a different kind of person--a person with a specific mission and purpose.

That these stories help us little with establishing heaven is almost banal. The interesting question is what in our emotional make up drives us to feel compelled by them. Do we understand the father's doubt? His subsequent connection, through the son, with his god? Do we understand the son's recollection of a dream? His sense of being able to give something to his father, of being a source of power?

The impulse is to rally around the people and to partake in their transformation, not so much to believe the story. Surely, some people will believe the story and agree that heaven is real. But most folks, I think, will maintain an "I'm not sure" attitude while setting themselves in the community of people they think the father and son represent. The important thing to walk away with after a story such as the father and son's is "I'm a Christian, too," not "I really and fully believe in heaven."

The important thing is the transformation. That's what everyone sees. That's what everyone believes. That's what everyone feels. That's what everyone desires. And that's why the story compels.

But heaven still isn't real.

I'm Dreaming of Some White Christians

I mentioned recently that I was all "meh" on religion these days. It's true. I don't feel inspired to comment on matters of religion and atheism right now. Part of the problem is that I very much want to say something original. I want to get into issues. I don't simply want to link to stories or other blog posts, and I don't want only to point and laugh at religious beliefs.

Here is a story worth thinking about, an advertisement for a "white Christians" gathering in Alabama. MSNBC reports:

A three-day whites-only religious conference — which will conclude with a flaming cross — in Lamar County, Alabama, has some residents upset at the racist implications while the minister complains that his freedom of speech is being violated.

"Yes, we believe that the Europeans and their descendants are the chosen people of God," according to the website for Christian Identity Ministries, which is holding the event with Church of God’s Chosen. "We believe this, not because we think that the white race is superior, but because there is overwhelming proof in support of this belief. We do not back down from this belief, because we are certain."

Some local residents learned of the July 4-6 gathering after the group posted fliers promoting their fourth annual pastors conference, announcing "All White Christians Invited," according to a report by WBRC in Birmingham.

"It was put up throughout the town in the middle of the night. (It was) when everyone was asleep without the permission of the business owner," said Tyler Cantrell, manager of Norris Music in nearby Winfield, Ala., the report said.

According to the flier, the three-day conference, being held in a rural area, will end with a "Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony."

From this story, the feature that strikes me first is the distinction:

• European Christians (and descendants) are God's Chosen.
• European Christians are not superior to Christians of other races.

My Jewish background gives me some perspective on the "chosen" issue. The teaching from the rabbis was always that "chosen-ness" was a bad use of terms. God honored Israel by giving the Torah to them, and through them to humankind. They told us that being Jewish was not a matter of superiority but a matter of priority: we were the first to know God and His Holy Law, and to know a mission for ourselves to be a light unto the nations.

Now, this ministry says that Israelites (and by extension, modern Jews) have been replaced by European Christians. Co-opting the chosen-ness idea is hardly new. I once attended a speech by Louis Farrakhan that claimed Black Americans were chosen. The DNA of Abrahamic religions seems to hold this pernicious idea that a single swath of people has more of God's favor than other peoples.

While it's not surprising that this group claims the mantle of God's favor, it is unexpected that they insist not to be racist. There is "progress" here, in a sense. They seem not to conceive of Black people as the enemy. They seem not to consider Jews, Muslims and Asians to be lower or lesser humans. In the Alabama flier, the "Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony" reads to me as a specific attempt to divest cross-burning from its associations with KKK and their anti-Black terror campaigns.

Is the ministry racist? Of course. But they certainly are conflicted. They like being white and feel it's pretty cool. They may even feel as though the world-at-large doesn't (or no longer, to put the matter into narrative form) value racial whiteness as it should. Yet they also sense the moral wrongness of racism. They want racial coherence and perhaps insularity; they also tolerate the diversity of the world beyond their group. And so, they bury their racism by downplaying how great it is to be white and chosen--it's the "Mo' money, mo' problems" argument.

That tolerance has ugly limits, though. This ministry is fully certain that it stands closest to God's favor and intentions. It has "overwhelming proof." I wonder: If you are a Christian and you think this ministry is wrong, how do you go about showing them? How do you refute their "overwhelming proof," and how do you know that you are not the one who's wrong?

Let's close by hearing some of the comments on the story. One person says:

Alabama. 'nuf said.

This, of course is not helpful, although we all get the joke. I think the good thing that atheist criticism can add here is to ask whether this event is strictly provincial. We atheists ask whether the exclusion of this group is really so different from exclusive practices that are normal to mainstream Christianity: exclusion of women, homosexuals; the insularity of church leadership; the place of Christians generally at the top of the holy heap, above Jews and Buddhists and atheists.

Another comment:

These people obviously didn't get what Jesus was trying to say.

Riiiight. Because Jesus was saying what YOU say he was saying.

But let's continue. Here's the inevitable tu quoque:

And did the Black Caucus or The Black Law Students Association get the message too. Or maybe you need to attend a meet of the African Americans For the re-election of Obama and ask them if they got his message. Don't tell me you don't know of all of these organizations. Maybe you know the Black Panthers then. This is just the same people doing their usual racist things....but they are not whites...Right!

So tell me I am racist now....I'm not black and I am tired of everyone like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton telling me I'm racist because I'm white and not black too......get over it. We are not all black here it this country. Just look at the President....he's not all black either. Is he?

Here's the history buff chiming in:

Overwhelming proof? Really? Don't know how to break this to you Rev, but "the white race" (my ancestors) were pagan until they were dragged kicking and screaming into Christianity; ever heard of Charlemagne? Charlemagne, or "Karl the Butcher" as he was lovingly known by the Saxons, force converted Western Europe just as Jesus would...by torture and murder. So tell me, with that history, and being that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam originated in the middle-east, and each of the three claim to be God's "chosen" people...what could possibly be your overwhelming proof...ROFLMAO!!!

One more comment on how one bad Christian group does not Christianity make:

There is no such thing as a All white Christian gathering. If your not reaching out to all... your not reaching out at all.

All they are doing is trying to get news. That church (if you can call it that) been around for awhile and now they made front page on a left leaning site... wow.

Don't even try to associate all Christian with this ... All real Christians denounce this and so do I. It their deal not Christs.

There are more comments I could post, including the ones on how Jesus was dark-skinned and Jewish, on how we all came from Africa, and inroads to Obama/Romney. But it's time to sum up.

The takeaways from the story are (1) that co-opting earlier identities, narratives, and status (as in connecting myself or my group to Israel at Sinai) is part of what religion enables; (2) that overt, hostile racism and bigotry may be on the decline; and (3) we have lots of stock responses to stories like the "white Christians" gathering, but the gathering is really just one manifestation of what groups do (setting 'in' and 'out'-group boundaries) and of what seems endemic to Western religious thinking.

Magical Thinking: Sometimes You Just Gotta Believe

This past weekend, I chilled out on the couch with my kids. We watched a program re-telling "Jack and the Beanstalk." In this version, Jack receives the magic beans from a roadside vendor. The vendor advises that the beans only work if you believe in magic. The tale's hero, of course, believes in magic.

The "you gotta believe" idea--what I call the magical thinking trope--appears a lot in kids' movies and shows. When a story uses magical thinking, the character who doesn't believe or who is skeptical always gets shown up by the power of belief. For instance, the heroine who knows in her heart there is a "diamond castle" that can be called into existence by singing a song--she will prevail. In another program, the skeptical character will eventually be forced to admit that there are powers beyond rational and scientific explanation.

I don't see the point of putting magical thinking out on TV like this. Maybe it has something to do with an ideal of childhood--a time when magic seemed real and wonder abounded. But I think the producers have it wrong. Look at most any Bugs Bunny cartoon, universally smarter and funnier than today's kiddie pablum. In these animated shorts, humor comes from the fun of being able to violate reality. In the classic Bugs joke, he defies the law of gravity, but then notes he never studied law.

Bugs cartoons play with magical thinking; they never take it seriously, and never promote it as a life value.

The magical thinking of today's kiddie media comes with an ugly downside, too. When you tell the little darlings that magic is real you also tell them monsters are real. They have to accept both. The world of fairies and demigods by necessity includes sorcery and demons. The world of Jesus is the world of Satan. The world of the faithful is the world of infidels. You open their hearts to both wonder and terror; you cannot shut out the scary.

In contrast, a world without magic is a world where power comes from the mind, the will, the body, the community, the resources, and the technology. Who manages these is best positioned to influence the world. There are no magic spells in this world, only knowledge and power. There are no hidden helpers, only one's friends and one's network. There are no gods to please, only a society to contribute to. There are no devils to resist, only bullies.

There is both wonder and terror in this world, too. There is scary. The difference is that we are part of it all. In the magical world, the dram of good an evil happens on some other plane, hidden from us except for the magic that brings it out.

There's no need for magical thinking. We can have fantasy movies without bolstering general superstition. We can dramatize positivity without advocating miracle-dependence. We can promote imagination and creativity without endorsing irrationality.

Reality may be scarier than fictional monsters, at least at times and for some people. But reality is certainly far better than magic.

The Children's Crusade, Then and Now

When I saw the video below of a child being applauded in a church (namely, the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle Church in Greensburg, Indiana) for singing "“Ain’t no homos gonna make it to Heaven”--

I was reminded of the Children's Crusade of 1212. Wikipedia introduces it as follows:

The Children's Crusade is the name given to a disastrous Crusade by Christian children to expel Muslims from the Holy Land said to have taken place in 1212.

The traditional narrative is probably conflated from some factual and mythical notions of the period including visions by a French or German boy, an intention to peacefully convert Muslims in the Holy Land to Christianity, bands of children marching to Italy, and children being sold into slavery.

The 1213 Chronica Regiae Coloniensis relates events this way:

In this year occurred an outstanding thing and one much to be marveled at, for it is unheard of throughout the ages. About the time of Easter and Pentecost,4 without anyone having preached or called for it and prompted by I know not what spirit, many thousands of boys, ranging in age from six years to full maturity, left the plows or carts which they were driving, the flocks which they were pasturing, and anything else which they were doing. This they did despite the wishes of their parents, relatives, and friends who sought to make them draw back. Suddenly one ran after another to take the cross. Thus, by groups of twenty, or fifty, or a hundred, they put up banners and began to journey to Jerusalem. They were asked by many people on whose advice or at whose urging they had set out upon this path. They were asked especially since only a few years ago many kings, a great many dukes, and innumerable people in powerful companies had gone there and had returned with the business unfinished. The present groups, moreover, were still of tender years and were neither strong enough nor powerful enough to do anything. Everyone, therefore, accounted them foolish and imprudent for trying to do this. They briefly replied that they were equal to the Divine will in this matter and that, whatever God might wish to do with them, they would accept it willingly and with humble spirit. They thus made some little progress on their journey. Some were turned back at Metz, others at Piacenza, and others even at Rome. Still others got to Marseilles, but whether they crossed to the Holy Land or what their end was is uncertain. One thing is sure: that of the many thousands who rose up, only very few returned.

Today, it seems the foundational events are apocryphal and the crusading group was made up of poor people in Germany and France, some of whom tried to reach Jerusalem. It's not clear how many, if any, bona fide children launched or participated in the crusade.

Now, there is not much connection between the video and the crusadeoutside of the shared idea, "children," which, as we know, probably doesn't really attach to the Children's Crusade.

In both cases, however, Christian belief establishes a context for seeing the "homos" or the Muslims as "other." The other can be the object of jokes, even jokes that delight in the idea of a group of people eternally receiving punishment and being denied love. The other can be the object of military and political action, as in influencing others through force to change their opinions and way of life.

And although the Children's Crusade of 1212 may not have involved children centrally, we have no doubt that religious communities of all sizes love to put children on the front lines. Get the children believin' and prayin' and preachin' while they still accept doctrine on authority. While they still believe in magic. While they still care about gaining approval. This remains true today as it did in 1212.

The Suffering Spouse: A Story of Religious Melodrama

Woe is me! How much I suffer!

I consider myself a "New Atheist" because when I assess the effects of mainstream religious beliefs on the world, religion more often than not appears to be harmful.

The harm shows not only in criminals like the pope or in the violence of religiously motivated groups, but also at a very basic, everyday level. At Spiritually Unequal Marriage, a website for Christians married to "non-believers," a woman writes an open letter to the community:

I remember when I came across your site. I was so thankful that I was not alone! I think the most powerful thing that you and Dineen [i.e., Lynn and Dineen, the site owners] have done lately is to post honestly and transparently. Women in these marriages WANT to have hope but they also don't want to necessarily hear that others in "unequal" marriages are thriving and joyful etc. That may sound strange but for the most part unequal marriages suffer, greatly.

This woman wants to be part of a community...of suffering! She will hear nothing of couples happy and satisfied in "unequal" marriages but prefers to dwell in sadness and difficulty.

As the woman continues, see how religious beliefs give her life a context with a narrative based on war/struggle and characters such as the devil:

And truthfully if the marriage is unequal the home has a constant open doorway for the devil. He is always welcome and WE must do battle continually. We may get "breaks” the fog may lift to some degree but the battle is continual. For those of us in marriages where there are serious addictions the battles are that much more intense. The need to cling to the Lord is that much more necessary. I think your honesty lately is revealing more Truth than ever. Because the truth is, we may live our entire lives with our spouse and they may never be saved. The hardest thing to grasp in these relationships is that it is not God's WILL that ALL be saved. It is His desire and He woos and calls people to Himself but He gives them the free will to love Him in return.

This poor woman imagines herself a solitary warrior in her own home. She mentions "addictions," so perhaps she or a loved one (likely) has substance issues. True enough, plenty of people never shake their addictions. More than anything, this woman seems trying to cope with the uncertainty of the addict. Her reality is an allegory of the religious: one may not be saved from addiction as one may not be saved religiously. The final result is beyond her ken and control, even beyond--to some extent--her loved one's control. The woman invokes God because she wants SOMEONE to be in control. The idea of God covers over the unpleasant scenario of no one having intelligent governance over her affairs.

Yet, the idea of SOMEONE being ultimately in charge, even if that someone is God, does not comfort the woman. It costs her to feel part of a purposeful universe, and that cost is separation from her loved one:

This is so difficult for us who have loved ones who are unsaved. At times, I find myself with a lump in my throat, my spirit crying out, and pain that goes deep beyond description, as I watch my loved ones walk further and further away from the Lord. Yet, at other times, there is great peace and there is a sweet surrender. It is then that I realize the peace that Christ had. He mourned those who are lost but pressed forward into God's will, trusting the entire world to God's sovereign care. Jesus prayed that God would "make another way" but prayed nevertheless, that God's WILL be done. God's will called for Christ to die. This side of the Cross we don't argue with God's decision. On the side of the Cross where Jesus' mother Mary kneeled God probably seemed to be failing His people in more ways than they could imagine. But, He knows what He's doing. We must remember that Jesus said . . .Matthew 7:13-14:

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

My great peace has not come from giving up hope.
I cling to the Promises and I declare:

"But I will keep on hoping for your help; I will praise you more and more"
Psalm 71:14

In each successive paragraph, the woman toggles between grief and sad resignation. True, the notion of God keeps her from falling into an emotional abyss. However, she would do much better to discard the idea of God altogether.

God and Bible quotes give her consolation, but the potential for happiness lies outside of God and the Bible. If she were not so preoccupied with the "spiritual warfare" scenario, she would have no worry of the saved/unsaved problem. This problem would not exist. She would own her life and her life choices. She would understand that her decisions and actions would be able to help her feel better about her life. Although she would never be able to control her loved one's addictions or know if he would re-lapse, she would be able to adopt a proper "we'll deal with it if it comes up" attitude.To ditch God would be to claim her life in the present.

For this reason, I find that atheism better allows one to compartmentalize. In contrast, religion encourages an awful combination of ceaseless naval gazing and self-flagellation. This woman seems driven to see and open her own wounds:

I pray continually for the salvation of my husband and my loved ones but my hope is not in that outcome. If I hope in that I will find myself disappointed. But if I hope in God, trusting that HE knows best even if that means that He must allow some of my loved ones to turn away from Him then, I will not be disappointed. Just as Jesus' Disciples were not disappointed at the resurrection! So, I guess to make a LONG email short, haha. I just think that the more you share your struggles, the more power you will see in your ministry. God will not force ANYONE to love Him. If He did then the love He offers would not be love at all. You can't FORCE someone to love you. Therefore, each person may choose. Though it is difficult for saved spouses to watch, their unsaved spouse may continue to drift back and forth. It is the power of God moving. Yet, in the end it is the decision of their heart and yes, God allows it. Because of His great love.

Those who have engaged in any sort of discussion with religious people know the familiar fallback, "you must freely choose to love (or fear or submit to) God/Jesus." The fallback, again, says more about the woman's fear and need to cope.

Indeed, the woman says almost nothing of substance about her loved one. In the end, her message has nothing to do with her loved one or God/Jesus. It's all about her and her oh-so-valiant struggle to fight the devil. It's about her telling us to look at her and admire her being tied to the train tracks.

She's like the lyric from the Offspring's great song, "Self Esteem":

The more you suffer,
The more it shows you really care.

And this is where I have a real problem with this woman's outlook and the religious context from which she draws. All of her "suffering" is self-inflicted and totally unnecessary. Any moment she really wanted to, she could remove herself from her marriage and just get along with her life. She could, and she'd probably be happier. Look, I take marriage and divorce very seriously, but when the two people in the marriage are not happy they should separate.

It takes more than love to make a happy marriage. It takes attitude, communication, effort, flexibility, giving, reflection, teamwork, and more. In a happy marriage, no one is "suffering" because of the other partner. On a personal level, there is no freaking way I would ever want or allow my wife to suffer because of me--and I'm sure she feels the same way. We didn't get married to be sources of suffering to each other; we married to be constant sources of comfort, encouragement, and support. For this reason, marriage partners do not need to share the same religious beliefs any more than they need to support the same political candidates or parties.

But if your beliefs or your politics cause you pain if your spouse isn't in the same camp, then you need to re-assess those beliefs and politics. And if those beliefs and politics turn out to be more important to you than your spouse, then break away from the relationship. I doubt your spouse wants to be a pre-text for your suffering.

New Atheism looks at some types of religious narrative--such as that of a world engulfed in spiritual conflict--and religious characters--such as the devil--and argues that these are not only ungrounded but poisonous. The woman who wrote the email I've examined here is one case, but notice all the assent and agreement she gets in the comments section. Instead of advising the woman to chill out and then do something productive for herself, the comments are all of a "me too" variety (although there are some disagreements on bits).

If suffering is avoidable, it should be avoided. If happiness is attainable, it should be attained. These statements seem commonsensical, but in practice we often act against common sense.

Rabbi Shmuley on the Disabled

A collage to illustrate a bit of the man.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is a celebrity clergyman, notable mainly for an ignominious association with pop-star Michael Jackson and for a best-selling advice book called Kosher Sex. His latest book, Kosher Jesus, is causing some undulations in the worldwide Orthodox Jewish community because the orthodox don't want to hear anything having to do with Jesus--and Boteach is apparently running as a Republican for a spot in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Recently, he wrote in the Huffington Post on why God allows some to be born with mental or physical disabilities. This seems to be the payoff paragraph:

I have no idea why G-d would allow any child to come into this world with severe mental or physical disability. What I do know, however, is that He shouldn't. Children deserve to be born with all their faculties and with all their abilities. All children deserve to be healthy. Those who come into the world with mental handicaps are, of course, beautiful children, the equal of every healthy child, deserving of infinite love, equality and rights. Indeed, given their special needs they require more of our love, more of our attention. What they do not deserve, however, and what they certainly have never earned, is our contemptuous effort to justify their suffering and their challenges by ascribing them to some unknown and lofty divine purpose.

This explanation is remarkable for several reasons:

1. "I have no idea." This line of thinking might be considered refreshingly honest. Nevertheless, the statement runs counter to what religion is fundamentally supposed to offer: resolution into a larger, purposeful order. This statement confesses total ignorance where many others would soften the admission to "The Lord works in mysterious ways." I cannot see how such a confession would satisfy many people, who generally want to think of their clergy as knowing the intentions of the supreme being. Perhaps Boteach thinks confessing ignorance allows him to relate better to a person in pain, but I imagine that one reason a person would consult a rabbi is to be led from pain to a better sense of normalcy.
2. "He shouldn't." I imagine that many Christians raise their eyebrows at this statement. They cannot handle criticizing the supreme being because it violates the celestial hierarchy. People have no standing and insufficient knowledge--allegedly--to challenge anything the Yahweh does. I find the audacity of the statement silly, mainly because it contradicts the earlier "I have no idea." You cannot claim that X is morally wrong while not knowing God's reasons for doing X--unless you care to admit that God can commit wrongs.

3. "Children deserve to be born with all their faculties and with all their abilities. All children deserve to be healthy." This is bullshit. When Boteach says "All children deserve to be healthy," I hear the response from Clint Eastwood's character in the movie Unforgiven: "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it!" None of us deserves health, just like none of us deserves tallness, a zit-free adolescence, natural gifts in music, or x-ray vision. We "get" health by a fortunate convergence of body development, mental and physical traits, and external social perception of normal health.
4. "Those who come into the world with mental handicaps are, of course, beautiful children, the equal of every healthy child, deserving of infinite love, equality and rights." I don't believe Boteach here. Maybe I'm unfair, but he comes across like the person who professes not to be racist--just before launching into a vicious black joke.
5. "What they do not deserve, however, and what they certainly have never earned, is our contemptuous effort to justify their suffering and their challenges by ascribing them to some unknown and lofty divine purpose." Boteach is just posturing here with trumped-up moral outrage. Trying to justify suffering--and I by no means grant that disabled people by and large experience life as suffering--can hardly be called contemptuous. Many people justify suffering as a way to cope: we sympathize with a person or their family but don't feel like it's enough. I have no idea by what right Boteach describes disabled children as "suffering." Surely, he's projecting, but he doesn't know what he's talking about. Disabled people and their families find and make happiness. It happens all the time. What's more, plenty of so-called "normal" people are very unhappy.

Boteach's is a muddled and ill-conceived article, and while the man tries to position himself as bringing religion's reason to modernity, what he delivers is essentially a secular ethics that retains reference to traditional religion:

Why does God allow the innocent to suffer? I have no idea. He shouldn't. But our job is to fill in the empty spaces G-d seemingly vacates in His universe and to act in G-d's stead, being as human and loving as we can.

The notion of God here ends up as a huge, unnecessary distraction. People need to step up and act, Boteach says. People must assume the role that otherwise would be reserved for God because God is apparently out of the picture. Boteach is but a scintilla away from jettisoning God altogether: God's not protecting innocents and not minding the store here on earth. Why keep the fucker?

Theology or atheology aside, Boteach's passage above shows the unfortunate fact that he focuses not on the disabled and the realities of their lives but rather on "normal" people like himself. He preaches to "normal" people, for "normal" people, teaching them how to sound properly enlightened. With this focus and armed with religious opinions, he wrote an article that he thought said something, maybe even something profound. The article actually added nothing but detritus.

"Judaism is opposed to sexual equality"

Jacob Stein, the Jewish or Torah Philosopher:
Accused sexual harasser and unrecognized sage.

 "Judaism is opposed to sexual equality."

So says the self-styled Jewish philosopher, or Torah Philosopher, or whatever he wants to call himself these days. He then states: "Within the Orthodox Jewish community, the primary decision makers should be men."

The philosopher, Jacob Stein, has a history of hating women. He made inappropriate, sexually-laced comments on other people's blogs--leading to his firing once his employer found out how Stein spent company time. Stein was then dismissed from a nursing program at the Rockland Board of Cooperative Educational Services for comments to students that were deemed to constitute sexual harassment.

Of course, Judaism is no different than many religions before and after that view men as fundamentally superior and therefore entitled to privileges unavailable to women. These religions also set norms than make certain behaviors and duties prohibited to men--on pain of being seen as effeminate or less-than-manly.

These same religions also stratify the religious community and outsiders. The outsiders are intrinsically immoral, two-faced, and untrustworthy. One can behave toward them in ways that would not be appropriate with another member of the in-group.

The Torah philosopher gives only the unvarnished core of religious thinking, unconflicted by conscience and reason. The more liberal of his co-religionists have a harder time: they know that religions like Judaism are essentially unjust, but they cannot accept it.

The proper response to the Torah's philosopher's statement is to mock it, and then walk away. The man is negligible and his stupid, archaic worldview deserves only enough attention to make fun of it.

So, go over and comment at Stein's blog. Mock the fucker.

And laugh with me as we think about this joke on the all-powerful Jewish man:

A Jewish boy comes home from school and tells his mother he's been given a part in the school play. "Wonderful. What part is it?" The boy says, "I play the part of the Jewish husband." The mother scowls and says, "Go back and tell the teacher you want a speaking part."

Feser on the Soul

Philosopher Eward Feser explains what a soul is, but not successfully, I'm afraid.

His analysis begins with de rigueur Aristotelian-Thomistic tap dancing on the nature of things. He then locates human beings between animals and angels, evidently seeing no need to consider whether angels exist outside of human fantasy. After this, we get to human beings. Feser defines human beings by their powers to reason:

A human being is by nature a rational animal. That is to say, a human being is something which by its nature exercises both the animal powers of nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, appetite, and locomotion, and the intellectual and volitional powers possessed by angels.

Unfortunately, Feser does not address whether studies of animal intelligence have any bearing on the last statement. For instance, ring-tailed lemurs apparently have some math abilities, and dogs are pretty smart, too. For another instance, bottlenose dolphins may experience a sense of self. For a third instance, we may have reason to think animals and humans share a similar "free will." If these instances carry any merit, perhaps we should say human beings are more rational animals or more broadly rational animals. In any case, we should be careful not to assume an absolute distinction between humans and animals in terms of intellect and volition--and we still have no evidence of angels.

Yet, without a very clear demarcation between animals and humans, it becomes difficult to isolate the essentially human soul--as opposed to the animal or vegetative souls. That difficulty, in turn, should push us to question the usefulness of the idea of a human essence, and so too a human soul. For me, a serious red flag has already been raised in the simple fact that Feser takes too much time to get to the concept of the soul. He might explain that the concept is poorly understood popularly and even by religious experts and Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers, but this would only suggest that the concept is itself problematic.

Let's look at how Feser tries to back into the idea of the soul from human intellect and volition. He begins to isolate the soul by figuratively lopping off the human body:

a human being can be damaged to such an extent that it completely loses the organs of its animal and vegetative powers, and thus cannot exercise them at all -- to such an extent that only its intellectual and volitional powers remain. But those intellectual and volitional aspects of human nature, precisely because they are immaterial and thus do not depend on any corruptible material organ, cannot themselves perish, any more than they can in the case of an angel -- though they would be impaired given that the human intellect’s normal source of data is the sense organs, which are material, and given that its activity is normally carried out in conjunction with imagination, which is also material.

Feser asserts the immateriality of the "intellectual and volitional aspects of human nature," but I cannot see the basis for the assertion--outside of assuming dualism. Yet human intellect and volition have clear ties to the functioning of the human brain, primarily. Were the brain to become non-functional, that person’s intellectual and volitional powers would cease. They would become ultimately immaterial, so immaterial as not to exist!

Feser seems to be saying that the soul, human intellectual and volitional power, is what the brain does; it is the sign of what people essentially are. Feser also insists the soul is like a material aspect of a person. For him, a person has eyes, arms, legs, hair, lungs, and a soul. It's dualism, again, but I don't get it. This is like saying a ball has both a spherical shape and motion. It's like taking an effect--intellectual and volitional power, motion--and asserting that it causes or determines the thing--a person or a ball, respectively. I thought we had grown up from the kind of thinking where we just made shit up without having to reference reality.

So, if Feser's answer is the best there is--which I am not claiming--on what a soul is, then I remain unconvinced that it is anything mysterious or outside of what we normally understand as nature.

You Can Ban/Moderate Me, Uncommon Descent, But You Cannot Silence Me: A Reply to Kairosfocus

Welcome to Uncommon Descent. Feel free to comment.

I shouldn't post comments I make on other sites, but I want to save the following thoughts from a comment that Uncommon Descent decided not to release. They must have resented my uncharitable review of the recent purge of ID questioners.

Still, Kairosfocus had made a "challenge" to me, so it would have been nice if my post was accepted--even if the offending part was snipped. I hate to leave a challenge unanswered.

Dialoguing with Kairosfocus is difficult, and his foggy prose doesn't help. Now, I make no boasts of my own style; I mean only to point out that Kairosfocus has an information-rich and opinionated style that an interlocutor must work through. Kairosfocus gives long, ranging comments laced with snide remarks. For example, he begins his comment to me with this bit:

You of course must know about the recent exchanges here at UD (and in the penumbra of objector sites) that showed that there is a basic clash whereby evolutionary materialist atheists strongly tend to deny the reality of self-evident first principles of right reason; leading them to absurdities such as asserting that quantum physics provides empirical warrant — by contradiction to prior expectations! [oooopsie . . . ] — to dismiss the key laws of thought such as the law of non-contradiction.

See the reductio ad absurdum on denial that is a hall-mark of trying to dismiss self evident first principles?

In only two sentences, Kairosfocus raises many topics:

(1) The recent purge of ID critics from UD.
(2) A "basic clash" between atheists and theists.
(3) Atheists deny "principles of right reason."
(4) Atheists say absurd things.
(5) Atheists say that quantum physics allows "key laws of thought" to be dismissed.
(6) Atheists are forced into reductiones ad absurdum when they do #3 and #5

From the two sentences above, we understand that Kairosfocus writes in emotionally charged terms of attack (exchanges, clash) and irrationality (deny, self-evident, right, absurdities). For this reason, his long posts are akin to the Gish Gallop, a barrage of charges and dismissals that make dialogue difficult, if not impossible.

The charges are totally false, if I must dignify them by pointing this out. Atheists do not deny "principles of right reason." For most atheists that I read and observe, reasoning rightly and well is a primary concern--as well as a factor in why they are atheists. Part of good reasoning includes examining one's assumptions: everything is available for questioning and nothing is sacrosanct. That Kairosfocus and his friends want to surround their parochial version of "right reason" with high, barbed-wire fences--on pain of bannination from UD (the horror!)--tells us that intellectually there are places they refuse to go. Such refusal again makes real dialogue extremely difficult.

Nevertheless, I have aimed to give dialogue the old college try. Here's what I wrote, and you'll notice I gave a long-ish reply to match what was given to me. Your comments are invited.

KF,

I do indeed know about the recent exchanges at UD. The purge of ID critics was duly noted. In fact, it became a source of amusement for many folks, myself included, who think UD and its leadership are more bluster and bullying than substance. The “evolutionary materialist atheists” that I read were not denying first principles at all. They were demanding that first principles be considered with proper nuance and not simplistically.

I am an atheist, but I am not an “evolutionary materialist atheist.” I tend to be satisfied that modern biology provides the best available explanation for the diversity of life on earth. I also lean to materialism as being sufficient to account for everything we see and experience in the universe. But I am not an “evolutionary materialist atheist” because I am neither a biologist nor a physicist. I simply do the best I can understanding the information before me and concluding as seems correct. My atheism, if I may be personal, starts with understanding the history of the Bible, the history in it, and the history of the religions that take the Bible as Bible: the point is that evolution and materialism were not and are not the prevailing factors in my reasoning about theism. But I digress….

My questions were directed to jstanley01. The expression “rational foundations of reason” didn’t make sense to me. It would have been like saying “the happy foundations of happiness.” Seems a bit circular, doesn’t it?

I hear your argument that an atheist and a theist equally rely on faith. You say this here:

the vaunted “bright” atheist is just as much relying on faith as the Christian whom he mocks as ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked and/or blindly credulous.

I'll quibble with you on the kinds of faith employed by an atheist as opposed to those of a theist, but I get your larger point: we’re all working as best we can with what we got.

As for my “patent and irresponsible, unfair strawman caricature”: what I said,

Folks here refuse to grant atheism intellectual permissibility.

is either generally true at UD or it is not. We can establish the truth of the statement with a poll:

(1) Is atheism a “reasonable faith”?

(2) Is it possible for atheism to be a “reasonable faith”?

I also hear your objections about atheists. You say we are pretentious and do not face the challenges of building our worldview from the ground up, which I assume is what you feel theists do. Personally, I try to develop and refine my worldview from the ground-up. I think I've done an OK job, and I see many atheists who have done the same. If you disagree, please show me specifically where I or others need to shore up our worldview.

You then say,

If evolutionary materialist atheism cannot stand on its own feet and ground itself as a reasonable faith on matters of accuracy to reality, coherence and in particular accuracy to the reality of ought, then it is not worth holding.

I totally agree. If atheism is not true, then one is better off adjusting her or his thinking. However, I happen to think it’s probably true. You clearly think it is not; what’s more, you think it is incoherent and inaccurate “to the reality of ought” (a difficult phrase to parse). That’s fine. In my opinion, Christianity (speaking generally and for example) is untrue, incoherent, and less than ideal in many of its official moral strictures.

We need to disagree, then.

Your points on Hawking and Lewontin are noted, but don’t carry much weight with me. Generally, you criticize these folks for what you wish they would have said and not what they actually say. You may now wish to retort that I am being unfair, obstinate, twisting words, lacing in red herrings and the like. I get it. But you now know my opinion, and I think that opinion is highly defensible, if you care to press me on it.

Thanks for the playbook on right reason. Yes, I think atheism works well for [1] through [6]. Atheism also does a better job than theism on [5] and [6]. Your footnote tries to answer, but does not, the questions that I know you know are coming:

Are gods something “that are”? If so, can it be found why they are? If so, how can it be found (what methods) why deities exist?

Do gods have a beginning or may cease from being? If so, can it be found why they begin or cease from being? If not, can it be found why they do not begin or cease from being?

So, we arrive where we started: atheism seems quite reasonable to me, and not to you. And theism seems quite reasonable to you, and not to me.

But I never asked for atheism to get a free pass from you. Don’t ask that theism get a free pass from me.

Finally, you may be aware that UD moderators typically hold my posts for several hours (when they allow posts to pass). This is frustrating. I will therefore not engage further on this conversation, not because I don’t want to but because it’s too irritating to be moderated all the time. Thanks for understanding.

Alpha Course: Week 10, Faith Healing! Holy Crap!

Faith Healing? That's fucking awesome!

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.

Yes, We Materialists Really Do Understand Materialism

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.

And we mean it.

Burn My Books. I Won't Kill You in Retaliation.

You may have heard that copies of the Qur’an were incinerated by Americans at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. I don't know how many copies were burned or whether it was intentional, but I know that people have been killed in response.

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.

Rick Santorum Is Dangerous--and Electable

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.