Theology Versus Communication

"I'm spiritual but not religious."

"We're followers of Christ but not Christians."

"Religion does not requires gods of any sort."

"Buddhism is not a religion."

"Christianity is pagan."

"Religion is mankind's most important function."

Theology does not require making sense. Quite the opposite, in fact: it requires a deliberate assault upon good sense, consistency, logic and coherence. When religion is approached with logic one ceases to believe, and religion becomes a thing of the past, to be studied by historians, archaeologists and anthropologists. That doesn't mean it becomes less interesting, quite the opposite, it becomes more interesting, in my opinion at least, when one has removed one's head from one's ass and begins to see religion as a stage in human developed which has been superceded (by some).

But that shrinks the number of believers, and that's bad for business for some people. And it's quite plain to see that vast numbers of people equate "mankind's most important function" with "what makes money for me," without at all seeming to know how ridiculous and petty this makes them seem. And for many others, maybe for most, who have no concern for the business side of it, or at least conscious concern, losing belief is painful. For me there definitely was a period of severe discomfort between being a believing child and an historically-minded adult.

So I'm saying that the confusing nature of much theological writing is not only not coincidental: it's the main point of that writing. Theologists do not object to each other's willy-nilly redefinitions of terms, because that's one of the primary ways in which the confusion is maintained, and hopefully increased. Whatever objecting is going to be done is up to us and those like us.

When, in spite of all of this constant theological effort to obfuscate, things nevertheless start to become clear, that can be very uncomfortable indeed. If this clarity is only temporary it is known as a "crisis of faith." If the clarity lasts longer, then the believer becomes an atheist. And after a while the discomfort lessens.

Everything I've said in this post has to do with theology now, in the twenty-first century of Our Lord. Lately there has been a lot of nonsensical New Atheist talk about religion having always been intended as a tool for the powerful to subjugate the powerless. This implies that those who hold power in religious organizations are always insincere about their belief, that it's just snake oil sold to the rubes. I think that's a very farfetched accusation when applied to religious leaders of the twenty-first century. Some of the leaders, certainly, are insincere, but all of them? That's an assertion without evidence, so, if we were to go about things in as slipshod and arbitrary a manner as Christopher Hitchens, we could simply dismiss it without evidence. And the accusation becomes steadily more farfetched the further back in time we go. The earliest clear indications of atheism we have are a little more than 2000 years old. The oldest signs of religion we've found so far are more than 30,000 years old. Today, certainly, there is a sharp conflict between religion on the one hand and serious scholarship on the other. The farther back in time we go, however, the more religion and serious scholarship are synonymous. One of the little things which New Atheists dismiss with contempt, which are taught in World History 101 classes and evident to any historian. As recently as 5000 years ago, religion may well have been mankind's most important function, and its surest path toward the scholarship which nowadays, paradoxically, is replacing it.

What Bothers Me About "Progressive" Religious Believers

I write a lot on this blog about what bothers me about New Atheism. For a short time, when I first heard about New Atheism, I assumed that I was a New Atheist: I'm an atheist, and I'm fairly loud-mouthed. However, I very quickly learned that New Atheists are very deficient in their knowledge of what we in the English-speaking part of the world have agreed lately to call the humanities, and determined to stay that way.

That ain't me. Therefore, I am a Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheist. And maybe you are too.

Hopefully it's fairly obvious, upon even slight acquaintance with me, what bothers me about religious fundamentalists.

What bothers me about "progressive" Christians and Muslims and observant Jews and Sikhs and Hindus and other "progressive" religious believers -- "progressive" always in quotation marks, because there is nothing progressive about this thing which annoys me -- is that they have exchanged one category of ignorance of history for another.

"Progressive" Christians no longer believe that Adam and Eve or Noah or Abraham existed, they don't all believe that Moses existed, they're willing to debate the accuracy of the Biblical accounts of the size of David and Solomon's kingdom.

Sometimes they readily acknowledge that Mary wasn't a virgin when Jesus was born, that there's no reason to believe he was born in Bethlehem or was related to David or walked on water or cured the blind or the lame or the insane or raose Lazarus from the dead or himself rose from the dead. So why exactly are they still Christians? That's a good question. It's a very good question. Do they think that living a lie is good for their children somehow? Are they just networking on Sunday mornings?

They are scientifically literate, they know that life on Earth is billions of years old and that the universe is billions of years older still. Some of them are very competent scientists. (Some fundamentalists are very competent scientists too, of course, but with the "progressive" believers, expertise in science involves far less cognitive dissonance.)

And all of that is great. What is not so great, what bothers me, is that "progressive" believers very often insist that members of their faiths centuries ago regarded their holy texts the same way they do. "Progressive" Christians say that fundamentalism, literalism, regarding the accounts of things in the Bible to be literally true, is a recent development, going back to the 19th century, perhaps as far back as the very late 18th century. But no further.

Which is sheer nonsense. That it is sheer nonsense is one of the things about which fundamentalist Christians and I agree. Just look for the phrase "word of God" in texts dating from before the 18th century -- look for it in the Bible, for instance.

I submit that what began to happen in the 18th century was that people could begin to write things which were openly NOT literalist without fear of being tortured and killed for it, for the first time, in Christian-controlled territory, in about 1400 years.

I further submit that this is obvious to anyone who's read a lot of things written in those Christian-controlled places during those 1400 years. The amount of stuff which you have to ignore or tell yourself is "just allegorical" in order not to see this is huge. The number of people imprisoned and/or killed for doing science, because their work seemed to some authorities to challenge a very rigid view of the Bible as the ultimate source of truth is huge. Roger Bacon, Giordano Bruno and Galileo are only the most famous cases. People aren't burnt alive because their laboratory experiments seem to conflict with allegories.

And yet this is what many, perhaps most Christian theologians and scholars of the Old and New Testament canon and apocrypha will tell you, often with mountains of mind-fogging jargon. (A mind has to be fogged to believe it.)

Christian theologians have not stopped writing straight-up bullshit. The "progressive" ones these days -- and a lot of Biblical scholars and Biblical archaeologists -- have merely started to write a different kind of straight-up bullshit.

This seems so obvious to me. It seems to me sometimes that very few people -- not even academic historians -- want to investigate history on even the most superficial level, if what they found would conflict with certain preconceived notions which they cherish. New Atheists don't want to check Paulkovich's list of 126 names -- the fact that he says he's an historian and that his conclusion pleases them is enough, why risk being displeased by checking the man's work? "Progressive" Biblical scholars want to believe that there was no fundamentalism in Medieval and Renaissance times -- why disturb that belief by honestly looking at what stares them in the face all day long every day in their jobs? (Perhaps including some very solid reasons to wonder whether or not Jesus existed?)

Nietzsche knew what I was talking about. Was it really syphilis which drove him mad -- or was it that every day, everywhere he looked, he clearly saw things which everyone else refused to look at or talk about?

Atheists Who Claim, Among Other Things, That They've Read The Entire Bible

You ever wonder why so many atheists who claim they've read the entire Bible only ever talk about 12 verses from Genesis and Leviticus, plus 5 snarky quotes about the Bible from famous people? If you have, I certainly hope it didn't take you too long to figure out that it's because they're actually only ever read those 12 verses and 5 quotes.

Now let me be clear -- some atheists actually have read the entire Bible.



For example, a lot of academic Biblical scholars are atheists. I wouldn't be surprised if you're surprised to hear this: those academics don't tend to announce loud and proud that they're atheists, the way that New Atheists, aka movement atheists, tend to do. In fact, they tend to suck up to the huge rich religious institutions which butter their bread much too much to suit me. (NO ONE ESCAPES MY WRATH! NOT EVEN ME!)

Back to the movement atheists: who are they kidding? Each other, that's who. The nonsense about how they've all studied the entire Bible AND the Koran AND the Epic of Gilgamesh is a familiar example to anyone who's familiar with this movement. I came across another example today, a particularly striking example of an atheist kidding him- or herself: someone asking rhetorically why religious believers are so so desperate to gain the approval of atheists. I'll tell you why, Sparky: because they're not. Because you made that up.



But how do I know that so many movement atheists/New Atheists are making up that bit about having read the entire Bible? It's not just that they only mention those 12 verses and 5 snarky quotes over and over and over and over, and never mention Moses' confrontations of Pharaoh, or Ezra, and how it seems pretty clear now that it was Ezra and not Moses who collected and edited the Pentateuch, or Saul and Jonathon and David and Goliath and Solomon and Bathsheeba, or Job, or any of the particularly dramatic aspects of Revelation, or anything. If you've read all 2000 pages you've noticed more than those 12 verses. But over and above that, if there really was a community of Bible readers here, then people like Michael Paulkovich would get laughed out of that community long before being published in its leading periodicals. I'm not saying that Paulkovich hasn't read the entire Bible, it's just possible that he has. But it seems pretty likely that he's somehow managed to avoid any knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics which were written around the same time. That sort of avoidance is possible with one individual who's already gone to the trouble of reading the entire Bible, but extremely unlikely impossible in an entire close-knit community full of people thoroughly familiar with the Bible.

On the contrary, what we have here is a bubble, people sealing themselves off from those who actually have studied these ancients texts. Sealing themselves off and creating a fictional world in which religious believers are desperate for their approval and the entire Bible is like Leviticus and ancient Judea and Galilee were swarming with historians and there were newspapers and detailed court records so that anyone remotely resembling Jesus would have been mentioned in numerous non-Biblical written sources, a fictional world in which Muslims are either terrorists or approve of terrorism, and Obama is secretly an atheist because no Christians are as progressive politically as he is, and only religious believers teach Biblical studies in universities, and so forth.

Obviously, not all movement atheists/New Atheists are that wrong about all of the above. The point is that none of the above is immediately laughed out of the room, and all of it should be. All of the above is directly at odds with common knowledge. (Again -- maybe except for the part about the religious beliefs of academic Biblical scholars. Again, that may not be common knowledge, because the scholars tend to suck up too much to the religious institutions who give them all those fat grants and fellowships, and so they don't want to rock the boat by making their lack of belief too plain. The same way that almost none of the academics dare to rock the boat by voicing less than full certainty that Jesus existed. NO ONE ESCAPES MY WRATH!)

What's the point of shaking off nonsensical religious beliefs only to turn around and either constantly spout other nonsense, or act as if that other nonsense is fine because it's atheists who are spouting it? Sorry guys, but I'm not having it. The main point here is making sense. The existence or non-existence of God is just one of very many topics upon which we can make sense or not. You don't get a free pass from me on all those other topics just because we agree on that one.

(Review Of Why I Am An Atheist Who Believes In God By Frank Schaeffer) I Wonder Whether There's A Precedent For This Willy-nilly Re-Definition Of Terms:

-- "spiritual but not religious." "Followers of Christ but not Christians." "Jumbo shrimp." (Just kidding about about the term "jumbo shrimp;" it doesn't belong in this discussion because if the shrimp in question are unusually large, the term actually makes some sense.) And Now: The Amazing Story Of Frank Schaeffer, The Atheist Who Believed In God!



If it were not already quite enough that Schaeffer claims to be simultaneously a believer and an atheist -- oh, but it is, it is -- in this book Schaeffer claims never to have met an atheist nor a believer. Nonsense is one thing. Inconsistent nonsense is quite another, and writing "or" when "nor" is correct -- strike three, siddown, Schaeffer!

Just as there was a serviceable existing description of SBNR's etc -- they're Protestants -- so also is there a term for what Schaeffer is talking about in the title of his goofy new book: he's a Christian who has crises of faith now and then. If he had them a lot he might actually wake up someday and become a nice sensible atheist, but we really shouldn't hold our breath in Frank's case.

Nonsense Doesn't Matter Except That It's Everywhere

I wouldn't care much about Reza Aslan or his new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazarethexcept that, imitating Salman Rushdie and the Ayatollah Khomeini, Aslan's book was propelled to nationwide-#1-bestseller status in the wake of a stupid Fox News interviewer asking him how dare he, a Muslim, write about Jeebus. History has repeated itself as farce: Rushdie, a brilliant writer,was lifted to superstardom because religious fanatics were under orders to assassinate him; Aslan, a mediocre writer, has become a superstar because a Fox talking head said something hilariously stupid even by the standards of Fox. Aslan isn't stupid, but he's very, very far from writing as well as Rushdie, and his book is the 7-bazillionth example of the Jesus-as-Rorschach-test genre: we're all pretty much familiar with the New Testament Jesus; New Testament scholars, from Albert Schweitzer through John Dominic Crossan to Aslan, expand upon and/or depart from the basic familiar narrative and incorrectly label their work nonfiction. Not only did Nikos Kazantzakis write a much better Jesus story than those other three, he also called his version what it is, a novel.

I wouldn't care much about the assertions that the entire story of Jesus is copied from other myths, except that it's everywhere and it's proponents are every bit as resistant to discussion as any religious fanatic. List a dozen or so substantial variations from the myth of Oedipus, or Dionysis, or Hercules, or Perseus, or Osiris, or Theseus, or Prometheus, or Romulus, or Lucifer -- if you know any of those myths it's not hard to come up with a dozen ways in which the story of Jesus varies from each one of them -- and ask the turnip smugly smiling as he says that the Jesus story is 100% copied to respond to your objections to his thesis, and he'll respond as if he didn't hear your challenge at all, and chide you for not having read his favorite mouth-breathing author's book-length rant about how they did too steal it, and conclude that obviously your faith (doesn't matter a lick to him if you're an atheist) is obviously threatened by having come into the truth he's layin' down, and -- well, I'm sure you've met idiots yourself and know what they're like. The ones claiming that Jesus' story is 100% STOLEN -- they like to use the word "stolen" -- and that the Bible is a game of Telephone, these morons wouldn't matter much except that there are so many of them. (The story of the fictitious manuscript in the the preface to Umberto Eco's Il Nome Della Rosa --now THAT is a tale of a game of Telephone, which, although fictitious, will surely delight anyone who actually knows anything about the transmission of texts originating in the Middle Ages or earlier.)

Dan Brown wouldn't matter to me a bit if he hadn't sold hundreds of millions of copies of his silly books crammed with factual errors often taken for facts, in part because Brown insists they are facts when he isn't covering his ass by pleading that his books are just fiction.

Idiots who don't get that humans are warming the climate or who don't care wouldn't bother me if they weren't numerous enough to elect public servants.

Probably My Last Comments For a While About Karl Barth's Einfuehrung in die evangelische Theologie

My third post about this book, following this post and this one.

If you know more than a dozen Christians personally, chances are that the main thrust of this book will be quite familiar to you: an embodiment of Nietzsche's definition of faith as "Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist;" nonstop elaboration of the dimensions and qualities and implications and effects of that which is not, accompanied by a stubborn refusal to consider even for a moment the reality of anything which is real, and frequent childish denunciations of reality and its fans. With Bible verses cited occasionally. What makes Barth unusual is that this everyday, thoroughly pedestrian, utterly mediocre content is transmitted in elegantly convoluted prose employing a large vocabulary and frequent sprinklings of Latin and occasional references to Greek. Barth is a fine example of someone who received an excellent education which didn't work. Much like William F Buckley in that regard.

Karl Barth's Einfuehrung in die evangelische Theologie up to page 18

This might be my last post on Barth's book. Not only has it been hugely disappointing so far, but it's extremely familiar: I'm finding in this book many of the harebrained assertions currently en vogue in Christian and also Jewish theology, or at least in the versions of those disciplines or undisciplines (How disciplined is it to make things up willy-nilly in order to defend one's preconceived notions?) which make it onto the Huffington Post. Either HP's theologians have been greatly influenced directly or indirectly by Barth, or else they and Barth share important influences.

Or maybe this is actually as close as theology can come to making sense. (Not close!)

As I mentioned in my first post on this book of Barth's, Barth wastes no time in making the untenable and insulting assertion that everyone has a God or gods, and that therefore everyone is a theologian, the only question is: what kind of theologian? From this point he rushes, as any sensible German would agree, "von einem Kurzschluss zum naechsten," from one premature conclusion to the next. He describes the God of the progressive person and of the "deified progressiveness" as a human being with all sorts of nasty qualities: aloofness, contempt, deadliness, a God of No, bringing Bad News directly opposed to the Good News of the Gospels, from which people would flee if only they could, and he throws in terms such as "Uebermensch" just in case anyone might have any doubt that he was implying that progressivism, humanism and National Socialism are all one and the same.

Nazis may have referred to themselves as "progressive." That doesn't mean that it made any sense at all when they did, any more than when Barth implied that German progressives in the 1960's were like Nazis. The Nazis were of course thoroughly regressive, regressing back to a time when the primary occupation of the Germanic times was war. Barth is also regressive, harkening back to a time of unquestioning belief in the fairy tales of the New Testament. Of course I greatly prefer Barth's regression to that of the Nazis, and of course Barth resisted the Nazis in a very courageous manner. But still he's building an entirely fictitious world here and insisting that it's real. And perpetuating the fiction of the Nazis that they were Nietzscheans, when in fact Nietzsche despised antisemitism and did all that he could to keep his sister from associating his name with it. But Nietzsche suddenly went insane in 1889, leaving his sister in charge of his estate, and she published altered editions of his work and actively associated his name with so much that he despised, and in 1935 Hitler attended her funeral. The false association of Nietzsche and the Nazis persisted for quite a while, but one expects to find it mostly among non-German non-academics. To find it in the work of a German professor who is considered to represent the twentieth-century epitome of his field is downright discouraging, even if that field is only Protestant theology.

And by the way, yes, I am referring to Barth's theology as Protestant, not Evangelical. Yes, the German words "protestantisch" and "evangelisch" look very much like the English words "Protestant" and "Evangelical," but they do not mean exactly the same. There is no exact English equivalent for either of those German terms, but "Protestant" is much closer than "Evangelical" to "evangelisch." Thst's how these things go sometimes. Yes, I know that other English translations of Barth say "Evangelical." They're wrong.

So, Barth says that everyone has a God. He goes on to say that the God of progressives is horrible, cold, distant, negating -- basically either a Nazi or potentially a Nazi -- and then compares this imaginary God to his equally-imaginary friend, "the God who is the subject of Protestant theology," who in and with mankind wishes to accomplish a helpful, healing, correcting work which will bring joy and peace. How nice! And what a stark contrast to that awful, awful God of progressivism which doesn't exist outside of his imagination any more than his own wonderful Protestant God does.

This is the sort of gibberish which is considered by many Christian theologians to represent the very best any of them has ever accomplished. And perhaps they're right.

The First Couple of Pages of Karl Barth's Einfuehrung in die evangelische Theologie

I received my copy of Karl Barth's Einführung in die evangelische Theologiein the mail yesterday and began reading it right away. I began writing notes about it, and it occurred to me that I might want to write a review of the book here in The Wrong Monkey after I was done reading. But then I decided not to wait that long, because I don't know how long it will take me to read the entire book, and because I already have quite a few notes. Maybe I won't have much to say about the rest of the book. (Or maybe I'll write many blog posts about it, who knows.)

The first thing to say is that I hate this simple-minded crap, as I have hated all of the theology I've read so far in my life. So why am I reading Barth if I hate him? Same reason I've read some -- not all. Shuddering at the very thought -- of Augustine and Aquinas and other Christian "thinkers" -- because Christianity continues to rule a very large portion of the Earth. Perhaps I will actually like some parts of this book by Barth. I continue to hope that someday I'll find some theological writing, Christian or otherwise, which I find interesting. But to be frank, that hope is fading.

Well no, that's not entirely true, not if you consider the writing of Hesiod and some of that of Homer and Ovid to be theological -- and why shouldn't you? I love that stuff. But it's so very different from Christianity. It's true that Christians were sometimes systematically persecuted by some ancient pagan Roman Emperors, who tried to stamp them out. One of the chief recurring pagan charges against the Christians was impiety. Christian apologists have pointed to this as evidence that the pagans simply didn't understand Christianity, but these apologists, most of them, don't understand what piety was to the Romans: it was a respect for every religion and every deity on the face of the Earth. Don't worry, I'm not about to become a pagan. I don't agree with any concept of piety, but I find this pagan inclusiveness much more sympathetic than any monotheism. It has a lot in common with the multiculturalism of today, and, if I have not been misinformed, with some strains of Hinduism and Buddhism. Naturally, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and every other sort of monotheist flew straight in the face of piety as the Romans defined it.

Back to Barth. Right off the bat, at the very beginning of Einführung in die evangelische Theologie, he offends me by making a very familiar assertion: that everyone has a God or gods and that therefore everyone is a theologian. Over and over again in "modern," "enlightened" Christianity there's this attempt to drag everyone down to their level. Is this sort of thing familiar to me because the contemporary theologians I know are all, directly or indirectly, influenced by Barth? Or does Barth merely swim in the same putrid stream as they? What about apes, Karl? Are they all theologians too? And dogs and cats?

I don't want to assume things and then believe them -- I'll leave that to Barth and his ilk -- but I wonder whether Barth would entertain for a moment my question about apes and cats and dogs and whether they, too, are all theologians. Most theologians, of course, would dismiss such a thought with a contemptuous snort, betraying that their image of mankind comes not from science, because of course science tells us that we share our DNA with other species, and they evolve just as we do (some of us anyway), but from the Genesis legend, which portrays man as a thing apart. (Unfortunately many biologists obviously still follow the Genesis legend rather than science inasmuch as they reject out of hand, in the face of ever-mounting evidence, the very possibility that animals may possess certain qualities and states of consciousness traditionally -- at least in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition -- thought to belong to mankind alone.)

Barth says that "we" -- presumably "we humans" -- are all theologians, and then he loses me even more thoroughly by revealing that the theology he follows has all to do with the Bible and particularly with the Gospels, the Evangelium, that God Himself, the Creator of All, the Infinite, has expressed Himself most clearly in Bible, and in the Bible especially in the New Testament, and in the New Testament especially in the Gospels. (Note the complete contrast to pagan Roman piety or modern multiculturalism.) He wrote that in 1962, after centuries of textual criticism of the Old and New Testaments, after the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library and thousands of scraps of papyrii at Oxyrhynchus, and he is considered by many Christian theologians to still represent the state of the art of theology, and that's just about the most damning thing I can think of to say about Christian theology. So many books in this world, such a big world, so many discoveries piling up concerning the world around us and things long ago, and we can see so far and ever farther beyond this Earth into regions which make it look tiny indeed, and the man many Christian theologians call the greatest philosopher of the 20th century insisted that the key to understanding Everything is distilled into Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It was a pretty silly notion when those four books were freshly written, and the more we learn the sillier, the more infuriatingly, arbitrarily narrow-minded it becomes.