Some Writers I Haven't Understood, and Some I Have

It goes without saying that when I think I've understood a writer, I could be completely mistaken.

To begin with, writers I know I haven't understood:

-- In the past few days I gave up on my most recent, and only, serious attempt to understand Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. There was one moment when I was prematurely optimistic: I opened Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte at random and saw that he had a chapter dedicated to the Crusades. Some further skimming revealed statements about the Crusades which actually seemed fact-based, down to Earth and accurate. But when I settled down to read the entire chapter, I discovered that there were only a few lines' worth of this sort of narrative in the entire chapter, embedded in a murky sea of the objective teaching of Christianity and the immense idea of coupling the finite to the infinite and so forth, and I really just can't.

-- Speaking of Kant --

yeah, I don't understand him either. I apologize for having occasionally pretended that I did.

-- Heidegger: whoosh! he goes over my head.

-- Any theologians whatsoever. I still seem to share the New Atheists' problem with theology: theologian says, "God[...]," I respond, "[...]," theologian says, "That's not what I mean when I say 'God," and I've already lost interest. I don't even have the energy to angrily ask, "Well why don't you try saying what you mean when you say 'God'?!" because I despair of getting an answer which isn't even worse.

Writers whom I think I've understood:

-- William Gaddis. The only writer of realistic dialogue known to me. Because apart from literature, most people don't speak in complete sentences which resemble those written in books. And each one of Gaddis' characters is speech-impaired in his or her specific way, which again is realistic, and allows the reader to tell them apart even in a book like JR which is about 98% unattributed dialogue. Even the few characters who are able to speak quite elegantly while sober lose their verbal form, in a quite realistic way, as they get drunk.

Jean-Paul Sartre: I believe I understand: the world, the universe, is devoid of inherent meaning, and so therefore each of our lives is as meaningful as we are able to make it. Communism, with its goal of everyone working for the common good, is more noble than capitalism with its goal of he who dies with the most toys wins.

William H Gass: His prose is pure music, prose poetry. I never found it difficult.

Gertrude Stein: Hers either. Her joy in her experience with language is as pure and beautiful as the joy of a toddler, except that where a toddler toddles around a backyard and is astounded by a pebble, Stein traveled quite a bit, and took joy in her own wide knowledge, experience and vocabulary. Emulating her, writing as well as she did? Excruciatingly difficult, maybe impossible. Reading her? Never anything but joy as pure as a toddler's smile.

Edward Gibbon and Anselm's Ontological Argument

People continue to accuse Gibbon of being unfair to Christians, a charge which from one point of view is about as true or false as it's ever been. After 15 years of New Atheism, one might be inclined to chime in and say that Gibbon is just annoying already -- if you forget that Gibbon was writing in the eighteenth century, and fighting for freedoms of expression which people by 2004 had started taking for granted.

Freedoms somewhat less in evidence in Anselm's day. I find it very difficult to believe that his ontological argument (Google anselm ontological argument, cause I just can't get into the details right now without endangering the serenity for which I am so famous) would not have been about as savagely criticized as it is today, had Anselm's contemporaries been as free to speak and write about it as we are. About as difficult as it it is for me to believe that he had a horror of every worldly advancement, this Archbishop of Canterbury.

I had already encountered Aquinas' fivefold proof of God's existence, and rolled my eyes aplenty at it. Still, I felt quite positively disposed toward Aquinas as I heard about his attack on Anselm's proof, even cheered him on a little bit. Did Aquinas develop his fivefold proof because Anselm's ontological argument seemed embarrassingly flimsy to him? Was there no more to it than that?

I find it quite hard to conceive of anyone who doesn't already believe in God having their mind changed by Aquinas, and much more difficult still to imagine them having their mind changed by Anselm. I find it quite easy to imagine people rolling their eyes back when Anselm and Aquinas were alive, and holding their tongues because it wasn't worth being tortured and then burned alive.

A few days ago, I was made aware of the title of Richard Dawkins' latest book, by walking past it in a bookstore: Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide. And I felt quite embarrassed, as an atheist. As with Aquinas and even more so with Anselm, but in reverse, I thought about Dawkins' lack of appeal with non-atheists. Even a lot of us who are atheists find Dawkins thoroughly obnoxious. Is a believer going to see a book with a title like Outgrowing God and feel any way except personally insulted and less well-disposed toward atheists than they were a moment before?

It's hard for me to imagine.

And Dawkins doesn't have the excuse which embarrassed defenders of Anselm or Aquinas -- if any of them ever do feel embarrassed. I can't think of any such at the moment, but than again I haven't subjected myself to many of their fans -- always have at hand: that Anselm and Aquinas rarely came into contact with someone who is allowed to say that they think differently.

Anselm with his argument and Aquinas with his proofs, were they answering Lucretius? Or their own subconscious minds? That's one thing which still puzzles me: to whom were they talking? Were they actually trying to change anyone's mind, beyond some purely imaginary mind of some non-believer who was not ever at hand? Is this the Glass Bead Game I've wondered about my whole life, the one they played (and still play) just because they loved the game so much, with no further point to it at all?

A Short Manifesto

Whether or not someone believes that God or gods exist is much less important to me today than before I met a lot of New Atheists who proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that atheism is no guarantee that a person is even a little bit bright. I'm pro-environment, pro-multi-culture, pro LGBT rights (which are just human rights, no more and no less), I'm in favor of universal health care and helping homeless people and refugees. Where people stand on issues like those is much more important to me than their religious beliefs. And despite what some New Atheists and some right-wing Christians will try to tell you, a person's religious beliefs or lack of them is no indicator of where they stand on any of those issues.

I'll admit that I tend to think of theology as worse than useless, but I've read enough philosophy to know that theology and philosophy aren't synonymous, even though many theologians and New Atheists seem to disagree. I think that studying history and philosophy is as important as studying science, and for similar reasons. (And history includes the history of religions, plural.) I like Nietzsche's statement (he was a philosopher, kiddies) that life without music would be a mistake. All the arts do is make life bearable. Many New Atheists are very strong in science, but they tend to cultivate the antagonism between science and the humanities, and that antagonism is very unfortunate -- and only a few centuries old, and much more pronounced in the US than in, for example, Germany. Milton wrote about science and Galileo wrote sonnets, and of course there was Leonardo da Vinci. You don't have to choose between science and the arts; in fact, it's very unfortunate when anyone is antagonistic toward one in the supposed name of the other.

Theology

Seen in an Internet meme:

"God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God." ― John Shelby Spong

God is just more thing people have created, and the main purpose of theology going back hundreds of years at least, and probably thousands of years into the past, has been to keep people confused about that very thing, to insulate them from that uncomfortable insight. A few years' worth of contact with New Atheists has left me much more sympathetic with people who just wish to be left in peace to continue to go to their churches, mosques, synagogues and other temples, but I still have just about no patience at all with theologians. Go ahead and worship God if you want to, just don't try to tell me that it makes sense to do so. (And let's not forget those who actually don't believe in God anymore, but still attend religious services for other reasons: for the music and art, or because their friends and family are there, or what have you. Our society's discussions about religion are not nearly open enough yet for us to have any idea how many people might be in this category)

I don't want to pick on most people any more for going about their religious habits and rituals, because it's just mean. The main reason people believe in God or gods is because it is comforting to do so. Subjecting the idea of God to real, honest scrutiny, and seeing that it just doesn't make sense, can be very painful. It certainly has been very painful to me. And if the leading alternative to belief, for the rank and file believers, is something no better than New Atheism, then in some cases it may be better, kinder, just to leave the rank and file alone.

Moving from the rank and file believers to the theologians, the official and unofficial representatives of the world's religions and those who rebel against those representatives, but have in common with them that they spend their entire careers studying and describing an omnipotent Being or beings which don't exist, which means that they're very free to just make stuff up as they go -- many of them, perhaps most, can be placed in one of two camps: firstly, there are those who also believe, and who use their studies to keep themselves blissfully confused as they keep their flocks confused; and secondly, there are those who do not believe, perhaps have never believed, but who see what a glorious scam it can be to exploit beliefs which are so widespread, beliefs which are at one and the same time so powerful and so fragile. In the first case you've got the blind leading the blind; and in the second case you've got shepherds more interested in shearing their sheep than in protecting them. Neither case is good.

And besides their congregations, those who seek out what they have to offer, there is the question of how much they will continue to interfere with those of us who aren't buying what they're selling. We pay lip service in the US to the concept of separation of church and state, but we're far from actually achieving that separation. One thing which is even farther from being achieved is the separation of church and academia, which leads to non-fact-based approaches to biology and climatology and history and every other field of inquiry.

Well. Here we are again where we've already been so often. The insistence on fact-based approaches to biology and climatology is gaining public support because it's becoming more and more obvious that we're going to need such approaches in order to survive as a species. When it comes to disciplines such as history, the interference of theology is much less widely understood, and therefore much more ingrained and tenacious. Two or three centuries ago, theologians absolutely controlled almost all of the universities in "Western civilisation." Since then, science has done a somewhat better job of freeing itself from that domination than have history and philosophy. Indeed, there is still a lot of crossover between theology on the one hand, and history and philosophy on the other. This has led some New Atheists to throw out the babies of history and philosophy along with the theological bathwater in which they sometimes swim, which in turn has led to a lot of New Atheist stupidity. See posts labeled new atheists in this blog. Religion doesn't poison everything, it hasn't been free of benefits, but it has crunked up a lot of things as well.

Fiktion Wichtig Nehmen Ist Albern, Aber Das Tue Ich Noch

SPOLIER ALERT! LIES ZUERST HESSES SIDDHARTHA, ODER KOENNTE FOLGENDES EINIGES FUER DICH SPOILEN!

Ich erinnere mich nicht mehr, zu welcher Zeit ich anfing, Literatur sehr wichtig zu nehmen. Ich weiss nicht mehr, wann ich begann, selbst Fiktion zu schreiben. Mit 8 Jahren schrieb ich das Drehbuch zu einem kurzen Filme, vielleicht was das mein erster Versuch als Author, vielleicht nicht.

Ich erinnere mich sehr genau, wie mir so um 1987 oder '88, als ich 25 oder 27 Jahre alt war, ganz ploetzlich, in einem Klassenzimmer in der University of Tennessee, Knoxville, wo wir Aenglistik sehr wichtig und gewichtig nahm, von einem Augenblick zum naechsten, das ganze mir komplett albern vorkam: zwei Jahrhunderte frueher hatte ein englischer Dichter ein Gedicht geschrieben, und nun nahmen wir das Gedicht sehr ernst.

Ich gar nicht zuletzt. Es war ein honors course, ein Seminar fuer Fortgeschrittene unter Tennessees Studenten, fuer Studenten, die Gedichte besonders ernst nahmen, und ich hatte sie vielleicht gar ungewoehnlich ernst genommen auch verglichen mit diesen anderen honors students. Es kann sein, ich erinnere mich nicht genau, dass es mir alles ueploetzlich doof vorkam, als ich selbst mitten in einem von den praetentioesen Spontan-Reden war, mit denen ich in solchen Seminaren gar nicht scheu war.

Oder vielleicht sprach zu diesm Augenblck die Professorin, oder ein/e von den anderen honors-Student/innen.

Das Bewusstsein von der peinlichen Eitelkeit und Leerheit des ganzen hat mir seit nun fast 30 Jahren nicht losgelassen. Trotzdem, bliebe ich in diesem Seminar, machte meinen Bachelor of Arts zu Ende, machte einen Anlauf auf graduate school. Ich habe tratzdem noch wir vor Fiktion geschrieben. Ich habe gar zwei Romane zu ende geschrieben, unter wohl mehr als einer Dutzenden, welche ich angefangen habe.

Aber seit diesem einen Augenblick der Eleuchtung und Entzauberung ist der Anteil der Fiktion scharf gesunken unter dem, was ich geschrieben habe, und die der non fiction gestiegen.

Diesen Tag sprach ich privat mit dieser Professorin darueber. Sie schien mich nicht zu verstehen. Ich habe bisher keinen Aenglisten oder Germanisten oder Dichter gefunden, der aehnlicher Meining zu sein scheint.

Ich las also Hermanns Hesses Siddhartha, in der Hoffnung, es wuerde mir helfen, endlich den sehr hoch geschaetzten Romancier auch schaetzen zu koennen, und zuerst ging alles gut. Aber als mir klar wurde, dass die Titelfigur Siddhartha nicht Siddhartha Gautama, aka der Buddha, war, sondern ein Zeitgenosse mit gleichem Vornamen und einigen Aehnlichkeit der beiden Biographien, und dass dieser Roman keine Biographie des Buddhas ist, fing mir an, sauer zu werden.

Leider mag ich Hermann Hessens Screiben immer noch nicht. Vielleicht sollte ich es doch aufgeben, herausfinden zu wollen, was es dann so besonderes on Das Glasperlenspiel ist.

Vielleicht is Hesse einfach nicht fuer mich.

Warum? Vielleicht weil ich nicht noch den Dingern suche, nachdem er und die beiden Siddharthas suchten. Ich suche nicht nach Erleuchtung, sei es, weil ich schon erleuchtet bin oder sei es weil ich gar nicht einmal verstehe was Leute meine wenn sie "Erleuchtung" sagen, oder warum auch immer: ich suche nach anderen Dingern. ("Moechtest Du Erleuchtung bekommen?" "Nein, danke sehr, Magister. Um ganz ehrlich zu sein, wuerde ich sehr viel lieber ganz grosse Mengen von Geld bekommen, als Erleuchtung.")

Vielleicht finde ich den Zugang zu Hesse nicht, weil er Theologe oder etwas Theologenaehnliches ist. Leser dieses Blogs kenne meine Allergie gegen Theologisches sehr gut. Wenn Goethe und Nietzsche ueber Theologie schreiben, verstehe ich sie sehr gut.

Alles, was ich mit Sicherheit ueber die Sache weiss, ist, dass ich Siddhartha ca 30 Seiten Lang mochte and dann stets weniger, und dass ich jetzt gar keine Lust habe, mehr von Hesse zu lesen, und dass ich es lieber mit Aristoteles Πολιτικά versuchen mag, und mit einigen anderen vorchristlichen griechischen Authoren, die hier in Ausgaben von Teubner und Oxford und Loeb und Anderen rumliegen. Eigentlich wurde mir gestern gar prickelnd nach Aristoteles, lange bevor ich Siddhartha zu Ende gelesen hatte. (Wustest Du eigentlich, wie schwach die Handschiften-Ueberlieferung von Aristoteles' Politik ist? Um 1930 schrieb H Rackham: "The oldest evidence for the text is a translation in barbarous Latin by a Dominican monk of the thirteenth century, William of Moerbeke in Flanders [...] The five best extant Greek copies are of the fifteenth century [...]" Seitdem haben Funden von Papyri dies aufgebessert, aber nicht um vieles.)

Why Are Religious Believers Re-Defining Terms So Often These Days?

There's a been huge amount of redefining of the terms "God " and "religion" by believers lately, as well as of many other terms having to do with religion. (Look out, any time now they'll start re-defining "believer.") A recent OP in a FB group says, "God hates religion." Not too many years ago, most people would have found such an assertion utterly bizarre. Now, it barely occasions a batted eyelid. It's par for the course in discussions of religion: "I'm spiritual but not religious." "We're followers of Christ but not Christians." "God hates religion." "The authors of the Old Testament never meant to be taken literally; their intent was always far beyond that." Gibberish. Non-stop straight-up gibberish.

When terms are not clearly defined, or when the definitions can be changed without objection whenever anybody wants to change them, it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion about the subject at hand.

And I have long suspected that THAT is why so much of this willy-nilly redefinition of terms has been going on lately, as well as why many believers object to any of these redefinitions of terms so seldom: because the last thing that they want is a coherent discussion about belief.

And I suspect that the reason why so many people want so badly to avoid a coherent discussion about religion may be that they subconsciously fear that a coherent discussion with clear terms might be all that it would take to make them lose their faith. Except of course for those cases where people are only pretending to be religious in order to exploit those who really believe. Nobody denies anymore that some people are like that.

In the meantime, trying to talk about religion with a believer is a lot like Alice's Wonderland. Then again, making it up as you go, and not just an indifference toward reality, clarity and coherence, but contempt for them, has always been required in theology. Perhaps this wholesale redefinition of terms is merely the newest fashion in a stream of bullshit which is thousands of years long. 500 years ago people saw angels and demons. Today, they insist that words don't mean what they mean whenever we God-damned disrespectful atheists threaten to make too much sense of a religious topic.

What will they think of next.

The Ancient Israelites WERE Dumb Enough To Take The Biblical Stories Literally

John Dominic Crossan says: "“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

I, on the other hand, say that the ancient Israelites were dumb enough to take the Bible stories literally -- which is nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn't make them any dumber than the ancient Greeks with Homer or the ancient Germanic tribes with tales of Odin and Thor -- and that a lot of people today are dumb enough to take John Dominic Crossan, not to mention John Shelby Spong, seriously.

I'm sorry, I'm not going for it at all. A smaller percentage of Christians and practicing Jews are taking the Bible literally now than thousands of years ago, not a greater percentage. I do not believe that symbolic intent on the part of the Biblical authors would have been completely misunderstood for 2000 years until the late 20th century when then likes of Crossan could suddenly set everyone straight again. I do not believe that Biblical literalism was a completely Gentile thing, and that the Christians were simply too out of touch with the Jews, or that the Jews were simply too polite, for the misunderstanding to have been pointed out for 2000 years.

Crossan and Spong and other modern theologians don't want to let go of the privileged position of the Bible and other early Christian writings, and put them in the perspective of being just myths among other myths. And further, they don't what to admit that people thousands of years ago were more primitive in their beliefs than people generally are today. And so, since there is nothing actually in Biblical texts to justify seeing them as standing apart from other ancient myths, nothing to justify the way the Christians destroyed so many other religions, and since there is nothing in any ancient myths to justify denying that they are primitive and cruel and crude, Crossan and his ilk make things up like complex symbolic layers of meaning, and insist that those thoroughly modern things -- postmodern, actually -- actually are there in the ancient texts.

There's no reason to be ashamed of ancient texts. We've have thousands of years to learn since the Iliad and Genesis were written. We've built upon ancient texts in many large and small ways. They're wonderful things when seen for what they really are, they deserve a place of honor in the history of our society. (Just, not nearly as central a place as the Bible had in the European Middle Ages with its Inquisition torturing and killing everyone who didn't honor it enough.) They don't need to be gussied up by any of this modern theological bullshit. Hesiod's description of Achilles' shield doesn't contain myriad layers of symbolic meaning. It's just a vivid description of a wicked-cool shield.

Old And New Theological Nonsense

The people who wrote the Old and New Testaments and the Koran all thought that God was a being who looked like a man, who lived in the sky and watched us, and so did almost all practicing Jews, Christians and Muslims until a couple of centuries ago. Those Christians and Muslims, plus those of the practicing Jews who believed in life after death (never a unanimous belief among Jews) believed that Heaven was up in the sky where God lived, and that Hell was deep underground. They believed that angels and demons, who looked somewhat like people except that they had wings and the angels had halos and demons had horns, were flying around us all the time, the angels having come down from the sky and the demons up from deep underground. They believed that Satan, an angel who used to live in the sky with God and the other angels, had been thrown out of Heaven and now operated from Hell, deep underground.

All of those paintings and sculptures made over thousands of years' time of God and angels and demons and Satan and Heaven and Hell -- they weren't symbolic presentations of principles of physics which weren't elaborated until long after they were painted or carved -- they were realistic depictions of what people believed literally existed. People claimed to have seen God and/or Jesus and/or angels, and these people weren't thought to be liars or hallucinating or over-imaginative -- and they damned well weren't thought to have been speaking in parables either. What they said was taken literally and they were thought to be blessed.

The many people accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition and Protestant witch-trials, most of them women, were usually thought to have literally had sex with horned flying demons, as part of Satan's master-plan to conquer the world with evil.

Now, a few people still believe in all of the above. When "progressive" theologians say that those people are misunderstanding things which were never meant to have been taken literally, they're full of shit. It's as simple as that. When they say that the bible and Koran weren't meant by their authors to be taken literally, they're full of shit. When they say that God is physics or love or some kind of principle of idea, they're saying something completely different than the Bible and Koran authors. They've had the good sense to reject the literal existence of all of those supernatural things in the Bible and in all of those religious pictures, but if they remain practicing Jews or Christians or Muslims, then they hardly ever have the intellectual honesty to admit that they believe in things which are completely different than the things in their holy books. They've switched from the nonsense of preaching the literal belief in all of those things to the nonsense of preaching that those things weren't literally believed in for the great majority of the history of they claim are their religions. It's maddeningly seldom that a contemporary theologian will talk sense about the theology of past eras.

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.

I Gather That Christianity Is Not A Religion

After thousands of years' worth of general agreement that "religion" means what it means, all of a sudden people are telling us that Christianity is not a religion, that Buddhism is not a religion, that they're spiritual but not religious, that they're followers of Christ but not Christians. (I didn't make that last one up, there's at least one very silly rock group saying that. I forgot the name of the group. I haven't heard them, just read about them. I can't remember whether they're considered Christian rock -- by some. Not by themselves of course, because they're followers of Christ, not Christians.)

I think this sudden denial of the meaning of the word "religion" is related to the recent absurd assertion -- unfortunately, not nearly absurd enough to get theologians fired even from the world's most prestigious universities -- that Biblical literalism is no more than 200 years old.

It's as plain as can be that before the study of science and history began to give us more accurate ideas of things, Christians and practicing Jews believed that the world was 6000 years old. Including the most highly-educated Christians and practicing Jews. They believed that Moses led 600,000 families out of Egypt and parted the Red Sea, and the Christians, at least, although not all of the Jews, believed that Jesus rose from the dead. They believed that angels and demons were all around us all the time -- not metaphorical angels and demons but real ones. The real un-metaphorical torture and killing of the Inquisition -- unfortunately, even claiming that the Inquisition never killed anyone has not been enough to get academics fired from history departments, let alone theology departments -- had very often to do with this belief in the literal existence of those demons. And let's not let Protestants off the hook here. Those 20 people in Salem in the 1690's weren't executed over differences in interpretation of mythological tropes.

And all of the universities in Western Europe and the Americas were very firmly in control of Christian authorities until a few centuries ago. What happened about 200 years ago is almost the exact opposite of this very popular assertion among today's theologians: Biblical literalism didn't appear for the first time. Rather, it started to fade from its dominance as the default intellectual position in the West.

Both the Christians who deny that they're religious and the ones who say that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally, that all of it is parables, not just the parables but all of it, are sort of half-smart about religion. They sort of half-suspect that religion is not the font of all wisdom which it has always claimed to be. (They may well deny that religious leaders ever made such a claim.) But they can't bear to consciously admit it, they are too heavily invested in religion, it would simply be too painful and/or too damned inconvenient, and so instead of a rational perception of religion for what it is and a description of it which makes any damn sense at all, we have this mass tendency to deny that religion is what it is, and this massive falsification of the history of religion.

This is one reason why it's important to study history. And really studying history means mastering the languages which people wrote and spoke in other times and places. So that you can check for yourself, and let people know when theologians, and even some historians, are trying to hand them a crock. This is what Gibbon did, and Bury, and Runciman, and this is why all 3 of them have been attacked to this day by apologists, many of them posing as historians.

"That's Not What I Mean When I Say 'God'."

Traditionally, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God has been an entity who looks like a man with a grey or white beard, lives in the sky and intervenes personally in the lives of people. The Greek god Zeus bears a lot of resemblances to the Abrahamic capital-G God. There's just one letter's difference between "Zeus" and "Deus," Greek for "God."

Today, most Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in a God who differs to a lesser or greater degree from the bearded man in the sky. Sometimes to such a great degree that, instead of "God," they could call it something else, like "physics" or "love" or "gravity."

So why do they still call it "God"? (Lucretius was posing the very same question to pagans almost 2100 years ago.) Nietzsche may have found the answer: he declared, in his book Der Antichrist, in the 52nd chapter:

"»Glaube« heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist." ("Religious belief means not wanting to know what is true.")

They don't seem to want to know that not very long ago at all, when members of their religions said "God," they meant an omnipotent bearded man in the sky, and not physics or love or gravity. They seem to want to pretend that the bearded man in the sky was always a symbol, of -- something. Something other than an actual omnipotent bearded man who lived in the sky.

It's difficult to talk sense with people who don't want to make sense.

Nothing I've said in this post is a secret, or hard to understand. But many people, maybe most people on Earth, don't want to understand anything of the sort. Some of these people who don't want to understand such things, things which only become clearer and clearer with the passage of time, are intelligent enough that they have to study theology full-time just to keep themselves confused.

The Religious Situation

Back in the 20th century there was a particularly silly conversation going on among some literary critics and associated buffoons, asking when and if anyone was ever going to write The Great American Novel. Philip Roth made appropriate fun of this pretentious silliness by calling the novel he published in 1973 The Great American Novel.

One of the reasons it was silly was because many great American novels had already been written. But if you insisted on calling one of them THE Great American Novel, well that was also no problem: Herman Melville published it in 1851, and America's literary critics, those monumental wastes, trashed it. It's called Moby Dick. It stands comparison with War and Peace and Don Quixote and Tom Jones and Ulysses and any other Greatest Novel Of All Time you got. Moby Dick is the stuff.

It begins with a page concerning the word "whale" in English and the words for whales in several other languages; then a dozen pages of quotes concerning whales taken from the a variety of sources arranged chronologically from Genesis up to Melville's time; then comes Chapter 1, whose first paragraph contains these three sentences:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

When I first read Moby Dick I had already been very pleasantly surprised by the literary whaling voyage undertaken before Chapter 1, but when I read the above passage, Melville had me. I knew that he was one of my guys and that I was one of his. It came as no surprise to me when, some time after my first reading of Moby Dick, and then of his novel The Confidence Man and his story "Bartleby the Scrivener," I learned that Melville had been an atheist. Of course he had. The thing about needing the strong moral principle in order not to spectacularly lose his composure and manners had already told me that he was like me.

I came here today to talk to you about the people who make you want to step into the street and lose all control of the angry part of yourself: Christian theologians. I got a book today: The Religious Situation by Paul Tillich, translated from Die religioese Lage der Gegenwart by H Richard Niebuhr.

I have this book because I am weak, in insufficient control of my bookworm tendencies, and because it was free, one of the books being given away at the local library. I knew better than to even pick up a book by Paul Tillich. And when I read on the back cover of this Living Age Books edition, Published by Meridian Books, Fifth printing July 1960, that Nietzsche was one of the book's subjects, I knew even better.

But I'm weak. And so, on the first page of Niebuhr's introduction to his translation of Tillich's book, I read this:

"It is not a book about the religion of the churches but an effort to interpret the whole contemporary situation from the point of view of one who constantly inquires what fundamental faith is expressed in the forms which civilization takes. Tillich is more interested in the religious values of secularism, of modern movements in art, science, education, and politics than in tracing tendencies within the churches or even in theology."

"The religious values of secularism." Cato the Younger falls on his sword, Ishmael (the narrator of Moby Dick) gets on a ship, some poor guy who doesn't know what to do walks out onto a crowded Manhattan street and actually does start knocking people's hats from their heads, or something even less socially acceptable, because he simply can't take it any more, until they drag him screaming to Bellevue -- Melville and I write about it. Maybe I'll take a hint from Roth and write a book and call it The Religious Situation. Or The Moral Landscape.

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?

The Academics Haven't Convinced Me That Jesus Existed. With Very Few Exceptions, They Haven't Convinced Me That They've Really Begun To Investigate The Matter

Here we go again, round and round and round, getting all worked up, getting nowhere. Isn't it all just perfectly dreadful.

Historicists, people who believe that Jesus of Nazareth existed, including many atheists who don't believe any of the New Testament stories of supernatural things, often correctly point out that the great majority of academics are historicists. And they often correctly point out that most of the mythicists, the people who have doubts about Jesus' existence, are amateurs, and often do a spectacularly poor job of making the case that it's less than certain that Jesus existed. To be clear: mythicists don't merely doubt the supernatural stories about Jesus. They (we) are not convinced that those stories are even based on a real person, named Jesus, who came from Nazareth. We figure: so much of the New Testament is clearly legend, the existence of Jesus might be just one more legendary detail -- a rather small detail when one considers the proportional of legend in the New Testament.

I agree that there are a lot of zany mythicists. I've criticized some of them so harshly in this blog that some of them, apparently having stopped reading before the end of one post or another, have assumed that I am an historicist, or even a very devout Christian. So, for the billionth time and the 2nd time in this post: I'm an atheist and I'm not convinced that Jesus existed.

Yes, I've criticized some mythicists very harshly. I've also pointed out that the fact that some of them argue the mythicist case very poorly says nothing at all about the soundness or unsoundness of the case itself, the soundness or unsoundness of the position: it is not certain that Jesus existed.

There must be a term in formal logic for this sort of fallacy: the fact that A argues the case for 1 poorly does not say anything about the soundness or unsoundness of 1. Whatever logicians would call this fallacy, it's the primary argument of the historians.

Surprisingly, historicists who are also academic specialists in Biblical studies very often assert that the evidence for Jesus' existence is more extensive and solid than the evidence for the existence of Socrates or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Surprisingly, because it's so obviously wrong: we have writings from 3 of Socrates' contemporaries, compared to 0 for Jesus. Besides Caesar's own writings we have those of his contemporaries Cicero and Sallust. We have likenesses of Socrates and Caesar and Alexander in the form of sculptures which were obviously based on real people. We know what each of them looked like. Not so with Jesus. And in the case of Caesar and Alexander there's the little detail of them having been the leaders of huge armies and huge states, which means that huge numbers of people would have had to have been silent about them being fictional.

And you know what? Just like the historicists pointing out unsound mythicist arguments doesn't prove that Jesus existed, my pointing out unsound historicist arguments doesn't prove he didn't exist. Far and wide here, no one is proving anything one way or another about whether Jesus existed.

Still, the fact that the academic consensus that Jesus existed is so solid impresses many people. And the consensus shouldn't just be dismissed. However, it is not quite proper to compare mythicists, people who challenge that consensus, to global warming deniers and Holocaust deniers, people who oppose the consensus of climatologists and historians of the 20th century respectively, as Bart Ehrman has done, because Biblical studies is not exactly the same as climatology and 20th century history. Biblical studies is problematic, as scholars say when they suspect that some nonsense may be afoot, screwing up the work of serious people. Biblical studies is not always distinguishable from theology: sometimes a person whom everyone would think of as a Biblical scholar has diplomas which say that his or specialty is theology, and sometimes a theologian has diplomas which say that he or she is a Biblical scholar. There is a certain amount of overlap.

And theology is certainly not at all like 20th century history or climatology. It simply isn't, and if you want to insist that it is, I have nothing to say to you about it. Instead, I'm trying to communicate with serious people here.

Christians theologians are the people who made the Dark Ages dark, who wiped out pagan religions, who tortured and killed fellow Christians for not being the proper sort of Christians and not believing the correct things about the way the world was. They imprisoned Roger Bacon, over academic differences. They killed people for saying that they believed Copernicus' theories. They threatened to torture Galileo, and kept him under house arrest for the last several years of his life. All over academic differences. They condemned Darwin's theories when they were new, although by that time, the mid-19th century, they were no longer allowed to torture and kill the people who disagreed with them. They were slow to come around concerning 20th- and 21stcentury physics. They're still interfering with stem-cell research.

I'm not claiming that present-day theologians want to torture and kill people who disagree with them. (Not all of them.) I also don't deny that, although they're very opposed to even discussing the question of whether or not Jesus existed, most of them presently do acknowledge that Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham are mythical figures. Most of them. Many have even stopped arguing altogether for the existence of Moses.

But they haven't led the way in academic consensus, they've never been cutting edge and they're still not.

That's the theologians, though. Not the Biblical scholars, the very ones who have dismantled our belief in the literal truth of the earlier stories in the Bible, the very ones who've shown us that Bible, supposedly the inalterable word of God, has indeed gone through some revisions over the course of centuries.

Except that you can't always tell who's one and who's the other, who's a theologian and who's a Biblical scholar, and who's partly both. Except that sometimes it seems that the theology still corrupts almost every single scholar in the field. Times such as when people try to discuss Jesus' historicity, and the scholars almost all insist that that already has been thoroughly studied, and that Jesus' historicity has been solidly proven. And even more so when many of them go even farther than that and needlessly insult people for thinking that there could be any doubt, for merely wanting to discuss the question. I get a really unpleasant sense of being in the presence of traditionally-Christian, Medieval attitudes at such times.

Nobody's proven anything here. The academics haven't proven that Jesus existed. Not to me, anyway. Not yet. I certainly haven't proven that Jesus was made up by St Paul or someone else. But maybe, just possibly, I've gotten one or two people to begin to wonder whether the academic Biblical scholars sometimes cease to behave like 21st-century academics in fields like meteorology or chemistry or 20th-century history or physics or Classical studies or math, and begin to get a little Medieval, when the question of the Historical Jesus is brought up.

I Could've Been Even Clearer: New Atheists Are Ignorant ABOUT HISTORY

(I'm not ignorant of the objection which will be raised by some, that "ignorant about" in the title is incorrect and should be "ignorant of," but those who would so object may themselves be ignorant of the ways in which language changes more quickly than manuels of supposedly "correct" language. I'm lucky I eventually found me a whole differnt kind a English teacher. "About" is correct in the post title. "Ignorant of history" would suggest that New Atheists are unaware that there is something known as history, and honestly, in several cases it's not as bad as that.)

This insight -- that I could've been clearer about the bug the New Atheists have put up my butt -- came to me last night in the midst of a horribly unsuccessful attempt to communicate with someone about my previous blog post. The New Atheist with whom I was trying to communicate was disputing my accusation of Richard Dawkins' ignorance, and referred to Dawkins' refutation of Anselm's cosmological argument.



That led to an a-ha moment for me: Dawkins engages in theological disputation, and I don't. I mean, I knew already that Dawkins debated theologians, but this suddenly made clear to me how Dawkins and I approach certain subjects, such as Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, in two completely different ways: Dawkins from a theological perspective and I from an historical perspective. I've never engaged in a theological debate, and I don't ever intend to. I've got a streak going, 54 consecutive years without engaging in theological debate, and I'm proud of that streak and I intend to keep it going. Dawkins has spent some time countering Anselm's ontological argument. I'm much more interested in Anselm's role in things like the investiture controversy, a power struggle in the 11th and 12th centuries between some Popes and some European monarchs, because those Popes and those kings and the power they fought over all actually existed, whereas God, the sole subject of ontological arguments, does not. It's similar to the way that long debates over who would win completely imaginary fights between completely imaginary comic book heroes -- debates not seldom participated in by New Atheists, notorious for their comic book fandom -- do not interest me, while discussions of things which do exist or have existed do interest me.

So there it is, one major difference between me and Dawkins: I have nothing to say about theology. Maybe I'm wrong, but it really does seem unnecessary to me to respond at all to someone like, for instance, Terry Eagleton. In my opinion, Eagleton makes himself seem quite horrible enough. No need for any help from me. And as Eagleton attacks people like Dawkins he also promotes Christianty, making it look horrible too. What is there left for me to do, except perhaps to ask people to please note that just because Eagleton and I both criticize Dawkins, it doesn't mean we'd have one nice thing to say about each other?

Yes, I know that theists do exist, and that some of them are ready at the drop of a hat to discuss Anselm's theology and in some cases even to defend it. But because of historical developments between Anselm's time and our own, there is no requirement for me to pretend that Anselm's theology is worth taking seriously, or that there is any Christian theology which doesn't bore me excruciatingly. Maybe I'm wrong, and Dawkins is right, and there actually is a need to critique theology. I think all that's needed is to offer something better. And what's not better than theology?

When I take Dawkins to task for talking about Islam without having read the Koran, it is not a theological objection -- although Dawkins going into detail about someone like Anselm makes his proud ignorance of the contents of the Koran look even more provincial than it already did -- but an historical one. From my point of view with my emphasis on the importance of the study of history, the importance of reading the Koran is not in order to be able to discuss God. What is said in the Koran about God resembles what Anselm said about God in that both are talking about something purely imaginary, and therefore infinitely less interesting than all of the Muslims who have actually existed and actually do exist now. We're talking about billions of people, and one book, not even a particularly long book, which might just tell you more about all of those people than any other book could. If you're at all interested in those people, why on Earth wouldn't you read that one book? And Dawkins, as we all know, can't seem to shut up about all of those people. He's constantly trying to tell us all just exactly what is going on with all of those people. It's beyond the beyond. It reminds me of the anti-Western cleric in exile in London in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses,



who constantly issues stern warnings of the evils and dangers of the West, who stays in an apartment with the curtains always drawn so that he will not see the West, and whenever he must leave the apartment his followers walk before and behind him and to his left and right and hold up veils so that he will never get a glimpse of the West. The West he's always criticizing and damning. Okay, Dawkins isn't actually quite that daffy, but he's headed in that direction.

And he has set the tone for New Atheism, and so we get things like Free Inquiry's publication of Michael Paulkovich's list of 126 people who supposedly should've left us some mention of Jesus but didn't -- a publication in the leading New Atheist magazine, in New Atheism's flagship, almost, of an essay that would've gotten an F in any Ancient History 101, because it purports to be about ancient history, and yet is so jaw-droppingly free of any connection to something like historical facts.

The Great Debate Over What Jesus Said About Homosexuality Is Underway

No, I don't actually find it particularly great, but I'm just one snarky person. Many thousands of Huffington Post Readers' Comments have been posted in response to one article entitled What Jesus Says About Homosexuality. (Yep: "says." Present tense.) The official HP position: Jesus said nothing about homosexuality and many things about acceptance and non-judgmentality. Conservatives counter: Jesus did say things about upholding the old law, and Jewish society was quite homophobic at the time. So far, both sides are right. (Except that Jesus also said things about tearing down the old order.) Both sides are right, that is, if we stipulate that "What Jesus says" = "What Jesus is portrayed as saying in the Gospels." Homophobic positions are taken in the New Testament outside of the Gospels. The progressives, the pro-LGBT-rights side, say that it doesn't matter what the rest of the New Testament says, the conservatives say Uh-huh it does too matter.

And then there are those who insist that it's "obvious" that Jesus and the Apostle John were a gay couple, and also that it is obvious that the centurion and his servant whom Jesus healed were a gay couple. They say this based entirely on the text of the Bible. If anyone has even attempted yet to explain how this could both be obvious and escape the attention of ridiculous numbers of people studying the Bible with ridiculous diligence for a ridiculously long time, I haven't noticed it. But of course this is theology. There's absolutely no requirement to make sense, whether you're perpetrating progressive, human-friendly theology or reactionary misanthropic theology.

And then there are those -- razor-sharp minds, these ones -- who insist that the word "homosexual" was not coined until the 19th century and that this is relevant. I suspect that there is significant overlap between this group and the group who insist on referring to Jesus as Jeshua or Yoshua or Joshua or something else other than Jesus, and consider themselves to be deep.

I don't know how any of the last group are Mainline Protestants. Not many, perhaps. But progressive Mainline Protestants tend to be very impressed with themselves in this discussion of Jesus' LGBT policies, as they generally are impressed with themselves. As far as I've noticed so far the progressive Mainline Protestants don't talk a lot about how it was their church who killed all of those people in Salem in the 1690's for witchcraft. There once again we have the tendency among progressive Christians, which I've pointed out so often, to ignore, distort, excuse away and misinterpret, in short, to lie* their smug ugly asses off about the history of their religion. And that, of course, is good traditional Christianity, as thoroughly Christian as constantly pointing out that other Christians are doin' it wrong. (*Of course, "to lie" implies conscious and deliberate deception, and so the term does not apply at all to many of these jokers, because they actually believe their own malarkey, or so it surely seems, head-spinning as it is.)

This Christian tendency to just straight-up make stuff up goes all the way back to the era of the martyrs, if Candida Moss and others are correct in their assertion that the martyrs never were, and, of course, thoroughly obviously, but we've become so thoroughly used to it that it bears repeating, further back, to the very beginning of Christianity, to the basic Christian story: an Omnipotent Creator of Everything sends His Son to Earth to be a human sacrifice (even 2000 years ago human sacrifice was an outmoded, primitive, rejected concept in Greek and Roman and also in Jewish culture), a sacrifice which the Omnipotent One, in His infinite mercy, provided in order to save mankind from -- the awful wrath of... uh... the Omnipotent Creator. Offhand I can't think of any myth which is so far from possessing internal logic.

Theologians, Christians and others but especially Christians, attempt to prevent themselves and others from even addressing the ridiculousnesses of it all by referring to them as "mysteries." The only thing which strikes me as mysterious here is how successful the theologians continue to be in preventing people from thinking clearly about the whole fooferah. The success with which they pose questions like "What did [or, more often than "did," "does"] Jesus say about homosexuality?" and deflect sensible counter-questions such as:

"Who gives a rat's ass?"

"Why are you pretending that what Jesus said [says] is equivalent to what the New Testament says he said, and ignoring the evidence of the non-canonical Gospels and of the extensive polemical re-writes of the entire New Testament in the second and third centuries?"

Or, my favorite:

"Why do you all still insist upon insisting that the question of the Historical Jesus has been thoroughly examined and was answered conclusively: Yep, he existed, decades ago, or centuries ago, depending on what sort of exaggerating full-of-shit mood you're in on a particular day?"

Actually, that's my co-favorite. The actually more pertinent and pithy question is "Who gives a shit?" Why do we keep pretending that what Jesus said is so damn important one way or another, even if we could figure out what exactly he said, which clearly we can't?

Church Of England Faces Extinction, Says Former Archbishop Of Canterbury Lord George Carey

We are one generation away from extinction and if we do not invest in young people there is going to be no one in the future, Lord Carey said one week ago today.

"Extinction" is an imprecise and overly melodramatic term when used in this context. Extinction refers to the literal, physical death of organisms. One of the things I dislike most intensely about Christian theologians is this tendency toward imprecision and wild exaggeration in their language -- when, that is, they're not outright lying or talking gibberish. If 12 pimply-faced young boys who used to comprise a model-airplane-building club have ceased to attend the meetings of that club, so that the club has ceased to be, no extinction has therewith occurred. It may well be that all 12 of the boys are, in fact, still alive. There may, in fact, be still more good news: perhaps some of the boys' faces have cleared up, perhaps some of them have gotten girlfriends, perhaps all of them now are socializing in wider circles, so that the fact that there is now no longer a model-airplane-building club might actually have to be considered, by all 12 boys and almost any outside observer, to be a very good thing, all in all. Not that there's anything wrong with model airplanes per se, of course. A man such as myself, with my passionate interest in pocket watches, would of course be on rather thin ice were he to suggest that there were anything wrong with model airplanes per se.

But my hypothetical example involves only 12 people. According to the linked article, the Anglican church has 85 million members worldwide. There are perhaps 100,000 sea otters living in the world today, perhaps 4000 black rhinos, most of them in captivity, only a few hundred Siberian tigers, perhaps 4000 or 5000 snow leopards. Throwing around terms like "extinction" in reference to a group of 85 million people would be insulting to all of those animals even if it actually were the people themselves which were meant, even if living, breathing organisms were meant.

I can already hear the theologians responding: "Oh, but a denomination IS a living, breathing organism!" Oh, but it's not! And no matter how many times you repeat yourselves, a denomination will still not be a living thing, and no matter how many other people you eventually wear down, so that finally they say, "Okay, okay, the Church of England (or the Methodist Church or Sikhism or what have you) is a living, breathing organism!" just so that they can politely be done talking to you and stagger away, desperately searching for some sensible person somewhere to talk to about something sans gibberish -- no matter how many others you wear down, you smug infuriating pustules, you will not ever get me to say that a denomination is a living thing or that 2 and 2 are 5 or that we are one in the Grace of the Body of Christ, fuck you and your tiresome boring voodoo, you evil impediments to the progress and well-being of this Earth!

Dixit Carey: "To sit in a cold church, looking at the back of people’s heads, is perhaps not considered the most exciting place to meet new people and hear prophetic words." Do you really think that the problem has more to do with the heating in churches and with the backs of people's heads than with things such as your concept of prophecy? When the Church of England began, it was, in Ricky Gervais' words, a matter of "cake or death" : English men and women were offered the choice of swallowing a piece of cake and a slurp of wine and sitting quietly while men like you blathered on and on about things like "prophetic words" -- or being imprisoned, tortured and then burned alive. And so, not really surprisingly, most said, "Uh... I believe I'll have the cake, please. Thank you very much. And yes, I'll just sit here quietly until you're done speaking, Lord Reverend" or whatever the title happened to be at the specific place and time.

But you can't get away with torturing and killing people over religious differences any more, not in England at least, and so, horribly to your traditional soul, people are free to stand up and say things like, "'Prophetic words'?! Pull the other one, Guv!" and walk out on you, and even to point out that your use of terms like "extinction" is imprecise, overly-melodramatic, self-serving, self-pitying and all-round ridiculous. People who are REALLY concerned about actual extinction are working on things like AIDS research and combating poaching and volunteering in disaster areas and boy o boy do you look petty and small and yet still like an enormous waste of time and resources compared to them.

Theology, Ah Rilly Rilly Kant Standz It!

There seem to be some atheists such a R Joseph Hoffmann and Hermann Hesse (I think he was an atheist but I'm not certain) who are capable of enjoying theology, reading it for pleasure despite disagreeing with its authors on small points like God and Heaven and Hell and sin and orthodoxy and heresy and so forth, and then there are atheists such as Goethe and myself, who are not. I get the impression that Schopenhauer was not, and studied it, as I do, out of a self-sacrificing, Stoic sense of duty that them bastids must not be allowed to get away with it. (Goethe studied viewpoints with which he did not agree, including every single theistic thought, in order to understand. Schopenhauer studied viewpoints with which he disagreed in order to attack. Studied them like an epidemiologist studies disease, in order to attack and annihilate. I honor both approaches, Goethe's and Schopenhauer's too.)

Who's right, Hoffman and Hesse or Goethe and I? Or is that an irreducibly subjective question like, "Do green peas taste good?"? (They do NOT.)

As Schopenhauer said, "Das Grundgeheimniß und die Urlist aller Pfaffen, auf der ganzen Erde und zu allen Zeiten, mögen sie brahmanische oder mohammedanische, buddhaistische, oder christliche seyn, ist Folgendes. Sie haben die große Stärke und Unvertilgbarkeit des metaphysischen Bedürfnisses des Menschen richtig erkannt und wohl gefaßt: nun geben sie vor, die Befriedigung desselben zu besitzen, indem das Wort des großen Räthsels ihnen, auf außerordentlichem Wege, direkt zugekommen wäre. Dies nun den Menschen Ein Mal eingeredet, können sie solche leiten und beherrschen, nach Herzenslust." ("The essential secret and basic trick of all preachers all over the world in all eras, be they Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or Christian, is the following: they have recognized and understood the great strength and indestructibility of mankind's metaphysical longings: and now they claim to possess the means of satisfying these longings because the answer to the great riddle has come directly to them in an extraordinary way. Once they've convinced people of this they can control and dominate them just as they wish.")

There is, of course, no Ultimate answer, no Timeless Truth Which Will Save Us, and because people and the conditions under which they live are constantly changing, so too the bullshit which can be successfully presented to some people as Eternal Truth must constantly change.

And so we look in the Sunday paper or channel-surf on TV and encounter the brand-new Version 34,763,299, 473.267334 of this or that timeless truth contained in this or that Holy Scripture.

I might be missing something, but to know better, like Hoffmann or Hesse, and still to be okay with or to somehow admire people being used and led around by the nose like this because their deepest longings and fears have been exposed and are being used against their good sense, being okay with it just for the sake of enjoying the great Glass Bead Game, just strikes me as being impossibly cold.

PS, 21. August 2014: Although he doesn't believe that any deities exist, Hoffmann does not want to be called an atheist. So I take back my description of him as an atheist... No, you know what, I don't take it back. "Unbelievers But Not Atheists" is every bit as absurd as "Spiritual But Not Religious." There is more than enough absurdity in the world, including more than enough perpetrated unintentionally by me, I won't go along with it when I know better. You're an atheist, Dr Hoffmann. Get over it.

Ken Dark Said That PERHAPS Dalmanutha Has Been Found

Dark mentioned here that his archaeological team may have found the town of Dalmanutha, a town known until now only from a mention in the Gospel of Mark.

Joel L Watts thinks Dark is full of it. In a commentary on Huffington Post, Watts seems to be making some rash assumptions: that Mark's style follows Lucan's. (Lucan's only surviving work, his poem on the Roman Civil War, was left unfinished at his death in AD 65, and Mark's Gospel was written within a dozen years of that. Lucan was popular, but did his influence on other writers extend as far as Judea and Galilee that fast? Hmm.) That Matthew not mentioning Dalmanutha argues against its existence. That Dark is affected by a compulsion to "to locate everything mentioned in Holy Writ." Pardon me, but Watts seems to suffer from a compulsion to dismiss Dalmanutha right away as a fictional literary device. What's wrong with saying that for the moment we don't know whether the newly-excavated site is Dalmanutha or not? I'm perfectly comfortable not knowing for sure yet, just as comfortable as I am not being sure yet whether there was an historical Jesus. Sometimes -- many times -- the only responsible position an historian can take is to say, it could have been like this, or like this, we don't know, so why not try to learn more about the subject, and in the meantime keep an open mind?

I see a widespread compulsion to oversimplify things. For example, in the comments on Watts' Huffington Post article, one reader declares: "The Bible is FICTION!" This simpleminded compulsion to reduce all 2000 pages or so of the Bible to one two-syllable all-caps word is often to be seen these days, and this particular instance wouldn't have been worth mentioning except that it comes from a HuffPost blogger. That's depressing.

Of course, neither Watts nor HP's simpleminded new atheist blogger betrays any particular interest in archaeology per se. Watts is a Christian theologian, still insisting, here and now in the 21st century, that The Answers Are In There (in the Bible that is), and the new Blogger appears to be a professional atheist with no other notable qualifications for employment. Dark is the only one of three with expertise in the field of archaeology -- and the only one of the three who seems to have an open mind about whether the site in question is Dalmanutha or not. The only one of the three who appears to intend to investigate the matter further before coming to a conclusion. The only one of the three whose motives for investigating the matter appear to be actually archaeological and not theological. Regular readers of The Wrong Monkey know that I have a very low opinion of theology. Let me just take the opportunity to point out that my opinion of atheists who have nothing better to do than to endlessly and fruitlessly argue with theologians is about as low. There are much more interesting, much more substantial things in the world, much more rewarding topics of conversation. (Archaeology, for example.)

Derek Flood And Søren Kierkegaard

Two theologians, but only one philosopher between them. I thought long and hard about how best to describe Derek Flood here, but it's hard to top his Huffington Post author bio:

A longtime voice in the post-conservative evangelical movement, Derek’s focus is on wrestling with questions of faith and doubt, violence in the Bible, relational theology, and understanding the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice.

Yeah. Stick that in yr pipe and smoke it. In his HP icon Flood's mane of hair looks a bit like Kierkegaard's. Like Kierkegaard in that one portrait of him we all know, Flood stares at you earnestly, but while Kierkegaard has a twinkle in his eye and the hint of of a smile, Flood looks deadly dull. Kierkegaard looks like he might actually be interested in you and what you have to say. Flood looks like he thinks that what he has to say to you is so important that it may not even have occurred to him to listen to you unless it's to see whether or not you've understood him. In every piece I've read by him, Flood can't go for 2 sentences in a row without being unmistakeably Christian. Kierkegaard talks about all sorts of things other than Christianity without constantly distorting them in that theological way we all know and love. Not only does he quote many pre-Christian Greek authors, he clearly also likes them the way they really are. No distortion required. He sometimes goes dozens of pages at a stretch without giving the slightest sign that he's a Christian theologian. This of course is what makes Kierkegaard the most appealing of all Christian theologians: he's the one who least resembles a Christian theologian. All the others have no end of urgent things to tell you, such as how they understand the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice. Kierkegaard's interests are much wider. He's receptive.

Of course, autistics, such as myself, are not receptive so much, that is to say: one of the major ways you can tell we're autistic is that we have a hard time switching from telling everybody what's what, to listening. At least when it comes to face-to-face conversation. We may be good at absorbing written communications -- although there can be problems there too -- but that often breaks down in face-to-face communication. "Face to face" is even a misnomer in some conversations with autistics, because some autistics have a very hard time maintaining normal amounts of eye contact. I pretty much can't do it with most conversation partners. Don't take it personally, I have a problem.

But at least I know that it's a very serious problem. And I know that a lack of eye contact is just one of the ways in which I routinely fail to achieve what most people think of as the normal back-and-forth and give-and-take of conversation.

But that doesn't mean that I don't want to have more give-and-take with you. I doesn't mean I don't care. I realize that it often looks like I don't care, if it doesn't look even worse, as if I'm hostile or something like that. It's a technical problem with the interface. Don't worry, people are working on this.