Scribble Scribble Scribble!

I couldn't catch up with gay male literature even in the 1970s.  This was partly because it was harder to find the older works, which were often out of print, published by small houses, or allowed to slip down the Memory Hole because of their scandalous nature. There were no sections of gay books in bookstores aside from the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City, founded in 1967, which felt too far away to be useful to me.  (Other people my age traveled freely around the country, but I was too unadventurous and frankly unimaginative to do that.)  A few gay writers wrote about the books that they'd read before Stonewall, which they could cover in one chapter; Roger Austen's Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Bobbs-Merrill) didn't appear until 1977, and I didn't read it until years later. But such proliferating resources, including friends in the field, pointed me to more works than I could read.  Much as I was interested, there were other areas I wanted to explore.

By now, LGBTQ+ books are a sizable market niche, and can be found even in small public libraries despite the efforts of bigots to remove them. I've become skeptical of complaints that we aren't represented, though I still see plenty of them. I don't think I'm doing the old "You kids think you have it bad? Hah! In my day..." line. Mainstream publishers are putting out books in every imaginable category, to the point of self-parody: you want stories about disabled transgender Afro-Asian shapeshifters living in small US towns with their gay-sorcerer dads and their telepathic flying cats?  They're out there, and probably in your public library. They can also be found on TV and the Internet.  Sure, some kids are being held prisoner by their knuckle-dragging fundamentalist parents, and that's a real problem, but it's not because there aren't books about People Who Look Like You.  There are even books about People Who Look Like You Being Held Prisoner by Their Knuckle-dragging Fundamentalist Parents.  The problem is about finding ways to get access to them.

But back to me.  I'm a seventy-four-year old white American gay man.  I don't have any difficulty getting access to books or other media about people who look like me.  Nor am I interested in reading only about people who look like me; that hasn't been my goal, at least since I first read lives of George Washington Carver and Clara Barton in fifth grade.  My problem, insofar as it is one, is finding books that I consider worth reading. Self-publishing, including the self-publishing of ebooks, has produced a flood of works of varying quality ranging from the sublime to the dire. The conglomeratization of publishing has produced almost as many books that can't be faulted for bad writing, only for a boring mediocre professionalism and a focus on catering to market niches.  I see this not only in gay writing but in genres such as mysteries and fantasy/sf, which now (happily?) overlap with gay writing.

The strange thing is that this is not really anything new.  There have always been too many damned thick square books.  Sturgeon's Law has always applied.  It's the flip side of the complaint that there aren't enough damned thick square books about people who look like me.  I should make it clear that there are plenty of books that I do enjoy reading, far more than I can ever hope to read.  I'm just musing on the irony that my (and others') wish for more has been granted.  What we hoped for were more good books, and they're out there, lost in the crowd, but it has ever been thus.

What provoked me to write about this is Swimming in the Dark, the first novel by the Polish-German writer Tomasz Jedrowski, published by Morrow in 2020.  (He's reportedly working on another, but it's not done yet.)  It's a love story about two young Poles in 1980, when Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, and the upheavals by Solidarność were still to come.  The narrator, Ludwik, addresses his lost love Janusz in retrospect from the United States where he now lives.  They came together at a summer work camp after graduating from university, Ludwik unsure what to do next, Janusz ready to work for the government; after an idyllic month camping out in the countryside they must figure out how, if at all, to go on loving each other.  If you've read your share of gay fiction over the past few days, you should be able to predict the obstacles they face.  For me there were no surprises, but it might well be different for a younger, less experienced reader, so I hesitate to criticize too much.

What did surprise me is that Jedrowski, born in Germany to Polish parents, wrote the book in English: it's not a translation.  The reviews quoted on Amazon overpraise his writing, but he still did quite a good job.  As I say, though, I found the story familiar and predictable, except for its setting, which Jedrowski constructed as a historical novel; at most it reflects the world of his parents, not his own experience.  Even there, I had problems.  Jedrowski's characters must contend with life in a repressive society suffering from economic austerity -- long lines for food, inadequate medical care, censorship of media both artistic and journalistic, police crackdowns on dissent -- though an elite few enjoyed luxury.  

Ludwik remembers furtively listening to Radio Free Europe as a child with his mother and grandmother, for example.  I immediately thought of something the left-wing British historian E. P. Thompson wrote in the 1980s, I think in Beyond the Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), about his interaction with Soviet dissidents: they were properly scornful and skeptical of official propaganda, but completely credulous of the Western propaganda they heard on Radio Free Europe.  I felt the same way about Jedrowski's two-tiered society.  Americans have rarely had to wait in lines for groceries except in wartime before the lifetimes of most of us, but poverty and hunger were serious problems here, and exacerbated by the contemporary Reagan and Thatcher regimes, which wanted to eliminate the social safety nets that alleviated them, how ever inadequately. Those programs, come to think of it, also involved waiting for hours in lines or in grim office waiting rooms, trying to appease grim bureaucrats. As for health care in the US, I don't really need to detail that, do I?  Or of police crackdowns on dissent in the land of the free?  Young Ludwik couldn't have known about all this in 1980, but older Ludwik doesn't seem aware of it either.

Nor could young Ludwik have known about the long history of antigay repression in the West, though a major prop in Swimming in the Dark is the illicit copy he acquires of James Baldwin's gloom-and-doom gay classic of 1956, Giovanni's Room, over which he and Janusz bond.  He's also aware of US racism; the Soviet bloc made sure its citizens were well-educated about it, much to our government's indignation.  Older Ludwik doesn't seem to have learned much, and I wonder about Jedrowski himself.  Yes, it's difficult to balance all these things in a work of art, and Swimming in the Dark is his first try.  Still, the over-familiar features of its love story left me paying more attention to the background, which I think needed work.

And you know, I feel the same way about books by more experienced gay writers, including some of the most acclaimed.  I haven't been reporting here on my reading as I should, so let me mention quickly a couple.  Andrew Sean Greer's Less (2017) was praised to the skies, but I found it a slog: it relies on a type of protagonist who I believe was introduced by Stephen McCauley but picked up by others, the uncloseted but socially awkward gay nerd, with a close straight woman friend and even some gay male friends. He can't get a date, but he wants a boyfriend, and eventually he stumbles across one -- sometimes literally.  Then there was Andrew Holleran's latest, The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022).  It features another Holleran doppelganger, enduring gay old age and not enduring it very well.  The main thing I got from it was the urgency of finally getting the shingles vaccine, after reading the book's lengthy account of another elderly gay character's suffering from the disease. So that's taken care of. The novel is Holleran's unrelentingly downbeat (but yes, very well-written, as his books always are) take on aging as a single gay man with no evident support network, and he's entitled to it.  It's worth comparing the prolific Edmund White's experience as he recounts it in his brand-new The Loves of My Life (Bloomsbury, 2025), which I read just last week. White has plenty of health problems, but he doesn't wallow in self-pity, and though as always his curmudgeon routine can be annoying, he's good company on the page.  It's a matter of temperament, I guess.

I could also mention Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers (Vintage, 2007), a historical novel about the relationship between two gay men in McCarthy-era Washington DC, recently adapted as a Showtime miniseries.  It has some points of comparison with Swimming in the Dark, come to think of it.  It too received higher praise than I would give it, but it was worth reading and I intend to try some of Mallon's other work; again, it's not fair to compare this experienced writer's work to a first-timer's.  It's foully depressing, given the situation, but that's okay - I don't demand happy endings.  Also there's Colm Tóibín's novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician (Scribner, 2021); it's brilliantly done, but I didn't get the point of doing it.  (Though it does show that one can write interestingly about homosexual life in the past and in other countries.)  I've liked some of his other writing, including his essays, though, and I mean to read more.

To return to my original point, though, I'm not as impressed as I feel I should be by some of the prestigious gay (or straight) fiction being produced in our supposedly more enlightened times. Maybe it's just me, a consequence of having read too many other books. I'm not sure, in fact, what I'm looking for - but I'll know it if and when I find it.

Atheists Still Say the Darnedest Things!

Hemant Mehta, who goes by the alias "Friendly Atheist," has a YouTube channel on which he reports on religious overreach in the US, mostly by Christian reactionaries, which he deplores with the kind of scandalized relish that I associate with Christian reactionaries, though liberals love it too.  I've been aware of him for a long time, but only started noticing his videos in the past couple of months.

A day ago he posted this video about a 26-year-old Christian youth pastor who decided that God wanted him joined in marriage to a fourteen-year-old girl.  This was in the mid-1990s.  His church and the girl's parents accepted his claim, though they insisted on its being only a "betrothal" until she was older.  He then initiated sexual contact with her.  In 1998 he fled to Australia before he could be charged, but last year Interpol blocked him from entering the Philippines and he was returned to the US and to jail in Pennsylvania, where he was held without bail as a flight risk.  He's now 55.  This month he accepted a deal to plead guilty to felony charges; he will serve six to twelve years in prison, followed by several more years of probation, and he will be registered for life as a sex offender.

It's hard to call this outcome good, because of the original situation and the long delay in catching the man.  The victim, who's been in touch with Mehta, is more or less satisfied, though of course she wishes her abuser had been caught sooner, but thanks to the plea deal she was spared having to confront him in court.  She points out there have been changes in American society, including in organized Christianity, regarding abuse of power by authority figures in and out of the churches.  Their expectation of protection and immunity has been eroded considerably, but new cases continue to emerge, so we have a long way to go still.  It surprises me that churches should have any prestige or authority anymore, given their exposure as institutions that enabled and protected the mistreatment of their own members for so long.

I read the comments on the video with interest.  Certain themes and slogans recurred, such as that people should not get their morality from books but rather from their inner feelings and hearts.  I asked where they thought the "books" got their contents?  So far I haven't gotten an answer, though a few people liked my comments.  This is the familiar belief that religion is something external to human beings, rather than something we invented.  If bad stuff is in the Bible, it's because people put it there.  This should be obvious, a truism, in an atheist forum, but once again it seems not to be.  It's certain that the oppression of women predates the Bible, and existed outside the cultures that produced it.  I keep having to point out that most religions have not relied on sacred writings; yet their treatment of women wasn't better than what the Bible prescribes.

I noticed a number of comments on the video that consisted of one word, gross, sometimes in all-caps.  I suppose they were sincerely looking into their hearts, but although gross isn't a moral principle but an aesthetic one, Mehta and his liberal fans wouldn't want to rely on it much.  Many actions and practices have been judged immoral because they're gross: anal sex, for one; vaginal sex, for another.  Bodies are gross, especially female ones with their monthly bleeding.  Heart surgery is gross.  Childbirth is gross, as shown by the number of people (not all of them men) who have run gagging from films or the reality of birth.  Nudity is gross, especially male nudity. "Interracial" sex has been judged gross.  Abortion is gross, as is all non-reproductive sexual activity.  And so on; the list could continue forever.  I think there are better reasons to object to the youth pastor's actions than their grossness.

If you don't want to admit that the sexual morality of the Bible (to keep it simple I'll leave out the rest of the world) is the result of people looking into their hearts, very well.  (I should have said "moralities," because the Bible isn't consistent in its moral teachings, including those on sexuality.)  You still have to explain the tenacity with which many people today cling to male supremacy; as I've argued before, that includes male scientists and secular philosophers.  And if you want to have a set of moral principles that apply to everyone, as opposed to individuals' personal likes and dislikes, you have to be able to discuss them, to argue with people who disagree with you.  Morality isn't just a question of what feels right to you, it's about what happens when people come into conflict. That hasn't occurred to Hemant Mehta's commenters, from what I see, nor to many atheists or other unbelievers.

One commenter tried to answer me by concocting a little story about two cavemen who, after bashing each other on the head, realized that it was in their best interest to stop bashing each other on the head, and voila! there's morality that didn't come from a book.  What he had to offer was a myth (in the sense of a just-so story that purports to explain the way things are), not an argument; nor was it about morality.  Modern religious reactionaries accept religious toleration on the same prudential grounds, but they still consider competing sects to be immoral, and they would suppress them if they could.  Nice try, but no cigar.

The public library in the nearest, mid-sized city asked for input on its Facebook page last fall on what sorts of public programs it might organize and sponsor.  I wrote that I would like a group that would discuss morality and ethics from an atheist viewpoint, reading and discussing serious writing on the subject.  The comments I got were interesting.  Someone told me about an atheists' advocacy and educational organization that covers northern Indiana. I looked it up on the web and it looked worthwhile (unfortunately I don't own a car and couldn't go to their meetings), but it doesn't seem to include exploratory programs about unsettled questions like morality and ethics.  When I said so, several people mocked the idea that such questions even need to be asked: everybody knows what's right and wrong!

Well, no, everybody doesn't know.  When I was much younger, I looked for and found books about non-religious philosophy and sexuality.  Books published before around 1970 simply assumed that homosexuality was a bad thing - but a sickness that could be treated, not a sin.  There were some dissenters about that, but not many published books saying so.  It was the post-Stonewall gay movement that pushed secular philosophy and medicine away from complacent, unquestioning heterosexual supremacy.  The same was true of second-wave feminism.  Both movements had to grapple with religious bigotry, but secular authorities were also our targets.  We won some victories sooner and more easily than we'd anticipated, but resistance hasn't died out yet.

When other atheists have written about morality on a non-academic level, they tend to fall back on handwaving like "Be good for goodness sake!" which ought to be embarrassing.  Luckily for them, their religious opposite numbers don't do any better.  And it's not like I have the answers.  What I mainly have are questions.   The writings on moral philosophy I've read indicate that even the best thinkers are in the same boat.  I think we'd be better off if more people were aware of the complexity of the questions they brush away so lightly.

If You Don't Know, I'm Certainly Not Going to Tell You!

A goodly number of people on the left, let alone in the Democratic Party, were severely shaken and demoralized by Trump's victory, and I have to admit that I'm one of them.  I find that I have little to say about it, because I don't have any good ideas on how to combat him other than the obvious: support the ACLU and other organizations that have fought him in the past and are ready to fight him now, speak out on specific matters when possible.

Unfortunately, some of the commentators I've looked to before are in disarray, not just from the US version of the center (what is considered "left" in the mainstream and the far right) but to some extent from the actual left. It's no surprise that many people are looking for someone to blame.  I've got a little list myself.  Nor is it a surprise to see a lot of lashing out, almost at random, and as I've seen so many times before, a favored target is The Woke or whatever symbol of infantile leftism is current.  As I've already argued, "woke" is a meaningless epithet, like "politically correct," "CRT," "cancel culture," or "DEI."  All those terms can be defined in meaningful and useful ways, but that's not how they're being used.

I think it's fairly obvious that Kamala Harris didn't lose because she was too "woke."  Supporting horrific Israeli atrocities and dumping on those in her own party who oppose them, cozying up to billionaire donors, and embracing the Cheney crime family don't constitute "wokeness" in any sense the term is being used -- rather the opposite, I would think.  No matter where on the political spectrum you imagine yourself, ignoring or endorsing those tactics is siding with reaction.  That's happening a lot right now, on immigration (where there has never been much daylight between MAGA and the Democratic Party establishment anyway) and birthright citizenship for example. The political scientist Corey Robin has written some very good things on this, but on Facebook rather than on Twitter/X or his own blog; if you use Facebook, I'd recommend following and reading him there. 

But here's a good example of that lashing out.

I don't recall "the left" ever making such a decision.  The only time I heard that line during my half-century working at a Big Ten college campus, it came from upwardly-mobile students of color, who weren't leftists. But yeah, you know, maybe I missed the announcement from Woke / PC Headquarters.

Another possibility is that the "left" (again, not the Kamala Harris campaign or the Democratic establishment) tried to educate people but did it badly.  I've written along those lines for a long time, but there too I was addressing not the left but what I call the Culture of Therapy, which has a lot of power in universities and in the corporate world (also not the left).  Much of the Sixties left went into inventing the culture of therapy, which could mean that there's a deep affinity between radical politics and therapeutic authoritarianism.  That possibility is supported, I think, by a response to the post above, which also has roots in dogmatic left hostility to any political activism outside the labor movement.

This is MAGA-level incoherence and rage, I think.  Shirtless continued:

If "sustained gaslighting campaigns, outright lies," etc. don't work, why has the far right - which relies on those tactics -- gotten as far as it has?  Why did Trump win in November?  I pointed out to Shirtless that pretty much every successful advance in human affairs has been denounced as insane, utopian, bullshit, what have you: the extension of the franchise beyond white property-owning males; the abolition of slavery; religious freedom; allowing various national groups to immigrate to the US; the 40-hour work week and the 8-hour day; social safety-net programs; abortion and contraception; allowing blacks, women, and gays in the military; same sex-marriage, and more.  On the other side, genuinely insane projects like colonizing Mars or planets outside the solar system get a respectful hearing from people hostile to transgenderism.

Shirtless accused me of "survivor bias" in my choice of examples.  That was a clueless or deliberate dodging of the point, which is that his original claim is falsified by many cases, so what made the difference?  I certainly agree that the Culture of Therapy isn't the right approach.  I submit that while top-down measures were sometimes used, several of my examples (such as the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day) were genuinely popular at a grass-roots level and were only considered insane by elites and their toadies.  In other cases, such as increased acceptance of gay people and of same-sex marriage, change occurred because while we are a minority, we are embedded in society at large.  As we became more visible to our friends, families, and co-workers, it became harder to demonize us. The same has been true of "interracial" marriage, and is true of transgender, an even smaller minority but one that is connected to the majority.  Several lefty-liberal commentators argued that GOP candidates below the presidential level played down anti-trans positions in 2024 because their base knew trans people and didn't support the MAGA line.  But I'm critical of trans people and their allies who try to support their claims with misinformation.

(I believe that contrary to much of what I hear, transgender [not necessarily by that name] is intuitively plausible to most people, because most people think of sex/gender in magical terms.  That's apart from [or maybe related to?] the general confusion over sex and gender, which gives us "gender reveal parties" to announce the sex of a fetus, confusing "intersex" with transgender, the historical and transcultural popularity of drag, and so on.  It's no surprise that the Cultural of Therapy got transgender issues wrong: it's a bountiful source of misinformation and sloppy thinking.  But I need to do a separate post about all this.)

Whose job is it to educate you?  There's no single answer.  I was an active educator on sexual orientation at my university for over four decades; I certainly see it as my job to educate others -- not only straights but other gay people. That often put me at odds with Culture of Therapy professionals, but in the long run I think I won against them in important areas, though I had no power to impose my views.  Numerous of our speaker volunteers told me that I'd influenced them on the born-gay question.  At first, they said, they thought I was just being mean (why?) but over time they thought it over and changed their minds.  As a white male, I also consider it my job to educate myself, and I am critical of those who want to put that burden on the Other.  I think that stance is connected to hostility to minorities who do try to educate them.

I'm skeptical of the very claim that the "left" abdicated its role in educating others in the first place.  I think it's an excuse for joining MAGA reaction, which always happens when the right wins an election.  I remember liberals sliding right when Ronald Reagan became president, for example.  I'm not optimistic about the next four years, and one reason is the liberals and leftists who are all too ready to make common cause with Trump.  There are a lot of them.  The rest of us can't rely on them.

Job's Friends; or, Excuses, Excuses!

When this meme came up in my "memories" on Facebook the other day, I clicked through idly to see what kind of reaction the original post got.  At the top of the comments was one from a Christian who asked why an unbeliever would mock someone they don't even believe in??!!  

I've seen this move before.  The first most obvious response would be that Christians and other believers arguably don't believe in other gods either, but that has never stopped them from mocking them and their worshipers.  (Historically, both Jews and Christians have accepted that other gods exist, but they're demons.  Remember that in ordinary usage, "believe in" can mean either "believe in the existence of," "have trust in," or even "agree with.")

The second obvious response is that the meme is making fun less of Jesus or his heavenly father than of the people who believe in them, who do unquestionably exist. While the meme is unkind, it's not an inaccurate representation of popular religion: God needs a million prayer warriors, thousands of Christians rallied in the streets for Christ last weekend, etc.  So what does God do while only half a million prayer warriors are on their knees?  Why doesn't Jesus heal the sick child right away? Does he really need to be informed?  What is the tipping point at which he'll (supposedly) take action?

A few months ago I saw a lot of video clips on Facebook - and no, I didn't have to watch them, but it was very educational for me - from a number of online preachers warning Christians that if they aren't constantly watchful, demons will sneak up on them and drag them down to Hell.  Why, I wondered, did God let that happen?  If a person is saved, how can demons even get near them?  If Satan can undo your salvation, what are the Christian promises worth?  That these preachers put the burden of resistance on the believer is even worse: how can a mere fleshly person fight off supernatural Evil?  One of the most basic premises of Christianity is you can't, which is why people need the intervention and protection of supernatural Good.

It happened that not long before I saw these videos, I'd also read The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, a 1962 novel about the demonic possession and exorcism of a teenage girl, "a devout girl who attended Mass regularly."  Two Roman Catholic priests take on the job of driving the devil out of her, and much of the book is about their struggles and doubts as they perform the rite of exorcism.  I thought of writing about the book then, but at this remove I'll need to reread it.  For now, I'll just say that I had the same questions: why doesn't the Christian god protect his children against demonic harm, and why does so much depend on the efforts (weak and ineffectual by definition) of the exorcist?  The accounts of exorcism in the New Testament may be abbreviated, but there's no doubt that in that context Jesus and his followers drove out demons by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by theological disputation.  (To anticipate one possible objection, those stories were not merely symbolic.  Christian writers were bragging about the power of exorcism and healing for at least a couple of centuries after Jesus' day.  I should also concede that in one gospel exorcism story, Jesus admits that "prayer and fasting" are needed to drive out especially stubborn devils.)

The larger issue is what's known to philosophers as the Problem of Evil, though it's not just a problem to them: why, if there is a god who is both all-powerful and all-good, is there so much suffering in the world? Nowadays there's an apologetic tendency to distinguish between 'natural evil' like earthquakes and plague, and 'moral evil' committed by human beings, like the Holocaust.  I learned from Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2004), that the distinction is a comparatively recent one: "evil" referred to natural disasters, also known as "acts of God," no less than to moral ones.  Sometimes evil might be the work of Satan, but it was always difficult to tell whether a given unpleasantness was Satan's mischief or God's judgment.

Not that this mattered much, because as the biblical book of Job made explicit, Satan couldn't bother a righteous person without God's permission.  In Job's case, which should be even more troublesome for simple faith, God gave that permission not because of any failing of Job's, but as a bet with Satan that Job wouldn't complain if God withdrew his protection.  Some theologians have argued that the opening prologue of the book of Job is a later addition to the main text, but I consider that apologetic invention. It wouldn't change the point of the book very much if at all, and anyway, that exit is closed to less sophisticated believers who work from the text as they find it in their Bibles.

After several decades of examining other interpretations, I still think Walter Kaufmann's discussion (The Faith of a Heretic, Doubleday, 1961) of the Problem of Evil in general, and of Job in particular, is the best.  It's ironic that the usual attempts to escape the problem are exactly those which the book of Job rejects, offered by Job's friends: You must have done something wrong, or God wouldn't have done this to you!  As Kaufmann stressed, it never occurs even to God's self-appointed defenders that God wasn't responsible for Job's misery, nor does God himself protest when he appears from the whirlwind that the Devil made him do it.

I thought of all this when the philosopher Helen De Cruz, who's undergoing treatment for cancer, posted on Twitter/X in December: "As a theist, I not only am angry at my own body and it not responding enough to treatment, I am also very angry at God. So that’s been fun."  She's been posting for months about her case and treatment, and she has quite properly received plenty of support and sympathy.  But Job's 21st- century friends promptly lined up to set her straight.

"I so understand your anger, dear H, but I think your body deserves compassion," wrote one. "It's doing its best to resist the onslaughts of cancer & treatment. As to God, he's, in appearance at least, mostly absent. Moreover, his demands are higher of beautiful souls bc life is an initiation."

And: "What did [you] think about The Essence of Christianity ~Ludwig Feuerbach 'People forget that their lives will end soon. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.' Seems you are quarreling with your own body and with God. Though Nietzsche suffered terribly and died: belle âme".  Yes, De Cruz is quarreling with God, how astute of this person to figure that out.  She's not forgetting that her life will end soon, though; that's exactly her complaint. What Nietzsche has to do with this exchange isn't clear, but everybody dies.  That's part of the Problem of Evil.

And: "Helen, I'm not a theist, but I'm not an atheist either. I don't think death is the end of our stories. (Still, I hope a longer life for you.)"  So what if death isn't the end of our stories?  As Ludwig Wittgenstein asked rhetorically a century ago, ""[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.3412).

A few took this tack: "To be angry is to believe you are entitled to something you did not receive. There are others that didn't receive half of what you have. It would make as much sense to be overjoyed about that. In reality, both responses have no merit."  Think of the starving children in Ethiopia who'd be glad to have your cancer!  I commented elsewhere in the thread that the callousness of Christians toward other people's suffering amazes me; this comment is a good example of that callousness.  Maybe the next time I encounter Christians complaining that infidels mock them and their god, I should respond along the same lines?

Sometimes when I've invoked the Problem of Evil by pointing to the suffering of children with cancer (for example), Christians protest, "Gee, God must have done something to make you mad." Well, yes -- that's what we're talking about right now. Such people couldn't seem to grasp that someone might object to the suffering of the innocent (but we are all miserable sinners, none is innocent) as a matter of principle. It's an interesting inability.

De Cruz had posted about the Problem of Evil in an earlier post I can't find now, and I was struck by people who tried to solve it by denying another of its premises, namely that the God of Christianity could stop the evils we see.  These people suggested that he'd like to but he just can't.  That may be, though 1) it's difficult for me to understand how a being who could create the unthinkably vast universe we inhabit is powerless to stop suffering and other evils, especially since 2) it is a pillar of Christian faith that he will do so when he establishes his kingdom on earth, which means he can do it but for some reason won't.  And to some extent this argument requires me to accept 3) that he can't prevent any of the evils infesting the world now.  Maybe Jesus' miracles (in one small region of the planet) used up all his strength, and he's resting until he gets it back?

Those who consider C. S. Lewis an authority should remember that when he engaged with, as he called it, the Problem of Pain, he took for granted that suffering comes from his god, who kneecaps the righteous in order to keep them from becoming too full of themselves.  Even after his wife died of cancer and he was in turmoil with grief, he never denied his god's responsibility for her agony or his misery: he simply assumed it.  Maybe he was wrong, but not according to traditional or biblical doctrine.  After all, if Yahweh can't prevent suffering, how can believers hope that someday he will end it altogether?

I've seen some posts and videos from a recent theology Ph.D., whom I won't name yet because I want to go into his work in some detail later; but one is relevant here.  He declares that the Bible never says that its god is omnipotent, which in a narrow sense may be true; but I think he's hair-splitting. The biblical authors weren't professional philosophers or theology Ph.D.'s, but they regarded Yahweh as almighty and expected him to conquer Evil in the end.  If this guy is right, he's cut the Gordian knot of the Problem of Evil, but he's still saying that God is impotent to stop any of the suffering in the world, in which case the entire edifice of historical Christianity comes crashing down, and there is no hope for believers or anyone else. (Samson among the Philistines might be a better analogy than Alexander the Great.)  In which case, why believe in him?

I'm not sure that abandoning belief in Yahweh's power or his goodness would faze all believers, since they so often deny either or both as they find it useful to do so.  I think they know that openly admitting that they do so would hinder their missionary efforts, which depend on big promises they don't have to keep.  I also want to bear down heavily on their callousness to human suffering in the crunch.  "Oh, you're dying of cancer? Big whoop" is bad PR, and all their works of charity don't make it look any better. If suffering is no big deal, if it's your god's own action, then why ameliorate it in this life?

Ah Yes, I Remember It Well

Speaking of coincidences, this 2018 book was recently brought to my attention by the Algorithm, blessed be its name.  I can borrow the e-book through my library, but I have a large backlog so I've put it on my wishlist and will try to look at it eventually.

Sword and Scimitar is on a familiar, clash-of-civilizations theme, "the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West, shedding a revealing light on current hostilities" as the publisher's blurb puts it:

The West and Islam -- the sword and scimitar -- have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Roman emperor rejected Prophet Muhammad's order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam, unleashing a centuries-long jihad on Christendom.

Sword and Scimitar chronicles the decisive battles that arose from this ages-old Islamic jihad, beginning with the first major Islamic attack on Christian land in 636, through the Muslim occupation of nearly three-quarters of Christendom which prompted the Crusades, followed by renewed Muslim conquests by Turks and Tatars, to the European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s, when Islam largely went on the retreat -- until its reemergence in recent times.

It's true that the conflict between "the West" and Islam began in the mid-seventh century, because Islam didn't exist until then. So the Islamic jihad couldn't have been "ages-old" in 636.  Were West and East good buddies before?  I'd noticed this sort of vague erasure of history before, in Seven Myths of the Crusades, a collection edited by Alfred J. Andrea and Andrew Holt. published by Hackett in 2015.  It's valid as a corrective to the notion that Muslims had inhabited Palestine from time immemorial, and European Christians were blue meanies who opposed and attacked a religion of peace, but it still leaves a lot of history out.  

My own knowledge of Middle Eastern history is spotty, but I already knew that the region had been a battleground long before Muhammad was a gleam in Allah's eye, and East versus West is a sloppy, anachronistic way to look at it.  East was often at odds with East as far back as historical knowledge goes.  There are glimpses of this in the Hebrew Bible, from the numerous regional wars to the Babylonian conquest of Israel in 586 BCE, followed by the Persian conquest of Babylon in 538.  Persia tried to conquer Greece but failed; then Alexander the Great conquered both Persia and Greece, along with Egypt but also as far east as India. But then he died and his empire fell apart.  West, in the form of Rome, swallowed up not only the East but north Africa and western Europe.  All this happened not by sweet reasonableness but by conquest, with gains and losses at every step.

One Eastern threat to Rome was Judea, which rebelled at least twice, in 66-70 and 132-135 CE, necessitating a great deal of expense in life and treasure to put down.  You've heard of Masada?  That was the last gasp of a jihad by Eastern religious fanatics against Western Rome, though it's not usually framed in those terms.  

Soon after the Roman Empire was Christianized, it came under attack by northern tribes who had no connection to Islam (that was still three centuries in the future) and split into western and eastern regions with different empires and capitals.  In the east, they were menaced by the new Sassanid Empire, est. 224 CE.  Both sides suffered internal strife and external attack until the Sassanids fell to Muslim forces in the mid-7th century.  While all this is peripheral to the Crusades four centuries later, it's part of the background and should be borne in mind.  I don't suppose that Raymond Ibrahim, the author of Sword and Scimitar, or the editors of Seven Myths of the Crusades, are ignorant of it, but they rely on the ignorance of their readers.

I found two books useful for filling in the gaps somewhat.  One was Robert Graves's historical novel Count Belisarius, about a hero of the late Roman Empire - or, if you like, the Byzantine Empire.  Graves was a fairly dry novelist, and Count Belisarius often reads like straight history rather than a novel, but it includes some racy stories about the imperial family, and gives an accurate picture of the period and events.  The other was The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam (Skyhorse, 2014) by Peter Crawford.  Crawford's approach is that of a military historian, and he emphasizes the battles, but he covers the historical background on this key period.  As the subtitle indicates, the conflict was between East and East as much as East and West.

This is not to say that Islam was or is a "religion of peace," only that neither was Roman "paganism" or its Christian successor.  Contrary to some current-day propaganda, Muslim armies didn't put conquered peoples to the sword (or scimitar, whatever) any more than the Romans or other conquering empires did.  (The later English invaders of North America were a different story.)  From what I read, they (either side) would massacre whole populations in cities that refused to surrender, but they needed those populations alive, to produce food and pay tribute.  None of the sides involved in this history comes off well.

Did you notice the reference to "European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s"?  European - Christian - conquest and colonization of the Americas, Africa, and non-Muslim Asia may not be directly pertinent to Ibrahim's thesis, but it's not irrelevant and shouldn't be forgotten.  It caused immense loss of life both in crushing initial native resistance and in maintaining imperial control, and it has a lot to do with the Islamist reaction of the twentieth century.  It doesn't justify Islamic violence, but European Christian violence can't be justified either - which won't keep propagandists from trying.

Someone said that all beginnings are political -- meaning, I think, that where you begin a narrative is a decision that shapes what your story will tell.  The same is true of endings, I would think: the Muslims finished off Constantinople's longstanding enemy the Sassanids, but that turned out to be just the beginning of another story. In Ibrahim's case it's easy to see how political his choice of beginning is.  Its ending is yet to come.

These Are My True Doctrines - If You Don't Like Them, I Have Others

People love coincidences. I love coincidences.  But I get jumpy when people try to find meaning in them.

Take the story in the video I embedded above.  It's charming, it's moving: A woman and the son she gave up for adoption find each other in the bakery she runs, where it turns out he has been a regular for years.  When she falls ill, he takes over running the bakery.  It's like the string of coincidences in Oedipus Rex, only with a happy ending.  "You can't tell this story without talking God, because I was led the entire way," the son tells the TV reporter, as the camera pans over inspirational mottoes and a battered Bible.   You could say the same about Oedipus.

Here's another story, also from Chicago.

     

The owner of a construction company is remodeling the bathroom of his parents' house, and finds a Christmas present behind the drywall; it fell there in 1978.  Hashtag Christmas miracle! -- I take it that's the TV station's label, since the man himself is pleasantly wry about it all.  "It's worth tens of tens of dollars," he says of the mint, unopened package of Thunder Jets.

Do I need to say that I'm happy for these people?  Of course I am, just as I was happy for the friend who lost her car keys.  Her friends on Facebook had prayed up a storm for her, but I didn't, so maybe it was my fault that she only found them only after paying a couple of hundred dollars to replace them.  I was also happy that a seven-year-old boy who was hit by a van and spent some time in an induced coma recovered and became a chef; I was not so happy that his mother said on NPR that the accident was God's way of nudging her to become a nurse, a career path she had resisted until then.  I'm more neutral when believers kvell that the Lord preserved a Bible, or a stack of Bibles, or some holy icons (via), when a church or residence burned down; I think they're flaunting a lack of moral sense, but as moral failures go this one is relatively mild.

When something terrible happens to someone by coincidence, nice people are apt to chalk it up to karma, not-so-nice people will call it a judgment.  But believers disagree on specific cases, and I've never been able to get them to explain the criteria they rely on.  Some believe that the COVID pandemic was God's judgment on America (the rest of the world doesn't exist for them); but the same people are apt to believe that the pandemic was a liberal germ-warfare plot.

I love to remember something the philosopher David Hume wrote centuries ago, that your ordinary person will justify belief in the Christian god by telling "you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it." This is still true, though belief in a capricious deity easily coexists with belief in a trustworthy deity whose eye is on the sparrow and will never let his chosen stumble, let alone fall.  

That Janus-faced god is not the god of the philosophers but the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the god of the simple common-sense believer who has no time for the double-talk of the pointy-headed intellectuals.  Not only of the superstitious doofus, though: in 1983 the late skeptic and (I presume) round-headed intellectual Martin Gardner published a book, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, in which he declared (Kindle edition, loc 2882):

In line with the practice I have tried to follow throughout this book, I take the word God to mean what I believe it means and has always meant to most philosophers and theologians in the history of Western thought, as well as to almost all ordinary people. As I use the term, God is a God who is in some way outside our universe, who in some manner created the universe, who has some kind of plan for humanity and for every person, a God to whom we can pray, above all a God who sustains our hope for immortality. A personal God. Yes, the God of Christianity, but not only of Christianity. The God of Judaism, of Islam, and hundreds of smaller faiths. The God of Plato (yes, Plato!) and Kant and Charles Peirce and Miguel de Unamuno and a thousand other eminent philosophers and writers who were theists unshackled by the doctrines of any organized religious institution.

There are many problems here, and I'm wondering whether I should bother to reread the entire book; but as another famous scrivener reportedly said, I would prefer not to.  His argument boils down to the claim that everybody else does it, which isn't even an argument.  Gardner would never have let an opponent get away with a similar assertion about belief in healing crystals, or ESP, or a "literal" seven-day creation.  Notice too how he goes along with the crowd while invoking bold free-thinkers "unshackled by the doctrines of any religious institution", giving his readers the worst of both worlds.

A few pages later Gardner wrote: "Plato, remember, wanted to keep Homer out of the hands of school children because he regarded the Homeric mythology as blasphemy against the gods."  

Gardner was being disingenuous here. First, Plato wanted to ban Homer and other canonical Greek poets from his ideal republic, not only to protect school children but all its subjects except for the small minority of philosopher-kings who ruled it. He suggested instead a "noble lie" of humanity composed of different metals according to the roles they played in the republic, which the ignorant Many would believe and their rulers would not.  Second, the god of Plato (yes, Plato!) was not a creator but a craftsman, not an interventionist personal god but a philosophical principle, and certainly not the god of Christianity.  Gardner tried to explain away the difficulties of his position by pointing out that "educated" Christians don't take Christian mythology literally. Nor, I would add, do uneducated Christians: both groups interpret their mythology opportunistically and incoherently.

Gardner thought he was staking out a middle position between atheism and fundamentalism, but his position was the false one that all religions basically believe in the same god.  In one sense he was correct, in that the god of Hume's "vulgar" believers probably is like the gods of most lay believers in all religions.  But in another he was completely wrong: the god of the philosophers, including Gardner himself, is an explicit rejection of the gods of popular piety.  Like another famous preacher, Gardner was trying to be all things to all men; but what was he offering except yellow stripes and dead armadillos?

If someone wants to believe that a god led them to the bakery owned by the mother who gave them up for adoption, no one is harmed by that. It's not even harmful if someone believes that a god nudged her to become a nurse by nearly killing her young son, since she didn't cause the accident herself. But what if someone believes that a god saved Donald Trump from the assassin's bullet?  From which it would follow that a god didn't save John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. from the assassin's bullet.  Or as I've asked in a non-Christian context, do earthquakes happen because the spirits are understaffed, or inattentive, or hungover?  In my experience, most believers try to avoid following their logic to its conclusion in matters like these; I don't think they should be allowed to get away with it.

Lately I've been thinking more about useful atheist responses to missionary activity.  The standard attacks on belief in gods, or on established religion, are generally valid but tend to miss the point, as Hume indicated.  Like Christian apologists, we sometimes move the discussion to topics we are prepared to address, instead of meeting our opponents head on.  I've been noticing a lot of books on Amazon or in the library which claim to help apologists and missionaries deal with the "new" secularism, and to avoid alienating potential targets.  It doesn't appear that they offer anything new, which may be a mercy.  But I find I have other questions, other objections, which go deeper and I think will be useful to explore. I want mainly to ask: what are they selling, and how are they selling it?

--------------------------------------------

*Gardner wrote a critical review of his own book for the New York Review of Books - under the pseudonym George Groth, as he apparently acknowledged at the end of the piece.  It's paywalled, so I can't read it. 

Am I Confrontational? Very Well Then, I Am Confrontational

In the past decade or so I've become a fan of numerous British women writers from the middle of the 20th century.  Some, like Nancy Mitford, are still pretty well-known; her novel The Pursuit of Love was adapted (not for the first time) by the BBC and aired / streamed in 2021.

But most of the writers I've been enjoying are not that well-known anymore: Elizabeth Cadell, Noel Streatfeild (and her alter ego Susan Scarlett), Betty Smith, D. E. Stevenson, and others. Most of them were working writers, and very prolific. Their books are being re-issued, and are available as e-books at attractively low prices.  Cadell is my favorite at the moment because of her humor -- at my age, not many writers make me laugh as she does -- but I've begun buying and reading Stevenson.

Most of these women began publishing before World War II, so their books give a glimpse into life in England just before and during the war.  It's a bit eerie to read their (or their characters') experience of what is now history: the 21st century reader knows what will happen, but they don't. I've dipped into one of D. E. Stevenson's series, Mrs. Tim of the Regiment and its sequels.  The first book originated as Stevenson's diary, recounting her experiences as an Army wife from 1932 onward.  She fictionalized it and it became popular, so she followed Mrs. Tim and her family into the postwar years.

Today I tentatively started Mrs. Tim Carries On, originally published in 1941.  The Kindle re-issue opened to an introduction by another writer, which eulogized Stevenson and writers like her.  Most of it was unexceptionable until I reached this passage:

The appeal that they have for the contemporary reader lies in the fact that there is no artifice in these books. They are not about dysfunctional people. They are not about psychopathology. There is no gore or sadism in them. The characters speak in sentences and do not resort to constant confrontational exchanges. In other words, these books are far from modern. But therein, perhaps, lies the charm to which Stevenson’s many readers are so quick to respond.

To each his own, but this really isn't true.  I'm not sure how he jumped from "no artifice" (all fiction is artifice) to no "dysfunctional people", and the 1930s are definitely modern.  It's true that most of these books, including Stevenson's, have little overt sex or violence, but novels set in wartime have mass violence hanging over them, or raging offstage.  Mrs. Tim wrote, "Indeed my diary is a sort of escape from the war ... though it is almost impossible to escape from the anxieties which it brings", including air raids -- violent death was part of everyday life in those years for English civilians, no less than English soldiers.  Most of these books featured varying amounts of romance, but explicit eroticism was forestalled by legal censorship as well as by genre conventions.  For all that, Mrs. Tim's four children were not virgin births, though some readers will consider stories about large families "clean" as long as they can pretend that no bodily fluids were exchanged to produce them.

Besides, books like these were and are a publishing niche. The same readers who turned to them for a soothing draught of wholesome family life (some of Mrs. Tim's wackier escapades remind me of I Love Lucy) might on another day pick up a murder mystery full of psychopathology and sadism, or a gothic like Daphne DuMaurier's 1938 best-seller Rebecca. (Would Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre count as "modern"?  Or Shakespeare? Their characters "speak in sentences" too.)  One popular genre that I find rather weird is the "cozy" mystery, which takes place in small towns that suffer inventively spectacular murders as often as the series authors can turn them out.  That's not what I consider cozy, but ...

Perhaps you're wondering what disingenuous clown wrote the introduction that annoyed me so much.  So was I, until I reached the end and found the writer's name: Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, along with numerous other feel-good series.  It made a kind of sense: McCall Smith has progressively toned down the "mystery" elements of Precious Ramotswe's investigations as he's ground out the tomes, and his other series are even less eventful - but also less interesting to me.  I still read the Precious Ramotswe books as they are published, but it seems to me that the characters are increasingly becoming one-dimensional collections of tics.  A bit more "artifice," like Western civilization, would be a good idea.  Stevenson, Mitford, Cadell, Streatfield do this sort of thing much better.

Here We Go Again...

I used to start each new year by listing the ten or fifteen posts that got the most views, but in 2024 I only posted thirteen times.   That makes the ranking easier, at least.  Let's go with the top five.

5. Now You See It...., 69 views. On the death and resurrection of this blog.

4. One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays, 81 views.  The novelist Edmund White thinks that the Russians beat America into space because of the progressive school he attended as a kid.  Nonsense, of course. White's older contemporary Noam Chomsky went to a progressive school too, and it didn't dumb him down:

But up until 8th grade I was in an experimental school run by Temple University. Progressive school, and that was great. But then high school I had to go to an actual high school. There was one academic high school were I was, one for boys, one for girls, and it was very rigid. For the teachers it was a dream because the kids there wanted to go to college, so the teachers could sit back and relax. But it was very rigid, you know, tests, grades. I had never had grades before, never knew I was good student, nothing. And it was a bore. It was a black hole.

3. What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?, 82 views.  See also the followup, And I, A Woke, Found Me Here, with 33 views so far.

2. Forbidden Desire and Blameless Friendships, 128 views.  I still haven't read Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, a review of which sparked this post, but I did buy a copy.  I'll get to it this year.  Admittedly the review didn't make it sound terribly attractive.

1. The Golden Meanie, 203 views.  On the fantasy that Americans have gotten meaner than they used to be.  This one probably should have been a little longer, with more details of political vitriol from US history. I was influenced by Larry Tagg's The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln, which was originally published in 2009 as The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of American's Most Reviled President.

Not a bad resumption, I think.  We'll see if I keep it up.