You Keep Using This Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” 

The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman - or more likely, his subliterate social media team - posted this on Facebook a few days ago.  ("'Deconstructed' out of" is new to me, though I've seen some other people talking about "deconstructing Christianity" online.)  It got plenty of comments along the lines of "The earth is not 6000 years old and Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch", which are fine. I began thinking over my own journey, as they say, on this subject.  It's a bit more complicated, and I bet so are other people's stories.

As I've written before, I've been an atheist since I was about ten years old. This distinguishes me from most of Ehrman's fans, I think, who appear to have had religious upbringings and had to make more dramatic breaks with belief. I was never a fundamentalist, though I grew up in rural northern Indiana in a Christian milieu and I had to start thinking about my relation to religion early on. I didn't begin reading serious biblical scholarship until I was 30, and it was a complicated process as I learned to think historically. But one thing that broke the logjam was Morton Smith's "A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition," Journal of Biblical Literature 1963. It's an article that (like much of Smith's work) has been misrepresented shamefully. It sent me back to compare the resurrection stories in the gospels and 1 Cor 15, and I saw how incompatible they were. I also owe a lot to scholars like Dennis Nineham and James Barr, whom I encountered long before I heard of Ehrman. Almost everything I've read by them was helpful, but Nineham's The Use and Abuse of the Bible and Barr's Fundamentalism stand out, along with Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon Authority Criticism, which I reread a few days ago. These and other scholars seem to me much more thoughtful than Ehrman, but it may be that you need a basic awareness of Bible scholarship to be able to follow them.

In most online discussions about religion, numerous commenters will pipe up sarcastically: "Why would you want to study fairy tales?" There are scholars who study fairy tales, from all cultures, and the problems they deal with are the same that biblical scholars study: oral tradition, turning oral tradition into written forms, where they came from and what they mean. It's questions like these that drive my interest in religious studies. Scholars also study modern religious texts such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Matrix.  Many nominally secular people quote those texts as if they were scripture, and many avowed atheists have faith-based theories of morality. (Such as "people should get their morals from their hearts and feelings, not books.")  Thinking is hard: let's go shopping.

I've mentioned before one of the most useful insights I picked up from the philosopher Mary Midgley: that thinking critically or philosophically is not like taking apart a machine, but like disentangling a mass of yarn. You pick at your problem here, then there, and once in a while a big section comes loose; but then you have to return to the detail work.  It described my own engagement with big issues - not just religion, but US foreign policy, literature, and more, but certainly religion and specifically Christianity.  I'd read one book, move to articles and books it cited in the footnotes, and soon one of those would send me off in another direction.  Then I'd write about it.  Sometimes this process was more interesting than at other times, but over time I covered a lot of ground.  This wasn't a sign of my great patience, but of the persistence of the problem. I'd leave the subject for awhile, then pick it up when I found a book that drew me back in.

Come to think of it, the biggest hurdle I had to get over, even as a lifelong atheist, was to recognize that Jesus was not a good person, not a great and wise teacher, not an authority on anything. Apart from being wrong factually, as in his end-times teaching, he was often wrong morally, in his fondness for extreme punishments especially. And there was no reason he should have been other than he was. This, I think, is the hurdle that stops even many atheists and other nonbelievers: they want to reject religion and churches, but they still want a Jesus they can admire, a Jesus who'd be their best friend, someone they could have a beer with and laugh at all the stupid Bible-thumpers. This drives a lot of the hatred for Paul, for example the claim that Paul plumb ruint Jesus' beautiful simple teaching of love. Jesus was distorted and misunderstood by the stupid apostles, but they understand him.

It requires determined selective reading of the gospels, which depict Jesus as an end-times prophet, a hellfire and damnation preacher, a faith healer and exorcist who cadged money from his (often wealthy) followers, who taught his followers to break with their families and was hostile to normal human sexuality.  These traits, which non-fundamentalists are aware of in the sects they've left, aren't visible only through the eye of fancy-pants biblical scholarship.  They're right there on the surface of the text, and critical scholarship hasn't really dislodged them. I don't mean to be smug about this: I found them easy to ignore for quite some time, partly because the critical scholars I read didn't dwell on them either.  But since they are emblematic of the Christianities that liberal Christians and secularists alike despise, shouldn't they get more attention?  They don't, though, even when they're pointed out. 

Part of the explanation for this, I think, is the normal human tendency (which I share) to view others in either-or terms, as totally good or totally bad.  Either Jesus was, at the very least, a supremely good man and a moral visionary, or he was a totally evil person, as in C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" trilemma from his Mere Christianity. I'm not going to discuss it here, maybe another time, but for now it's relevant for the problem of how to evaluate our heroes. If people have trouble dealing with the clay feet of people who are unquestionably merely human, then it will be even harder to assess someone who stands at the apex of Western civilization.  Even those who reject the churches want to use his prestige, and they'll work very hard to preserve it in their own minds, by their own standards.

So, for example, this post by gay African-American former Clinton staffer Keith Boykin, which the Facebook Memories feature sent my way recently:

I think they both are equally God-fearing Christians. Or neither, as you like. Obama has as much innocent blood on his hands as Trump, but for Boykin and others that fact has to be ignored.  It's fair and reasonable to try to evaluate both of them based on the evidence, but for the true believer, Obama fan or MAGA, it's unacceptable and indeed unthinkable.

At this point I insist that we don't have enough reliable information about the "historical Jesus" to evaluate him at all.  We probably never will. People who want to be Jesus' BFFs usually seem to have a good grasp of the problem; at best they believe that since the Bible is not a reliable historical source, they can pick the parts they like and dismiss the rest as inauthentic.  That's not how it works, but of course they have the First Amendment right to believe what they like, if not to demand that others accept their version of Jesus. It's why I stress the less appealing traits Jesus is assigned in the gospels, and which they ignore -- except quite often to accept the hell-and-damnation part for people they hate. Recognizing that the world wasn't created in 4004 BCE or that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch isn't enough; it's barely a beginning.

Surely I Am Coming Literally; or, the Messiah Has All the Lines

Then there was this one.

Followed by:

And later by:

"Simplistic" isn't the word I'd use, but ...

Liberal Christians and secularists love to mock conservative Christians for taking the Bible literally.  They're wrong about that, since conservatives believe the Bible to be inerrant, an illusion that requires a lot of non-literal interpretation to sustain.  Ironically, perhaps, Julian Sanchez here takes the Bible literally: he assumes that the gospel of John is a literal, factual report of Jesus' interaction with Jewish elites.  Anyone who has had any contact with New Testament scholarship will find that especially amusing, because the Fourth Gospel (as scholars often refer to it; it was probably not written by the disciple John) is known as the most "spiritual" gospel, even in Christian tradition.  It doesn't match up with the other three in chronology, style, or its portrayal of Jesus.  Yet, despite their dismissal of the Bible as the fantasies of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds and peasants, they frequently do as Sanchez did here, and take it as straight reportage.  The commenters under his posts follow suit.

The great teacher who must contend with the foolishly literal-minded inquirer is a staple literary device of "spiritual" writing, from Plato's Socrates and the Buddha down to Zen masters and Carlos Castaneda's equally fictitious Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.  It's also common in any kind of propaganda, religious or political: of course the outsider or unbeliever is a foil, dumber than a box of rocks and existing only to be schooled, though it's probably a vain effort.  The trope allows the teacher to hold forth at great length, and it doesn't hurt that the script is written so that the teacher gets all the gotcha lines, while the opponent can only gape helplessly and confess his stupidity.  It's fun to chuckle at Nicodemus, as Sanchez does, but it's disturbing to realize that he thinks Nicodemus was really that dumb and Jesus was really that smart, and that he himself is very clever to have spotted it.

In one post Sanchez balks at taking John's anti-Jewish polemic at face value, but this is straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.  I agree that "It’s [sic] seems awfully unlikely, e.g., that the historical disciples really went around talking about 'the Jews' like some foreign group," but I see no reason to take the rest of the gospel material as gospel either.  Does he really believe that a writer who caricatured Jesus' opponents in this one respect would depict them accurately in others?

Another irony is that apologists like to claim that in olden days nobody took religious statements literally, that everybody from high priests on down knew better than that.  This is probably false, but it's true that people in Jesus' time and region were given to elaborate interpretations of religious teachings.  Not only the Hebrew Bible (the New Testament came along later) but the epics of Homer were treated as inerrant texts to be mined for hidden wisdom.  It's said that the Sadducees, the Judean faction who controlled the Temple at the time, insisted on interpreting the Torah literally.  That's unlikely in practice, even if it was their principle, but Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a sect very fond of non-literal readings of Scripture.  The Dead Sea Sect also had secret spiritual teachings, and interpreted the Torah for their own ends.  In all disputes, though, propagandists find it convenient to mock the literal absurdity of their opponents' beliefs and practices (the heathen believe that their graven idols can hear their prayers!).

The gospels do contain material that shows Jesus teaching in riddles so as to confound his hearers, not only those outside but his inner circle of disciples.  The fourth chapter of Mark consists of the Parable of the Sower, the disciples asking what it means, and Jesus explaining the parable while declaring that he teaches in parables in order to prevent outsiders from understanding, repenting, and being saved.  The parallel versions of the story in Matthew and Luke soften this as much as they can, but they retain the idea that no one could understand Jesus' teaching until after he died and was resurrected.  Only then could the Scriptures be opened to their true meaning.  But this idea isn't sustained throughout the gospels.  Most of the time the crowds and Jesus' opponents understand his meaning entirely too well, for example in Mark 12:12 and parallels: "And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them." 

I also think that Julian Sanchez gives Jesus far too much credit for profundity.  Why should Nicodemus have understood Jesus' claim that one must be born again to see the kingdom of Heaven?  His question about it, far from being stupidly literal-minded, is simply feeding Jesus a chance to explain himself -- which, as usual, Jesus takes, though his follow-up is as usual as clear as mud.  Does Sanchez thinks he understands Jesus' pretentious bloviation about sin and salvation in the Fourth Gospel?  He recognizes that "born again" is a pun in the original Greek -- it can also mean "born from above," which isn't self-explanatory either -- but still thinks it means something.  Maybe it does, but what?  I can understand a Christian apologist taking this stance, but why would a self-styled secularist do so?  What does Sanchez thinks "the kingdom of Heaven" refers to?  It's a Christian commonplace that Jesus' Jewish contemporaries had wrong ideas about the Messiah and the kingdom he would establish, but I don't agree that Jesus' ideas, whatever they were, were correct.  Considering that the kingdom he promised did not arrive within a generation, as he promised, it's a safe bet that his ideas were wrong.  (Trying to interpret his teaching to get around that basic stumbling block is a hallmark of fundamentalism, not of secularism.)  The Christian churches have changed their understandings of Jesus' teaching over the millennia, and modern scholars disagree on just about everything aspect of it. 

As an atheist, I am free not to think "the Kingdom of Heaven" has any real referent.  Based on my experience with both modern scholarship and lay atheists' confused efforts to appropriate Jesus' teaching for their own purposes -- efforts which make no sense to me at all -- I don't think they know any more about it than Nicodemus did.

Cthulhu Loves Me, This I Know

 

A friend posted this story this morning: 

Deputies were called Sunday when a Christian prayer group and Native Americans faced off Sunday at the Great Serpent Mound, the Native American national historic site in southern Ohio.

The Native American leader who was there says they were trying to protect a sacred site that belonged to their ancestors.

The leader of the prayer group says the mound is a place where dark energy is released into the world.

"I'm not calling the Indians dark," Dave Daubenmire told The Enquirer. "This has nothing to do with the Indians."

It's shocking how much Daubenmire concedes to the Satanic forces of Political Correctness here. In the past Christians would not have hesitated to call the Indians "dark," and worse.  Denouncing pagans and calling their gods demons is an ancient Christian tradition.  Jesus even called his Jewish (that is, not pagan) opponents sons of the Devil.  At this rate, before you know it Daubermire will be saying that there are many religions but they all believe in the same God.

Spirituality is so beautiful.  Each man believes that the other has spiritual power that he has to cancel, and which his own god can protect him against, though Daubermire seems to feel more protected than Yenyo.  Are the Indians' gods so weak that the Christians can exorcise them?  Is "sacred space" so fragile?  These are serious questions.  I've often seen writings by adherents of the old religions complaining that they had their own earth-based gods of great power and holiness, but then the Christians came along and destroyed them.  Why didn't all the earth-based gods get together and give Jesus a wedgie?  Why did their power depend on the existence of their temples and shrines, even when their members were an overwhelming majority?  It's possible to give secular answers to such questions, but the non-Yahwists should answer them in their terms.  Mostly they just whine.  If I were a theist, I'd prefer gods who aren't losers; and make no mistake: these disputes are about power and winning, about honor and shame, not about "holiness" and "the sacred."

If a Christian prayer group is such a threat to the Indians' sacred site (owned by an unnamed "nonprofit"), why not counter them with the Indians' own rites -- dancing, chanting, burning sage?  Executive Director of the American Indian Movement Philip Yenyo told the Cincinnati Enquirer:

"It's a sacred site for us, but other people with other faith beliefs think they have the right to go there and do their ceremonies. In our opinion, they don't," Yenyo said. "It would be like me going into a church and doing my ceremonies in that church – disregarding and disrespecting their believes."

This is as disingenuous as Daubermire's claim that he wasn't calling the Indians dark.  I hope that Yenyo does "disrespect" Christian beliefs; why the hell shouldn't he?  If he can't lead a purification ceremony in a Christian church, why not do it on the lawn, in the parking lot, even across the street if necessary?  No wonder the sacred sites are under attack: he doesn't care about them that much.

It's also great to see the tranquility and peace that Faith and Spirituality bring to both sides, as shown in the lovely photograph above. Thanks to Dave Daubermire and Philip Yenyo for strengthening my atheism on a cold morning.

Prophets? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Prophets!

Today a friend linked on Facebook to this tweet by the Canadian blogger Ian Welsh.  It's part of a longish thread, really a sermon, on religion, a subject on which Welsh has shown himself to be careless in the past.  That makes this remark ironic at least:

As I'll try to show, Welsh hasn't done the necessary work either.  On just a factual level, he wrote in an accompanying blog post containing some of the same materials:

Jesus, poor bastard, had his teachings bastardized more than almost any great prophet I can think of: a Christianity which includes the book of Revelations has lost the plot, and I suspect the Old Testament should be ditched as well, because the God of the Old Testament acts in ways opposite to what Jesus teaches.

Either Welsh hasn't read the New Testament or he's imposed his own preconceptions on what he did read.  First he takes a popular position, that Jesus had a pure (i.e., not "bastardized") set of teachings that his followers twisted.  That wouldn't be surprising, but how does Welsh know what Jesus' original teachings were?  He left no writings; we know him only through the New Testament, which is not a reliable source (or rather, collection of sources), but there's no way to get behind it to Jesus himself.  Scholars have been trying to recover the "historical Jesus" for over two centuries, and they're no closer to solving the problem now than they were when they began.

As for the Revelation of John, which is a bugbear to many, it certainly poses many difficulties, but Welsh doesn't indicate why he objects to it.  It appears he doesn't know that its themes of violent judgment and punishment run throughout the New Testament, including Jesus' own teaching as the gospels report it.  You could ignore or remove the Revelation altogether, and you'd still have to deal with an end-of-the-world cult. As the great historian Morton Smith declared in a 1955 review of a scholar who tried to get rid of the end-times material in Mark, "to accept the great majority of the sayings in [Mark] as substantially accurate reports of Jesus' ipsissima verba [i.e., his own words] ... is implausible. But to do this and also get rid of the apocalyptic sayings, is impossible."  Welsh is ready to criticize his "great prophets" for teachings he disapproves, so this shouldn't be a problem, yet he prefers to blame all of the bad parts of Christianity on everybody except Jesus.

As for ditching the Old Testament, once again Welsh expresses a view that is shared by many who haven't done the work necessary to have an opinion worth respecting.  Jesus situated himself in "Old Testament" religion: he quoted the Hebrew Bible frequently, and claimed to be its fulfillment.  When he rejected parts of the Bible, he usually did so to make them harsher: it is not enough to refrain from killing, you must not even get angry; not just to refrain from adultery, you may not even feel erotic desire, so it's better to make yourself a eunuch if you can.  The Hebrew Bible demands the death penalty for some offenses, but Jesus threatened endless punishment after death, to be visited on the overwhelming majority of humanity.  Jesus' more attractive teachings, such as "Love your neighbor as yourself," are often direct quotations from the Hebrew Bible -- Leviticus 19:18, in that case.  Teaching care for the poor is a major theme in Hebrew religion, as in most religions, even if it's honored more in the breach than in the observance, but it's not the core of Jesus' teaching any more than it is of Hebrew religion or any other.

Welsh refers to Jesus as a prophet, along with Confucius, Mohammed, and the Buddha.  But of those four, only Mohammed actually was one.  A prophet is a person through whom a god speaks.  Jesus never said "Thus says Yahweh," as the classical Hebrew prophets did; when he set aside parts of Torah, he did so on his own authority: "But I say to you..."  His disciples reported that some thought Jesus was a prophet, but that's treated as a misconception: he wasn't a prophet but the Messiah, the Son of God.  Perhaps Welsh would dismiss this as another bastardization of Jesus' pure teaching, but if he wants to be taken seriously he would have to give good reasons for dismissing it.  As it is, he doesn't seem to know what a prophet is; he seems to use the word to mean "a really cool guy."

In another tweet in that thread, Welsh declared that "Nobody is God's only or final prophet. Anyone who says or believes otherwise is spreading evil."  This is strangely religious language, but except perhaps for Mohammed, no one seems to have claimed to be only or final prophets.  If Welsh had actually read the Bible, Old and New Testaments, he'd know that ancient Israel was crawling with prophets; much of the Hebrew Bible is the work of some of them; for some reason Welsh never mentions Moses, the prophet par excellence of Israelite religion.  Also, "prophet" was an office in the early Christian churches, as worshipers were possessed by the spirit of Jesus and spoke on his behalf.  And of course, there were prophets and oracles in ancient Greece, from the Delphic Oracle to Socrates and beyond, none of whom was "only or final."  Welsh doesn't seem to know much about the history of religion.  "I have a lot of respect for Confucius, Jesus and Buddha," he writes, but respect born of ignorance is an odd kind of respect.

"The person of reason," Welsh declares,

the moral person, takes these beliefs as arbitrary and inquires as to what parts are good and bad, rather than bowing down before tradition and authority.

This is the path of respect for the great prophets, each of whom came into an imperfect world, was unwilling to accept it, and tried to make it better. Buddha saw suffering and sought a way to end it. Confucius saw rulers savagely mistreating their subjects and sought to bring better rule. Jesus saw people following “the law” and missing the spirit of love and care for fellow humans that was the essence of the love of God. Muhammad’s first followers were mostly women and slaves (as was true of early Christianity) because he offered them a better life than the one they had.

This is a tendentious misrepresentation of all these men.  Welsh's take on Jesus, for example, is a variant of Christian anti-Semitism; Jesus' criticism of those "following 'the law'" was standard "Old Testament" prophetic teaching.  The core of Jesus' teaching was the imminence of the final judgment and the importance of escaping hellfire.  The Buddha was concerned first about his own suffering, the suffering of others was a mirror in which he saw himself, and social justice was not his priority.  About Confucius and Muhammad I know less, but I see no reason to suppose he's any more accurate about them.  I wonder where Welsh got this stuff; it sounds as if he had read a couple of popular books about religion, and never bothered to go any deeper.  He claims he spent "a good 15 years meditating," and denies that he's an atheist, but his take is basically that of the kind of people I call Village Atheists, who picked up their information from crank literature and spun it into conspiracy theories, and who pay lip service to the great teachers they evidently identify with but know nothing about.

I agree with most of Welsh's expressed values, such as his opposition to caste (though he has nothing to say here about Hinduism) and the oppression of women (though he has nothing to say about the deeply entrenched sexism of Western secular science).  But you don't need prophets to take those positions.  Moral positions don't come from gods, and someone who says you shouldn't oppress women because a god says so is part of the problem.

In another tweet Welsh declares "All most religious followers are is indoctrinated slaves; born into a religion they did not choose. It's just another form of identity politics, usually combined with authoritarianism."  Of course, because a prophet is by definition an authoritarian figure: "Thus says Yahweh!"  But does Welsh seriously believe that you can eliminate indoctrination and authoritarianism by getting rid of "religion"?  The real and probably intractable problem lies in the fact that human beings are born helpless and must spend years being brought up in families.  Children don't choose their parents, the language they speak, the culture in which they grow up -- all of which they learn to accept as "nature," the way things are.  "Religion" is just a part of the matrix of indoctrination that goes with being human.  I hope Welsh knows better than to believe that you can raise children without indoctrinating them; that's a fantasy, one that could fairly be called religious.  It's certainly not based in science or reason.

Welsh also either ignores or is ignorant of all the scholarly work that shows how unsatisfactory, misleading, and impossible to define the word "religion" is.  But ignorance never keeps people from pontificating, does it?  Given the ex cathedra quality of his remarks, I wonder if he sees himself as a prophet.

A Cautionary Tale

This morning Amazon, like the Hand of Providence, threw into my path a book by James A. Lindsay, Everybody Is Wrong About God (Pitchstone Publishing, 2015).  Everyone except for James A. Lindsay, I figured, and I was right.  According to the accompanying blurb the book is:

A call to action to address people's psychological and social motives for a belief in God, rather than debate the existence of God  With every argument for theism long since discredited, the result is that atheism has become little more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. Thus, engaging in interminable debate with religious believers about the existence of God has become exactly the wrong way for nonbelievers to try to deal with misguided—and often dangerous—belief in a higher power. The key, author James Lindsay argues, is to stop that particular conversation. He demonstrates that whenever people say they believe in "God," they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet. Lindsay then provides more productive avenues of discussion and action. Once nonbelievers understand this simple point, and drop the very label of atheist, will they be able to change the way we all think about, talk about, and act upon the troublesome notion called "God."

I'm sympathetic with Lindsay's approach here.  I've benefited from reading the literature debating the existence of gods, but I was already an atheist when I began reading it.  I became an atheist quite young, at around the age of ten.  I was fascinated by Greek and Biblical mythology, and one day my father told me that I should know that some people don't believe in God.  "Why not?" I asked. "Well," he replied, "they don't feel any need to."  I took my time absorbing this information, and I don't know exactly when I realized that I was one of those people, but I did.  After all, I didn't have much of an idea of what God was before; he was sort of like Santa Claus, of whose existence I'd been disabused some years earlier, or the Greek gods.  Learning what it meant to be an atheist took a lot more time and thought.  I'm still learning, but debating whether gods exist doesn't interest me any more than debating whether homosexuality is okay.

The trouble with Lindsay's stance is that it cuts both ways; we atheists, when we say we don't believe in "God," are really telling theists that we have certain psychological and social needs that we don't know how to meet.  Everyone does.  Human beings aren't rational creatures at heart; we can learn to use reason, but our needs and drives are pre- or sub-rational.  Does Lindsay realize that he's echoing, almost parodying, a popular Christian missionary line here?  I don't think so.  But it's also reminiscent of Almost-New Atheist Sam Harris's conviction that people who criticize American foreign policy are "masochistic," and need to have our eyes opened to the healing light he brings, that we may have life more abundantly (and Muslims have it less).

And -- surprise, surprise -- I downloaded the Kindle sample of Everybody Is Wrong About God, and found that Harris is for Lindsay one of "the most prominent atheist writers of the beginning of this century, among them Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, the late Victor Stenger, and Jerry Coyne."  "Prominent" seems to be damning this pan-atheon with faint praise, I must admit, but Lindsay thinks that they have definitively brought theism low.  He says he will work with a "clarified position on the term atheism, one that speaks back to the meaning originally put forward" by Harris et al.  This is also odd: did they -- does Lindsay -- believe that there was no atheism before the twenty-first century?  From what I've read of their work, which I admit isn't enough, they were just following in the footsteps of much smarter writers.  David Hume, for one.  And far from what you might call post-theists, which is what Lindsay seems to be aiming for, they are very noisily anti-theist.

Lindsay also says that "we need to understand myth.  Myth doesn't just mean a misinterpretation of a phenomenon."  (Actually, it doesn't mean that at all.  I'll return to that point shortly.)

At the core of myth is a blend of misinterpretation, obscuring ignorance, and yet clear apprehension, but what is most relevant about mythology is none of these.  True, myths are built out of ignorance, often due in part to the complexity of the subject matter at their cores, and, true, myths are a kind of misinterpretation of that subject matter.  On the other hand, and importantly, also true is that myths encapsulate some degree of understanding of what they represent -- otherwise they'd be far less compelling than they are.  What is most relevant about myths, however, is exactly what makes them most compelling: myths are culturally relevant narratives that simplify complex or unclear phenomena and that speak to people at the level of their psychological needs.  Narratives of this kind, though, are exactly what religions provide for people, and it is therefore precisely this observation that illustrates why God, at the center of so many religious beliefs, is a mythological construct.

This isn't far from the view of a theistic apologist like Karen Armstrong.  The main difference is that Armstrong allows more understanding and knowledge to mythology.  But they're both wrong.  There's a lot of scholarly debate about just what myth is, and at best Lindsay is addressing only a subset of the material.  It's not even sure how much the ancients believed their myths.  Some scholars argue that at least some myths encode not ignorance, but knowledge about the world, perhaps to keep it esoteric.  But it ill becomes Lindsay to dismiss ignorance, since everyone is ignorant of more than they know, including Lindsay.  Indeed, "ignorance" and "superstition" are both religious concepts.  Especially going by the mythos of Modern Science, everyone today is an ignorant savage compared to those who will follow us in centuries to come.  He has, as far as I can tell from what I've read of the book so far, a rather backward conception of religion, as a bunch of silly stories invented to keep the rabble happy and controlled.  It appears that he hopes to fill the shoes of the elites who developed religion for that purpose in the first place.

Take the last sentence I quoted, which has the form of a logical conclusion but isn't one.  First, mythology is only part of any religion, and it's likely that ritual predates mythology.  People create narratives for their own sake, and only rationalize them afterward.  Mythology is a part of epics like the Gilgamesh cycle, the Homeric epics, and the Torah, but only part; and I wouldn't care to pontificate as to their purposes.  In Greek drama, which originated as part of religious festivals, the gods are used as part of the stories, just like the human characters, who are also mythological though not divine.  Myth is part of the backdrop of any human society.

Second, because human beings think narratively, mythic narratives aren't specific to religion.  It's a cliche that nations have their own mythologies, and the United States is no exception: Columbus, who defied superstitious belief in a flat earth to discover America; the Pilgrim Fathers, who fled persecution to build a haven for religious freedom in the New World; the Founding Fathers, who in their wisdom created a new nation devoted to freedom for all men; and so on.  (I know that these are ahistorical; that's the point.)  So does science, not just with heroic tales about the Patriarchs -- all male, naturally -- who defied superstition to bring Man the light of knowledge, of Galileo muttering "It still moves" after being forced to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun, Thomas Huxley totally destroying Bishop Samuel Wilberforce over Evolution in 1860, of Watson and Crick cracking the DNA code by themselves, down to bold cowboy geeks inventing the computer in their garages without a penny of government money -- but with a mythology of the Scientific Method, which bears little or no resemblance to what scientists actually do.  But scientists believe in it, because it speaks to their psychological needs.  The myth of evolution as a linear ascent from lower to higher, dumber to smarter, is also popular among those with Faith in Science.  You might be able to get rid of religion, narrowly and tendentiously defined, but mythology won't be eliminated easily, if at all.

Unwittingly supporting my position, Lindsay declares a little later, "We saw the idea of racism collapse long before the culture started really catching on, a process lamentably still continuing today." This, lamentably, isn't true.  The idea of the oneness of humanity is actually much older and is found in some universalizing religions, but in the late 1800s the "idea of racism" moved from "the culture" to science, where it's comfortably entrenched to this day, along with the "idea of sexism."  Lindsay has degrees in physics and mathematics, but he doesn't know much about history.

If the price of Everybody Is Wrong About God is marked down, I might try reading the whole thing, but so far it isn't promising.  As numerous people have said, including me: the trouble isn't that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.

Wake Up! Wake Up Wake Up Wake Up Wake Up!

We're sure to see more horrible stories like this as the COVID-19 crisis continues and worsens.

A 38-year-old Wilson Borough man who had become increasingly despondent over the COVID-19 pandemic and who had recently lost his job shot his longtime girlfriend then himself on Monday afternoon, police report.

Luckily he wasn't a very accurate shot.  According to this report, the woman survived, though she's in critical condition.  The shooter didn't survive.  It was less spectacular than the engineer who tried to crash his train into the hospital ship Mercy at the Port of Los Angeles "out of the desire to ‘wake people up,’” but no one was injured that time.  From what I've read so far, the perpetrator seems to have been vague about how the ship was suspicious, or what he expected people to realize once they were awakened.  This, in my experience, is normal when someone orders others to wake up: their analysis of the situation tends to fall apart under examination.  The command always makes me suspicious.

What I want to focus on here is the shooter's reported motive.  The police chief told a reporter:

“He went into the basement and came outside onto the rear porch with the victim. While holding the handgun, Bliss told the victim, ‘I already talked to God and I have to do this.’ The victim ran off the porch and he shot at her four times striking her once. Bliss then shot himself.”

As I write this I'm unable to access Twitter, whether because the site is down or because I've been bad and must be disciplined.  (If you don't know what you've done, we're certainly not going to tell you!)  A number of commenters fastened on Bliss's claim to have talked to God and, presumably, gotten permission to end it all.  But as I've noticed before, they seemed to be confused.

Did God tell Bliss to kill himself?  Of course not: God doesn't exist.  Yet the atheist commenters seemed to think that God was somehow involved anyway.  So let's ask ourselves whether this killing would not have happened if no one believed in gods?  I don't see any reason to think so.  Bliss didn't decide to kill himself and his girlfriend because a god put the idea into his head.  If he hadn't had recourse to the conception of a god, he'd have had something else: Evolution, or Science, or George Carlin, or Donald Trump, or the Invisible Hand of the Market - some imaginary friend or another.

Christians and other believers, of course, will have a different response: God would never tell someone to kill someone how can you say such an awful thing!  They'll blame Satan, or mental illness, or Donald Trump.  I can't prove them wrong, but for what it's worth the Christian Bible contains many stories of Yahweh ordering his servants to kill, maim, rape, and plunder others -- sometimes individuals, sometimes whole populations.  My Catholic mother would have sneered that he was weak, which might be true but isn't going to solve the problem.

It's no different outside of the Yahwist tradition.  Believers invent gods who order them to do what they want to do anyhow; religious pacifists just invent different gods.  Atheists, alas, have managed to invent imaginary friends who endorse killing as well.  Maybe Bliss's genes ordered him to kill himself and his girlfriend; maybe it was his DNA.  Maybe Evolution told him: You cannot go against the word of Evolution!  The only way to stop the killing is to stop the killing.  No middle-deity or principle is needed.

Your Get-Out-of-Hell Free Card

Here's an unremarkable, everyday example of what I mean when I insist that religion is a human invention and should be evaluated in that light.

A great, good, and holy man has passed. Friends know well, he would sign every note, “pray for me.” I ask the same - please pray for the repose of Fr. James Schall, S.J., the best of men, and a good and faithful servant.

I had never heard of James Schall before this morning, but this memorial to him turned up in my Twitter feed this morning.  I don't doubt that he was a great, good, and holy (whatever that means) man, though any Christian ought to remember that their Lord said that no one is good except God.  (On "the best of men," see my recent reflections on that kind of inflation of merit.)  What interests me are the assumptions underlying the request to pray for Schall's "repose."  One is that death is like sleep, and that the person somehow is still there.  Another is that the default of the after-death state is restlessness, whether it's conceived as a hungry ghost craving revenge on the living or torment in some placeless place. Yet another is that the living can help the dead find repose, either by appeasing the vengeful spirit or, as in this case, praying for them to receive an upgrade to first class, where they'll be able to rest.

It's common for infidels like me to explain such beliefs by claiming that those who hold them have been "brainwashed" (people keep using that word) by the Church, by wicked Priests, by fairy tales written by Bronze Age shepherds.  (Those shepherds are evidently immortal, and amazingly powerful.)  I don't think that explains anything.  Why did those wicked people invent the belief, and more important, why is it so durable?  Christian churches have been trying for two thousand years to brainwash believers to do or refrain from doing many things -- calling people good, for an easy example -- but without much success.  In many cases the offenders feel no guilt at all.  I think it's reasonable to suspect that when believers conform, it's less because they were brainwashed than because they are the kind of people who'd invent those beliefs in the first place.  Either they feel strong anxiety about their own lives, or are full of resentment toward others they'd like to see punished.

The belief in a painful afterlife is not only Christian, after all.  It may not be universal, but it's very ancient and widespread.  Even biblical Judaism, which supposedly has no doctrine of the afterlife, imagines the dead in a dark, shadowy place called Sheol; if you want to invoke Bronze Age shepherds, that seems to have been how they thought of it.  I've written before about Korean Buddhist beliefs and practices that were not very different in principle from Roman Catholicism.  I once read a scholar who claimed that in his parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, which revels in fantasies of eternal post-mortem torture, Jesus didn't mean to describe the geography of the afterlife but simply borrowed imagery from Egyptian sources among others.  It's a false distinction anyway, but I would ask why Jesus preferred that imagery.  Why not imagine both Lazarus and Dives comfortable, reconciled, at an eternal and joyful banquet?  Why believe that anything happens to them after their deaths at all?

But not only that: along with belief in Hell (or whatever you want to call it) goes the belief that the living can help the damned to escape from it by what I can only call magical means, by prayer, by Masses for the dead, by baptizing the living on behalf of the dead, and so on.  Christianity, like other religions of salvation, is at its core preventive magic to keep you from being sent to Hell in the first place.  I don't know how accurate the accounts I've read of ancient Egyptian religion are, but the idea that the hearts of the dead will be weighed to decide their posthumous fate can hardly be blamed on Christianity, and the basic principle is the same: to learn the password, the secret handshake, the necessary bribes to get past the gatekeeper to eternal safety.  But the default setting is torture; "punishment" may not be the right word, because the suffering is free-floating, apart from anything the sufferer may have done.

So: why all this?  Death is scary, whether it's our own or the death of other creatures.  Nobody knows why we die, nobody knows if there's any kind of existence after we die.  When I've raised this point with some believers, they often invoke a version of Pascal's Wager: well, we don't know, so we're playing it safe, it does no harm to pray for Father Schall, etc.  Like the original form of the Wager, there are problems, highlighted by the variety of beliefs and practices people have.  What good will it do to light lanterns so the dead can find their way to paradise more quickly, if they're going to Hell anyway because they weren't baptized in the name of Jesus, the only name in which we are saved?  If there is a real danger of posthumous suffering, we need accurate information about how to avoid it, and there is none.  (If we knew that this was the geography of the afterlife, it would be different, but we know nothing about it.)  Yet many (most?) people cling desperately to belief that the danger is real.  Some get very upset at the idea of giving up the belief, of admitting that no one knows and that there's no reason to believe that we go on existing after we die.  Certainly my skepticism about the call to pray for the dead will upset some people.

A common reaction is to demand "respect" for the dead.  I am not sure what that means, but I have as much respect for Father Schall as it's possible to have for someone I've never met and know nothing about.  I don't think he should go to Hell; I don't think anyone should go to Hell.  Demanding "respect" is just flailing around.  My point is that we should be aware of and examine the assumptions that lie behind these beliefs and practices.  Getting rid of "religion" -- whatever that would mean, given that no one knows what religion is, where it ends and not-religion begins -- won't help.  In principle you could have religion without these strange and (I think) malign assumptions about death, but I think there would be powerful resistance to getting rid of them.  Many, probably most people, prefer to think of the universe as a giant booby-trap, laid for us by a Cosmic architect who loves us and wants to see us slip on the banana peels he put in our path, and you can't change that preference simply telling them they're stupid, brainwashed, and superstitious.

I think that resentment is a major factor in that resistance.  If Donald Trump or Ilhan Omar isn't going to be punished horribly, if the bully who took your lunch money in third grade or the stuck-up girl who didn't invite you to her birthday party is just going to get away with it, then what is the point?  Again, this resentment can't be wished away; I feel it myself.  The trouble is institutionalizing it in our moral systems, as all the systems that postulate punishment after death do.  Nor will you find it only among fundamentalists: think of the liberal Christians who fantasized violence against Paul Ryan for his views on poverty.  Think of this biblical scholar, showing his superiority to an antigay Christian who spoke against Pete Buttigieg in Iowa.  Such resentment is a cause of (certain aspects of) religion, not an effect.  It's easy for me to see why it's so tenacious.  Making the world better (by ending poverty, for example, which you recall Jesus had no interest in doing) is hard, perhaps impossible.  Making it worse, by throat-punching a bigot with the binding of your Scripture, or punching Paul Ryan in the face, or - better -- fantasizing about it, is so much easier. If you hang on to an unsupportable belief so doggedly, it's because you like it: you want to see the world that way.  A lifestyle choice, if you will.

To try (perhaps vainly) to make myself clear, I'm not saying that people who encourage us to pray for the dead are wicked.  I'm asking that we, and they themselves, pay attention to the assumptions that lead them to encourage it. They are not benign assumptions. They express some weirdly negative attitudes towards life and the living that I imagine these people would repudiate. But they hold them nonetheless.  Those of us who reject religion need to be aware of those attitudes, in the conventionally religious and in ourselves, if only to understand them in hopes of correcting them.

Faithful and True; or, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

While I was working -- well, procrastinating -- on another, still unfinished post, I happened on this tweet:

I’m so glad you at least waited the customary 10 days after a massacre in a mosque to compare Islam to cancer.

It referred to this image:

And referred back to a previous tweet featuring Dawkins' letter to the editor of the London Times, denouncing Cambridge University's rescinding of a fellowship offered to Jordan Peterson, a well-known crank philosopher with arguably racist and sexist views.

I don't think it's accurate to say that Dawkins "compare[d] Islam to cancer."  He was attempting, with his customary tin ear, to draw an analogy.  True, the analogy depended on Islam being bad, but it's not exactly news that Dawkins is hostile to Islam.  Presumably, and I'll return to this, he is equally hostile to all other religions.  The point he was trying to make was something along the lines of "Hate the sin, love the sinner," which is no more convincing from him than it is from Christians.

Let me attempt to disentangle some of the threads of Stupid in Dawkins's tweet. First, bigotry does not necessarily refer to hostility to persons as opposed to their belief systems.  One can be bigoted toward belief systems too, for example by assuming that they are uniform and unchanging, and that all adherents share exactly the same implementations of their system of choice.  I reject Islam, as I reject all belief systems which claim the authority of a god to support their teachings and practices.  But I also recognize that its teachings are internally inconsistent, subject to many (including sectarian) interpretations, and that its adherents vary widely in their observances.  For simplicity's sake, consider the hijab, one of the practices that particularly exercises Dawkins: not all Muslim women wear it, and those who do vary widely in how much they feel God wants them to cover up.  I don't know Dawkins's opinion on this particular issue, but as I've said before, I object to secularist societies which ban the hijab as strongly as I object to societies which require it.  (Should I condemn secularism as a cancer because of its history of intolerance and oppression of, inter alia, women and homosexuals?  By Dawkins's logic, I should.)  A better analogy, though not useful for Dawkins's purposes, might be to "cellular growths" rather than cancer: some are benign, others malignant, some constitute more of a threat to the host than others.

Second, religion is not an "affliction."  Even if it were, we don't blame people with illnesses for their condition.  It is something that happens to them.  The whole point of the medical model is that the patient is a patient, not an agent, with respect to his or her disease.  We don't jail cancer patients, nor do we bomb hospitals to drive the cancer out of them.  Religion is a lifestyle choice, and it's appropriate to criticize morally the choices believers make, though not before we've examined our own.

Sometimes we bomb hospitals for the sheer hell of it, though.  I don't know the basis for Dawkins's claim that Muslims are the principal sufferers from Islam, but Christians and Jews have been doing their best to win that competition for centuries.  As Jimmy Durante used to say, "Everybody wants to get in on the act."  Perhaps Dawkins would acknowledge that Christians are the principal sufferers from Christianity, Jews the principal sufferers from Judaism, Hindus the principal sufferers from Hinduism, and so on, but such acknowledgement wouldn't play as well in a political context that demonizes Islam and Muslims while ignoring the religious component of Christian and Jewish and Hindu offenses.  Indeed, condemning the crimes of a Jewish state is a very serious thoughtcrime in Christian and secularist societies.

Third, and related: the first thing that occurred to me when I read Dawkins's remark about "homosexuals" was "Tell that to Alan Turing!"  Turing, you may recall, was forced by the State to take hormone "therapy" for the crime against Nature of having sex with other males.  Until the early twenty-first century, secularist science in the US was tolerant of secular attempts to "cure" homosexuals, decades after homosexuality was removed from the index of mental disorders and it was widely known that sexual orientation cannot be changed.  It's not clear to me why scientists changed their views on the status of male homosexuality; it doesn't seem to have been because of evidence, because whether a condition is an illness or not is not something that can be settled by evidence. And the whole edifice of psychiatry is of very dubious validity in general.  It reminds me of the way Bob Jones University, which insisted for decades on the Biblical doctrine of racial separation, suddenly awoke one day to discover that there was no such doctrine and they couldn't remember what it was supposed to be.

On women, the record of the "hard sciences" is comparable to that of "religion."  Not only were women regarded by (male, of course) scientists as a lesser breed than men, almost a separate species, but their health issues were largely dismissed.  I've pointed out before that militantly anti-religious scientists are terrible on issues like rape, which they seem incapable of understanding.  But male scientists, not only those of a certain age, still resist with great fierceness allowing women into the labs.  True, this guy is Not All Male Scientists, but he doesn't stand alone, and it's significant that a highly respected newspaper gave him a platform.  And as someone else pointed out, this scientist's claim that "it's not as if they ... build walls to keep women out," is false.  But maybe I should just conclude that scientists are the principal sufferers from science?  If that were so, I might have more sympathy for Dawkins, but it's not so.  Two words: eugenic sterilization.

Perhaps the worst error in Dawkins's analogy between religion and disease is that it's based on the assumption that religion is an external entity, like a radioactive virus, an "affliction" from which human beings "suffer."  Religion is, as an atheist like Dawkins ought to know, a human invention.  If a religion upholds male supremacy, even if all religions uphold male supremacy, a rational thinker should ask why they do so -- especially since Science also does so.  The conviction of female inferiority and the consequent belief that they should live under male tutelage (aka patriarchy) is plastic -- societies, including Muslims ones, vary widely and within themselves on how far women are disadvantaged -- but it's remarkably tenacious.  If it's a precept of many religions, including Science, it must be because male human beings put it there.  This presumption generalizes.

Recently I acquired a copy of a book I've wanted for a long time, a photographic essay about the Naked Festivals in Japan.  It includes some quasi-ethnographic articles about the history and rationale of these festivals, which prompted me to wonder why people decided that the gods wanted young men to strip to loincloths (or less, sometimes) and mass together for a giant game of Keep Away involving various sacred objects.  The visual appeal of such a rite is obvious to a pervert like me, but to the gods...?  At around the same time I saw some discussion of Roman Catholic High Mass.  We know more about the history of this rite rendering service to Yahweh and his Only Begotten Son, but again, people simply invented it in all its complex spectacle or music, costume, scent, and so on.  If one is an atheist, one can hardly claim that it is an expressive of, or compliant, with God's will.  It should be obvious to an atheist (though surprisingly often it's not) that none of the many religious rites or doctrines are the will of any god.  They are the will of the people who perform them.  In many cases, as with the Naked Festival, they are not imposed from above, let alone from outside, but are welcomed by the participants and observers, who not only enjoy the sight of massed naked men in the streets but are deeply moved and edified by it.  Blaming any human practice or belief on "religion" is an act of extreme intellectual and often moral laziness.

One more point, which actually was my starting point for this post.  Someone else commented on this thread:

Dawkins converts more atheists to agnostics than he turns away from faith altogether. Arrogant, dickish, islamophobic. Who would want to co-sign that unless you were one or more of those to begin with?

This annoyed me. I replied:

Any atheist who changes their opinion on atheism because Dawkins is an asshole is a sheep. Certainly can't claim to be an independent thinker. I'm an atheist on the merits, not because of who else is an atheist. If that's your approach, I wouldn't want to co-sign with you either.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that the truth or falsehood of a claim about the world has anything to do with the personality of the person who makes the claim.  His or her personality may be relevant if he or she tries to make it so, but that can be a distraction, and certainly is here.  I've criticized philosophers before who complained that the New Atheists come across as unpleasant.  (Don't forget that Dawkins himself notoriously whined about the "inexplicable hostility of Mary Midgley's assault" in her review of The Selfish Gene.  "I deplore bad manners as much as anyone...", he complained dishonestly, and also claimed falsely that Midgley hadn't read the the book before she reviewed it.  But all of this only influenced my opinion of Richard Dawkins, not of atheism.

And why, now that I think about it, would Dawkins's obnoxiousness make people abandon atheism for agnosticism?  Is there any actual evidence for the claim anyway?  Someone, I think, doesn't know what these terms mean.  But there's a lot of that going around.

Jeez, You Two, Get a Room!

I just saw a link to an interview President Obama gave to Bill Maher on religion in public life. As usual, Obama was vacuous and dishonest. He acknowledged that an atheist would have trouble being elected to public office in the US, and said that "we should foster a culture in which people’s private religious beliefs, including atheists and agnostics, are respected." This is the same kind of gaseous platitude he routinely uses to discuss gay people or feminism (or race, for that matter), and I'm not gratified.

I suppose the key word here was "private," since Obama himself has expressed disrespect for people's "private religious beliefs," presumably because those beliefs were publicly stated and acted on.  (Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, for example, were nice guys but a couple of unrealistic idealists who didn't understand the cold hard facts of life as Obama does.  They didn't keep their religious beliefs "private" either.)  And most of Obama's fans do the same. So does Maher, whom I hold in contempt. (Why? Because he's contemptible.)  But no one is obligated, under either the First Amendment nor the more general principle of toleration, to respect anybody else's beliefs. Nor, under the same principles, is anyone obliged to keep their beliefs "private." (I'll start doing so when liberal Christians start.) What we are obliged to respect is people's right to hold beliefs and express them -- even publicly -- though we are free to disrespect and criticize them.  Maybe that's what he meant, but it's not what he said. Thanks, Mr. President, but no thanks.

I have the impression that when most people use the word "freedom," they're thinking of a comfortable and easy condition, perhaps because they're thinking of their own freedom, not of others'.  Living in a free society will be comfortable in some ways, but often very uncomfortable in others.  Not only you, but other people have the right to express their views, hold their opinions, and attend the church (or no church) of their choice.  And since other people's beliefs are often highly offensive, it can be uncomfortable not to be able to silence them.  But being uncomfortable won't kill you.

(And if anyone is distressed because I disrespected the sacred person of Our POTUS, I can only say that if he doesn't want to be criticized, he should keep his "private" opinions [and his religious beliefs, which he has often talked about in public] private.)

And Don't Slam the Door

When I saw the teaser for Jack Miles's December 2014 (though I just now happened on it) essay at the Atlantic, "Why God Will Not Die," my first thought was, "Well, he's undead -- of course he won't die."  I've always been baffled by the "God Is Dead" trope, since a non-existent being can't die; but it can't live either.

The piece concludes:

But when life refuses to wait any longer and the great game begins whether you have suited up or not, then a demand arises that religion—or some expedient no more fully rational than religion—must meet. You’re going to go with something. Whatever it is, however rigorous it may claim to be as either science or religion, you’re going to know that you have no perfect warrant for it. Yet, whatever you call it, you’re going to go with it anyway, aren’t you? Pluralism at its deepest calls on you to allow others the closure that you yourself cannot avoid.

Science keeps revealing how much we don’t, perhaps can’t, know. Yet humans seek closure, which should make religious pluralists of us all.

That is one of the most stunning non sequiturs I have ever seen.  It may be that Miles meant that we should resist the craving for closure, which is at odds with pluralism, but he's so incoherent that I can't be sure.

The comments are not impressive either.  Here's a bit of the first one:

If one is religious, that religion ought to provide, if not answers, at least a path which one can follow to work toward answers. If one is not religious and has no supernatural belief which suggests a life after death existence, why spend time on this stuff? This isn't, I hope, a completely nihilistic viewpoint. I think it is possible to live within and by a moral code without believing such a life to be in the service of some deity. To put it another way, one can be a good person, a moral person, a person all of us would be happy to have as a neighbor, without any idea that it means anything beyond being a good neighbor on a day to day basis.

This is a remarkable, though not very tasty, salad of cliches.  That first sentence, for example, about what religion "ought" to do, would I think have surprised many devoutly religious people over the millennia.  Religion has never been satisfactorily defined or delimited, but it's remarkable when the kind of people who insist that you don't have to have a religion to be a good person then turn around and equate religion with being a good person.  If you look at the history of religion, it is as much about rites and rituals, maintaining purity, communicating with spirits through prayer and sacrifice, and so on, quite separate from any interest in morality.  You couldn't actually separate out morality from this conglomeration like a yolk from the rest of the egg, of course, because "religion" covered all of life, but that's exactly the point.  Morality is no more the essence of religion than ritual is, but different religions (and the same religion at different times) emphasizes this or that element and de-emphasizes others.

Then there's that word "supernatural," another one of those words that people keep using, I do not think it means what they think it means -- or that they have any idea what it means.  Suppose for the sake of argument that human beings have a component that is separable from the body, that survives after the body dies.  There's no reason to call that survival "supernatural," not least because we have no idea whatever what it would be; we know nothing about it, and so we can't classify it.  It would presumably be as "natural" as the life we know.  If we ever do learn that such survival is a fact, and are able to investigate it and describe it, it will be as a "natural," not a "supernatural" phenomenon. 

If you read the Christian Bible on its own terms, rather than through the lenses of much later reinterpretation, you'll see that it regards "heaven" as a place, far above the earth and separated from it by the great dome that God built to separate the waters above from the waters below in Genesis 1.  Mountains were considered holy and therefore dangerous places because they were spatially closer to heaven.  But you could be taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, accompanied by a chariot and horses of fire.  When the resurrected Jesus left his disciples, he rose into the heavens.  And so on; the writers were inconsistent about it, because they didn't really know anything, and the conception became metaphorized, much as other important concepts (like "spirit") did.  But even in twentieth-century America, there were people who believed that astronauts would end up in the Christian heaven if they went high enough.  There was nothing "supernatural" about that belief; they regarded heaven as a place like the earth.  "Supernatural", as Merriam-Webster puts it, means "of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; especially :  of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil" -- but these are all vague boundaries.  What do "visible" and "observable" mean, for example?  Were germs and electrons "supernatural" before they became "observable"?  What is the "natural" that the "supernatural" is beyond?  Notice that the spatial metaphor is built into the word itself, but what is the literal truth behind the metaphor?

Then there's the little matter of "being a good person."  There is some broad, and vague, consensus about what that might mean, but all the qualities involved are subject to a lot of interpretation.  A good person would, among other traits, be truthful -- except when not telling the truth was preferable.  (Immanuel Kant rejected the idea that it could ever be preferable to lie under any circumstances.  Susan Neiman went over his reasons at length in her excellent book Evil in Modern Thought [Princeton, 2002], but I'm going to dodge discussing them because most people don't agree with Kant; his position is avowedly at odds with the broad, vague consensus I'm referring to here.  Similarly, a good person won't kill -- unless in self-defense, or unless the State orders him to.  Vengeance is bad, but also a duty.  And so on -- what it means to be a good person in specific cases is disputed, not as an ivory-tower exercise but very hotly as a practical everyday matter.  Religion doesn't give any definite answers, or even "a path which one can follow to work toward answers."  But there is no single path toward answers outside of religion either, wherever "outside" might be.  This might even be, contrary to the commenter's assertion, a nihilistic conclusion.

Is it possible to be "a moral person ... without any idea that it means anything beyond being a good neighbor on a day to day basis"?  Not for human beings, but then "a moral person" and "a good neighbor" are abstractions, not observable realities.  Other animals have impulses and reactions, and they police each other's behavior, but they don't have morality.  When we start using words, and as human beings we are condemned to do so, we move beyond the "day to day" and try to link our wishes and aversions to the Universe, to find what we want built into its structure.  Atheists who try to construct morality from "reason" or "science" are not in principle doing anything different than religious moralists: if they don't believe that a Robin Redbreast in a cage puts all Heaven in a rage, they still talk as though Reason has an opinion on the matter.  It doesn't.  One of the reasons why "God won't die" is that although the religious don't possess Truth, and indeed can make no real sense of the universe, no one else can either.  Meanwhile, the rites and rituals, the myths and stories, have the comfort of familiarity, and they're actually more malleable than many people (religious or not) believe.  I happen to agree that it is possible to get through life (notice I don't say "be a good person") without making grand claims about the means by which one does so, or what long-term end will be gained by it.  I think that morality is a severely local, human-scale matter that not only can be left open, it is left open, even when people claim otherwise.  But I also think that not many people are happy to leave it there, which may well be something we can't change.  I also think we can learn to be more humble about the limitations of our knowledge, but it isn't easy, and is a project that must be done day to day.  On the other hand, I don't think it matters in any larger-than-human sense, or how we'd know if it did.

So, back to religious pluralism.  Is it a higher good?  No.  Jack Miles, I think, was trying in his own incoherent way to make the point I'm making here.  It's not a transcendent value; it's a gritty practical conclusion based on experience; it's a truce.  As I understand it, the idea of religious tolerance became widely accepted, not because people really understood its value in the abstract, but because they got tired of being arrested, tortured, and killed by others, and realized they had to give up the pleasures of persecuting others in order to avoid being persecuted themselves.  The same is true of freedom of speech.  But I don't think most people, religious or not, have ever really been happy with the compromise.

Because My Heart Is Pure

The most valuable lesson to be learned from Sam Harris's recent e-mail exchange with Noam Chomsky is that two atheists, both champions of science and of Enlightenment values and rationality, can disagree vehemently on issues they both consider to be of first importance.  This might seem obvious enough, but I noticed that some of the coverage failed to grasp it.  The first notice I saw of their exchange was this article from Salon, was subtitled "How the professor knocked out the atheist." That Chomsky is also an atheist is hardly obscure; whoever wrote that headline was trying to create an illusion of more space between the combatants.

I consider this more important than who "won."  Not too surprisingly, there was little agreement about that question, with Harris's fans sure that Harris won, or at least that Chomsky lost because he was mean and rude to Harris, and Chomsky's fans sure that Chomsky won, mopping up the floor with Harris.  Or "undressed" Harris, as one notably wacky headline put it.  (The headline stayed with the post as it was cross-posted to several sites.)  Elsewhere I learned that Chomsky bitchslapped Harris, that he owned him,  and so on.  PZ Myers provided a round-by-round, punch-by-punch commentary on the exchange.  So did Susan of Texas.  Those who haven't yet seen the exchange, and are interested, could begin there. I'd prefer not to link to Harris's original blog post, just because he doesn't deserve any more traffic; you can find it easily with a simple online search if you wish.

What interests me here is Harris's recent postmortem on the encounter, in which he lamented that "Anyone who thinks I lost a debate here just doesn’t understand what I was trying to do":

Harris said he had hoped to learn what Chomsky actually believes about the ethics of intent, and he hoped his own arguments would steer leftists away from their “masochistic” tendencies.

He said Chomsky’s followers believe the U.S. was morally worse than ISIS because it had, through “selfishness and ineptitude,” created ISIS and victimized millions of people in other nations.

“This kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the left,” Harris said. “I don’t think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting, much less wise.

... Harris complained that he encountered “contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language” throughout his exchange with Chomsky – and he now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly.

...“I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off of this island of masochism so that these sorts of people that I’ve been hearing from for years could cross over to something more reasonable, and it didn’t work out,” he said. “The conversation, as I said, was a total failure, but I thought it was an instructive one.”

I agree that the conversation was instructive, though probably not for the reasons Harris thinks.  Harris initiated the exchange by telling Chomsky that "I am far more interested in exploring these disagreements, and clarifying any misunderstandings, than in having a conventional debate."  (Harris was being disingenuous about that, since he'd announced on Twitter that he was "trying to arrange a debate with Noam Chomsky".) The ensuing conversation clarified Harris's misunderstandings very effectively, and his follow-up remarks are even more instructive.

When Harris first contacted Chomsky, he now reveals, he didn't really think he had anything to learn from him.  He was already certain that he had the True Gnosis, and if given access to what he regarded as Chomsky's cult of devotees, he could expose Chomsky's "misreadings" and free his cult from their "masochistic" view of US policy and conduct.  It's ironic that he should complain of "contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language" from Chomsky, because that describes his own contributions so very well.  Though Chomsky explained, with amazing patience really, why he disagreed with Harris, Harris simply brushed his explanations aside and repeated his original claims -- but repetition is not argument.

The accusation of masochism, which is very nearly content-free, is especially interesting.  No one, Harris believes, could have any good reasons for judging US policy as harshly as Chomsky does, so he and his followers must be suffering from some sort of mental dysfunction.  The tactic may be connected to Harris's interest in neuroscience, which is being used nowadays to explain away all human behavior as the result of conditions within the brain, not to any external (social, political, intellectual) factors.  Those who adopt this tactic (or other reductive pseudo-explanations) never pause to consider that, if this were true, it would apply as forcefully to themselves and to neuroscience itself as to everyone else.  It would mean, for example, that Harris's stance on Islam, as well as his politics generally and his atheism in particular, is also merely the product of some kink in his synapses, not because of his superior intellect.

It also has another consequence.  Suppose that all the Muslims in the world suddenly acknowledged that Harris is right that Islam is an inherently violent cult, renounced faith in favor of atheism, and blamed Islam for everything wrong in the Middle East and in the world.  Would that be "masochism" in Harris's eyes?  I don't see how it could be anything else.  But perhaps Harris believes that Muslims are Muslims due to some neurobiological defect, so they are incapable of change, and must (however regretfully -- we're all humane and well-intentioned here!) be exterminated.  Since Harris's view of Islam is so clearly irrational, perhaps it should be diagnosed as "sadism."

Clearly Harris hoped to leapfrog over Chomsky and speak directly to his followers, bringing them the Healing Light that he uniquely has to offer.  Now, I know that, like most well-known people (Harris included), Chomsky has some fans who are devotees, who parrot his opinions without understanding them.  But I don't see any reason to believe that this is true of all of them.  Many of them have ties to various traditions of political dissent: pacifism, antiwar, international solidarity, and so on.  I formed my views on the Vietnam war, for example, based on the evidence, long before I read Chomsky's writings.  I liked them because they fit with everything else I knew.  I disagree with him on some matters, and have written about some of those at length.  I've observed that despite the accusation, popular in certain circles, that Chomsky tolerates no disagreement, he can be disagreed with if you have some idea of what you're talking about; witness the disagreements between him and Gilbert Achcar in their lengthy conversations on the Middle East, for example.  So if Chomsky's fans don't immediately accept Sam Harris's Love Gift of Wisdom, they may well have reasons other than mere "masochism."

Harris's position on morality is often described as consequentialist, including (albeit ambivalently) by himself.  Like most such classifications, consequentialism isn't all that clear-cut, but it apparently boils down to "the view that an action is right if and only if its total outcome is the best possible. This is the basic form of consequentialism; there are, however, many varieties, a few of which will be noted below. What they all have in common is that consequences alone should be taken into account when making judgements about right and wrong."  If so, then Harris is an odd kind of consquentialist, because he insists to Chomsky that intent (American intent, anyway) is vitally important, and it seems to trump every other consideration for him.  No matter how horrible the outcome of US conduct, it's still better than anything anyone else does, because the United States *

are, in many respects, just such a “well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and [Arundhati] Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it “the perfect weapon.”

"The perfect weapon" is a totally imaginary concept, a weapon that can kill only bad guys without harming any good guys in the slightest.  Harris fantasizes that US officials would gladly use the Perfect Weapon if they could, thus avoiding any collateral damage whatever, and that bad guys (Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, whoever) would reject it even if they were offered it, because they are totally Evil and like hurting innocent people.  How he knows this is not clear.  But since the Perfect Weapon doesn't exist, this is a purely speculative exercise, which is revealing given Harris's professed disdain for metaphysics and other boring, airy-fairy logic-chopping.

In the real world, we must consider how people use the imperfect weapons they have.  And oddly, Harris is rhetorically ready to concede that the United States is less than perfect.

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky’s thesis whole. ... The result [of our actions] should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

Taken out of context, these remarks could be taken to accuse Harris of surrender-monkey American-self hating masochism.  But his concession has no consequences.  Like any exceptionalist (Rachel Maddow is another well-known example) Harris simply refuses to admit that "our misdeeds" might lead to anger and retaliation by our victims, especially since even if the US should atone and pay reparations for our crimes, in fact we never do.  We just keep killing and killing and killing.

Rather than a consequentialist, then, Harris appears to be quite the opposite.  America is good, not because of the consequences of our actions, which are in fact often quite bad, but because we mean well.  Our intentions not only need to be weighed along with the outcome, but they trump everything else. And we know this, not because of any evidence, but simply a priori, as a matter of faith.  Chomsky and others have rebutted Harris's claims about American good intentions, but the rebuttals bounce harmlessly off Harris's armor of true belief.  Evidence?  Reason?  Harris laughs your evidence and reason to scorn, because he knows.

To acknowledge that our actions might have consequences is not to justify any and all retaliation, as exceptionalists like to claim.  What it means is that we cannot make a great show of injured innocence when the chickens come home to roost.  I don't think that the 9/11 attacks were justified, any more than Martin Luther King Jr. was calling for the Vietnamese to invade and conquer the US when he called his government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" in 1967.  If Harris had any principles, it would be he and others like him who called for the destruction of America for its manifold crimes; but he has no principles. America, that "well-intentioned giant," can do whatever we like, because we're the good guys.

One other small matter.  Harris whined about the limitations of e-mail, the medium through which he Chomsky communicated.

I’m sorry to say that I have now lost hope that we can communicate effectively in this medium. Rather than explore these issues with genuine interest and civility, you seem committed to litigating all points (both real and imagined) in the most plodding and accusatory way. And so, to my amazement, I find that the only conversation you and I are likely to ever have has grown too tedious to continue.

I've been on the receiving end of this sort of passive-aggressive nonsense myself: people who clashed with me in a public forum "reached out" via e-mail, in the apparent belief that in public discussion I'm just putting on a show and in a private exchange I'll admit that I don't really believe anything I say in public.  I wonder if such people are projecting; in some cases it seems they are.  "Tedious" does describe Harris's conduct in his correspondence with Chomsky, but of course he projects onto the Other.  What, I wonder, did Harris prefer?  Does he think he'd have done any better face-to-face?  Maybe have a brewski with the Noamster and just be two regular guys together?  The trouble wasn't that e-mail inhibits communication, it was that Harris wasn't interested in communicating: he was going to preach, and Chomsky was supposed to listen, and marvel, and be saved along with all his household.  In my experience it's usually Christians who talk like this.

Notice also how in Harris's followup he "now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly."  That's one of the benefits of having this sort of exchange in writing, including e-mail: you can take your time, consider your next move in relative tranquility, and even delay your response until you've had time to think it over.  But Harris isn't, on the evidence, interested in thinking.

* I'm relying on Susan of Texas's quotations from Harris here, not from Harris's original post, but the quotations are accurate; you can follow the links to his blog if you want to check them.

** Here I'm copying PZ Myers' quotation from Harris, under "Round 8."