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?

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*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.

I, A Woke, Found Me Here; or, All Things to All Persons

Last week I saw this definition of "woke" by Tyler Austin Harper, an African American academic I read sometimes on Twitter: 

An attitude prioritizing identities related to race, gender, and sexuality over class identities, and which reduces politics to ritualized performances of correct language use and self-examination that are designed to purge one’s inner bigot without requiring material sacrifice.

I understand where he's coming from, but he's wrong.

First, what he's describing here is what used to be called "political correctness," though that was as much of an aggravated misnomer as "woke" is now.  I wonder what it was called before that.  Despite its association with liberals and the left, a fixation on correct terminology over content can be found all over the political spectrum, and probably throughout history.  Today's American Right has its own totems, from "DEI," "CRT," "grooming," to "Merry Christmas," "There are only two genders," and "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."  And while I understand his formulation, it's composed in language that only an academic could love, and a left-wing academic at that: MAGA would see language like "class identities" as paradigm wokeness.

Second, while he's describing a recognizable attitude, it certainly isn't what Leadbelly meant when he advised his listeners to "stay woke."  Nor, at the other end, is what the Guardian writer I quoted in my previous post on this matter meant by the term.

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke. 

That's the beauty of such words, I suppose.  They allow you to deride and dismiss people you disagree with -- or think you do, since you don't have to listen to or understand their actual views; with luck, they don't understand their views either, they're just using different shibboleths.  I've often gotten pushback from people I challenged to clarify their positions, because they couldn't do so and didn't see why it mattered.  They thought I was being sophistical, or "showing off," though throwing around "woke" is showing off one's moral superiority if anything is.  I ask them about this when it becomes obvious that they are talking past each other, assuming that they mean the same thing by a key word ("woke," say, or "God") when they don't.  Using these words can produce an illusion of agreement, but it's only an illusion.  True, it's easy to get bogged down while trying to sort out what you mean or believe, but that doesn't seem any worse to me than flailing around in mutual incomprehension because neither of you knows what the other means.

Although Harper is correct to criticize the attitude he does, it's not as if he's the first to do so: he has plenty of predecessors who denounced "political correctness" for decades before him.  Since he's defining a part of the problem as if it were all of the problem, he's coming close to the irrational people Sartre criticized in his essay on anti-semitism, who "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed."  The "one superb word" in this case is "woke."

Someone tried to brush aside this problem in another context recently by pointing out that words change their meaning over time.  It's true, they do, but usually by adding new meanings that co-exist with old ones, which leads to the confusion I'm talking about here.  By "woke" do I mean merely "alert," with Leadbelly, or politically and morally enlightened, like the Guardian writer, or virtue-signalling, with Harper?  The most common meaning in the US today, I would argue, is none of these: it's the MAGA meaning of any and all opposition to bigotry and injustice, with (as with "political correctness") the smug assumption that their comfort with bigotry is itself truly correct and woke.  They try to sell their sloganeering as "common sense" rather than "woke," but "common sense" is another virtue-signalling evasion of thinking.  

If Harper thinks that right-wing opposition to "wokeness" has anything to do with a sophisticated class analysis that rejects mere theatrical posturing in favor of a thoughtful, informed stance, he's tripping - but I don't think he took the actual right-wing stance into account.  While I appreciate his take to some extent, I see it as part of the problem, not a step toward a solution.

Vagabond Scholar's Jon Swift Memorial Best of 2024

Once again, Batocchio has posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, carrying on the good work of the late satirist and blogger Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift.  Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio links to them.  Have a look, and see what you think. 

The True Christmas Spirit

Christians of a certain bent don't seem to get much comfort, let alone joy, from their faith.  It's not enough for them to believe that unbelievers will be tortured for eternity, which is at least Christlike: they want them to be punished now.  Not only far-right Christians feel this way, either: liberals also fantasize about violence befalling right-wing Christians.  (I linked to several examples from that thread in this post, but I find that some of them have vanished since then, gone to Internet Heaven I guess.)

The image above comes from a thread I saw on Facebook yesterday.  A popular response to those who criticized it was If you don't believe in Christmas, then why don't you work on Christmas instead of taking the day off?  I've heard that one before, and as I said then, I wouldn't mind working on Christmas in the least.  My job, in university food service, required me to work on numerous holidays.  The university closed down for semester break, which included Christmas and New Year's Day, so working or not wasn't an option.

.... Except, I realized, for campus police, maintenance, and other functions that don't observe holidays.  This extends beyond special cases like universities.  The gas station / convenience store across the street from my apartment is open today, for example.  Workers for airlines and other travel industries are at work today, as they are every other day of the year, making it possible for those who aren't working to enjoy their time off in travel.  Radio, TV, and other media are still functional.  (Do Christian radio and TV take Christmas off?  Why not?  I believe they even operate on Sundays.)  Police, firefighters, and the like are at least on call.  Society slows down for Christmas, but it never stops altogether, and most of the people who keep it working are surely Christians.  So the Christmas warriors' snarky question is based on the false assumption that believing in Christmas gives everyone a day off, and we infidels are hitchhiking on the benefits Christians legitimately enjoy.

The term "essential worker" comes to mind, and from what I remember, there must be considerable overlap between those people who throw tantrums over "Happy Holidays" and those who misunderstood what "essential workers" were during the height of the COVID pandemic.  They expected others to risk serious illness in order to serve them, and to do so quickly and efficiently.  Nor should they have to wear masks in crowded stores -- that was communism.  I especially recall a local woman who threw a tantrum on Facebook because her curbside pickup at Walmart was delayed a few minutes due to staff shortages.  She demanded to know why people didn't want to work.  That they might fear for their own health, or for the health of their families at home, didn't even occur to this person, or to many others.

Although empathy for others is at least implicit in the teachings of Jesus, many Christians manage to ignore it.  They demand empathy for themselves, though.  And some, like the guy who posted the image I swiped for this post, glory in their lack of empathy.  That's fine with me.  There are reasons why Christian churches are bleeding members, and the War on Christmas probably isn't the most important.  But it helps.

The Power and the Glory

This news item caught my eye recently, partly because the vandalism happened in a nearby city I have ties to.  Someone broke into a Catholic church, played with the fire extinguisher and trashed the place,  destroying numerous objects there.  As far as I can tell, no one has been arrested yet.

What interests me is this comment by the parish priest:

"If you think about a statue that's been in a church for well over 100 years, the amount of devotion, the affection, the prayers that have gone up to heaven through the intercession of St. Joseph, it really is a loss for the community," said Father David Kime.

I'm not in favor of iconoclasm, whether sectarian or freelance, but this seems strange to me.  Will the "devotion, the affection, the prayers" disappear, or be invalidated, because the images they used were destroyed?  That question should be directed to the vandal too, though I doubt they hoped to achieve that; I speculate that they were unleashing some of the "wild male energy" I used to hear so much about.  

Catholics have often been accused of idolatry for their use of images, though the difference between them and even the most iconoclastic Protestants is a matter of degree, not of kind.  It's proper to deplore the malicious destruction of property, whether it belongs to a church or not; but I don't understand tying the non-material devotion etc. to the material objects.  Can't St. Joseph intercede for Catholics if his physical image isn't present, or has been destroyed?  I've asked similar questions before, with regard to Native American religion.

This doesn't mean that I don't sympathize with lay believers who find it hard to distinguish spiritual practice from the material objects they associate with it.  But admitting its importance seems to me to confirm my atheistic insistence that religion is a human invention and construction.  Apologists will, I think, counter that because of human weakness, many or most people need to refer to embodied symbols and concrete images. If only Christians were as understanding of the principle as applied to the "pagan" use of images!  I understand both groups, but I think understanding and sympathy can co-exist with rejection.

A Zen story comes to mind: an outsider observes a Zen master bowing to an image of the Buddha.  "Why are you doing that?" the outsider protests.  "It's just an image, an illusion, not reality.  I can spit on these statues."  "Okay," replies the master: "You spit; I bow."  I do neither, but I think that spitting on a religious image, no less than smashing it, indicates how much power that it still has over the vandal.  Of course images have power, because human beings assign them power.  I doubt we can ever escape that, but we can be aware of what we're doing.