Aw, Hell No

I don't usually like engaging with videos on subjects that demand careful attention; I'd rather work from text, which can be quoted and analyzed more easily.  But I've been watching the work of a popular YouTube guy, a biblical scholar named Dan McClellan who's also active on TikTok.  I first encountered him in the Twitter feed of Candida Moss, whose book The Myth of Persecution (Harper, 2013) I liked a lot. I found him offputting then, and still do, but he knows his stuff and is good on matters of fact.  But matters of fact about the Bible tend to bleed into questions of doctrine, as in this short video. 

 

McClellan isn't as different as he might be from the Christian TikTokers he takes on.  As you can see in this case, he draws in traffic with a catchy line, "There is no biblical concept of hell."  At least he doesn't begin by gushing "This video will BLOW YOUR MIND!"  He quickly explains that there are several biblical concepts of post-mortem punishment, and I can go along with his reconstruction of the development of ideas about the afterlife in Judaism and Christianity.  I believe I've seen another video where he goes into differing terms such as "Hades" and "Gehenna," which some English translation render as "Hell."

So that much is good.  I don't think the translation of specific words is that important: if you're being burned by the fire that is not quenched, gnawed by the worm that is not sated, it's not going to matter whether you're in Hell or Hades or Gehenna.  As McClellan says, the New Testament has several conceptions of post-mortem punishment, as it has several conceptions of what you must to do be saved, and what is required of you after you've been saved.  If you take such things seriously, that can't be reassuring.  It's why so many Christians are anxious and unsure that they won't be condemned after all.  Quibbles about terminology are like fussing about whether Jesus' name was really or some variant of Yehoshua: do the purists on that issue, who generally don't know any more Aramaic and don't fixate on the Aramaic forms of other Biblical names, think that the Savior won't hear their prayers if they don't address him by the exact correct name, or pray in flawless Aramaic or koine Greek?  Maybe he won't, I don't know.  

I think it's more important that Jesus in the gospels is consistently punitive, though of course he forgives sins when he's in the mood.  (Aren't human tyrants always marketed with touching stories of their occasional generosity and kindness? You don't want to see them when they're mad, though.)  God isn't consistent either, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy (Exodus 33:19, quoted in Romans 9:15).  As McClellan points out, Paul doesn't talk about post-mortem torture - that's Jesus' shtick.  But the default setting of the New Testament is that you are in danger of God's wrath, and you can only escape it through Christ.  As I've argued before, this is a widespread human assumption, older than Christianity and found beyond the borders of Christendom. As with any belief about the afterlife, there's no evidence for it, but it's what many people take for granted anyway.  It isn't something that wicked priests invented to control the masses; the masses believe it on their own, and may even have invented it.

Many Christians and what you might call Christian-adjacent types don't like the idea that a loving god would condemn them or people they like to eternal torture, though they're willing to throw Truly Bad People under the bus.  Maybe they're right, but they have to work hard to forget that Jesus didn't see it their way.  The time, for some reason, was very short, and the gospel must be proclaimed far and wide, but he came to save a few; most would not find the way to safety.  The promise of salvation depends on, and is meaningless without, the threat of punishment. Whether you'd end up in Hades or Hell is, it seems to me, a distraction from the main message of danger and safety.

Of course many of his fans react as if McClellan had come up with this information on his own, the way people react to Bart Ehrman or Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. That goes with the territory.  When I read the comments under his videos I often wonder how many of them really understand what he's telling them. Many of the reactions are of the typical Internet line that he DESTROYED the Bible Thumpers.  SCHOOLED them.  And so on. It doesn't matter whether they understand, as long as they're on the Right Side.  

As someone who's read a lot of biblical scholarship over the past forty-five years, I don't see it that way.  McClellan likes to invoke "the data" and intone that the scholarly consensus "absolutely" disproves the apologists' claims, and in many cases he's right; but scholars aren't always as unanimous as he implies, and the scholarly consensus has changed in the time I've been following the field.  I agree with much of what McClellan says, but I'm wary of being too absolute about it.  The data about Jesus are too sparse, vague, and contradictory to say much with certainty about him.  Many different reconstructions have been constructed from the data, and despite archaeology and some manuscript finds, very little new data have  been found in the past century.  Compare William Shakespeare, who lived much more recently than Jesus, in a period and place that is much better documented.  But we know surprisingly little about him, almost no new documents have turned up in the past century, and his biographers use speculation, often very free, to fill in the yawning gaps. (See David Ellis, The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies, Edinburgh 2013.)  The great English scholar and churchman Dennis Nineham quoted his teacher R. H. Lightfoot "lamenting that New Testament scholars 'are "so hot for certainties"; if only they would sometimes say, 'we simply do not know'".  But scholarship abhors a vacuum.  So do believers and unbelievers.

I suspect McClellan wanted to convey that no one knows what Jesus taught about the afterlife, to forestall any claims about it, and I think some of his fans decided that they could fill in the gap with their own wishful thinking.  It's possible that the clashing concepts in the gospels go back to Jesus himself. When the time is short and the gospel must be proclaimed with the help of the Holy Spirit, consistency is not a priority.  Jesus was not a systematic theologian but a back-country revivalist, exorcist, and end-times preacher, not a serious scholar of Torah.  If he had teachers or other influences, we don't know who they were; scholars can only infer them.  As McClellan indicates, the gospels show the influence of religious speculation and writing of Jesus' time and place; he may not have bothered to think hard about them when the Spirit drove him into the wilderness (Mark 1:12) after his baptism. Or he might have.  It's fun to speculate, and I do it myself, but speculation isn't evidence, let alone certainty.

Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine

  

This is the sort of remark from Francis that won the hearts of many a non-believer, but I don't get the appeal.  

In the first place, while Jesus' teaching on eternal punishment was as inconsistent as the rest of his teaching, it was a theme he returned to often enough that I see no reason to believe it wasn't dear to his heart.  Some scholars have tried to get around it by pointing out that his teaching on the matter wasn't the fully-developed doctrine the later churches produced, but one could say the same of pretty much all his teaching.  He wasn't a theologian or a scholar, he was a back-country faith-healer and end-times preacher, and even if every word ascribed to him in the gospels were authentic (not likely!), we'd have a very sketchy set of doctrines just begging to be filled in by later followers.

A number of Christian apologists have tried to scratch out hints in the gospels of a more conciliatory doctrine that doesn't involve eternal torment, but hints are all they have.  (Yes, the second-century Christian thinker Origen of Alexandria was one such; but he was declared a heretic, and he lived in a notorious hotbed of Gnosticism, so not many would endorse his ideas if they weren't desperate for an ancient precedent.  For example: the evidence is dubious, but most scholars seem to accept a much later rumor that he made himself a eunuch for the Kingdom; should modern Christians follow him in that as well?)  If Jesus did believe and teach that no one would go to hell, that would count against the reliability of the gospels as a source of his teaching.

I've noticed that many of the same people who let wishful thinking be their guide will also denounce Christians with dogmas they dislike as ignoring the overwhelming two-thousand-year bulk of Christian tradition.  When they do it -- and Hell is part of that tradition -- it's suddenly of no account.  I understand why they do it, but I'm not obligated to respect their reasons or their conclusions.

One more thing struck me when I saw the post above, though.  I've seen numerous variations on this theme on the internet over the years:

Why would Hell exist in the first place?  Why would you need to pay to stay or get out of it?  I've written about this before too: faced with solid ancient tradition about suffering after death, people just invent loopholes to get around it.  When the Pope let slip his rejection of two thousand years of Catholic tradition about divine Justice, that's what he was doing.  I wouldn't expect an elderly cleric to reject that tradition, of course: he has too much invested in it to do such a thing. But for non-Catholics and non-theists who get all excited about his qualms is, to my mind, like rejoicing over a child's lemonade stand raising money to save a few* orphans from the orphan-crushing machine.  It's the mildest, safest objection to a horrible, inhumane doctrine that, on top of everything else, is pure invention. There is no hell, there is no heaven, and anybody who claims to know how to escape one or get into the other is a scammer.  "Yeah, but he's a nice, kindly scammer who wishes nobody needed his snake oil!" should be embarrassing, but a lot of people think it's a sign of their good judgment and character.

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*Remember that Jesus taught that only a few would be saved, and most would be damned.  So "few" is precisely correct here.

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.

Justice, You've Been Served!

On Monday Democracy Now! rebroadcast a 2006 interview with the late Daniel Berrigan.  It includes his account of an exchange with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1965 about the Vietnam war, with the unintentionally (I presume) funny aside that Berrigan had to ask a secretary at the magazine he was publishing to transcribe McNamara's response "in shorthand" -- he couldn't write it down himself?  Isn't a Christian supposed to serve rather than be served?

The part that prompted me to write, though, was this, at the end of the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve continued to get arrested. Do you think these arrests, what you have engaged in, protest, even when people are not being arrested or jailed, have an effect? I mean, you have gone through a number of wars now. Do you think things are getting better, or do you think they’re getting worse?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: No. No. This is the worst time of my long life, really. I’ve never seen such a base and cowardly violation of any kind of human bond that I can respect. These people appear on television, and the unwritten, unspoken motto seems to be something about "We despise you. We despise your law. We despise your order. We despise your Bible. We despise your conscience. And if necessary, we will kill you to say so." I’ve never really felt that deep contempt before for any kind of canon or tradition of the human.
 
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "We despise your Bible"? It is often said it’s done in the name of the Bible.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, yes, these people are—they’re making a scrapbook out of the Bible in their own favor. And they’re omitting all the passages that have to do with compassion and love of others, especially love of enemies, or the injunction to Peter, "Put up your sword. Those who live by the sword will perish by the sword"—all of that. All of that gets cut out in favor of, well, a god of vindictiveness, the god of the empire, the god who is a projection of our will to dominate.

I respect and honor Berrigan's tireless activism over many decades, but I could never really trust anyone so intellectually and morally dishonest as to say something like this.  Berrigan himself was "making a scrapbook out of the Bible in [his] own favor."  He omitted all the passages that have to do with the killing of those who worship the wrong gods or are living in the wrong territory or simply failed to meet the deity's high standards.  The "god of vindictiveness, the god of the empire, the god who is a projection of our will to dominate" is Yahweh, the god of the Bible, and his son and viceroy Jesus. While Berrigan was correct about others' selective use of the Bible, he himself was constructing a god who was a projection of his own will.  It was perhaps bad luck on Berrigan's part that he grew up in a tradition defined by the Christian Bible, a book full of violence and hatred as well as professions of love and compassion and peace, since in order to oppose war and empire he had to engage in the same cut-and-paste job he condemned (rather self-righteously, I must say) in others.

But at the same time it must be remembered that Berrigan chose to remain in the Christian, and specifically the Roman Catholic tradition, and hamstrung himself by using the fundamentalist assumption of biblical inerrancy: if you interpret the Bible correctly -- that is, if you agree with his interpretation -- it will be true, free from all error, and by remarkable coincidence will agree with Father Dan!  In order to sustain this belief he had to lie about his opponents, by implying that because they conveniently ignored the parts of the Bible that were inexpedient for them, they rejected it entirely.  But the same accusation could be made of him: If cherry-picking the Bible means that you "despise" it, then he despised the Bible no less than the warmakers do.  The difficult thing to do, with the Bible or any other scripture or authority, is to say forthrightly that it is not free from error, that it is wrong and you reject the parts that are wrong, while recognizing that they are there.  If I weren't prone to the same temptation, I'd be amazed that so many people find this non-fundamentalist approach so difficult.  It is difficult, but it can be done.  Once you admit the possibility, it becomes easier.  Instead Berrigan chose to present his own projection as if it were truth.

Even if Christians leave the Tanakh, with its divine commands to exterminate whole populations, out of the picture, they are still stuck with the Jesus of the gospels, whose vindictiveness deserves more attention than it usually gets.  Jesus not only threatened people with eternal torture, he was preaching in the apocalyptic tradition which expects Yahweh to establish his Kingdom on earth (as it is in Heaven) through a cataclysmic war between Good and Evil, reaching a climax as "the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood came out from the wine press, up to the horses' bridles, for a distance of two hundred miles" (Revelation 14.20; the metaphors get tangled up there, but the meaning in context is clear).  Whether he liked it or not, whether he thought it through or not, this is the Jesus Dan Berrigan followed.

Some Christians I've talked to try to get around this problem by arguing that while God is of course a loving god, he also is a god of justice.  The answer to that is simple enough: punishment is not justice.  As the philosopher Antony Flew declared:

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offense whatever.  Thus a religious commitment which must involved the glorification of such behavior as if it were a manifestation of perfect justice and goodness would be repugnant to ordinary decency and humanity; even if the facts were such that in prudence we had to trample down our generous impulses in a rat-race for salvation [The Presumption of Atheism, 1976, 64].

The fantasy of Hell can't have been invented out of a desire to teach people they've been doing wrong, since part of the fun is that if they do learn anything from their punishment, it's too late, because they're in Hell!  Forever!  Hahahaha!  The apologist C. S. Lewis tried to justify it in The Problem of Pain in 1940.  Imagine, he proposed, 

a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity ... Suppose, further that he does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant ....

We must be careful at this point.  The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is very deadly sin.  Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a man ... But that is not the point.  Supposing he will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him?  Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness ...?  And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness -- only spite -- that prevents you from doing so? ... You are moved, not by a desire for the wretched creature's pain as such, by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow.  In a sense, it is better for the creature to know itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake.  Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such ghastly illusion [122].

Of course Lewis made things too easy for himself by supposing that there were only two possible options: Heaven or Hell.  An infinitely wise and omnipotent Creator could do better than that.  But even accepting Lewis's terms, I would send his wicked man to Heaven.  I assume that Heaven is a place without suffering, so that he will be able to make no one else suffer.  If this will curtail his free will, everyone's free will must be curtailed in Heaven if there's to be no suffering there.  In Heaven the man's "continued course of treachery and cruelty" would give him no advantage, as it did on earth.  (Which raises the question why Lewis's god arranged his creation so that bad people can flourish.  In what sense, given that arrangement, is the wicked man's bad behavior "a failure, a mistake"?)  Since Lewis represents his complacency as based on his worldly success and happiness, which would mean nothing in Heaven, is it accurate to say that he could 'remain what he is'?  But even if he could, so what?  The important thing would be that he couldn't hurt anyone else.  Lewis assumed that the only way that "soon or late, the right should be asserted" is by stomping on it for all eternity; it never seems to have occurred to him that rebellion might be quelled by mercy as well as by punishment.  One thing we know is that punishment is not an effective way of changing people's behavior; if Yahweh has such a thing for punishment, why did he create us so that it would be ineffective?

I like to quote Michael Neumann's remark that "Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt."  I think this should be extended: you shouldn't do those things even to bad people.  I think that many people would disagree, even Christians who, according to orthodox teaching, believe that we are all bad people.  But then it's also orthodox teaching that God is entitled to beat or jail or torture all of humanity, and only tempers "justice" with mercy by letting some of us off; again, I deny that punishment is just in the first place. This is a matter of judgment, of course, not of fact or even of logical demonstration.  But the same is true of the mindset that demands infinite retaliation for "rebellion," and that indeed sees harm done to others are primarily an offense against a deity rather than against the people actually harmed.  And I ask what good is achieved (other than the "passion for vengeance" Lewis rejected while still clinging to it) by punishment at all.

Going back to Daniel Berrigan: I don't object to his rejection of the wrathful aspects of Christianity.  What I do object to is his pretense that those aspects aren't a core part of the religion, and of Jesus' teaching in particular.  It's not only dishonest to denounce those who believe in a "god who is a projection of our will to dominate" (though that is reason enough to reject his projection), but it will be ineffective as long as Christians refer to the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus.  Jesus believed in, and taught, a god of vindictiveness and empire and a projection of our will to dominate.  The only way to correct that teaching (assuming it is incorrect) is to confront it head-on, and reject it directly rather than by projecting it onto the bad Other, as Berrigan did, and so many other Christians do.

An Inordinate Fondness for Flesh-Eating Bacteria

A friend of mine posted these remarks --

Several people I know have had to say goodbye to their pets recently or having to face the prospect of doing so. I'm not a believer, but it seems to me that if God does exist, S/He wouldn't be so petty as to deny happiness to all of creation. So good on Pope Francis.

-- with a link to this article about everybody's favorite Bishop of Rome.  Since President Obama has proven to be a disappointment, many liberals and progressives are evidently looking for a New Hope, and they've found one in Jorge Mario Bergoglio.  They never seem to see the irony in this.  They're quite ready to dismiss with scorn those Christians and Christian leaders who appeal to imaginary beings to say things they dislike, but they seem sure that Pope Francis is a true Christian who's getting the Church back to the real, original teachings of Christ, risking his life to speak truth to power and preach the real will of God.  This is true even for some who present themselves as atheists; I must say I doubt that someone who appeals to the real will of God is really an atheist.  But leaving that aside, how do they know what God really wants?  How does Francis know what God really wants, or will do?

My friend's comment on the meme is a case in point.  Why does he take for granted that the creator of supernovae, mass extinctions, plagues, cancer, flesh-eating bacteria, birth defects lethal and merely disabling, predators, and human beings -- with all our unlovely traits and practices -- gives a rat's ass about "the happiness of all creation"?  Why would he suppose that such a being cares whether human beings see their pets in the afterlife?  (Except for cats, of course. That's why I'm a cat person, so I'll have a companion animal in Hell.)  The prevalence of suffering in the world is, at the very least, evidence against any claim that its creator is concerned with "the happiness of all creation."

I'd also say it's going too far to take for granted that these humans will go to Heaven.  Will Fido look down on his Mommy's torment in Hell, as Lazarus did on Dives from the bosom of Abraham?  And that's assuming that there is an afterlife, which is a big assumption.

The linked article, from the New York Times, is thoroughly fatuous and sloppy.  As so often has happened, it involves a wild explication of a stray remark by the Pontiff.  The writer begins by declaring that Francis "has given hope to gays, unmarried couples and advocates of the Big Bang Theory."  I'm certainly gratified to know that I can hope to be reunited with the Big Bang Theory in Heaven; surely the creator of the universe wouldn't be so petty as to deny me that.

Anyway, here's what happened:

During a weekly general audience at the Vatican last month, the pope, speaking of the afterlife, appeared to suggest that animals could go to heaven, asserting, “Holy Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us.”

Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, analyzing the pope’s remarks, concluded he believed animals have a place in the afterlife. It drew an analogy to comforting words that Pope Paul VI was said to have once told a distraught boy whose dog had died: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”

The news accounts of Francis’ remarks were welcomed by groups like the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who saw them as a repudiation of conservative Roman Catholic theology that says animals cannot go to heaven because they have no souls.

"Appeared to suggest"!  "Was said to have once told"!  With support like that, who needs an actual declaration from the papal throne?  You can hope for anything you like, regardless of what the Vatican says, and you can make up whatever fanciful tales you like about what the pope says or believes, but that doesn't guarantee you'll get what you want.

For what little it's worth, the Christian Bible doesn't have any clear account of the afterlife or of the "soul."  (I'm frequently surprised by people who talk confidently about souls, though they have no idea what a soul is, even if it exists; no one does.  I don't see how you can have a "new debate" on whether animals have souls when you don't know whether human beings have them.)  It doesn't, as far as I know, say anything about the status of non-human animals in the heavens or after death.  The "conservative Roman Catholic theology" is constructed of later extrapolations from the Bible, Aristotelian and Platonist philosophy, and theologians' prejudices and fantasies.  I don't see why the Humane Society or PETA, unless they are affiliated with and subordinate to the Roman Catholic Church, should care much what the pope has to say on this or any subject.  From the Times article I conclude that their spokespeople simply took the opportunity to expound their favorite talking points.

Maybe Francis does believe that animals will go to heaven; that's more than can be said for most human beings, since Jesus said explicitly that only a few would find eternal life salvation compared to the many would be lost.  But unless you're a conservative Catholic who believes that the pope has the keys to the gates of heaven, transmitted by apostolic succession from Simon Peter -- unless, that is, you accept Catholic mythology -- I see no reason to believe that Francis knows any more about this than anyone else does.

My Racist Friend

I went to work on the previous post before I read about this:



An eleven-year-old boy sings the national anthem at a professional basketball game, and sings it quite well.  (A bit shaky on the high notes, but many adults do worse.)  Watching the video creeped me out in numerous ways: the use of children to sell jingoism, and the militarization of American sport (though who cares, I know), the pomposity of the announcer trying to elevate sport to cosmic levels of significance.

I wouldn't have seen the video if not for the reaction of many Americans to the boy: Twitter apparently exploded with expressions of rage that a "Mexican" was allowed to breathe on our sacred bloodthirsty-doggerel-set-to-the-tune-of-a-drinking-song.  (More of their frenzy is collected here.)  It's reminiscent, among other shining hours, of the widespread reactions to the discovery that some important characters in The Hunger Games were, like, black.  It's also a reminder that adult nativist bigots don't discriminate between adults and children in their attacks.

It quickly emerged that Sebastien De La Cruz is a native-born American citizen, and his father served in the US Navy.  You don't have to listen very closely to recognize that he sings the words with an American accent.  He responded to his critics on TV with poise and remarkable articulateness for a boy his age.  (You can see his original performance and his rebuttal on the same page that showed some of the racist tweets.)  One commenter on Youtube wailed, "It's horrible that a TEN year old child has to come on television to defend himself against racist tweets."  I think it's great that a ten (or eleven, or twelve -- the numbers vary, as does the spelling of his first name) year old child got to go on television and demonstrate his intelligence and fundamental decency compared to the cowardly scum who attacked him from the anonymous safety of the Internet.  I'm also impressed that he didn't use the typical liberal response to bigotry, Oh, how can you say such awful things? I have to go kill myself now, I'm too pure to live in this world.  I hope Sebastien De La Cruz goes far.

Of course, it wouldn't matter in the least if the boy were "just a Mexican," as he put it, or even if he were an "illegal immigrant."  (Remember, racists don't really distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants: they regard all immigrants as illegal.)   Nor would it matter if he were a Mexican visitor invited to sing at the NBA finals in the heavily Mexican-American town of San Antonio because of his talent and fame as a child mariachi singer.  Many foreigners foolishly believe that American ideals of freedom, equality, and welcome to the world's huddled masses are actually meant to be honored and practiced here, rather than pissed on by our Morlock masses.

I'm in a somewhat better mood now than I was when I began writing this post this afternoon.  I passed these links along on Facebook, signing off my post with "Remember, Christian racists, I'll see you in Hell."  This was partly out of general exasperation with the racist garbage in which my country marinates, much of which some of my Facebook friends happily share on their timelines, but I confess that it was partly because I learned earlier today (on Facebook, natch) that one of my racist former friends died yesterday.  (Former, because she defriended me a couple of years ago after I called her on her anti-immigrant racism. I believe there was some antigay bigotry in the mix too.)  She was a year younger than I am, and we went to the same school from second grade on.  I remember her as a nice kid, but all I know of her as an adult was her racist diatribes against illegals and against any charity for the survivors of the 2010 Haitian earthquake; like many bigots, she opposed universal health care in America because she thought it might help illegal immigrants.  And of course she also loved to post inspirational Christian memes, with no sign of cognitive dissonance.  I didn't mention any of this in the comments on her passing on Facebook, of course; it wasn't the time or place for it.  This blog is.

We all die, and it's disturbing when someone younger than I am bites the dust.  I didn't realize at first the connection between my anger at the bigots who denigrated Sebastien De La Cruz and my anger at my former friend. And at mortality, I guess.  My anger wasn't inappropriate in the least, but I was seething more than I usually would.  It was interesting to realize how furious I was, and to try to sort out why.  She's not the only Christian racist I'll see in Hell, if there is a Hell, but my subconscious evidently made the connection.

Maybe I should add for clarity that I don't believe in Hell -- I'm an atheist, duh -- and even if I had the power, I would not condemn anyone to eternal punishment.  Punishment doesn't fix anything.  (But remember, in saying "I'll see you in Hell" I'm starting from the notion of the Christian Hell, and if it exists, I as an atheist and a homosexual will surely go there.  The only problem is that the Christian racists might not, but if it works out that way, I certainly wouldn't want to spend eternity with them anyhow.)   If I were constructing an afterlife, it would be an environment where no one could hurt anyone else, which would be punishment for those who want to hurt others.  Imagine all the racists in a post-mortem state, with lots of the racial others they hate all around them, and unable to do anything to exclude them, marginalize them, or make them suffer for their difference.  (That could be a kind of Purgatory, I suppose.)  I don't think such a condition is possible, but it is the only kind of afterlife I could endorse.  The closest to such a concept I've seen is Kore-eda Hirokazu's film After Life, which rejects both Heaven and Hell in favor of something I could live with -- for myself and others.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light

I have mixed feelings about Rebecca Solnit. I like her when she's writing critically, as she does in her essay "Men Explain Things to Me Facts Didn't Get in Their Way" or her contribution to The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle. I'm not so pleased when she starts getting spiritual. Take her new and important book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (Viking, 2009). Her project there is to counter the myth of people reverting to "savagery" when things get tough -- you might call it the Lord of the Flies myth. The corporate media dusted this one off right after the earthquake in Haiti, partly to support a US military occupation but also because media people believe it, as most elites do. That's probably projection, because it is elite groups who live in a constant state of Hobbesian war of all against all. The myth also did yeoman's duty in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the media tried to depict black residents of New Orleans (rather than white Blackwater operatives) as violent looters.

Anyway, early on in her book Solnit writes:

Few speak of paradise now, except as something remote enough to be impossible. The ideal societies we hear of are mostly far away or long ago or both, situated in some primordial society before the Fall or a spiritual kingdom in a remote Himalayan vastness. The implication is that we here and now are far from capable of living such ideals. But what if paradise flashed up among us from time to time -- at the worst of times? What if we glimpsed it in the jaws of hell? These flashes give us, as the long ago and far away do not, a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become. ... The door to this era's potential paradises is in hell [page 9].

Eeeuuuw. I'm sorry, there are just so many things that I object to here. I'm not interested in an "ideal" society, which almost by definition is a society that exists only in ideas. Yes, a man's reach should exceed his grasp and blah blah blah, but I think that in trying to imagine a society worth living in, we must also attend to what is possible. (I think Paul Goodman said something to that effect once.) The good news of Solnit's book (and others like it -- see also Alfie Kohn's The Brighter Side of Human Nature) is that solidarity, consideration, empathy, kindness and generosity are possible, are workable.

But y'know, it isn't just "now" that paradise is used to refer to something far away or long ago. It has been used that way for a couple of thousand years. Ultimately it comes from a Persian root meaning a walled garden, which tells you something right there: it's a hiding place, a refuge from the unpleasantness outside. Luke's gospel says that Jesus assured the good thief on the next cross over that "today you will be with me in paradise," presumably meaning Heaven -- which is something remote and impossible if anything is. But I also see from the Wikipedia article that in contemporary secular use the term refers to "'a society (whether it be hypothetical or otherwise) whose organizational features serve to render, and are fully calibrated towards, the harmonious luxuriating development of the psychological, physiological and creative natures of mankind. As such, a society, continent or planet so constructed, naturally provides a suitably nourishing and convivial social and educational formulae apt to bring about unconditional joy and happiness within that populace'."

An old friend, who was in Philosophy before she switched to Political Science, took a similar stance, which now that I think of it helps me understand why that last sentence I quoted especially sets my teeth on edge. We were discussing the problem of suffering (or the problem of evil, as it is more commonly called), the dilemma which asks how an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good god could permit so much misery in the world. My friend argued that this world is Hell: it's a test, or a purgatory, or something. Apparently she believed that when we die the testing will be over and we'll go to a better place. I've run into numerous people since then who've said the same thing. But according to the standard justification of Yahweh's relation to suffering, we suffer here because it's the best of all possible worlds: as the conservative Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga put it, God could not create a world with less suffering in it. That doesn't mean this world is perfect, only that it is the best that poor, helpless, bumbling but well-meaning Yahweh can provide for us. This argument has troubling consequences for belief in a paradisiacal afterlife, because it means that this life is Heaven -- it can't, or at any rate doesn't, get any better than this. If that is true, we're in deep trouble, but I don't think it is true; and I don't believe in other worlds or an afterlife anyway.

Oh, maybe it does no real harm to use words like "paradise" and "hell" in connection with human societies, but it still makes me put my guard up. I know that it's probably impossible to avoid the use of symbols and metaphors, but these strike me as notably ill-chosen. "Hell" is particularly troublesome when applied to disasters, natural or artificial, since Hell is a place made by Yahweh for the punishment of the wicked; I don't think Solnit wants to suggest that the residents of New Orleans or Haiti were wicked and merited horrific punishment -- that's the attitude she opposes. As for "Paradise," I would like to live in a world where people had enough to eat, had suitable shelter, received adequate and acceptable medical care, were encouraged to educate themselves and provided the resources to do so; where conflicts were resolved without violence, where people renounced vengeance, and treated one another with empathy and compassion. But I don't think it would be Paradise -- for one thing, I suppose that in such a world there would still be conflict, still illness, accident, and ultimately death.

Especially there would be conflict. I don't think a world without conflict would be a good place to live. So we must learn to live with conflict, not to fear it, even to welcome it as a way to learn from others and from ourselves. So I reject that secular definition of an earthly paradise which requires that such a society would be "harmonious" with "unconditional joy and happiness" in its citizens. Even if such a society were truly "ideal", it's not my ideal. But neither is the kind of society I just briefly outlined; I submit that it would be better than ours today, that it is possible and could be worked toward if not fully achieved. (How to work toward it is another question too complex to address now; I'll try to begin to address it some other time.)

And I had better concede right away that I haven't yet read all of A Paradise Built in Hell. It might be that at some point in that hefty volume she addresses questions like these. I've put the book aside for the time being, however, because I realized Solnit didn't need to convince me of her primary thesis about human cooperation during disasters -- I already believe it -- and I didn't feel like wading through her supporting evidence yet. I have too much else to read right now.

P.S. Solnit has a pretty good article at The Nation this week. I hope I'm not being too hopeless when I say that I think I'm actually pretty hopeful about human possibilities, even though I remember that Hope was the final evil to emerge from Pandora's box, and that the word "Hope" was co-opted by the Madison Avenue election campaign of our current President. Don't let him have it.

Don't Worry, Be Happy (or Sleepy, or Dopey, or Doc ...)

While I was surfing the Web last weekend I stumbled on a blog post about the "atheist bus" ad campaign that I've written about before. This post was by a Christian writer who found the campaign's slogan strangely attractive:

There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy with your life.

His answer was predictable, at least to me.

Then it slowly dawned on me. This ad is a cry for freedom; a cry against the tyranny and oppression caused by a diabolical god. For once, I find myself fighting alongside the atheists. A god who paralyzes with fear, overburdens with guilt, and replaces the joy of life with sorrow and regret is no God at all. This god is an idol that demands tribute and can never be feed enough. The atheists are avidly fighting against a god who takes life rather than gives it.

In this instance, perhaps the cry of Ariane, Dawkins, and others is not far from the cry of Jesus, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them… you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.” (Lk 11:46, 52).

Sometimes I wonder… Would Jesus ride the atheist bus?

I joked in my first post on the Atheist Bus Campaign that an 'atheist bus' must be a bus that doesn't believe in gods, but this guy wrote as though he thinks that were true, or that riding a bus means agreeing with all the advertising it carries. That's presumably why a Christian bus driver refused to drive a bus with the atheist ad on its side; or maybe that driver knew that many riders would think so, and blame him -- not the bus company -- for the ad. ("Presumably," another blogger shrewdly speculated, "he was previously perfectly happy to drive about in buses advertising capitalist multinationals, bearing exploitative images of women and encouraging us to go out and spend money on goodness knows what rubbish – but there you are, that’s Scummerland for you.") And presumably, I as an atheist should refuse to ride a 'Christian bus' displaying a Christian ad. People are scary.

But I think that our blogger knows better, and is just constructing a sermon theme, a superficially startling opener that in the end turns safely home to the faith you know and love. What I don't get is how he can claim Jesus as an opponent of what he calls "the tyranny and oppression caused by a diabolical god." The Jesus of the gospels is a preacher of hellfire and damnation. Shortly after the passage the blogger quotes, Jesus tells "the crowd," "I tell you my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!" (Luke 12:4-5, NRSV). Be afraid, be very afraid! This heartwarming passage, which is followed immediately by more of the same, can be read as referring either to Yahweh or the devil, or to Jesus himself, whom the gospels depict as having "authority to cast into hell." It doesn't much matter, though, for the ultimate source of that authority must be the same: Yahweh, the god of Israel. Jesus' promises of reward usually alternate with threats of eternal punishment.

Jesus' message in the New Testament would be meaningless if there weren't a Hell, created by Yahweh for the devil and his angels, awaiting those who fall short of whatever standard Jesus demanded of people. Being "saved" is only a concern if you're in danger, and Jesus is clear and explicit about what the danger is. The cosmology of the New Testament is incoherent -- it's impossible to know exactly what one must to do avoid Hell and be admitted to the Kingdom, since different requirements are declared at different points. The function of this incoherence -- not necessarily its intent -- is to foster that paralyzing fear and anxiety that our blogger objects to. First you have to create the danger, then you can sell the remedy for the danger.

On one of my first trips to Korea, my friends took me to a famous and very old Buddhist shrine at Seokguram Grotto. I wrote in my journal:

HK told me, as we continued downward, about the meaning of the white paper lanterns that were hanging above our heads; they were in memory of the dead. They're part of the rituals intended to help the dead make their way to paradise more quickly. HK said she'd been surprised to find no such elements in Christianity when she was in the US. I explained to her about masses for the dead in Roman Catholicism, and prayer to saints for intercession, which are intended to shorten people's stay in Purgatory. I also told her the rabbinic story of Rabbi Aqiba saving a spirit from Hell, and mentioned Wittgenstein's remark from the Tractatus that any afterlife would be as mysterious as this life.

It's odd to me that people invent hell, and then invent ways to get other people out of it. Which comes first, the punitive impulse, the construction of a system of posthumous spiritual "justice", or the construction of loopholes in the system in the name of mercy? It's commonplace, a cliche really, for unbelievers whether atheist or just members of competing cults, to blame these systems on the greed of priests and other religious professionals. There's probably some truth in that notion, but it also seems to me that laymen like the process, the system, the game, the complications.

There's certainly a human impulse toward elaboration, and one toward creating obstacles so as to have something to get around. The iconoclasts who smash one such game will see it replaced with another by their followers, if they don't invent the replacement themselves. Jesus was no exception, for what it's worth. He was in some kind of competition with the Jerusalem temple cult. Rather than deny outright the need for expensive atonement, he (or his disciples) established the cut-rate alternative of baptism -- but inflation inevitably set in. If Jesus himself instituted baptism, he was in on the process himself, and by the time Paul became a Christian, Jesus' followers certainly had such a system in place. If we knew that people really needed this sort of help after their death, it would be perfectly reasonable and rational for their friends and relatives to give it. But we don't know any such thing, and that is the problem.

So, like a true fundamentalist, our blogger puts the blame on Jewish "lawyers" in the gospels, and on modern churches that interpret the gospels differently than he does, trying to divert attention from the fact that it was Jesus, as far as anyone knows, who preached the "diabolical god" he objects to. Since he can't believe in the Jesus of the gospels (and who can, really?), he constructs a Jesus he can believe in. Would Jesus join the Atheist Bus Campaign's protest against such beliefs? I see no reason to think so.

In his 1958 Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Harper & Brothers), Walter Kaufmann wrote a dialogue between Satan and a Christian, which concluded (chapter 59):

Christian: You always harp on hell.

Satan: There is no place like home. And you might as well get used to the idea: haven't you been told that I enjoy the company of those who cannot answer me any better than you?

Christian: But I don't understand at all. Only hysterics think of going to hell themselves.

Satan: I know: good Christians consider hell a place for others. But don't you realize that if you are right about everything, you, and those like you, are undoubtedly headed for hell? Don't you see how immeasurably you stand to gain if Christianity is untenable? It is I that bring you glad tidings. Believe me and you are saved. That God exists, that is a ritual phrase, charged with emotion and a thousand connotations: some sheer superstition, some myths, some true, some false, and most of them vague. But here is the truth that shall make you free: I do not exist.

Christian: If Satan does not exist, I must have dreamed. So I can go on believing what I have always believed. But what exactly do I believe? That is the question.

(image link)