You might have to believe in God to take the Declaration of Independence seriously

The idea of natural law is of Roman origin, not Jewish or Christian. As Romans had an Empire all over Europe their laws were used in many places, like England. When English jurisprudence was being formed in the Middle Ages after time immemorial had passed Roman law was cited by jurists, and from being part of English law then Roman law went to America with the colonists.

“Jus naturale was a concept the jurists developed to explain why all people seemed to obey some laws. Their answer was that a “natural law” instilled in all beings a common sense.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_law

“The Declaration’s God both reflects and reinforces hope that their rights were not reducible to their power or chance of immediate success.” And also their idea that justice is reducible to rights, while rights themselves are not functions of specific social institutions, but are given to us by God for no particular reason that history can discern, are received by us without our doing anything to claim them, and are retained by us throughout all time no matter how many centuries may pass without our exercising them, defending them, or knowing that they exist.

The Declaration may not mention the resurrection or Jesus “or other specifically Christian doctrines,” but in these three aspects it is, I think, obvious that the God of the Declaration relates to humanity in just the way that the God of Calvin does. Unconditional election, irresistible grace, and the persistence of the saints are three of the five petals of the Calvinist TULIP, and the Declaration’s view of rights as our history-free endowment implies a barely secularized version of all three.

The other two petals of the acronym, total depravity and limited atonement, are not far to find either. Both the king, in the comprehensive corruption that the list of grievances reveals, and the “merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions” show what humans are like when the Nature’s God does not so enlighten their understanding that the extraordinary claims of the opening paragraph become “self-evident.”

Even the very strange fact that the Declaration, which is a press release, became the occasion for the USA’s chief patriotic holiday shows the Calvinist influence. Not only do Calvinists tend to have rather a high respect for the market, so that an event in the marketing of the Revolution could become the paramount symbol of the Revolution, but also Calvinism’s emphasis on Biblical exegesis and the liturgy of the word prepared the Calvinist mind to look for the climactic moment of the Revolution, not in a battle or a treaty or in any other event where people gather and physical objects move between them, but in a presentation of abstract ideas to which people listen in silence.

There is a sense in which Enlightenment values arose from Christian values — the valorization of man was a traditional Christian theme (as was the concomitant condemnation of man as fatally flawed) also the conception of history as progressive, rather than cyclical. There was an impulse, in the Renaissance and later, to believe that a synthesis/reconciliation of the better parts of Classical tradition with Christian and indeed with all world religions and outlooks was possible and desirable. This involved a purging of all these religions from undesirable “superstitious” elements, such as the Trinity (or whatever else one wanted to exclude) in order to get back to a presumed pre-Adamite “natural” religion. However, the immediate result of Renaissance syncretism was not harmony and world peace but rather the wars of religion and a “blowback” of entrenched dogmatism on all sides.

Richard @4,

The bible gave us the concept of “social justice”? That would be news to the ancient Chinese, Indians, Babylonians, etc. etc. The code of Hammurabi predates biblical texts by a thousand years, for instance. The bible is largely derivative of far earlier sources, and several other cultures had social justice traditions many centuries before it.

Ancient Greece had its philosophers who dealt with the issue contemporaneously, and ancient Rome the same, with later Jewish thinkers. Just as it would be a mistake to say “philosophy” is some exclusive invention of the Greeks, it’s a mistake to say anything is an exclusive creation or development from the bible. It’s a very big world out there.

Consider who “us” is in that sentence. Hint: the sentence of yours that I quoted follows one beginning with “Our particular form of government”. In general, consider that a large majority of the difficultiesthat you have with what other people write may be because of your difficulties with reading comprehension.

OP: The Declaration … loses much of its political and historical significance if God is left out.

Why is this? Because unless there is a “maker of the universe, who cares for man’s happiness, gives him the resources to pursue it, and judges the manner in which he does so,” there is no secure ground for the rights enumerated in the Declaration.

From the time of Constantine until roughly the 17th century, most people believed that there was indeed a maker of the universe, who cared for man’s happiness, gave him the resources to pursue it, and judged the manner in which he did so, and that it quite clearly followed from all this that the main duty of mankind was to obey those whom that universe-maker had set in authority over them. To assert the rights enumerated in the Declaration was regarded (and punished) as the grossest impiety, when they were even conceived of. The only — sole, solitary, unique — respect in which being created in the image and likeness of God implied equal treatment for all humans was equal treatment on Judgment Day; and even then, the arbitrary distribution of divine grace (let alone the arbitrary damnation of most of humanity, viz. predestination) meant that we appeared before the Supreme Judge with very different amounts of explaining to do. Sam knows the history of Judaism infinitely better than I do, but in the glory years (centuries) of Christianity, it does not seem to have occurred to very many people that their beliefs were compatible with — let alone provided secure grounds for — the rights enumerated in the Declaration.

In any case, after due consideration of all available evidence over the last several centuries, most educated people, probably including more than 90 percent of all the people whom Sam knows, and I suspect Sam himself, are reasonably sure that there is no maker of the universe who cares for man’s happiness, et cetera. Does this mean that there are no secure grounds for rights? That depends, as dozens of previous Crooked Timber threads have demonstrated at blessed length, on what is meant by “grounds” and what is meant by “rights.” Deontologists believe there are metaphysical grounds for inalienable rights. We pragmatists believe that rights are purely legal, historical, contingent things, and that their ground is solidarity: the quality of moral imagination in virtue of which we perceive that other people think, dream, suffer, and love in very much the same fashion as we ourselves; and, moreover, feel that this entitles them to respect and care.

To Sam, as to Dostoevsky, Leo Strauss, and other critics of the Enlightenment, uncoerced solidarity is a very frail reed on which to base political morality. Well, even we atheist/anarchist/utopian/rationalist radicals agree that having a universe-maker around to consult certainly would simplify things wonderfully. In His/Her apparent absence, the options seem to be: 1) prove that S/He exists after all; 2) pretend that S/He exists and thereby pacify the swinish multitude; or 3) pitch in and try to enhance solidarity.

Come on, Sam — join us!

It’s always struck me as beyond bizarre that Christians would think of their god as being concerned with our personal happiness and well-being. At least if they read the bible as being literally true. And even if they read it poetically, it takes an amazing amount of energy to get there as well.

The god of the bible slaughters human beings by the tens of millions at the drop of a hat. He commits genocide frequently. He orders genocide frequently. He supports slavery. The Christian telos itself ends in the mass slaughter of billions of human beings. The god of the bible, in a bizarre fit of anger, throws the supposedly first two human beings out into the wilderness for simply eating an apple and being curious . . . this, despite the fact that they’ve never had any parental guidance, teaching, schools, role models, etc. etc. And because he was “disobeyed,” he condemns all women after Eve to give birth in agony, etc. etc. Read Job for another example of this monster’s sadism, and the examples are legion.

Again, it takes an enormous amount of energy and pretzel logic to derive from these stories the concept of a benevolent deity. What is far more obvious is the level of his irrationality and evil. Goddess knows why anyone would deduce Yahweh cares, etc. etc. And that’s not to mention the problem of evil outside Yahweh’s purview. He does nothing about any of that.

I see no way that the Declaration makes a lick of sense if there is a god factoring in. At least not the god of the bible.

I was struck by the motto ““Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.” That could be the motto of Milton’s Satan. In fact, it really only seems significant if it’s taken in that sense. If tyrant is understood politically and God religiously, it amounts to no more than forsaking the material world for God. Only when God becomes a tyrant, does the need for a Declaration of Independence arise.

Christians have proven themselves effective bullies. If that is what you think is required to win a fight, I suppose you have an argument. Theists are not, in my experience, often effective egalitarians. Oh, they talk a good game at times, but their image of God is of a king, atop a hierarchically ordered universe. These are the people who gave us the divine right of kings, against which the Declaration was rebellion and revolution. A tactful side-stepping of potential opposition among the religiously inclined, rather than alliance let alone thought leadership is how I would read the Declaration’s references to the Divine.

As for Lincoln, I would note that “under God” made it into the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s most famous remarks on cause of the fight, only after the speech was to be reproduced in written form to raise funds.

Harold,

I think the ethical precepts came down to us despite the three monotheisms of the Levant, not because of them. Boiled down, their idea of morality is to obey the dictator in the sky. Immorality is disobedience.

(Again, there are countering voices throughout, of course. It’s a collection of stories, parables, allegories, myths, etc. etc, written by hundreds, edited and translated by thousands over the centuries. So it’s not possible to be coherent or consistent. But, for the most part, the main theme is obedience.)

From my godless view, the continuum of morality to immorality is basically kindness, compassion, generosity of spirit on to to indifference, cruelty, sadism, etc. etc. The god of the bible is the latter all too often and the former only rarely.

“the Declaration presumes a personal and providential deity.”

IMHO, the God of the Declaration is a deist God. This is plainly stated in the opening passage, with the reference to Nature and Nature’s God. It is affirmed in the statement that the truths that follow are “self-evident,” that is, disclosed by reason, introspection, and observation, and not by God.

The reference to the endowment of rights by the Creator is not contrary to this reading. Eighteenth-century deists believed in Creation – how could they not? There is no contradiction in the belief that rights arise from the nature of man as created by God, and the belief that the vindication of such rights is entirely a human enterprise, and not by the intervention of God in human affairs.

The references to God in the peroration do appear to be a personal God. The first –
“appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions” – is purely rhetorical. It asks God to witness that the signers acted in good faith, but it doesn’t ask him to do anything.

The second – “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence”- is more troublesome. It seems to be a statement of a belief that God is on our side. Yet it was possible, in the 18th C, to interpret Divine Providence not as direct intervention in the world, but as the working out of God’s plan through his natural laws.

In any event, the operative provisions of the Declaration do not rely on a personal God. There is no appeal to scripture or revelation, no assertion that the new nation will be a City on a Hill or other Godly construction, no claim to be the instruments of God’s will. There is nothing that would be overly objectionable to a deist and much that a strictly orthodox Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist of the period would have disliked intensely.

Stephen @8 and Harold @14: I’d like to see a reference for either of your claims, Stephen that English common law derives from Scots common law, and Harold that it derives from Roman law. The former assertion is just obviously wrong, and I’ve seen little evidence for the latter, although I am not a student of the subject. Actually, I imagine that the Scottish legal system has a much closer kinship to Roman law than does the English, as Scotland has historically been much more nearly connected to continental Europe than England has been.

p.s. “ideologies” being a neutral synonym here for “worldviews,” “basic beliefs,” etc.

Well all this seems to ignore the distinction made in the text between God as creator of rights and the People as the originators of the powers of government. That is the Declaration is explicitly NOT “God-given”.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People”

‘consent of the governed’, ‘Right of the People’. Nor does that naturally derive from ‘Natural Law’ which as conceived in antiquity and medieval times is anything but democratic.

You get a similar bifurcation in the summartion.

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies,”

God here is explicitly a witness and not the authority. In each case the Deity is at one remove from the Authority.

As to the invocation of ‘Nature’s God’, whether you want to see that as Deist or more narrowly Christian, He, She or the FSM is presented as the originator of rights and not in any way the giver of law. At least not this law

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, ”

Once again it is the People who are entitled and whom in the next section provide the authority, it is from the People that just powers are derived. God is once again at some remove.

Harold 06.18.15 at 8:41 pm @ 15:
‘Plume, a) reading the Bible literally and interpreting it oneself, without assistance, is a modern (Protestant) heresy….’

Obviously, the priesthood of all believers, the theory that every person can interpret the Scriptures for her- or himself, is the foundation or parent of the ideas of universal equal rights and democracy. As far as I know, this concept was unknown in the ancient world, although there is some radically egalitarian talk in the New Testament. (And communism, as well.) It would be interesting to know how it arose in its context.

However, I believe that in the Declaration of Independence, the most reasonable explanation of the ringing-in of God was to make a claim about objective truth, not to summon the Ancient of Days to particularly underwrite the project. This objective truth is ‘self-evident’, not derived by authority and interpretation from revelation, which would be the case if the writers were citing Christian or other theological doctrine. They are not; they are rather putting their political beliefs on the same level as, say, the motions of the planets. Anyone can observe them.

floopmeister,

“TBH I’m rather glad my own country has no similar founding document – the debate over the Constitution/Declaration texts is too close to the dusty musings of biblical exegesis for my liking. ”

If you look up Edmund Barton’s annotations of the draft bill to constitute the Commonwealth of Australia you will see his notes about Moses, Abraham, and Joseph being politicians.

Intellectually, the Enlightenment project has been dead a long time. Its death is what Nietzsche, Sartre, and in a different way Lovecraft were carrying on about. Life came about by evolution, and evolution programmed us to breed. Like every other organism on the planet, we reliably overpopulate our environment (unless culled) and suffer the resulting catastrophes. Life can’t be the harmonious system of the cosmic clockmaker for long; it just doesn’t work that way.

As war propaganda, the Declaration is a classic. As philosophy, it’s war propaganda.

I haven’t followed the textual analysis closely, but the conclusion appears to be that only theists can be democrats, or even republicans (in the sense of supporting some form of government by the people).

That seems bizarre. But otherwise we are in the Rawlsian overlapping consensus model, where there are non-theistic routes to the conclusion reached, in the Declaration, by theistic means.

Or maybe I’ve misread the post and there’s something in the Declaration of Independence other than an assertion of the right to self-government, and that depends critically on a deity. What is it?

JQ: “but the conclusion appears to be that only theists can be democrats”

No, I’d say the conclusion is: “So while people can accept the Declaration’s claims about rights for secular reasons, I suspect that those who take its religious elements seriously are more likely to act in the ways necessary to secure them.”

Or, as another way that I might put this, if you accept that racism is the organizing principle of American society from its founding, then you have to confront the fact that all of the effective anti-racist movements have been religious.

Anarcissie @32 ” the theory that every person can interpret the Scriptures for her- or himself” as “the foundation or parent of the ideas of universal equal rights and democracy. ” Is not obvious to me. Though there may be a connection somewhere.

As far as all this being a new idea — not so much. In his famous funeral oration Pericles is made to say of Athenian law:

“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.” — Thucydides (431 BC).

Roman law held that a Roman citizen could not be subject to torture (though this was increasingly honored only in the breech, apparently). The Stoics extended the principle of universalism even to slaves. In the first century, Seneca wrote that:
“There is one short rule that should regulate human relationships. All that you see, both divine and human, is one. We are parts of the same great body. Nature created us from the same source and to the same end. She imbued us with mutual affection and sociability, she taught us to be fair and just, to suffer injury rather than to inflict it. She bid us extend or hands to all in need of help. Let that well-known line [by playwright Terrence (195- 159 BC] be in our heart and on our lips: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto [I am a man and I think nothing human alien to me].”

As far as your second statement about axioms and their being self-evident, this sounds very plausible to me. (God was often depicted as a geometer in this period.)

I have the feeling that if one looked into it, the language both of the Declaration and the Constitution probably echoes well-know law books of the day.

The Declaration of Independence was the justification for rebellion. It must therefore stand opposed to the divine right of kings, because under the divine right of kings there is no justification for rebellion. Therefore rights must proceed from some other source.

The “self-evident” bit makes me think of Descartes and Galileo. Interesting that it was Franklin that put it in.

The development of the British constitution is a long series of various monarchs agreeing to give up bits of their absolute power, starting with King John and the Magna Carta that just had its 800th anniversary. Until that time the divine right of kings was theoretically absolute (except maybe for the Pope). But behind that is a memory that under old Germanic law going back to pagan times, freeborn men had certain rights that the ruler could not take away. I believe that, under Roman law, citizens had certain rights, and the same in classical Athens. (I’m not an expert in any of those areas.)

So there’s kind of a background to the idea of inborn human rights. It’s not Christian particularly, although I suppose you could say one has the right not to have one’s wife coveted and so on. But I think the Declaration is one of the first places where it gets prominently advanced as a legal point.

This is a different argument than has existed before. This is not “we’re going to back a different claimant for the throne because we want the spoils” and it’s not “we’re going to demand concessions from the king” like Wat Tyler. This is an attempt to claim that a rebellion is legally justified. It’s a bit hand-wavey, but it’s not bad for a first attempt. When you get into the list of grievances it’s a bit one-sided and simplistic, but it is a kind of propaganda document.

I suppose one of the purposes is to get the King of France on board. He’s going to say “why should I support these rebellious subjects against one of my brother monarchs?”, and here’s the argument all laid out. Of course once the principle had been established, the King of France turned out to be the next one in line. Then next comes Napoleon (just had the 200th anniversary of Waterloo as well).

Once the rebellion succeeded, the Declaration had served its purpose and essentially became a historical document, although the Constitution certainly shows its influence, particularly the Bill of Rights. So whether it referred to God or not, it doesn’t affect the current US system of government directly.

In furthering this discussion, I think a couple of additional topics would be interesting. Did the Articles of Confederation (which came between independence and the “more perfect union” of the Constitution) make any reference to divine power? Also, did the constitution of the Confederacy (which owed more to the Articles of Confederation) do so?

I suppose I could research this myself, but I’m hoping that someone who’s smarter than me will weigh in.

Off-topic (sorry) but…

@Rich Puchalsky, #40: “Or, as another way that I might put this, if you accept that racism is the organizing principle of American society from its founding, then you have to confront the fact that all of the effective anti-racist movements have been religious.”

I’ve been wondering if the recent environmental encyclical, Laudato Si, will have an effect that other attempts at moral suasion have not. We’ll see.

However, though I do not think one must be a religious believer to take the Declaration seriously, I do think the theological staging of that document is VERY important and I’m wondering if that staging is somehow related to the fact that modern Americans are more religious than Europeans. I argued this awhile back inSalvation and Democracy, or How One’s Personal Relationship with Christ Underwrites Governmental Legitimacy. Here’s a passage:

How can the people legitimize the state unless their authority is itself independent of that state? The only way to guarantee that independence is to guarantee the separation of church and state.

And that, I suggest, may be why religion has been so important in American society. For a large fraction of the population, though not for all, it has been the ground of capital “B” Being on which their sense of themselves-in-the-world depends. To understand this, however, we need to push beyond political doctrine, which is mere abstract theory, perhaps not even that. It is ideology. We need a sense of concrete social practices that make such ideology real.

I got a glimpse of those practices from Deborah V. McCauley’s Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (1995). This religion is an intense fundamentalist Christianity organized into small congregations housed in modest churches. These churches protect and promote a mode of religious experience that is foreign to highly educated secular humanists comfortable with the impersonality of urban life. The services are intensely emotional and promote an intimate and personal fellowship between the participants.

The central experience in these mountain churches is salvation through conversion, which has been the central experience of Protestant revivalism since the seventeenth century. In McCauley’s view “conversion breaks through the dominant status order by moving those who become part of a new or separate membership group beyond the control of the prevailing power structure at a basic level of identity.” That “dominant status order” is simply the network of public and private institutions that impinge on the local group from the outside. For someone who has been saved, identity is purely a function of the local religious community. Christian doctrine and stories couple this identity to the larger rhythms of the cosmos while local fellowship gathers the those rhythms to the sensible world.

The Appalachian churches McCauley studied make up a relatively small portion of America’s churches. But many of their attitudes and organizational motifs quite common elsewhere. In particular, their centrifugal and strongly localist organizational style is wide-spread among fundamentalist denominations. This contrasts to the strong hierarchical structure characteristic of the Catholic or Episocopal churches. The world of Protestant fundamentalism is one of local congregations of varying scope cross cut by an extensive but loose web of revivals, conferences, and loose affiliations with Bible schools and colleges. As such, these congregations can serve as a concrete social mechanism for the bottom-up legitimization Jefferson’s doctrine demands.

Chris Bertram @ 43,
Rousseau may have held the prevailing view that atheists were not to be trusted, but wasn’t the character of Julie’s husband M. de Wolmar, in La Nouvelle Heloise meant to demonstrate that an atheist could be perfectly virtuous?

LFC: “The argument from the OP you’re quoting is an example of the slippage or ambiguity between the U.S.-specific context and a broader context. ”

While I think that it’s questionable that Americans should care about the Declaration, I certainly don’t see why anyone else should, or why anyone should take it as a worldwide model rather than as an expression of American culture. So I regard the slippage to the broader context as a bad idea and I’m not trying to defend it.

floopmeister,

“BTW what struck me most when I looked at it was page 12 where he has underlined the bit about the Senate and the passage of supply bills and then scrawled ‘Deadlock’ in the margin.

Did he predict the Dismissal? :)”

Thank you for pointing that out — it is interesting as it would seem to demonstrate that the founding fathers of Federation purposefully made the Senate able to vote down bills voted by the House of Representatives.

This is not the case in the UK — although I am not sure from what date. In the UK the House of Commons very trickily got a rule made that any money bills were the responsibility of the House of Commons alone so the House of Lords can’t vote them down.

From this the UK House of Commons then extrapolated that every bill that goes before parliament in some way relates to money — effectively leaving the House of Lords toothless when it comes to voting against anything whatsoever the House of Commons votes for.

(at least that is my understanding. If commenters from the UK think that I am wrong about this then they can explain the role of the House of Commons and the House of Lords with regard to the House of Lords being able to vote against bills that the House of Commons voted for with or without regard to money)

28@ 30@ You have a very unusual way of interpreting the multiple references to a deity that populate the Declaration text you cite.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”

“…to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

Contrast this text with that of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson also had a hand in shaping, and which conforms much more to the the interpretation you assign the Declaration:

“The representatives of the French people, constituted as a National Assembly, and considering that ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption, have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man: so that by being constantly present to all the members of the social body this declaration may always remind them of their rights and duties; so that by being liable at every moment to comparison with the aim of any and all political institutions the acts of the legislative and executive powers may be the more fully respected; and so that by being founded henceforward on simple and incontestable principles the demands of the citizens may always tend toward maintaining the constitution and the general welfare. In consequence, the National Assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and the citizen…”

The passage: “In the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being” explicitly places a deity at some remove from the process of a government made by man. The Supreme Being is a witness to, rather than author of, the declaration by the National Assembly.

The text of the Declaration argues that “they [men] are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…” The operative term here is “by their Creator.”

What is meant by this passage “endowed by their Creator”? Tom Paine’s reply to Burke (1791 pp.49-50) offers a some clues: “Every history of the creation, and of every traditionary [sic] account, whether from the lettered or unlettered world, however they may vary in their opinion or belief of certain particulars, all agree in establishing one point, the unity of man; by which I mean, that all men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the latter being only the mode by which the former is carried forward. and consequently every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.”

Lafayette and his co-authors, assisted by Jefferson and others, had a different audience and a different constituency to satisfy. To my mind the two documents read very differently, while guaranteeing similar freedoms and rights. What is absent in the language of the preamble to the Droits is present in the text of the Declaration for good reasons, many of which have been identified by other commenters. God bestows certain inalienable rights upon man, first among them equality. These rights are passed down over generations in much the same way as Original Sin. From this first God-given right to equality proceeds the right to form political organizations and those other rights required to preserve and protect the God-given right to equality. Those of no, or lukewarm, faith can live with the language because the rights to liberty and property and equality are explicitly guaranteed. Those of faith find the language they need to sign the document.

Harold 06.19.15 at 6:36 am @ 42 —
The Greeks of Pericles’ time practiced and justified slavery, so I have to doubt that Pericles was talking about equality in the same sense as the religious radicals of the early modern period. (Pace Abraham Lincoln, one must say the same of Locke and Jefferson, but they were later and less radical.) The radicals as well not only assumed the right to question the status of persons but the proper formulation of the social order (for them, as given by the Bible). The part about the Stoics is interesting, but fire-eating words like ‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; he hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek; he hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away’ would have had more effect, I think. Curious that they laid inert for centuries, though.

kidneystones @57,

Go team Christian go!!!

For every Christian you can name who made a positive contribution to human rights, civil rights, etc. etc. I can name thousands who slaughtered their fellow human beings in the name of their evil ogre god. I can name tens of thousands who tortured their fellow human beings in the name of the genocidal madman they worship. I can name millions who crushed the spirits of gay people, women and a host of minorities and drove their fellow human beings to suicide. I can name millions who engaged in pogroms against the Jews, and slaughtered the innocent to and from the Crusades.

As for “ending slavery.” Your religion was used to justify its existence for centuries, and “good Christians” engaged in worldwide torture, killing and enslavement of indigenous populations by the millions, in the name of their murderous, hate-filled god.

Cherry picking a few good eggs in a seas of century upon century of atrocity doesn’t make your case.

People who speak nonsense like that have not undergone a change in being and realized that religion really is (and always was) a functional, metaphorical expression of what is essentially a wordless process — however much the theologies are twisted by the unknowing, to commit crimes. Wittgenstein (far wiser than Weinberg) wrote:

“Christianity [W. was a convert] is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.”

kidneystones @61,

I’ve studied comparative religion and myth since I was a kid. It’s been more than four decades now of research, observation and reflection. I’ve read countless books on the subject.

And I never even remotely implied that slavery came out of Christianity. I said Christianity was used to justify it for centuries. While you’re cherry picking your books, you might want to find one on reading comprehension and take heed.

Lee @60,

The main problem kicks in when people ascribe to one and only one religion a process that occurs for people in thousands of different faiths, spread around the globe and throughout time. The main problem kicks in when people actually believe their faith is the one and only faith, and that everyone else is lesser or even evil for not adhering to their particular brand name.

For thousands and thousands of years, people have been experiencing the mysteries of faith and its impact on the body and mind, and it makes no difference if one worships Athena, Kali, Odin, Astarte, Jesus, etc. etc. From the religions of Africa, to Asia, Europe, the Americas, the Pacific Islands, et al . . . . for thousands and thousands of years, the same effects have been noted by countless witnesses, regardless of the name of the chosen one or higher being.

And modern science teaches us that there is no difference in the way the brain perceives these things, even if one just meditates successfully, and has no “higher power” in mind. And the same feeling also appears for humans when they see a beautiful sunrise, hear the laughter of children, hold a loved one’s hand, etc. etc. We all reach “spiritual heights” in thousands of different ways, and ascribing this to just one particular religion, or father-god, or any name you might want to use, has had catastrophic consequences throughout world history. When we humans learn the root of these sudden or sustained transformations — that they have nothing whatsoever to do with any actually existing higher being, and are available to virtually 100% of the population — we will move a long way toward peace, love and understanding.

As long as we actually believe in the exclusive domain, dominion or place of one religion over another, we will never get there. Never. We will eternally be divided and at war.

“As long as we actually believe in the exclusive domain, dominion or place of one religion over another, we will never get there. Never. We will eternally be divided and at war.”

No offence Plume, but you are being as exclusionary with your anti-faith perspective as anyone who proclaims their faith is the only true one. A lovely Hindu nun recently bought and planted many flowers in the Catholic Church grotto here, which is a better example of peace, love, and understanding, than saying no one can have any religion.

ZM @66,

I never said “no one can have any religion.” Far, far from it. Not sure how you derived that from what I wrote. The problem kicks in when someone puts theirs above all others, or says there is no other faith but theirs.

I’m more than fine with robust pluralism. I think it’s healthy. The problem is domination.

Well, I’d say that all interpretations of the Bible are selective. There’s a lot going on in there, including many sources from different periods. For an historical account of why people thought the OT, in particular, taught republicanism, you might start with Eric Nelson, “The Hebrew Republic” and Eran Shalev, “American Zion”. Nelson focuses on the 16-17th centuries in Holland and Britain; Shalev concentrates on the American reception and modification of these ideas.

Plume @64,

1. Your first two paragraphs are not what Weinberg said, are they? He’s talking about all religion, period.

2. As to the rest, actually science has NOTHING valid to say, so far, about whether there are differences in consciousness that provide new emotional and intellectual insight (except at low levels in psychiatry). Nor does science have anything valid to say about whether all of these experiences are the ‘same”.

I write “so far”, because neuroimaging studies may begin to change that. What the outcome will be, however, is certainly not predetermined.

As to whether there is an external higher being flying around like Santa Claus, I doubt it. But it should be also very clear that:

1. “God” is not only “a concept by which we measure our pain” (Lennon), but also a concept which works functionally to call oneself from outside oneself, which anybody in AA can explain to you.

2. The notion of the scientific alternative, e.g. an evolutionary explanation of the rise of perception and consciousness, including the development of rationality, mathematics, and logic, runs into extreme explanatory difficulty at our current stage of science, because self-reference becomes a logical issue, and because the source of mathematical creation is non-algorithmic (Gödel’s theorem), yet algorithm is a requirement of scientific explanation.

3. A scientific explanation of the universe may therefore be required to admit another metaphysical principle (in addition to the metaphysical ideas of mathematics, particles, fields, forces, whatever) which might look a lot like Leibniz’ monads, as Whitehead and Gödel both concluded. And if there is a central monad?

SG @ 67: For my part I did not mean to disagree with your interpretation “because Jefferson and Franklin were deists” but because the text of the Declaration is deist, referring in precise language from the 1730s to an intentionless god from whom nature and natural law simply flow, not particularly different philosophically from the concept we now have of the Big Bang.

The notion that the generation of 1776 might have looked to the Hebrew Bible as a warrant for republicanism and anti-monarchical thinking shouldn’t sound so strange. I assume we can turn to Paine’s Common Sense as a trusted source:

“All anti-monarchical parts of scripture have been very smoothly glossed over in monarchical governments, but they undoubtedly merit the attention of countries which have their governments yet to form….

“Near three thousand years passed away, from the Mosaic account of the creation, till the Jews under a national delusion requested a king. Till then their form of government (except in extraordinary cases where the Almighty interposed) was a kind of Republic, administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes. Kings they had none, and it was held sinful to acknowledge any being under that title but the Lord of Hosts. And when a man seriously reflects on the idolatrous homage which is paid to the persons of kings, he need not wonder that the Almighty, ever jealous of his honour, should disapprove a form of government which so impiously invades the prerogative of Heaven.

“Monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins of the Jews, for which a curse in reserve is denounced against them. The history of that transaction is worth attending to.”

Which Paine then attends to. At some length.

http://www.ushistory.org/paine/commonsense/sense3.htm

yastreblyansky @74 That is possibly true of the language in the first sentence. I don’t think it’s true of natural rights passage (although we perhaps could argue about what “Creator” means). I’m pretty sure that isn’t for the references to the “Supreme Judge” and “Divine Providence”. My interpretation is based on the assumption (which I share with Allen) that these statements, which were added by groups including more conventionally religious members, have to be taken into consideration. Again, I don’t think the likes of Adams, Sherman, or Witherspoon would have signed on if it were *just* deism.

There’s also an important distinction to be made between deism–“an intentionless god from whom nature and natural law simply flow”–and natural theism, which involves an intentional creator, but excludes miracles, revelation, etc. The Declaration is clearly compatible with natural theism, which was a popular and pretty respectable view in the 18th century. Outright deism was another matter…

Lee A. Arnold: “How did the POPE end up being rhetorically more comprehensive than any scientist or economist, on these issues?”

Not to derail the thread, but have you kept up with what’s happened to any scientist who speaks about this without limiting themselves to statements of strictly supported science? I think that might give you a good idea of why the Pope can be rhetorically more comprehensive and scientist’s can’t. (As for economists, well, they are trained to regard the status quo as the condition of lack of social cognitive bias, and anything varying from that as being questionable.)

Lee,

Yes, recent science has shown that our brain waves are virtually the same, effected in the same way, regardless of the supposed higher power at issue. Again, they’ve tracked this for people who are serious adepts of meditational forms as well.

And, to me, this is perfectly logical. I had an epiphany of sorts at age nine, after reading world mythologies. It hit me like a ton of bricks that the sheer multiplicity of religious faiths through the ages proves no one religion can possibly be the one and only. Knowing as we do that religious adepts all over the world and through time have experienced a certain form of ecstatic reaction to belief tells us that there is nothing unique about any of them. The oracle at Delphi was every bit as much in touch with the divine — as she saw it — as any Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Shaman, etc. etc. African religions, Asian religions, European, the Americans . . . . on and on and on . . . there is no difference on that score. The names are different, the rituals are different, but the concept is the same.

In general, I think the East has long understood this far better than the West, as many of its “Ways” practice this communion daily, with no necessary recourse to “worshiping” any higher being. And mystics East and West do away with the names altogether, for the most part . . . . realizing the “goal” or “not-goal” is to achieve oneness with the all. They burst through the named gates, the labels, the exclusive clubs, the members only gatherings, and flee those chains. They realize the names are just shortcuts for the ineffable, and that non-mystics all too often block themselves from that All because they remain with the names . . . . They stop well short of going through the gate.

SG @ 67 I don’t understand the fine points of theology without a reference guide but as I understand it Adams was not “basically a liberal Congregationalist” (Calvinist). Adams was, rather, a devout Unitarian. Unlike Congregationalists, Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity, therefore, they do not believe in the divinity of Christ although accepting Christ as a prophet.

By the 18th C., as I understand it, reaction against the heartlessness of Calvinist doctrine of total depravity and in pre-destination had driven many of its adherents (in Switzerland as well as New England) to become Unitarians. Nevertheless, it was only in the twentieth century that people stopped believing in Providence.

kidneystones @83,

Your misreading continues apace. I feel very sorry for your students.

Aside from more misreading on your part, this is an all too familiar line from Christian apologists:

The Christian churches have a lot to answer for, but trying to hang slavery on people of faith in general, and Protestants in particular, seems to me both venal and wrong. World history teaches us that folks don’t require religion to slaughter one another. We just seem to keep doing it cause that’s what we keep doing, whether for money, self-justification, out of fear, or for fun. Religion’s just another excuse.

I see this used constantly, both on the individual and group level. If someone does something good, it’s because he/she is a Christian. Their Christianity was the reason. But if they do something bad, their Christianity had nothing to do with it. This extends to the general as well, and it’s a nice gig if you can get it.

With this sophistry, Christianity can never be faulted for anything, it can only be praised as the source for all that’s good and holy in the world. Nonsense.

kidneystones @ 83: That great 17th-century theologian of free will John Milton, for one, accepted the idea that black Africans were “natural slaves” and the fate of Ham,

…the irreverent son
Of him who built the ark ; who, for the shame
Done to his Father, heard this heavy curse,
Servant of servants, on his vicious Race.

I think the idea that Christians ran the anti-slavery movement in the 18th century has to be based on a foolishly anglocentric view: Surely it belonged more to the Enlightenment than the church, in nontheological packaging from Scotland and the ideas of the decidedly non-Christian anti-slavery campaigners Voltaire and Rousseau before it Bishop Wilberforce took it up.

kidneystones @89,

It’ll be a treat to tell them about someone who regards MLK, Wilburforce, and Gandhi as the bad guys. And I promise I will!

More gross misreading. Again, I really really feel sorry for your students. I never said, nor do I believe, that MLK, Gandhi and Wilberforce were the bad guys. I hold MLK and Gandhi, especially, in very high esteem, and Wilberforce for his courageous work on abolition . . . . though he was far from perfect, too conservative on several other issues, and had his own critics to his left for various reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=William_Wilberforce

Political and social reform

Wilberforce was deeply conservative when it came to challenges to the existing political and social order. He advocated change in society through Christianity and improvement in morals, education and religion, fearing and opposing radical causes and revolution.[51] The radical writer William Cobbett was among those who attacked what they saw as Wilberforce’s hypocrisy in campaigning for better working conditions for slaves while British workers lived in terrible conditions at home.[159] “Never have you done one single act, in favour of the labourers of this country”, he wrote.[160] Critics noted Wilberforce’s support of the suspension of habeas corpus in 1795 and his votes for Pitt’s “Gagging Bills”, which banned meetings of more than 50 people, allowing speakers to be arrested and imposing harsh penalties on those who attacked the constitution.[161][162] Wilberforce was opposed to giving workers’ rights to organise into unions, in 1799 speaking in favour of the Combination Act, which suppressed trade union activity throughout the United Kingdom, and calling unions “a general disease in our society”.[161][163] He also opposed an enquiry into the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in which eleven protesters were killed at a political rally demanding reform.[164] Concerned about “bad men who wished to produce anarchy and confusion”, he approved of the government’s Six Acts which further limited public meetings and seditious writings.[165][166] Wilberforce’s actions led the essayist William Hazlitt to condemn him as one “who preaches vital Christianity to untutored savages, and tolerates its worst abuses in civilised states.”[167]
Unfinished portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1828

Wilberforce’s views of women and religion were also conservative: he disapproved of women anti-slavery activists such as Elizabeth Heyrick, who organised women’s abolitionist groups in the 1820s, protesting: “[F]or ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions – these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture.”[168][169] Wilberforce initially strongly opposed bills for Catholic emancipation which would have allowed Catholics to become MPs, hold public office and serve in the army,[170] although by 1813 he had changed his views, and spoke in favour of a similar bill.[171]

Corrected formatting:

It’ll be a treat to tell them about someone who regards MLK, Wilburforce, and Gandhi as the bad guys. And I promise I will!

More gross misreading. Again, I really really feel sorry for your students. I never said, nor do I believe, that MLK, Gandhi and Wilberforce were the bad guys. I hold MLK and Gandhi, especially, in very high esteem, and Wilberforce for his courageous work on abolition . . . . though he was far from perfect, too conservative on several other issues, and had his own critics to his left for various reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=William_Wilberforce

Political and social reform

Wilberforce was deeply conservative when it came to challenges to the existing political and social order. He advocated change in society through Christianity and improvement in morals, education and religion, fearing and opposing radical causes and revolution.[51] The radical writer William Cobbett was among those who attacked what they saw as Wilberforce’s hypocrisy in campaigning for better working conditions for slaves while British workers lived in terrible conditions at home.[159] “Never have you done one single act, in favour of the labourers of this country”, he wrote.[160] Critics noted Wilberforce’s support of the suspension of habeas corpus in 1795 and his votes for Pitt’s “Gagging Bills”, which banned meetings of more than 50 people, allowing speakers to be arrested and imposing harsh penalties on those who attacked the constitution.[161][162] Wilberforce was opposed to giving workers’ rights to organise into unions, in 1799 speaking in favour of the Combination Act, which suppressed trade union activity throughout the United Kingdom, and calling unions “a general disease in our society”.[161][163] He also opposed an enquiry into the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in which eleven protesters were killed at a political rally demanding reform.[164] Concerned about “bad men who wished to produce anarchy and confusion”, he approved of the government’s Six Acts which further limited public meetings and seditious writings.[165][166] Wilberforce’s actions led the essayist William Hazlitt to condemn him as one “who preaches vital Christianity to untutored savages, and tolerates its worst abuses in civilised states.”[167]

Wilberforce’s views of women and religion were also conservative: he disapproved of women anti-slavery activists such as Elizabeth Heyrick, who organised women’s abolitionist groups in the 1820s, protesting: “[F]or ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions – these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture.”[168][169] Wilberforce initially strongly opposed bills for Catholic emancipation which would have allowed Catholics to become MPs, hold public office and serve in the army,[170] although by 1813 he had changed his views, and spoke in favour of a similar bill.[171]

@87 Not clear to me whether Adams was more seriously orthodox in his forties than his seventies or felt freer to be open. He was anxious as he and Jefferson remade their friendship to insist that that famous statement made to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798 ( when he was 63, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”) was meant to have the broadest interpretation including atheists, as he wrote in 1813:

Who composed that Army of fine young Fellows that was then before my Eyes? There were among them, Roman Catholicks, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anababtists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists Universalists, Arians, Priestleyans, Socinians, Independents, Congregationalists, Horse Protestants and House Protestants, Deists and Atheists; and “Protestans qui ne croyent rien.” Very few however of several of these Species. Nevertheless all Educated in the GENERAL PRINCIPLES of Christianity: and the general Principles of English and American Liberty.

Surely he and Franklin stuck in that “endowed by their creator” to broaden the appeal of the document in the same way, not to change its meaning (and to improve the clunky sound of “from that equal creation”, which was a good decision from a stylistic point of view; some kind of “creator” is already implied in the passive of “are created” in the previous clause, but it still doesn’t need to be personal or intentional).

#91-
I Samuel 8-22:
And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, … all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations…

And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them…

And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots…

And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks… And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your olive yards … and ye shall be his servants…

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles…

And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king.

“Are you really saying that without Christianity, blacks wouldn’t have been at the forefront of their own liberation struggles?”

Excellent point Plume. Truly A+ comments here.

“The bible didn’t give us republicanism or democracy. “

The Bible depicts the descent of the Israelites from the nascent republicanism of the Judges era to the kingdom of Saul as proof of their stiff neckedness and failure to live to the ideals demanded of them.

Now I’m confused. Like Rich @40, I understood a key quote of the essay to be

So while people can accept the Declaration’s claims about rights for secular reasons, I suspect that those who take its religious elements seriously are more likely to act in the ways necessary to secure them.

In other words, understanding and accepting the abstract content of the Declaration as an atheist is fine, but only theists will actually do something about it. However this

If no such God exists, I’m not sure the Declaration *as written* makes a lot of sense.

seems to mean that even the abstract meaning depends on the existence of a particular God. This is so patently absurd that I must be misunderstanding: whether something makes sense to someone is not an objective property of the object, so if the Declaration makes sense to atheists (and it does), that is proof enough that it can make sense to atheists, even if Sam Goldman doesn’t see how or isn’t sure it is possible.

If however, one sticks with the first quote (maybe it makes sense to them but they are less likely to act upon it), then whether or not a particular divinity exists is totally immaterial; it is more than enough that people believe it does.

I believe that one should be fairly generous to the author of a long and interesting post, and not harp on details, nevertheless, it seems to me that, since Euthyphro, it was settled that unless you go the full way and posit the deity actually showing up and delivering the material Muhammad-in-the-cave or Moses-on-the-Sinaï style, arguments for rights that make reference to God are not going to be anymore compelling (logically speaking) that arguments that don’t, so

you can construct coherent (although not very compelling IMO) arguments for rights that make no reference to God

entails either a strange understanding of logic, deep solipsism or the belief that the contribution of God was direct, historical and tangible. Sam Goldman is entitled to hold any of these positions, of course, but, as several people remarked in the thread already, they were completely antithetical to the religious philosophy of the founders, so certainly an odd intellectual perspective to take in an analysis of the Declaration.

Z @ 102, re. Euthyphro:

I suppose you can suppose that Providence wouldn’t have put us here with these beliefs if God didn’t want us to have them, and that God wouldn’t want us to have these ideas if they weren’t true and useful for practical life and salvation both. (Descartes presumably comes in here too.)

Or you can suppose some complicated philosophical justification for why, even though the beliefs I have now aren’t perfect, institutions as they are, are in fact perfect.

Or you can invent all kinds of epicycles within epicycles to distract from the difference between the real and the ideal, and proclaim that studying the epicycles is better than paying a lot of attention to practical life.

Or you can come up with some substitute for Revelation on the Mountaintop, involving perfect people whose every word is gospel truth–either now or sometime in the past.

Or you can assume there’s a perfect truth that old books must come close to, and that the ideas we have must probably let us come closer to.

But yeah, at some point every religion just stops giving reasons and says the truth was brought down from the mountain.

Plume: “This is pure nonsense. Take away religion, especially Christianity, and we take away many of the rationales used for racism in America over the centuries, as well as anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny.”

Plume is the perfect misreader. I can write “perhaps the racism that features as such an enduring and important feature of American society is itself also related to American religiosity” and Plume will write what he writes above in the full belief that he is disagreeing with me.

Plume: “Are you really saying that without Christianity, blacks wouldn’t have been at the forefront of their own liberation struggles?”

Am I really saying … something that I didn’t write? I wrote tha “tanti-racist and anti-slavery movements in the U.S. are inextricably tied to religion and more specifically Christianity” — which they were, like it or not — and that “without religion there is no historical American anti-racist movement to speak of.” Note that that is a statement *about history*, not a counterfactual. A statement like “without Christianity, X would have happened” is a counterfactual.

In actual history, when blacks were at the forefront of their own liberation struggles, they used a particularly religious idiom in which to carry out those struggles. And that’s really all of your nonsense that I’m going to respond to: you’re the worst commenter I’ve seen in some time.

@93 Aren’t you moving the goal posts a little? I was responding to your suggestion that opposition to slavery originated as “attacks on the slave trade by Christian abolitionists, attacks which began in earnest after 1700. These took the form of pamphlets.” But as far as I can tell English antislavery pamphlets began in the 1780s with the freethinker Thomas Cooper (later, alas, a South Carolina slavery and nullification advocate), whereas Montesquieu denounced slavery in the 1748 L’esprit des lois and Diderot in the 1765 Encyclopédie.

The earliest Christian anti-slavery organizing, in the later 18th century, appears to have consisted mainly of the very heterodox Quakers, both in Philadelphia and in England (in Philadelphia, though, the atheist Tom Paine was a founding member, and the religiously indifferent Benjamin Franklin eventually became the president). When more conventional Christians like Wilberforce took up the cause–and I’m not denying he was a lot more effective than Condorcet–it was in alliance with the secular utilitarian movement of Jeremy Bentham, which also did a lot of the work.

So it’s not only philosophically wrong to insist on the essential role of Christianity, as Plume @97 shows, it’s also not historically accurate.

I don’t think we can be good without a sense of something being sacred, but that is not necessarily a supernatural category.

Relevant literature? Gregory Bateson, Roy A. Rappaport.

Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

can [enough of us ] be good […] to make democratic self-government possible […] without God?? Burke and Strauss say no […]. This is a disturbingly plausible argument. […] If we […] don’t put paid to this fatal distrust of ordinary people’s virtue and wisdom, who will?

Do we really need to? In the 21st century?

OK, I’m going to be blunt: hardly anyone in the developed democratic world believes in God anymore. Oh sure, some of them might pay lip service to the metaphysical idea of transcendance (self-identifying as theist in opinion polls, for instance) and (far fewer) will even perform some religious rituals from time to time, but for all intent and purpose, they conduct their lives as if there was no God. Effectively, religion as a significant collective social movement has disappeared of most of the developed world; in some countries since several decades already. Does the developed world appear to be particularly more tyrannic, brutal or anarchic since this disappearance?

Who would in good faith pick any developed country 50 or 100 years ago (in the former time period, religion still existed as a social movement in some countries; in most for the latter) and say it was then more sensitive to universal rights than it is now? Or who could look at the list (easily accessible on Wikipedia) of european countries ordered in decreasing order of percentage of the population believing in God (or even some form of transcendence) and perceive in earnest a descent into barbary?

So what is the fifth sacred thing?

If I told you that the first four are air, fire, water, and earth, could you guess the fifth?

Or, you could read the book. ;-)

It’s probably far too . . . something . . . for most of CT’s commentariat, but not everyone can live on the philosophical and academic heights.

z@114: Do we really need to? In the 21st century?

Hah! I’ll let Goldman answer this.

And further – population increase is not responsible for malnutrition, which is a problem of distribution, not scarcity. Much of the world’s population eats too much, some don’t get enough.

Similarly, climate change has not been caused by over-population but by fossil fuel use and high rates of consumption in wealthy countries. Here’s a useful article http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/1/014010/article

Sorry that was further to my previous comment to Jay @ 36

Lee — yes, love. I’m not familiar with the movie “The Fifth Element,” but a two-second glance at the wikipedia page makes me doubt that “that’s where that came from” — whichever antecedent you meant to go with each of the “thats.” (I.e. the directionality of your references was unclear.)

Maybe both came from the same original strand of thinking…I have no idea. Starhawk is a Wiccan teacher and writer whose books I have learned a lot from over the years. Most of her writing is non-fiction but Fifth is a novel. Certainly not one of the world’s great novels, but not a bad attempt at fleshing out abstractions into a story, and for me quite thought-provoking.

Lee,

Yes, the rituals are very important. Essential, primal. They focus the mind, then link us with others, they establish connections between humans in the present and the past. Add whatever “sacred” aspects to the mix, and it can be a very good way of directing positive energy outward, and warding off dark energy from attacking the inner life.

My point is that the object of that veneration and ritual is largely irrelevant. The stories we build up around it — the scaffolding as Geo mentions above, regarding a different ideal — those matter. Those indicate the general rationale behind this coming together, its purpose, its goals. Is it about power? Imperialistic by design? Is it exclusivist? Is it based on a pre-elect, a chosen people? Or it is truly welcoming to all, to everyone, regardless of whether or not they agree with the stories, etc. etc.? And is that welcoming contingent on total conversion, or simply without conditions? Is it a loving embrace, a compassionate hello, without desire to transform the outsider into a clone of the insider?

It is extremely difficult for any religion that begins by saying “our way is the only way” or “our god is the one true god” to ever be truly welcoming or loving in a meaningful sense, and it can never be welcoming without condition — by definition. Christianity says our way or no way at all, and if one takes its stories literally, it ends one strand of those stories with the mother of all genocides, wherein billions of human beings are slaughtered for not converting and roasted in hell for all eternity.

From my pov, those stories, along with similar genocidal myths in the OT, make it all too easy to understand why the three religions of the Levant have had more than their share of earthly imperialism, genocide, violent, forced conversions and endless attempts to dominate on the individual, national and international stage.

If we do indeed need rituals, stories, the sacred, an organizing principle to do what is right, we need all of that to begin with unconditional welcoming, all out love, zero imperialism or exclusivity and no forced conversions. In essence, we need that to be the sacred, as well as Nature in the here and now, the most logical organizing principle of them all.

I should make it clear that I did not say that religion is an anthropological category. I wrote that ritual is an anthropological category. It has a description-set of functions which is quite aside from any beliefs whether religious or secular, any purposes, times, or places. Roy A. Rappaport is very good from a structural approach — see the book Ecology, Meaning and Religion.

Lee,

From Ritual to Romance, by Jessie L. Weston, is also very strong. T.S. Eliot took much from her work for his poem, The Waste Land. In the tradition of Frazer and Harrison.

Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Levi-Strauss is another seminal work.

@OP
>The political question is whether groups and peoples can be moved to take risks and make sacrifices if they do not think they are justified by a higher power. I am skeptical that this is the case.

This is so disconnected from reality that it seems close to trolling. I understand that one may not *like* explicitly atheistic ideological movements such as communism, anarchism in the Spanish civil war etc., but it is simply a fact of life that huge numbers of people all over the world have sacrificed their lives for them. (That’s even if one excludes the already-mentioned sans-culottes because of stuff like Roberspierre’s Supreme Being.)

The general logic of the argument in this blog post seems to be as follows:

You must be a theist to take the Declaration of Independence seriously, because:

1. There are some theistic references in it;
2. Some of the people involved were theists;
3. Admittedly, one can subscribe to the ideas of the Declaration of Independence without being a theist, but:
4. One can’t take them *really* seriously (as in fighting and risking one’s life for them) without being a theist, because:
5. I just feel so.

So, to abbreviate even more by skipping the intermediate steps, “You must be a theist to take the Declaration of Independence seriously because I just feel so”. Not bad for a theistic argument, actually. Admittedly CT is supposed to be a leftist blog, but it is understandable that when a conservative argument reaches such a level of intellectual sophistication, it really must be shared with the readers.

I’m not entirely clear now whether Sam Goldman is maintaining the claim I imputed to him. Regardless of Sam’s views, the correct position is that stated by Z@114. The consolidation of democracy in developed countries since 1945 has coincided with the disappearance of serious religious belief. Only in a US-centric debate like this one could the contrary view be maintained.

Plume @133, Well it’s got nothing to do with deference to religious beliefs, so you fail again. The proper response would have been an apology without the usual self-justifying and hectoring. So this will be the last time I read anything under your name.

Lee A Arnold @ 131
You criticise Plume for crudely and insensitively introducing the massacre of nine people at Charleston. I can understand why you feel that, but I have to say, as I’ve said on the other thread, from an outsider’s point of view the strange thing is that people here are not talking about it.

You are talking about racism, Christianity, the nature of ‘America’ and its founding beliefs, and yet you don’t talk about that. Why is that? At least Plume named it, even though it was insensitive to do so in the course of making a polemic point about ‘Christians’ as if they were all the same.

Is it despair? Have progressive people given up thinking you can do anything about these profound problems? I ask that charitably because I am trying not to go into the outsider’s default ‘only in America’ position, but I really don’t understand how you can not be talking about this.

About passages like 1 Samuel 8: they can be and have been, historically, (mis)used for constutionalist and democratic purposes, but in fact they have little to do with popular sovereignty and much to do with theocracy. What the Bible advocates and sets up as an ideal is not for the ruler to be accountable to the people, it’s for both the people and the ruler to obey God (whose will is expressed, of course, through prophets, priests, ideally also through a righteous ruler, etc.). To the Yahwist priesthood, the institution of kingship was a dangerous rival, much more of an independent power centre than the earlier “Judges” had been, so it’s natural that we find such “republican” passages in the Bible. While they include populist complaints (isn’t it nasty that we have to pay taxes to the King and not just to God/the priests as we used to?), they are not based on the principle or ideal of self-government as an alternative, and whatever they liked about (their idea of) the previous system, it wasn’t popular sovereignty.

It doesn’t seem to be very clear what the actual mechanics of the rise of a “Judge” in Israel were. The Bible merely states that they were “raised” by God in Judges 2:16. It is not inconceivable that some kind of elections could have taken place as well, judging from the Phoenician parallels, but if so, it’s telling that the authors just weren’t interested in that aspect of things; the leaderships they approve of are made legitimate from above by God, not from below by elections. Conversely, it is the establishment of kingship, and also specifically the election of Saul – the leaderships that the authors disapprove of – that are explicitly presented as intiatives from below. This is very indicative of the authors’ attitude towards democracy.

It’s clear that control of the heads of state by the citizenry, through election or otherwise, is not what distinguishes a good system from a bad one in the eyes of the authors. The population is not called upon to control its rulers (say, to maintain Yahwism or to protect some of its rights that are enshrined in Moses’ Yahwist “constitution”). This is understandable, since it is distrusted and chastised throughout the text for its alleged ungodliness just as much as the kings are.

Even in the passage cited in 1 Samuel 8, we see that Samuel somehow “made/appointed his sons leaders/judges over Israel” – i.e. it is not stated that the people elected them, and indeed the author does not criticise on principle Samuel’s attempt at de facto heritability as in the Roman Empire or Cromwellian England (even if one wants to assume that a formal election “from below” also occurred, the authors of the text obviously just don’t care about this formal electability). What matters isn’t that Samuel is an elected leader – if he even is one – what matters is that he is a man of God (and indeed a Prophet), and when the people reject him, they reject God (1 Samuel 8:7). There are enough passages that show that it’s acceptable for God’s true representative, just as it is for God himself, to do anything, including imposing his will (God’s will) on the majority of the population by force or indeed terror. It’s just that the Jewish kings in particular weren’t generally recognised as such true representatives by the Yahwist priests. The problem with kings was probably that the stability, permanence and heritability of the institution made them at least partly independent in terms of legitimacy from the priesthood, hence the sighing for the idealised past era of righteous judges.

So the the Old Testament (and the Bible in general) gives few pretexts for political egalitarianism and democracy (even though Europeans have done their best to seek out and use such pretexts as can be found); the general orientation and spirit of the thing is very much that of top-down authoritarianism. Justifying the human rights of the citizens, including their defence against authority, with another authority that bestows them (King, God, God through King, God through Prophet), basically using one boss against the other, is a time-honoured strategy, but it is not only not necessary, but indeed has always been fraught with contradiction and leads to intellectual incoherence and instability: if you recognise that rights are merely secondary with respect to an authority above, then you will easily accept the idea that they can also be cancelled by an authority above. It is not inevitable, but rather a paradoxical compromise with inherited authoritarian ideological traditions.

@ 139
I think the harshess of your attack on Plume wasn’t justified.

Val @138,

In no way, shape or form do I view all Christian the same. But if people up thread can tout individual Christians for their work on abolition, for example, then they have to also be willing to deal with individual Christians who do terrible things, or say terrible things, or seek to dominate others and impose their religion on them.

They can not, legitimately, call attention to “the good stuff” and then get offended when the “bad stuff” is also brought up.

Several American politicians and media outlets, in the wake of this atrocity in Charleston, called this “an assault on religious freedom,” instead of what it is, a racist, terrorist attack by a white supremacist. In recent months, stretching back many a decade, America has been subjected to a barrage from “Christians” who say they are being persecuted for their religious beliefs, even though this is in the context of their bigoted, discriminatory behavior toward powerless minorities. As in, they have been the persecutors, not the persecuted.

I find this deeply offensive, and today’s and yesterday’s comments regarding the massacre the same. Our national obsession with a protracted defense of superstition has gone on far too long, in my view. On balance, I see no possible defense of the overall effects of organized religion, especially Christianity and Islam, on the health and well-being of the world’s population. The amount of death and destruction easily attributable to religious believers is astronomical. And while Christians and the religious of all faiths have also contributed wonderful things to society and civilization, the bag is far too mixed to warrant our knee-jerk, autopilot, inflated sense of deference and calls for “sensitivity.” Frankly, organized religion in general simply hasn’t earned that deference or that call for endless sensitivity. It just hasn’t.

Plume @ 144
I didn’t think Lee’s attack was justified, and I thought you were right to raise the discussion, but I was influenced by Lee’s outrage into thinking (mistakenly) that you had generalised about Christians. Now I see that of course you didn’t, you wrote ‘some “Christians” ‘, making it clear that you weren’t generalising about all Chistians. My apologies, and I certainly think Lee’s attack was unjustified,

Val,

Thanks. I know and love many Christians. Always have. Was a camp counselor at a Christian camp, in fact, and loved my fellow counselors, staff, etc. etc. It was one of the best experiences of my entire life and I’ll never forget it.

The same goes for several Christian philosophers, mystics, artists, etc. etc. Love and admire dozens upon dozens. Kierkegaard, Hildegaard von Bingen, St. Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Sienna, Meister Eckhardt, Jacob Boehme, to name a few.

Plume @145
Btw, South Carolina has no hate-crime laws. If it comes to that, it will be a federal issue.

If you go back and read what I wrote @143, you will see that I wrote that hate crimes are an established category in U.S. (meaning federal) law, and that I believe that the Justice Dept — a part of the federal executive branch, as you know — is investigating it as a hate crime.

I don’t want to get into a long debate on the other issues. But I will say that, as various commenters have noted above, organized religion has not declined as sharply in the U.S. as in most other ‘developed’ countries (esp. in Europe), and it remains rather important, for better or worse, in various aspects of national life, including politics. I think most Americans still tell pollsters they believe in some kind of supreme being (I don’t happen to share that view, but that’s neither here nor there). Writing comments about the horrible effects of religion won’t change those facts. On the question of deference, I don’t know but I suspect that representatives of organized religion are treated w a certain amt of at least residual deference everywhere, incl. countries where the religious make up only a small minority of the pop.

Outside the developed world, the story is, again, different. For example, the Catholic Church in Latin America, while no doubt the record is mixed, has been in some contexts a progressive force. (This is all fairly obvious, istm.)

If I could add one last note on theological language in the Declaration, because I’ve just learned something from a 2002 conference paper by Jeffry Morrison and a useful (though wingnut-sponsored) online breakdown of the drafting process, about the peroration to the work (@22):

The interpolations of “supreme judge of the world” and “divine providence” were not part of the initial editing work by Adams and Franklin (unlike “endowed by their creator”); they were added by the Committee of Five of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin plus Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston, the former (as Sam Goldman points out @67) a devout Calvinist.

Morrison finds that the two phrases are not just more theistic/less deistic than the language of the introduction, but downright seriously and exclusively Calvinist, with a particularly New England Puritan resonance: “supreme judge of the world” is repeatedly used in Jonathan Edwards’s second most famous sermon, on the Last Judgment, and “divine providence” a favorite of none other than Dr. John Witherspoon, president of Princeton, member of the Continental Congress, and the only clergyman to sign the document, who preached a sermon on divine providence at Princeton in May 1776, just a few weeks before the Congress got moving. An oral tradition says that Witherspoon specifically asked Congress to use the expression. (“Providence” is also an Enlightened term for an impersonal divinity, but Morrison notes that “it was common practice for “Awakened” pastors to use what would today be considered deistic language to refer to God”.)

Anyhow, Morrison concludes that the phrases

would have struck Reformed Americans as simply good Calvinist faith in practice, and rallied their support for the cause of independence; which, in the event, they gave. It was in this way that the Second Continental Congress made strategic (though not necessarily impious) use of what can be called political theology in its Declaration of Independence.

while agreeing that the “creator” phrases at the beginning equally express deism.

It’s thus pretty clear that the Declaration was meant to reassure the deist majority in the Congress (which would possibly not have understood the Puritanism of “divine providence” or “supreme judge”, a phrase associated with semi-deist Locke) and the Calvinist population of New England (which would similarly fail to see anything weird about “nature’s god”) that nobody’s religious or irreligious sentiments were being disrespected. But properly understood the final sausage has an unresolvable theological contradiction and shouldn’t be understood as making a theological point at all. The point is political and about the accommodation (unlike in wicked England with its established church) of all views, including disbelief.

I note Sam Goldman advertises himself as a “vaguely Straussian conservative”, suggesting to my way of thinking that his idea of the community’s need for a faith in God to make them behave properly is advocating one of those “noble lies” of which Strauss is often accused, and that the argument for a theological content without which the Declaration cannot be understood (in fact you can only understand it by ignoring the theological content, since it’s contradictory) is itself a kind of Straussian deception; it’s not true, but it ought to be so that it will perform its function of facilitating social control. This is the very opposite of what the Declaration ought to mean.

geo

[M]ightn’t social stability benefit from, or even necessitate, religious sanctions?

In the actual developed world, social stability was finally been reached when religion ceased to be an operative social force (not saying one caused the other, just observing the simultaneity) so the argument you hope is wrong is in fact maximally empirically wrong. Why worry about it?

Which is why so many conservatives have asked whether, since myths and authority structures seem to be a prerequisite of social stability…

What if it were the exact converse? What if myths and authority structures were a prerequisite for disruptive social change? The intellectuals of the past can be excused-how could they possibly perceive that their epoch was one of permanent transformation?-but with historical hindsight, we can see that with the disappearance of all grand organizing ideologies (mass religion, communism, nationalism…) came a period of great social stability.

Finally

The “atheist ideological movements” that have succeeded — Stalinism, Maoism, fascism — have, alas, been as authoritarian and myth-ridden as any religion, and even crueler.

My nationalistic pride is hurt! The first successful atheist ideological movement (the French Revolution and its 19th century siblings) was well within the range of ordinary revolutions, cruelty-wise.

It doesn’t seem terribly surprising to me that both endorsement of and opposition to slavery would be couched in religious language. After all, it’s not as though either the slaves, the slaveowners, or the abolitionists existed in a vacuum; religion suffused all their lives, as it did the lives of all people at the time generally. So it makes sense that in looking for a common language with which to combat slavery, abolitionists would lean on the Bible; that was a rhetoric that would have come naturally to them. I’m not sure that indicates any sort of necessity for religion as a requirement for collective action, though; it’s just a contingent fact about what sort of vocabulary was accessible to the public at the time.

It is rather amusing reading comments about how Christians must note every bad thing any Christian has ever done – from the very same people who always make a fuss whenever anyone points out Stalin and Mao were Communists at which point they retort you can’t measure Communism by any existing Communist state as it wasn’t proper Communism

I guess since the shoe is on the other foot the Christians can just retort it wasn’t proper Christianity

It is rather amusing reading comments about how Christians must note every bad thing any Christian has ever done – from the very same people who always make a fuss whenever anyone points out Stalin and Mao were Communists at which point they retort you can’t measure Communism by any existing Communist state as it wasn’t proper Communism

I guess since the shoe is on the other foot the Christians can just retort it wasn’t proper Christianity

The mistake being made on both sides here is the assumption that the “founding document” (the Bible in the Christian case, Marx for communists) provides sufficient information to read off an actual political program for a state. Turns out that you can’t derive either the abolitionists or the Crusades just by reading the New Testament; they aren’t necessary consequences of whatever it is that some Jewish sectarian preached thousands of years before. Just the same, you can’t derive the gulag from Das Kapital; it’s obviously more explicit as a political text than the Bible, but a whole bunch of things that self-proclaimed communists did have very little if any connection to whatever Marx was writing about. Actually this is also true for both the Declaration and the Constitution. The latter does not in any real sense derive the modern administrative state, which formed by various historical accretions. The mania for reconciling obviously necessary state function with some “original intent” of the Constitution is a uniquely American lunacy; most other countries just pass the laws that they think they need and move on with life.

Ideologies, especially ones as broad as religions, can support almost any reading you want if you pick your hermeneutics right. Which is to say that attributing responsibility for social ills (or successes) to something as ill-specified as “Christianity” or “communism” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. These exercises always take the form of some sort of petty point-scoring, with participants trying to hang the maximum amount of corpses on their opponents. It doesn’t seem like a good use of time and energy to me.

ZM @158,

It is rather amusing reading comments about how Christians must note every bad thing any Christian has ever done – from the very same people who always make a fuss whenever anyone points out Stalin and Mao were Communists at which point they retort you can’t measure Communism by any existing Communist state as it wasn’t proper Communism

I guess since the shoe is on the other foot the Christians can just retort it wasn’t proper Christianity

Who is calling for that here? No one. I’m simply saying that if you claim Christianity as the reason for the good stuff, be prepared to hear criticism about the bad stuff done in the name of that same religion. No one is asking for a blow by blow acknowledgement. It would, however, be a huge improvement if some Christians simply accepted that others aren’t going to believe as they do, or feel the need to treat their beliefs as delicate little flowers . . . or that even innocent bystanders didn’t feel the need to jump in and protect those delicate little flowers.

As for the latter part of your quote: It’s not that they weren’t a “proper Communism.” It’s that they had absolutely nothing to do< with communism at all. They could have called themselves "bird watchers," and it would have made more sense. And those of us in the anticapitalist, egalitarian, radical democrat, radically anti-authoritarian camp are far more opposed to the Stalin's and Mao's than the vast majority, for reasons already expressed several times here.

But the real key, IMO, now that you bring this all up: In America, it is considered open season, forever, on attacking the left, ferociously, angrily, without restraint. It's considered A OK in conversation to level major denunciations against political philosophies of the left. Of course, the left does this with the right as well, so it's all open season, generally, across the political spectrum.

But religious beliefs? We're supposed to be very, very careful and treat them like the most delicate of flowers. Someone's religious sensibility is elevated to protected status in our country, even though there is absolutely no reason to do so, other than 100% empty, unsupported, received convention. Would we be so careful if someone claimed to worship Athena? Well, there is no more evidence to support the worship of the Christian god than the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom. It's just as bizarre, IMO, to worship either. Worshiping a risen Elvis is no less sensible in comparison . . . other than the two thousand year head start, building up an effective organization. Take away that scaffolding, and it's still, at the very least, questionable enough to criticize openly.

Belief in the literally impossible, the absolutely unproven, the ridiculously absurd. Sorry, but I feel no requirement to walk on egg shells on a forum that is discussing the ludicrous idea that we need “god” to understand the Declaration of Independence. From my viewpoint, America will have taken a major leap in maturity when it finally places religious belief in the same category as politics, philosophy, sports, the arts, when it comes to vigorous, open and honest debate about differing views.

To the put it a bit more directly: I’m not saying that all democratic citizens need to be particularly pious all the time. That’s clearly not the case. If you look at my original post, however, what I am saying is that is religion matters a lot at moments of crisis like the one the Declaration addressed, which involve…revolution, civil war, economic collapse, foreign invasion, etc. Luckily for them, our European friends haven’t had to deal with these things recently.

Plume 06.20.15 at 3:46 am @ 145 —
A mysterious vacuum might not be a bad sort of master, if one felt a lingering need for one. Remember that with the priesthood of all believers the professional priests have been fatally compromised, if not fully deposed.

Z 06.20.15 at 1:39 am @ 135 —
I accept the idea that in order to unite the many tribes and subtribes of Europe which immigrated here, bringing their lethal hostilities with them, it was necessary to have a clearly marked and accursed anti-elite or anti-elect so that the Europeans could define themselves against them as members of one supertribe, that of the White Man. Otherwise they would have fought one another here as they did in Europe. No existing religion could have fulfilled this purpose, since by mere local exclusion it could not provide the universally accursed minority for ‘everyone else’ to define themselves against.

Val @146, Geo @149,

I strongly disagree. To begin with, this is a public forum. So the FIRST thing you do when writing of a new tragedy is to think to yourself, “What if anybody who just lost a loved one in that tragedy, were to read this?” You are supposed to do this, no matter what your true beliefs about it are. And no matter how unlikely it is that they, indeed, will be reading this discussion.

Why? Because if you do NOT, then you automatically exhibit, to all the rest of us, that you have very little experience of other’s peoples’ emotions, and almost no understanding of emotions other than your own. And perhaps not even your own.

It therefore immediately follows, though you will certainly be uncomprehending of this fact, that you have little understanding of how most human discourse proceeds, much less how it proceeds in a public forum. There are rules of public discourse, and you as an individual don’t get to set them just by your participation in the conversation.

Therefore people will turn away from the discussion, because you have coarsely cheapened the conversation through your own lack of emotional tact. Even when no loved ones are listening. And thus, you have broken another rule of discourse, which is to keep the others in the game, by using sympathy, amusement or instruction.

Indeed the rest of us are likely to find your own prior injunction “to begin with unconditional welcoming”, (see the last paragraph in #126), to be laughably hollow.

But that is just to begin with.

If, in addition to that, your statements in a time of grief don’t explicitly recognize, in a discussion of religion, that religion is a standard and successful way to deal with grief, then you have demonstrated that you don’t know even know one of the main functions of the topic under discussion.

In response to this charge, an intellectual defense of yourself will be inadmissibly incomplete, because the overcoming of grief is not an intellectual process.

On top of that, if you state historical falsehoods, then you’ve now triply damned yourself as a juvenile logic-chopper, and are well on the way to a complex web of embarrassments:

#129: “…17 centuries of Christianity haven’t led to a better world in the slightest” ?

“In the slightest”? Well that’s not merely feckless, it’s wrong, on both the debit and credit side of the ledger. Christianity is on the hook for some crimes, but it can hardly be blamed for not stopping all the rest.

And to its credit? There is no credit? Is this because people could have found other ways to learn love, sympathy, sanctity? Because Bach would have found another reason to write cantatas? Milton, to write the greatest poem in English?

But: A) no, as a scientific matter, we can never KNOW the validity of all of those millions of counterfactuals, and B) as an historical statement, it’s simply false. Putting them together: C) the assertion that a counterfactual might prove it, is wrong.

“…we hear from “Christians” that it was an assault on their religion, not a racist act of terrorism.” ?

What does this mean in the context? That Christianity hasn’t led to “a better world in the slightest”, and that FURTHER evidence is, that the new murders are blamed as an attack on the religion instead of as an attack on a race?

Well that isn’t necessarily further evidence of Christianity’s worthlessness and perfidy, to begin with.

And if the scare quotes mean “some” Christians instead of all Christians, then it is even less evidence about Christianity, as a whole that hasn’t done any good, “in the slightest”.

And if the scare quotes mean, “people who say they are Christian, but are not” (which is what scare quotes usually mean: false representation, simulation, or provisional or temporary status) then Christianity’s got NOTHING to do with this additional evidence.

So this part is all completely illogical.

And in reality of course, almost everyone is calling it a racist act of terrorism, except a few execrable nuts in the right-wing political press and the vile political candidates who are angling for their support. But the fact that politicians hide behind Christianity is not something Christianity can do a lot about. It can’t sue for trademark violations, slander, or false representation of Jesus’ name. However, preachers are frequently warning against others who commit crimes in Jesus’ name.

And the Pope just delivered an encyclical two days ago which is an enormous step in making a better world.

To conclude, the question is NOT, “Golly, maybe Plume’s right? Religion is a two-edged sword, and by golly, no one’s ever pointed THAT out before — and pointed it out endlessly, as if we hadn’t read him the first dozen times!… And as if the rest of us on this blog don’t already know it, from millions of other people, and thousands of books, even though we’re three centuries into the Enlightenment!”

And the question surely is not, “But! those who are grieving their loved ones, don’t know it! and must be newly instructed!” Because I imagine they are pretty much feeling the sword at this moment, and don’t need an emotional imbecile to press it in more.

Instead the real questions are separate; intellectual, emotional.

Intellectually, as ZM And Jerry Vinokurov both indicate, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Emotionally, religion is much, much more than an ideology.

So I think that an apology to the community is still in order.

Lee @166,

Nothing I wrote warrants an apology, and especially not in relationship to the grief people are feeling in South Carolina right now. In fact, I’ve read and heard them decry the exact thing I decried. I’ve read and heard their appalled reaction to the suggestion that this was an attack on religious freedom, as opposed to what it clearly was:

A racist, terrorist attack on blacks by a white supremacist.

And given that this wasn’t at all about religion, it makes zero sense for you to suggest that criticism of Christianity is at all relevant to the emotions in effect. They are grieving for their loved ones, not because of a supposed assault on Christianity. They are forced to grieve because a white supremacist, wearing three different white supremacist flags, said he wanted to start a race war. He murdered nine blacks in hopes of doing that.

It’s not about Christianity, Lee. Being critical of it is not even in the same universe of concerns for the family and friends of the victims.

You really couldn’t be more wrong about this if you practiced for months.

I don’t owe the board or anyone else an apology.

Rich @169,

You hold a grudge. That’s all too clear. So your piling on is duly noted. But it’s baseless.

And I did think about the remotely slim possibility that someone in SC would read this board. It’s at least a part of the reason I brought it up in the first place. My outrage at the events is outrage on behalf of the victims and their families. There is nothing in what I said that would offend them, and I think they’d agree with that outrage and its rationale. That includes the outrage over the opportunistic attempt to make this about an assault on religious freedom. If Lee or anyone else really wants to get angry and demand apologies from anyone, they need to look there.

I categorically reject his bizarre framing of any of this. It’s actually surreal in its focus.

Plume is right, he has nothing to apologise for, and what is shameful here is Lee A. Arnold and Rich Puchalsky’s opportunistic attempts to silence an opponent and win their arguments by means of drama and emotional manipulation. While I do think that that Plume’s statement about no improvement having resulted from Christianity was unprovable and thoughtless, what he said was in no way an attack on the families of the victims. The idea that a tragic event shouldn’t be mentioned at all because such discussion could hypothetically somehow increase the distress of those who grieve is likewise absurd.

Re Lee A. Arnold’s “Religion is much, much more than an ideology” – well, you might not realise it, but ideology is much more than an ideology, too. Secular ideologies also provide ways to deal with grief, and they are also extremely important to their adherents. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be discussed, and the same applies to religion. “This is an emotional issue to me, so shut up” is just a bullying tactic.

F. Foundling @171,

Interesting. And it makes a lot of sense. Riffing from that, some questions pop up for me. A Hungarian, minding his own business, not seeking to extend his realm and range of influence, power, etc. etc. That’s one thing. It would be strange to ask him, “Why are you a Hungarian.” But doesn’t the dynamic change, at least a bit, if that Hungarian seeks to extend empire? More so if he successfully does? Wouldn’t imperialism negate the ethno-deference in that case?

Christianity spread beyond the Levant largely because of Roman power, and then several European empires, and then American empires. It’s pretty safe to say it never would have reached our shores without those empires. Especially for the European conquerors of the Americas, a distant desert faction of another desert religion, one with extreme asceticism and self-abnegation built in, doesn’t appear to be the best, most organic candidate for assimilation. And from what we know about pagan religions in Europe, the overall ideology and points of reference were wildly at odds.

In short, Christianity was deeply foreign to the “sensibilities” of pagan Europe. I can see no successful adherence without the strength of various empires (en)forcing it, supporting it, pushing for it, etc. etc. Many scholars believe that the Romans could have gone in several directions. We might all be worshiping Mithras, for instance (a favorite of the Roman legions) if a few minor events had been only slightly different.

MPA @173,

Well said. And that is the crux of the problem. Because when we are asked to pay special deference, the effect is an elevation of the thing in question above thoughts and feelings of non-believers. Their beliefs, in that case, become more important than others — than ours. Their protected class is a forced hierarchy of values, with ours being much lower on the totem poll. We non-believers don’t accept this. At all.

Again, in America, this is becoming a legal issue as well. In the name of “religious freedom,” we are losing ours, which includes the freedom from religion. The autopilot deference is foundational for that. For that loss. It is also especially foundational for legalized discrimination and oppression of sexual minorities, as well as the non-religious.

To me, a vibrant democracy places all of these “beliefs” in the same open and free marketplace of ideas, up for debate, argument, persuasion, etc. etc. And if one’s religious belief is secure, he or she should welcome this challenge. Eagerly.

Geo @177,

I like the small c communism and christianity thing. Graeber uses that for his sense of the real meaning of communism, etc. . . . as we discussed in that other thread.

The human Jesus, which is the only kind I believe existed, lived his life as a small c communist. At least from our limited knowledge of his days on earth. If the proper definition of a Christian is someone who follows Christ, tries to live like Christ, then this opens up the term to billions, including Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, secular humanists, etc. etc. Gandhi comes quickly to mind. The Buddha, too. If, however, the definition is more Paulist, that belief in Jesus as messiah is all that matters — later morphing into belief in his divinity; the two were not originally linked — then we narrow the field again.

I think the switch to belief (as central) from actual practice was key for its spread outside the Jewish community. Paradoxically, it both expanded and narrowed who could be considered “christian.”

@Plume 06.20.15 at 4:38 pm

>Interesting. And it makes a lot of sense. Riffing from that, some questions pop up for me. A Hungarian, minding his own business, not seeking to extend his realm and range of influence, power, etc. etc. That’s one thing. It would be strange to ask him, “Why are you a Hungarian.” But doesn’t the dynamic change, at least a bit, if that Hungarian seeks to extend empire? More so if he successfully does? Wouldn’t imperialism negate the ethno-deference in that case?

Well, then the criticism will be of Hungarian imperialism, but not of Hungarian-ness itself. Christianity, on the other hand, is based on a set of claims, and if these claims are true, then it makes all the sense in the world that one should work to extend the sphere of influence of Christianity, as Christians always have been. In that way, Christianity is like socialism, liberalism, libertarianism, the claim that washing your hands before eating is good for your health, the claim that black cats crossing your path can bring bad luck, etc. As for how “natural” Christianity was for an area before conversion, that’s a purely historical question with little relevance for its legitimacy today. Personally, I’ve got the impression that it was best adapted to the relatively developed, urbanised areas of the Roman Empire, and that part of its spread was pretty “natural”; most of the rest has been connected to civilisational influence and with political and economic considerations. But these sorts of spreading mechanisms are pretty normal for religions in general, I think.

MPA Victoria #173: “This is just religious people claiming their beliefs are SOOO much more important than non-religious people’s.”

MPA Victoria, you think that I am a religious person?

Lee,

Please be honest here. What I said offended you. It offended you deeply enough to say I should apologize to the entire board or leave. To strengthen your claim, you attempted to make this an issue about the emotions of the people in Charleston, even though you have no way of knowing they’d care at all about a particular criticism of Christianity, and no logical reason to suppose they would . . . . especially when that criticism had absolutely nothing to do with them. Their loved ones were murdered because they were black, not because they were Christian. It is those who refuse to acknowledge that, and try to shift it to some other rationale, who are being offensive and insensitive. Eric Erickson, for example, is now blaming this all on our acceptance of people like Caitlyn Jenner!!

In short, this is about you, not the people in Charleston. Be honest. If you were, you would ask me to apologize to you, because you took this personally and it offends you. IMO, you have no right to assume you speak for anyone else, especially not the victims in SC.

Layman #185,

So you, too, think that people who were worshipping in a church, and then watched their loved ones be murdered, could read,

“17 centuries of Christianity haven’t led to a better world in the slightest,” (Plume, #129)

and they would agree that

“There is nothing in what I said that would offend them,” (#170)

because YOU also think that they were in the church to participate in something that THEY believed hasn’t led to a better world, in the slightest?

Why should I care Lee? And why is a religious person’s beliefs afforded more importance than mine?

Dodging my question Lee. Why is that? Lets have an honest conversation here.

MPA Victoria #190,

I certainly don’t think a religious person’s beliefs should be afforded more importance than your beliefs! That’s why I asked you about the secular case. Would you say to people exiting the Aurora theatre shootings, “Movies are worthless, anyway”?

F. Foundling @180
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “civilisational influence and with political and economic considerations..?”

Charlemagne and the Saxons?
The Teutonic Order?
La Reconquista?

Is the common pattern of conversion of a monarch, followed by “conversion” of the population fall under civilizational influence or is it a political and economic consideration?

Also, is this kind of thing relevant to the conversion of one nation to Protestantism or Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy?

MPA Victoria,

WHERE did I say that a religious person is more emotionally attached to their beliefs than you, or than anyone else? Please give me the comment #.

Oh I see. My mistake, sorry. It’s because I always take “ideology” by the dictionary definition: a system of ideas to run a political-economic system. Whereas religion to me is primarily spiritual-emotional, with an intellectual-theological framework that is interchangeable, really. I don’t think of people running to an ideology to overcome grief or despair; it is supposed to be reasoned and dispassionate. But of course people do become emotionally attached to them, as we have observed here.

Fair enough Lee. Thank you foe the responses.

@steven johnson 06.20.15 at 8:19 pm
>I’m not quite sure what you mean by “civilisational influence and with political and economic considerations..?”
>Charlemagne and the Saxons?
>The Teutonic Order?
>La Reconquista?

These are some of the more violent cases, obviously. But yes, the reason the Frankish state and most of the other Germanic tribes had become Christian in the first place, and probably even the reason the Christianisation campaign so successfully converted the rest of the Saxon population after the end of the Saxon wars, was the cultural and civilisational dominance of the Roman/Christian sphere.

>Is the common pattern of conversion of a monarch, followed by “conversion” of the population fall under civilizational influence or is it a political and economic consideration?

Usually both, for the monarch and the elite that converts. They do it because of civilisational influence or is it a political and economic considerations. Of course, being a monarch and an elite, they then proceed to influence the rest, sometimes by force. On the other hand, some segment of the population usually converts even before the monarch. In a period with no ideal of religious pluralism, all of this was pretty normal.

Yes, I noticed your sarcasm, and of course the whole thing is appalling from a modern leftist point of view, but obviously, pretty much nobody had such a point of view back then. However, the whole thing can’t be reduced to the violence.

Yastreblyansky #201: “…the need to be sensitive about criticizing the movie industry just in case any family members of the Aurora shooting victims happen to be listening? And this explains why we should be sensitive about criticizing the history of Christianity…?”

Depends on 4 things: 1. What your criticism of the movie industry is (the matching example would be, “Movies are worthless anyway, have never led to any good in the slightest”, 2. How soon after the shootings you publish it, 3. That the criticism of the history of Christianity was condemnatory, “[it hasn’t] led to a better world in the slightest”, and 4. the obvious fact (well, obvious to most of us) that those people will now be turning to that very same Christianity to handle their grief and despair, even though it was insisted that it hasn’t led to a better world in the slightest.

@ 204
Please let it go. Plume’s general comments about Christianity obviously weren’t meant in the way you’re suggesting.

I have the utmost respect for the Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston and deep sadness for its terrible loss and anger at the racism of the attack. If you asked the question whether the black church in the US has done more good than harm in the course of its history I would easily answer more good.

I felt the movie theater analogy was trivializing the church and the massacre monstrously, and in that way far more directly offensive than discussions of the history of Christianity in general.

I think just everyone drop the Charleston stuff, maybe? It’s not really relevant to the post, to begin with. Just a friendly suggestion.

Val @203&204,

I don’t take anything Plume wrote as a personal attack! As for me, I apologize if it offends anyone’s sensibility. My basic objection was rhetorical, about the emotional perception of listeners already in existential crisis. So I suppose I should pay attention to the fact that there are also readers who are not Americans, and aren’t ready for the rough-and-tumble of words from a society that is almost entirely inured and numbed to violence, and contains many intellectuals who are always sure they are right, and will even insist that they didn’t mean what they clearly wrote. So you may find it’s all too much to take. But I apologize to you personally.

Rich @207,

So, sure, you can condemn Christianity if you want to. I have no problem with that: I’m not Christian, and I’m not religious. You can also talk about this massacre all you want. Go right ahead. But doing both at once, at the same time? That’s a whole lot like those people who show up at funerals with the “God Hates Fags” signs. You can still do if you want to — go right ahead. But some people will look at you with the same scorn that they get. Like it or not.

This comment is simply deranged. It makes Lee’s hysterical reaction to a very mild and general criticism of Christianity look almost sane in comparison. Comparing what I said to the odious, disgusting, despicable people behind that campaign? Seriously, fuck you. You’re a fucking idiot.

. . . .

Notice that I said Christianity, in its very long history, has not made the world a better place, which would be an extremely tall order for any entity. Why on earth would anyone find that a shocking statement when it’s so obviously true? And I would say the same about every single religion in history. Not one of them, over the course of their existence, made the world a better place. Not one of them. Each one may have helped individual followers at important times in their lives, and many have been helped by them, as individuals. But the world — the world, the planet and its inhabitants in total — have not seen an increase in our overall state due to any religion, ever, on balance. On balance, they all have come with far too many heavy negatives for that to happen, including an all too relentless desire to control lives and force people to adhere to their very strict vision of “morality,” often by force.

We still suffer through the same things we’ve always suffered through. We still slaughter each other, we still have all the pathologies we’ve always had. We’re still raping and pillaging and destroying ecosystem after ecosystem. Religion has absolutely failed to make the world a better place, and this is patently obvious to anyone who actually, honestly observes the here and now and reads history and is strong enough, mentally, to escape from propaganda. If they are not strong enough mentally, they will continue to believe in fairy tales about fairy tales, one of them being that a religion actually has the power to make the world a better place. You expect the impossible if you think they can.

That task is far too big for any religion, and religions tend not to have that as their goal in the first place. At least organized religions. They tend to have expansion as their goal, and unquestioning acceptance of their rules. They tend to be imperialistic, and that has never, and never will, lead to a better world.

Again, better for individual followers, at times? Certainly. I never suggested otherwise. I’ve seen it happen. But I’ve also seen religion destroy people. First hand. And I shouldn’t have to remind folks about the various atrocities throughout history, like the Crusades, the witch hunts, the Inquisition, the endless sectarian wars, the forced conversion of native peoples all over the world, etc. I shouldn’t have to. And if anyone owes anyone an apology here, it’s Rich and Lee for saying what they’ve said.

The preceding post is *not* an attempt to return to the discussion of any recent events, it is about ideology and religion in general. And that’ll be all from me.

F Foundling @213,

Agreed. I think it’s a very shaky separation/division, proffered by Lee.

I’m an atheist. I’ve had direct experience with terrible tragedies, lost countless loved ones, have grieved because of this more times than I can count. I’ve been near death several times, and have battled incurable cancer for the last 12 years, the vast majority of that time taking chemo. It would appear that Lee is suggesting only the religious have emotions, or that only religions can offer emotional support for grief. I find that deeply offensive, on many levels, as it cheapens what the non-religious go through and how we grieve, how we find ways to cope, that life matters to us just as much as any Christian.

The gist of what Lee has been saying all along is that emotions are for the religious, and that because of this we need to pay special deference to them. The rest of us apparently have lesser concerns and needs, and our feelings matter less, our forms of coping don’t count, don’t deserve the same kind of deference, don’t warrant sensitivity, etc. etc. Obviously, this is insulting to the non-religious. But, ironically, it’s also insulting to religious people. As mentioned above, it’s patronizing and it treats the religious like children, as if they’re not strong enough to deal with what everyone else deals with.

Beyond that, this dichotomy is false. For every religious person who has deep, emotional attachments to their faith, I’ve known many who are calmly analytical about theirs. And I’ve known people who are more attached, more emotional, more passionate in their beliefs about politics, sports, books — than many a religious. Online, or in the real world. In fact, these forums should be proof of the emotional attachment and passion for ideas in the secular realm. Hell, I’ve been party to far more heated and emotional battles on the old New York Times book forum than in real world debates with religious people.

In short, Lee assumes too much and stereotypes to the point of caricature.

@215 Ah. If it’s about the use of religious rhetoric in 19th-century America I have no quarrel. William Lloyd Garrison and Abraham Lincoln used lots of it.

What I object to is a hypothesis being pushed all the GOP evangelicals: that it was churches (evangelical white churches, as opposed to the necessary Quakers, and the black churches founded in the 2nd Great Awakening) that did all the work, to the exclusion of movements like Garrison’s, which was downright anticlerical, and political parties, the abolitionist faction of the Whigs and eventually Republicans, and workers’ Free Labor and Free Soil movements. But they certainly used a lot of spiritual language.

yastreblyansky: “What I object to is a hypothesis being pushed all the GOP evangelicals”

Do we have to take it seriously? I really didn’t think that was worth arguing against here. At most people seem to be arguing against a vaguely Straussian idea that people need religion in order to actually follow through on these ideals. And, again as I mentioned upthread, that’s disproved by history as a general contention even in an American context. The feminism and gay rights movements have had substantial success in the U.S.: neither one was or is essentially religious, so they serve as examples against the theory that only religion can motivate this kind of movement. Racism is a special case because the ground of value that racism provides in America is a lot like religion’s ground of value.

You mention Garrison, so here’s the Garrison “no compromise with the evil of slavery” speech, worth mentioning because he cites the Declaration prominently and religiously.

F.Foundling #213: “Ideologies are ways to make sense of the world and of life and death.”

Then what is NOT an ideology?

I always take “ideology” by the dictionary definition: a system of ideas to run a political-economic system.

This “dictionary definition” is almost misleadingly truncated (I can give the relevant bit of the Shorter Oxford if you want). But even going by this, why wouldn’t religion classify as an ideology? It seems fairly obvious to me that any given religion is a system of ideas (even if it’s other things as well), and that some religion or other has served as the basis of pretty much all political-economic systems for most of human history. You actually disagree with this?

@225
For what it’s worth Plume I also felt that comparison made by Rich was offensive. I was thinking of saying so, but also of entreating you not to respond to it. That’s from bitter experience – in the past I have lost my temper and sworn at people online who’ve said offensive things to or about me, but you come to realise that by responding like that, you end up in the same place.

Anyway I won’t comment any further, except to say to js @ 210, I understand why you want people not to talk about Charleston here, but maybe just to put my views into perspective – we are having a national conversation here about recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the constitution. If anything similar happened here to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (which happened a lot in the past, and which, although I’m not formally religious, I truly pray never happens again), that would have to be acknowledged in the conversation. Obviously you have to be very careful how you speak about these things, but not speaking can also be a problem, I think.

I know it’s not directly comparable, but it might help you see why I thought in a conversation about one of your founding documents, you might talk about Charleston.

I understand people might feel this is the time for mourning rather than talking about what to do, but it seems like in America that’s what people say, and then nothing is done. Anyway I won’t say anything further.

Js. #226: “You actually disagree with this?”

If you define an economy as production and distribution, then there have been very few economies based on religion. Ancient temple economies comes to mind. A number of economies devoted a part of production to religious ritual, but most of the time, not a very large part.

Anyway, if you accept the expanded definition of “ideology”, then what is an example of a system of ideas that is not an ideology?

If you define an economy as production and distribution, then there have been very few economies based on religion.

Well, you presumably know about how banks based in many Muslim countries don’t charge interest (at least as normally understood), or say about usury laws in medieval Europe. You don’t think these are economic institutions based on religion? What about taxes levied specifically on members of religious minorities—a common practice in the pre-modern era. On the other hand, you don’t want to be too strict about “economies based on [x ideology]” because then nothing will turn out to be an ideology. After all, it’s not as if modern capitalist economies are based on the writings of Smith, Ricardo, etc. It’s the other way round, surely—first you get the social practice, then , on its basis, you get the theorizing. (I mean, you can’t even get central planning out of Marx, and that’s your most favorable test case.)

But look, this is all besides the point. Because the point really is: what does one gain or lose by designating religion as an ideology or by withholding that designation. I kinda got confused on that point myself, so I went back through the thread, and I found this by you @60:

religion really is (and always was) a functional, metaphorical expression of what is essentially a wordless process

OK. So… I literally don’t know what to make of that. But surely you realize that that is an amazingly controversial characterization of what religion is. Seriously, I am honestly, truly not trying to be dismissive, but that is so alien to what I think that I don’t know how to make argumentative contact with it. Except perhaps to say that when I talk about “religion” and when you talk about “religion” we’re just talking about completely different things. To illustrate: the thing I’m talking about is the kind of thing where a dude in funny hat in Rome can say something and it causes unforeseen problems for Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum. What you’re talking about is… something very different, at any rate. And frankly, I’m not sure why I should at all be concerned about the thing you’re talking about, whereas it’s pretty clear to me why I should be concerned about the dude-with-funny-hat/Jeb Bush kind of thing (or for that matter the MLK kind of thing or the liberation theology kind of thing).

js@226 and Lee @230

It’s true that few civilisations are directly based economically on religion (although Sumeria and Egypt certainly were). But it’s true that without the ability to frame questions of power and distribution in some way that is not tied to self-interest but is yet emotionally compelling, production remains limited. That frame was first religious (Sumer, Egypt, Assyria, Shang China), then religious-ethnic (Persia, Greece, Rome) then religious-ethnic-national (France, England, Russia, the US), elsewhere national-ethnic-Communist (Soviet Union), just national-ethnic (Australia), and so on, with the proportions varying as the arguments played out.

In effect, people in these systems are arguing about what the system demands, not about what they in particular should have (although, of course, a lot of the arguments are self-serving). And they need a system to have such an argument. This is not to support some Straussian claim about elite mysteries – there is no reason the argument cannot be open. But it will not, at bottom, have some purely rational, instrumental or individual foundation.

Human consciousness is all about making up stories. Stories explaining our place in the world. Stories called ‘religion’ are not better or worse than any other stories.

The government of Geneva was presumably based on religion. I can’t think of many others. The first Holy Roman Empire was justified by religion and endorsed by religion, but it seems that the government was allowed to do its own thing in almost all spheres. As time went on, religious people thought their ideas should have more influence, but religion itself did not often endorse its merger with government.

I’m noting that Bach and Bunyan are pluses for religion when they make religious art, regardless of the beliefs they promote, but not when their sects want to institute their beliefs in government and make those with other beliefs second-class citizens–presumably?

bianca steele,

“I’m noting that Bach and Bunyan are pluses for religion when they make religious art, regardless of the beliefs they promote, but not when their sects want to institute their beliefs in government and make those with other beliefs second-class citizens–presumably?”

I don’t know about this. As John Bunyan started writing when he was a religious-political prisoner after the Restoration, I would think if he never got arrested and gaoled for 12 years for fighting in the Parliamentary army and espousing non-conformist religious beliefs then he might never have had the time or inclination to start writing The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Lee A. Arnold @ 188

This is shocking bad faith. At any moment, there are certain to be people, recently bereaved, in a house of worship, somewhere, who in your view might have been offended by Plume’s comment, which in fact was not directed to them. The import of your objection is thus that no one can ever utter such comments to anyone, anywhere, at any time, without going beyond the pale. If that’s what you mean, then say so clearly, and stop hiding behind the victims.

Some small comments:

LA: “religion really is (and always was) a functional, metaphorical expression of what is essentially a wordless process”

js: “OK. So… I literally don’t know what to make of that.”

Funny.

Since William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience” I’ve most often seen religious experience described as religious experience and religion described as religion. They are two quite different things, even though they are related (religious experiences can be important formative elements in making religions, religions influence the kinds of religious experiences that people have).

Peter T: “Note than the mass protest movements in Europe today march under national (SNP, Syriza) or ethnic (Golden Dawn, FN) banners, with tinges of religion and utopianism. Genteel liberalism is not, apparently, enough to motivate people to pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honors.”

The U.S. managed a sort of mass protest movement recently, Occupy, which wasn’t religious at all and which drew on the anarchist tradition.

geo: “Let’s call the egalitarian, solidaristic, theologically primitive beliefs and practices of the Jesus movement in the first two centuries CE “christianity,” and the authoritarian, hierarchical, theologically sophisticated organization that came into being as a result of Constantine’s patronage “Christianity.””

Christian revival movements have been making this distinction for centuries, and it’s probably a historical fiction. Or rather, it’s very like communism/Communism: people contrast the actual state of an existing social system to an imaginary ideal state that never existed.

Terrible post, terrible thread. Just my two cents.

Layman #244: “At any moment, there are certain to be people, recently bereaved, in a house of worship, somewhere, who in your view might have been offended by Plume’s comment, which in fact was not directed to them. The import of your objection is thus that no one can ever utter such comments to anyone, anywhere, at any time, without going beyond the pale. If that’s what you mean, then say so clearly, and stop hiding behind the victims.”

Well yes I think that’s pretty obviously the first premise: that no one should offend people who were bereaved the day before, and I imagine that most people would think that such conduct is beyond the pale.

But there’s another premise, and it does not hide behind the victims: I also think that what was said intellectually about Christianity (“17 centuries of Christianity haven’t led to a better world in the slightest”) is patently untrue.

And you also write, “…which in fact was not directed to them.”

But no, that comment logically implies EVERY Christian. All are logically included, both by the collective phrase, “17 centuries of Christianity”, and by the absolute qualifier, “in the slightest”.

In addition, a bereaved could not fail to notice the next two sentences, so she might find it hard to suppose that it was NOT directed at her.

However, I do not believe that it was the writer’s intention to be so inept.

@245 I don’t think Wood’s review is a very good summary of Allen’s book. She does begin by describing the Declaration as an ordinary memo. She moves on to treating it as a “philosophical argument”, in which all the language (and even the punctuation) contributes important information and claims. As a result, she spends three or four chapters (I don’t have the volume in front of me) analyzing the references to God, etc.
I follow her lead in treating the Declaration in the same spirit.

If you read the book, you might be surprised to find that Allen and I agree that it’s not so easy–although it is certainly possible–to endorse the Declaration’s conclusions about equality in the absence of the theological claims. Maybe we’re both wrong about that. But I assure you that there’s no bad faith here.

As a side point, I think my self-description as quasi or vaguely Straussian is a pretty fair description of what I’ve said about Strauss elsewhere. Although I have defended Strauss from critics, I’ve also pointed out some of the many ways I think he’s wrong, both as an interpreter of texts and as an analyst of politics. That might be the subject for a future thread, should CT be kind enough to invite me back.

Your “cold water” reading of the Declaration as a political compromise without stable meaning is much closer to the one Pauline Maier offers in the excellent “American Scripture” than it is to Allen’s view. I didn’t engage it here because I think it’s often more interesting to explore disagreements with an author that emerge on the basis of shared premises.

John Quiggin @237. I’m quite sure that we aren’t going to agree about this. But two points for at least clarifying our disagreement:

1) I really didn’t think you had the Balkans or Russia in mind when you brought up the “consolidation of democracy in developed countries”. They’re only dubiously developed, and there’s been no consolidation. In any case, they weren’t included in my proposed case of postwar Western Europe. So we’re talking past each other.

Which leads to a second and more general observation…

2) To argue, as I do, that religion has an important role in promoting “liberalish” democracy is not to say that it’s a necessary or even sufficient condition. Among other things, you need to have the *right* kind of religion (and a lot of other factors contribute to its success or failure).

One tendency I’ve noticed throughout the comments is that when I suggest that a view of God as guaranteeing human equality and encouraging republican government (which I find in the Declaration) may be politically salutary, commenters respond that there are many forms of religion that offer very different teachings.

This is true (and well known to the contributors to the Declaration–see Adams’ Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law). It is also irrelevant. If I argue that a German shepherd is a good watchdog, the observation that chihuahas, pugs, and shihtzus are not doesn’t refute me.

It’s possible that I’ve been less direct than I want. But I don’t think a reasonably charitable reading of the original post leads to the conclusion that I’m praising, recommending, or otherwise endorsing “religion” as a generic category–or even Christianity. As I and several commenters have pointed out, the Declaration appeals to a synthesis of natural theology and Calvinism. More recently, Catholic thinkers have developed natural law arguments for similar conclusions. But I’m just not talking about the political theology of Eusebius or modern Russian orthodox “Eurasianism”.

To return to the beginning, I start the post by asking “Can you agree with the Declaration of Independence if you don’t believe in God?” And I conclude that you can, although I’m less optimistic than most commenters about building political institutions and movements on that basis.

But I could also have asked “Can you believe in God without agreeing with the Declaration of Independence?” The answer to this question is also clearly yes. But I contend that belief in a certain kind of God has nevertheless promoted democracy, especially in America but also in countries that share a similar theologico-political heritage (mostly Western Europe).

I don’t expect this to convince anyone who takes a Christopher Hitchens position on religion as such, or perhaps thinks that we no longer need such crutches, however useful they may have been in the past. But I suspect that this is a fundamental difference of disposition–not the kind of thing that can be settled either by philosophical or historical argument.

@252 Your “cold water” reading of the Declaration as a political compromise without stable meaning
No. The part that matters is the Declaration of Independence and its assertion of the right of all people to egalitarian self-government, and its meaning is entirely stable. The political compromise is the Declaration of Appeal to the Supreme Judge of the World, which I think is why we don’t call it that; it’s just not important.

“Well yes I think that’s pretty obviously the first premise: that no one should offend people who were bereaved the day before, and I imagine that most people would think that such conduct is beyond the pale.”

More bad faith. You understand quite well what’s wrong with your premise. And believe me, that’s the charitable alternative.

Layman @257,

Well said.

A part of that is the assumption that all soldiers and their families are in lockstep agreement with government policies in the first place. This extends to the assumption that all Christians support the doings of their particular organized religion. They obviously don’t. In fact, some of the greatest critics of church history were and are practicing Christians. Some of the very loudest critical voices are Christians who seek to better their own organized religion, and understand the importance of acknowledging past wrongs. To silence criticism about those wrongs would be “beyond the pale” for them.

Recent examples would be the fight to expose priestly child abuse, and sadistic practices in various church-run “homes for wayward girls,” etc. etc. Lee, apparently, would prevent exposes like The Magdelene Sisters and Philomena from ever coming to light, because somewhere a Christian is grieving.

if you went to the gravesite to protest while the burial was going on, then I think you should apologize to the family.

Did Plume do that? Wow, what an arsehole.

Engels @260,

;>)

If someone can’t understand the profound (and profoundly obvious) difference between a generalized comment on a bulletin board, directed at no one in particular, and a face to face confrontation at a gravesite . . . there is no hope for them. They simply don’t possess even the most basic ability to differentiate between massively different phenomena.

Layman @263,

Again, well said. But to take it a bit further: Wouldn’t the nature of the protest also matter? Beyond the location, what is the protest all about?

If one is protesting the abuses and atrocities, past and present, inflicted on various people by an organized religion (or government, or corporation, etc.), wouldn’t this be in an entirely different category from, say, a “protest” in the mode of Westboro Baptist?

“Then it would depend on the nature of your protest, much as I replied in #206. If you said war is bad, all will agree. If you said the country he fought for never did anything good, hasn’t led to a better world in the slightest, then you should apologize.”

Isn’t this simply another way to say that the graveyard funeral (and the Charleston church-goers) are immaterial to your original objection? That you objected to Plume’s sentiment itself, not that sentiment juxtaposed with Charleston? And that framing your objection as you did, as an insult and harm to those Chareston victims and mourners, was simply an effort, conscious or not, to use them yourselves in raising the righteous volume of your objection?

I’m done, I think.

PS to 261: So we agree that “communism” has never existed.

I meant “never existed except as an ideal, of course. I know Rich isn’t as literal-minded as all that, but someone somewhere may be.

@engels:
Terrible post, terrible thread. Just my two cents.

I disagree. The post was provocative and arguable, which at least some blog posts should be, and Samuel Goldman should be commended for participating in the comment thread (which is not to say I agree with him). Too often in past CT book forums, the contributors have filed their pieces and then sat back in silence, not deigning to converse with the, often rather few, commenters. If I recall correctly, that was pretty much the case in the forum on Knight & Johnson, The Priority of Democracy — I esp. remember that one because we were given some advance notice and that was the one case where I actually bothered to read the book beforehand (well, 85 percent of it or so). Anyway it’s nice that Goldman has participated in the thread (and in a very civil way), quite apart from whether one likes what he has to say.

Okay, I take it back. I agree it was good of Prof. Goldman to respond to people (however implausible his position may be).

ZM @242

I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.

“Basis” means the foundation, or underlying structural principles, etc. “Systems” refers to whole systems, not to only particular institutions WITHIN them.

But I dealt with this point last time around: I wasn’t reading you literally because a literal reading trivializes your argument. There probably hasn’t been any actually existing economic “system” that was, as a whole, successfully ideologically theorized post-facto. The idea that any economic system as a whole is based on an ideology, strictly speaking, is bizarre. So, given your definitions of “basis”, “system” and “ideology”, it’ll turn out that there are no ideologies at all! At least not not any that can be practically consequent in any way. On this view, you do get the result that religion is not an ideology, trivially, but the argument seems to me like a reductio.

On to the more important point. For the sake of this argument, I’ll just grant that “religion” is the name for a metaphorical articulation of a certain kind of contact with the ineffable (that’s my gloss on @60; feel free to correct it). Fine. But there’s still this other thing, let’s call it schmeligion, which is a name for a generic specification of a (kind of) set of social institutions. In fact, there are multiple schmeligions, each consisting of a set of social institutions with a specific history, etc. The important point about schmeligions, though, is that they are in fact the source of proposals for organizing social, political, and economic life. And through most of human history, they have been quite successful at this—i.e. schmeligion-derived proposals for social, political, and economic arrangements have in fact been adopted and have been very much practically consequent. So it seems to me that schmeligions are in fact ideologies in (more or less) the sense you propose. And of course, most people would recognize Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, etc., as instances of schmeligions.

(I was going to say something about why this matters, but I’m getting tired of typing. Maybe later.)

ZM@239: What to do?

I’m stumped.

Samuel Goldman @252 . “But I contend that belief in a certain kind of God has nevertheless promoted democracy, especially in America but also in countries that share a similar theologico-political heritage (mostly Western Europe).”

Some scholars, like Jean-Paul Vernant, believe that democracy arose in Athens through the military, which in Athens elected its officers by popular vote and which was remarkably successful in defeating its enemies. Athenian democracy remained quite connected to the military, since military service was a prerequisite for citizenship, which excluded woman and slaves. However, one did not have to be especially wealthy to serve — many citizens were humble craftsmen or shop-keepers, like Socrates, a sculptor. I don’t see how God had much to do with it, frankly, if that was the case.

Also, after the Peloponnesian war there was a tremendous and glorious memory of all the amazing things Athenian democracy had accomplished — militarily and artistically, but as a form of government it was anathema in the very European countries that had a similar cultural heritage to that of America, unless you are speaking of republican government, such as had existed for many many centuries in Venice and was thought to have been instituted by Nature.

floopmeister

Religion is not the only ideology capable of motivating people or justifying a socio-economic order. Harold illustrates the point – the religion of Athens was Athens (the polis of Athena), with civic festivals, personification of the city’s traits and so on. From outside, a large part of the US discourse seems to be between those whose primary religion is some form of Christianity (seen as justifying America) and those whose religion is some vision of the United States, for whom the truths of the Declaration and the Constitution are sacred. My point is simply that any complex socio-economic order is not self-justifying.

Js. #276: ” I wasn’t reading you literally because a literal reading trivializes your argument.”

What argument were you talking about, there? By all means, let’s be scientific as possible and hold each other to the literal meanings of words, and please hold me to them, and punch me hard!

Js.: “The important point about schmeligions, though, is that they are in fact the source of proposals for organizing social, political, and economic life.”

Before, you wrote, “…some religion or other has served as the basis of pretty much all political-economic systems…” (#234), but you are saying now, that was not literal. So this new quote similarly means, “The important point about schmeligions, though, is that they are…the source of [SOME] proposals for organizing social, political, and economic life.”

Is that right? Certainly I agree.

And if you get the chance, please write about why this matters. Because actually, you sensed it: I’m not convinced that “ideology” is a useful concept.

Geo #179: “Let’s call the egalitarian, solidaristic, theologically primitive beliefs and practices of the Jesus movement in the first two centuries CE ‘christianity,’ and the authoritarian, hierarchical, theologically sophisticated organization that came into being as a result of Constantine’s patronage ‘Christianity.’ ”

I’m afraid that will not work, and that we must go with what people call themselves.

First, many people, perhaps almost everyone in the world, would naturally call “belief in Jesus Christ” a religion, and call it Christianity, without needing to mean the organized religion. What is the intellectual basis upon which we, here, reserve the right to disregard this usage, and to take the word “religion” to mean organized religion, and the word “Christianity” to mean organized Christianity?

Indeed, second, we have had a strong tradition on the Left of calling people by that which THEY prefer to be called, and respecting their own preferences insofar as self-naming goes, and not denigrating that appellation: “Black, transgender, gay, white, etc.”

Well, people who believe in Christ call THEMSELVES Christian, capitalized, and call their beliefs Christianity, whether they belong to an organization or not. Don’t they certainly deserve the same consideration?

We already have other people in comments above whose writing would imply that we do not NEED to respect believers on this matter.

@287

Indeed when the thesis gets that weak it’s almost unarguably true and therefore almost totally trivial. In medieval-t0-modern Europe, did Christianity play anywhere near the role of that played by moneylending rules (constructed contrary to Scripture) permitting people of low birth to exercise political power over the nobility and monarch?

Lee,

Yes. Words matter. They matter a lot. Which is why saying “Christianity hasn’t made the world a better place” isn’t even remotely the same thing as saying individual Christians haven’t done this.

There is absolutely no reason for an individual Christian to take offense at my comment. It’s not about them. It’s about Christianity, as a whole, the institution, the organized religion. And, again, in order for any entity to claim it is responsible for making the world a better place — an impossibly tall order — it must show that, on balance, net, with all things factored in, it has done so. That means the good it has done has to be weighed against the bad.

It’s simply beyond dispute that “Christianity” can’t say, on balance, as a net change, that it has made the world a better place. No large institution can, and Christianity more than most, given its history — and present.

@285 Lee A. Arnold

The Crisis of the European Mind made a deeper impression on me than almost any other book, as far as guiding the direction of my subsequent reading. I am so glad when I hear anybody referring to it. Now if only more people were made aware of Sarpi, a priest whose enemies (and some of his friends, such as David Wootton, himself an atheist, accuse/ed of atheism.

As far as literacy in antiquity, it is my impression that it was greater then than in the Middle Ages, insofar as private people knowing how to read and owning books — but I may be wrong. But ability to read and write aside, the Middle Ages was a literate society in the sense that people were exposed to the written word through having it preached and read to them, poems, stories, and epics were recited at fairs — and this was true not only in Europe but in China, India, and the Near East and had probably been true in antiquity as well, through the popular medium of the theater.

“Christianity” doesn’t do anything on its own. Trying to formulate a coherent thesis about what “Christianity has done” is like trying to nail a puddle of water to a post.

Geo # 289,
I am not a believer, I just think that people who insist there is no deity have little understanding of the rational method.

And why is it tragic? Suppose someone asks, “How can I take capitalism seriously after inequality and environmental destruction?”

The answers are: I am a Christian who doesn’t make Inquisitions. I am a communist who doesn’t make gulags. I am a capitalist who doesn’t make inequality and environmental destruction.

Each proponent claims that the real causes of the bads are: avarice, vanity, power, hatred, sloth, ignorance.

Perhaps it is so, for all of them.

Never said or implied that “it” does anything on its own. I’m speaking of the totality of acts in its name, under the aegis of institutional Christianity, the effect of its tenets, doctrines, orthodoxies, dogmas and so on. Its imperialist history from at least Constantine on.

The flipside of the point I was making in response to the OP is that this maneuver won’t work either. I mean, yes, obviously under the aegis of institutional Christianity terrible crimes were committed. At the same time, they were being committed before institutional Christianity was a thing, often just because those committing them had the power to do so. “The strong exact what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” wasn’t a Christian thesis. Genghis Khan managed to murder a higher percentage of the population of the Earth than anyone before or since, and it wasn’t because he was such a religious dude. The An Lushan rebellion, pretty much an entirely secular conflict, resulted in the deaths of millions, far beyond any atrocities committed by contemporary Christendom.

People want to assign to religion, and indeed, ideologies generally, much more responsibility for various events than can be reasonably read out from the data. Depending on where you sit in the ideological space, you’ll be assigning merits to Christianity and capitalism and demerits to communism and atheism, or vice versa. As I said before, it’s not good intellectual history; it’s point-scoring so that you can associate something you don’t like with some other thing that everyone recognizes is bad. That’s why the dishonest equation of “progressive taxation = communism = gulag” is deployed by morons all the time. Don’t be equally dishonest by employing their methods.

Jerry @298,

I think you’re missing the context for this. At least for me. It looks like you’re discussing something else entirely.

Mine is in response to Lee’s relentless crusade that I apparently owe an apology to those who are mourning the racist massacre in Charleston . . . because of my statement that “Christianity has not made the world a better place.” He says this is just like going to the gravesite and personally bashing the mourners directly. Rich Puchalsky took things to an even higher level of rank absurdity by saying my comment was just as bad as the Westboro Baptist bigots when they “protest” at various funerals.

I owe no apology to anyone. But Lee and Rich certainly owe one to me.

Jerry, we disagree. I think there is more than enough evidence to support what I said, and the reasoning behind it. You don’t. I can live with that.

Jerry @301,

an additional comment, based upon what Lee has just now posted at 303:

I can see the reasoning behind saying “Christianity” is something too vague, amorphous and inconclusive a thing to even be thought of as a thing. I don’t agree with this, at least not in the way I intended the comment, but I can see that.

If that is the case, however, it makes even less sense to take offense at the comment. One can find the comment objectionable, as you do, because of its vagueness. The puddle against the wall thing, etc. But assigning merits or demerits works both ways. If the comment is essentially meaningless, as you suggest, if it’s not really about anything . . . . how can that be offensive to anyone? It is then even further removed from any direct confrontation with anyone else . . . even moreso than I intended. How can someone take offense at a comment about something that doesn’t even exist?

Geo @305,

I think it’s pretty safe to say that any great idea can be destroyed when it’s institutionalized — when it goes from lower case to caps — especially when it has the backing of an imperialist power. Then the motives all shift. The rationales all change. The intentions all morph into something else entirely. Growth of the institution itself. Centralization of power for the sake of more power. Which really means power at the top, for the sake of the top.

Jesus lived his life as a small “c” communist, from what we know of that life. I don’t think he would recognize what the Christian church or faith became after he died, and he would certainly be revolted by everything about the American Christian Right. He wouldn’t be too thrilled with American liberalism, either, IMO.

To be a “Christian” once meant to walk the walk, to be like “Christ.” And Jesus said don’t even think you can follow me and still hold onto your riches. Give all of that to the poor, and then we can talk. Just the ostentatious display of wealth in our churches alone would drive him to drink in excess . . . .

But my artist side is happy that we have the Chartres and Rouens of this world.

“If deity were defined as a flying horse, then it would be irrational to believe there is a deity. ”

But if I say to you that flying horses are beings defined as beyond rationality, will you say that people who insist there are no flying horses don’t understand the rational method?

Is there some particular point I’m missing, where positing the unknowable so as to assert that the unknowable can’t therefore be denied, is somehow worth the effort?

Layman @308,

I think Lee’s premise rests on far too many assumptions. He assumes he knows what offends everyone else, in particular, people likely far removed from his own experience. He assumes he knows what is unknowable — an obvious contradiction. He assumes he holds the key to all of this and is therefore entitled to speak on everyone’s behalf and play the high priest. He assumes he gets to demand apologies on behalf of people he knows nothing about.

Personally, I’m pretty tired of his assumptions, and I wish he’d look in the mirror for a moment or two.

Jerry @311,

I think I do understand what you’re saying, and we’re on the same page. Yes, there are incredible numbers of contingencies along the way . . . . in programming language, all kinds of “if this, then that.” No question. The links in the countless chains, the concatenation of events, the multitude of variables along the way. Certainly. The unrelated, parallel realities. The accidents and the accidental mergings. All of that is true. Which is why, ultimately, what I said isn’t offensive in the slightest. It’s too generalized a comment to bother anyone who does believe as you do, that there is no such thing as “Christianity” to pin to the wall, and that one can’t hand out blame and merit to any degree that matters or makes sense.

If an individual believes this, and they read someone making the completely harmless observation that “Christianity hasn’t made the world a better place” — harmless because it’s not about anything, anyone, and can’t be, according to your view — if they read such a comment on the Internet the worst thing they might think is . . . . as you no doubt did . . . . that’s a rather empty, meaningless statement and then they’d go on their way. If they take offense, they can only do so if they actually believe it was directed at them, or at least an actual substance, an actual thing, which you said “Christianity” isn’t.

At worst, most will say, this is all a silly waste of time. I’m going to dinner. In short, Lee is making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill. Actually, less than a molehill and more than a mountain.

Geo @313,

For our purposes, though, the relevant difference is that, unlike communism and christianity, capitalism has not been massively, successfully, and unfairly maligned in our society (or in any society really — Soviet and Chinese propaganda wasn’t successful, since hardly anyone believed it and ideological conformity had to be achieved through force).

Very true, and I’d go further. Not only has it not suffered endless criticism. It has long received a rather sickening level of unearned praise. Most Americans don’t see this. But our level of pro-capitalist propaganda is every bit as strong as the old Soviet Style Pravda machine was for its own system of choice. In general, it’s probably more sophisticated, and folded into everyday life in a far less obvious way. But it’s equally a matter of brainwashing and propaganda, and it’s every bit as divorced from lived reality.

Layman #308: “if…flying horses are beings defined as beyond rationality, will you say that people who insist there are no flying horses don’t understand the rational method?”

Aren’t there two different extrarational types? If flying horses are beyond rationality, then the question is, are they visible (like Pegasus), or not? If not, how do you know they are horses, or fly? But god is defined as formless and invisible, whether or not She shows up as a burning bush.

“..somehow worth the effort?”

Well this is where I think it gets interesting. I don’t know how much thermodynamic EFFORT it really costs you — and whether there is any “worth” to the effort, is not presently provable. But I think we need a typology.

To see this, it may be helpful to consider two different facts: 1. Every era of thought in history has limits, uncertainties, complementarities, including the present era. 2. Our present physical description of the world has different uncertainties at every hierarchical level of the description (I elaborated upon this second fact, using the suite of examples from Murray Gell-Mann in comment #123).

Why? Scientists tend to say, “Well, that’s just the way it is”, and that’s just fine, they’ve got lots to do: the universe is open-ended and new scientific laws will always be revealed. (Although we should note that Feynman thought that the basic laws were a finite set and would soon all be discovered, and the future after that would be new applications.)

But the next era of science may benefit, just “may”, by being able to recognize what KINDS of unknowability and paradox are regularly generated by the mind, particularly for use in quantum physics and neuroscience. A typology of unknowability and paradox may lead to new scientific discovery. It is worth noting that both Whitehead and Gödel thought that metaphysics would become an exact science.

My point is simply that any complex socio-economic order is not self-justifying.

Point taken, Peter T.

Lee @317,

So, if it can’t be determined, one way or another, that also means you have no way of proving I’m wrong. And at the very least:

1.) that means finding the statement offensive is beyond ridiculous.

2.) Thinking you have the god-like ability to know what is offensive to total strangers is a thousand-fold more ridiculous.

3.) Claiming that making such a statement on a bulletin board is akin to going to a gravesite and attacking mourners directly, in person, is yet another thousand fold of absurdity added to the total.

4.) saying, as Rich did, that it’s akin to what the hate-mongering bigots at Westboro Baptist do is still another level of lunacy.

5.) And, the fact that you are still banging on about this indicates a serious problem of monomania, and Lee, I think you really need to seek help with a professional. And now.

JimV #315,
What is your view of the existence of mathematics? Did numbers exist before humans, or did we invent them? If they existed before humans, where are they located? What about higher order mathematics? Did the Mandlebrot set exist to be discovered, or was it invented?

Js. #321,

I already AGREED with you at #284 that schmeligions “are…the source of [SOME] proposals for organizing social, political, and economic life.” But at #276 you wrote after that, that you were “going to say something about why this matters” — so I assumed this means BEYOND that fact. So what is it? I want to know!

js @325,

Good points.

And . . .

*Granting the fact that they can be used against the grain to fight that very structure of oppression. I’m not disputing this.

I’m with you in that they can be used against the grain, etc. But on balance, do they generally do enough of this to negate the bad stuff they do? I don’t think so. I don’t think there is any evidence to support that. So when someone touts the wonders of X ideology or schmeligion, without acknowledging the dark side, it’s important to counter this, in my view. If it’s not, it tends to help the fairy tale built up around said ideology or schmeligion, and that actually helps them oppress others far more easily.

And to me, one of the most vile ways of seeking protection from such criticism is to go all passive-aggressive and demand special status and special rights above the fray . . . . to demand that we silence our criticism because it may hurt someone’s feelings to hear the truth.

I reject that frame and that request, at least beyond the same civility would would accord anyone else.

One could add to “No gods, no masters,” . . . . “no special exemptions for religious beliefs.” They simply don’t deserve the pass others don’t receive. They simply don’t deserve any extra special considerations not granted to non-believers, book lovers, sports fans, political enthusiasts, etc. etc.

Lee: I do agree that “ideology” is very often used in misleading and unhelpful ways. But I do also think it can be a useful concept, at least within certain frameworks, and assuming that it’s not being used carelessly.

Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.

#296:

” I am a Christian who doesn’t make Inquisitions. I am a communist who doesn’t make gulags. I am a capitalist who doesn’t make inequality and environmental destruction.”

The difference in those 3 is that the 3rd version is implausible: capitalism does at least require *some* inequality, even if it doesn’t have to be as vast as it has been historically.

The capitalist would be better off accepting that, and then arguing the other 2 apologists were merely ignoring the practical details of any social order based on their rule.

To be consistent, or to make any sense at all, or to be “fair,” Lee would have to raise the same level of objection to the following:

Someone on a bulletin makes a critical comment about the NFL
Someone, somewhere, has just buried their father, son, husband, who played in the NFL

Someone on a bulletin makes a critical comment about higher education in America
Someone, somewhere, has just buried a family member who worked for an American university

etc. etc.

It would then be incumbent on the posters to scour the news, 24/7, the obituary section of every newspaper known, to make sure he or she never said anything negative about any organization, institution, group, etc. etc. if someone, somewhere, was in the process of mourning someone involved with those institutions or groups.

Logically, all critical conversation would grind to a halt. Now, some might argue that this would be a really good thing, and who knows? Others, not so much. But, it would be the logical outcome of such restrictions.

Re:”Did numbers exist before humans, or did we invent them? …”

(My answer on this is my own thought and worth what you paid for it, as always, but since you ask …)

In general, I think math is thinking, thinking is math. When I have three errands to do, such as, buy some ice cream, pick up some dry cleaning, and deposit a check at the bank, deciding what order to do them in is a math problem – a simple one which can be solved by going through all the permutations one at a time and keeping track of the best one so far. (I will get the ice cream last, and go to the bank first because it is closer than the dry cleaner and the dry cleaner is on the way to the super market.) Over time, after considering a lot of problems of a certain type, people develop tricks, or algorithms, to get good solutions quickly, and pass these tricks on to posterity.

One could say, if one wanted to for some reason, that there is a conceptual space (like a Hilbert space) of such tricks which we are exploring. Whether that counts as existence or not depends on how you define existence. This seems like an arbitrary and therefore not hugely important convention to me.

Numbers started as counts (integers) which were empirically based. A herder has eleven goats today. Tomorrow he still has eleven goats. Then one has two kids. Now he has thirteen goats. Then he sells six of them and has seven left. Did counts exist before there were humans or other creatures to experience them (monkeys can count and add and subtract integers up to a total of about eight – which is about the same as the number of things I can visualize distinctly in my head)? I would say yes, this solar system had one sun and Mars had two moons before there were humans to count them. I can’t prove this by my direct experience, but I think so.

Then we have the rational numbers as ratios of integers and the irrational numbers and complex numbers and surreal numbers and so on. They were developed as part of those tricks I mentioned, to solve various problems. However (I think) anything much past the integers is more a useful convention than a metaphysical necessity. As one of the references I linked to points out, complex numbers are just one way of handling rotations, and for many (perhaps all) problems there is more than one trick and set of conventions which can be used to solve it – quaterions, for example. So a different civilization on a different planet will have a different set of tricks and conventions and may think some of our notions, such as irrational numbers, are silly. They could still be considered part of that vast, light-explored conceptual space I mentioned above (to which I attribute no mystical properties), if one wants to, however.

I mention irrational numbers as perhaps unnecessary, because every calculation done on every digital super-computer is done using integers (binary bits), and could in principle be done on an abacus given enough time and a way to record intermediate results. (How about analogue computers, you ask: see quantum mechanics – Zeno was right.) Also, a rational number is just a convention for expressing two integers relative to each other. So integers (counts) are the real-est part of “real” numbers. The rest are our particular conventions, or mathematical language. One might as well ask if the English language existed before before anyone used it. As part of a conceptual space of all possible sounds and meanings which could be assigned to them, yes; but as something that physically existed, no; and as something that was bound to exist (in its specific current form) soon after humans evolved, no.

Anarcissie @ 335

I certainly grasp that one can define deity in such a way as to place it beyond the realm of rational inquiry; but it seems to me that a deity defined in that way – undetectable, as it were – can quite reasonably be said not to exist. This is intrinsic to the meaning of words like ‘detectable’ and ‘exist’ , as what can it possibly mean to say that we know of an undetectable existing thing? This is the reason for my earlier questions: what is the point of the exercise, and why give it any credence?

JimV #336,
I’m not sure I understand you. If numbers and math did not exist before humans evolved, then what is the relationship of current mathematical language the early universe, i.e. before the Earth was formed? How is it that mathematical cosmological theories give us some insight into the formation of the universe? Claiming that math is a “convention” or a “conceptual space” into which human thought is moving, rather just dodges the question by fudging an answer, doesn’t it? What would it be a “convention” of?

Anarcissie @335: we have no idea of what the number of possible states of godfulness the universe(s) can be in

Do you mean “godfulness” or “Godfulness”? For that matter, do you mean “universe” or “Universe”? And remember, there’s “being” and “Being.”

“Well if that is the question, then I gave my own answer in #316: it may be very useful to future science to formulate a precise typology of arationalities, paradoxes, and uncertainties.”

Indeed you did, but I confess I found the answer unconvincing.

Layman #344: “I found the answer unconvincing.”

Since just above it I wrote, “…whether there is any “worth” to the effort, is not presently provable,” I saw you coming.

But then, in #266 you appeared to be unable to allow that a reader could find objectionable, all at the same time: 1. a feckless falsehood, 2. an offensive statement whether it is made deliberately or fecklessly, 3. an offensive statement that uses the falsehood, and 4. a falsehood that insults the thing that the offended will be turning to for emotional support.

Quick follow up:

Your description of everyone owning their own means of production isn’t capitalism, at all, as mentioned. It’s pre-capitalist C-M-C and use-value. It also leaves out the fact that capitalism itself destroyed C-M-C, wiped out self-provisioning and the masses’ ability to self-provision in order to force people into the factories. It violently kicked millions and millions of people off the lands that enabled their self-provisioning, starting in Britain, and forced governments to also block other means, like hunting and fishing. Michael Perelman details this history in his seminal The Invention of Capitalism.

This violent overthrow of C-M-C was even worse in the so-called “third world,” where huge populations were enslaved outright, after their resources were pillaged, or enslaved via pennies on the dollar wages under deadly conditions. The massive gap in what an executive at Apple makes, versus the workers who build Ipads and so on, was the norm for capitalism from day one. While the gap itself has increased over time, in relative terms it’s always been built in and monstrous. It’s baked into the mechanics of the capitalist system. To escape it, we have to escape capitalism itself.

Plume 06.23.15 at 3:06 pm @ 337 —
Belief is necessary, because our little monkey brains can take in only a very small part of what is going on around us, even though expanded through social practices like science. The rest we have to make up, and hope for the best. Ignorance is necessarly one of the cardinal facts of human life.

Layman 06.23.15 at 3:18 pm @ 338 —
But some people have religious experiences.

“But some people have religious experiences.”

Some people have something they call ‘religious experiences’, which seem to be oddly consistent with their cultural norms about religion. If deity is unknowable, our cultural norms are surely wrong, and in fact no one should have such experiences, as they are inconsistent with the idea that deity is unknowable.

JimV #353: “Counts (integers) existed…”

No, sorry, I did not see that. I think our world-views are compatible. But that’s actually what I wanted to know. Because it sounds to me like you think that numbers are metaphysical (which is not to say magical). Is that right?

“By ‘unknowable’ you may mean ‘imperceptible’ but clearly persons who have religious experiences perceive something.”

If I perceive voices emanating from my refrigerator, we don’t usually think that means I’m experiencing evidence of actual speakers residing in my refrigerator. For some reason, if my perception has a religious framing, we tend to take it more seriously as evidence of some other entity; but I’m not sure why we do that.

More broadly, though, you can argue that God falls outside of the scientific method, but if religious experiences are actually experiences of God, then God is in some manner detectable by experience, which means He/She is susceptible to the scientific method. It’s a paradox; you can’t reasonably argue both sides. Either undetectable or detectable, pick one.

Finally, if you settle on undetectable, our own cultural religious heritage is almost certainly wrong – how could it be right if we can’t know anything of God? If you still insist on religious experiences as genuine, isn’t it odd to find that they always conform to the expectations of the claimant with respect to their own cultural religious heritage? If that heritage is surely wrong, then it must be informing the experience rather than being confirmed by it, which is to say that the experience is something but not a genuine encounter with the ineffable.

“Science is (currently) limited to phenomena which can be repeatedly observed, measured, described in language, and usually replicated by others, which necessarily leaves out a huge amount of significant experience.”

Yes, of course, but I’m not responding to the claim that deity can’t (currently) be studied, I’m responding to the claim that it can’t (ever) be studied – that it is outside the bounds of rational method, by definition. If so, then deity is irrelevant – if it can’t be detected, as a practical matter it doesn’t exist.

The claim of religious experience is incompatible with the claim that the deity is beyond the bounds of rational method. Religious experience, if genuine, represents data about deity. If deity manifests – presents data – then it can’t be wholly unknowable. Similarly, communities of worship, and established doctrine, are incompatible with the claim of a deity beyond the rational method. How could we know the doctrine is correct? How could we agree on any precepts?

As to the experiences themselves, I think they’re suspect. They are not different in nature than other phenomena, which we have no qualms about deciding are hallucination or self-deception. And they do seem to invariably reflect and reinforce the religious traditions of the person claiming the experience.

Layman 06.23.15 at 11:22 pm @ 358 —
I didn’t say god(s) could never be studied rationally, indeed, scientifically, although she, he, it, or they have been so coy up until now, I would be surprised at any marked change of habit. But never say never!

I admit, though, that I agree with Hölderlin: God’s great gift to us is his (etc.) absence.
What will we do if it is withdrawn?

On the other hand, if people have religious experiences, they have to deal with them. Belief in a framework which says you’re crazy might be less satisfying and less effective than belief in whatever you’re experiencing.

Ben Franklin struck “divine rights” and replaced it with “unalienable rights,” precisely to avoid the impression that God is required to make the Declaration effective.

This is one case where the intent of the founders is clear from Franklin’s writings and other commentary at the time.

Franklin also noted in other places the distinction between natural law, which he said could be determined by study of nature (much as he had discovered lightning was not a tool of gods), and law delivered from the pulpit. Justice Scalia has worked hard to poach on Franklin’s distinctions, and wipe out Franklin’s claims. I think we do better to stick with Franklin’s definitions and other contemporary definitions from that time, in trying to parse whether God is necessary for government. Madison and Washington noted that our Constitution works only for a virtuous people; not enough cops possible to track everyone’s speeding, so we depend on voluntary compliance. Franklin labored to make it clear that virtue arises from many places other than a belief in gods. For that matter, so did Jefferson: In his Autobiography Jefferson recounted the 1786 passage of the law he proposed in 1779 to secure religious freedom in Virginia, the Statute for Religious Freedom:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and the Infidel of every denomination.

Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Modern Library 1993 edition, pp. 45 and 46.

“The claim of religious experience is incompatible with the claim that the deity is beyond the bounds of rational method. Religious experience, if genuine, represents data about deity.”

It would depend what you mean by the rational method.

I am reading the very well regarded Melbourne ethnographic historian Greg Dening’s book Church Alive! Pilgrimages in Faith 1956-2006. Greg Dening was a Jesuit before he was a historian, studied ethnography at Harvard, and he left the Jesuits later as he disagreed with the stance on contraception. In this book he says it worries him that the 50 years of the book “belong to the troughs and peaks of my life and spirituality. I have no desire to take anybody where I have been or to tell anybody where to go… Let my own faith be on my own head.”

The Prologue begins with the early church :

“They come down from the mountain in a daze. They realise the Lord has gone from them in a physical sense, that his appearances — ophte is the word they use, a word their Scriptures use exclusively for the ways Yahweh ‘made himself seen’ to Abraham and Moses — are as much a way of understanding as a way of seeing.”

“First, the women ‘saw’ him — ‘saw’ as in a piercing, understanding look — and bore witness to his rising.”

There are similar accounts from other cultures, such as women who sit down by a maid and perceive Ceres’ presence in her.

In terms of the discussion of the institutionalisation of Christianity in the Church, Dening presents Vatican II as a move back to the ways of the early Church:

“Perhaps the most powerful example of the prophetic imagination at work within the Church was the call of the Council Fathers to return to the freedom that Paul calls all who are baptised to; namely, that they exercise their gifts in the service of the Lord. In the inevitable institutionalisation of the Church in the early centuries, that notion of gift and charism became ordered — literally — in the sacrament of order. St Augustine explained order as ‘the appropriate disposition of things equal and unequal by giving each its proper place.’ Thomas Aquinas, a little more bluntly, called it ranking. So priest, deacon and-deacon are ranked.
…
The ‘imposition of hands’, a joyous, Pentecostal sacrament of the early Church, became ordination, an ordering, with its fatal tendency to built ontological walls around what was ordered.
…
There was probably no bigger boost to the prophetic imagination in the parish than when the reforms of Vatican II on the ministry began to be implemented in the 1970s. Perhaps there is no more consistent theme in the word pictures of the parishioners than their sense of awe at being entrusted to make a gift of their services…. it was a very rewarding moment when the Church recognised them as ‘acolytes’.
…
This is the Spirit levelling the Church’s sacramentality. This is ministry in the Church… This is prophecy, a vision of the future.”

People should in fact not believe things which are not true, and there’s nothing wrong with arguing the facts with them; but in the end, if they insist on their fantasy, I don’t see any palatable alternative to letting them keep their illusions, do long as they don’t use them to harm others. And even then, the prohibition can as a practical matter only be on the acts of harm, not the thoughts.

Layman,

It was not so much an objection but a clarification of what is to be counted as rational. If someone perceives the presence of Ceres in a maid is it rational to give this the status of fact, or the status of some other type of knowledge, or to discount it as knowledge all together?

Does rationality only refer to measurable knowledge, or other knowledge?

The question about numbers comes in here, as numbers themselves cannot be measured, but are only used in the measurement of things.

I do not think it is so odd that people’s religious experiences tend to be grounded in their own culture, as it us like speaking a language, you need to know what the sounds mean before you know they are words not just noise.

There is a similar saying in The Wisdom of Solomon, which was always my favourite saying in that book – For the elements were changed in themselves by a kind of harmony like as in a psaltery notes change the name of the tune but are always sounds;

You have to be able to recognise the tune, not just noise

“It was not so much an objection but a clarification of what is to be counted as rational. If someone perceives the presence of Ceres in a maid is it rational to give this the status of fact, or the status of some other type of knowledge, or to discount it as knowledge all together?”

I think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but that’s not my point. My point is, if Ceres is defined as a phenomena which can be perceived – whether in a maid or elsewhere – then Ceres cannot also be defined as being beyond the reach of the rational method. And, if there are gods, and they exist outside the bounds of the physical universe, then as a practical matter they don’t exist and can reasonably be denied with no harm done.

By their fruits shall ye know them. For millennia religion has attracted the best minds and has be responsible for great poetry and art, wisdom literature, as well as moral teachings. I am not sure that what purports to replace it has always been more free of error and superstition. I only say we disregard it at our peril.

As far as letting people have their religion being equivalent to saying “let them be climate change deniers.” No. If the current pope is any indication. Most religions affirm that reason is given to man by God, to be used for good.

In any case how are you going to force people to abandon their religious traditions? By force or punishment? That’s been tried. The rebound effect that way is certain.

Harold @ 372, I submit that judging religion by its fruits will produce a mixed report card, with some good and some bad. And, it has to be said, often the agency behind the use of force to change religious beliefs has been (you guessed it!) religion.

@Harold 06.24.15 at 6:04 pm

>For millennia religion has attracted the best minds and has be responsible for great poetry and art, wisdom literature, as well as moral teachings.

For millennia, there was no alternative. If you wanted to talk about what it meant to be human and what morality required, you had to do it within the framework of religion. Things that have been a fact for millennia are not necessarily good things.

I check back in and I discover that the CT commentariat has neither yet solved the Euthyphro dilemma nor come up with a definitive proof of the reality or unreality of numbers. Get it together, people!

I think there are two very different things going on, and they happen to intersect:

1. Intellectually, lots of people want certitude and finality, and they retain a naive feeling that science is untrustworthy, because it provides open-ended discovery instead.

2. Psychologically, there are lots of changes which are more easily categorized, and more easily initiated, by religious or spiritual concepts. Scientific terms such as relaxation, brain cascade, peak experience etc. don’t begin to cover it — in fact they are less descriptive — and science doesn’t provide programmatic concepts such as prayer, meditation, devotion, sacrifice, etc. which can work. This is common knowledge even to many psychotherapists.

@Lee A. Arnold 06.21.15 at 1:29 am

>>F.Foundling #213: “Ideologies are ways to make sense of the world and of life and death.”

>Then what is NOT an ideology?

My statement wasn’t necessarily a definition, it simply mentioned some characteristics of ideologies. This is separate from the question whether ideologies need to be defined as strictly *political* systems of ideas and whether religions are to be counted as ideologies (but I’d say no to the first and yes to the second, and I don’t think a sharp distinction between the two is warranted, since religions can be very political to varying extents – Islam, Judaism and Hinduism provide more or less extensive instructions for social, economic and political organisation, and traditional Christianity, while not containing such instructions originally, tried to play a somewhat similar role).

Scattered thoughts in response to Lee Arnold’s #373 (currently; the numbers here change, they may not be the metaphysical kind):

“Anyway at comment #315 you called my observation that there are uncertainties at different levels of scientific description, a “god-of-the-gaps “argument.” Very possibly wrongly on my part. It was based on a general impression that you were stacking uncertainties to reach a conclusion of incredulity, similar to the way creationists try to attack evolution. If that was not what you were doing, I apologize.

“I will argue that it is possible that there may be something else that exists metaphysically that is not space, time, or number.” Oh boy, sounds like I really need to understand “metaphysically” and I am still not sure I do. I take it to mean “something that is a basic, axiomatic, fundamental part of this universe such that this universe could not exist in its present form without it” but that might be too broad. Moving right along, any argument that starts with there might be something (which humans have yet to discover or figure out) can only get agreement. The devil will be in the details of what that something is speculated to be, and whether it is plausible that scientific exploration so far could have missed it.

Occam’s Razor – is related I think to a statistical principle: don’t overfit. If you have a lot of data points, don’t keep adding degrees of freedom to your fitting function until you match all the data points exactly, stop with the minimum number which preserves the general characteristics of the curve (and makes sense physically). This has an empirical foundation: when extrapolating, it turns out that in most cases you will be way off using the former fit compared to the latter fit (once you get the actual data). So in addition to the efficiency of simplicity argument, there’s that. Personally, when faced with two alternative explanations, I also like to use Mario’s Sharp Rock (named for my friend Mario – who doesn’t use it): among two competing hypotheses, yada, yada, yada, choose the most humble one. Example: hypothesis A – a god created this universe and fine-tuned it specifically to produce his desired creature, human beings; hypothesis B – the universe just happened (or has always been here – anyway the same sort of origin story as for the god under A), and humans were fine-tuned by evolution to occupy a very small ecological niche in it. MSR says choose B.

“We see the repeated appearance of limits to rational thought, appearance of uncertainties, paradoxes and complementarities, in every historical period and at many levels of current explanation. Some are solved, or else absorbed into larger unknowns, but others are not.

So I asked myself, why is this a persistent occurrence? …

… it could be that the process of evolution does not cover everything that there is, or even cover everything that is discoverable; that evolution is not the only method of the universe,; and moreover, it may have introduced a systematic distortion into our thoughts of the universe.”

Let’s call that hypothesis A for the persistence of limits and uncertainties. Here’s a hypothesis B: humans just aren’t that smart, but think they are (thanks to evolutionary drive to compete) (present company excluded). Once in a while a very smart human like Einstein occurs and pushes us a little further along, but as our technology gives us access to more and more fine details of the universe, we keep getting stumped. Mario’s Sharp Rock says B. I’m not sure what Occam’s Razor says.

But neither OR nor MSR are infallible, so you could be right. Or both could be right (with a little adjustment of A), if the other metaphysical thing you were postulating turns out to be something like “evolution by random trial driven by some selection criteria with screened results preserved by some sort of memory works in this universe” (but over long times, in fits and starts). My sense of “metaphysical” is that we use it in relation to our universe, but what’s metaphysical to us might not be true in a different universe. So there might be a universe in which creationists would be right, that evolution is somehow physically incapable of producing anything that is very complex (however, there likely will not be any creationists in it to crow). Whereas in this universe, it works – given stable environments for long enough times.

Anyway, I agree in this much: evolution has given us some unfortunate tendencies, as flipping TV channels for ten minutes will demonstrate (or reading most comment sections).

John Plamenatz wrote an interesting short book about ideology, showing the value and limitations of the concept.

I don’t mean that MSR asserts it, but counsels its avoidance.

@Jerry Vinokurov 06.24.15 at 11:08 pm

>I check back in and I discover that the CT commentariat has neither yet solved the Euthyphro dilemma nor come up with a definitive proof of the reality or unreality of numbers. Get it together, people!

On Euthyphro: the objective direction of causation (“the goodness of X is caused by God’s command for X” vs “God’s command for X is caused by the goodness of X”) is a separate issue from the matter of what people recognise as a practical criterion for establishing morality and godliness (“we can conclude that X is good from the fact God commands X” vs “we can conclude that God commands X from the fact that X is good”). As a practical criterion, the “God > good” direction is inevitably at least partly present wherever you have theism (when you have “evidence” of gods commanding X, this proves X is moral – even if moral intuition or reasoning unrelated to divine authority suggest otherwise, they are too imperfect to be relied on).

As for the direction of objective causation, philosophers and theologists can speculate and have speculated ad infinitum, but the behaviour of deities in traditional narratives makes it clear: the original and earliest view, and the one enshrined in the religious traditions, was that a deity is just your regular patriarch who can and will do pretty much anything, even for obviously trivial and selfish reasons, and must always be obeyed just because he is the boss and has the right to demand obedience (hence “God > good”). This is like the earliest and most primitive view of a child: “good” is whatever his parents command and reward and “bad” is whatever his parents forbid and punish, regardless of why they do it. But no matter which objective direction you assume, as long as the practical criterion remains “God > good”, in practice the authoritarian implications are mostly the same.

Re: “I don’t understand how OR and MSR are different.”

For me the difference is that I can judge (and explain to others) which of two hypotheses makes me feel humbler more easily than I can judge and/or explain which is simpler. Many people seem to find the “god did it” explanation to be the simplest possible explanation for anything, but I don’t.

Another example: A = humans are the smartest, most successful macroscopic creature on Earth because a god loves us and made us in its image; B = some creature had to come out on top (on Earth) and we won the lottery; the universe doesn’t care who did. Again, many seem to find A simple and compelling, and will say that Occam’s Razor favors A.

To paraphrase Feynman, “Don’t let your ego fool you; you are the easiest person for it to fool.” That is the empirical basis for Mario’s Sharp Rock.

JimV #392: “…makes me feel humbler…”

Well be careful there, because many if not most religious people would contend that belief in God is the most humbling for them, and some of them refuse to use belief in God as a justification for the subjugation of nature, and that science by contrast immediately engages a sort of vanity. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and there is no humility-meter to gauge these things.

Lee A. Arnold @ 393

‘The full mechanism of evolution is reproduction + selection. I wrote, in that same paragraph, that “in addition, evolution has led to energy inefficiencies inside certain organisms, because it makes them fitter in other ways”.’

It would be helpful if you would point to a few examples where you see that “Darwin’s survival of the fittest decribes the most efficiently-functioning animal, the fastest, best-structured for the task, and so on.” Which animals prosper because they are the most efficiently-functioning; and how do you measure this efficiency?

“The question was: Is there a logic in evolution that would program the logic of Occam’s razor?”

If you mean, ‘does something select for beings with a tendency to favor parsimony in their hypotheses’, how would you see this working? How would this tendency make it more likely that a particular primate would find a mate, breed, and protect offspring as they grow to sexual maturity? If anything, humans seem less parsimonious in their thinking than do other animals. Do elephants manufacture convoluted explanations for natural phenomena? I guess I don’t know, but it hardly seems likely from their behavior.

I would imagine that, at least subconsciously, it’s always been easier for people to “humble themselves before,” or “feel humble in the presence of” the kinds of gods and goddesses who, themselves, are less than humble — to put it gently.

It would be a mistake, for instance, to see the religious as somehow more virtuous than the non-religious, simply because they “humble themselves” before a god. In all too many cases, especially with the tyrannical, frequently genocidal god of the bible, that god crushes those who disobey or refuse to “humble themselves before him.”

In a sense, this “humbling” is either forced or a vicarious experience of the power and might of a supreme being. I have my doubts as to whether the religious would be as likely to humble themselves if their god didn’t demand this, or if their god was never given to genocidal fury. The instances of religious people who voluntarily submit to an absolutely peaceful and gentle deity, who never demands this of them . . . . well, I can’t think of any off hand.

In short, where does “fear” factor in? And how much of this is a kind of submerged joy at having a divine weapon at one’s disposal — believing this, etc. etc.?

The three monotheisms of the Levant rise out of origin myths created by one frequently defeated tribe. Much of the story is about revenge and divine vengeance — against their enemies and against the faltering chosen people themselves. Right wing Christianity especially continues this legacy . . . as it seems to have forgotten about the forgiving side of the story, the Sermon on the Mount and so on. The genocidal madman, Yahweh, seems a much larger presence in the psychology of right wing Christians than Jesus . . . . and Jesus is not without his revenge stories, either. The Second Coming is all about the mother of all genocides, so while we have dozens of stories about a gentle, forgiving, all-embracing Jesus, ultimately he, too, takes part of mass slaughter.

Can anyone really say their “humbleness” matters if they believe in such deities? At least enough for it to mean anything?

This is bad of me and I blame evolution for it, but I can’t resist another personal anecdote.

I come from a family of mostly religious fundamentalists who go to Bible colleges and marry like-minded people whom they have met there. When a nephew or niece graduates from high school, I have a tradition of sending them a popular science book. So when my oldest grand-nephew graduated I sent him Simon Singh’s “Big Bang” (a mostly historical account starting with human-eye astronomy, and only explaining a few things in detail, such as parallax), which I myself enjoyed. In his thank-you note he told me he was not going to read it, because “Science can’t be true because it always changes; religion must be true because it never changes.”

As always, I had taped an envelope containing some $100 bills inside the back cover, labeled “Bookmarks”. I wonder if he threw the book away without finding them.

Anyway, that summarizes the sort of religious humility you mentioned, for me – the ability to ignore thousands of reliable facts and the conclusions of the most brilliant and hard-working humans who have ever lived in favor of their own rationalizations. Not all religious people/religions do this, of course, but I think most of those who don’t will understand my point about humility.

JimV #400,

That’s not religious humility, that is epistemological fear. I described it as the first of the two problems in #380.

ZM #399,

In other words, do you mean that (originally) “Give us” was not a supplication, it was an invocation for the reception of a sacrament in a ritual? The only thing I was familiar with was Lutheranism, where the Lord’s Prayer was spoken at the end of every service, whether it was a communion service or not. Now I have to suppose, that the Lutherans supposed, that it was symbolical, of the symbolism!

Last comment by me as this is devolving into semantics at this point.

The animus that arises in me is due to what I consider bad-faith (pun accepted) arguments such as that believing in a personalized universe is humility, because I don’t see how one could be more arrogant on that particular issue. If instead one is saying that many religious people try to practice humility in other ways, and therefore Mario’s Sharp Rock will always cut for them, that is a non-sequitor. That they believe there are wiser, more powerful entities than themselves is a trait they share with most atheists, not something uniquely to their credit. My statistical intuition tells me there is intelligent life in the universe much smarter and better than ourselves, and that a god with the technological understanding to create universes would not see much difference between humans and ants. Most religious people I know would consider these opinions sacrilegious. Yes, to do this while claiming absolute humility creates some animus in me. I have no problem with those who don’t argue that way. Those who do need to explain to me why my position (on the examples I have previously used) is actually the less humble one, not just claim that humility is their middle name.

JimV 406,

I’ve never had a problem thinking that there is “intelligent life” out there that might make us look like ants in comparison. It really doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It also has always puzzled me when some people take offense at the idea that we have common ancestors with apes. It seems to personally offend some — especially the religious — that humankind isn’t something altogether special and vastly superior, and that we evolved over the course of billions of years, rather than being formed originally as we are today.

To some, the concept that there are vastly more intelligent beings out there, and that we aren’t the bee’s knees even here, freaks them out.

Personally, I couldn’t care less. And it seems to go hand in hand with another, more geopolitical problem. That all too many Americans can’t stand the idea of not being Number One. Again, I couldn’t care less if we top the list in this or that, other than the bad stuff. Incarceration rates, inequality, the ugly spread of Walmartization, etc. etc.

@ Lee

“evolution is the survival of the most efficient” is definitely a mistaken assumption about evolution (I know you weren’t positing it as gospel), but “survival of the fittest” is too — both of them are wrong in subtle ways, in that they carry unquestioned assumptions that are mistaken, subjective and completely human.

The best encapsulation of evolution is Douglas Adams’, that “Whatever survives, survives.”

Evolution is directionless; humans are not the “strongest,” the “best,” the “top” or “the most fit” — and life is not “a struggle over resources” (although I really like what you say @125 and quickly dismiss, I think it’s smart and carries a certain poetic profundity) — life is just what happens, and what has evolved when a certain amount of time is up is just what’s left — it doesn’t mean humans are superior to dinosaurs, for example.

Take Douglas Adams’ favorite animal and mine, the New Zealand kakapo — a flightless bird straight out of Monty Python, an asburdity that evolved in the absence of predation which tends to fall clumsily out of trees, shuns the contact of fellow kakapo, and breeds only rarely when a certain fruit flowers, by digging a bizarrely intricate acoustic nest and making a deep bassy call. It’s said that, when Cook first came to the islands, New Zealand had a heartbeat when the kakapo bred, because this deep throbbing came from all directions — which is why it’s such a terrible method of breeding, you can’t tell where the sound is coming from! Still, in their bizarre and cutely-futile way of life, kakapo thrived until humans came, with big wooden ships bearing rats, stoats, weasels, cats, etc., who must have seen them as some great cosmic buffet.

All this is to say there’s no reason to assume that a particular piece of human intelligence evolved because it’s somehow correct, or improved, or efficient, or it makes rational sense, or it metaphysically links up with the nature of the universe.

So, when you ask @ 401, “What is the simplest way of describing the way in which scientific explanation rewards humans? All scientific explanation. Beyond the joy of discovery and knowing, that is. It gives us “more knowledge”, but please characterize the way in which this knowledge is better than other knowledge. And how more of it, is better still. Something happens that is valuable to us.”

I would answer, science does not persist because it’s better, or more joyous (though it is for me), or produces “more knowledge,” or even “is rewarding” — it persists because it persists. (A tautology, but a useful one).

Earlier, you say “The full mechanism of evolution is reproduction + selection,” and I’d like to problematize that as well. A big portion of evolution is “genetic drift” — if a species of 2,000 individuals lives on four islands and three of those islands sink into the ocean, you have genetic drift — evolution isn’t just this rationalist picture of natural selection culling stochasticity, it’s also randomness acting on randomness.

Another useful Adams tautology: “Whatever happens, happens. Whatever happens again, happens again.”

There must be a thousand reasons why science is displacing religion, not all of them good. It’s not a faster car; it’s just something that does some things religion used to do for us, and, consequently, has taken up some of the space it used to occupy.

That’s one reason religion as we know it might be faltering, from an evolutionist perspective — over its 20 centuries or so, it expanded to fill up this space where it described the material world, and that literalness of Medieval monotheism, which stands in such contrast to primitivistic, animistic religion, became a major part of Christianity & etc’s DNA. That those genes mutated through the early physicists and astronomers, through Victorians like Darwin up to the present day to eat some of religion’s lunch is just the way things went — I don’t see how it can be divorced from the climate of sociological/cultural moments like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or the mid-20th c. and examined in a vacuum. For example, any declining popularity w/ religion in my generation is due as much to the political failure of The Christian Right’s Moral Majority as any inherent logical structure in its way of thinking.

(I like your posts btw and don’t mean to attack, hope it doesn’t sound that way — I do have a hard time understanding what perspective you’re looking from; that said, I’m a proud atheist, but a deep skeptic about pervasive rationality and also worry that science, as we conceive of it today, might lead more to functionaries than visionaries)

Layman #411,

Yes, the second half of the conclusion is not related to any of those premises.

JimV #406: “Those who do need to explain to me why my position (on the examples I have previously used) is actually the less humble one, not just claim that humility is their middle name.”

I will never claim that humility is my middle name, but your request is easy to fulfill, although you may not wish to hear it, because you think you already know everything there is to know. But in reality there are two different things going on here, and you ignore one of them.

1. The intellectual reality is that there is rampant “epistemological closure”, because many people, perhaps most of them, need intellectual certitude and cannot think outside the box. We see this in politics, climate denialism, religious fundamentalism, market fundamentalism, utopianism. By contrast, the attitude of science is that the “truth” is provisional and subject to change, and the process of inquiry is open-ended.

2. The psychological reality is that there is ALSO widespread need to deal with despair, with guilt, with fear of death. The best means for doing this are psycho-spiritual — there is no scientific program which is remotely as “efficient”. To take a narrowly-focused example about which success rates are well-known, we need only look at the success rate of AA and compare it to any “scientific” alcoholism-recovery program. AA has a better success by nearly a magnitude — “It works.” (In fact some alcoholism-recovery programs increase their success rate by finally getting their subjects into AA.)

For #1, i.e. the intellectual difference, talk of “pride” vs. “humility” is pretty superficial. Yes of course, the epistemically-closed are more proud to be “right” but it is silly for a scientist to go around expounding upon his or her humility, and no one ever claims that he or she got into science to be humble. That doesn’t make sense. You get into science for other reasons. Moreover there have been plenty of scientists for whom “humble” was definitely NOT the middle name.

On the other hand, the need in psycho-spiritual change is to admit the powerlessness of the self and to accept a high power. This is a functional strategy, but it can cause a real event. The whole POINT is to defeat pride and accept humility.

Be a scientist, describe and try to understand both #1 and #2. Get your own emotions out of this. Overbearing, obnoxious religious types are NOT the whole phenomenon, and have no bearing on #2. If you yourself do not have a spiritual need and do not see what the fuss is about, well don’t make the mistake of supposing that #1 is the whole story here.

@ ZM 06.25.15 at 3:54 pm
>Jim V you have really misunderstood the meaning of the words “daily bread” in the church, and it is a sacrament not a supplication …
>That word ‘daily’ is an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek word ‘epiousios’, and it is nowhere else to be found in Ancient Greek literature. It is a word they must invent to describe a new sort of bread, the breaking of which was a sign of the presence of the Lord among them. … It is epiousios: eucharistic.

This claim seems very dubious. It’s true that “epiousios” is a hapax, but it could conceivably be interpreted in the very commonly assumed sense mentioned by JimV. “Ousia” can mean “being”, thus “life”, hence “what is necessary for life”; some have proposed that it was derived from “epi ousan he:meran” “for the current (lit. “being”) day”. If, instead, “epiousios” was supposed to be a unique technical term having to do with the Eucharist or with transsubstantiation, it is strange that all the various standard translations are with words meaning “daily”, which do not unambiguously point to the Eucharist and can be interpreted as referring to ordinary food, and indeed have come to be interpreted exactly so. Thus, while the Vulgate gives the hapax Latin calque “super-substantialis”, the Catholic liturgical version has “cotidianus”, i.e. “daily”, in “Panem nostrum cotidianum”, the Gothic has “sinteins” from a root “tein-” for “day”, the Old English has “gedæghwamlic” from dæg “day” again, etc.). The Syriac translation reportedly reads “the bread of which we have need today”. Again, if it meant “eucharistic”, it is remarkable that even the Greeks have forgotten that; like everybody else, they now understand the phrase “epiousios artos” to mean “everyday food, or more generally, the absolutely necessary things for human survival”. In the Orthodox Slavic translations, the word is calqued (na-sÇ«shtÄ­nÅ­), but again, the phrase hlÄ›bÅ­ na-sÇ«shtÄ­nÅ­ has entered the languages with the same sense “everyday food or essential necessities”.

Finally, it is very odd that Jesus introduces the phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, in the Sermon on the Mount, a long time before the whole transsubstantiation business gets started in the Last Supper. At that point, since there was no Eucharist yet, a reference to “eucharistic bread” should have been completely incomprehensible for his audience and should have remained so for quite some time (so it would have required explanations about the future that Jesus doesn’t give). F

“Finally, it is very odd that Jesus introduces the phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, in the Sermon on the Mount, a long time before the whole transsubstantiation business gets started in the Last Supper. ”

How silly of the former Jesuit and renowned historian Greg Dening to forget how biblical scholarship thinks Jesus’ words in the New Testament were recorded verbatim as he spoke :-/

@ZM 06.26.15 at 12:39 am
>How silly of the former Jesuit and renowned historian Greg Dening to forget how biblical scholarship thinks Jesus’ words in the New Testament were recorded verbatim as he spoke

I’m not sure I get your point. Even if it’s not a literally true account of precisely what Jesus said and when he said it (I’ve never said I believe anything in that text to be factually true), it’s still supposed to make sense as a story, internally, and that’s what I think it fails to do if we assume the interpretation in question. As for Dening, arguments from authority are not *always* sufficient to convince me. The man was a historian of the Pacific, not of Christianity; and he isn’t even presenting some standard teaching of his Church here – a look at the relevant article in the Catholic encyclopedia shows that a “eucharistic” interpretation is not traditional in Catholicism. And of course, even if he were presenting a standard dogma of his Church, I still wouldn’t necessarily believe in its correctness; I don’t unconditionally trust priests about religion, or astrologers about astrology, or politicians about politics, or soap advertisers about soap.

ZM 06.26.15 at 12:43 am

>your argument that based on translations of the word being ‘daily’ … is not a good argument, as everyone knows translations are not exact word for word, context for context, substitutions.

I don’t exactly get this either. Translators do try to avoid misunderstandings and don’t just replace one word with another randomly. If “epiousios” was a technical Christian neologism for “eucharistic”, one would expect a translator to borrow the word in its original form or to make a calque, instead of choosing an existing word with a very different meaning that could lead to a misinterpretation. It’s odd to use a translation that is bound to cause a misunderstanding, it is even odder that all the translators have made more or less the same mistake and shifted the meaning in basically the same direction (I now see that even the Vulgate has one “quotidianus” besides one “supersubstantialis”), and that, even in places where the original coinage has been more or less faithfully preserved, literally or a calque, the meaning is still shifted more or less in the same direction. Occam’s razor, you know.

“If “epiousios” was a technical Christian neologism for “eucharistic””

I do not read the passage at all as suggesting that epiousios was a technical term for Eucharistic. It is saying it was a neologism expressly used for the communion/Eucharist ceremony and the sacraments of bread and wine which become the body and blood of Christ in the ceremony.

Even if Jesus coined the word himself , since the Sermon on the Mount predated the Last Supper and crucifixion the audience for the Sermon in the Mount would not be aware that the daily bread mentioned in Jesus’ words in the sermon would soon come to refer to the body of Christ which is shared in the Eucharist service.

The word eucharist by itself is just a word meaning thanksgiving from eu “well” and kharizesthai “offer graciously” not anything to do with daily bread except in the sense of the ceremony.

You are also wrong the gospels are meant to make sense as a story. You can see this quite easily by that fact that the Church kept these 4 different accounts (plus others no longer in use and of uncertain provenance like the Gospel of Peter) and even the three synoptic gospels are not the same, let alone the Gospel of John. As I went to a Catholic university and took the subjects The World and Literature of the Bible and Apocalyptic Eschatology I know the differences in the gospels is acknowledged and taught in contemporary Catholic theology.

Would you say that Newton’s laws were no better than the previous physical theories? (Which were the Aristotelian explanations of motion.)

@Lee A. Arnold 06.25.15 at 9:52 pm

>On the other hand, the need in psycho-spiritual change is to admit the powerlessness of the self and to accept a high power. … The whole POINT is to defeat pride and accept humility.

Humility? Well, I guess you could call it that. Personally, I prefer to use “humility” for humbleness (a realisation of one’s imperfection) that is actually warranted – ethically and factually. Obeying an imaginary superior who neither exists nor would be morally good if he did exist is something I would be more prone to characterise as spinelessness, toadyism and masochism. I wish people would confine whatever BDSM impulses they have to their sexual lives and keep them out of their political, ethical and philosophical decisions.

>The intellectual reality is that there is rampant “epistemological closure”, because many people, perhaps most of them, need intellectual certitude and cannot think outside the box. …

I don’t see how any kind of “certitude” can be provided by claims that are certain to be *wrong* (as much as anything can be certain). If one wants to be dogmatic, one can at least pick a dogma that makes *some* sense and has *some* plausibility.

In my opinion, what primarily motivates such people is tribal loyalty – loyalty to one’s community and background – and a desire to belong and fit in, even at the price of affirming and convincing oneself of things that aren’t true.

>2. The psychological reality is that there is ALSO widespread need to deal with despair, with guilt, with fear of death. The best means for doing this are psycho-spiritual — there is no scientific program which is remotely as “efficient”.

Resorting to this “means” to deal with the nasty stuff comes with a very high price – so much so that it can be counted as a failure as much a success, depending on how much you value cognition and ethics and on the severity of the distress. But sure – better religious than suicidal, I’ll grant you that; fortunately, in most cases these are not the only two possibilities, and current statistics on alcoholics do not convince me of the contrary.