John Derbyshire at the NRO does an extensive review of Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct. One of the subjects Wade’s book discusses is survival value of a belief in God. Throughout their existence as a species human beings have devoted a lot of time and effort to religious questions. Assuming that that nature didn’t simply spin its wheels there must have been a payoff. As Derbyshire puts it:
The topic of The Faith Instinct … is the natural history of religion. Darwin noted that a belief in “all-pervading spiritual agencies” is well-nigh universal among human populations. Why? Religious observances are costly in time, energy, and resources. Why has not natural selection purged out this wasteful behavior? From the point of view of species survival, is there an upside to balance or outweigh the wastefulness? If so, what is it? …
There are two current theories to explain the origins and persistence of religious belief. One says that religion is an accidental by-product of our extremely complicated cognitive equipment. … A tree, the sun, or a statue can then be believed to have volition and power. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom popularized this point of view in a 2005 Atlantic Monthly article (“Is God an Accident?”). Anthropologists Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have presented it at book length. …
The other theory is that religion is adaptive. That is, on net, human beings who have religious instincts propagate their genes more successfully than those who don’t. The best-known exponent of this point of view is biologist David Sloan Wilson, whose 2002 book Darwin’s Cathedral laid out the adaptionist case for a general reader.
The adaptive approach — survival of the most pious, you might call it — has the smaller market share among researchers, mainly because it relies on natural selection working at the group level, a controversial notion long out of favor because of mathematical problems. Wilson and others have recently helped to revive group selection, so that the adaptive theory is now very much in play.
Thus religion helps humans survive because it fosters cooperation; individual sacrifice for the common good and imposes a time horizon longer than a single life. But as in everything there is the danger of choosing the wrong “frame”. Human spirituality is not necessarily equivalent to organized religion — and hence with group behavior — but since anthropologists and sociologists cannot measure the state of individual human consciousness, the light of evidence shines on proxy indicators like religious customs and artifacts. It’s what social scientists can measure, even though it may not be what they want to measure. But suppose religious practices are group expressions of an individual adaptations, then we may be reversing the arrow of causality. Religious history isn’t “natural selection working at the group level” but the social manifestation of natural selection working at an individual level.
Be that as it may, Derbyshire’s review of Wade’s book suggests that religion has an interactive relationship with society and technology. Form followed function. Hunter gatherers had egalitarian religions; agricultural saw the emergence of a specialized clergy; big polyglot empires brought forth monotheism. We worshipped according to the form of our society. But since our society has moved beyond those foundations the question for Wade was given the deeply rooted nature of the religious impulse, what form would it tend toward in the future? Were ethical religions or New Age type beliefs the wave of the future?
In a thoughtful closing chapter, Wade peers forward into the possible future of religion. He thinks that traditional religion has lost too many of its bouts against modernity and rationality, and needs some radical reworking if it is to fulfill human religious yearnings as it used to. He asks: “Is there not some way of transforming religion into versions better suited for a modern age?” If there is, can we discern the shape of whatever rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem?
Perhaps we shall dump the gods. Buddhism, after all, has no gods, at least in theory. Buddhists, though, as D. Jason Slone pointed out in Theological Incorrectness, behave uncannily like adherents of theistic religions. They pray to Lord Buddha, even though their doctrines say he does not exist — even though the entire point of their religion is that Buddha attained nonexistence! One of the odder things about religion is how little doctrine matters to believers. The founding stories of Mormonism (golden tablets, magic spectacles, ahistorical migrations) are at the high end of the preposterosity scale, and the scriptures are, as Mark Twain reported, “chloroform in print”; yet Mormonism is easily the most successful modern religion, with innumerable smart and accomplished adherents, impressive growth in numbers, and remarkably little attrition.
The various attempts to establish “ethical religions,” from Emerson’s Transcendentalism to Scientific Buddhism, have in any case fallen flat, offering only cold temples to their followers. A transformed religion, Wade tells us, must “touch all the senses and lift the mind . . . find a way to be equally true to emotion and to reason, to our need to belong to one another.” The transformation, he says, needs to be similar in scope to the transition from hunter-gatherer religion to that of settled societies.
What may actually happen, it seems to me, will be a partial reversion to Paleolithic styles. The dissolution of the power relations that prevailed until just a generation or two ago — hierarchies of class, race, sex, age, and behavioral inclinations — has returned us to the egalitarianism of our remotest ancestors. Perhaps our religion will likewise regress.
If we are regressing, it is not to the time of the hunter-gatherers but to the Middle Ages. Socialism and Islam, to mention two of the most widespread belief systems of our day, are two of the most bureaucratic and dogmatic that ever existed. But Derbyshire’s intuition that religious practices may be changing can be compared against an actual modern datapoint. Ann Althouse and Andrew McCarthy have both blogged about Barack Obama’s references to God during the memorial service for the soldiers who were shot by Major Hasan at Fort Hood. Obama offered a stub in place of a social consensus god. Althouse and McCarthy noted that Obama simultaneously disclaimed knowledge of the purposes of God while still seeming to know His will. Pick a god, any god. “We’re a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses.” Pick a side and hope it’s the same side which God chose. “And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln’s words, and always pray to be on the side of God.”
But the character of that God is nevertheless asserted in another paragraph. Obama said.
It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know — no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice — in this world, and the next.
Althouse — if she is not being sarcastic — says the ambiguity may be one more proof of Obama’s nuance. She writes “did Obama purport to know what God thinks? … On first reading, my answer was yes. … On second reading, I saw the room to deny that Obama purports to know what God thinks. … Now, I am not saying this because I think Obama secretly shares Hasan’s evil beliefs about God. I’m saying it because I appreciate the subtle way in which the speech avoids claiming to know the mind of God. That is elegant and beautiful. Good religion.”
If Obama’s ambivalence is admirable as intellectual faith, as religion — as a belief system with group utility — it fails the first and most basic test: that of defining identity. There is no way to join a central group; each must go off into his own. And they are most of them equally worthy. “No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts.” But what about Islam? Andrew McCarthy asks:
At his blog today, Andrew Bostom, a scholar of jihadism, cites the following passage from “Reliance of the Traveler,” a widely distributed manual of Islamic law produced by al-Azhar University in Egypt, the most authoritative interpreters of theology and sharia jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, the dominant tradition among the world’s Muslims … As Dr. Bostom points out, the first hadith referred to in the passage — the one in which Mohammed explains that Allah has commanded the Muslims to fight non-Muslims — was cited by Nidal Hasan in slide 43 of the June 7, 2007 presentation that Jonah discusses in his excellent column today.
The President, as befits the leader of a secular democracy spoke very little to religion, except to give them all a seal of good housekeeping. All told the emotional chords which President Obama chose to strike at the Fort Hood memorial had less to do with “religion” and group survival than individual spirituality. By relating anecdotes from the lives of each of the deceased and by assuring the audience that the perpetrator would Burn in Hell, Obama spoke to his audience less as members of a religion then as individuals in a human race whose instinct for the numinous goes back into pre-history.
Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic thought Obama’s speech was the greatest he had ever written.
Today, at Ft. Hood. I guarantee: they’ll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won’t do it justice. Yes, I’m having a Chris Matthews-chill-running-up-my-leg moment, but sometimes, the man, the moment and the words come together and meet the challenge. Obama had to lead a nation’s grieving; he had to try and address the thorny issues of Islam and terrorism; to be firm; to express the spirit of America, using familiar, comforting tropes in a way that didn’t sound trite.
But rhetoric is no dry thing. It is employed for a purpose: to shame, to inspire, to unite, to destroy or to build. Whether it will be taught in rhetoric classes a century hence depends on how things turn out. Perhaps Obama’s ambivalent sentiment will last the longer. The doubts about what lies in the mind of God and the nature of heaven or hell are still unlikely to be settled in a hundred years. But it will exist as an inexpressible thought, dreamt in every human tongue. Yet if rhetoric classes are to be taught at all, at least in the English language, the nation must survive in some form at least. And then the chances are that Macaulay and not Obama will be remembered whatever Ambinder might think. Man survives upon God, but societies rely upon gods to subsist. The men at Fort Hood either died as soldiers for a shared set of national myths or they died without them. The dead will buried, but whether their myths survive them is a question that only the living can answer.
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods. …And in the nights of winter,
When the cold north winds blow,
And the long howling of the wolves
Is heard amidst the snow;
When round the lonely cottage
Roars loud the tempest’s din,
And the good logs of Algidus
Roar louder yet within;When the oldest cask is opened,
And the largest lamp is lit;
When the chestnuts glow in the embers,
And the kid turns on the spit;
When young and old in circle
Around the firebrands close;
When the girls are weaving baskets,
And the lads are shaping bows;When the goodman mends his armor,
And trims his helmet’s plume;
When the goodwife’s shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom;
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.
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Man forsakes God. God forsakes man. The most ancient law of talion manifest. It’s the way of things. How many times since September 11, 2001 and with each new Muslim attrocity have I fervently thought ‘God help us!’ followed hard on by despair? After all, how can an unbeliever yearn for God’s deliverance? But in the valley of shadows I do yearn…
A tree, the sun, or a statue can then be believed to have volition and power.
Finally, an explanation for Obama’s election.
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods
Brave men will fight the fiercest foe
Despite the gravest odds
Today the foe amidst us
Walks upright and in the light
He fears naught but his holy book
That tells him he is right
To kill the infidel at hand
By any means possessed
He smiles the smile of conquest while
His victims are obsessed
With mortal things and mortal thoughts
Of living the good life
Avoiding confrontation and
Avoiding parlous strife
But come the day the masks fall off
Of Islam’s murderous face
And by its acts of savagery
Ignites the Christian race
Then only then will Christian men
Unite to stem the tide
And Islam’s terror gangsters will
Then have no place to hide
A burnt out western city will
Return a thousand fold
And western man the warrior
Will hark back to days of old
And will savage the black Muslims
Put them all beneath the sod
With the ashes of their fathers
And the temples of their god
Laurence Gonzales’ book “Deep Survival” looks at who survives extreme situations, and one of the characteristics that repeatedly emerges from survivors is a connectedness to the divine, extension of the survivor beyond the current dire situation and a feeling that, whether lost in the mountains, grievously injured or adrift on a raft with dwindling supplies, the survivor is not alone. Groups cannot survive unless individuals survive, maybe this human need for religion is less of a top-down imposition from the group than a bottom-up demand from individuals needing the group to recognize what is important to them. Of course, given enough time the group will adopt a worldview and pass it on, but for religion to last it has to be an emergent phenomenon rather than an imposition, certainly in the present day.
Obama is ostensibly a Christian, he says he is and I believe him, so why can he not express the outrage of his God at the murder of innocents, expressed so vehemently in what is even to the adherents of Islam a holy book? The transnationalists have a terrible time dealing with religion, and it may well prove their undoing. By not personally experiencing religion they cannot grasp the motivational and transformative power of it. This will cause them to dismiss it, and as a policy matter that is rather foolish in the present day.
Islamists do not want more after-school programs, or more affordable housing. A bureaucrat cannot provide what they want, which makes the bureaucrat scratch his head. I do not believe the Islamists even want equality, the most militant interpretations of the hadith and Koran demand dominance in the name of Islam. Part of the relative success of the United States in dealing with Muslim integration may be that in providing not much beyond opportunity compared to the European social safety net, Muslims are allowed to succeed on their own merits, left alone to worship and live as they wish, and even proselytize freely. Success in one environment may ennervate the need for success in others, individual leaders able to achieve in the marketplace may find themselves too busy to become radicalized.
The case of Major Hasan is troubling because he has apparently become what our system was intended to avoid: an intelligent and academically-successful person with a terminal degree in his field who nevertheless fell (or jumped) into radicalism to fill some perceived need. The religion was always there, but in his later years the religion has apparently dominated over more typical Western concerns of integration into the group and professional advancement. Maybe this is because he was in a hothouse environment, without significant competition (as we said in medical school, “C=M.D.”) and protected from confrontation due to the political correctness not only of the military but his chosen field of psychiatry. Without the need to conform to remain in his position, his religiosity was free to take over.
The other problem with progressivism in general and political correctness specifically is that should religious tolerance be placed high in the pantheon of protected classes, that worldview is rendered incapable of distinguishing gradations of religious fervor. A radical Islamist would be rejected only if his or her statements were offensive to another class, and even then there is a process that a PC person has to go through to determine which protected class has higher status. Major Hasan is dismissive to a woman — well, she is a white woman, so while female gender is to be protected, there is the white thing, and it’s his culture so…(variables collide in unpredictable fashion).
Interesting, and somewhat dangerous, times. I’m not sure that even GWB would have come down on this as religously-motivated terror, he was rather quick to embrace Islam as practiced by nonviolent Muslims after 9/11, and nobody wants a domestic religious war. I have little doubt that many Muslims regard Major Hasan the way many Christians regard abortion clinic bombers — “That’s awful, and quit using my religion to justify your actions.” There is a problem here, and I’m not sure how to solve it. I am pretty sure that failure to understand religion is not a feature of successful governments. The Communists at the end certainly underestimated the power of a Polish Pope to motivate his countrymen, and although I can’t think of many others, I’m pretty sure history is littered with governments that failed to understand religions in their populations and paid the ultimate price as a consequence.
2. Salt Lick:
All those headstones went out voting for him.
Ahh, the Chicago Style.
I watched the speech twice, it was delivered very well. It is that dull, blank look in Obama’s eyes that worries me. Like an actor that has performed the play too many times his actions and timing are perfect but his heart was not in it.
If one accepts Darwinian theory, then what religion seeks to do is replace the alpha male primate, with an “all time” alpha, hence limiting friction due to the risk of displeasing our Superior.
(“all-time” runner in a game of running bases provided the same effect, lack of argument over who got to play which role)
In a society that drifts more and more toward the right of the individual rather than the responsibility to the communal good, “religion” takes on a squelched appearance. For the very institution is formation of communal behavior toward internal and external members of one’s community and one’s neighboring communities.
If the individual is his own alpha, he needs no other…responds to no other, accepts no other. Behavior toward others is confined only by a sort of “gentleman’s anomie”…which, given the slightest provocation…or virtually any provocative slight…will render the unspoken agreement null and void.
For the anarchist, religion is the art of speaking of the common good…in an echo chamber in Babel. The cacophony that results is due to the “individual as his own god” mentality. Socialists and communists don’t understand that the path to heightened “individual” is the totalitarian control over their behavior…”for their own good”.
The nanny state is nothing more than the organized religion of populism.
While jihadists create enemies of the “infidel”, populistas create enemies of other faith-based folks. One blows up a disco, the other blows up the information stream. The virulent attack by the populistas against faith-based Christians (and sub rosa…all Jews), is an attack on the Bible as an instrument of faith that interferes with the “one true religion”…populist totalitarianism.
Populistas invent a creed that invokes the individual as his own god, then controls him by invention of behavioral conventions that, if not followed, are met with harsh rebuke, shunning, and peer pressure outcasting.
It’s probably the neatest trick in post-modern history. To at once be subservient and master is high art of suspended disbelief. The state is the alpha, but all the hymns are to the individual.
For most other organized religions, there is an invisible Supreme Being alpha, rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior…but allowing for free choice.
This latter concept is most important. The gift of free choice allows for the absorption of good behavior to enter the subconscious.
Totalitarian populism and jihadists beat obedience into submission. The difference between a religion and a cult…is the ability to find one’s way…to choose a path. Guidance vs. groveling.
This also accounts for why jihadists and populistas have so much in common. Language choice, the need for duplicity, the constant state of warfare. Populistas cannot exist, but for, the eternal need to create class, racial, creed, etc. …enemies. It is the very need for “battle” that breathes life into the cult-like adherence to notions so preposterous…they are jarring to non-cult members.
Similarly, jihadists must always make battle with an “enemy”. Civilians, women, children, babies…no matter. Without the battle both groups lose oxygen and die. Battle therefore, is the profit for the prophet of each.
Until we decide that the balance between individual exaltation and communal responsibility need to be re calibrated, we indeed will be slouching toward Bethlehem.
WRT Derbyshire’s review, Rodney Stark in Discovering God points out that the primitive societies often have monotheistic religions.
Individual consciousness, as mediated by language, is dependent on a communal consciousness that constitutes the scene of the emergence of shared linguistic signs.
One cannot of course refute the atheist’s extension of laboratory epistemology to what we may call in religion-neutral terms our lived anthropology; one can only suggest that whether one’s social relations are mediated by atheism or by religious belief tells us little about the originary basis of these relations. The shared aspect of belief is a more fundamental human phenomenon than its propositional content. Before one can even formulate such content, one needs a mode of communal communication. That semiotic communication arose among us centered on a god-concept is scarcely refutable as a historical fact. It is this fact, not the question of “the existence of God,” that is of fundamental anthropological interest.
http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw382.htm
Thank you God for giving this nation the men and women who have fought for the rights of man, our natural rights.
This day, so special as to be as honored as
the acknoeledgement of their sacrifice and devotion is fitting and proper.
To all those who have served, to those who came away unscathed save for the lurid memories war infuses our in our minds, to the injured who have had to overcome so much more than simply the psychology of the carnage I thank you.
“Is there not some way of transforming religion into versions better suited for a modern age?”
The better question is this: Has man’s nature changed since the ancient age? Rhetorical question. No, man remains the same; with both his/her animal and Divine natures. As C.S. Lewis noted, man is a miraculous hybrid composed of two natures; a brutish or cunning animal (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) without the Spirit, and a religious freak without the animal. It is not possible to fundamentally transform religion without first transforming the nature of man; an impossible task – impossible that is without genetic engineering – something to think about there I would say.
What would new religion “better suited for a modern age” look like? It would depend upon what a new genetically-engineered (or completely brainwashed and demoralized) man would look like. My prediction is that the “new religion” will reflect man made in the image of pond scum. It is possible that some old religions (Marxism and Islam) already possess this core idea of the new man, and wait in the wings for the new modern age – a dark age to come.
The confusion of theology and religion is a typically American problem that is exemplified by William James “Varieties of Religious Experience” all of which occur inside the heads of lone believers, and by our SCOTUS jurisprudence which has long confused belief and religion.
Religion is what social groups do to sanctify themselves and align themselves with each other and the larger social and natural world. As such, it is clearly adaptive. And, as such, it will change as the social world changes. However, changes in belief will follow changes in religion, not create them.
Science has no influence on religion. Those who wish to leave a social group may cite science as a justification, but those to wish to stay, will reconcile science and their theology.
Prof Althouse gives to much credit to BO, or his speech writers, for their theology. Their precedent is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, one of the greatest, and most profound, of our orations:
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”"
truepeers/8
The quote, bare the last sentence, sounds/reads like generated by a chomskybot… semiotic communication… whatta… semiotic means symbolic or sign communication, so the learned one is saying “symbolic communication communication”. Purdy deep. Maybe he should encapsulate that and then use “[encapsulated] communication” and… it would be even deeper!
If, under a new religion “better suited for a modern age,” man is seen as made in the image of pond scum; then all men are not created equal – those individuals comprising the State (Marxist or Islamist) are more equal than others – and legally so. If man is made in the image of pond scum, then the individual has little value in comparison to the State. These fortunate (or should we say blessed) new age individuals will have no unalienable rights to property (pursuit of happiness), liberty or life – that reflects “old religion.” No, we will have a new understanding for the modern age; those silly “unalienable rights” of the old religion are nothing more than reversible privileges granted by the State.
Man, I can’t wait for the new Manifesto/Quran thumping religions of the modern age to come; I can already see some of the images conjured up for my children and grandchildren. Praise the Lord! – Strike that – Praise the (Marxist &/or Islamic) State!
We’re about to find out whether shared myths, whether religion in the widest sense, has any bearing on survival. If any age could truly be called one of religious war, then this is it. Can the truly irreligious play unless they are serious about their irreligiousity? Can you be in such doubt as to doubt that you doubt? Is it possible for humanity’s billions to go around in a kind of existential tension, like a man who wishes to go to the toilet but can’t? Can people live forever in a wry state of absurdity, inside a running joke? Or must they turn, as Hasan turned, as environmentalists turned, as socialists for years have turned, to some kind of definite belief to give meaning to their lives? How many of those who think that “religion is the opiate of the people” also believe that Prohibition was a good idea?
As a practical matter people need to invest their lives with meaning, if only one of provisional nature. Science can work without eternal verities, but never without a working hypothesis. Man searches for meaning, but in order to do so sanely, he must believe that meaning exists; and he is not in the pursuit of some mirage shimmering emptily across the Arabian sands. Maybe “I believe” is the shortcut for “I think I know but am not sure”. I will bear the Ring, though I do not know the way.
Scoring Obama’s speeches for their quality is a bizarre and repugnant exercise, and I wish people would stop it. It’s as if his speeches are more about … his speeches than about the subject they purport to address. Which may indeed be the case, but still.
Also, I’m not quite sure of the point Wretchard is making with regard to Obama. I’m being serious, not snarky.
I do, however, know the point of Horatius at the Bridge, which I long ago memorized in its entirety.
Does “just and loving God” apply to Allah?
Thanks so much for that citation of Horatius at the Bridge. I hadn’t seen it since I read it in high school in 1959.
First, monotheism spread perhaps because of polyglot empires but it was invented (?) or discovered (?), found (?) or revealed (?) in lonely out of the way places like Mt. Moriah and Mt. Sinai.
Please forgive this brief religious discussion, but the moment at which the Creator God was identified as the Ethical God occurred in last week’s Torah portion, Va-yera. The moment in question was when God disclosed to Abraham His plans to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham challenged Him asking, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” This precise moment marked the fulcrum of ethical monotheism.
The Judeo-Christian tradition holds that God MUST be a just and ethical God and not a capricious one. Again this is Pope Benedict XVI’s point in his Regensberg speech. Monotheism means there is one deity for the entire world. Ethical monotheism means we must apply those same ethics to everyone, kin and stranger alike. And that is why it is possible for the Hebrew Bible to command, “Love the stranger.”
It is no accident that the foundation of Western Civilization rests on those Judeo-Christian principles. Yes, there are huge differences in theology and practice among those in the Judeo-Christian galaxy. And sometimes those differences have been the cause of persecution, pogroms, wars, and prejudice. That is tragic enough as a historical matter but it will be fatal to civilization if they obscure the fundamental ethical monotheistic commonality within the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The discussion of balance between recognition of a supreme authority (an Ethical God, a capricious God, or the State) and the individual, and the role of intermediary groups and communities to which individuals have responsibility and obligations and which in turn have responsibilities and obligations to their members, is never a settled matter.
Alan Dershowitz is said to have likened religion to a candle. Get too close to it and you will be burned. Get too far away from it and you will no longer benefit from its light and warmth.
The great sage Hillel,who lived in the first century before the common era and is thought to have died around year 10 of the common era, put it perfectly.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am for myself alone, what am I?
And if not now, when?”
I reflect on that daily as I struggle with a desire to retreat and shut out this decaying world on the one hand, and a belief that I should drop everything else and join the fight to preserve and rescue it
I didn’t want to score Obama’s speeches, but came to it after reading Derbyshire. The question was, “if religion confers a survival advantage then how did it manifest itself at Fort Hood and the subsequent events”. That led me to Althouse, who led me to McCarthy. Along the way I discovered Ambinder. And like you I had learned Macaulay.
At first I wondered why Ann Althouse thought Obama’s speech was “good religion” — and then I realized that for her, if she wasn’t being facetious, all good religions were religions of doubt. But from McCarthy I learned that Hasan at least had no doubts about what his religion required. But returning to Obama it seemed as if Hasan’s religion was just as good as another. What a muddle.
In the end I realized that as logical propositions things were just chasing their tails. But as a survival proposition, Hasan’s side had something going for it. It had a definite “us” and a definite “them”. Could a belief system which operated like an optional revolving door ever compete with a group whose solidarity was binding and compulsory? If the answer is yes, then what was that “yes” based on but a ‘faith’ in democracy? But then that faith wasn’t even strong enough to make attendance at the Fall of the Berlin Wall compelling, although presenting the Olympic case for Chicago was worth a trip.
Ok never mind. We are in the middle of history and history will judge us in part according to whether we had effective beliefs. Effective. And that’s a different word from nuanced.
Thanks Wretchard for continuing to bring the most important issues facing our culture.
Belief in a God or gods is in itself a survival advantage, whether that belief is accurate or not. Religion is independent of individual beliefs. Religions are examples of what I call Cultural Streams. Cultural Streams interact evolutionarily by providing froups that maintain the Cultural Streams a survival advantage.
Ambinder must be a world-class idiot. I am appalled at much of the logic in 0bama’s speech. It is almost the opposite of the Gettysburg Address – 0bama pretends this was a battle at home. This was no battle, Mr. President, this was a sick and twisted individual firing on unarmed men and women with whom he was entrusted to work. They are not heroes for being victims, and you belittle the military in its work and the soldiers in their sacrifice, by saying what you said.
And you are no president for not knowing the difference. You are not even a competent citizen, as far as I can tell. I question your loyalties, your intelligence, and your taste. Drech.
Maybe humans are religious because God made them that way.
I think Obama is a bs artist. Hence I don’t think much of his speeches, even the well-crafted ones. Hence I can’t stand to listen to him talk.
Wretchard:
Thanks for the clarification. Also I didn’t mean to imply that you were scoring Obama’s speeches. I was referring to Althouse and Ambinder. Sorry I wasn’t clear about that.
Regarding the survival value of religion, I believe it has several things going for it. It tests the social intelligence of a worshipper, to see if they are competent in the tribe, able to earn points for keeping any coherent series of thoughts in mind, and propagating them, and working in concert with others.
Daniel Dennett, modern philosopher of mind, criticizes religion as bad science and believes it is obsolete. I’ve thought of trying to explain it to him, along the lines above, in purely reductionist, scientific, anthropological, Darwinian terms – his own. But Dennett is a brilliant man and if he holds the positions he does, he has already rejected the conclusion, much of what I’ve outlined is pretty obvious to anyone interested in those sorts of arguments. Pity.
But the character of that God is nevertheless asserted in another paragraph.
Actually, Wretchard, Obama is NOT asserting something about the character of God in the excerpt you cited. In fact, Obama is not even asserting the existence of God, period.
It’s one thing to say, “God does not ____” and another to say, “No God does _____.” The former asserts both the existence of God and, by process of exclusion (what God does not do or say or think), something about God. The latter is what a person who wants to avoid making any *pro*fession about God would say — a carefully parsed wording that is about two notches north of saying nothing at all, most likely born of the intent to avoid offending anyone.
Consider the antithesis of his statement: “God looks upon [these acts] with favor.” This would hack off about 98% of the American population, shock and appall a large percentage of the West, and pretty much disgust civilized people anywhere they live. It wouldn’t even please the jihadis who have praised Hassan’s act because the formulation of the statement uses the term “God” instead of “Allah.”
So. If your primary intent is to be as rhetorically careful as possible and avoid giving offense to as large a number of people as possible, you go for the maximum amount of content neutrality as you can. Which is pretty much what he did.
OTOH if your primary intent was to make an assertion, any assertion, from your gut feelings, the assertion would be phrased as an assertion. It would not come out as a labored-over non-assertion.
Which brings me to Darren @ 4:
Obama is ostensibly a Christian, he says he is and I believe him
Obama has said all sorts of things which range from the demonstrably false to the stinks-highly-of equivocational. To take him at his word on this is IMO to be gob-smackingly credulous.
Not being God, I cannot say with absolute certainty what is in the man’s heart, but the “fruit,” which is all any of us are ever known by to each other, does not exist as far as I can tell.
He joined a highly politicized church for what appear to be entirely or almost entirely street-cred political motives. While an Illinois state senator, he voted against or “present” on that state’s Born Alive Infant Protection Act.. The seven years of tax returns that he made public do not indicate that he gave to any faith-based charities other than (surprise surprise) Trinity United Church. Meanwhile he exposed his daughters for years to bile from the pulpit of TUC.
The most charitable interpretation one could give to this record is that it indicates an exceptionally poorly taught, undiscerning, lumpen-pew, lukewarm Christian. A more rigorous interpretation would be that he is most likely not a Christian at all … an interpretation that is given additional weight by a host of his other words and actions as a public figure.
I don’t go around administering religious tests to people for public office (the Constitution forbids that), and in fact there are plenty of people with whom I would disagree theologically whom I could see myself voting for, for high office. Obama’s non-American instincts, leftist worldview and radical voting record & associations are the real disqualifiers IMO, not his theology. But it does bother me that he appears to be lying about his being a Christian. And, no, I don’t think he is self-deluded. He is intelligent enough to know what constitutes being born again in Christ and IMO also reflective enough to know whether he is or is not. His assertion that he is a Christian is, to me, yet another example of his, ahem, fudging details on his identity in order to be accepted & elected. The habit would be pathetic if it weren’t rooted in a man who is in a position to do so much damage to so many.
FWIW, I don’t think he’s a Muslim, either. He comes across to me as a man who is theologically adrift, in part due to his intellectual vanity, in part due to his own personal identity issues.
9. Habu: Amen to that.
I’m afraid modern man is spending much of his time asking whether he needs God and quite a bit less time wondering if He needs us.
The answer for both depends upon what we seek from the other. I don’t believe we are at all clear as a species as to what we want from our deity…and what we expect in return.
And, perhaps the better question to ponder, is what would our deity wish from us? Because whatever that might be…we aren’t on the right path toward accomplishing it.
I see someone has been hacking the Ajax editor. Looks like a work in progress. Had to explicitly refresh the blog page after editing. I’ll watch for further developments!
As a basis for social framework, religion has worked quite fine for Western civilization. In its more arcane epistemology are the rough edges of our beliefs and is where they come into conflict with different tribes and religious orders. But in its core constituency, as a fundamental law of behavior and societal sense of a shared burden of fate, it performs quite well and binds us in common purpose. Christianity was so successful in expanding the virtues of god’s chosen people; it was soon cloned around the tribe of a clever man who wrought a religion in the image of himself. Islam has claimed the mantle of the chosen ones and has all of the tools to see to it that they are not out done. The last prophet was an insecure prophet and would be the last god would have to say about that.
I enjoyed reading Christopher Hitchen’s “God is not Great”, because of the case Hitchen’s makes that religion destroys everything that it touches, and, in his case, it was a source of great tumult. But the education that led Hitchen’s to such conclusions left him with a knowledge and a penchant for inquiry rarely equaled. What I left with is that Hitchen’s was a tortured soul of sorts and I forgive him his excesses. What he has utterly failed to do is show how Western civilization would be no shadow of its greatness without the rigors, warts and all of Christianity. I am drawn to Kierkegaard’s sense of existentialism, and at times, have remorse over my lack of fervent faith. But in the end I feel very strongly in the need to preserve our Christian heritage and rail at every threat to it, be it atheists having the symbols of sacrifice, the Christian cross, torn down, the pederast priest, or new wave revisionists who will make it conform to their modern sense of political correctness.
Habu -
We have staff meetings every Tuesday morning at my office. Yesterday morning, after everyone was seated at the conference table, I asked my supervisor, “Before we start, can I just say something first?” Yes, said supervisor. “Ooh-rah!” I said. And told them what yesterday was.
Morning hosts on the local Fox radio station read mini bios of all the Ft. Hood casualties (sorry, I refuse to say “victims” to signify military personnel who die by an act of war). Pfc. Kham Xiong (who has a brother in the Marines in Afghanistan) was the son of a man who fought the VC in the early ’70s.
Not only are the lines drawn, but the lines go back for generations.
“7. James the lesser: WRT Derbyshire’s review, Rodney Stark in Discovering God points out that the primitive societies often have monotheistic religions.”
Absolutely right. But the discoveries of modern archaeology, microbiology, and physics as well as the lack of discoveries fitting Derbyshire’s meme are just…inconvenient. “Tosh tosh” our British (pseudo) American chap might say, “Explaining away God is the task for today!”
Mark Hyan at the American Spectator has written a profound piece on “The man Who hates America. Recommended.
?Con perniso?
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/11/11/the-man-who-despises-america
So-called ethical religions (and New Age fads as well) fall flat in the end because they try to ignore both the darker mysteries and travails of human existence and/or the reality of powers greater than ourselves. In a word, they are shallow. The old-school atheists like Camus took matters of faith much more seriously and while I disagree with their conclusion they at least gave the question the profound consideration it deserves.
I haven’t seen or read Obama’s speech but there’s no doubt his writers were working overtime to counter the negative impression he made with his initial remarks. Big deal – I don’t discount the importance of what the POTUS says on these occasions but there’s a lot more to the office than being the world’s most visible talking head. Marc Ambinder is a condescending fool if he thinks anyone who actually believes in “the spirit of America” is going to be dazzled by the artful use of “familiar, comforting tropes”. The fact that he is suggests that his own conception of that spirit is just as trivial and cynical as Obama’s.
Religion of the future? Woody Allen in Sleeper getting absolution from a sideshow gumball machine.
Without an external brake a man becomes his own god and then anything is possible. That is the theme behind Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Kurtz had, “No restraint. No restraint at all.” He became a monster. The film based on HoD was Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The production of which was effected by the director, cast and much of the crew themselves acting out drug induced debaucheries in which they were each their own gods. A high level of technical expertise can be retained without any belief in the system that created the knowledge consumed. In the movie Kurtz, Willard and Kilgore are all equally lost. What does Kurtz then die for? The real life model that Milius and Coppola claimed to base Kurtz on was MG Michael D. Healey. The film as such was a slander of a fine gentleman. General Healey is I am proud to say a friend of mine. His biography is here.
Hasan’s slideshow was not badly done. The failure to respond to his central tenet, that muslims are very troubled by wars waged against other muslims, was an example of PC causing the can to be kicked down the road with tragic consequences. An honest response would be to say that every faith demands that you accept responsibility for the justice of your cause before you commit violence. Indeed under the Nuremberg precedent every member of the Armed Forces is held to that standard. So yes muslims are allowed to ask if it is for a good cause that we ask them to kill other muslims, in exactly the same way that christians or jews should be concerned before they kill muslims. In our system we have enabled sufficient clarity and reliance on the wisdom and mercy of the people, as expressed by our democratic values and republican system, that arbitrary and abusive use of force is unlikely. That supports good order and discipline. If Hasan or any muslim feels that they cannot be bound by the orders issued by an authority not controlled by muslims because the edicts of such are inherently unjust then indeed they cannot serve, in any capacity and not only in a conflict involving other muslims.
As a Physician Hasan appears to be a technically incompetent affirmative action baby. Asking how he got into Medical school edges uncomfortably close to unanswered questions about how Obama got into, well really everywhere. It is interesting how dramatically his presentation improved after two days to rehearse a script. The Left castigated Reagan as an actor who read his speeches. They refused to believe that he read voraciously and actually wrote much of his best work. The difference between RR and BHO goes deeper. Reagan was a good but not great actor, nevertheless he knew that over time the only way to carry off a role was to inhabit it. Reagan sounded good at Point du Hoc or speaking with only a short time to rehearse after the Challenger disaster because he believed in the words. Obama is at root the hustling charlatan that Ayers described in the “autobiography.” His first public reaction was a disaster because unscripted he had nothing inside to draw upon. He has perfected a trick of feeding an audience what it wants to hear, pulling in cadences from black churches the same way that white musicians sold the patterns of R&B to a larger audience. Unlike the musicians or the true statesman there is no reason to believe that he understands or believes in the content behind the presentation.
Storm-Rider/14
Not that a valiant effort has not been made–the newageism was pushed in any way possible and gained many solipsistic, navel gazing adherents. The purpose was the destruction of the “old” creeds–judaism and christianity–with something that can be later channeled and molded into something useful by the new aristocracy. But replacing religions and their underlying theology without convincing miracles is a tough business.
Commies tried a bit direct approach, substituting the christian triune concept with Marx as the holy father, Engels as the holy ghost and Lenin as the holy spirit. But there was always someone who did not understand the original intent and added himself to the holy trinity, Stalin, Enver Hoxha or Klement Gottwald. Did not work, Poland can be used as a point in case. One visit by Wojtyla (at the time a pope) and the whole substitution was rendered void and canceled.
The New Age manufacturers derived from that experience that the stalinist rigidity is not the correct approach and that a fuzzy mush may work better. As long as the detachment from the prevalent creeds was achieved, anything goes. Once you erase the judeo-christian paradigm and its moral underpinning (that is the mother lode they are really after), then the fuzzy mush can be replaced by something more structured, appropriate for the occasion.
Another approach was to infiltrate some branches of established religions and render them impotent by gramscian pablum.
Both approaches had a degree of success. But all the conspiracist always forget that there are several factors that usually wreck the whole enterprise–unintended consequences and currents and random foams that seemingly arise from nowhere. The more a rigid structure to be imposed is, the more chaos seems to be generated to fudge the envelope of variability to render the standard bell curve correct and true. The Designer put in place a corrective mechanism that is, surprisingly, popping up everywhere you look.
The creeds always arise from these undercurrents, they are not imposed, at least that is true for at least some 3.5kya, even thought they are later institutionalized in some form by powers that are.
That was even the case with Islam. However, since the creed was devised by a pair of con persons (One Khalija and one Mohammed) that in the opposition to the judeo-christian paradigm re-established human sacrifice, it took a more ominous turn. There was a chance that it would become a relatively benign religion after its first brigand parasitic phase that lasted 4 centuries. But the fact that it was endowed by a pair of psychopaths gave it a mooring that could flip it into a rigid and inflexible system. And that is what happened after Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. The reformation drew on the original psychopathic core. The spectacular cultural rise was halted and since then Islam has been on gradual decline.
The current “revival” is an anomaly that is only possible by the fortunes of oil money, to provide a fuel for its parasitic nature. But that is only temporary rescue. Or that would have been–once the supply of oil is exhausted, the decline would continue the trend that has been set forth in 12th century, if not for fecklessness of our current aristocracy that is willing to provide a feed in the form of a human sacrifice to Islam’s aspirations. Their rationale is simple–the enemy of my enemy is my temporary friend. But they are mistaken in their thinking that they are better parasites than Soldiers of Islam, after all the SoI had been at it for some 1400 years so they got much more experience. The scorpion, even with a seemingly friendly grin, is always a scorpion, it is its nature.
wretchard:
I know that this is a simplistic view/response to your (and all the commenters) very thoughtful entry.
You may be aware that by my handle that I am the child of holocaust survivors and was born in Föhrenwald.
I am very afraid for our future as a civilization.
This country seems to have very little in common.
The takeover of our society seems to be reflected in the book
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
any thoughts ?
I think I can finally verbalize what has bothered me about Islam but was eluding me. Islam is a parasitic religion just as socialism is a parasitic ideology. The power brokers, Imams, take their power through force (follow me exactly or die) just as the power brokers in socialism take their power from the workers (follow me exactly or no goodies). Both can only be sustained by taking from those who produce because all it knows how to do is consume. So while many people immigrate to escape the extreme elements they, by not renouncing their faith, provide sustenance, or a least a vector, for the next generation to spread- the latest version less benign than the previous as Islam gains influence and culturally being predisposed to respect only strength. I do not hear too much about humility from Muslims.
Labor unions are parasitic in nature as well. They can not be created from the ground up- a successful business must exist for it to attach itself to and start siphoning off nutrients. Never mind that they have destroyed so many once world-dominant industries, this time will be different.
I do not have the gift of expression that so many contributors here possess, so I apologize in advance if I have gone too far astray. I consider this site the cornerstone of my continuing education.
Fat Man@11
“Science has no influence on religion. Those who wish to leave a social group may cite science as a justification, but those to wish to stay, will reconcile science and their theology.”
Indeed, as Prof. Reynolds would say. I long ago fully reconciled my religious beliefs thoroughly with science, including Darwin and all the rest. To me, there is no conflict. Science merely describes the concrete nature of what God created and set working eons ago. It wasn’t even really that hard.
This fact, of course, really upsets True Believers on the Left in discussions, because once they find out that I simply don’t conform to their preconceived notions about “wingnuts” and in fact my understanding of science is close to or identical to their own, they are left with little else to attack my views on. It’s actually kind of fun when they flounder, float “racist” balloons (until I clue them in that my daughter is black) and go fishing for other “gotcha” items.
Wretchard @ 15:
Can people live forever in a wry state of absurdity, inside a running joke? Or must they turn, as Hasan turned, as environmentalists turned, as socialists for years have turned, to some kind of definite belief to give meaning to their lives? How many of those who think that “religion is the opiate of the people” also believe that Prohibition was a good idea?
As a practical matter people need to invest their lives with meaning, if only one of provisional nature. Science can work without eternal verities, but never without a working hypothesis. Man searches for meaning, but in order to do so sanely, he must believe that meaning exists
Gosh, W, you write like a man who has read Viktor Frankl. I tend to put a lot of stock in Frankl’s observations because he was in the Laboratory of Hell and saw this stuff first-hand. He was not lolling about in a sun-drenched theorizing abstractly upon meaning and survival.
Derbyshire is, from what I can gather, either a particularly obnoxious agnostic or a committed naturalist. The difficulty I have with taking committed naturalists seriously when they attempt to speak about what we would call spiritual or transcendant things, is that naturalism makes the a priori assumption that non-nature does not exist, and there is no truth that does not come from nature & the study of it ……. IOW, a wholly closed system, of which I find myself wanting to inquire, “And how do you know that?”
Derbyshire has been remarking on studies probing the possible existence of “the spirituality gene” in The Corner and other venues for probably at least a year or two now. Okay, whatever. But we have seen the road that biological determinism takes with regard to morality and it is not pretty.
We (the majority of humans) seem to keep returning to the conviction that meaning is somehow rooted in the transcendant. To either (a) carry ourselves around as gods on our own shoulders, or (b) bear the slings and arrows of this life as “outrageous fortune,” random meaninglessness, appears to be too much for the human psyche to bear and still operate productively.
If there’s going to be some “new” form of “religious impulse” in the future, I guess I would have to go with wetware that fixes this pesky search-for-meaning “bug” in humans by providing endorphin hits almost instantaneously at the slightest anxiety-inducing chemical imbalance. (The non-anxious do not worry about anything, including and especially meaning) What’s religious about that, you say? Well, what if humans start rejecting the code? What if it turns out it’s not just that we run on the answers to “why?” … but the ability to ask the question itself?
Föhrenwald47,
No immediate thoughts, but I did want to add that back in the day I was given a book by a very great patriot and former political prisoner, the late Filipino Senator Jose Wright Diokno. The book was called “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Victor Frankl. Diokno gave it to me because he had found it source of strength and wisdom during his confinement.
Some of the words in that book are “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Frankl quotes Nietschze who says, ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.’
I think this is true. At least, it is true for most. And if the country lacks for conviction in something — whatever that something may be — that is because the times since the Second World War have been largely good. No need to think about the last piece of bread. Too much entertainment to think about the why.
I am also reminded of another ghost from the past, a woman who mothered two high ranking Communists. One of them was killed fighting in the hills. And for a time she often went to the cancer ward at a local hospital for reasons she never made clear. And while there she discovered that none of the terminally ill had any interest in the collected works of Mao Tse Tung (sorry Anita Dunn).
If the notion of God is part of us, then we need not fear a time when we will be without the numinous, whether in the cancer ward or in the depths of a political prison, or even as Victor Frankl said, inside the concentration camp.
Lifeofthemind/34
“Without an external brake a man becomes his own god and then anything is possible.”
It is the human tendency to take shortcuts. If you look deeper into the judeo-christian conceptual framework, there is an implied concept that the intent of the God is to make mankind gods–his equals. But the path to that is strenuous and not without a sacrifice. The only way a member of mankind can arrive to godhood is through a complete discarding of hubris, arrogance and haughtiness. Only then they can fully understand the concept of responsibility, or rather live it. Although the story of the fallen angels is originally an overlay, a fable and allegory for events that once transpired and were of a different nature (actually many layers meshed together), it is still illustrative and illuminates the opposing aspect that renders the God’s gift unobtainable.
Lifeofthemind/34
twobyfour/41
“Without an external brake a man becomes his own god and then anything is possible.”
“If God does not exist, then everything is permitted” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Marxist religion confirmed this with 100,000,000 million civilian murders during the twentieth century. Since Islam has a god which views the individual in a similar way to the Marxists, i.e.: the insignificant individual; they (together) appear to be positioning themselves for a twenty-first century re-do.
Lord of the Flies comes to mind.
http://theblackbook.wordpress.com/2006/11/22/excerpt-from-introduction-the-crimes-of-communism-by-stephane-courtois/
SpeakEasy/37
Don’t underestimate your ability to verbalize and form correct conclusions. Your whole post is spot on.
In 1932 the Yankees beat the Cubs in the World Series despite my grandfather getting out Ruth, Gehrig , and Red Ruffing in order.
But germane to any topic on religion is its historical companion, war. In 1932 the League of Nations asked Albert Einstein to choose a correspondent to write to with the letters being published. Enstein chose Sigmund Freud.
Their correspondence is instructive of these two great minds, and reflects on not only war but on one of it’s major causations, religion.
http://tinyurl.com/yzfb5f7
Levinas has religion as the poeticization of ethics, and thus following from the inclination to see the other guy as having a claim for your help, which perhaps is what is uniquely human.
Here, look inside and search for “holy ark” p.17, for example.
And also, search for “being who says me” pick p.89
25/bogie wheel:
My statement might be less-credulous if you included the rest of it. I know I am not credulous in terms of BHO, I don’t listen to his speeches because they are the definition of sound and (lack of) fury, signifying nothing. He is a magician, and as such I don’t listen to his patter, I watch his hands and his props. What he says is useless as a guide to the man, he reads what’s put in front of him like Ron Burgundy. What he does is much more revealing because his main use of language seems to be obfuscation. I agree with you that he makes Christian noises only when there is no chance his words will offend anyone, or to shield him from criticism, but not in the way that someone who has experienced the transformative power of religion does. It is not important enough for him and his family to even regularly attend a church in the DC area. After all, we wouldn’t want to offend the Bill Maher demographic, would we?
People who believe that religion of all types is shaking rattles at the stars are the people I worry about. I think that the last President took religiously-motivated threats seriously because he understood personally what religious motivation is about. People who think solely in terms of political motivation or material motivation are likely to dismiss religious threats, and further dismiss the people who are alarmed by threats in the context of religion. When these people are in charge of the safety of their fellow citizens and during a time when religiously-motivated threats are the main external dangers to our nation, I think this becomes a very dangerous blind spot.
twobyfour,
There was more intellectual communication in the ancient world then our arrogant contemporary world understands. Why people even learned about people from other lands before there was an internet! Back in those primitive times two groups traveled around to help pollinate cultural content. The first were merchants, who usually would observe but not share because you don’t give anything away and the customer doesn’t want to hear your ideas while he is haggling over the price of dates. The second were soldiers, who did often travel with priests, artists and other intellectuals in tow and who were not the least bit shy about sharing their information, cultural or genetic, with those they met.
While I do not see the idea of God intending humans to deify I do see how the question of persistent personality as the soul returns to God could resonate with the concept of angels. Most people confuse the concepts of angels and saints. The alternative is the idea that even if the soul persists the identity is burned off in the presence of God. The Buddhist concept of soul transmigration and extinction through nirvana is not only rooted in vedic Hinduism, itself based on a core belief in a unifying divine force in the universe, Brahma but also in Hellenistic philosophical concepts that came with Alexander’s army. The Greeks knew the Jews, even if they disagreed, the Jews knew the Persians, the Persians knew the Greeks, etc. So not only was Christianity molded by Jewish, Greek and Egyptian sources but all these currents were flowing between the Mediterranean and Central to South Asia. Indeed the odd character out in all this theological ferment was Islam. They seem to have come late, heard everything second hand and gotten the important parts wrong. Perhaps trade routes had shifted and made the Hejaz into a real backwater. For those of us who enjoy making references to Tolkien’s ainur (vala or maia), elves and humans waiting in the Halls of Mandos this is a good time to plug in the links.
The god of Islam is like Calvin on steroids, arbitrary and angry. Only this time inconsistent, as Hasan noted capable of changing the perfect revelation to demonstrate the flawed perception and incompetence of humans. This is a god who discovers a “kangaroo strait” rule in the middle of a poker game, or boxes of ballots in the trunk of a car after an election.
Romans 8: 28-39
More Than Conquerors
28And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,[j] who[k] have been called according to his purpose. 29For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
31What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”[l] 37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[m] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Historian Geoffrey Ashe, and in a different manner, Edith Hamilton, both said, more or less, that you never take myths literally but you always take them seriously.
For example: The bridge Horatius was defending could be held by three guys. Not a big bridge. The bad guys had no way across, otherwise. Presumably any party sent to look for boats would strike out on its own.
Horatius and his two buddies had to hold the bridge while the old crocks of the city council were down in the riverbed chopping at the supports.
When three guys are your last line and the geezers of the zoning commission your strategic reserve, you don’t have much going for you.
IOW, this was a story of infant Rome under threat from the pre-classical equivalent of a biker gang.
So why did the Romans tell each other the story for a thousand years?
And why did generations of British and American school children memorize Macaulay’s version?
In Puck of Pook’s Hill, Kipling has Oona magic up a centurion from the Wall by shouting verses from Lays of Ancient Rome into the wind. He expected his audience to know the Lays and to see nothing out of line with an eleven-year-old girl knowing them.
Why?
BTW, see “A Medal for Horatius” which, this day of all days, seems appropriate. You can probably find it by searching for the title.
Obama: “no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts”
Um… except Islam. So more evidence of duplicity, or – much more likely – plain laziness. You’d have to read only 20 pages of the Koran, just that 1 book, before you realized the place of …
And so since we have not read and cannot hear we have no other way of interpreting the motivation of others except in terms of concepts we can know and feel – which is to say our own, dominantly liberal, or (specifically enough) anti-anti-Communism.
Which brings me to the following point, riffing on your Nietzsche quote:
Wretchard wrote: “And if the country lacks for conviction in something — whatever that something may be — that is because the times since the Second World War have been largely good.”
Consider. Nietzsche believed that Nihilism was the logical consequence of the destruction of Christianity/God because Christianity happens to be – for lack of a better word – ideology which purports to Explain Everything. This in contradistinction to, say, The Age of Constantine (by Jakob Burkhardt, N’s favorite historian), which was an absolute orgy of different beliefs, few or none of them totalizing, all more or less compatible with the existence of other gods. The only exception was Judaism, with its single jealous god, who demanded exclusive obedience, yet which begat Christ amid the Augustinian world-breaking welter. And Christ went forth and conquered.
But by the 19th century, having maintained its dominions really up until the advent of Socialism in the latter half of the 19th century, more or less, for hundreds of years, and having stamped out serious contention for rivalry – when that idol falls what else is there to replace it? Nihil. Nothing.
Now – what if it is the case that, similarly, the post-war consensus was short-lived precisely because the Uniquely Good War, the Second World War, had absolutely monopolized the public spirit, so that once its bright sunlight waned – what Nietzsche might call “The Great Noon” – what could compete, at least emotionally or spiritually, with that mighty self-evidently Good Campaign? The clarity of other things and policies paled and paled and enabled the habit of equivocation exploited to great effect by…
Oh wait. You mean there was a giant concentration camp ideology called Communism? Communism, piloted by Joseph Stalin, who funded and directed and generally unleashed a colossal Narrative of Anti-Fascism! on the rest of the ambivalent world? Stalin, whose propaganda monopolized public discourse (after almost inventing it) over a huge swath of the Earth, whose intelligence services worked for the subversion of every nation on Earth, who may have effectively improvised the Second World War itself to bring about the World Revolution denied in the wake of the First?
That is, wasn’t World War 2 to a very large extent Communism’s Great Noon?
I wonder if it is a case of, humanity being incurably superficial, “Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Is Empty?”
I’m sick of all these other theories and sociologies and philosophies and theologies. The world is shaped by actions – thought is an action. All these theories simply betray a lack of good intel. The Era’s Answer lies in this odd relationship to Soviet Communism. I know it, even if eloquence fails me yet.
Habu/44
Their correspondence is instructive of these two great minds, and reflects on not only war but on one of it’s major causations, religion.
Don’t have time to read through it… but can you formulate, if you agree with that premise, how is a religion a major causation of wars (unless the wars are a cornerstone of such a religion as is with Islam)?
It is true that often the initiators of wars used a religion as the pretext for their less noble goals, or as a form of defensive/offensive banner, like for instance crusades. But if you analyze each war case by case, the religion was not the major cause.
Again, with the exception of Islam, or creeds of some Amerindian tribes that were based on a ritual human sacrifice (Aztec. Maya, Inca), as well as for instance Papua/New Guinean tribes that had a similar core beliefs, too, the degree of sophistication with which the sacrifice were rendered, notwithstanding.
The major cause of any war, the offensive, initiating component of it, is simply the quest for power and acquisition of resources. Find any war where that is not true. And I mean a war, not a battle.
Even the Iraq war had that component, though it could be understood as a mere battle, just one theater in the current war that is fought by many means and that was initiated by Islam. The “interest” is a transmogrified code word for the quest for an advantage. The defensive aspect was, though, prevalent in this particular case.
“So why did the Romans tell each other the story for a thousand years?”
I’m going to with, “Because they were Romans for another thousand years, and not Etruscan biker gang chattel.”
The future belongs to the people who show up for it — I think Mark Steyn said that, or some close approximation thereof.
Wretchard I suspect that the effect of the conflict between Islam and the post-religious West will be to transform the conflict into one of annihilation.
In WWI, the German Empire entered the conflict with limited objectives: force a defeat on the Russians and French and British, protect Austria-Hungary, gain acceptance as a strong colonial power. Britain entered mainly to protect Belgian neutrality. As time went on and casualties mounted, war aims changed radically in scope. Each side wanted enormous territorial and other concessions so as to make any peace agreement impossible. Since so much blood and treasure had already been lost.
The effect is slower, because the casualties are lower, in the West. But eventually, they will come. The nation that will emerge out of say, a nuked DC and NYC and Atlanta, from terminal political correctness and Diversity and Multiculturalism will reject ALL OF THAT.
It will be largely, an America organized along military lines. Along the majority population and along fairly strong Evangelical-Christianity. With explicitly defined enemies, chief among them, Muslims. A casualty list in the millions of Americans post-nuclear blasts will do that. And there will be no turning back.
You can already see this — Sarah Palin occupying the approximate Andrew Jackson position, rapidly increasing and permanent unemployment, open mocking of the “rules” (see Ace of Spades posts) of PC diversity.
The West cannot remain in a state of Seinfeldian irony. A show where nothing happens requires … nothing happening. And something is definitely happening.
To me, technology leads us to religion.
Why else would our probes into space and plumbing of the depths lead up to conceive a creation exactly as told in Genesis – and one covering seven periods of time (not days, and the Hebrew original did not say days). The Big Bang theory was absurd at one time; today we know that there was indeed a “let there be light” moment at the start of creation.
In the 19th century organisms seemed about as complex as steam engines. Organisms burned food like engines did coal. Pneumatic and hydraulic processes made everything work. Evolution seemed entirely possible.
Today we look in wonder at even single celled organisms that had to be designed and could not have evolved from random chemical processes. We are astonished at intricacies of a single human cell. We are now knowledgeable enough to know how incredibly impossible life is. Classical evolution just does not work anymore. What was self-evident in the age of steam engines is now seen as impossibly intricate in the age of supercomputers.
And finally – Happy Veterans’ Day! I just came back from lunch with my Mom and I was surprised to see how many restaurants were offering free meals to former military. This is something new, and in the Age of Obama, very surprising.
But wait a minute .. restaurant owners and the people employed there actually work for a living. They were not dancing in the streets a year ago saying “I no longer have to make my house and car payments and will not have to worry about paying for gas.” Now I understand.
Habu,
Thank you for that excellent find that I intend to spend some time studying. These displaces the time I had set aside for Postmodern Pooh, really a friend gave me that. What Einstein, and maybe Freud, fail to consider at my first glance is the nature of the regimes that would constitute the prospective world government. How can a sum be any better than its’ parts? The possible role of totalitarian regimes in the League, Soviet or Nazi was before them. The experience of Fascism was already ten years old but the example does not inform their discussion. Freud noted that Medieval christian nations would ally with muslim nations against other members of Christendom. He does not consider the possible effects of having the Qadis sitting in the Law Courts and the cities of Rotterdam, Milan and Manchester occupied by muslims.
On my #47 strait=straight.
There have a number of experiments tracking blood flow in the brain of those who are meditating or praying. I remember (sorta) a dialog a Belgian experimenter had about it. His theory was that a number of people were more physiological capable of getting solace from prayer. Someone said, “So then religious belief is just an accident of biology then.”
His reply was, “It might be that God has made a number of people that way.”
The fun of life is finding out the answers, at finding out whether you’ll win while at the Big Casino. It’s always better to think that the prizes are real and that the answers are meaningful. Cause they just might be. One could of course, take the view that it don’t mean nothing. But since it doesn’t let you out of the Casino there seems little point to it. It’s perfectly possible to read the quotations of Mao Tse Tung on your cancer sick bed, or praise Joseph Stalin in the concentration camp, but there’s no advantage to it. You could do it, but whatever for?
sorry, did not mean to post just yet!
my two cents:
Perhaps there’s a bit of ‘dancing on the head of a pin’ going on here?
Might not mankind’s near universal persistence of religious belief have, as explanation, a simple answer: the soul’s spiritual yearning for reconnection and oneness with God?
You know, Genesis does speak of it.
If we, in fact are God’s ‘lost’ children, how could we not mightily yearn for reunion with “a love that surpasses all understanding”?
Religion offers two things to any society that are of inestimable value: premises that transcend personal opinion and the societal cohesion that results from premises we can all agree upon.
Without social cohesion there is no possibility of maintaining civilization and eventually we are all reduced to the survival of the fittest.
Dostoyevsky’s “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted” concisely illustrates the consequential loss of social cohesion that inevitably develops in any society that abandons transcendent premises.
Most importantly, the veracity of any religion’s transcendent premises is irrelevant to the larger allegiance they allow to believers; that mankind’s limited understanding and the mere personal opinion and popular public whim of the moment that results, are overridden by the assertion that religion’s premises are based upon transcendent truths that allow a deeper understanding of that reality which, composes our very existence.
America has come the closest to secular transcendent ‘truths’ with its proclamation of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but these are claimed to be inalienable rights because of the premise that they are granted by our creator and thus transcend human opinion as to their validity. It is asserted that they are divinely granted rights and, thus inalienable rights that cannot be taken away.
There’s just no getting away from the need for and necessity of, a set of ‘organizational moral principles’ that individuals can embrace in order to form a society and, since one individual’s premises are as logically valid as anothers, only transcendent premises have the organizational power to bind men together.
Wretchard implicitly and now Charles is as explicit as ever- for us believers there is meaning in our sacrifices.
W and this forum are in extra good form today.
May God bless you and keep you, make his face to shine upon you and grant you peace – to all y’all but especially you veterans.
One thread common to islam, marxism, cults and evil is this: Once in, you can’t leave. Communism built walls to keep people in. Islam kills apostates. Cults make it painful to leave. Scientology and Jehovah’s Witnesses both share that trait. Evil tricks you into letting it in. It shows the angel of light face until you let it in the door, then the true nature is revealed. Evil, islam and marxism want you slave, or dead.
God and good, says you are free to go. Love sets you free. Jesus came to set captives free. To offer wholeness. To heal. To offer forgiveness. To love us so much, to die for us. When Jesus walked past, there was power to heal, He didn’t have to do anything, the power was so strong. Yet he never coerced, never manipulated, simply asked: “Do you want to be healed?”
The most amazing part of the universe is that it is designed for free will. Quantum mechanics proves you cannot know the result from a starting position. 19th century science thought God couldn’t exist because there was no place for him. Just because you can’t see, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Rather I see a universe created for creatures both physical and spiritual, created to be able to come voluntarily. This is the great cosmic gamble, God lets us go so we can come to Him.
I see God in quantum mechanics, the same way I see him in Mark’s testimony.
Darren
Bingo. WRT the Romans, anyway. Why others two thousand and some years later?
IMO, it’s the line, “but how can man die better…?”
You either take that into yourself and hope the opportunity doesn’t arise, or you don’t.
It was admirable.
Fabulous stuff, BCers.
w
there she discovered that none of the terminally ill had any interest in the collected works of Mao Tse Tung.
True, but the terminally ill were directly facing their end. Most of the time, most people, religious or otherwise are not.
On the basis that people create their gods (which partly explains hunter/gatherer gods from settler gods), the more interesting question is: given that society X has chosen God G, what does it say about the values of society X. For example, given that the Arabs have chosen Islam, what does it say about their culture?
But leave that question aside for the moment. What infuriates me is the use that charlatans (aka priests, imams, deep greenies, warmists, socialists, professional nice guys on the tele, Omighty) make of the structure to advance their power over others. (Allthough I’d have to say Ratzinger is playing his hand very carefully)
And now I’m back to the frame, and a nuanced speech.
ADE
Richard writes: “Man survives upon God, but societies rely upon gods to subsist.”
People talk about the disappearance of religion in Europe, and maybe it’s true, but visit Seville during Holy Week to see what a society looks like that relies upon God (and the Virgin) to subsist. America’s not that kind of place, but it’s interesting to see how religion increasingly must be private and not public, at the risk of giving offence.
wretchard writes: “Is it possible for humanity’s billions to go around in a kind of existential tension, like a man who wishes to go to the toilet but can’t? Can people live forever in a wry state of absurdity, inside a running joke?”
A great convention of the all wee-wee’d up existential basketcases was recently on full display in the comments section of the “Kirkegaard on the Couch” article in the NYT on Oct. 30, the most frequently e-mailed article of the week. Of course it’s NYC, but it’s amusing, and sad, to see so many psychoanalysts weighing in and having so little to say, especially about God, who barely gets a nod from the learned doctors and clients.
One might note that “family” or “children” are words that didn’t enter much into the post-modern comments. The existential crisis of the self doesn’t seem to leave much time for the selves to give serious thought about reproduction, or ensuring the kind of society and economy that can sustain it.
Life of the Mind: Did you catch my #83 on the “Frame 2″ thread?
Hate to toot my own horn, but since nobody else wants to toot it for me———-.
It seems to me that Islam, at least the Arab
version thereof, can and does lead to a deep-seated belief that the road to salvation
requires the perpetuation of evil. That if you do not go around slaughtering, torturing and enslaving your fellow human beings, you will suffer eternal hellfire and damnation.
Either I have had (a) a brillant insight or
(b) another attack of CRIS (cranial rectal inversion syndrome). Your opinion, sir?
(will check back later, after work)
Lifeofthemind/47
For the sake of brevity and due to the format in which we participate, we all are using reductive arguments.
No doubt, there was a cross-pollination of ideas in the past, theology naturally, too, was a part of the exchange.
You can find traces of budhism and even hinduism in the Essene theological constructs and reflected in early christian framework. I say it is actually older than that, these ideas were present in different forms in all creeds since first writing documented them. The later major religion were selective in their focus–hinduism concentrated on concept of incarnation, while budhism concentrated on the concept of oneness with God. You could go back in time and find these concepts in different degrees contained in previous theologies.
At the beginning was Sumer and these concepts were introduced there as far into history as we can go.
The alternative is the idea that even if the soul persists the identity is burned off in the presence of God.
There are different hierarchies of identities. The soul is one of them and is the first bridge between the human form and the divine. The identity is not burned off, it is just becoming a part of a composite soul that encompasses many lifetime experiences. One may see it as a form of evolution, but it is not governed by time (in the linear, gradual sense as hinduism, or to some degree budhism, presumes) but rather by completion. Our perception of time is not relevant at that level as time is an illusion from that perspective, or may be considered a parameter that constrict or envelopes our human experience. On that level, time is a focus. It is actually apparent even to the soul when it crosses the boundary of human existence, even if it is only temporarily at some occasions (NDE).
What is beyond that I can’t tell. Not that I did not get a glimpse… it is something that am unable to translate and did reach an understanding why I shouldn’t even attempt it. There is a specific purpose to our lives and we will gain understanding of the bigger picture when we are ready on a personal (soul) and then on a superpersonal (composite) levels.
The theologies are a form of guidance. The religions are a form of organized guidance-social systems. Every religion has a con job (socio-political) aspect inherent in it, but some took that part to a stratospheric height, drowning most of the original message in a human folly..
As I was reading the comments on the “Kierkegaard” NYT article, I thought to myself, “Hasn’t any one of these people read Victor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’?”
twobyfour @ 41:
It is the human tendency to take shortcuts. If you look deeper into the judeo-christian conceptual framework, there is an implied concept that the intent of the God is to make mankind gods–his equals.
From what I understand of Mormon teaching and certain heretical Christian preaching, yes, men can become “little gods” or some type of god after eons and eons. In orthodox Christian teaching, a most emphatic no. Humans may become “Christ-like” in terms of being conformed more and more to His character in love, peace, kindness, gentleness and ultimately holiness … but we can never become God or even gods, and at no point could we ever be considered His equals in power, glory, wisdom, or infinity. We are and will always be creatures, utterly distinct as such from the Creator.
As for taking shortcuts, that does seem to be a human trait, doesn’t it? Cf. “knowledge of good and evil, tree of.”
LOTM @ 55:
What Einstein, and maybe Freud, fail to consider at my first glance is the nature of the regimes that would constitute the prospective world government. How can a sum be any better than its’ parts? The possible role of totalitarian regimes in the League, Soviet or Nazi was before them. The experience of Fascism was already ten years old but the example does not inform their discussion.
I had the same shudder up the spine reading the passage where Einstein wrote:
Thus I am led to my first axiom: The quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action–its sovereignty that is to say–and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.
It was, and still is, the prevailing opinion among some people that national sovereignty is an obstacle to world peace. And yet a century-plus of experience shows that sovereign democracies do not war against each other … it is, rather, totalitarian countries bent on external conquest that are the major aggressors. Sovereignty per se isn’t the destructive catalyst; it is the insatiable quest for power. Those who won’t stop within their own borders are unlikely to stop at them, either.
The faith that Einstein puts in a world “legislative and judicial body” is baffling since, as you observed, there was no shortage of poisonous ideology in his day and there was every reason to believe that scaling government up to a global level would not neutralize the poisons but could quite conceivably spread them even further and faster.
This seems to me a geopolitical version of kicking the can down the road … instead of hoping that time will resolve the problem, hoping that throwing hundreds of millions, even billions, more people into the sphere of the problem will somehow solve the problem. Collectivism at its “best.”
The American Revolution was/is the crowning achievement of Western (Reason) and Middle Eastern (Judeo-Christian Faith) Civilization; and it’s (our) values are summed up in the Declaration of Independence. The goal of our Revolution is “Peace Under Liberty.”
The Marxist and Islamist Revolutions are the worst achievements of Western and Middle Eastern Civilizations; their values articulated in holy books (Manifesto & Koran/Hadiths). The goal of the Marxist and Islamist Revolutions is the same: “Peace Under Tyranny.”
Notice that the goal is the same: Peace
When the Peace is exchanged at Church I often hear my neighbor say to me: “God’s Peace.” I sometimes reply “Peace Under Liberty,” which is in fact God’s Peace.
69/Storm-Rider:
Re: Peace,
Margaret Thatcher said during the Cold War, “We speak of peace, yes, but whose peace? Poland’s? Bulgaria’s? The peace of the grave?”
Smart lady. People who are willing to accept any peace are nearly as dangerous to their own tribe as those willing to support any war. Maybe more so, because some wars are worth fighting and some peaces not worth having.
M/67; i suspect a lot of the folks on this site are intuitive Frankl methodologists –don’t you?
Thanks to all BC commentators – I continually learn from you.
Dave/65
It seems to me that Islam, at least the Arab
version thereof, can and does lead to a deep-seated belief that the road to salvation
requires the perpetuation of evil. That if you do not go around slaughtering, torturing and enslaving your fellow human beings, you will suffer eternal hellfire and damnation.
The evil is sublimated by a simple dichotomy: us and them. This dichotomy, in degrees, is a normal part of social organization (the lefties would tend to deny that (kumbaya), but it is just a part of their lobotomized mental processes, because they then invoke even more pronounced dichotomies (reactionary, kulak, bourgeois, class enemy, filthy capitalist). In the case of Islam, the dichotomy is absolute. The Dar-ul Harb beings are considered less than human (similar to Nazi dichotomy of ubermench and untermench).
Another aspect of Islam is that in opposition of all modern religions it dragged from the folds of time the element of a ritual or ritualized human sacrifice. There were some other creed fairly recently that had the same underpinning, but they were not numerous due to their exclusivity or lack of the developed political element–like Thuggees.
These two concept are reflected in your correct observation. It is not something that is necessarily reflected in all Islam’s branches–there were many small sects that came and went (usually by being regarded as apostates and killed off) that tried to transcend this unfortunate aspect, but main schools of Islam have these two components at their core.
Mohammed goal was the loot. The rest–the whole edifice–was a sauce devised how to get it. It is a simplification, but deserved one. The Mecca Mohamed was after what he considered his birthright–a part of the Meccan pagan pilgrimage parcel profit, but that was not in his stars. With the help of his wife, he started to create an elaborate scheme how to get it. But he was expelled from Mecca once his schemes become a public knowledge. During hijra in Medina, he revised his scheme by trial and error, incorporating jumbled bits and pieces from his earlier discussions with rabbis and christian scholars and decided that employing all stratagems of war and deception is his best strategy and abrogation is his tool. He was a revengeful and lustful god, and his pathologies and greed were framing his concepts more and more as he gained power.
The rest is a history.
Dave,
Neither of your two conditions apply. Hasan said essentially that himself in his presentation. So you are neither blindingly insightful nor autoproctological on this one. Now how do we respond to that information about their intentions?
#13 twobyfour,
you object to the line That semiotic communication arose among us centered on a god-concept is scarcely refutable as a historical fact. It is this fact, not the question of “the existence of God,” that is of fundamental anthropological interest.
“semiotic communication” is not here redundant because it is being used to distinguish human communication, through the use of signs or symbols, from animal signal systems. The difference is indeed fundamental and is but one of the reasons applying Darwinian ideas to the study of language and religion often leads one astray. Human language is unique and its emergence in the world cannot be explained by any evolutionary theory, however much some biological evolution was no doubt necessary to the human capacity for language. Biology is necessary but not sufficient to understanding what is necessary for human language to work: a shared consciousness of a shared scene. In other words, one needs a theory of an event if one is to have a convincing anthropology of our religious nature. Religion, most fundamentally, is a way of remembering (or mythologizing and “mis”representing) real events.
This emphasis on the communal, “real time”, shared scenic nature of language origins is something Chomsky does not appreciate. The writer you are being rude about, Eric Gans, has developed a truly innovative hypothesis of language origins, one that leaves Chomsky and all others well behind.
bogie wheel/68
From what I understand of Mormon teaching and certain heretical Christian preaching, yes, men can become “little gods” or some type of god after eons and eons. In orthodox Christian teaching, a most emphatic no. Humans may become “Christ-like” in terms of being conformed more and more to His character in love, peace, kindness, gentleness and ultimately holiness … but we can never become God or even gods, and at no point could we ever be considered His equals in power, glory, wisdom, or infinity.
Mormons’ concepts are more like scientology paradigm than a christian theology. Not without a reason, Hubbard decidely found a lot of inspiration in mormonism.
The orthodox churches of present (and granted, for quite a while) do no equal the christian philosophy in pre-Nicean times.
The the focus changed after Nicea, or even before that. It all depends what aspect of existence became expedient. The church fathers, as the church as a whole became more a socio-political structure, adopted interpretations that were better suited for the role it decided it needs to play.
There is a core belief system that is common in judeo-christian context. It’s the 10 commandments. The rest is interpretations. They are not that crucial to the human existential framework. Their purpose is to scaffold and elucidate that core.
In a sense, it is what truly matters. Even agnostics have to admit that it is a system that is truly extraordinary. Deviations often carry a high price.
Most of the people have some concept of the beyond. Intuitively they know that the transcendence is a part of their being. The mechanism is really not that relevant, or essential for one to lead a good life. It would be revealed to you when you are ready.
Even if you don’t accept the possibility of transcendence, there is still a guide that is vetted by time and you know it is true. You may think of it as a flash of brilliance that for some reason Moses was privy to–he was apparently a very intelligent and erudite man–maybe he figured it all out.
At the time when many religions or creeds elected the human sacrifice avenue, he went into an opposite direction, whatever was at the root of his flash of brilliance.
Back to “little gods”… That is not concept that I was trying to convey… with some form of a “verse”‘s real estate and a deed to rule it. Just to make it clear. The forms you find yourself in when your time comes are beyond description in our framework and are not translatable. All I can do is something akin to a crude cartoon-like rendition.
We are and will always be creatures, utterly distinct as such from the Creator.
In our form, as flesh and blood human beings, that is absolutely true.
LOTM
The Freud/Einstein letters instruct us that mastery in one field , or substantial IQ’s do not equate to knowledgeable and full understanding in other areas. Some of their letters are better than others especially when they discuss the nature of man, yet even then Einstein is not as turgid as Freud .
Batman (#18),
I really like what you said here…
Jamie Irons
truepeers/76
Thanks for the elucidation. I stand corrected and will Czech Gans out.
One quip… his construct may be rendered in more reader friendly terms. I know that academicians are usually writing for a peer perusal and assume a degree of familiarity with the terminology they use, but they often resort to the jargon by default, instead of trying to use semantic devices that would provide more clarity. QED, I misinterpreted what he is trying to say. Perhaps it is because the segment you posted is out of the context and placed in it, it would be then more clear.
The excessive use of jargon is often used by mediocre minds to hide the lack of internal consistency and logic. On the surface, it may seem that the author is tying to say something, but no one can decipher it and everyone is in awe because it seems to be that far beyond their comprehension … so it must be utterly brilliant. The very example of that sin is Chomsky. He bamboozled many in believing in him as almost a demigod of linguistics.
Sorry to be going around simply praising contributors and offering so little myself, but I was very impressed by Lifeofthemind (#34), and wretchard at #40 in response to Föhrenwald47 brought tears to my eyes.
This site is amazing.
Jamie Irons
Habu/78
What can I say? I would have to parrot you word for word.
Wow…this issue of BC took me only 4 or 5 minutes…totally boring for an atheist. But I’ll be back for the more intellectual offerings on the BC from y’all. I learn every day from the intellects on BC, for the life of me I cannot get interested in todays issue. Good health to you.
IMHO, I don’t think religion in the West is dead, it’s just been driven underground, into the realm of deep, personal introspection. Western religion is in the same position today that free market Capitalism was in a year ago: in hiding. The Left, Controllers of The Narrative, have ridiculed and marginalized both philosophies to such a degree that they were, until very recently, both deeply uncool. It was only when free market economics came under open assault by an openly hostile administration that you saw the first, almost frantic, stirrings of organized resistance. Within the space of a year, Obama has galvanized free marketeers to an unprecedented degree: we don’t care anymore that we’re uncool. That same dynamic will apply when Christianity comes under open and brutal assault, when a critical mass of Christians begin to see that they are under personal and individual threat. When it finally becomes personal, the gloves will come off.
Föhrenwald47:
When they held the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Wash DC they did something remarkable, one that we would do well to recall, especially on 11 Nov.
They held a ceremony honoring the men who liberated the camps. One of the old soldiers so honored said “We did nothing so great. We just opened the gate and walked in.” And to that someone asked “But what did you and your friends have to go through to get to those gates?”
The camps were not shut down because the Nazis grew weary or the ovens broke down. They were not liberated by people carrying signs in New York and DC or meeting in Geneva. Men fought their way to those camps, slept in wet foxholes, trudged through the snow, fought tanks that had far larger guns and thicker armor than theirs had, and did a thousand million things, each of which are nearly unbelievable to us today.
I saw on the Discovery Channel some time back an interview with a Jewish lady who was in one of the camps. Word came that the Americans had arrived. She spoke English so she went to find them. She found a US solider in a Jeep and said to him “I am Jewish.” He replied “So am I.” She told him that there were a number of woman who needed medical help right away. He asked her to take him to them.
She led him to the barracks and he opened the door and held it for her. She stopped and stared in wonder. Here was man in uniform with a gun and he was holding the door for her. She said “I knew at that moment that civilization had returned.”
I have always held doors for woman all my life. Now when I do it, I stand with that solider, for civilization as it should be.
BooreyPith/83
Wow…this issue of BC took me only 4 or 5 minutes…totally boring for an atheist.
Do we need to apologize profusely for causing you a bout of boredom… or what?
See, I would never post something similar on a thread that would be solely devoted to atheistic point of view.
Mind you, I’d categorize myself as an agnostic.
God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being. This is why St. Augustine says that the most beautiful thing a person can say about God consists in that person’s being silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth. So be silent and don’t flap your gums about God, for to the extent that you flap your gums about God you lie and you commit sin. If you want to be without sin and perfect, then do not flap your gums about God. Nor should you want to know anything about God, for God is above knowledge.
Meister Eckhart
Jamie Irons -
Welcome back. I was wondering the other day what you were up to (sometimes it’s hard to keep in mind that people DO have their own lives out there), and I fancied the thought that you were on an epic bird-watching expedition.
Somewhat OT but highly relevant to Veterans Day:
In the mid-1970′s I was a physician (at that time a family doctor, not yet a psychiatrist) on the Navajo Indian Reservation, in Ganado, Arizona. I had one patient who had been one of the Navajo Marines who had been made a “Code Talker.”
Just a very few of these heroes survive.
Read about them here:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/yagcfn7
(Click on “Proceed to this site” when you arrive at “tinyURL.com”.)
Jamie Irons
bob @ 87:
So be silent and don’t flap your gums about God, for to the extent that you flap your gums about God you lie and you commit sin.
Uh oh. Then that Jesus guy is in biiiiig trouble.
“Nor should you want to know anything about God, for God is above knowledge.”
Isn’t this what the Muslims say about Allah?
God is not only life, liberty, creativity and love; He is reason. No, God is approachable, because we are made in His image; with the above attributes. We are free to make the approach – or not.
bob from Idaho/87
As my friend Jerry used to say in his admonition # 17: “If God did not want us to flap our gums, he would have given us a straw instead of a mouth”.
#3 Walt, that was awesome. The meter reminded me of Chesterton’s style, and the subject reminded me of his Lepanto. Thanks.
WDMFF@84: That same dynamic will apply when Christianity comes under open and brutal assault, when a critical mass of Christians begin to see that they are under personal and individual threat. When it finally becomes personal, the gloves will come off.
But as well, Christian worship became a cartoon caricature of faith, grace, and redemption with the rise to prominence of televangelism.
An observation shared with me by a consistently wise relative, the televangelists are all opposed to health care reform, which they are, but the why of it – because their congregations will have little left to put on the collection plate after health care becomes more expensive.
As they say, your humor mileage may vary, but I think that’s hysterically funny … and quite likely accurate.
bob from Idaho/87
continued…
Yes, there is nothing like standing in the middle of nowhere, under a starry night sky and experience the mystery and beauty of it all and suddenly the innate understanding, a recognition of God’s presence takes your breath away…
And you can say a prayer in your mind, or say it in a whisper or say it out loud.
The third commandment says:
Lo’ teesah et shem Adonai.
Thou shall not take the name of God in vain.
It means do not swear on the God if your intentions are deceitful.
It does not mean that when you talk about God, you lie because you can’t really fully comprehend God. God has given you certain facilities–your brain, your mind and the vocal chord to express sounds in a meaningful way, you are a social being and that is how you form concepts, by flapping your gums, by asking questions. Or if someone responds to your question–unless they want to deceive you, they provide their understanding of the God. And you form a concept, a seed that may form a bridge between you and God as your understanding may grow in time. You just have to find that one starry night in the middle of nowhere to get that deeper understanding that is beyond the expression in words.
Geeze Louise/94
Televangelism is an abomination, whether the lead salesman is a preacher or 0′bam’ah.
Ragnar D/96
People don’t understand what Hell is.
It is not a place of consuming fire and of demons shredding your internal organs. You may think you have a body, but you don’t. There are no internals, nor limbs.
Nor it is a recognition that there is oblivion into which you emerge, forever, without a trace.
It’s a junction outside space and time where your actions and intents would be replayed, with all the pain that your victims, if there were any, felt, unadulterated, raw, in full force. Outside time, it would feel like an eternity.
No guts. Granted, some people do tend to get stuck in the transposition of their baggage into the next world.
But that is their construct, a facade that for some reason they are unable to let go of. They would be creating their own torment. It would have nothing to do with anyone else.
You stand confronted with what you perceive as your maker, it’s between you and your maker alone. You are your own judge–you are given means to do the job–a mirror that reflects your life, but with a superb clarity, in minute details and with causal connections totally revealed. Many orders of magnitude real than your lifetime experiences.
You’ll know that there is no room for vengeance, for that you would turn against yourself.
I am sorry I can’t present something more than a shadow, a reduced bad facsimile. But perhaps this would provide an insight that whatever in your life you do is important, in more ways than you think or know.
@34 LotM
~ “Most people confuse the concepts of angels and saints.” ~
This is a bit off the beaten track of this thread’s discussion, but you put me in mind of something in Lady Gregory’s “Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland”. The book is mainly about the Sidhe (pronounced shee), elemental beings who inspired Yeats and were later bowdlerized as leprechauns by Disney and Hallmark. After a passage describing the appearance of the dead among the Sidhe, she writes:
~ “The dead are of the nature of the Saints, mortals who have put on immortality, who have known the troubles of the world. The Sidhe have been, like the Angels, from before the making of the earth. In the old times in Ireland they were called gods or the children of gods; now it is laid down they are those Angels who were cast out of heaven, being proud.” ~
BTW you mentioned Tolkien and “plugging in the links” – I’ve linked to this poem before but it’s been a long time
and it bears on the discussion here
http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/mythopoeia.html
All wishes are not idle, nor in vain
fulfilment we devise — for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is deadly certain: Evil is. ~
@76 truepeers, @80 twobyfour
Wouldn’t the “shared scenic nature of language” be its literature? Tolkien argued that the study of the two were inseparable and that any attempt to understand the one without the other was incomplete. His teaching career was dedicated to the cause of bridging the academic divide between Language and Literature (a “long defeat” as it turns out)
@85 RWE
My uncle took part in the liberation of Ohrdruff. He and my father normally didn’t have much to say about the war but they were moved to speak about it after Eichmann was captured – they said they were telling us because the day would come when people would deny it ever happened. That seemed impossible to me then, but here we are.
marymcl, #33: So-called ethical religions (and New Age fads as well) fall flat in the end because they try to ignore both the darker mysteries and travails of human existence and/or the reality of powers greater than ourselves. In a word, they are shallow. The old-school atheists like Camus took matters of faith much more seriously and while I disagree with their conclusion they at least gave the question the profound consideration it deserves.
It seems to me there are (at least) two kinds of atheists: those who categorically deny the existence of God, and those who are merely hostile toward society’s prevailing conception of God – in the West’s case, the Judeo-Christian conception.
It also seems to me that the atheism of the Left is pretty much dominated by the latter variety. To hear them talk, they don’t reject Christianity so much because Christianity’s God doesn’t exist, as because they see Christianity’s God as the root of all the evils they accuse Christianity of, as though God were just another powerful victimizer or oppressor from which to be liberated. Big Oil, Big Tobacco, the Big Guy In The Sky… same difference.
twoby/97; i think of the Swaggarts and Bakers and McPhersons and all those fraudulent preachers as being a sidewise compliment to a very open, trusting nature in their followers. What do they trust? Well, the Lord. What is the bad preacher? the Bible come to life, that warning, from the Jewish book Deuteronomy warning of listening to the Dreamer of Dreams, to the Christian book warning of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Anyhoo, tremendous, lifting thread, such wonderful comments–
What sticks in my mind about Viktor Frankl is that he found respite, even at hard labor in horrid conditions, in thinking about his wife. A fellow prisoner, as he soon learned, was doing the same thing about his own wife and family.
Over time it dawned on VF that there was a discipline involved in this deliberate thinking, it had evolved itself as a therapy, and the method was to let the imagination depart from her familiar loveable traits and to explore in every way possible, everything there could be to understand, about every nice thing there was, about her.
In this way a hard day would pass, and at the end of it he, VF, was not further down the hellhole his situation but was in fact refreshed and bouyed up –not by the love fantasy but by his manifest rising power to cope and overcome. His survival, then his writings, his book’s great success, his clinical practice, all are testament to the thoughts of a man who could as easily have died in the camps, like most everyone else did, or survived to emerge shorn of any impulse to help advance the prospect of mankind.
I’m fuzzy on this, but i believe that his therapy included the patient’s writing –writing every day as a habit of forcing expression and thereby ordering the inchoate. hey, that’s what WE do here (sez i, utterly unnecessarily).
anyhoo, the lesson offered at the moment to me, is that the term “critical examination” –the communist commandment (codified in Frankfurt School pedagogy) to account for everything and strip it of all sentiment –is the doctrine of the doctrine doing deliberately to one’s mind, heart, and soul, the exact opposite of what Victor Frankl’s mind, heart, and soul found to help the being of Viktor Frankl live through extremis.
In the concentration camp his soul ”went positive” and authoritatively took control of his thinking, and the fruit of this direct action was the Victor Frankl who lived and gave so much of so much value to his fellow humans.
No need to contrast that with the ”criticl examination” with which one weeds out of mind the very items that saved Frankl, to instead concentrate on all that can be found in some way to be wrong, and bad, and in need of the direct action of obliteration.
Joshua/100
#1. Greed
#4. Envy
Lefties would not mind Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Guy in the Sky (embodied), Big Whatever as long as it would be their Big Whatever.
#2. Glutony
#5. Sloth
#7. Lust
They do not mind the concept of God by itself, they just mind very much anything that stands in the way of a just-in-time gratification– food, gas and sex (and summer house once they are empowered). It is easier to steal the means to obtain them by redistribution that work hard.
#6. Pride
The commandments are a salt in their eyes, unless their embodied god utters them.
#3. Wrath
And god forbid if anyone stands in their way.
@100 Joshua
I agree there is something kneejerk and transparent in leftist posturing about Christianity. I also think that the greater part of New Age “spirituality” is more a matter of style than faith, though that’s relatively harmless compared to the doctrinaire atheism of Communism (which the American left is only flirting with IMO, oblivious to the danger, as usual)
But regarding your first category, I would break it down even further into those atheists who are at peace with the faith of others and those who resent it. Camille Paglia says she doesn’t believe in God but considers God to be mankind’s greatest idea. Oriana Fallaci defended the Church as a bulwark of the West against Islam. And Albert Camus wrote that nihilism had nothing to offer but suicide.
On the other hand you have someone like Christopher Hitchens – see Annoy Mouse’s post @29 above. I like Hitchens as a writer and love it when he skewers the Left over the WOT, but when he gets on the subject of religion he’s a bitter man indeed. He’s what I call a proselytizing atheist, which is a very sad figure. I can’t help thinking that if he really didn’t believe in God, he wouldn’t be so angry at Him all the time.
2X4 @ 95:
He also gives us the Belmont Club and Wretchard and 2X4 and Jamie and Storm Rider and Bogie and RWE and the list is endless.
We are given to see through a glass darkly. All we have is scripture and the lights of those who dont hide theirs under the bushel.
marymcl/99
Wouldn’t the “shared scenic nature of language” be its literature? Tolkien argued that the study of the two were inseparable and that any attempt to understand the one without the other was incomplete. His teaching career was dedicated to the cause of bridging the academic divide between Language and Literature
“When I was your age, the TV was called books.”
I’d include oral traditions as well. It served a function of literature when no means of rendering it in writing were available.
One thing though, the literature is hard to quantify and it is often a hostage to fashion trends, from a scientific analysis POV. Language can be abstracted more readily as it is a limited set of data. Literature is a superstructure that is built on the top of the language data set.
You can use the analogy of DNA. We know the alphabet. We even know some words and some sentences. But the literature of DNA, the code that forms our identity and that is an expression who we are, as species and as unique beings (even single-egg twins, they have the same DNA, but their RNA tags differ and are attached based on their unique experience and thus express the word and sentences encoded in DNA differently).
That there is an inseparable connection between language and literature is beyond doubt.
@105 twobyfour
Oral traditions – yes, of course. Though living oral traditions are hard to find today. And a lot of ancient literature is in fact a distillation of spoken tradition – the Iliad, the Tain, the Mabinogion, the Eddas. Lately I’ve been reading the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic compiled from traditional stories still being sung in the early 19th century) and something that strikes me about all the ancient literatures is the forcefulness of their language and the clarity and simplicity of the images, as if the language itself reflected a kind of existential certainty that is rare in modern writing. Of course I’m reading all this stuff in translation but there’s something to the idea nonetheless.
Tolkien’s entire creation of Middle Earth and its various peoples derived from the languages he’d invented – which is a unique creative process as far as I know. It’s delineated fully in Tom Shippey’s book “The Road to Middle Earth” which explains the method in detail – it’s complicated but he does it without a lot of technical philological jargon. I’d need to read it a couple of times more to be able to explain it easily though!
To be blogged under the title “On Literature and Sin.”
It bemuses me to realize that I am old enough to have studied literature in my Humanities classes. For my freshman Common Core Introduction to the Humanities class at Chicago I had kindly old Professor Merlin Bowen go over Moby Dick with about 20 of us, and we dug in and found meaning in every word on every page. There was no time or reason for charting Conflicts or Schools. There was a text. That was 15 years after Susan Sontag had left campus to act out her shallow indulgences before the world. A friend gave me Postmodern Pooh, the sequel to The Pooh Perplex. You can’t make this stuff up but people do and mean it seriously. What is more amazing is that they churn out this stuff for real, and get paid for it.
marymcl,
Thank you for the poem. I may not share your faith but it makes me want to chase any single women in your family.
twobyfour,
The way to study the list I recommend is with Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled.
buddy/101
Cildren, very young, age 4-5 have often an uncanny ability to recognize a lie. But as we mature, we have often to travel through a grey area where things are not as clearly defined when one is protected by parents. The forks of the road are numerous and often confusing. We are gradually losing the ability to recognize a lie, as we feel the need to use it to protect our perceived possessions. Some of us less and some of us more. In some cases, people want to be lied to, because it is simpler an easier than being confronted with the truth. The truth is tougher, it usually requires taking a degree of responsibility for yourself.
Victor Frankl is unfamiliar to me, thanks for the pointer.
twobyfour/95
The Hebrew transliteration got truncated, just noticed…
Lo’ teesah et shem Adonai eloheykha lashav’.
@107 LotM
Funny you should say that, I happen to be the only one
40. wretchard:
81. Jamie Irons:
85. RWE:
Thank you all!
The difference between Judaism, which does not require non-Jews to convert in order to be ‘saved’ and Christianity which does, but doesn’t do it by the sword and Islam-ism, which will kill non-Muslims is the belief in the Seven Laws of Noah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah.
The reference that I made to harry potter was that if we don’t submit to voldemort [Islam-ism] and bow down [convert or admit our 'dirtiness'], we are fair game.
twobyfour,
and anyone else interested in my comment on Eric Gans, coincidentally Brussels Journal has just published an overview of Gans’s work, here:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4167
#99 Marymcl Wouldn’t the “shared scenic nature of language” be its literature?
-yes indeed, literature is a fundamental tool for human self-discovery and it has provided many insights or hypotheses into our nature and (lingusistic) origins. But not just literature is scenic; all forms of human communication are scenic in nature, in that they assume or require some common focus of attention, some share understanding of what is significant or sacred. Language refers in the first place to this shared attention and only secondarily to the things of the world we are talking about. In other words, human communication requires communion, a shared event or scene. In communicating, we attend to each other’s intentions and attention; language is not simply indexical to the things of nature; rather, we re-present things so as to create a scene. A man talking to a crowd is first of all a man talking to a crowd; the propositions he is making are of secondary importance to our consciousness of what is going on.
Morton Doodslag @ 1 and James the Lesser @7)
There are agnostics who wish they could believe. Morton sounds like he might be one, and Rodney Stark says he is.
Sometimes, believing can happen suddenly and unexpectedly. One example is my own. A couple of other examples happened in the very first church I ever pastored.
One was a young man who came to me. What he wanted was for God to help him stop drinking. But he didn’t believe God existed! Could I help him? He was not as dumb as that sounds, but an intelligent and gifted linguist.
I tried the scientific approach. God’s existence is a testable hypothesis, I told him. “If you seek Me with all your heart, you will surely find Me.” He could test that. But that might take a long time, he thought, and he wanted quicker results. So I explained to him that while faith and belief were important, what was more important was commitment. Simply, but sincerely, committing his life to Christ was the key. Even if he didn’t believe Christ existed? Yes, I told him. The Holy Spirit does not enter in until that point. And it was the Spirit who “will lead you into all truth.” If that was true, belief in the existence of Christ would come after commitment in his case.
Made sense to him, and he committed his life to Christ then, despite still not believing Christ existed. Within three weeks, that belief came. It lasted too.
The other was a young woman I had in counseling because she could not come to terms with the death of her brother some years before. She also didn’t believe God existed. Yet, she hated God for her brother’s death. It was strange counseling, weekly for about a year, because we sometimes had shouting matches – something I never did with anyone else. But the day came when she walked in and announced “I believe God exists, and I forgive him.” (For her brother’s death.) She was suddenly well, and stopped looking guilty and angry from that point forward. All her family noticed. It also lasted.
Sometimes it happens that way, suddenly and unexpectedly. Often when someone is praying for you. Prayer matters. It’s important not to give up too soon.
I have always liked Hunter S. Thompson’s Commentary on Faith.
I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me. Hunter S. Thompson
I will admit it is not a religion suitable for children.
I believe God exists and that c********* had better straighten up and fly right or I’m going to kick some serious arse when I get a holt of the summabitch.
Of course I really don’t need faith. God talks to me every day. Or it could just be my mild schizophrenia.
You want mild schizophrenia to help you? Lower the filters. You know, be born again. Stop making so much internal noise. Replace it with external noise. Because there is signal hidden in that noise. All true religion consists of teaching you how to be born again. Being the technical geniuses we are in the West some day we will invent a pill. Maybe we could call it TFW. Temporary Filter Wipe.
It’s important not to give up too soon.
And that is the survival value of religion in a nutshell.
Especially important to warriors.
I feel the need to flap my gums a bit.
If God is love, then hell would be the absence of God, the I am. Existence without love.
I don’t know if that is or is not my mild schizophrenia speaking. But even if it were, I think, therefore, I am…
…with love.
I do love this place Wretchard.
Also Walt, that is some plain powerful prose.
18. Batman:
…….
In the Tuesday night CBS Ministries bible class that you can pick up all over the country…the lesson was on the section just before Sodom was destroyed.
Genesis 15:2-6
2But Abram said, “O Sovereign LORD, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit [c] my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.”
4 Then the word of the LORD came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir.” 5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
6 Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
…….
The St Paul in the New Testament Uses verse 6 to argue that righteousness comes by faith and not by works.
Romans 4
Abraham Justified by Faith
1What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, discovered in this matter? 2If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. 3What does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
The Mohamed simply rewrote the whole story.
my religion is to share a good meal with my family and or friends, and to feel that that is the best thing on what we could agree altogether.
I do not trust institutionalized religions, for they are ment to control populations, and the most pragmatic of them is islam.
Now through the basic life sentiments you get an idea of “God”, or rather of the “sacred”, which could also be spirituality, no matter with what name or word you would label these sentiments, only because they are shared and understood by a group makes them cultural.
I have met such a”God” not later than 2 days ago, with an evening meal of portugese shells, cooked in a french manner, accompanied with a portugese wine, this was rejoicing my heart, and what a hapiness !
So my religious feeling are verybasic and naive, I don’t like the goldness of churches to impress me !
Man forsakes God, God forsakes man,: I have wondered if the West turning it’s back to God has caused God to turn his back on the West? My Sunday School learning taught me that God wants to be worshiped. Islam worships God while the West does not. So will God ultimately side with Islam to fulfill His desire to be worshiped? Or will the West ultimately change it’s ways and return to worshiping God instead of Big Government and Gaia?
bogie wheel (#88):
Thanks for the welcome back!
Have been busy and distracted, but not, alas, by anything as agreeable as bird watching!
;-(
Jamie Irons
GerryP (#113):
That is really quite beautiful.
Marie Claude (#119):
I like what you are saying here. It may indeed be that G_d is where you find Him (Her)…Of course, you have the advantage of being able to enjoy real French cuisine!
Jamie Irons
@105 twobyfour
~ “One thing though, the literature is hard to quantify and it is often a hostage to fashion trends, from a scientific analysis POV.” ~
I’m an artist, not a scientist, so bear with me, but couldn’t the same be said to some degree about language itself? The old historical philology that Tolkien practiced barely exists as an academic discipline any more. According to Shippey, Tolkien was the last of his kind, and the fashion of the day is for Chomsky’s “transformational grammar”, whatever that means.
Scientific analysis has its place but when all is said and done literature an art form and scientific analysis can miss the point altogether. “Beowulf” is a perfect case in point. Before Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “The Monsters and the Critics” (available in print in several different anthologies) English literature was held to begin several centuries later with Chaucer. Beowulf had been studied extensively for many years as an archeological relic or historical curiosity. Tolkien made the case that it was first and foremost a poem, and while we take that for granted today, it’s often forgotten that the poem had to be rescued from scientific analysis before its true value could be revealed. In a way I suppose we’re making the same point for different reasons.
@119 MarieClaude
Speaking as one heretic to another
I do like the idea of sacred spaces. The ability to find joy in everyday things is a great blessing and I also believe that one can find God anywhere – it’s just a matter of looking. That said, there is something special and inspiring about places that are reserved for the purpose of prayer.
BTW I’ve enjoyed the dispatches from your Portuguese vacation!
marymcl/123
Artist myself, beside other things, like sci.
Yea, essentially we expressed the same thing in different frames of reference (as opposed to different frames of deference and obfuscation, the faved deconstructionist tool–close to meaning of framing as a nefarious activity)
A part of language-literature that is difficult to quantify is beauty. Though it is often in the eye of the beholder, we all recognize that there is such a thing, yet we don’t know how to define it. In my view, what comes closest to a definition is that beauty is a form of perfection, not as an absolute category but in a form of scale, in many cases it is a composite of several arbitrary parameters.
Radiant beauty… maybe there are beauty particles–beautons, hehe. Some people are better at collapsing beautons’ wave function, some aren’t and can’t recognize beauty even if they are bombarded by a coherent stream.
The current linguistic theories are somewhat clinical in their approach, using dissection as its tool… “let’s cut that insect in half”. But the relationship of language and literature is transformational. If we stay in the insect world, the analogy would be a metamorphosis.
I am not that well versed in the current linguistic theories. One thing that bothers me (perhaps it has been addressed by someone and I haven’t noticed) is that beside phonemic structural language there exists a conceptual language or object language. It is a mechanism often used by multilingual people, instead of thinking in a particular language and its syntax and semantic forms, they bypass it entirely and deal with encapsulated concepts directly. I am not entirely sure where this comes from, but I suspect that we use it as wee ones before we are able to use the particular grammar and syntax rules of a mother tongue.
Funny thing… very young children are strict in their attempts at grammar construct–they are not that fond of irregular forms, very systematic and logical they are.
The St Paul in the New Testament Uses verse 6 to argue that righteousness comes by faith and not by works.
Jews have a different idea: keep the faith AND keep working.
A Catholic Priest who gave a talk at my synagogue told a joke about that. And then he said that there was a lot of truth in the stereotype. Sometimes God doesn’t answer you. Some times he gives you the answer and you have to do the work.
126. M. Simon:
Actually this was one of the big issues of the protestant reformation of the 1500′s. Are christians saved by faith (in Jesus) or by faith and/plus works. The protestants said the former and the catholics said the latter.
The protestants made the proviso that works are the fruit of faith but are not in and of themselves the means of salvation.
Its a Christian thing.
Faith without good works is dead faith.
MC@119: I don’t like the goldness of churches to impress me !
Nor their boldness to subdue me.
Interesting about church architecture. Often, more than not, the material contours are beautiful and inspiring. One gets a physical sense of the personal epiphanies that inform life on those odd occasions when we find ourselves in a position receptive to inspiration, truly a banal and inadequate word for the beauty of the moment when epiphanies inform and taunt us with another dimension of existence.
But enough of that. Once inside those beautiful structures, it all falls apart. For this lapsed Christian.
Sacred space is one of the paradoxes. How can a God who is everywhere be found specifically in one place? I suspect some of the difference is for our benefit. It is more like, I speak to you constantly, and want to reveal My love to you, but you need a place you know you can find Me.
This is related to “Be still and listen”.
Yet beyond that, there seem places where the mystery beyond, seeps through into our universe. Holy places. Perhaps one problem with churches is that, in a sense, they can be counterfeits, trying to appear holy places, yet you do not find God there.
Church architecture, and music can be dangerous. By manipulating feelings, they create a feeling using a short cut, rather than a space where God is found and we are present. So when we become aware of the counterfeit, we think God must not be real, because what we thought god was mere manipulation.
127, 128; SR is right about dead faith but the doctrine can’t be otherwise –if a person is what a person does, then that’s but two to the trinity.
Jews believe in salvation by works. Every year we ask forgiveness from God and man. God’s forgiveness is automatic. With men – not so much.
It comes from having no official theory of an afterlife (at least until the final days). So do your good works here and now.
no afterlife does indeed push forward the production schedule –almost infinitely in fact.