Déjà vu all over again. A collection of clippings. Militant what?!
It seems, almost, that history is undergoing a reprise of the struggles of the Enlightenment. It is déjà vu all over again. The thought occurred to me as I was leafing this morning through Jonathan Israel’s very big book on The Radical Enlightenment, and I had the strange sensation that the Enlightenment may never have happened in the first place. It was just that history imagined it, imagined that people had criticised religion, even abandoned it, that they had formed governments based on the critique of religion, that they made efforts to exclude religion from the realm of political decision-making. Suddenly, it almost seems as though the idea that religion should be excluded from the public square, or that decisions regarding what governments can do and what laws they can pass should be distanced from the religious convictions of those who are making them, had never occurred to anyone, and that the wall between church and state had never been built — as if Christians had never themselves pointed to this separation as being a distinctive feature Western governments influenced by Christianity.
What about all the daring things that men (and women too) had said about religion — still nervously glancing towards the executioner, who might still burn a book or a living body or two – about their desire to be freed at last from religious beliefs imposed and monitored by the state, about their desire to think for themselves, to stand on their own two feet, instead of being confined in the intellectual Gängelwagen that Kant believed we could now dispense with? What happened to them that they need now to be defended once again? How is it possible, in this year 2012 of the Common Era, long after Spinoza’s Jewish confrères excluded him from the synagogue with ponderous execrations and condemnations, and erased him from the book of life, long after religion began to seem so unessential to the common good, whatever it might do for individual believers, who would not, as Kant bade them do, let go of their self-imposed minority, and grow to adult stature, able to think their own thoughts, dream their own dreams, and rule their own lives — how is it possible, after all this, that the criticism of religion should arouse so much alarm and despondency, so much heated rhetoric and condemnation? Have today’s Christians just emerged from snorting in the seven sleepers’ den?
Adam Lusher and the Resurrection of Jesus
Anyone reading the title of this post will doubtless be perplexed. What could it possibly mean? After all, what does a marginal journalist have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? The answer of course is: nothing at all. But that is precisely the reason for juxtaposing them here. You see, Christianity, just like any religion, has a serious problem with credibility, and this is problem that Christians themselves have increasingly had to face. I thought of this just after making a comment over at Why Evolution is True on the post “More “sophisticated” theology: John Polkinghorne proves that the Resurrection happened.” The link takes you to the post. I’ll come to my comment in a moment.
Now, clearly, this is one of Christianity’s chief sticking points: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Did it happen? And, if it didn’t, does Christianity have a gospel? St. Paul was the first to recognise the problem. As he said to the Christians in Corith:
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain. … If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. [1 Corinthians 15: 13-14, 17]
This is why John Polkinghorne takes the resurrection very seriously, and tries to find a way to justify the claim that Jesus was really and truly, as a matter of historical fact, raised from the dead. Now, let me swipe a block of text from Jerry Coyne’s post. First, we have a quotation from Polkinghorne’s book Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (2011, Yale), then a short comment from Jerry, and then a continuation of the quote:
At first sight it might seem that we are faced with a bewildering confusion, consisting of a variety of stories, some set in Jerusalem and some in Galilee. Could this variety not simply reflect the fact that we are presented with a bunch of made-up tales, originating in the pious imaginations of a number of different communities? (p. 122).
Well, given that Biblical scholarship has shown us that the Bible is a farrago of made-up tales, perhaps the parsimonious answer here is “yes.” But Polkinghorne dissents (my emphasis in the following):
I do not think so, for there is a recurrent theme, hardly likely to have arisen with such consistency from a gaggle of independent sources, namely that it was initially difficult to recognize the risen Christ. For example, Mary Magdalene took him to be the gardener (John 20:15), the couple on the road to Emmaus only recognised at the end of the journey who their companion had been (Luke 24:31); Matthew even tells us that it was on a Galilean hillside ‘some doubted’ who it was (28:17). It seems to me that this unexpected feature is more likely to be a historical reminiscence of the character of actual encounters, rather than a fortuitous coincidence in a set of independent confabulations. (pp. 122-123).
Of course, as Jerry points out, the assumption that Polkinghorne makes that the texts of the gospels are independent sources is nowhere made good. It can’t be, since we do not know enough about the sources to be able to say this. Of course, Jerry’s point is also an overstatement, since it has not been demonstrated that the Bible is (only) a farrago of made up tales, though it has been shown that much of the text of the gospels and other texts, even supposing them to have some historical content, have been airbrushed by imagination.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
Jessica Ahlquist: First Amendment Hero
The text of the amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That’s it, folks! Now, there may be many legal convolutions and ramifications involved in the interpretation of those few words — 45 in all — but it amounts neither to an explicit endorsement of religion nor to an implicit support for it. Janet Daley, over at the Telegraph begs to differ. In an article entitled “A very good week for smiting the ungodly,” she says, without any apparent awareness that she is talking nonsense:
It [the First Amendment] is the ultimate acknowledgement of the importance – in effect, of the sacrosanct nature – of religious belief and practice, regarding it as one of the “unalienable” human rights.
To which one can only retort with a contemptuous: “Nonsense!” There is not a jot about the importance, still less of the sacrosanct nature of religious belief and practice expressed by those words. The amendment takes a deliberately impartial stance towards religion. It is about freedom, pure and simple, and, arguably, freedom of speech, of the press, or the right of free assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances constitute the heart of the amendment, to which the exclusion of a law regarding the establishment of religion is subordinate. Indeed, rather than expressing any view regarding the importance or sacrosanct character of religious belief and practice, the First Amendment indicates a clear awareness of the danger of religion to the unity of the young republic.
Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: XI: “The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin”: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings
Time to return, after a long absence, to my series of posts on Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great. In the last instalment we discussed Hitchens’ take on the miraculous, and how petty and tawdry the kinds of miracles cited in defence of religion makes religion seem. An unexplained remission — even, sometimes, one that is completely explained by scientific medicine – for example, gets turned into a miracle, just by praying “to” (if this makes sense at all) some person now — very often, long since — dead. The survival of a baby in an air disaster, in which no one else survived, is considered a miracle, and attributed to a god who is not blamed for the disaster which killed the child’s parents. People celebrate the miracle of survival in a mine disaster only to find that only one miner actually survived. Was his survival, then, a miracle, while his companions’ deaths are not added to god’s account of failures? Of all the criminals crucified by the Romans only one is said to have survived death. Is this, then, enough to turn the survivor into a salvific figure? Must, then, all his sayings before he died be deemed true? Christians believe it to be so, yet Muslims reject this interpretation of the story, while believing in the miraculous revelation of the Qu’ran, a work which can in fact be shown to be largely borrowed from other sources. Christians and Jews read of their god’s commandments to commit horrendous genocide with equanimity, and still think of their religions as, at heart, about love and compassion. Similarly, for Muslims, the Qu’ran, at the reading of which many Muslims are said to weep tears of joy, is mind-numbingly boring to all but the devout, who read assurances of Allah’s mercifulness and forgiveness, interspersed with threats of demonic torture, and commandments to kill unbelievers, with a sense of divine rapture. The petty jejune miracles, the manifest imperfections of holy texts, and the pathological cruelty of the gods supposedly revealed therein, testify to the fact that religions are purely human creations. Christians, considering the traditions of the Muslims, think of them as burdened with sin, their minds blind to the beauty of holiness. Muslims, returning the favour, condemn Christians as perverters of revelation, and enemies of God. Only those, it would seem, who want to be deceived, could possibly believe that religions are not based on lies.
One of the problems with this judgement — viz., that religions are packs of lies — is that they are ancient and respected lies, lies told often enough and with enough conviction that they seem to carry with them an armour plating of respect which none but the strongest critical weapons can penetrate. The telling of the lies is so wrapped up with historical pretensions and prevarications that it is almost impossible simply to call them lies. Shrines to these lies litter the world with imposing and sometimes even beautiful buildings, memorials to hostages given to imagination hundreds if not thousands of years ago. We can no longer watch the machinations of the early years, when everything was in a fluid state, and the sacred beliefs had not yet jelled and taken form from the messiness of thought, jealousy and anger that preceded the shape that now attracts so much devotion and loyalty.
Andrew Brown out of bounds — again! Secularism and Reason
I was going to continue with my series on Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great today, but then I bumped into Andrew Brown way out of intellectual bounds, and decided a few more words directed toward him, as well as towards the huge brouhaha brewing over the place of religion in public life, would possibly be more to the point. The US bishops were girding up their loins for a long battle with unseen forces — even to the point of shedding blood! – at the same time that Baroness Warsi and her Tory pals made their pilgrimage to Rome in defence of religion against the looming powers of secularism. Suddenly, it seems as though the whole religious world has lost touch with reality, beleaguered and threatened by an imagined bogeyman whom they have chosen to name “secularism” even though, like their god or gods, there really is nothing there.
Andrew Brown says that “militant secularists” fail to understand the rules of secular debate, and in an article bearing that title simply fails to explain what he means. Indeed, he makes no sense at all this time, and although purportedly about militant secularists, he does not explain what he means by the term. Consider this paragraph from his article, in which he claims to be explaining what he means by militant secularism:
There are three kinds of people in Britain today who might be taken for militant secularists: that is to say people who are not just themselves unbelievers, but have an emotional investment in the extirpation of religious belief in others. There are the adolescents who have just discovered “rationality”; there are gay people who feel personally threatened by traditional monotheist morality; and, in this country, there are parents frustrated by the admissions policy of religiously controlled schools.
This is simply incoherent, as just a moment’s thought on Brown’s part should have confirmed. He does mention Dawkins in connexion with adolescent secularists, some of whom, we are told,
… discover Richard Dawkins the way that others discover Ayn Rand. Large confident solutions to all the world’s problems, which are only held back by the stupidity and self-interest of the old, will always appeal to teenagers.
But that’s about as close to a statement about militant secularism that he gets. After discussing the uniquely bewildering English school system for a few irrelevant paragraphs, he then says, suddenly, and irrelevantly:
None of these groupings are large enough in themselves to threaten the future of Christianity, or of Islam, in this country. But they make a useful enemy for politicians such as Lady Warsi.
Their real offence, though, is that they don’t understand the rules of secular debate.
The pronouns “their” and “they” don’t refer to anything that could be construed as militant secularism, and the claim that “they don’t understand the rules of secular debate” is arguably without any reference at all.
True Religion — We’ve Been Warned!
The following appeared in the Wall Street Journal today (h/t Ophelia Benson, Butterflies and Wheels):-
Cardinal-designate speaks of joy, love – and blood
Associated Press
VATICAN CITY — The top U.S. bishop, Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, has told a meeting of the pope and his fellow cardinals that they must spread the faith with joy, love — and blood if necessary.
Dolan, archbishop of New York, gave the keynote address Friday to a gathering of the cardinals who will participate in the ceremony Saturday to bring Dolan and 21 other cardinals into the elite men’s club that will elect the next pope.
Dolan said the Vatican No. 2 had told him to speak about spreading the faith in a secular world since New York was the “capital of a secular culture.” Dolan said while there’s “graphic secularism” in the Big Apple, “it is also a very religious city.”
He said cardinals wear scarlet to show they are willing to shed blood for the faith.
The inventor of the cure for cancer might be someone’s fourth child that they decided not to have
The title is the kind of reasoning that goes for conclusive nowadays, amongst some religious, who have no idea where they fit into the world in which, sleepwalkingly, they find themselves adrift. It’s a bit like passing through the looking-glass and seeing everything in reverse, but that is what apparently intelligent people are doing in the face of the simple decision of the American government that employees of public hospitals in the US, regardless of religious affiliation, deserve to receive contraception as part of their health care package. So now we have people like Father Raymond de Souza (who will never be a father, or, at least, if he is one, will only be one on the sly), and Michael Brendan Dougherty and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, over at Business Insider, telling us that, after all, the Catholic Church has been right all along, and that separating sex and babies is morally wrong, and that it has centuries of tradition to prove it. Dougherty and Gobry end their article with the words I have used for my title, since it is so obviously wrong. This “might have been”, like Thomas Gray’s “mute inglorious Miltons,” is a way of saying that someone else was left to discover cures for cancer, or write Christian epics. (They forget, however, “some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.”) Counterfactual conditionals of this sort have never really said very much, aside from a pious “if only …”, which never, in the event, occurred. After all, of those children who are born we might say the same thing. If only a different sperm, of several millions, had fertilised that particular egg, instead of the one that did, then someone different would have been who might have done wonderful things, instead of, say, turning into the psychopath that in fact eventuated.
This kind of speculation gets us nowhere, and not once, in all their ponderings do either of these three men — yes, notice, like the panel to discus contraception on Capitol Hill in the United States, highlighted over at Butterflies and Wheels this morning, this is a game that only men can play – consider what gifts contraception have provided to our society, how it has freed women from the constant round of pregnancy and childbirth so that they have been able to contribute their talents to governance, to the search for cures for cancer, and so many other things that simply would not have happened had it not been for the fact that they could control their own reproduction in such ways as to enable them to carry out research, enter into government, lead nations, and just generally make their own contribution to the life of national and world communities that would have been so much poorer without that contribution. And yet these benighted men have decided that all this wasn’t worth it, and that women should be returned forcefully to the cycle of birth and child care, and denied the rights that they have won at such costs. Freedom means nothing to these religious men; they prefer women who are bound dutifully to the ceaseless round of childbirth and childcare; even though de Souza thinks it is okay for him to choose celibacy over marriage and reproductivity, despite the command of his god to go forth and mulitply. Horses for course applies to him, but not to women. They, of course, should just be subordinate, as all good women should be.
