The Postmodernism Translator

James T. Kirk using the Postmodernism Translator to learn deep thoughts from the French.

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry was having trouble with a paragraph from postmodern scholar Bruno Latour. I happen to speak postmodern, so the table below gives Latour's sentences on the left and my liberal translation on the right.

Latour

Tanner

In religious talk, there is indeed a leap of faith, but this is not an acrobatic salto mortale in order to do even better than reference with more daring and risky means, it is a somersault yes, but one which aims at jumping, dancing toward the present and the close, to redirect attention away from indifference and habituation, to prepare oneself to be seized again by this presence that breaks the usual, habituated passage of time. As to knowledge, it is not a direct grasp of the plain and the visible against all beliefs in authority, but an extraordinarily daring, complex, and intricate confidence in chains of nested transformations of documents that, through many different types of proofs, lead toward new types of visions that force us to break away from the intuitions and prejudices of common sense. Belief is simply immaterial for any religious speech-act; knowledge is not an accurate way to characterize scientific activity. We might move forward a bit, if we were calling “faith” the movement that brings us to the close and to the present, and retaining the word “belief" for this necessary mixture of confidence and diffidence with which we need to assess all the things we cannot see directly. Then the difference between science and religion would not be found in the different mental competencies brought to bear on two different realms—“belief ” applied to vague spiritual matters, “knowledge” to directly observable things—but in the same broad set of competences applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions. The first chain leads toward what is invisible because it is simply too far and too counterintuitive to be directly grasped—namely, science; the second chain, the religious one, also leads to the invisible but what it reaches is not invisible because it would be hidden, encrypted, and far, but simply because it is difficult to renew.

Religious people take "leaps of faith" [in talking about the substance of belief]. But it's not just fancy, meaningless talk, and it's not trying for mere poetry or emotion. Instead, it attempts to articulate the wonder and extra-ordinariness of the present moment, of its present-ness. Where the events of our lives could be seen indifferently and as mundane happenings, in a religious frame the events are grand and worthy of amazement. Religious knowledge--that is, feeling sure that God exists, is watching, and is at work--is not like knowing in everyday life. It is, rather, a heroic assertion and a point of view that finds new and beautiful ways, every day, to confirm that assertion. The assertion, perspective, and continual connecting of the two make the knower a supremely open-minded learner. Religious belief therefore transcends ordinary speech. Language cannot convey the complexity of what the religious seeker is actually doing and learning in active seeking. Neither is the word knowledge appropriate to the learning done by anyone who actively looks at and in the world. Current discussions of religion and science might progress if we all shared a more nuanced understanding of the difference between "faith" and "belief." The more nuanced understanding would help locate the real difference between science and religion: the different cognitive skills and ideological commitments each brings to bear in inquiry. Science and religion are, in other words, different ways of knowing and and of advocating for personally held values. Science orients the thinker to the invisible reality that only mathematics and high-powered instrumentation can access. That reality is far from us and behaves in ways we often find counter-intuitive. Religion also orients the thinker to the invisible, but this invisible reality is the now, the unique present. It's here and close, but only momentary and unrepeatable.

Latour's prose is dense, but not inscrutable. Unfortunately, it's hard to be overly impressed with the logic of his grand--and beautiful--claims for what religion is, does, and knows.

For Latour, to be religious, to think in the religious mode, is to elevate oneself and the now. One is introspective and amazed to be part of a singular narrative in time. Every facet of one's life now is imbued with higher meaning and purpose. And exercise of religious thinking is equally noble and equally important compared to the exercise of scientific techniques.

His aspirations and dancing prose notwithstanding, Latour ultimately fails to make his case. Religious thinking and talk, by his characterization, are little more than very deep navel gazing. They are solipsistic exercises, the dramatic cry of one unable to escape time, and thereby death. In Latour's ornamented formulation, religious introspection re-states William Saroyan's famous quote: "Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case." Religion is the fantasy invoked to come to grips with the fact that no exception will be made.

The Why Evolution Is True crowd notes, as I do, the rhetorical game Latour is playing: "science" is the standard, and Latour wants to bring religion up to or--even better--past the standard. Science has a presumed preeminence and authority he wants conferred also to religion.

It's a silly game, and unnecessary. Religion can be very beautiful. It can make one introspective, and it can yield breathtaking insights into one's life and one's moment. It can help one question common sense and one's own prejudices.

But religion really isn't like science and today bears no relation to it. There's no basis for comparing the two.

Religion is not about truth or knowledge, even self-knowledge. Rather, religion is about understanding, about feeling rationally justified to hold a certain view. The key here, as far as I can tell, is "feeling rational." We're not talking about pure rationality but emotional sanctification with the idea that one is intellectually attuned to forces at work in the universe.

Religion taps into an enticing fantasy, the fantasy of somehow knowing something. But it's just a fantasy. It isn't true, not in the sense of modelling, observing, or schematizing a phenomenon.

I wish people could be OK with that, with the fact that religion isn't true. After all, they can still go to church. They can still pray. They can still observe the rituals and special days. They can still read holy books and discuss teachings. They can still imagine heaven. They can still contemplate hell.They can still fantasize about knowing, all by themselves, deep secrets of the universe.

Religion does not need to be true for people to be interested in it, inspired by it, educated by it, moved by it. But it needs to be true if people are going to learn about the universe and about people.

And it's not true, so let's not ask it to be, and let's not try to extract knowledge where there is none to be had.

In the end, Latour's prose and point are ineffectual because they misguidedly inflate religion into areas it cannot influence. A reformed postmodernist myself, I hope my prose and my arguments are more compelling than his indulgent apology for the unsubstantive.

Heaven Can Wait

Warrant sang that heaven isn't too far away. In reality, you have to transform yourself.

Is heaven real?

No, of course not. There is a popular book claiming otherwise, but we have good reason to give the book little weight.

First, consider what something real is. It has a material existence. A microbe, a star, a color--all of these can be talked about as presences in the universe. If a color is the one questionable item in the above list, remember that it's a wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. So it is physical.

What about love? Love is traceable to chemical impulses in the brain affecting physical processes in the human body. Therefore, love too has a clear and direct connection to materiality.

What about an abstraction such as the number 4? Is 4 real? Yes, 4 can be encoded in material units: four sticks, four apples, four fingers.

Is heaven real?

Can we observe it directly and measure it? No.

Does it affect physical processes in the universe or in live beings? No.

Can it be encoded in material units? No.

Therefore, we are very justified in rejecting the idea of heaven.

But a popular book tells the story of a father, a pastor, telling the story of his son. Following recovery from a very serious illness, the son began to claim having visited heaven. The father and son both believe that the son visited.

The story is compelling. The father had been shaken in his faith. The son, so the father tells us, speaks with the authority of observation. What's more, as we so often get in stories of this type, the visitor to heaven comes back with knowledge "he could not have possibly known." We readers and hearers must take in the story and say, "Could it be so?"

Compelling as the story may be--I don't think it is, particularly--it's probably best not taken as evidence of heaven's existence. The story does nothing to bridge the gap from the idea to material reality. The human brain, awesome as it is, doesn't do a great job in helping us construct a full picture of reality or reconstruct remembered observations. Indeed, because we actively construct cognitive pictures, making us susceptible to all sorts of illusions, and actively construct memories, we ought to be especially wary of a second-hand retroactive claim about "observations" made in the mind.

Ultimately, the I've-been-to-heaven story is of a type we've seen since Moses came across the burning bush. It's 40 days in the desert. It's the light on the road to Damascus. It's Augustine opening his Bible. It's Bruce Wayne witnessing the murder of his parents. It's Iron Man escaping from terrorists in Afghanistan. The hero witnesses something amazing and becomes transformed into a different kind of person--a person with a specific mission and purpose.

That these stories help us little with establishing heaven is almost banal. The interesting question is what in our emotional make up drives us to feel compelled by them. Do we understand the father's doubt? His subsequent connection, through the son, with his god? Do we understand the son's recollection of a dream? His sense of being able to give something to his father, of being a source of power?

The impulse is to rally around the people and to partake in their transformation, not so much to believe the story. Surely, some people will believe the story and agree that heaven is real. But most folks, I think, will maintain an "I'm not sure" attitude while setting themselves in the community of people they think the father and son represent. The important thing to walk away with after a story such as the father and son's is "I'm a Christian, too," not "I really and fully believe in heaven."

The important thing is the transformation. That's what everyone sees. That's what everyone believes. That's what everyone feels. That's what everyone desires. And that's why the story compels.

But heaven still isn't real.

Allan Sloan: Five Myths of the Financial Meltdown

We are about five years and one month past the financial meltdown, when America's largest and most prestigious banks could no longer hide the fact they were in big trouble--and were taking everyone else with them.

Fortune Magazine columnist Allan Sloan recalls:

It's hard to believe, but it's been five years and a day since the U.S. financial system's problems surfaced, and we're still not even remotely close to being able to feel good about the economy. My admittedly arbitrary start date is June 12, 2007, the day the Wall Street Journal reported that two Bear Stearns hedge funds that owned mortgage securities were in big trouble. At the time, things didn't seem all that grim -- in fact, U.S. stocks hit an all-time high four months later. But in retrospect the travails of the funds, which collapsed within weeks, were a tip-off that a crisis was afoot. Problems kept erupting, efforts to restore calm failed, and we trembled on the brink of a financial abyss in 2008-09. Things have gotten better since then, but still aren't close to being right.

There's a long way to go before the economy, and people, recover from wounds inflicted by the financial meltdown. The value of homeowners' equity -- most Americans' biggest single financial asset -- is down $4.7 trillion, about 41%, since June 2007, according to the Federal Reserve. The U.S. stock market has lost $1.9 trillion of value, by Wilshire Associates' count. Even worse, we've got fewer people working now -- 142.3 million -- than then (146.1 million), even though the working-age population has grown. So while plenty of folks are doing well and entire industries have recovered, people on average are worse off than they were. Bad stuff.

Sloan observes that only five years away from these shattering events, myth is already displacing reality (and some people wonder why I distrust the reliability of the gospel accounts of Jesus and such.)

Sloan reminds us of the facts. I'll just list them here. Go read the article.

Myth No. 1: The government should have done nothing.
Myth No. 2: The government bailed out shareholders.
Myth No. 3: The Volcker Rule will save us.
Myth No. 4: Taxpayers are off the hook for future failures.
Myth No. 5: It's the government's fault.

Sloan's article generated reaction. In a follow-up article, he brought out more facts and reasoning to deal with the rabble. First he deals with the cries over Myth #1, the myth that the government shouldn't have done anything:

Dozens of commenters said that cleaning up the mess should have been left to the private markets, which would have done things better than the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and rest of the government did.

What most of those people probably don't realize, though, and what I had no room to discuss in my last column, is that private markets took the first big swing at recapitalizing troubled financial institutions -- and struck out.

Other objectors told Sloan the government should have done something else. He dispenses with this line of thinking, too.

The alternate complaint -- that the government should have nationalized troubled institutions -- sounds plausible too. But that strategy stood no chance of working, regardless of how things played out in other countries. First, seizure would have resulted in endless litigation. Second, there were practical problems. For example, when I looked into the consequences of the government nationalizing Citi, I discovered (from independent third parties) that Citi most likely would have had to surrender lucrative franchises in several foreign countries that don't allow banks there to be owned by foreign governments.

A third complaint made to Sloan dealt with Myth #5, that the government was really to blame for the financial meltdown. Sloan explains why this is bunk:

The other widespread criticism was of my last point: that although the government lowered some mortgage loan standards, the debacle is primarily the private sector's fault. I was attacking the oh-so-convenient myth that private markets are blameless and pure, that the whole problem comes from misguided government efforts to help "those people" get homes they couldn't afford. Many commenters were, shall we say, displeased.

Well, let's see. Most of the bad mortgages were made to supposedly qualified borrowers, without pressure from the government. Lenders required little in the way of down payments or credit checks; they wanted to juice up their loan volume. Credit-rating agencies gave AAA ratings to trash, to keep fee income flowing. Yield-hungry investors snapped up garbage that bore the agencies' imprimatur. Private enterprise all the way.

Sloan closes by reminding all of us just how bad it was five years ago.

Credit default swaps and other esoterica spread the problems worldwide, magnified losses, and put even the soundest institutions at risk. That's because if giant, less sound institutions had failed en masse, they would have defaulted on their obligations to their sounder trading partners.

We also need to remember that for all the criticism (including mine) of particular tactics, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke bailed out the U.S. financial system at no net expense to America's taxpayers. An impressive achievement.

Instead of a discussion about what happened, we've gotten into a government-vs.-free-market shoutfest. These fragmented days, many people tend to see things in black and white terms, in ways that reinforce what they want to believe. The real world is more complicated than that. Black and white have their places -- but to understand the financial meltdown, you need to see some gray.

To me, the big takeaway is that the financial meltdown was caused and magnified by bad business and poor regulation. And although the crisis was mitigated by cooperation between business and government, we still need lots of partnership, transparent decision making, and cool-headed leadership on both sides.

We need business to step up and we need government to stay involved and proactive.
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To a Student in My Composition and Rhetoric Class (Introduction to Literature)

Dear Student,

I was very happy you recently emailed me about a research essay topic you want to pursue. That you felt strongly enough to ask a question is gratifying. You wouldn't know this, but I begin every semester hoping that students find plays, poems, and stories that move them profoundly, or at least profoundly enough to ask such questions as you have.

Unfortunately, after fifteen weeks of class this term, you alone have fulfilled this hope. Your classmates, though nice people and smart enough, have rarely shown the desire or self-motivation to vigorously explore the literary texts in our course. They have read, or skimmed. They have glibly opined. They have written papers. However, I feel they have not been taken by any of our texts. They were unimpressed by Hamlet's grief and by how severely he reckoned every possible course of action. They eschewed, or seemed to, the lonely and noble reflection of Jane Kenyon's "Let Evening Come." They saw no kinship between themselves and proud Sylvia in Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson." 

It takes passion to read anything, but especially drama, poetry, and fiction. It takes conviction to write, but especially to write an academic essay. What I have really been trying to tell and teach all of you is to be passionate, assertive, bold, and confident. If you can muster these attitudes for a class, you can muster them in your life. As much as any knowledge, skill, or wisdom that you take from school, these attitudes will serve you well in life and carry you far.

But there is more than utility to these attitudes. They have more value than getting you a job and helping you succeed in a career. No, these attitudes are the formula of emotional depth and perspective. The happiness literature offers is understanding happiness. From our best writing we learn that happiness is complex, fleeting, easily unrecognized, and surprisingly connected to outlook and effort. And the wisdom literature offers is that of adventure, for the worlds created in literature lead out to reality and to knowledge that spans centuries of human endeavor.

Just two examples of the happiness and wisdom I mean, and then I will close. Think on the rich, lasting happiness from the end of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind":

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Shelley describes a happiness greater, if less pure, than a child's. It's a lasting, hopeful happiness. It's the happiness of knowing life continues inexorably. To Shelley, we are instruments of a powerful universe in motion. Such happiness comes from being bound sonically and temperamentally to that universe. We readers, too, joyfully recognize the intertwining rhyme Shelley uses. We see it and connect with him, and his world. We hear the trumpet tones and know this sound calls just as well in our world.

We take from Shelley a wise happiness, a kind of knowledge not found in movies, television, games, or other activities--all of which possess their own wisdom. Yet we talk about wisdom and knowledge as if they were only about having facts and being able to recall them. Consider, then, the wisdom of the speaker in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues":

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn't with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing -- he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

The man admits at the outset he is limited in his knowledge about music. Yet, like the improvising musicians he observes and hears, he builds on what he knows and tries to expand it. Baldwin's writing here focuses on hearing and watching--listening to Sonny play and watching him expend effort. Baldwin searches and finds in the music a dialogue between Creole and Sonny, a dialogue that turns into Sonny's musical exodus or perhaps a musical baptism.

This is the wisdom of hearing and observing, yes, but more the wisdom of sharing and connecting. What sings in this prose is how the speaker voices--attempts to articulate on the fly--how he understands Sonny and Creole. He wants to partake of their interplay. He learns by doing and by actively being.

The happiness and wisdom of literature are unfathomably rich. My student, I wanted you and all your classmates to learn this. Excepting you alone, I failed this semester. I failed because your classmates did not want to be reached and did not think it was worth their energy. I failed because I was not focused or skilled or apt enough to overcome their extraordinary apathy and complacence.

I will retire as a college teacher at the end of this semester. I cannot foresee teaching an Introduction to Literature course again. After 17 years of teaching, I have lost the drive to lead any more classes on the perilous journey through the language and stories of the past, and through the struggle of writing now. I have ceased to be an effective teacher, if ever I was one.

My student, your letter is a comfort to me as I depart. As you go your own way in life, I hope some of what we have read this term stays with you and grows with you. I bid you, as Tennyson's "Ulysses," to seek newer worlds beyond the sunset. That is my intent. Perhaps we will meet again.

Larry Tanner, a teacher

A Jesus Fight...And What It Means for the Jews

Religious historian and humanist R. Joseph Hoffmann has declared war on Jesus mythicists:

This little rant (and it is a rant, I acknowledge and I do not apologize for it: somebody’s got to do it) will be followed  next week by three essay-length responses to Richard C. Carrier’s ideas: The first by me, the second by Professor Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham, and the third by Stephanie Fisher a specialist in Q-studies. We will attempt to show an impetuous amateur not only where he goes wrong, but why he should buy a map before starting his journey. Other replies will follow in course, and we invite Carrier, his fans, and anyone else interested in this discussion to respond to it at any stage along the way.

As you can see, Hoffmann's main target is Richard Carrier, a Ph.D. in ancient history, author/speaker, atheist, and mythicist. Hoffmann aims to show both Carrier and his atheist applauders that the Jesus-as-myth view is probably untenable.

But it's important also realize everything that's at stake in this war on mythicism:

• What are viable ideas in scholarship versus crankery and crack-pottery?
• Who are scholars and what does it mean to practice responsible scholarship?
• What authority do consensus views have?
• What consideration should be given to marginal and fringe views?
• What status is given to non-professionals, hobbyists, and scholars in outside disciplines?
• What roles do tradition, bias, ignorance, innovation, and personal ideology have in scholarship?
• What methods work in historical and humanities scholarship, and how do we know they work?
• Where should scholarly debates be conducted, and in what forms?

I don't know this list is exhaustive, but it is accurate and reflects a timely angst about today's hyper-traffic in ideas and opinions.

I look forward to Hoffmann and cohorts bringing in solid data and arguments. I also eagerly await Carrier's replies. I hope we'll get to see whether mythicism withstands scrutiny or not. Most of all, I hope to see how all sides of the debate directly and indirectly wrangle with the issues I've listed.

This is, folks, an important moment.

Yes, you might say, but is it good for the Jews? (i.e., we begin the humorous part of the post.) Consider this:

• The outcome of the debate will not likely stir up antisemitism, unless people walk away thinking Jesus was a myth perpetrated by the Jews to make them look foolish.
• The debate may turn out to be high impact. American and world evangelicals could get stirred up regardless of mythicism's standing afterwards.
• The Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers should be one recurring item. Some, of course, will repress the idea.

Therefore, this debate may turn out not so good for the Jews. The best case scenario for the Jews is that Jesus is concluded to have probably existed and we all return to our regularly scheduled fantasies.

You Should Abandon Your Religion Now

Is your religion really the way to "true happiness"?

You should abandon the doctrines and beliefs of your religion. If you must, go to church, synagogue, mosque, or community center. But stop advocating for religious beliefs.

You no longer need to say Jesus died for anyone's sins, or that Israel received the Torah from God, or that Mohammed wasn't a delusional asshole. I know that you know religious traditions are bunk. I know that you suspect no clergyman or theologian has any real idea about God, gods, supernatural beings and realms, and so forth.

But I am not focusing here on the falsity of religions. Instead, I want you to try dropping the pretense of belief. I want you to imagine what would happen if you simply acknowledged to yourself that religion altogether stops or retards your personal growth .

Here's how we know that religion is poisonous. First, have a look at the top five regrets of the dying, as summarized by Hank Fox:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish I had let myself be happier.

Now, let's consider each regret individually.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
The sine qua non of religion is to tell you how to live your life. Religion tells you the values and expectations to which you should adhere in your life. Yes, some values and expectations are good in some contexts, but the point is that religion has no intrinsic claim on how you live. Don't give religion authority that properly belongs to you.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
The regret focuses mainly on professional work--one should scale back on the 80-100 hour weeks and so forth. Those who wish they had not worked so hard tend to feel they missed time with children, spouses, and friends. But the practice of religion doesn't always offer time for relating with others. On Easter, for example, the family may go to church together, but then everyone is just sitting or standing there while the people up front yammer at them about zombies. The actual relating that's done on Easter is the egg stuff and the traditional meal. The public worship aspect of many religions is antithetical to individuals communicating with one another and relating. The real interpersonal and social activity that people love and need have no special dependence on religion, and religions often serve only to defer that activity.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Religions by and large traffic in the suppression of feelings and intuitions. Are you uncomfortable with God's anger, misogyny, and penchant for killing (and see Exodus 4:24-26)? Are you in love with someone who does not share your religion or who is the same gender as you? Are you incredulous that so many animals and eight frakking humans could exist for 40 days on a single boat? Are you pretty sure that virgin birth is impossible for humans, and same for physical resurrection days after death? Do you think Pope Ratzi and Bernard Cardinal Law should be in jail? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, then you must know that religion is not particularly interested to delve deeply into these questions today. The sages and fathers of bygone days tended to assume the orthodoxies were true, and reality would bend to accommodate. But now it's best not to think too hard about all the poop that would have been on the poop deck of Noah's Ark. It's impolite to say out loud that a sitting pope enabled pederasty and valued his "church" over the suffering of real people. Religions do not advise you to share your feelings. No, they tell you "to keep an open mind" about it all. They tell you God will help you carry your burden. In other words, they are telling you to shut the hell up and deal.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Religions cast suspicion on anyone who is not part of the in-group. You are encouraged to stay in touch with friends only insofar as you talk to them about the Lord Jesus Christ or the wonderful way Allah has provided clarity in your life. Religion sets its own terms on your relationship with anyone and everyone: that's pernicious.

5. I wish I had let myself be happier.
This is the big regret, and the one where religions obstruct people the most. All religions talk about offering transcendence, a way to commune with something "bigger than yourself." They promise happiness as if it were a secret that only they knew. To religion, happiness is only defined and sanctioned by them. All else is not "true happiness."

And it gets worse. No religion is in the business of letting you be happy all by yourself. To religion, your happiness is selfishness. Your fulfillment is one step toward a society of Jeffrey Dahmers. Your independence is confusion. Your curiosity is foolishness. Religions are admittedly and decidedly opposed to your being happier; they favor instead your "voluntary compliance" to god-inflected happiness.

*  *  *  *  *

Religion is bad, not just untrue. The happiness it offers is happiness you can generate yourself. The happiness it scorns is none of its business.

Can you imagine lying on your deathbed saying "I wish I had gone to church more often"? Who could possibly utter, "I sure regret not having davened a few more times"?

Life is for doing stuff, folks. And it's for engaging others, talking and sharing adventures with them. It can't be about denying bacon and making solitary wishes for blessings.

Lose religion. Let it go. This is not about hating religion or being an angry atheist. This is about life. Your life.

Don't you at least owe it to yourself to consider it?

"What Must Be Said" and the Nuclear Threat Posed by Israel

In the US, it is National Poetry Month. So I offer a controversial poem by Nobel laureate Günter Grass.

"What Must Be Said" looks at how close we are to a nuclear conflict in the Middle east and criticizes Israel's current government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel has responded to the poem awfully by banning Grass from visiting Israel. The government evidently takes umbrage at even the suggestion of moral equivalency between Iran, which is also a subject of the poem, and Israel.

Joseph Kugelmass renders the following English translation. I am interested in readers' responses to the poem: good or bad. I can hardly think anyone will react indifferently.

Why am I silent, silent for too long,
about that which has obviously been practiced
in war games where we, the survivors,
are footnotes at best?

The alleged right to a pre-emptive strike –
against a subjugated people,
compelled into obedience,
acting in pageants orchestrated by bullies,
and now, under their influence,
suspected of constructing nuclear weapons –
threatens the Iranian people with annihilation.

Why do I stop short of naming
that other country
which for years, in secret,
has been developing nuclear capabilities
not subject to inspection or control?

My silence is part of what I now recognize
to be the greater silence, the constraining lie
enforced by the familiar threat
that we will be judged guilty of anti-Semitism.

And now, my country
(because it is still held to account
for its unprecedented crimes)
can describe as “reparations”
what it does in its own commercial interest:
delivering another U-Boat to Israel,
one capable of deploying devastating warheads
against targets inside a nation that has not, so far,
been proven to possess a single atomic bomb.
Fear is serving as a substitute for evidence.
I say what must be said.

But why have I been silent until now?
Because of my own background,
and ineradicable shame –
which, as well it should,
binds my fate to Israel’s.
I was too ashamed to state the facts.

Why should I say, as an aged man,
down to his final drops of ink:
“Israel’s nuclear capability
is a threat to this world’s
already fragile peace?”
Because it must be said;
tomorrow it may be too late.
We Germans, already so burdened with guilt,
may become complicit in a crime
that we can foresee
and for which the usual excuses
will not suffice.

Granted, I am also speaking now
because I am tired of the West’s hypocrisy,
and because I wish
to free many others from their silence.
I appeal to you who have created this danger
to renounce violence, and to insist upon
the unhindered, permanent control
of Israeli nuclear capability
and Iranian nuclear research
by an international agency
authorized by both governments.

For Israelis, and Palestinians
and all of the people, ourselves included
living as enemies, in territories
occupied by delusion:
This is the only aid.

If, like me, you wish to have the original German version, I give you "Was gesagt werden muss":

Warum schweige ich, verschweige zu lange,
was offensichtlich ist und in Planspielen
geübt wurde, an deren Ende als Überlebende
wir allenfalls Fußnoten sind.

Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag,
der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte
und zum organisierten Jubel gelenkte
iranische Volk auslöschen könnte,
weil in dessen Machtbereich der Bau
einer Atombombe vermutet wird.

Doch warum untersage ich mir,
jenes andere Land beim Namen zu nennen,
in dem seit Jahren - wenn auch geheimgehalten -
ein wachsend nukleares Potential verfügbar
aber außer Kontrolle, weil keiner Prüfung
zugänglich ist?

Das allgemeine Verschweigen dieses Tatbestandes,
dem sich mein Schweigen untergeordnet hat,
empfinde ich als belastende Lüge
und Zwang, der Strafe in Aussicht stellt,
sobald er mißachtet wird;
das Verdikt "Antisemitismus" ist geläufig.

Jetzt aber, weil aus meinem Land,
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal eingeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird,
wiederum und rein geschäftsmäßig, wenn auch
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert,
ein weiteres U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert werden soll, dessen Spezialität
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengköpfe
dorthin lenken zu können, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befürchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt werden muß.

Warum aber schwieg ich bislang?
Weil ich meinte, meine Herkunft,
die von nie zu tilgendem Makel behaftet ist,
verbiete, diese Tatsache als ausgesprochene Wahrheit
dem Land Israel, dem ich verbunden bin
und bleiben will, zuzumuten.

Warum sage ich jetzt erst,
gealtert und mit letzter Tinte:
Die Atommacht Israel gefährdet
den ohnehin brüchigen Weltfrieden?
Weil gesagt werden muß,
was schon morgen zu spät sein könnte;
auch weil wir - als Deutsche belastet genug -
Zulieferer eines Verbrechens werden könnten,
das voraussehbar ist, weshalb unsere Mitschuld
durch keine der üblichen Ausreden
zu tilgen wäre.

Und zugegeben: ich schweige nicht mehr,
weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
überdrüssig bin; zudem ist zu hoffen,
es mögen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien,
den Verursacher der erkennbaren Gefahr
zum Verzicht auf Gewalt auffordern und
gleichfalls darauf bestehen,
daß eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regierungen beider Länder zugelassen wird.

Nur so ist allen, den Israelis und Palästinensern,
mehr noch, allen Menschen, die in dieser
vom Wahn okkupierten Region
dicht bei dicht verfeindet leben
und letztlich auch uns zu helfen.

The One Book Everyone Should Read

People who want to break away from religiously based literature ask what books they should read. Before pointing them to Darwin, Dawkins, Coyne, Russell, Hume, Bayle or most anyone else, recommend them to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Meditations is the preeminent work of reason. Fewer educated people have read it today; it's not universal in literature survey courses, and Classics courses continue to disappear. This is unfortunate. Our world would benefit greatly if politicians, teachers, lobbyists, and dissidents regularly adopted the Meditations in their discourse.

Sample three passages from Book 1:

From Diognetus, [I learned] not to busy myself about trifling things, and not to give credit to what was said by miracle-workers and jugglers about incantations and the driving away of daemons and such things; and not to breed quails for fighting, nor to give myself up passionately to such things; and to endure freedom of speech; and to have become intimate with philosophy; and to have been a hearer, first of Bacchius, then of Tandasis and Marcianus; and to have written dialogues in my youth; and to have desired a plank bed and skin, and whatever else of the kind belongs to the Grecian discipline.

From Rusticus I received the impression that my character required improvement and discipline; and from him I learned not to be led astray to sophistic emulation, nor to writing on speculative matters, nor to delivering little hortatory orations, nor to showing myself off as a man who practises much discipline, or does benevolent acts in order to make a display; and to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing; and not to walk about in the house in my outdoor dress, nor to do other things of the kind; and to write my letters with simplicity, like the letter which Rusticus wrote from Sinuessa to my mother; and with respect to those who have offended me by words, or done me wrong, to be easily disposed to be pacified and reconciled, as soon as they have shown a readiness to be reconciled; and to read carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book; nor hastily to give my assent to those who talk overmuch; and I am indebted to him for being acquainted with the discourses of Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection.

From Apollonius I learned freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose; and to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, except to reason; and to be always the same, in sharp pains, on the occasion of the loss of a child, and in long illness; and to see clearly in a living example that the same man can be both most resolute and yielding, and not peevish in giving his instruction; and to have had before my eyes a man who clearly considered his experience and his skill in expounding philosophical principles as the smallest of his merits; and from him I learned how to receive from friends what are esteemed favours, without being either humbled by them or letting them pass unnoticed.

Everyone should read the Meditations. More should discuss it. It will not make one an atheist, nor will it make one a skeptic. It does not even challenge or criticize religion. Yet Meditations surpasses all in framing thought and in setting reason above desire.

We struggle to manage desire's rule, especially if we have been told that God or Jesus loves us. Especially if we enjoy being with friends and family at worship services. Especially if we like the architecture and atmosphere of a religious building. We want to feel personally empowered, loved, and connected.

The power of Meditations is to moderate desire. In fact, it puts desire in the service of reason. Until this happens, one cannot be persuaded that Jesus really isn't Lord, that God really isn't great, that Mohammed isn't Allah's prophet, that we are not sinners, that we do not have souls, that our dead loved ones reside neither in heaven nor hell, and that devils and angels are not fighting over us.

Religion and Smallness

Checking in from dissertation land. As I get into the work, I tense up at how great the labor is, and how small I am before it. It's a multi-colored mountain of junk, trinkets, nuggets, knick-knacks, gems, and rotting fruit all piled higher than Babel. And I stand in front of it with slacked shoulders and bent knees, grabbing an item here to make a sort, walking around there to something else for a different sort. To say I'm daunted is way beneath understatement.

But continue on, I do. So Yoda has instructed.

My leisure thoughts turn to reflecting on 2011. My birthday approaches and I want to clarify one or two truths I've pulled from that other Babel pile, my life. More than anything else, the year was demanding. If last year I appealed to myself and to the blogosphere for peace, perhaps I sensed my desire to be--or at least feel--less put upon.

Didn't happen.

I was needed. My family needed my presence and engagement. My ambitions demanded my time and my mind. My work had its requirements, too.

Life is a wave passing by the center of the ocean, as far away from land as one can be. It has a force that I can't resist. I don't think anyone can. Some lucky folks keep their balance as the force moves them in the wave's direction. Some struggle in the sea for equilibrium. Others rotate around and around, unable to stop what the rushing wave caused for them.

In this image, I finally see what religion and religious experience really are. I don't mean the political religion of the popes and pastors and rabbis and mullahs and masters. I mean the private religion of people such as those I knew in my Chabad days and those I met at Alpha. I mean the faith of individual men and women trying to adjust to the wave.

Yes, religion involves community and stability. Yes, it feeds on family togetherness. Yes, it declares the believer's trust in what admired elders and righteous ancestors have openly, publicly shared. And yes, it helps one feel more certain that she is doing right.

These are all symptoms of a more basic awareness: that one is small and alone. When we get sick or scared, the awareness re-emerges. What drives religion more than anything else? What's the source of religion's symptoms and political fingerprints? It's not quite fear, as Bertrand Russell concluded, but both understanding the basic human situation and instinctively reacting to it.

It's a process. One slowly comes to grips with his smallness and solitude. One performs being small and alone, and one conjures a figure for the bigness and everythingness of the passing wave. One deals with oblivion by doing something, anything. It's something meaningless and pointless, but it orients one and directs his desire.

That's religion. Doing something for a release and for a wish. It might look like floating, or swimming, or surfing, or drowning. It might look like fun or fear or deference. But it's actually futility playing futility, an actor playing the part of herself. It's an undercover cop who actually is corrupt.

This is not a criticism of religion. How could it be?

Prepare to Lose (for Tristan Vick)

This post is respectfully dedicated to Tristan Vick, "Advocatus Atheist," who makes all of us better thinkers.

I mentioned before that I have been participating in an Alpha course with my wife, who is a Christian. I stand by my description of the course as:

A Christian outreach program. It consists of weekly sessions to persuade people into becoming more devout Christians. It purports to offer a "safe" place for raising doubts and questions about Christianity, but--if my experience is typical--it's really an ongoing sermon conducted in "free" dinners, worship songs, DVD lectures, and small group discussions.

The latter part of the description gives the most serious objection to the course, that it encourages doubts and questions to be raised but doesn't give time and attention for them to be pursued. This is problematic because it means the course is "safe" for voicing concerns but not for holding them. It's not a course in investigation or inquiry: it's a course in indoctrination.

Honest investigation and inquiry require one to be prepared to lose even cherished hypotheses and beliefs. Thus, I am ready to learn something new in Alpha that will change one or more of my opinions dramatically. If a compelling argument is brought before me, or if I come upon one myself, I am ready to admit that atheism is less correct or probably incorrect.

Yet, I wonder whether I really am prepared to give up atheism or whether I am just saying it to appear more rational to myself. Of course, I also wonder whether my fellow participants are prepared to lose Christianity. The point is that I have no reason to feel superior or satisfied in the course, even though I often cringe at what people say.

Beyond this, my fellow participants are my fellows: I like them and genuinely feel for the struggles and successes they face outside the classroom. Someone has a very ill parent. A couple is enduring the endless waiting of the adoption process. A couple is trying to make it work. A woman is coping with depression. A man is waiting on a job offer.

I have settled into thinking that my role in the course is to assert that atheists are normal people with legitimate reasons for rejecting religious and theistic doctrines. It is possible, I say, to perceive the full message of Christianity and to understand it as well as any believer...and also accept that it is untrue. It is possible to be good, happy, giving, peaceful, fulfilled, and whole without gods and religions.

Atheist philosopher George H. Smith wrote: "We have nothing to fear, and everything to gain, from the honest pursuit of truth." This is not quite true. Right or wrong, as individuals we often fear losing the comfort of familiar beliefs. We don't like the uncertainty that comes with  the honest pursuit of truth. We don't like bracketing most everything we think or believe as provisional and conditional--and subject to revision.

But self-identifying atheists, more than other people, have to declare themselves willing to pursue truth honestly. I say "more than other people" because pursuing truth is a raison d'etre of atheism. We therefore need to show that our opinions and beliefs are not sacrosanct.

We should, forgiving the mystical language, accept the wise counsel of Bruce Lee: "Like everyone else you want to learn the way to win. But never to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat — to learn to die — is to be liberated from it. Once you accept, you are free to flow and to harmonize."

The Moral Deity That Commands "You Shall Not Allow Any Soul to Live"

Most everyone by now knows about the statement by biologist and public atheist Richard Dawkins on why he refuses to debate the Christian apologist William Lane Craig. A key reason, Dawkins explains, involves Deuteronomy 20:13-17 and Craig's endorsement of it. The passage has God commanding Moses to destroy various cities utterly, killing everyone indiscriminately.

Dawkins's refusal and citation of the Bible has, of course, caused fits of moral incoherence in the religious, who must reconcile (a) an authoritative picture of the god as vile and cruel with (b) a theory of the deity as good, just, and merciful. The reconciliation is impossible, and I'll admit to having enjoyed the conniptions of those who have sought to cling to their fantasy of a nice daddy-god.

Dawkins gives some of the biblical text in his article, but I prefer the Chabad version of the text, offered here with surrounding verses. This, then, is Deuteronomy 20:10-20:

10. When you approach a city to wage war against it, you shall propose peace to it.

11. And it will be, if it responds to you with peace, and it opens up to you, then it will be, [that] all the people found therein shall become tributary to you, and they shall serve you.

12. But if it does not make peace with you, and it wages war against you, you shall besiege it,

13. and the Lord, your God, will deliver it into your hands, and you shall strike all its males with the edge of the sword.

14. However, the women, the children, and the livestock, and all that is in the city, all its spoils you shall take for yourself, and you shall eat the spoils of your enemies, which the Lord, your God, has given you.

15. Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not of the cities of these nations.

16. However, of these peoples' cities, which the Lord, your God, gives you as an inheritance, you shall not allow any soul to live.

17. Rather, you shall utterly destroy them: The Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivvites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord, your God, has commanded you.

18. So that they should not teach you to act according to all their abominations that they have done for their gods, whereby you would sin against the Lord, your God.

19. When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them, for you may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a man, to go into the siege before you?

20. However, a tree you know is not a food tree, you may destroy and cut down, and you shall build bulwarks against the city that makes war with you, until its submission.

This is brutal, nasty, indefensible stuff.

Craig has now responded to Dawkins's charges. Christian Today reports Craig as offering:

"There was no racial war here, no command to kill them all," he said, alluding to extermination of the Canaanites in the Old Testament, "the command was to drive them out."

He then said: "I would say that God has the right to give and take life as He sees fit. Children die all the time! If you believe in the salvation, as I do, of children, who die, what that meant is that the death of these children meant their salvation. People look at this [genocide] and think life ends at the grave but in fact this was the salvation of these children, who were far better dead … than being raised in this Canaanite culture."

Craig's response stinks. In his "no command to kill them all," Craig might be referring specifically to Numbers 33:50-56, but of course that's a change from the text cited by Dawkins.

Craig's next bit is outright repulsive: "God has the right to give and take life as He sees fit"? No, no, he does not have that right. At least, it is not obvious that God has such a right either to give or to take life. I would like to see the philosophical case for this.

The rest of Craig's response continues the fail. By his reasoning, a fanatical religious group commanded by God may wipe out each of us, including our young and cute little babies. We should feel pretty good about being murdered, though, because our kids will be far better off in the afterlife--no matter their fear, crying, pain, suffering, and brutalization before death finally comes.

Better hope Westboro Baptist doesn't build up a stockpile.

Omnipotence and Practical Freedom

Alleged God's alleged omnipotence has been a subject here recently. The discussion on omnipotence has been instructive as an example of how these grand claims for God start to weaken and wither under scrutiny. We're told first that God is omnipotent, and then we're told that even God's power has boundaries. Like it or not, this is a downgrade of God akin to what has happened to God in the face of advances in the biological and physical sciences. The more we learn and establish about reality, the less present and prominent God becomes: that gaps are becoming ever more unworthy of a being we should worship.

But the downgraded God is the one that gets defended in the video below. The case made to the faithful is that God is all-powerful but he can't do what is logically impossible. Therefore, he could not have both given people freedom and forced people to obey him.

I'm not comfortable with the casual assertion that God cannot do what is logically impossible because it is based not on the Bible, not on biblical commentary, and not on religious doctrine. The assertion rather derives from recognizing that true omnipotence is a logically incoherent concept. The assertion, in other words, has only the function of defending a semblance of omnipotence so that people can continue to feel warranted in worshiping the god of the Jewish and Christian bibles. 

To illustrate the problem of the declaration that God cannot do the logically impossible, let's expand the phrasing: God cannot do what we consider to be logically impossible. Now, the implications of the problem rise to the surface:

• If God cannot do what is logically impossible (the original phrasing), then there are things that are impossible for any being to perform. Any being: plants, animals, gods, and humans. In this sense, all beings are equal before that law. And if we are peers even in a limited sense, then we have cause and reason to state that any individual being can assert independence from the governance and interference of another being.
• If God cannot do what we consider to be logically impossible, then things get more complicated. On the one hand, we seem to be imposing human logical systems on God. He cannot operate outside of a system of our own making and discovery. On the other hand, if God actually is not constrained by our logic, or our perceptions of logic, then perhaps he can make a universe governed by a super-logic such that square circles and so forth are coherent entities.
• If God cannot do what is logically impossible, in the first sense, then we can easily imagine a being whose powers either sidestep or transcend those boundaries. A being such a the new one we have imagined would, per the various ontological arguments, be greater and therefore a better candidate for God than the Abrahamic god. 

Claiming that God cannot violate the logically impossible also brings the divine reasoning into question: if God is omnipotent in the way described in the video, wouldn't it have been easy to make the logical move of not placing a prohibited item in the Garden of Eden at all? Without the fruit-one-must-not-eat, Adam and Eve would have still had freedom to act, but they would never have been in danger of doing the very bad thing that wound up condemning all humanity (according to the story, that is). Wouldn't this have been a better way to proceed?

But my larger point in the earlier post and in this one has little to do with the philosophy of omnipotence. I don't actually care that much about omnipotence as a concept. What I care about is that all of this intellectual energy is being put in the service of defending the conclusion that God exists and we should worship him. In the face of mounting evidence and logic, this conclusion is untenable and has been for some time.

Theodicy Is an End to Theology

I suggest you invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole.

Before the advent of Darwin's evolutionary theory, and the scientific and cultural revolution it inspired, theology was the height of intellectual activity. To be a theologian was to be a noble philosopher, an intimate to God's word and mind, a communicator of the divine nature. More than anything, the theologian reconciled God to humanity.

Today, however, apologists and their followers must perform all sorts of intellectual and emotional gyrations to maintain the integrity of the good-God concept. If you want an all-powerful, all-good god to worship, then you're going to have to squint your eyes just so and contort your body in just the right way. Theologians have almost replaced lexicographers as the harmless drudges of our age, as fewer people take theologians or God very seriously. Unfortunately, the Abrahamic religions maintain a core of government-minded practitioners who would have us all change our infidel ways under threat of sword. Were it not for those who take theology and God too seriously, the theologians could do their work in peace and the rest of the world would move ahead unperturbed.

The real difference between the theologians and the zealots is that the former group are more conflicted in their woo. They see that in the real world, the divinities and the holy books don't live up to the hype. They need to fit a square God into a round reality. Hence, theology. But theology cannot be complete unless and until it formulates a real theodicy, an explanation for the existence of evil if God is all-loving and all-powerful. J.F. Mackie expressed the problem this way:

In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.

Uncommon Descent's resident apologist Barry Arrington sheepishly tries to lead the hope-and-faith crowd down the correct path for understanding why God makes (or allows) terrible things happen to earnest believers, casual adherents, and unbelievers alike. God is no moral monster, says Arrington. Neither is the divinity unaware of what will befall any individual.

What is the correct path, the true approach, according to Arrington?

Evil never accomplishes some great cosmic purpose. God hates it, and in no sense does he intend it so that he can use it to accomplish his purposes. God did not intend for Joseph’s brothers to sell him into slavery. He did not intend for Potipher’s wife falsely to accuse him of rape. He hated the evil visited upon Joseph. It is true that God worked in Joseph’s life to help him overcome the circumstances into which he had been thrust by the evil acts of others. But most emphatically God did not “desire” those evil acts (or, far worse, specifically cause them to happen) to accomplish a greater good. He accomplished the good in spite of those acts, not because of them.

Of course! God only does the good stuff! People only do the bad stuff, and God only does the good stuff. Unfortunately, in 1955 Mackie disposed of Arrignton's proposed solution:

I should ask this: if God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good? If there is no logical impossibility in a man's freely choosing the good on one, or on several, occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion. God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong: there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right. Clearly, his failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being both omnipotent and wholly good.

Mackie continues:

If it is replied that this objection is absurd, that the making of some wrong choices is logically necessary for freedom, it would seem that 'freedom' must here mean complete randomness or indeterminacy, including randomness with regard to the alternatives good and evil, in other words that men's choices and consequent actions can be "free " only if they are not determined by their characters. Only on this assumption can God escape the responsibility for men's actions; for if he made them as they are, but did not determine their wrong choices, this can only be because the wrong choices are not determined by men as they are. But then if freedom is randomness, how can it be a characteristic of will? And, still more, how can it be the most important good? What value or merit would there be in free choices if these were random actions which were not determined by the nature of the agent?

I conclude that to make this solution plausible two different senses of 'freedom' must be confused, one sense which will justify the view that freedom is a third order good, more valuable than other goods would be without it, and another sense, sheer randomness, to prevent us from ascribing to God a decision to make men such that they sometimes go wrong when he might have made them such that they would always freely go right.

Arrington's theodicy falls, then, as a matter of logic. The square peg does not fit into the round hole.

Yet the most troubling aspect of the whole discussion is the argument that underlies and justifies the practice of theodicy itself. Here, Arrington spouts poetic pleasantries about the kind of idea he wants to worship:

God is powerful enough to combine apparent contradictions in his person. He is three, yet he is only one. He is both immanent and transcendent. He is sovereign, omniscient, omnipotent; yet despite the evil that exists in the universe he created, he is also omni-benevolent. It never ceases to amaze me that skeptics are surprised when they are unable to fit God into neat human categories. But if we could understand God completely, would we not be gods ourselves? I know I am no god, so I am unsurprised to find that I cannot comprehend God in his fullness or understand fully how such contradictions can be combined in him. Nevertheless, I am quite certain they are.

Arrington characterizes skeptics as incorrectly as possible. We are not at all surprised that God doesn't fit into categories of evidence, logic, and reason--this is the point we're making!

Arrington's picture of the deity is sweet. It sounds ducky: God is virile and complex, accessible and sublime. He actually is the best of the best. But what real evidence is Arrington's picture based on? Writings of other theologians? Holy writ?

How can the rest of the world know that his picture of the supreme being corresponds to the truth? How can anyone know that Arrington's picture of the creator god is better than that of other apologists and theologians?

We can't know. Ultimately, Arrington is making stuff up based on his personal view of the world. Square peg God doesn't have to fit into round hole reality because square peg God only has to fit into the square hole in Arrington's imagination.

I Send Email

Today, I made a bit of a break with my local rabbi:

Hi Rabbi Z.,

[My wife] tells me that you left a message on our voice mail recently. I have a moment now to drop a note, so I want to thank you for your call. Unfortunately, I must pass along my regrets, as I'll be unable to attend the Shavuos party this week. Certainly, my schedule is hectic, as usual. And certainly my family and I have our hands full with [my son's] autism.

But there's something else, and that is that I'm less inclined these days to participate in religious activities because I've abandoned the idea of gods altogether. I won't bore you with the full story of this transformation in my thinking. Basically, the research I did for [Rabbi S.] three years ago opened my eyes to arguments and information (some new, some old) that led me to put away the pretenses of gods, favored peoples, angels and demons, afterlife, and so on. I say all this not to offend, shock, or disappoint. Neither am I interested in debating the topic or discussing it further. My purpose in sharing this information with you is so that you can understand why I am focusing my energies in other directions.

Nevertheless, I still have the same high level of personal affection for you and your family. [My wife] and the kids enjoy seeing everyone. We'll be by in the future as we can. In other respects, however, I am gone and not coming back.

Best,

Larry

See? People Do Declare to Be True That Which Can Easily Be Proven False!

I mentioned yesterday that "People lie all the time, quite convincingly, even when they know they could easily be caught in the lie." And even if we don't think are lying, necessarily, people can quite easily spread falsehoods and misinformation.

Exhibit A, Penn Jillette:

Yesterday, around 3 p.m., a trend started emerging on Twitter. People began reciting a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that seemed strangely apt for this occasion:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."

The first person to cite it on Twitter was the famous magician/Libertarian Penn Jillette, but the words quickly went viral, and the source got lost in the shuffle. The only problem? As Megan McArdle pointed out in the Atlantic, Martin Luther King never said that. Actually, the quote from MLK about enemies is:

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

How did this other quote get misattributed to King? As McArdle says in her piece, "It's a bit too a propos. What 'thousands' would King have been talking about? In which enemy's death was he supposed to be rejoicing?" She also wonders, "Why? What do you get out of saying something pithy, and getting no credit for it?"

Penn admits to being the originator of the quote on Twitter, though he claims it got messed up when he cut and pasted from a longer piece by King. I'm not sure if I believe him; I have a strong suspicion Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking on the sources. After all, this is the guy who created the documentary "Penn and Teller: Bullshit!" and the subsequent Showtime series about how easy it was to dupe people.

Update: The source of the quote is a Facebook message by Jessica Dovey, where she goes on to quote Martin Luther King Jr. In this context, it's easy to see how a cut-and-paste job could have accidentally attributed the source to King. Congrats to Jessica, whose Facebook wall post is one of the more famous sayings on the Internet today. Salon has reached out to Penn Jillette for comment, but has yet to receive a response.

The lesson? A claim should not be considered true just because it could easily be proven false. If you don't do the work of actually researching and see if it is false, you may be misled.

We Can Explain Ancient Miracles

If only you believe like I believe, baby, we’d get by.
If only you believe in miracles, baby, so would I.

If you actually believe in miracles, as opposed to nominally believing in them, then you don't really believe in reality.


I hear this awful claim often enough to be annoyed by it:

Scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries spent much time rationalizing and attempting to explain the miracles of Jesus. These miracles cannot be removed or explained away. They are fundamental to the message as perceived by the audience of Jesus. As people of the 21st century believe in science, people then believed in magic. Although contemporary people may not accept that such miracles occurred, the age in which Jesus lived believed in miracles. The miracles have a progressive character, from curing Peter's mother-in-law of a fever to bringing a girl back from the dead. The miracles prompted people to deal with the question of God and he was speaking through this prophet or whether Jesus was a false prophet. In the narrative of the Gospel of Mark, these miracles are essential to authenticating the message of Jesus. [emphasis added]

A fair parsing of the above is to understand it not as a defense of miracles per se or as an affirmation of Jesus as god or demigod, but rather as an assertion that miracles are constitutive content of Jesus message. A real Jesus who didn't perform miracles was not Jesus, in other words. 

However, I want to focus on a different but also fair reading, the annoying reading. This is the one that blithely accepts miracles in the case of Jesus (though never, to my knowledge, in non-Christian contexts) and devotedly affirms Jesus as a singularly special personage. It is true, as the claim above suggests, that even today some modern scholars try to rationalize and explain the miracles of Jesus.

My point is that the explanations fall flat not because miracles are beyond explanation but rather because the most likely explanation is rarely considered, that the miracles are invented. The miracles are embellished. They are fabricated.

And the invention is indeed fundamental to the larger message. Jesus's miracles authenticate the divine claims about him. Similarly, the miracles of Sinai, manna, plagues, the parting of the waters--all these validate and justify the claims people make about the Torah and the Judaism they say is based on Torah. They are not lies but fantasies of the truth.

Nevertheless, although we today try to be careful in defining truth and fantasy, we can always find claims presented as fact that are badly, baldly incorrect. For example, our quote above states incorrectly that "As people of the 21st century believe in science, people then [in the time of Jesus] believed in magic." We people today do not believe in science. We do not claim that people with scientific powers can violate laws of nature, wipe out nations in response to our supplication, or save us the final fate of all organisms. We do not believe that science belongs exclusively to a hereditary cabal of social elites. We do not believe that people can walk into the wilderness and acquire full-blown scientific powers, as from a burning bush, that decipher the invisible yet perceptible patterns of a universe in motion. We cannot, therefore, allow a facile equation between the mindsets of people in the first and twenty-first centuries. 

Neither can we presumptively grant special status to the miracles of Jesus or the Torah because miracles abound in the religions of the world:

• Muslims consider the Koran itself to be a miracle.
• Muslims also point to the miracles of Mohamed's splitting of the moon, his journey to Jerusalem, and his ascension to heaven.
• The Buddha is reported to have created a golden bridge in the air, using only his mind. He walked up and down the bridge for a week.
• The Buddha also is said to have produced flames from the upper part of his body and streams of water from the lower part of his body, alternating this, and doing similarly between the left and right sides of his body. This is the "twin miracle."
• In Hinduism, Sathya Sai Baba produces ash for skeptical onlookers as a symbol of his divinity. Sri Ramakrishna proved his divinity to Swami Vivekananda by touching him on the chest, thereby revealing the true nature of the universe to him
• Also in Hinduism are the miracles of Sri Krishna, ranging from instances in his childhood in which his mother, Yashoda, saw the whole of creation in his mouth, to the revealing of his true nature to Arjuna during the Mahabharata.

To accept the existence of bona-fide miracles is to require a level of credence to all miracle claims. You cannot blithely state that the miracles of Exodus are true but not the miracles of Jesus. You cannot argue that the miracles of Jesus are true but not the miracles of Mohamed. You cannot say that the miracles of Exodus and Jesus are true but not those of the Buddha. And so on....

Thus: if you believe, really believe, in miracles, then you disbelieve in reality. To believe in miracles is to hypothesize that normal reality can at any time be fundamentally altered: the sun can stop, the dead can become alive again, the world can be made to act like a single living thing, and so on.

In this light, perhaps it should be unsurprising that people declare with puffed-out chests that the miracles of [insert religious figure here] cannot be explained through reason or science or common sense or whatever. People don't like the boredom and lack of drama that is most of reality most of the time. Miracles are sexier, more dramatic, more conducive to our natural solipsism.

Writer William Saroyan famously said, "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case." The miracle apologists suffer from adopting this line of thinking seriously. They live and move in reality throughout their days and yet steadfastly believe that reality can be excepted in the case of how they wish it would be.

My Goal's Beyond

John Milton, we all know, wrote Paradise Lost "to justify the ways of God to men." My goals in Textuality are slightly more modest than Milton's but exponentially more important: I write to explain my ideas and opinions to my children. I write to my wife, my brothers, my parents, my friends, and to anyone else who may be interested.

How many of us know what our mothers and fathers truly feel and think? How many get the chance to see the world through their eyes and approach ideas the way they do?

My goal for this blog is to make this knowledge and sight available to my loved ones, should they ever want to explore. I want them to know what I think and why. I want them to understand what I think, even if they do not agree with the thoughts. I want them to know that I think. I want them to realize that I am most comfortable writing and considering ideas.

I started Textuality in 2005, following the painful but necessary abandonment (temporary, it now seems) of my dissertation and my aspirations for doctorate in English. At that time, my aims for the blog were to to continue working, informally, in textuality:

This blog has been initiated and inaugurated to serve as a forum on textuality. Specifically, it is intended to support the analysis and understanding of current events, issues, and debates from the standpoint of textuality.

As I understand textuality, it is the quality possessed by a tangible thing of being a text. To proceed further, a text is a tangible thing – such as a piece of paper, a book, a Web page or Internet site, an onstage or onscreen performance, a painting, a sculpture, a building, a location in nature, and so on – that is understood to be or to be comprised of one or more signs. Signs may contain one or more signifying elements, but their referents are conceived of as statements of thought intended to be communicated.

I had hoped to build a site that would become the foremost authority on textuality. In practice, however, I used the blog as a diary. The personal and rather whiny nature of the blog during these early days was one reason (there were others) I took the pseudonym "Larry Tanner," a nickname someone gave me in college. Recently I have flirted with the idea of "coming out" and using my real name, but I already have other blogs under my real name. "Larry Tanner" has become like a separate identity, and I enjoy playing this role. So for now, the pseudonym stays.

Early on in the life of the blog, I seemed to lose interest. In 2006, I posted only one entry, and it was a personal disclosure:

It's almost been one year since I last posted here. Let's see: one child, two marathons, and some marital beauty and ugliness later, now I'm posting again.

I don't know why, exactly, I would even think of coming back. I'm struggling with something. I'm just not satisfied. I'm losing confidence and feel like I'm running out of time.

Hmm ... isn't this kind of what I said last year too?

The post above sounds rather bleak and self-chastising. I do that much less now, for whatever reasons. I remember some of the days of 2006. Our family was strapped for cash, stressed with the new baby, dissatisfied with my workplace, bewildered by my wife's depression, and dealing with my dislike of the wife's new church. We had issues, then, but we also had lots of happiness and love, too. In any case, I suppose my attention was best directed elsewhere than the blog.

Although I posted intermittently in 2007, the great change for Textuality came in 2008. Precipitating the change was my accepting a ghostwriting gig. As I began the gig and the writing involved, I did not foresee any shifts in my personal views but I did sense trouble between my author friend/employer and myself:

In the writing, I am finding a lot of passion and struggle in myself. It's good, I'm learning a lot and swaying between almost complete atheism and firm religious belief. It's interesting. There are just so many great perspectives available online. I am glad that I am able to be swayed. I am not an easy sway, but my openness is partly what makes it all work. Now, it could be that my author is not happy with what I have drafted. If that's the case, then we surely will not be able to work together.

Partly as a result of this gig, I took sides in the larger cultural squabbles concerning atheism and religion. I posted a big admission in November of 2008:

Do I believe in G-d? The answer is no, but it’s not an unequivocal no. It is a no of belief: I do not feel sure enough to have the scales tipped toward faith. I have little confidence that I ever will...and I am OK with this.

The character of my posts changed slowly. Throughout 2008 and into 2009, I was writing reactive stuff: I'd read an article or another blog post and then respond. I don't think I struck upon a clearer identity for Textuality until October 2009, with one post on Bob Dylan and another on the debates of atheists and religious believers.

With these essays, I brought out (at last) my full voice. I sought to make my points personal, original, unambiguous, and unfiltered. I tried to quote liberally and in context. I wanted to work through quotes slowly, patiently, and in detail. I aimed to have posts work as part of a larger, ongoing conversation between myself and the world.

In July of this year, I thought I'd exhausted my thoughts on atheism and religion. I intended to post mostly on Walt Whitman to find other topics of interest. I said then:

I have interests in addition to Atheism that deserve fuller and more sustained expression by me. I want to explore other aspects of this wonderful world, such as the poetry of its people, the conflicts of its nations and civilizations, and the endeavors of its animal inhabitants.

This statement remains true, even if I have not done as much about it (so far) as I might like. Indeed, recently I've been quite focused on topics in and around atheism and religion. Yet I've been generally pleased about the posts on the Kuzari Principle and on ultimate meaning.

One day, I hope to gather maybe 25-50 posts, organize them, and self -publish a book of the best and most enduring posts in Textuality.This book will be for the kids, mainly, not for sale or money. My focus today is on addressing topics that interest me but that also allow me to express ideas and opinions I haven't said before.

I have much, much more to write in this blog--about atheism, religion, family, aging, poetry, jokes, work, politics, and more. I anticipate the days and years ahead. Perhaps a post already written or yet to come will serve as pre-text for one or more face-to-face discussions with my children and/or with my wife.

This is a core element of my thinking: anything I write should have an application in real life. My blog life as "Larry Tanner" is a reflection and premonition of the life where I am interacting with actual human beings in real space-time. I would never want a blog that was all and only "in" the blogosphere.

I expect that if I keep up with Textuality, it will continue to morph. After all, I am still growing as an intellect and as a person, and I have much to explain and share. I cannot say whether the future will be good or bad. I hope it's more of the good, but who knows? The writing is part of what I can do. Textuality is part of my pro-activity.