ANOTHER EXCHANGE WITH DAVEO
This exchange began with a complaining letter I sent about one of the Spokesman Review’s columnists. She wrote an essay about evil and seemed to give credence to such religious nonsense as exorcisms and etcetera. That, of course, fired me up and my letter followed. Then Dave jumped in and off we went to the races. Hope you enjoy our titanic struggle:
Dear Editorial Board,
Rebecca Nappi’s muddled and uninformative essay on Wednesday about “evil” is a clear example of what I’ve been saying about the fact that no one on your paper represents a rational, useful and clear-eyed point of view on current events. She added nothing to anyone’s understanding of human behavior and so her column was a waste of everybody’s time.
I read a few of [Scott] Peck’s earlier works, when he was still a bit more sensible, but he’s fallen off the edge now, so to speak. S. J. Gould did a good job of picking apart Peck’s theories of human behavior quite some time ago, and I wish I could recall which of Gould’s essays performed the vivisection so that I could recommend it to the Board.
Who cares whether we call an act “good”, “evil”, “cute”, “bad” or “criminal”? Labeling an act by any name yields not the slightest information of why the act appeared in the behavior repertoire of an individual human being. None whatsoever. Historically, labeling never stops an act from occurring again, never has, and it doesn’t really explain the behavior. If it did, the human race would have had only to experience one Hitler. So Rebecca’s column was just an exercise in futility and commiseration. She waved a soggy handkerchief at the problem of human behavior and turned her back on some potentially real answers.
I’ll cut to the conclusion that Rebecca should have arrived at. An appeal for more funding for the scientific research of evolutionary psychology and a genetic understanding of the real causes of human behavior. In those fields some real understanding of human behavior is already being uncovered. Over and over I’ve recommended to your august company some of the names of those books for your reading pleasure. However, none of the solid and useful information from those books seem to be getting into your paper.
Human behavior does not occur in the way that most under-educated Americans think it does. Really, to hear most people talk, you’d think that all the sensory data which bombards the human animal every second goes to some little room in the brain where sits a homunculus (or soul, armed or unarmed with moral imperatives) which reviews all the arriving data for its moral content then selects from a repertoire of action levers on the wall beside it and pulls one or another to achieve some moral purpose. You’d also think that two other creatures also inhabit this control room, one which tells the little homunculus to chose the good action lever and one which urges it to pull the other lever. If you listen to most babble and commiseration about human behavior, you’ll see that’s what underlies most people’s simplistic idea of how behavior erupts from the human psyche. Nothing could be farther from the truth. How stupid, uninformed and actually immoral in it’s callous disregard for the knowledge being developed that could eventually change human behavior to more constructive ends.
I’ve got a lot more to say about the hows and whys of human behavior, but why should I bother? No one listens down there anyhow and we get the same old religious nonsense to explain everything. I’ll once more recommend a book by a scholar in behavior: Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”. Then when you finish that book packed with information, look in its index for other books about the whole issue of the evolution of human consciousness and the solid information being developed about human behavior. Anything less on your Board’s part is criminal neglect of your job or, at least, dereliction of duty. I keep appealing to your duty to inform your readers rather than to stroke their ignorance.
Sincerely,
Geo
PS: Really, Rebecca, a Yale graduate, you should be ashamed of yourself for supporting such superstitious nonsense to explain human behavior. Could it be correct that George Bush was right when he said the admission of women into Yale was the downfall of that institution? Please don’t make Bush and Harvard’s current president right nor let us male supporters of feminism down. Show that you do have the ability to think scientifically. I’ll support you one hundred percent.
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george; do you ever just let it go? what's your point in your constant carping? do you believe we listen when you rip a respected colleague? or do you prefer to be further marginalized in our sight? you have been relentlessly nasty to our board for years. i don't understand your strategy. you've turned off even those who might agree with your humanistic view of the universe. you're too intelligent to behave this way. you amaze me -- dfo
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Dave,
I just reread my comments about Rebecca Nappi’s column. It barely touches her, Dave. It’s mostly an appeal for someone with a scientific knowledge of how the world works to get some space in your paper. I was specific about the issues which troubled me and with how Rebecca Nappi failed to satisfy even a moderately scientific view of the universe. I even bothered to write a paragraph or two showing the clear clash between her view of the world and what science shows us so that she would see where I’m coming from. You media conservatives are in power, Dave. You get all the ink. To me, even most liberals, who still cling to only moral arguments, are conservatives. Way behind the curve. Therefore, as I also note with the situation with other minorities, since we rarely see our views represented in media pages, of course all our comments will, by necessity, sound negative. I’ve written in to praise some of the paper’s political positions when I’ve agreed.
I’m in constant communication with John Hill too, and you guys down there give him a bad rap. Most everything he writes is informed, accurate and telling. It’s the truths he tells which insult the uninformed and isn’t that how it’s always been? Right now the government is forcing scientists to lie just as the Vatican forced Galileo to lie. Isn’t that interesting? Where’s the outrage down at your paper? And, by the way, it’s Bush and that Harvard president who deep down insult women. All I did was challenge Rebecca to do some research. For Pete’s sake, Dave, I was in my 60’s before I started to really get into this science thing. It’s never to late for anyone who’s still rational.
I did not insult Nappi’s character. I was specific in pointing out just where she fails IN HER RESPONSIBILITIES AS A JOURNALIST to be aware of what’s going on in the world around us. To me, to not know anything about evolutionary psychology and what hard science is showing us about consciousness and behavior is a significant failure on the part of those in charge of our media. It keeps us talking about behavior as if it were 10,000 bce. We’re not making any progress, and we never shall if one can’t tell the difference between an Imam’s and an American Christian columnist’s view of reality. America is incredibly dumb when it comes to science, and that’s a crime in my book.
I suggest you read my comments again, and note that I didn’t just rant on about Nappi’s ignorance. I didn’t call her stupid. I suggested she was uninformed, which is true when it comes to science, and superstitious which she is when she talks about things which don’t have any evidence to support them. When I was in college, Dave, and someone pointed out how uninformed I was, which I often was and can still be, I was also hurt and still am when caught out, but I redoubled my efforts to know more about the subjects under discussion. Thus I’ve delved more deeply into Bible scholarship to understand the debate between Bible scholars on both sides of the inerrancy controversy. Etcetera. My goal is to keep knowing more each day until my mind gives out. Else why waste my time being alive other than the procreative (i.e. family values thing) and survival (work) drives which come from my evolved animal nature”
Shoot, Dave, I wanted to be short, but no discussion with me is short because my thinking is nuanced and layered and one thought is connected to another in a logical manner by the synapses of my brain. I think that means I have a connected and sensible view of the universe, at least as far as my chemical self goes.
Take ‘er easy,
Geo
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george; you... are so passé in your embrace of atheism. even the scholars and philosophers are passing you guys by because findings in science point to creative design, not away from it. here's an article from the washington times backing that up: http://www.washtimes.com/world/20050303-115733-9519r.htm . you and hill remind me of the guys described in the Bible who are always seeking but never coming to the saving knowledge of the truth. trouble is, God has set eternity in your hearts ... a deep-down knowledge that this ain't all there is ... and you two have to find a way to scratch that itch to bring some meaning to your lives. so, you acquire knowledge. others, like hagadone in coeur d'alene, can't get enough of things. still others can't get enough of women. or sports. or drugs, etc. in the end, it's so much chasing the wind. if you're right re: the lack of a God, you're existence is meaningless. so you might as well fill your hours until the grave by keeping your mind busy. what futility. what a waste -- dfo
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Dave,
Look, I’m well aware of those who are after getting intelligent design into the mix, so that they can bring god back into the picture, but, so far, the best scientific minds don’t buy the argument. But, Dave, you’re missing something. Those respectable scientists who are considering intelligent design don’t go to anything like the god of your Bible. I read one of those articles you sent me awhile back, and that philosopher (not scientist), who supposedly went toward “creative design” away from traditional theory, pointedly pointed out that what he was suggesting was a plan which had nothing to do with a god like in the Bible. He was talking about some mechanisms in the process which forced the universe to end up so that consciousness could understand it. He’s talking way beyond where you’re at, Dave. You need to read and understand the stuff you’re passing on. According to the best minds who are considering intelligent design, the “designer” could just as well have been a germ from Mars as a creature from Jupiter or a purely mechanistic process without any spiritual content. None of them is predicting anything like a god with a will and consciousness so very much like us as to allow for us to have created it as well as it having created us. Only those already convinced of an answer without an open mind go to the god of your particular limited religion.
Please understand what you are talking about.
Geo
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doggone it, george, quit this condescending horse crap. of course, i knew the folks i sent you were talking about a God other than the one I believe in. the point is ... they believe in something. which is light years ahead of your enlightened foolish position. i wanted to show you that very educated people believe in something out there. and so do you -- deep down. i saw it in your eyes when we chatted at starbucks. you'd like to slam the door on a monotheistic God because of all the relatives who let you down over the years (save your grandmother). but it's under your skin. i'll take my limited God and the abundant life He's given me any day over your broad-minded hopelessness. Why would anyone ever trade for so-called enlightenment that must hope that life ends at the grave? you have nothing to offer but the vanity of acquiring knowledge for knowledge sake and believing you're intellectually superior to others. pride cometh before a fall, pal -- dfo
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Dave,
This one is insulting. My only reason for believing the way that I do is because, believe it or not, I honor the truth and believe that the human race will get nowhere if they are living with false gods. And, please don’t bring in that family stuff. That’s underhanded and untrue. I’ve faced all those demons and won through to science. That little story I began to tell you has three more parts. They document my journey to the truth, only as I see it. I believe you are sincere in your truths too. Our only real conflict is I say there’s no proof of a god anywhere that can be tested. You say there is. Other than that, I honor your positions as having the same integrity as mine.
Geo
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george, i despair. everything around you should tell you how wrong you are about a superior being of some kind. the fact that we're here. and everything else is, too. i don't think it's an intelligent position to say it all just happened. that flat doesn't make sense. you can't prove where it all came from scientifically; yet, you hold on for dear life to an impossible position. that's fine. but don't be so dang condescending with your religion of unbelief. scripture dismisses your position rather succinctly. i can't prove God scientifically. and you can't disprove Him scientifically. He's in a different realm. He's like the wind. You can feel it. See its results. But you can't see it. In the form of Jesus Christ, however, you have God in the flesh, with plenty of Scripture to foretell his coming and even pen down where He was going to be born and how he and why he was going to die. but enough of this. you don't buy a word. and we've plowed over this ground. i don't mean to be insulting. but you are, too. i suppose you want me to turn the other cheek. i'm not good at doing that. i respect that you're a decent guy who truly is seeking truth. i continue this conversation for that reason only. i would not be having this conversation with your friend. although i believe we're wasting each other's time, i like you -- dfo
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That was the end of our conversation. I let him get in that last word, but here, I must prevail. On his own blog site, he always gets in the last word when he wants to. But I don’t want to actually argue with him in this place. What I do want to point out is how we both go around and around, and every thing he says, I’ve heard a million times. And I agree, when it comes to stuff outside of space/time where a god would have to be in order to have created space/time, neither of us can prove anything. So that brings us back to science which only claims to measure and explain what’s inside the space/time envelope. It’s when religionists of any world religion try to tell us that their tale-telling religious books better describe the material phenomena of this realm than does science that I say “poo poo”. Always and ever, when push comes to shove, science has always been right whenever scripture and science have clashed over the physical universe.
Wheeew! (Wipe brow.) A long one, eh?
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
BUSH PRAISES ANTIWAR MOVEMENT
Even George Bush recognized the antiwar movement in a speech over Memorial Day weekend at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He praised their valuable protest when he said that “America has always been a reluctant warrior.” Too bad he is not made of the same stubborn reluctance of those who opposed the illegal Iraqi invasion and, instead, is one of those bully Americans (the religious right, the neocon right) always in a fever to excuse and invent reasons to invade sovereign nations.
AUNTIE'S NOTES
The following short book review is from our largest, locally owned bookstore, Auntie's, and shows us in yet another way how badly neocons and other religious fundamentalists perform when they run the world. What's happening to "Riverbend" (if she's a legitimate writer telling a true story and not a plant somewhere by some agency with an ax to grind on someone's side other than our own) was foretold as yet another possible result of our invasion of Iraq. I recall the possibility of religious tyranny arising in Iraq as being one of the many possibilities that our religious neocons brushed aside in their rush to become war criminals. And here it comes—straight down the pike and into your living room—religious tyranny very much like the fundies here in America would like to impose upon us if they can just pack the Supreme Court to their liking. Fundies are great at acting without thinking, based on vague moral principles which don't apply to the way humans really act and think. If only they had the artist's and psychologist's knowledge of human behavior to go with their penchant for shooting first and asking questions later. Face it, neocons and religious fundamentalists everywhere, you've made a mess for all of us, not only for Riverbend.
[Open quote] BAGHDAD BURNING By Riverbend
$14.95 paperback / Feminist Press
Who is the writer called "Riverbend"? We know she's a young Iraqi woman in her mid-twenties, with a younger brother she calls "E" whose family lives with the daily terror of war. In August 2003, Riverbend began posting her "blog" on the Internet. Now, the first year of her dialogue has been published.
Whether or not you believe the decision to send our military into Iraq was right, you'll find Riverbend's reportage to be disturbing and moving.
Before the war, Riverbend had a job as a computer programmer, earning equal pay to that of men, and felt she had a bright future. Currently, she can't go outside her home without a male family member and fears for her life.
According to Riverbend, Iraq has gone from being a secular leader in the Middle East to a country awash in the tides of fundamentalism. She is able to discriminate between well-meaning Americans and what she believes to be misguided policies that plunged her country into chaos, however. Don't miss this poignant, moving diary written on the front line in Iraq.
Linda Bond [Close quote]
FREE PRESS
I'm amazed at how often what is going on today was an issue in the 1950s to such intellectuals as Stevenson and others in the Democratic party. Here's another Stevenson speech that could just as well be directed to today's neocons and religious fundamentalists as to the McCarthyites of yesteryear.
"As to you, the press, a last word. It is the habit of journalists, as of politicians, to see the world in terms of crisis rather than continuity; the big story is turmoil and disaster, not the quiet spectacle of men working. I trust that there will be none among my party who will hope for just a small, dandy little catastrophe to vindicate us. I am aware of the thesis that bad news sells papers. But neither politicians nor publishers have the right in this age to hope for the worst. Every newspaperman has talked at one time or another of how to handle the story of the end of the world; but who will be around to buy the 'extra'?
"Every lesson of history is that democracy flourishes when speech is freest. No issue is more important—and more troublesome—in this time of conflict with massive repression than the preservation of our right, even to bore each other. (I was flattered, by the way, by an unsigned letter last week that said: 'Please start talking again, Governor, or we'll be bored to death before we're starved to death.') Never was the responsibility of the majority press greater to make clear that it is concerned about the freedom of all Americans, and not merely about its own liberty to agree with itself. Your typewriter is a public trust. Its sound may be the most beautiful noise you know, but it has meaning and justification only if it is part of the glorious symphony of a free society." —Adlai Stevenson (as reported in Adlai Stevenson and the World by John Martin, p. 15)
PAIN ASYMBOLIA
What do you make of people who laugh at pain? Of course, in movies, we sometimes think we are watching people who laugh at pain and chortle at danger, but in reality, laughing when in excruciating pain is a whole 'nother kettle of molasses altogether. Though some people can do just that. Read the following paragraph.
"So perhaps in this patient the insular cortex was normal, so he could feel the pain, but the wire that goes from the insula to the rest of the limbic system and the anterior cingulate was cut: a disconnection similar to that seen in the Capgras patient. Such a situation would produce the two key ingredients required for laughter and humor: one part of the brain signals a potential danger but the very next instant another part—the anterior cingulate—does not receive a confirmatory signal, thereby leading to the conclusion 'it's a false alarm.' Hence the patient starts laughing and giggling uncontrollably." (Ramachandran's A BRIEF TOUR OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, pp. 22-23)
Even George Bush recognized the antiwar movement in a speech over Memorial Day weekend at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He praised their valuable protest when he said that “America has always been a reluctant warrior.” Too bad he is not made of the same stubborn reluctance of those who opposed the illegal Iraqi invasion and, instead, is one of those bully Americans (the religious right, the neocon right) always in a fever to excuse and invent reasons to invade sovereign nations.
AUNTIE'S NOTES
The following short book review is from our largest, locally owned bookstore, Auntie's, and shows us in yet another way how badly neocons and other religious fundamentalists perform when they run the world. What's happening to "Riverbend" (if she's a legitimate writer telling a true story and not a plant somewhere by some agency with an ax to grind on someone's side other than our own) was foretold as yet another possible result of our invasion of Iraq. I recall the possibility of religious tyranny arising in Iraq as being one of the many possibilities that our religious neocons brushed aside in their rush to become war criminals. And here it comes—straight down the pike and into your living room—religious tyranny very much like the fundies here in America would like to impose upon us if they can just pack the Supreme Court to their liking. Fundies are great at acting without thinking, based on vague moral principles which don't apply to the way humans really act and think. If only they had the artist's and psychologist's knowledge of human behavior to go with their penchant for shooting first and asking questions later. Face it, neocons and religious fundamentalists everywhere, you've made a mess for all of us, not only for Riverbend.
[Open quote] BAGHDAD BURNING By Riverbend
$14.95 paperback / Feminist Press
Who is the writer called "Riverbend"? We know she's a young Iraqi woman in her mid-twenties, with a younger brother she calls "E" whose family lives with the daily terror of war. In August 2003, Riverbend began posting her "blog" on the Internet. Now, the first year of her dialogue has been published.
Whether or not you believe the decision to send our military into Iraq was right, you'll find Riverbend's reportage to be disturbing and moving.
Before the war, Riverbend had a job as a computer programmer, earning equal pay to that of men, and felt she had a bright future. Currently, she can't go outside her home without a male family member and fears for her life.
According to Riverbend, Iraq has gone from being a secular leader in the Middle East to a country awash in the tides of fundamentalism. She is able to discriminate between well-meaning Americans and what she believes to be misguided policies that plunged her country into chaos, however. Don't miss this poignant, moving diary written on the front line in Iraq.
Linda Bond [Close quote]
FREE PRESS
I'm amazed at how often what is going on today was an issue in the 1950s to such intellectuals as Stevenson and others in the Democratic party. Here's another Stevenson speech that could just as well be directed to today's neocons and religious fundamentalists as to the McCarthyites of yesteryear.
"As to you, the press, a last word. It is the habit of journalists, as of politicians, to see the world in terms of crisis rather than continuity; the big story is turmoil and disaster, not the quiet spectacle of men working. I trust that there will be none among my party who will hope for just a small, dandy little catastrophe to vindicate us. I am aware of the thesis that bad news sells papers. But neither politicians nor publishers have the right in this age to hope for the worst. Every newspaperman has talked at one time or another of how to handle the story of the end of the world; but who will be around to buy the 'extra'?
"Every lesson of history is that democracy flourishes when speech is freest. No issue is more important—and more troublesome—in this time of conflict with massive repression than the preservation of our right, even to bore each other. (I was flattered, by the way, by an unsigned letter last week that said: 'Please start talking again, Governor, or we'll be bored to death before we're starved to death.') Never was the responsibility of the majority press greater to make clear that it is concerned about the freedom of all Americans, and not merely about its own liberty to agree with itself. Your typewriter is a public trust. Its sound may be the most beautiful noise you know, but it has meaning and justification only if it is part of the glorious symphony of a free society." —Adlai Stevenson (as reported in Adlai Stevenson and the World by John Martin, p. 15)
PAIN ASYMBOLIA
What do you make of people who laugh at pain? Of course, in movies, we sometimes think we are watching people who laugh at pain and chortle at danger, but in reality, laughing when in excruciating pain is a whole 'nother kettle of molasses altogether. Though some people can do just that. Read the following paragraph.
"So perhaps in this patient the insular cortex was normal, so he could feel the pain, but the wire that goes from the insula to the rest of the limbic system and the anterior cingulate was cut: a disconnection similar to that seen in the Capgras patient. Such a situation would produce the two key ingredients required for laughter and humor: one part of the brain signals a potential danger but the very next instant another part—the anterior cingulate—does not receive a confirmatory signal, thereby leading to the conclusion 'it's a false alarm.' Hence the patient starts laughing and giggling uncontrollably." (Ramachandran's A BRIEF TOUR OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, pp. 22-23)
Friday, May 27, 2005
BUSH CREATES MORE PROBLEMS THAN HE SOLVES
Jump back to December of last year and to a column by Allan Sloan in NEWSWEEK: “Bush talked about Social Security’s being a $10.4 trillion problem.... But the shortfall in Bush’s Medicare drug program is $17 trillion. In other words, the problem that Bush himself created a year ago is two thirds again as large as Social Security’s problem.” Further on in his essay, Sloan says “... you can put the program [S.S.] back on course with a few tweaks.”
Sloan’s not the first American to believe that we can “tweak” S.S. back to health. For one thing, it would be so simple to rescind some of the tax breaks for the ever increasingly richest Americans.
THE LAW AIN’T GOD’S
“The modern Western concept of a legal code is not a list of unassailable divine edicts but a rationally contrived evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social... aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained....” (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joseph Campbell, p. 91)
Well, at least some of us Americans do understand that. Others, lost in Bibleland, don’t.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, THROW A SONG AT IT
CONSILIENCE, Wilson, p. 225: “The dominating influence that spawned the arts was the need to impose order on the confusion caused by intelligence.
To Wilson, the arts, “Because of the slowness of natural selection , which requires tens or hundreds of generations to substitute new genes for old, there was not enough time for human heredity to cope with the vastness of new contingent possibilities revealed by high intelligence. Algorithms [procedures to solve problems] could be built, but they weren’t numerous and precise enough to respond automatically and optimally to every possible event.... The arts filled the gap.”
The human mind contains all the answers. It is the problem and the answer all in one, and no appeal to forces or a force outside ourselves will do any good to explain our modern situation. No force is out there to save os or harm us. That is the primary lesson to be leaned before we move on to better things.
The arts create, Wilson says further on, “order and meaning from the seeming chaos of daily existence.” It also nourishes “our craving for the mystical.”
WHO MINISTERS TO VIOLENCE?
In 1964 three Northerners (Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman) who were in Mississippi to help register black voters were tortured and murdered by Klansmen who buried them. Today’s Spokesman Review (Jan. 7, 2005) reveals that an arrest has been made in the murder case and Klansman and minister Edgar Ray Killen jailed.
The operative word here is “minister”. Sometimes I doubt that many Americans who claim “spiritual values” truly know how brutal and backward, fascist actually, many Southern religious figures were and still are. In fact the leadership of Oral Robert’s University where racism is still rampant are ministers. And Cal Thomas, who calls for America to use torture to interrogate prisoners claims to be a spiritual man. The examples are too numerous to list. So, when I hear all these religious people claim to have superior values to us atheists, I can only laugh nervously.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK. WHO RECALLS?
Reading about Chiang Kai-shek in my Adlai Stevenson bio., about Quemoy, Matsu and Formosa, I remember those days and how easily I accepted how “good” this tyrannical general for democracy was as he heroically opposed the nasty, Communist Mao. I recall stories about the prosperous island of Formosa compared to the horrible conditions in mainland China. All propaganda.
I was surprised to learn that another Republican general met secretly with Stevenson to inform him about the tyrannical Chiang. Adlai reported the conversation to the American ambassador, but, of course, nothing was or could be done about it. How often Republicans are willing to team up with dictators to help their causes! Still, my main point here is my own gullibility when I was a young whippersnapper.
_________________________________________
“Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.” —Oswald Spengler [What an interesting thought!]
Jump back to December of last year and to a column by Allan Sloan in NEWSWEEK: “Bush talked about Social Security’s being a $10.4 trillion problem.... But the shortfall in Bush’s Medicare drug program is $17 trillion. In other words, the problem that Bush himself created a year ago is two thirds again as large as Social Security’s problem.” Further on in his essay, Sloan says “... you can put the program [S.S.] back on course with a few tweaks.”
Sloan’s not the first American to believe that we can “tweak” S.S. back to health. For one thing, it would be so simple to rescind some of the tax breaks for the ever increasingly richest Americans.
THE LAW AIN’T GOD’S
“The modern Western concept of a legal code is not a list of unassailable divine edicts but a rationally contrived evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social... aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained....” (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joseph Campbell, p. 91)
Well, at least some of us Americans do understand that. Others, lost in Bibleland, don’t.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, THROW A SONG AT IT
CONSILIENCE, Wilson, p. 225: “The dominating influence that spawned the arts was the need to impose order on the confusion caused by intelligence.
To Wilson, the arts, “Because of the slowness of natural selection , which requires tens or hundreds of generations to substitute new genes for old, there was not enough time for human heredity to cope with the vastness of new contingent possibilities revealed by high intelligence. Algorithms [procedures to solve problems] could be built, but they weren’t numerous and precise enough to respond automatically and optimally to every possible event.... The arts filled the gap.”
The human mind contains all the answers. It is the problem and the answer all in one, and no appeal to forces or a force outside ourselves will do any good to explain our modern situation. No force is out there to save os or harm us. That is the primary lesson to be leaned before we move on to better things.
The arts create, Wilson says further on, “order and meaning from the seeming chaos of daily existence.” It also nourishes “our craving for the mystical.”
WHO MINISTERS TO VIOLENCE?
In 1964 three Northerners (Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman) who were in Mississippi to help register black voters were tortured and murdered by Klansmen who buried them. Today’s Spokesman Review (Jan. 7, 2005) reveals that an arrest has been made in the murder case and Klansman and minister Edgar Ray Killen jailed.
The operative word here is “minister”. Sometimes I doubt that many Americans who claim “spiritual values” truly know how brutal and backward, fascist actually, many Southern religious figures were and still are. In fact the leadership of Oral Robert’s University where racism is still rampant are ministers. And Cal Thomas, who calls for America to use torture to interrogate prisoners claims to be a spiritual man. The examples are too numerous to list. So, when I hear all these religious people claim to have superior values to us atheists, I can only laugh nervously.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK. WHO RECALLS?
Reading about Chiang Kai-shek in my Adlai Stevenson bio., about Quemoy, Matsu and Formosa, I remember those days and how easily I accepted how “good” this tyrannical general for democracy was as he heroically opposed the nasty, Communist Mao. I recall stories about the prosperous island of Formosa compared to the horrible conditions in mainland China. All propaganda.
I was surprised to learn that another Republican general met secretly with Stevenson to inform him about the tyrannical Chiang. Adlai reported the conversation to the American ambassador, but, of course, nothing was or could be done about it. How often Republicans are willing to team up with dictators to help their causes! Still, my main point here is my own gullibility when I was a young whippersnapper.
_________________________________________
“Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.” —Oswald Spengler [What an interesting thought!]
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
WHO AM WE? WHAT ARE US MADE OF?
The following two passages are from another great book I'm reading about the subject of consciousness. I really like his description of how we come to be selves and what constitutes "the self". The book is by Ramachandran: A BRIEF TOUR OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS.
THE FIGMENTS OF A SELF
[Open quote] Mental illness might be thought of as disturbances of consciousness and of self, two words that conceal great depths of ignorance. Let me try to summarize my own view of consciousness. There are really two problems here - the problem of the subjective sensations or qualia and the problem of the self. The problem of qualia is the more difficult.
The qualia question is, how does the flux of ions in little bits of jelly—the neurons—in our brains give rise to the redness of red, the flavor of Marmite or paneer tikka masala or wine? Matter and mind seem so utterly unlike each other. One way out of this dilemma is to think of them really as two different ways of describing the world, each of which is complete in itself. Just as we can describe light as made up either of particles or as waves—and there's no point in asking which description is correct, because they both are, even though the two seem utterly dissimilar—the same may be true of mental and physical events in the brain.
But what about the self, the last remaining great mystery in science and something that everybody is interested in? Obviously self and qualia are two sides of the same coin. You can't have free-floating sensations or qualia with no one to experience them and you can't have a self completely devoid of sensory experiences, memories or emotions. (As we saw in Cotard's syndrome, when sensations and perceptions lose all their emotional significance and meaning, the result is a dissolution of self.)
What exactly is meant by the "self"? Its defining characteristics are fivefold. First of all, continuity: a sense of an unbroken thread running through the whole fabric of our experience with the accompanying feeling of past, present and future. Second, and closely related, is the idea of unity or coherence of self In spite of the diversity of sensory experiences, memories, beliefs and thoughts, we each experience ourselves as one person, as a unity.
Third is a sense of embodiment or ownership - we feel ourselves anchored to our bodies. Fourth, a sense of agency, what we call free will, being in charge of our own actions and destinies. I can wiggle my finger but I can't wiggle my nose or your finger.
Fifth, and most elusive of all, the self, almost by its very nature, is capable of reflection - of being aware of itself A self that's unaware of itself is an oxymoron.
Any or all of these different aspects of self can be differentially disturbed in brain disease, which leads me to believe that the self comprises not just one thing, but many. Like "love" or "happiness," we use one word, "self," to lump together many different phenomena. For example, if I stimulate your right parietal cortex with an electrode (while you're conscious and awake), you will momentarily feel that you are floating near the ceiling, watching your own body down below. You have an out-of-the-body experience. The embodiment of self—one of the axiomatic foundations of your self—is temporarily abandoned. And this is true of all of those aspects of self I listed above. Each of them can be selectively affected in brain disease. [Close quote]
(From Ramachandran's A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, pp. 96-97)
HOMUNCULUS IN EX-QUALIA
[Open quote] I will begin with qualia. It seems quite obvious that qualia must have evolved to fulfill a specific biological function—they cannot be mere by-products (an "epiphenomenon") of neural activity. In 1997 I suggested that sensory representations that are themselves devoid of qualia might acquire qualia in the process of being economically encoded or "prepared" into manageable chunks as they are delivered to a central executive structure higher up in the brain. The result is a higher order representation that serves new computational goals. Let us call this second, higher-order, representation a metarepresentation. (Though I feel a bit uncomfortable using the prefix "meta," which is often employed as a disguise for fuzzy thinking—especially among social scientists.) One could think of this metarepresentation almost as a second "parasitic" brain - or at least a set of processes—that has evolved in us humans to create a more economical description of the rather more automatic processes that are being carried out in the first brain. Ironically this idea implies that the so-called homunculus fallacy—the notion of a "little man in the brain watching a movie screen filled with qualia"—isn't really a fallacy. In fact, what I am calling a metarepresentation bears an uncanny resemblance to the homunculus that philosophers take so much delight in debunking. I suggest that the homunculus is simply either the metarepresentation itself, or another brain structure that emerged later in evolution for creating metarepresentations, and that it is either unique to US humans or considerably more sophisticated than a "chimpunculus." (Bear in mind, though, that it doesn't have to be a single new structure—it could be a set of novel functions that involves a distributed network. Ideas similar to this have also been foreshadowed by David Darling, Derek Bickerton, Marvin Minsky and many others, although usually invoked for reasons other than the ones I consider here.) [Close quote]
(From Ramachandran's A BRIEF TOUR OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, pp. 98-99)
____________________________________________________________________
"If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent." —Bette Davis [Yes! How did they develop the consciousnesses that they have?]
The following two passages are from another great book I'm reading about the subject of consciousness. I really like his description of how we come to be selves and what constitutes "the self". The book is by Ramachandran: A BRIEF TOUR OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS.
THE FIGMENTS OF A SELF
[Open quote] Mental illness might be thought of as disturbances of consciousness and of self, two words that conceal great depths of ignorance. Let me try to summarize my own view of consciousness. There are really two problems here - the problem of the subjective sensations or qualia and the problem of the self. The problem of qualia is the more difficult.
The qualia question is, how does the flux of ions in little bits of jelly—the neurons—in our brains give rise to the redness of red, the flavor of Marmite or paneer tikka masala or wine? Matter and mind seem so utterly unlike each other. One way out of this dilemma is to think of them really as two different ways of describing the world, each of which is complete in itself. Just as we can describe light as made up either of particles or as waves—and there's no point in asking which description is correct, because they both are, even though the two seem utterly dissimilar—the same may be true of mental and physical events in the brain.
But what about the self, the last remaining great mystery in science and something that everybody is interested in? Obviously self and qualia are two sides of the same coin. You can't have free-floating sensations or qualia with no one to experience them and you can't have a self completely devoid of sensory experiences, memories or emotions. (As we saw in Cotard's syndrome, when sensations and perceptions lose all their emotional significance and meaning, the result is a dissolution of self.)
What exactly is meant by the "self"? Its defining characteristics are fivefold. First of all, continuity: a sense of an unbroken thread running through the whole fabric of our experience with the accompanying feeling of past, present and future. Second, and closely related, is the idea of unity or coherence of self In spite of the diversity of sensory experiences, memories, beliefs and thoughts, we each experience ourselves as one person, as a unity.
Third is a sense of embodiment or ownership - we feel ourselves anchored to our bodies. Fourth, a sense of agency, what we call free will, being in charge of our own actions and destinies. I can wiggle my finger but I can't wiggle my nose or your finger.
Fifth, and most elusive of all, the self, almost by its very nature, is capable of reflection - of being aware of itself A self that's unaware of itself is an oxymoron.
Any or all of these different aspects of self can be differentially disturbed in brain disease, which leads me to believe that the self comprises not just one thing, but many. Like "love" or "happiness," we use one word, "self," to lump together many different phenomena. For example, if I stimulate your right parietal cortex with an electrode (while you're conscious and awake), you will momentarily feel that you are floating near the ceiling, watching your own body down below. You have an out-of-the-body experience. The embodiment of self—one of the axiomatic foundations of your self—is temporarily abandoned. And this is true of all of those aspects of self I listed above. Each of them can be selectively affected in brain disease. [Close quote]
(From Ramachandran's A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, pp. 96-97)
HOMUNCULUS IN EX-QUALIA
[Open quote] I will begin with qualia. It seems quite obvious that qualia must have evolved to fulfill a specific biological function—they cannot be mere by-products (an "epiphenomenon") of neural activity. In 1997 I suggested that sensory representations that are themselves devoid of qualia might acquire qualia in the process of being economically encoded or "prepared" into manageable chunks as they are delivered to a central executive structure higher up in the brain. The result is a higher order representation that serves new computational goals. Let us call this second, higher-order, representation a metarepresentation. (Though I feel a bit uncomfortable using the prefix "meta," which is often employed as a disguise for fuzzy thinking—especially among social scientists.) One could think of this metarepresentation almost as a second "parasitic" brain - or at least a set of processes—that has evolved in us humans to create a more economical description of the rather more automatic processes that are being carried out in the first brain. Ironically this idea implies that the so-called homunculus fallacy—the notion of a "little man in the brain watching a movie screen filled with qualia"—isn't really a fallacy. In fact, what I am calling a metarepresentation bears an uncanny resemblance to the homunculus that philosophers take so much delight in debunking. I suggest that the homunculus is simply either the metarepresentation itself, or another brain structure that emerged later in evolution for creating metarepresentations, and that it is either unique to US humans or considerably more sophisticated than a "chimpunculus." (Bear in mind, though, that it doesn't have to be a single new structure—it could be a set of novel functions that involves a distributed network. Ideas similar to this have also been foreshadowed by David Darling, Derek Bickerton, Marvin Minsky and many others, although usually invoked for reasons other than the ones I consider here.) [Close quote]
(From Ramachandran's A BRIEF TOUR OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, pp. 98-99)
____________________________________________________________________
"If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent." —Bette Davis [Yes! How did they develop the consciousnesses that they have?]
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
THE FORCES OF CHRISTO-FASCISM ARE IN THE WHITE HOUSE
The following excerpt is from a speech that Matthew Rothschild, editor of THE PROGRESSIVE, gave at the 27th Annual national convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (Oct. 30, 2004). The kind of thinking that Matt points out is going on in Bushcountry ought to make every American who cares about his freedoms to shiver long and deeply. But, the scariest realization is that the Americans who listen to Bush have no history of freedom in their consciousness. They’re dedicated to a King and Kingdom and just don’t have the feel for democracy that skeptics have. They are not Americans first but slaves to Prince Jesus first. They crave a King to come rule over them. They’ll be the first to tell you. But the trouble is, they want their Prince to rule over us all. Freedom scares them, because free people don’t always do the things that Christians think they ought to do. They’ll be happy when they can force their slave mentality onto the entire country, and their mentality, in case anybody hasn’t noticed, is remarkably like the totalitarian views of radical Moslems, the kind of Moslems who support terrorists. American science is already suffering under the religious leadership of our country and the environment and our reputation as a world leader. How can a nation 2000 years behind the times lead anything? Anyhow, read what Matthew Rothschild has to say:
“I don't know how many of you read The New York Times Magazine cover story from a couple of weeks ago by Ron Suskind, who wrote the book about Paul O'Neill. Not only are they deaf to the harm that they're causing in the White House right now, they have this idea, this hubris, this chutzpah, that is almost incalculable, almost immeasurable. A senior White House advisor is telling Ron Suskind, who used to be a foreign reporter for The Wall Street Journal, that: ‘Look, you guys aren't in the reality-based community anymore.’
“It used to be, you'd insult someone if you said, ‘Boy, you don't have your feet in reality, pal. What world do you live in? Get back in the real world.’ But no, with these guys, it's a plus not to be in the real world. They think it's great not to be in the reality-based community. This senior advisor to the Bush Administration was saying, ‘We are an empire now. We create our own reality. All you can do in the reality-based community is study what we do. We create your reality. While you're studying that reality, we're going to go create another reality and you're going to study that. And while you're studying that, we're going to go create a third reality. We are history's agents,’ he said, ‘and all you can do in the reality based community is study us.’
“This is the kind of arrogance, this is the imperiousness of power, the likes of which we haven't seen since we read the Shelley poem ‘Ozymandias’. These people really are drunk with power. And when you're that drunk with power, you can do a whole lot of damage, especially when you're the most powerful country in the world. We're seeing some of that harm right now in Iraq. I would be remiss not to talk about the Iraq war for a little bit because the Iraq war has killed not only up to 100,000 Iraqis, but 1,100 US soldiers and wounded 8,000 other US soldiers, 5,000 of whom had been wounded just since April. Wrap yourselves around that. Bush's war is wounding almost 1,000 US soldiers a month....”
Try this one on for size too:
“... Bush still believes... ‘God speaks through me.’ That’s a direct quote. The great humorist Molly Ivins, who writes for The Progressive every month, said, ‘That’s a kind of a strange thing for the president to say, because I thought God could conjugate subject and verb better.’”
I don’t think people in the modern nations of the world have experienced such a backward, self-important, pompous fool since the days of Mussolini, Hitler and Charles de Gaulle.
GOD IS A PERSONAL PROJECTION
I know that the idea of god is a personal projection of the self into the world. In my own case, when I was a believer and trying to “find god” I soon discovered that my relationship to god was based on my relationship to my father. My father, though a kind man who provided well for me, just wasn’t able to spend a lot of time with me. I reminded him of my mother who he divorced when I was four, and he was never comfortable with me. Then, because she had been unfaithful, he was able to keep me and threaten her with loss of support if she tried to fight for me. After she gave me up, he placed me with my grandmother until he could marry a woman and provide me with a new mother. He more than once told me that he married his second wife to provide me with a mother. Naturally, she resented it.
Christians have also told me that they also understand that their fathers are the first models they have of their personal gods. They don’t quite mean it as I do, but some that I have talked to in this matter perfectly understand my experience.
What I discovered about my god search is perfectly expressed in the phrase “find god”. Why did I have to search for and to find god? Why wasn’t god right inside me and available to me? Why did I have to please god and make him like me? Why did I HAVE TO DO ALL THE WORK? Why was god absent from me?
All these statements of relationship show me to have been a Deist all my life, for the Deists believe that god created the world and then withdrew. You have to search for god to find him. It is all your effort. The Deist God-the-father made no effort except the act of creation. Eventually, I saw that god was just a figment of my imagination, created out of the psychological material of my relationship with my daddio. Once in that mental place, I was soon able to become the atheist I am today.
_______________________________________
“Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.” —B.F. Skinner (Have you read his Beyond Freedom and Dignity?)
The following excerpt is from a speech that Matthew Rothschild, editor of THE PROGRESSIVE, gave at the 27th Annual national convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (Oct. 30, 2004). The kind of thinking that Matt points out is going on in Bushcountry ought to make every American who cares about his freedoms to shiver long and deeply. But, the scariest realization is that the Americans who listen to Bush have no history of freedom in their consciousness. They’re dedicated to a King and Kingdom and just don’t have the feel for democracy that skeptics have. They are not Americans first but slaves to Prince Jesus first. They crave a King to come rule over them. They’ll be the first to tell you. But the trouble is, they want their Prince to rule over us all. Freedom scares them, because free people don’t always do the things that Christians think they ought to do. They’ll be happy when they can force their slave mentality onto the entire country, and their mentality, in case anybody hasn’t noticed, is remarkably like the totalitarian views of radical Moslems, the kind of Moslems who support terrorists. American science is already suffering under the religious leadership of our country and the environment and our reputation as a world leader. How can a nation 2000 years behind the times lead anything? Anyhow, read what Matthew Rothschild has to say:
“I don't know how many of you read The New York Times Magazine cover story from a couple of weeks ago by Ron Suskind, who wrote the book about Paul O'Neill. Not only are they deaf to the harm that they're causing in the White House right now, they have this idea, this hubris, this chutzpah, that is almost incalculable, almost immeasurable. A senior White House advisor is telling Ron Suskind, who used to be a foreign reporter for The Wall Street Journal, that: ‘Look, you guys aren't in the reality-based community anymore.’
“It used to be, you'd insult someone if you said, ‘Boy, you don't have your feet in reality, pal. What world do you live in? Get back in the real world.’ But no, with these guys, it's a plus not to be in the real world. They think it's great not to be in the reality-based community. This senior advisor to the Bush Administration was saying, ‘We are an empire now. We create our own reality. All you can do in the reality-based community is study what we do. We create your reality. While you're studying that reality, we're going to go create another reality and you're going to study that. And while you're studying that, we're going to go create a third reality. We are history's agents,’ he said, ‘and all you can do in the reality based community is study us.’
“This is the kind of arrogance, this is the imperiousness of power, the likes of which we haven't seen since we read the Shelley poem ‘Ozymandias’. These people really are drunk with power. And when you're that drunk with power, you can do a whole lot of damage, especially when you're the most powerful country in the world. We're seeing some of that harm right now in Iraq. I would be remiss not to talk about the Iraq war for a little bit because the Iraq war has killed not only up to 100,000 Iraqis, but 1,100 US soldiers and wounded 8,000 other US soldiers, 5,000 of whom had been wounded just since April. Wrap yourselves around that. Bush's war is wounding almost 1,000 US soldiers a month....”
Try this one on for size too:
“... Bush still believes... ‘God speaks through me.’ That’s a direct quote. The great humorist Molly Ivins, who writes for The Progressive every month, said, ‘That’s a kind of a strange thing for the president to say, because I thought God could conjugate subject and verb better.’”
I don’t think people in the modern nations of the world have experienced such a backward, self-important, pompous fool since the days of Mussolini, Hitler and Charles de Gaulle.
GOD IS A PERSONAL PROJECTION
I know that the idea of god is a personal projection of the self into the world. In my own case, when I was a believer and trying to “find god” I soon discovered that my relationship to god was based on my relationship to my father. My father, though a kind man who provided well for me, just wasn’t able to spend a lot of time with me. I reminded him of my mother who he divorced when I was four, and he was never comfortable with me. Then, because she had been unfaithful, he was able to keep me and threaten her with loss of support if she tried to fight for me. After she gave me up, he placed me with my grandmother until he could marry a woman and provide me with a new mother. He more than once told me that he married his second wife to provide me with a mother. Naturally, she resented it.
Christians have also told me that they also understand that their fathers are the first models they have of their personal gods. They don’t quite mean it as I do, but some that I have talked to in this matter perfectly understand my experience.
What I discovered about my god search is perfectly expressed in the phrase “find god”. Why did I have to search for and to find god? Why wasn’t god right inside me and available to me? Why did I have to please god and make him like me? Why did I HAVE TO DO ALL THE WORK? Why was god absent from me?
All these statements of relationship show me to have been a Deist all my life, for the Deists believe that god created the world and then withdrew. You have to search for god to find him. It is all your effort. The Deist God-the-father made no effort except the act of creation. Eventually, I saw that god was just a figment of my imagination, created out of the psychological material of my relationship with my daddio. Once in that mental place, I was soon able to become the atheist I am today.
_______________________________________
“Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.” —B.F. Skinner (Have you read his Beyond Freedom and Dignity?)
Friday, May 20, 2005
JOSEPH CAMPBELL TALKS OF PSYCHIC EXPERIENCES
I don't want to sound self-important here, but I see my own journeys and inner struggles in a couple of the passages, which Campbell delineates in the following paragraphs, through which I traveled in getting sober and after my third marriage ended disastrously. After three divorces, a man tends to finally blame himself and to take some responsibility for what is happening to him with the opposite sex. I have, and still do at times, seen myself as the joker and clown, making a role for myself while inside feeling that I have ideas and insights to share of some importance with others.
[Open quote.] And so, with that challenge before us, let us try to become acquainted with some of the tides and undertows of our inward sea [psyche, soul or etcetera]. Let me tell you something of what I have recently heard about the wonders of the inward schizophrenic plunge.
The first experience is of a sense of splitting. The person sees the world going in two: one part of it moving away; himself in the other part. This is the beginning of the regressus, the crack-off and backward flow. He may see himself, for a time, in two roles. One is the role of the clown, the ghost, the witch, the queer one, the outsider. That is the outer role that he plays, making little of himself as the fool, a joke, the one kicked around, the patsy. Inside, however, he is the savior, and he knows it. He is the hero chosen for a destiny. Recently one such savior did me the honor of paying me three visits: a tall, beautiful young man with the beard and gentle eyes and manner of a Christ; LSD was his sacrament—LSD and sex. "I have seen my Father," he told me on the second occasion. "He is old now and has told me just to wait. I shall know when the time comes for me to take over."
The second stage has been described in many clinical accounts. It is of a terrific drop-off and regression, backward in time and biologically as well. Falling back into his own past, the psychotic becomes an infant, a fetus in the womb. One has the frightening experience of slipping back to animal consciousness, into animal forms, sub-animal forms, even plantlike. I think of the legend here of Daphne, the nymph who was turned into a laurel tree. Such an image, read in psychological terms, would be the image of a psychosis. Approached in love by the god Apollo, the virgin was terrified, cried for help to her father, the river-god Peneus, and he turned her into a tree.
"Show me the face you had before your father and mother were born!" We have had occasion before to refer to this meditation theme of the Japanese Zen masters. In the course of a schizophrenic retreat, the psychotic too may come to know the exaltation of a union with the universe, transcending personal bounds: the "oceanic feeling," Freud called it. Feelings arise then, too, of a new knowledge. Things that before had been mysterious are now fully understood. Ineffable realizations are experienced; and in fact, as we read about them, we can only be amazed. I have now read dozens of accounts; and they correspond, often amazingly, to the insights of the mystics and to the images of Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, and classical myth.
For example, a person who has never believed in, or even heard of, reincarnation will begin to feel that he has lived forever; that he has lived through many lifetimes, yet was never born and will never die. It is as though he had come to know himself as that Self (a~nan) of which we read in the Bhagavad Gita: "Never is it born, never does it die.... Unborn, eternal, permanent, and primeval, it is not slain when the body is slain." The patient (let us now call him that) has united what remains of his consciousness with the consciousness of all things, the rocks, the trees, the whole world of nature, out of which we all have come. He is in accord with that which has indeed existed forever: as we all are, actually, at root, and therein at peace—once again, as stated in the Gita: "When one completely withdraws the senses from their objects, like a tortoise drawing in its limbs, then is one's wisdom firmly fixed. In that serenity is surcease of all sorrow."
In short, my friends, what I find that I am saying is that our schizophrenic patient is actually experiencing inadvertently that same beatific ocean deep which the yogi and saint are ever striving to enjoy: except that, whereas they are swimming in it, he is drowning.
There may come next, according to a number of accounts, the sense of a terrific task ahead with dangers to be met and mastered; but also a presentiment of invisible helpful presences that may guide and help one through. These are the gods, the guardian daemons or angels: innate powers of the psyche, fit to meet and to master the torturing, swallowing, or shattering negative forces. And if one has the courage to press on, there will be experienced, finally, in a terrible rapture, a culminating overwhelming crisis—or even a series of such culminations, more than can be borne.
These crises are mainly of four typical sorts, according to the kinds of difficulty that will have conduced to the regressus in the first place. For instance, a person who in childhood has been deprived of essential love, brought up in a home of little or no care, but only authority, rigor, and commands, or in a house of tumult and wrath, a drunken father raging about, or the like, will have been seeking in his backward voyage a reorientation and centering of his life in love. Accordingly, the culmination (when he will have broken back to the start of his biography and even beyond, to a sense of the erotic first impulse to life) will be a discovery of a center in his own heart of tenderness and of love in which he can rest. That will have been the aim and meaning of his entire backward quest. And its realization will be represented through an experience, one way or another, of some sort of visionary fulfillment of a "sacred union" with a wifely mothering (or simply a mothering) presence.
Or if it had been a household in which the father had been nobody, a nothing, of no force in the home at all; where there had been no sense of paternal authority, no one of masculine presence who could be honored and respected, but only a clutter of domestic details and disordered feminine concerns, the quest will have been for a decent father image, and that is what will have to be found: some sort of symbolic realization of supernatural daughterhood or sonship to a father.
A third domestic situation of significant emotional deprivation is that of the child who feels itself to have been excluded from its family circle, treated as though not wanted; or with no family at all. In cases, for example, of a second marriage, where a second family has come along, a child of the first may feel and actually find itself excluded, thrown away, or left behind. The old fairy-tale theme of the wicked stepmother and stepsisters is relevant here. What such an excluded one will be striving for in his inward lonely journey will be the finding or the fashioning of a center—not a family center, but a world center—of which he will be the pivotal being. Dr. Perry told me of the case of a schizophrenic patient who was so completely and profoundly cut off that no one could establish any communication with him at all. One day, this poor mute person, in the doctor's presence, drew a crude circle, and then just placed the point of his pencil in the middle of it. Dr. Perry stooped and said to him, "You are in the center, aren't you! Aren't you!" And that message got through, initiating the course of a return.
There is a perfectly fascinating inside report of a schizophrenic breakdown in the next-to-last chapter of Dr. R. D. Laing's book The Politics of Experience. This is an account given by a former Royal Navy commodore, now a sculptor, of a schizophrenic adventure of his own, at the culmination of which he experienced a fourth type of realization: a sense of sheer light, the sense of a terribly dangerous, overpowering light to be encountered and endured. His account suggests very strongly the Buddha-light described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is supposed to be experienced immediately upon death, and which, if endured, yields release from rebirth but is for most too great to bear. [Close quote.]
(MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joseph Campbell, pp. 224-228)
I don't want to sound self-important here, but I see my own journeys and inner struggles in a couple of the passages, which Campbell delineates in the following paragraphs, through which I traveled in getting sober and after my third marriage ended disastrously. After three divorces, a man tends to finally blame himself and to take some responsibility for what is happening to him with the opposite sex. I have, and still do at times, seen myself as the joker and clown, making a role for myself while inside feeling that I have ideas and insights to share of some importance with others.
[Open quote.] And so, with that challenge before us, let us try to become acquainted with some of the tides and undertows of our inward sea [psyche, soul or etcetera]. Let me tell you something of what I have recently heard about the wonders of the inward schizophrenic plunge.
The first experience is of a sense of splitting. The person sees the world going in two: one part of it moving away; himself in the other part. This is the beginning of the regressus, the crack-off and backward flow. He may see himself, for a time, in two roles. One is the role of the clown, the ghost, the witch, the queer one, the outsider. That is the outer role that he plays, making little of himself as the fool, a joke, the one kicked around, the patsy. Inside, however, he is the savior, and he knows it. He is the hero chosen for a destiny. Recently one such savior did me the honor of paying me three visits: a tall, beautiful young man with the beard and gentle eyes and manner of a Christ; LSD was his sacrament—LSD and sex. "I have seen my Father," he told me on the second occasion. "He is old now and has told me just to wait. I shall know when the time comes for me to take over."
The second stage has been described in many clinical accounts. It is of a terrific drop-off and regression, backward in time and biologically as well. Falling back into his own past, the psychotic becomes an infant, a fetus in the womb. One has the frightening experience of slipping back to animal consciousness, into animal forms, sub-animal forms, even plantlike. I think of the legend here of Daphne, the nymph who was turned into a laurel tree. Such an image, read in psychological terms, would be the image of a psychosis. Approached in love by the god Apollo, the virgin was terrified, cried for help to her father, the river-god Peneus, and he turned her into a tree.
"Show me the face you had before your father and mother were born!" We have had occasion before to refer to this meditation theme of the Japanese Zen masters. In the course of a schizophrenic retreat, the psychotic too may come to know the exaltation of a union with the universe, transcending personal bounds: the "oceanic feeling," Freud called it. Feelings arise then, too, of a new knowledge. Things that before had been mysterious are now fully understood. Ineffable realizations are experienced; and in fact, as we read about them, we can only be amazed. I have now read dozens of accounts; and they correspond, often amazingly, to the insights of the mystics and to the images of Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, and classical myth.
For example, a person who has never believed in, or even heard of, reincarnation will begin to feel that he has lived forever; that he has lived through many lifetimes, yet was never born and will never die. It is as though he had come to know himself as that Self (a~nan) of which we read in the Bhagavad Gita: "Never is it born, never does it die.... Unborn, eternal, permanent, and primeval, it is not slain when the body is slain." The patient (let us now call him that) has united what remains of his consciousness with the consciousness of all things, the rocks, the trees, the whole world of nature, out of which we all have come. He is in accord with that which has indeed existed forever: as we all are, actually, at root, and therein at peace—once again, as stated in the Gita: "When one completely withdraws the senses from their objects, like a tortoise drawing in its limbs, then is one's wisdom firmly fixed. In that serenity is surcease of all sorrow."
In short, my friends, what I find that I am saying is that our schizophrenic patient is actually experiencing inadvertently that same beatific ocean deep which the yogi and saint are ever striving to enjoy: except that, whereas they are swimming in it, he is drowning.
There may come next, according to a number of accounts, the sense of a terrific task ahead with dangers to be met and mastered; but also a presentiment of invisible helpful presences that may guide and help one through. These are the gods, the guardian daemons or angels: innate powers of the psyche, fit to meet and to master the torturing, swallowing, or shattering negative forces. And if one has the courage to press on, there will be experienced, finally, in a terrible rapture, a culminating overwhelming crisis—or even a series of such culminations, more than can be borne.
These crises are mainly of four typical sorts, according to the kinds of difficulty that will have conduced to the regressus in the first place. For instance, a person who in childhood has been deprived of essential love, brought up in a home of little or no care, but only authority, rigor, and commands, or in a house of tumult and wrath, a drunken father raging about, or the like, will have been seeking in his backward voyage a reorientation and centering of his life in love. Accordingly, the culmination (when he will have broken back to the start of his biography and even beyond, to a sense of the erotic first impulse to life) will be a discovery of a center in his own heart of tenderness and of love in which he can rest. That will have been the aim and meaning of his entire backward quest. And its realization will be represented through an experience, one way or another, of some sort of visionary fulfillment of a "sacred union" with a wifely mothering (or simply a mothering) presence.
Or if it had been a household in which the father had been nobody, a nothing, of no force in the home at all; where there had been no sense of paternal authority, no one of masculine presence who could be honored and respected, but only a clutter of domestic details and disordered feminine concerns, the quest will have been for a decent father image, and that is what will have to be found: some sort of symbolic realization of supernatural daughterhood or sonship to a father.
A third domestic situation of significant emotional deprivation is that of the child who feels itself to have been excluded from its family circle, treated as though not wanted; or with no family at all. In cases, for example, of a second marriage, where a second family has come along, a child of the first may feel and actually find itself excluded, thrown away, or left behind. The old fairy-tale theme of the wicked stepmother and stepsisters is relevant here. What such an excluded one will be striving for in his inward lonely journey will be the finding or the fashioning of a center—not a family center, but a world center—of which he will be the pivotal being. Dr. Perry told me of the case of a schizophrenic patient who was so completely and profoundly cut off that no one could establish any communication with him at all. One day, this poor mute person, in the doctor's presence, drew a crude circle, and then just placed the point of his pencil in the middle of it. Dr. Perry stooped and said to him, "You are in the center, aren't you! Aren't you!" And that message got through, initiating the course of a return.
There is a perfectly fascinating inside report of a schizophrenic breakdown in the next-to-last chapter of Dr. R. D. Laing's book The Politics of Experience. This is an account given by a former Royal Navy commodore, now a sculptor, of a schizophrenic adventure of his own, at the culmination of which he experienced a fourth type of realization: a sense of sheer light, the sense of a terribly dangerous, overpowering light to be encountered and endured. His account suggests very strongly the Buddha-light described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is supposed to be experienced immediately upon death, and which, if endured, yields release from rebirth but is for most too great to bear. [Close quote.]
(MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joseph Campbell, pp. 224-228)
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Christ a Fiction (1997)
by Robert M. Price
I remember a particular Superboy comic book in which the Boy of Steel somehow discovers that in the future, he is thought to be as mythical as Peter Pan and Santa Claus. Indignant at this turn of events, he flies at faster than light speed and enters the future to set the record straight. He does a few super-deeds and vindicates himself, then comes home. So Superboy winds up having the last laugh—or does he?
Of course, it is only fiction! The people in the future were quite right! Superboy is just as mythical as Santa Claus and Peter Pan.
This seems to me a close parallel to the efforts of Christian apologists to vindicate as sober history the story of a supernatural savior who was born of a virgin, healed the sick, raised the dead, changed water into wine, walked on water, rose from the grave and ascended bodily into the sky.
I used to think, when I myself was a Christian apologist, a defender of the evangelical faith, that I had done a pretty respectable job of vindicating that story as history. I brought to bear a variety of arguments I now recognize to be fallacious, such as the supposed closeness of the gospels to the events they record, their ostensible use of eyewitness testimony, etc. Now, in retrospect, I judge that my efforts were about as effective in the end as Superboy's! When all is said and done, he remains a fiction.
One caveat: I intend to set forth, briefly, some reasons for the views I now hold. I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin[?] must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith. In both cases, what matters is the reasons for the change of mind, not merely the fact of it.
Having got that straight, let me say that I think there are four senses in which Jesus Christ may be said to be a "fiction."
First (and, I warn you, this one takes by far the most explaining): It is quite likely, though certainly by no means definitively provable, that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological "Christ of faith" a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic "Uncle Sam" figure. But if you could travel through time, like Superboy, and you went back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there. Why conclude this? There are three reasons, which I must oversimplify for time's sake.
1) In broad outline and in detail, the life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels corresponds to the worldwide Mythic Hero Archetype in which a divine hero's birth is supernaturally predicted and conceived, the infant hero escapes attempts to kill him, demonstrates his precocious wisdom already as a child, receives a divine commission, defeats demons, wins acclaim, is hailed as king, then betrayed, losing popular favor, executed, often on a hilltop, and is vindicated and taken up to heaven.
These features are found world wide in heroic myths and epics. The more closely a supposed biography, say that of Hercules, Apollonius of Tyana, Padma Sambhava, of Gautama Buddha, corresponds to this plot formula, the more likely the historian is to conclude that a historical figure has been transfigured by myth.
And in the case of Jesus Christ, where virtually every detail of the story fits the mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over, no "secular," biographical data, so to speak, it becomes arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying back of the myth. There may have been, but it can no longer be considered particularly probable, and that's all the historian can deal with: probabilities.
There may have been an original King Arthur, but there is no particular reason to think so. There may have been a historical Jesus of Nazareth, too, but, unlike most of my colleagues in the Jesus Seminar, I don't think we can simply assume there was.
2) Specifically, the passion stories of the gospels strike me as altogether too close to contemporary myths of dying and rising savior gods including Osiris, Tammuz, Baal, Attis, Adonis, Hercules, and Asclepius. Like Jesus, these figures were believed to have once lived a life upon the earth, been killed, and risen shortly thereafter. Their deaths and resurrections were in most cases ritually celebrated each spring to herald the return of the life to vegetation. In many myths, the savior's body is anointed for burial, searched out by holy women and then reappears alive a few days later.
3) Similarly, the details of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection accounts are astonishingly similar to the events of several surviving popular novels from the same period in which two lovers are separated when one seems to have died and is unwittingly entombed alive. Grave robbers discover her reviving and kidnap her. Her lover finds the tomb empty, graveclothes still in place, and first concludes she has been raised up from death and taken to heaven. Then, realizing what must have happened, he goes in search of her. During his adventures, he is sooner or later condemned to the cross or actually crucified but manages to escape. When at length the couple is reunited, neither, having long imagined the other dead, can quite believe the lover is alive and not a ghost come to say farewell.
There have been two responses to such evidence by apologists. First, they have contended that all these myths are plagiarized from the gospels by pagan imitators, pointing out that some of the evidence is post-Christian. But much is in fact pre-Christian. And it is significant that the early Christian apologists argued that these parallels to the gospels were counterfeits in advance, by Satan, who knew the real thing would be coming along later and wanted to throw people off the track. This is like the desperate Nineteenth-Century attempts of fundamentalists to claim that Satan had created fake dinosaur bones to tempt the faithful not to believe in Genesis! At any rate, and this is my point, no one would have argued this way had the pagan myths of dead and resurrected gods been more recent than the Christian.
Second, in a variation on the theme, C.S. Lewis suggested that in Jesus' case "myth became fact." He admitted the whole business about the Mythic Hero archetype and the similarity to the pagan saviors, only he made them a kind of prophetic charade, creations of the yearning human heart, dim adumbrations of the incarnation of Christ before it actually happened. The others were myths, but this one actually happened.
In answer to this, I think of an anecdote told by my colleague Bruce Chilton, how, staying the weekend at the home of a friend, he was surprised to see that the guest bathroom was festooned with a variety of towels filched from the Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Holiday Inn, etc. Which was more likely, he asked: that representatives from all these hotels had sneaked into his friend's bathroom and each copied one of the towel designs? Or that his friend had swiped them from their hotels?
Lewis's is an argument of desperation which no one would think of making unless he was hell-bent on believing that, though all the other superheroes (Batman, Captain Marvel, the Flash) were fictions, Superboy was in fact genuine.
3) The New Testament epistles can be read quite naturally as presupposing a period in which Christians did not yet believe their savior god had been a figure living on earth in the recent historical past. Paul, for instance, never even mentions Jesus performing healings and even as a teacher. Twice he cites what he calls "words of the Lord," but even conservative New Testament scholars admit he may as easily mean prophetic revelations from the heavenly Christ. Paul attributes the death of Jesus not to Roman or Jewish governments, but rather to the designs of evil "archon," angels who rule this fallen world. Romans and 1 Peter both warn Christians to watch their step, reminding them that the Roman authorities never punish the righteous, but only the wicked. How they have said this if they knew of the Pontius Pilate story?
The two exceptions, 1 Thessalonians and 2 Timothy, epistles that do blame Pilate or Jews for the death of Jesus, only serve to prove the rule. Both can easily be shown on other grounds to be non-Pauline and later than the gospels.
Jesus was eventually "historicized," redrawn as a human being of the past (much as Samson, Enoch, Jabal, Gad, Joshua the son of Nun, and various other ancient Israelite gods had already been). As a part of this process, there were various independent attempts to locate Jesus in recent history by laying the blame for his death on this or that likely candidate, well known tyrants including Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and even Alexander Jannaeus in the first century BC! Now, if the death of Jesus were an actual historical event well known to eyewitnesses of it, there is simply no way such a variety of versions, differing on so fundamental a point, could ever have arisen!
And if early Christians had actually remembered the passion as a series of recent events, why does the earliest gospel crucifixion account spin out the whole terse narrative from quotes cribbed without acknowledgement from Psalm 22? Why does 1 Peter have nothing more detailed than Isaiah 53 to flesh out his account of the sufferings of Jesus? Why does Matthew supplement Mark's version, not with historical tradition or eyewitness memory, but with more quotes, this time from Zechariah and the Wisdom of Solomon?
Thus I find myself more and more attracted to the theory, once vigorously debated by scholars, now smothered by tacit consent, that there was no historical Jesus lying behind the stained glass of the gospel mythology. Instead, he is a fiction.
Rejoinders:
1) We deem them myths not because of a prior bias that there can be no miracles, but because of the Principle of Analogy, the only alternative to which is believing everything in The National Inquirer. If we do not use the standard of current-day experience to evaluate claims from the past, what other standard is there? And why should we believe that God or Nature used to be in the business of doing things that do not happen now? Isn't God supposed to be the same yesterday, today, and forever?
2) The apologists' claim that there was "too little time between the death of Jesus and the writing of the gospels for legends to develop" is circular, presupposing a historical Jesus living at a particular time. 40 years is easily enough time for legendary expansion anyway, but the Christ-Myth Theory does not require that the Christ figure was created in Pontius Pilate's time, only that later, Pilate's time was retrospectively chosen as a location for Jesus.
a) See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History on the tendency in oral tradition to keep updating mythic foundational events, keeping them always at a short distance, a couple of generations before one's own time.
b) And even if there were a historical Jesus and we knew we had eyewitness reports, the apologists fail to take into account recent studies which show that eyewitness testimony, especially of unusual events, is the most unreliable of all, that people tend to rewrite what they saw in light of their accustomed categories and expectations. Thus Strauss was right on target suggesting that the early Christians simply imagined Jesus fulfilling the expected deeds of messiahs and prophets.
3) It is special pleading to dismiss all similar stories as myths and to insist that this case must be different. If you do this, admit it, you are a fideist, no longer an apologist (if there is any difference!).
Second, the "historical Jesus" reconstructed by New Testament scholars is always a reflection of the individual scholars who reconstruct him. Albert Schweitzer was perhaps the single exception, and he made it painfully clear that previous questers for the historical Jesus had merely drawn self-portraits. All unconsciously used the historical Jesus as a ventriloquist dummy. Jesus must have taught the truth, and their own beliefs must have been true, so Jesus must have taught those beliefs. (Of course, every biblicist does the same! "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!"). Today's Politically Correct "historical Jesuses" are no different, being mere clones of the scholars who design them.
C.S. Lewis was right about this in The Screwtape Letters: "Each 'historical Jesus' is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to." But, as apologists so often do, he takes fideism as the natural implication when agnosticism would seem called for. What he imagines the gospels so clearly to "say" is the mythic hero! When, in his essay, "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," Lewis pulls rank as a self-declared expert and denies that the gospels are anything like ancient myths, one can only wonder what it was he must have been smoking in that ever-present pipe of his!
My point here is simply that, even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn't one any more. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern remythologizings of Jesus. Every "historical Jesus" is a Christ of faith, of somebody's faith. So the "historical Jesus" of modern scholarship is no less a fiction.
Third, Jesus as the personal savior, with whom people claim, as I used to, to have a "personal relationship" is in the nature of the case a fiction, essentially a psychological projection, an "imaginary playmate." It is no different at all from pop-psychological "visualization" exercises, or John Bradshaw's gimmick of imagining a healing encounter with loved ones of the past, or Jean Houston leading Hillary Clinton in an admittedly imaginary dialogue with Eleanor Roosevelt.
I suppose there is nothing wrong with any of this, but one ought to recognize it, as Hillary Clinton and Jean Houston, and John Bradshaw do, as imaginative fiction. And so with the personal savior.
The alternative is something like channeling. You have "tuned in" to the spirit of an ancient guru, named Jesus, and you are receiving revelations from him, usually pretty trivial stuff, minor conscience proddings and the like. Some sort of imaginary telepathy.
In fact I don't believe most evangelical pietists mean anything by "having a personal relationship with Christ" than a fancy, overblown name for reading the Bible and saying their prayers. But if they did really refer to some kind of a "personal relationship," it would in effect be a case of channeling. I suspect this is why fundamentalists who condemn New Age channelers do not dismiss it as a fraud pure and simple (though obviously it is), but instead think that Ramtha and the others are channeling demons. If they said it was sheer delusion, they know where the other four fingers would wind up pointing!
Especially in view of the fact that the piety of "having a personal relationship with Christ" and "inviting him into your heart" is alien to the New Testament and is never intimated there as far as I can see, it is amazing to me that evangelicals elevate it to the shibboleth of salvation! Unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus, buster, one day you will be boiling in Hell. Sheesh! Talk about the fury of a personal savior scorned!
No one ever heard of this stuff till the German Pietist movement of the Eighteenth Century. To make a maudlin type of devotionalism the password to heaven is like the fringe Pentecostal who tells you can't get into heaven unless you speak in tongues. "You ask me how I know he lives?" asks the revival chorus. "He lives within my heart." Exactly! A figment.
Fourth, Christ is a fiction in that Christ functions, in an unnoticed and equivocal way, as shorthand for a vast system of beliefs and institutions on whose behalf he is invoked. Put simply, this means that when an evangelist or an apologist invites you to have faith "in Christ," they are in fact smuggling in a great number of other issues. For example, Chalcedonian Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity, the Protestant idea of faith and grace, a particular theory of biblical inspiration and literalism, habits of church attendance, etc. These are all distinct and open questions. Theologians have debated them for many centuries and still debate them. Rank and file believers still debate them, as you know if you have ever spent time talking with one of Jehovah's Witnesses or a Seventh Day Adventist. If you hear me say that and your first thought is "Oh no, those folks aren't real Christians," you're just proving my point! Who gave Protestant fundamentalists the copyright on the word Christian?
No evangelist ever invites people to accept Christ by faith and then to start examining all these other associated issues for themselves. Not one! The Trinity, biblical inerrancy, for some even anti-Darwinism, are non-negotiable. You cannot be genuinely saved if you don't tow the party line on these points. Thus, for them, "to accept Christ" means "to accept Trinitarianism, biblicism, creationism, etc." And this in turn means that "Christ" is shorthand for this whole raft of doctrines and opinions, all of which one is to accept "by faith," on someone else's say-so.
When Christ becomes a fiction in this sense he is an umbrella for an unquestioning acceptance of what some preacher or institution tells us to believe. And this is nothing new, no mutant distortion of Christianity. Paul already requires "the taking of every thought captive to Christ," already insists on "the obedience of faith." Here Christ has already become what he was to Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, a euphemism for the dogmatic party line of an institution. Dostoyevsky's point, of course, was that the "real" Jesus stands opposed to this use of his name to sanction religious oppression. But remember, though it is a noble one, Dostoyevsky's Jesus is also a piece of fiction! It is, after all, "The Parable of the Grand Inquisitor."
So, then, Christ may be said to be a fiction in the four senses that 1) it is quite possible that there was no historical Jesus. 2) Even if there was, he is lost to us, the result being that there is no historical Jesus available to us. And 3) the Jesus who "walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own" is an imaginative visualization and in the nature of the case can be nothing more than a fiction. And finally, 4) "Christ" as a corporate logo for this and that religious institution is a euphemistic fiction, not unlike Ronald McDonald, Mickey Mouse, or Joe Camel, the purpose of which is to get you to swallow a whole raft of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors by an act of simple faith, short-circuiting the dangerous process of thinking the issues out to your own conclusions.
by Robert M. Price
I remember a particular Superboy comic book in which the Boy of Steel somehow discovers that in the future, he is thought to be as mythical as Peter Pan and Santa Claus. Indignant at this turn of events, he flies at faster than light speed and enters the future to set the record straight. He does a few super-deeds and vindicates himself, then comes home. So Superboy winds up having the last laugh—or does he?
Of course, it is only fiction! The people in the future were quite right! Superboy is just as mythical as Santa Claus and Peter Pan.
This seems to me a close parallel to the efforts of Christian apologists to vindicate as sober history the story of a supernatural savior who was born of a virgin, healed the sick, raised the dead, changed water into wine, walked on water, rose from the grave and ascended bodily into the sky.
I used to think, when I myself was a Christian apologist, a defender of the evangelical faith, that I had done a pretty respectable job of vindicating that story as history. I brought to bear a variety of arguments I now recognize to be fallacious, such as the supposed closeness of the gospels to the events they record, their ostensible use of eyewitness testimony, etc. Now, in retrospect, I judge that my efforts were about as effective in the end as Superboy's! When all is said and done, he remains a fiction.
One caveat: I intend to set forth, briefly, some reasons for the views I now hold. I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin[?] must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith. In both cases, what matters is the reasons for the change of mind, not merely the fact of it.
Having got that straight, let me say that I think there are four senses in which Jesus Christ may be said to be a "fiction."
First (and, I warn you, this one takes by far the most explaining): It is quite likely, though certainly by no means definitively provable, that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological "Christ of faith" a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic "Uncle Sam" figure. But if you could travel through time, like Superboy, and you went back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there. Why conclude this? There are three reasons, which I must oversimplify for time's sake.
1) In broad outline and in detail, the life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels corresponds to the worldwide Mythic Hero Archetype in which a divine hero's birth is supernaturally predicted and conceived, the infant hero escapes attempts to kill him, demonstrates his precocious wisdom already as a child, receives a divine commission, defeats demons, wins acclaim, is hailed as king, then betrayed, losing popular favor, executed, often on a hilltop, and is vindicated and taken up to heaven.
These features are found world wide in heroic myths and epics. The more closely a supposed biography, say that of Hercules, Apollonius of Tyana, Padma Sambhava, of Gautama Buddha, corresponds to this plot formula, the more likely the historian is to conclude that a historical figure has been transfigured by myth.
And in the case of Jesus Christ, where virtually every detail of the story fits the mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over, no "secular," biographical data, so to speak, it becomes arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying back of the myth. There may have been, but it can no longer be considered particularly probable, and that's all the historian can deal with: probabilities.
There may have been an original King Arthur, but there is no particular reason to think so. There may have been a historical Jesus of Nazareth, too, but, unlike most of my colleagues in the Jesus Seminar, I don't think we can simply assume there was.
2) Specifically, the passion stories of the gospels strike me as altogether too close to contemporary myths of dying and rising savior gods including Osiris, Tammuz, Baal, Attis, Adonis, Hercules, and Asclepius. Like Jesus, these figures were believed to have once lived a life upon the earth, been killed, and risen shortly thereafter. Their deaths and resurrections were in most cases ritually celebrated each spring to herald the return of the life to vegetation. In many myths, the savior's body is anointed for burial, searched out by holy women and then reappears alive a few days later.
3) Similarly, the details of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection accounts are astonishingly similar to the events of several surviving popular novels from the same period in which two lovers are separated when one seems to have died and is unwittingly entombed alive. Grave robbers discover her reviving and kidnap her. Her lover finds the tomb empty, graveclothes still in place, and first concludes she has been raised up from death and taken to heaven. Then, realizing what must have happened, he goes in search of her. During his adventures, he is sooner or later condemned to the cross or actually crucified but manages to escape. When at length the couple is reunited, neither, having long imagined the other dead, can quite believe the lover is alive and not a ghost come to say farewell.
There have been two responses to such evidence by apologists. First, they have contended that all these myths are plagiarized from the gospels by pagan imitators, pointing out that some of the evidence is post-Christian. But much is in fact pre-Christian. And it is significant that the early Christian apologists argued that these parallels to the gospels were counterfeits in advance, by Satan, who knew the real thing would be coming along later and wanted to throw people off the track. This is like the desperate Nineteenth-Century attempts of fundamentalists to claim that Satan had created fake dinosaur bones to tempt the faithful not to believe in Genesis! At any rate, and this is my point, no one would have argued this way had the pagan myths of dead and resurrected gods been more recent than the Christian.
Second, in a variation on the theme, C.S. Lewis suggested that in Jesus' case "myth became fact." He admitted the whole business about the Mythic Hero archetype and the similarity to the pagan saviors, only he made them a kind of prophetic charade, creations of the yearning human heart, dim adumbrations of the incarnation of Christ before it actually happened. The others were myths, but this one actually happened.
In answer to this, I think of an anecdote told by my colleague Bruce Chilton, how, staying the weekend at the home of a friend, he was surprised to see that the guest bathroom was festooned with a variety of towels filched from the Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Holiday Inn, etc. Which was more likely, he asked: that representatives from all these hotels had sneaked into his friend's bathroom and each copied one of the towel designs? Or that his friend had swiped them from their hotels?
Lewis's is an argument of desperation which no one would think of making unless he was hell-bent on believing that, though all the other superheroes (Batman, Captain Marvel, the Flash) were fictions, Superboy was in fact genuine.
3) The New Testament epistles can be read quite naturally as presupposing a period in which Christians did not yet believe their savior god had been a figure living on earth in the recent historical past. Paul, for instance, never even mentions Jesus performing healings and even as a teacher. Twice he cites what he calls "words of the Lord," but even conservative New Testament scholars admit he may as easily mean prophetic revelations from the heavenly Christ. Paul attributes the death of Jesus not to Roman or Jewish governments, but rather to the designs of evil "archon," angels who rule this fallen world. Romans and 1 Peter both warn Christians to watch their step, reminding them that the Roman authorities never punish the righteous, but only the wicked. How they have said this if they knew of the Pontius Pilate story?
The two exceptions, 1 Thessalonians and 2 Timothy, epistles that do blame Pilate or Jews for the death of Jesus, only serve to prove the rule. Both can easily be shown on other grounds to be non-Pauline and later than the gospels.
Jesus was eventually "historicized," redrawn as a human being of the past (much as Samson, Enoch, Jabal, Gad, Joshua the son of Nun, and various other ancient Israelite gods had already been). As a part of this process, there were various independent attempts to locate Jesus in recent history by laying the blame for his death on this or that likely candidate, well known tyrants including Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and even Alexander Jannaeus in the first century BC! Now, if the death of Jesus were an actual historical event well known to eyewitnesses of it, there is simply no way such a variety of versions, differing on so fundamental a point, could ever have arisen!
And if early Christians had actually remembered the passion as a series of recent events, why does the earliest gospel crucifixion account spin out the whole terse narrative from quotes cribbed without acknowledgement from Psalm 22? Why does 1 Peter have nothing more detailed than Isaiah 53 to flesh out his account of the sufferings of Jesus? Why does Matthew supplement Mark's version, not with historical tradition or eyewitness memory, but with more quotes, this time from Zechariah and the Wisdom of Solomon?
Thus I find myself more and more attracted to the theory, once vigorously debated by scholars, now smothered by tacit consent, that there was no historical Jesus lying behind the stained glass of the gospel mythology. Instead, he is a fiction.
Rejoinders:
1) We deem them myths not because of a prior bias that there can be no miracles, but because of the Principle of Analogy, the only alternative to which is believing everything in The National Inquirer. If we do not use the standard of current-day experience to evaluate claims from the past, what other standard is there? And why should we believe that God or Nature used to be in the business of doing things that do not happen now? Isn't God supposed to be the same yesterday, today, and forever?
2) The apologists' claim that there was "too little time between the death of Jesus and the writing of the gospels for legends to develop" is circular, presupposing a historical Jesus living at a particular time. 40 years is easily enough time for legendary expansion anyway, but the Christ-Myth Theory does not require that the Christ figure was created in Pontius Pilate's time, only that later, Pilate's time was retrospectively chosen as a location for Jesus.
a) See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History on the tendency in oral tradition to keep updating mythic foundational events, keeping them always at a short distance, a couple of generations before one's own time.
b) And even if there were a historical Jesus and we knew we had eyewitness reports, the apologists fail to take into account recent studies which show that eyewitness testimony, especially of unusual events, is the most unreliable of all, that people tend to rewrite what they saw in light of their accustomed categories and expectations. Thus Strauss was right on target suggesting that the early Christians simply imagined Jesus fulfilling the expected deeds of messiahs and prophets.
3) It is special pleading to dismiss all similar stories as myths and to insist that this case must be different. If you do this, admit it, you are a fideist, no longer an apologist (if there is any difference!).
Second, the "historical Jesus" reconstructed by New Testament scholars is always a reflection of the individual scholars who reconstruct him. Albert Schweitzer was perhaps the single exception, and he made it painfully clear that previous questers for the historical Jesus had merely drawn self-portraits. All unconsciously used the historical Jesus as a ventriloquist dummy. Jesus must have taught the truth, and their own beliefs must have been true, so Jesus must have taught those beliefs. (Of course, every biblicist does the same! "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!"). Today's Politically Correct "historical Jesuses" are no different, being mere clones of the scholars who design them.
C.S. Lewis was right about this in The Screwtape Letters: "Each 'historical Jesus' is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to." But, as apologists so often do, he takes fideism as the natural implication when agnosticism would seem called for. What he imagines the gospels so clearly to "say" is the mythic hero! When, in his essay, "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," Lewis pulls rank as a self-declared expert and denies that the gospels are anything like ancient myths, one can only wonder what it was he must have been smoking in that ever-present pipe of his!
My point here is simply that, even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn't one any more. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern remythologizings of Jesus. Every "historical Jesus" is a Christ of faith, of somebody's faith. So the "historical Jesus" of modern scholarship is no less a fiction.
Third, Jesus as the personal savior, with whom people claim, as I used to, to have a "personal relationship" is in the nature of the case a fiction, essentially a psychological projection, an "imaginary playmate." It is no different at all from pop-psychological "visualization" exercises, or John Bradshaw's gimmick of imagining a healing encounter with loved ones of the past, or Jean Houston leading Hillary Clinton in an admittedly imaginary dialogue with Eleanor Roosevelt.
I suppose there is nothing wrong with any of this, but one ought to recognize it, as Hillary Clinton and Jean Houston, and John Bradshaw do, as imaginative fiction. And so with the personal savior.
The alternative is something like channeling. You have "tuned in" to the spirit of an ancient guru, named Jesus, and you are receiving revelations from him, usually pretty trivial stuff, minor conscience proddings and the like. Some sort of imaginary telepathy.
In fact I don't believe most evangelical pietists mean anything by "having a personal relationship with Christ" than a fancy, overblown name for reading the Bible and saying their prayers. But if they did really refer to some kind of a "personal relationship," it would in effect be a case of channeling. I suspect this is why fundamentalists who condemn New Age channelers do not dismiss it as a fraud pure and simple (though obviously it is), but instead think that Ramtha and the others are channeling demons. If they said it was sheer delusion, they know where the other four fingers would wind up pointing!
Especially in view of the fact that the piety of "having a personal relationship with Christ" and "inviting him into your heart" is alien to the New Testament and is never intimated there as far as I can see, it is amazing to me that evangelicals elevate it to the shibboleth of salvation! Unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus, buster, one day you will be boiling in Hell. Sheesh! Talk about the fury of a personal savior scorned!
No one ever heard of this stuff till the German Pietist movement of the Eighteenth Century. To make a maudlin type of devotionalism the password to heaven is like the fringe Pentecostal who tells you can't get into heaven unless you speak in tongues. "You ask me how I know he lives?" asks the revival chorus. "He lives within my heart." Exactly! A figment.
Fourth, Christ is a fiction in that Christ functions, in an unnoticed and equivocal way, as shorthand for a vast system of beliefs and institutions on whose behalf he is invoked. Put simply, this means that when an evangelist or an apologist invites you to have faith "in Christ," they are in fact smuggling in a great number of other issues. For example, Chalcedonian Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity, the Protestant idea of faith and grace, a particular theory of biblical inspiration and literalism, habits of church attendance, etc. These are all distinct and open questions. Theologians have debated them for many centuries and still debate them. Rank and file believers still debate them, as you know if you have ever spent time talking with one of Jehovah's Witnesses or a Seventh Day Adventist. If you hear me say that and your first thought is "Oh no, those folks aren't real Christians," you're just proving my point! Who gave Protestant fundamentalists the copyright on the word Christian?
No evangelist ever invites people to accept Christ by faith and then to start examining all these other associated issues for themselves. Not one! The Trinity, biblical inerrancy, for some even anti-Darwinism, are non-negotiable. You cannot be genuinely saved if you don't tow the party line on these points. Thus, for them, "to accept Christ" means "to accept Trinitarianism, biblicism, creationism, etc." And this in turn means that "Christ" is shorthand for this whole raft of doctrines and opinions, all of which one is to accept "by faith," on someone else's say-so.
When Christ becomes a fiction in this sense he is an umbrella for an unquestioning acceptance of what some preacher or institution tells us to believe. And this is nothing new, no mutant distortion of Christianity. Paul already requires "the taking of every thought captive to Christ," already insists on "the obedience of faith." Here Christ has already become what he was to Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, a euphemism for the dogmatic party line of an institution. Dostoyevsky's point, of course, was that the "real" Jesus stands opposed to this use of his name to sanction religious oppression. But remember, though it is a noble one, Dostoyevsky's Jesus is also a piece of fiction! It is, after all, "The Parable of the Grand Inquisitor."
So, then, Christ may be said to be a fiction in the four senses that 1) it is quite possible that there was no historical Jesus. 2) Even if there was, he is lost to us, the result being that there is no historical Jesus available to us. And 3) the Jesus who "walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own" is an imaginative visualization and in the nature of the case can be nothing more than a fiction. And finally, 4) "Christ" as a corporate logo for this and that religious institution is a euphemistic fiction, not unlike Ronald McDonald, Mickey Mouse, or Joe Camel, the purpose of which is to get you to swallow a whole raft of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors by an act of simple faith, short-circuiting the dangerous process of thinking the issues out to your own conclusions.
Monday, May 16, 2005
FUNDIES WANT TO BURY FREEDOM UNDER A STONE TABLET
This is a long one, my friends, but very informative, forwarded to me by J. E. Hill with his own brief introduction.
"This is probably the best summary I've read of the reason the Christian right (AKA "religious Reich") is fighting over the display of the 10 commandments and why Bush toadies to them. It has nothing to do with religion (since Yeshua—"Jesus"—washed away the old laws with his blood) and everything to do with power—particularly the power to enslave women and children. Scratch a fundamentalist and you'll find a bigot, a homophobe and a misogynist all rolled up in one." —J.E.Hill
American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments
By William Thatcher Dowell
For anyone who actually reads the Bible, there is a certain irony in the current debate over installing the Ten Commandments in public buildings. As everyone knows, the second commandment in the King James edition of the Bible states quite clearly: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth."
It is doubtful that the prohibition on "graven images" was really concerned with images like the engraving of George Washington on the dollar bill. Rather it cautions against endowing a physical object, be it a "golden calf" or a two-ton slab of granite, with spiritual power. In short, it is the spirit of the commandments, not their physical representation in stone or even on a parchment behind a glass frame, which is important. In trying to publicize the commandments, the self-styled Christian Right has essentially forgotten what they are really about. It has also overlooked the fact that there are several different versions of them. The King James Bible lists three: Exodus 20:2-17, Exodus 34: 12-26, and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Catholic Bibles and the Jewish Torah also offer variants. If the commandants are indeed to be green-lighted for our official landscape, however, let's at least remember that Christianity did not exist when the commandments were given. It might then seem more consistent to go with the Hebrew version rather than any modified Christian version adopted thousands of years after Moses lived. Since the Catholic Church predates the Protestant Reformation, it would again make more sense to go with the Catholic version than later revisions.
It is just this kind of theological debate which has been responsible for massacres carried out in the name of religion over thousands of years. It was, in fact, the mindless slaughter resulting from King Charles' efforts to impose the Church of England's prayer book on Calvinist Scots in the 17th century which played an important role in convincing the founding fathers to choose a secular form of government clearly separating church and state. They were not the first to recognize the wisdom in that approach. Jesus Christ, after all, advised his followers to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's due and unto God that which was due God. The current debate, of course, has little to do with genuine religion. What it is really about is an effort to assert a cultural point of view. It is part of a reaction against social change, an American counter-reformation of sorts against the way our society has been evolving, and ultimately against the negative fallout that is inevitable when change comes too rapidly. The people pushing to blur the boundaries between church and state are many of the same who so fervently back the National Rifle Association and want to crack down on immigration. They feel that they are the ones losing out, much as, in the Middle East, Islamic fundamentalists fear they are losing out—and their reactions are remarkably similar. In the Arab Middle East and Iran, the response is an insistence on the establishment of Islamic Law as the basis for political life; while in Israel, an increasingly reactionary interpretation of Jewish law which, taken to orthodox extremes, rejects marriages by reform Jewish rabbis in America, has settled over public life.
In a strange way, George Bush may now find himself in the same kind of trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. To gain political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical, ultra-religious Wahabbi movement—the same movement which is spiritually at the core of al Qaeda. Once the bargain was done, the Saudi Royal Family repeatedly found itself held political hostage to an extremist, barely controllable movement populated by radical ideologues. Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has found himself in a similar situation, drawing political power from the swing votes of the ultra-orthodox right wing religious and fanatical settler's movement, and then finding his options limited by their obstinacy to change.
President Bush has spent the last several months cajoling evangelicals and trying to pay off the political bill for their support. In Saudi Arabia, the Wahabbis consider themselves ultra-religious, but what really drives their passions is a deep sense of grievance and an underlying conviction that a return to spiritual purity will restore the lost power they believe once belonged to their forefathers. The extremism that delights in stoning a woman to death for adultery or severing the hand of a vagrant accused of stealing depends on extreme interpretations of texts that are at best ambiguous. What is at stake is not so much service to God, as convincing oneself that it is still possible to enforce draconian discipline in a world that seems increasingly chaotic.
We joke about a hassled husband kicking his dog to show he still has power. In the Middle East, it is often women who bear the brunt of the impotence of men. Nothing in the Koran calls for the mistreatment of women or even asks that a woman wear a veil. What is at stake here is not religion, but power, and who has a right to it. The Christian Right, the evangelical movement that provided the added push needed to nudge President Bush past a tight election, is equally prone to selective interpretations of scripture. The Ten Commandments are used as a wedge to put across what is essentially a cultural protest against social change, but in the bitter disputes that have followed these seemingly ridiculous arguments the message of the commandments is usually lost.
The Christian Right pretends to be concerned about the life of an unborn fetus, but expresses little interest for the fate of the living child who emerges from an unwanted pregnancy, and is even ready to kill or at least destroy the careers of those who do not agree with them. Although the commandments prohibit killing, and Christ advised his followers to leave vengeance to God, the fundamentalists seem to delight in the death penalty, and in reducing welfare support to unwed mothers who are struggling to deal with the results of pregnancies that they could not control and never wanted to have. In the United States as in the Middle East, the core of this Puritanism stems from a nostalgia for an imaginary past, in our case, a belief that the U.S. was a wonderful place when it was peopled mostly by pioneers who came from good northern European stock, who knew right from wrong, and weren't afraid to back up their beliefs with a gun, or by going to war, if they needed to.
The founding fathers, of course, had a very different vision. They had seen the damage caused by the arcane disputes which triggered the religious wars of the seventeenth century. They preferred the ideas of the secular enlightenment, which instead of forcing men to accept the religious interpretations of other men, provided the space and security for each man to seek God in his own way. The idea that religious values should affect, and indeed control politics, is something that you hear quite often in the Islamic world. But perhaps the strongest rationale for separating these two dimensions of our daily lives is that politics inevitably involves compromise, while religion involves a spiritual ideal in which compromise can be fatal.
The conflict is easy to see in contemporary Iran. Iran's rulers have had to choose whether they consider politics or religion to be most important. Ayatollah Khomeini himself once stated that if forced to choose between Islamic law and Islamic rule, he would choose Islamic rule. The effect of that decision was to betray Islamic law and ultimately God. Iran's genuine Islamic scholars have found themselves under continual pressure to change their understanding of God in order to conform to political realities. The appointment of Ayatollah Sayyid al Khamenei to replace Khomeini as the supreme guide, is a case in point. Khamenei's credentials as a religious thinker are comparable to a number of other Iranian ayatollahs. But his real power stems from his political status. Because of that, he is in a position to affect and ultimately censor the religious writings of religious scholars who may be more thoughtful than he is, but whose thinking is considered threatening to Khamenei's vision of a theocratic state. Politics inevitably trumps religion when the two domains are merged. Religion, when incorporated into a political structure, is almost invariably diluted and deformed, and ultimately loses its most essential power. Worse, as we have seen recently in the Islamic world (as in the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials in the Christian world), a fanatical passion for one's own interpretation of justice often leads to horror—as in the obsession of some practitioners of Sharia law to engage such punishments as amputations or stoning women to death.
The fact is that, as Saint Paul so eloquently put it, "Now we see through a glass darkly." We have a great deal of religious experience behind us, but only God can understand to the full extent what it really means. Men have their interpretations, but they are only human and, by their nature, they are flawed. We see a part of what is there—but only a part. In that context, isn't it best to keep our minds open, the Ten Commandants in whatever version out of our public buildings or off our governmental lawns, and to lead by example rather than pressuring others to see life the way we do. As Christ once put it, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
William Thatcher Dowell is the editor of the Global Beat, a review of international security affairs published weekly over the internet by New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media. He has worked for NBC News, ABC News, and TIME magazine. He was a Middle East correspondent based in Cairo for TIME from 1989 through 1993.
Copyright 2005 William Thatcher Dowell. This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.
This is a long one, my friends, but very informative, forwarded to me by J. E. Hill with his own brief introduction.
"This is probably the best summary I've read of the reason the Christian right (AKA "religious Reich") is fighting over the display of the 10 commandments and why Bush toadies to them. It has nothing to do with religion (since Yeshua—"Jesus"—washed away the old laws with his blood) and everything to do with power—particularly the power to enslave women and children. Scratch a fundamentalist and you'll find a bigot, a homophobe and a misogynist all rolled up in one." —J.E.Hill
American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments
By William Thatcher Dowell
For anyone who actually reads the Bible, there is a certain irony in the current debate over installing the Ten Commandments in public buildings. As everyone knows, the second commandment in the King James edition of the Bible states quite clearly: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth."
It is doubtful that the prohibition on "graven images" was really concerned with images like the engraving of George Washington on the dollar bill. Rather it cautions against endowing a physical object, be it a "golden calf" or a two-ton slab of granite, with spiritual power. In short, it is the spirit of the commandments, not their physical representation in stone or even on a parchment behind a glass frame, which is important. In trying to publicize the commandments, the self-styled Christian Right has essentially forgotten what they are really about. It has also overlooked the fact that there are several different versions of them. The King James Bible lists three: Exodus 20:2-17, Exodus 34: 12-26, and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Catholic Bibles and the Jewish Torah also offer variants. If the commandants are indeed to be green-lighted for our official landscape, however, let's at least remember that Christianity did not exist when the commandments were given. It might then seem more consistent to go with the Hebrew version rather than any modified Christian version adopted thousands of years after Moses lived. Since the Catholic Church predates the Protestant Reformation, it would again make more sense to go with the Catholic version than later revisions.
It is just this kind of theological debate which has been responsible for massacres carried out in the name of religion over thousands of years. It was, in fact, the mindless slaughter resulting from King Charles' efforts to impose the Church of England's prayer book on Calvinist Scots in the 17th century which played an important role in convincing the founding fathers to choose a secular form of government clearly separating church and state. They were not the first to recognize the wisdom in that approach. Jesus Christ, after all, advised his followers to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's due and unto God that which was due God. The current debate, of course, has little to do with genuine religion. What it is really about is an effort to assert a cultural point of view. It is part of a reaction against social change, an American counter-reformation of sorts against the way our society has been evolving, and ultimately against the negative fallout that is inevitable when change comes too rapidly. The people pushing to blur the boundaries between church and state are many of the same who so fervently back the National Rifle Association and want to crack down on immigration. They feel that they are the ones losing out, much as, in the Middle East, Islamic fundamentalists fear they are losing out—and their reactions are remarkably similar. In the Arab Middle East and Iran, the response is an insistence on the establishment of Islamic Law as the basis for political life; while in Israel, an increasingly reactionary interpretation of Jewish law which, taken to orthodox extremes, rejects marriages by reform Jewish rabbis in America, has settled over public life.
In a strange way, George Bush may now find himself in the same kind of trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. To gain political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical, ultra-religious Wahabbi movement—the same movement which is spiritually at the core of al Qaeda. Once the bargain was done, the Saudi Royal Family repeatedly found itself held political hostage to an extremist, barely controllable movement populated by radical ideologues. Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has found himself in a similar situation, drawing political power from the swing votes of the ultra-orthodox right wing religious and fanatical settler's movement, and then finding his options limited by their obstinacy to change.
President Bush has spent the last several months cajoling evangelicals and trying to pay off the political bill for their support. In Saudi Arabia, the Wahabbis consider themselves ultra-religious, but what really drives their passions is a deep sense of grievance and an underlying conviction that a return to spiritual purity will restore the lost power they believe once belonged to their forefathers. The extremism that delights in stoning a woman to death for adultery or severing the hand of a vagrant accused of stealing depends on extreme interpretations of texts that are at best ambiguous. What is at stake is not so much service to God, as convincing oneself that it is still possible to enforce draconian discipline in a world that seems increasingly chaotic.
We joke about a hassled husband kicking his dog to show he still has power. In the Middle East, it is often women who bear the brunt of the impotence of men. Nothing in the Koran calls for the mistreatment of women or even asks that a woman wear a veil. What is at stake here is not religion, but power, and who has a right to it. The Christian Right, the evangelical movement that provided the added push needed to nudge President Bush past a tight election, is equally prone to selective interpretations of scripture. The Ten Commandments are used as a wedge to put across what is essentially a cultural protest against social change, but in the bitter disputes that have followed these seemingly ridiculous arguments the message of the commandments is usually lost.
The Christian Right pretends to be concerned about the life of an unborn fetus, but expresses little interest for the fate of the living child who emerges from an unwanted pregnancy, and is even ready to kill or at least destroy the careers of those who do not agree with them. Although the commandments prohibit killing, and Christ advised his followers to leave vengeance to God, the fundamentalists seem to delight in the death penalty, and in reducing welfare support to unwed mothers who are struggling to deal with the results of pregnancies that they could not control and never wanted to have. In the United States as in the Middle East, the core of this Puritanism stems from a nostalgia for an imaginary past, in our case, a belief that the U.S. was a wonderful place when it was peopled mostly by pioneers who came from good northern European stock, who knew right from wrong, and weren't afraid to back up their beliefs with a gun, or by going to war, if they needed to.
The founding fathers, of course, had a very different vision. They had seen the damage caused by the arcane disputes which triggered the religious wars of the seventeenth century. They preferred the ideas of the secular enlightenment, which instead of forcing men to accept the religious interpretations of other men, provided the space and security for each man to seek God in his own way. The idea that religious values should affect, and indeed control politics, is something that you hear quite often in the Islamic world. But perhaps the strongest rationale for separating these two dimensions of our daily lives is that politics inevitably involves compromise, while religion involves a spiritual ideal in which compromise can be fatal.
The conflict is easy to see in contemporary Iran. Iran's rulers have had to choose whether they consider politics or religion to be most important. Ayatollah Khomeini himself once stated that if forced to choose between Islamic law and Islamic rule, he would choose Islamic rule. The effect of that decision was to betray Islamic law and ultimately God. Iran's genuine Islamic scholars have found themselves under continual pressure to change their understanding of God in order to conform to political realities. The appointment of Ayatollah Sayyid al Khamenei to replace Khomeini as the supreme guide, is a case in point. Khamenei's credentials as a religious thinker are comparable to a number of other Iranian ayatollahs. But his real power stems from his political status. Because of that, he is in a position to affect and ultimately censor the religious writings of religious scholars who may be more thoughtful than he is, but whose thinking is considered threatening to Khamenei's vision of a theocratic state. Politics inevitably trumps religion when the two domains are merged. Religion, when incorporated into a political structure, is almost invariably diluted and deformed, and ultimately loses its most essential power. Worse, as we have seen recently in the Islamic world (as in the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials in the Christian world), a fanatical passion for one's own interpretation of justice often leads to horror—as in the obsession of some practitioners of Sharia law to engage such punishments as amputations or stoning women to death.
The fact is that, as Saint Paul so eloquently put it, "Now we see through a glass darkly." We have a great deal of religious experience behind us, but only God can understand to the full extent what it really means. Men have their interpretations, but they are only human and, by their nature, they are flawed. We see a part of what is there—but only a part. In that context, isn't it best to keep our minds open, the Ten Commandants in whatever version out of our public buildings or off our governmental lawns, and to lead by example rather than pressuring others to see life the way we do. As Christ once put it, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
William Thatcher Dowell is the editor of the Global Beat, a review of international security affairs published weekly over the internet by New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media. He has worked for NBC News, ABC News, and TIME magazine. He was a Middle East correspondent based in Cairo for TIME from 1989 through 1993.
Copyright 2005 William Thatcher Dowell. This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
WORK HARD, PLAY HARD, GROW WEALTHY? NOPE.
So you think that monetary rewards are equal to effort in Western society? Well, it turns out that such an idea may just not be the case. Wealth is not shared out on a proportional basis with talent or hard work. Other factors factor in, and the wealthy for some reason just seem to keep passing the wealth along and hogging the pot at the end of your rainbow.
12 March 2005
Exclusive from NEW SCIENTIST (Print Edition)
by Jenny Hogan
“It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly. ‘People on the whole have normally distributed attributes, talents and motivations, yet we finish up with wealth distributions that are much more unequal than that,’ says Robin Marris, emeritus professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London.” —Jenny Hogan
Bush’s ploy to end the taxing of inherited wealth will only make the imbalance worse. The wealthy don’t need our help it turns out. Click thislink and read more about it.
________________________________
“That money talks
I’ll not deny,
I heard it once:
It said, ‘Goodbye’.’” —Richard Armour
So you think that monetary rewards are equal to effort in Western society? Well, it turns out that such an idea may just not be the case. Wealth is not shared out on a proportional basis with talent or hard work. Other factors factor in, and the wealthy for some reason just seem to keep passing the wealth along and hogging the pot at the end of your rainbow.
12 March 2005
Exclusive from NEW SCIENTIST (Print Edition)
by Jenny Hogan
“It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly. ‘People on the whole have normally distributed attributes, talents and motivations, yet we finish up with wealth distributions that are much more unequal than that,’ says Robin Marris, emeritus professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London.” —Jenny Hogan
Bush’s ploy to end the taxing of inherited wealth will only make the imbalance worse. The wealthy don’t need our help it turns out. Click thislink and read more about it.
________________________________
“That money talks
I’ll not deny,
I heard it once:
It said, ‘Goodbye’.’” —Richard Armour
Friday, May 13, 2005
STUDY THE STOCK MARKET AND YOU FIND CHIMPS
That’s right, investing in the stock market is a gamble. Look! I play the stock market too. Well... no I don’t “play the stock market”, but I have dough in mutual funds because my company offered a 401k and the owner matched my dollars with his dollars up to three percent of my income. How could I lose on that? Then, come retirement, I rolled my does eat oats over into an IRA account so I didn’t have to come up with income taxes all in one bite. But, read the following, if you think of being a day trader. Not that it’ll stop anyone, but it’s sure interesting what a couple of scientists and a calculator can come up with.
[Open quote] Assume that City slickers are dumb and their effects on markets can be reproduced, according to complexity theory.
Roger Highfield reports (Filed: 16/03/2005)
“You might be forgiven for wondering if the best way to invest in stock markets is to consult a chimpanzee first - it has long been suspected that City hotshots are just lucky, overpaid fools who work in an industry where chance rules.
“Now science is beginning to support the idea that randomness, not rationality, exerts surprising sway over the markets. The insights have come from researchers who are interested in complexity, where the simple behaviour of many traders in a market governed by various rules can produce highly complex "emergent" behaviour (the waxing and the waning of share prices)....
“... another pioneer [Prof. Benoit Mandelbrot of Yale University, New Haven] in complexity science has gone so far as to claim that the edifice of financial theory that has been erected by economists over the past century rests on faulty foundations, placing investors at much greater risk of ruin than they realise....
“One of the leading exponents of applying complexity theory to the markets is Prof. Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.... The prevailing view in economics about how markets function is that you have a rational investor rationally processing all the information that arrives," said Prof. Farmer. "Our analysis challenges that view by saying that maybe a lot of price movement is more or less mechanical...."
“Sharp price swings - crashes and booms - are far more common than the standard models assume. And price changes in the past affect markets today; they are not "independent" from one another, as standard models also assume.” [Close quote]
The Whole Story Here
_________________________________________
Speaking of the stock market: “Work is for cowards.” —Pool hustler, U.J.Pucket
That’s right, investing in the stock market is a gamble. Look! I play the stock market too. Well... no I don’t “play the stock market”, but I have dough in mutual funds because my company offered a 401k and the owner matched my dollars with his dollars up to three percent of my income. How could I lose on that? Then, come retirement, I rolled my does eat oats over into an IRA account so I didn’t have to come up with income taxes all in one bite. But, read the following, if you think of being a day trader. Not that it’ll stop anyone, but it’s sure interesting what a couple of scientists and a calculator can come up with.
[Open quote] Assume that City slickers are dumb and their effects on markets can be reproduced, according to complexity theory.
Roger Highfield reports (Filed: 16/03/2005)
“You might be forgiven for wondering if the best way to invest in stock markets is to consult a chimpanzee first - it has long been suspected that City hotshots are just lucky, overpaid fools who work in an industry where chance rules.
“Now science is beginning to support the idea that randomness, not rationality, exerts surprising sway over the markets. The insights have come from researchers who are interested in complexity, where the simple behaviour of many traders in a market governed by various rules can produce highly complex "emergent" behaviour (the waxing and the waning of share prices)....
“... another pioneer [Prof. Benoit Mandelbrot of Yale University, New Haven] in complexity science has gone so far as to claim that the edifice of financial theory that has been erected by economists over the past century rests on faulty foundations, placing investors at much greater risk of ruin than they realise....
“One of the leading exponents of applying complexity theory to the markets is Prof. Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.... The prevailing view in economics about how markets function is that you have a rational investor rationally processing all the information that arrives," said Prof. Farmer. "Our analysis challenges that view by saying that maybe a lot of price movement is more or less mechanical...."
“Sharp price swings - crashes and booms - are far more common than the standard models assume. And price changes in the past affect markets today; they are not "independent" from one another, as standard models also assume.” [Close quote]
The Whole Story Here
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Speaking of the stock market: “Work is for cowards.” —Pool hustler, U.J.Pucket
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