Thor's Day: What’s Your Story? What’s Your Landscape?

By Bob Boldt

In Barry Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative” from the collection Crossing Open Ground, he states that the purpose of storytelling is

The book-wallah

This book-wallah is not an itinerant

This morning's commute reading (on a Triangle Transit Authority bus from Hillsborough to Chapel Hill^*) included the following "hilarious scene depicting the itinerant 'book-wallah,' in [George Orwell's 1937 novel] Burmese Days," quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his 2002 biography, Why Orwell Matters:

His system of exchange was that for any book in his bundle you gave him four annas, and any other book. Not quite any book, however, for the book-wallah, though analphabetic, had learned to recognise and refuse a Bible.
    "No, sahib," he would say plaintively, "no. This book" (he would turn it over disapprovingly in his flat brown hands) "this book with a black cover and gold letters—this one I cannot take. I know not how it is, but all sahibs are offering me this book, and none are taking it. What can it be that is in this black book? Some evil, undoubtedly." [p. 124]

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* Thursday was my last day for commuting by van from Mebane. My new work schedule dictates longer hours on my employer's premises.

She was suffering from religion

A very strange story (strange even in the weird world of religious belief) came to my attention yesterday.
    It was reported in The Washington Post on March 31, 2009 ("Deal Includes Resurrection Clause," by Dan Morse, with subtitle "Mother to go free if son rises from dead"):

Accepting a plea bargain that her attorney described as unprecedented in American jurisprudence, a 22-year-old Maryland woman yesterday agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of other defendants in the death of her son under the condition that charges against her be dropped if the child rises from the dead.

    She was charged with first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in the death of her son Javon, who was deprived of food and water because he didn't say "amen" before breakfast.
    Even more curious (perhaps) is the fact that, after Javon died,

he was placed on a couch while everyone knelt down and prayed. Ramkissoon [Javon's mother] also danced around her son, prosecutors said. The boy's body was later moved to a back room.
    At one point, two members measured Javon's body and bought a suitcase. Members believed that if the body could travel with them, it could be resurrected at a later date, said Steven Silverman, Ramkissoon's attorney. The group members left the suitcase with a man they had befriended. Police eventually discovered it in his shed in Philadelphia.

    The canny prosecutors tried to protect their part in the plea arrangement by stipulating that

Ramkissoon could not get out of her obligations if she asserted that Javon came back as anything other than himself.
    "This would need to be a Jesus-like resurrection," Margaret Burns, the spokeswoman, said after the hearing. "It cannot be a reincarnation in another object or animal."

I learned of the Ramkissoon case from Sam Harris's latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, which I am currently reading. On p. 158, he comments:

The boundary between mental illness and respectable religious belief can be difficult to discern...Despite the fact that this band of lunatics carried the boy's corpse around in a green suitcase for over a year, awaiting his reincarnation, there is no reason to believe that any of them suffers from a mental illness. It is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.

    Harris had, on p. 157, already put this in the context of what constitutes a delusion:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders...defines "delusion" as a "false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary." Lest we think that certain religious beliefs might fall under the shadow of this definition, the authors exonerate religious doctrines, in principle, in the next sentence: "The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith)" (p. 765)...As any clinician can attest, delusional patients often suffer from religious delusions. And the criterion that a belief be widely shared suggests that a belief can be delusional in one context and normative in another, even if the reasons for believing it are held constant. Does a lone psychotic become sane merely by attracting a crowd of devotees?

     Richard Dawkins, too, for his 2006 book, The God Delusion, was cautioned by the psychiatric profession about his use of the word:

The word "delusion" in my title has disquieted some psychiatrists who regard it as a technical term, not to be bandied about...I need to justify my use of [the word]. The Penguin English Dictionary defines a delusion as "false belief or impression." Surprisingly, the illustrative quotation the dictionary gives is from Phillip E. Johnson: "Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself." Can that be the same Phillip E. Johnson who leads the creationist charge against Darwinism in America today? Indeed it is, and the quotation is, as we might guess, taken out of context. I hope the fact that I have stated as much will be noted, since the same courtesy has not been extended to me in numerous creationist quotations of my work, deliberately and misleadingly taken out of context...The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as "a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder." The first part captures religious faith perfectly. As to whether it is a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion."

For the sake of "full disclosure," I'll tell you that I myself suffered from a religious delusion (involving the deity Universal Intelligent Energy, whom I knew as "Youie") during the summer of 1989, when I was so convinced that I would win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes that the day my name was to be announced that evening on network television (NBC, as I recall) I boxed up all of my personal belongings at IBM so that I could resign and leave quickly the next day.

Fortunately for Ms. Ramkissoon,

If she testifies truthfully against the other defendants...prosecutors will recommend that she be released from jail, placed on probation, and provided treatment that could include "a process of deprogramming."

    I overcame my own tendency toward religious delusion, first by learning (with the help of my wife) to monitor and control my mood swings, then, fifteen years later, by reprogramming myself through applied skepticism to finally opt out of religion altogether.

God the cosmic lover

One of the things I especially like about the David Lodge novel I'm reading now (Paradise News) is its central character, Bernard Walsh. He, like me, tends to be skeptical (or "sceptical"):

There weren't many jobs for sceptical theologians, and St John's College [in Lodge's own Yoknapatawpha County of Rummidge, England] had given him one. It was only part-time, admittedly, but he had hopes that it might eventually become full-time, and meanwhile they allowed him to live in one of the student rooms in the College, which saved him a lot of trouble and expense.
      He returned to his room and made the narrow, iron-framed bed, which he had left untidily rumpled in his eagerness to get out to the travel agency. He sat at his desk and took out his notes on a book about process theology he was reviewing for Eschatological Review. The God of process theology, he read, is the cosmic lover. "His transcendence is in His sheer faithfulness to Himself in love, in His inexhaustibility as lover, and in His capacity for endless adaptation to circumstances in which His love may be active." Really? Who says? The theologian says. And who cares, apart from other theologians? Not the people choosing their holidays from the travel agent's brochures. Not the drivers of the car transporters. It often seemed to Bernard that the discourse of much modern radical theology was just as implausible and unfounded as the orthodoxy it had displaced, but nobody had noticed because nobody read it except those with a professional stake in its continuation. [emphasis mine, p. 29]

My sensitivity to the final sentence—about nobody's reading stuff like Bernard is reading—had been heightened by my having just read Maliha's meditation on futile reading in her post of Friday...and by my uncomfortable awareness that the observation applies to the blabble that I write here about religion and other matters.

"Problems will always torment us..."

...wrote Arthur [Bancroft] M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-February 28, 2007),

because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.

On Friday, in a comment on the problem of evil, I myself wrote about one important problem:

I meant to contrast my "wide-eyed sobriety" with a person's typical wistfulness when it comes to God (and to most everything else important); that is, we typically believe what we want to believe.

Do we tend to believe what we want to believe when it comes to such problems just in order to avoid that "continuing struggle to try and solve them"? The continuing struggle in my case seems to have resulted in my somber disillusionment, to quote my friend Tom Sheepandgoats's comment on the "problem of evil" post.

Tom offers me a way to get around the impasse of this particular one of Schlesinger's insoluble important problems—the problem whether God (if God exists) is both good and evil. He suggests that I assent to the Jehovah's Witnesses' contention that the Bible shows that we humans (and other animals? I asked Tom) were intended to live forever, which I take it the Jehovah's Witnesses interpret as meaning that we, in fact, do live forever—that is, that we will be miraculously resurrected and find that our suffering and death here on earth were illusions and we didn't suffer that much, really, however many times we may have been raped and stabbed or whatever, and that God really was totally good after all.

I am skeptical that Tom and the Jehovah's Witnesses have found by their Biblical interpretation a reliable way to avoid Schlesinger's vain hope. Of course they have found a way to avoid it, but you've probably already guessed that I can't share their solace, for I doubt that their interpretation is reliable.

I can already hear Tom ask, "Well, would you like to remove your doubt by studying the text and our interpretation of it?" In asking that, he would be challenging me to put up or admit that I don't so much doubt the interpretation as assume that it's wishful thinking and inherently unreliable.

Am I putting too much faith in Schlesinger's contention (by implication) that this problem is and must remain insoluble? Is this skeptic's faith any better than the faith of the believer that "whatever the Bible [or the Quran or the Book of Mormon or some other book held to be 'God's word'] says is so must therefore be so"?