Theological half-gainers (Eight Years Ago Today)

By Moristotle

[Originally published on July 18, 2009, not a word different.]

In Christopher Buckley’s unexpectedly caustic memoir about losing his parents, Patricia Taylor Buckley and William F. Buckley, Jr., he recounts his father’s regret that a beloved friend whose ashes he and Christopher have just scattered was not a Catholic. “What do you mean, Pup?” Christopher asked.

Thor's Day: Please add to your prayer list

Odd man out

By Morris Dean

When I installed Thor as a sort of hearth god for Moristotle & Co.'s religion column (July 12, 2012), I had no idea how it would turn out. And I certainly had no inkling that Thor would perform seeming miracles in fetching such rich and totally unexpected material for publication. Two weeks ago, for example, there was the gift of email exchange titled "A little skirmish over 'the War on Christmas'."

Political half-gainer

After ridiculing yet another of the myriad rationalizations he exposes in his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens states unequivocally on p. 379: "I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind."
    The statement could be this blogger's motto, called upon as I am, in my own small, self-respecting way, to expose religious absurditities and theological half-gainers.
    During the Republican presidential primary debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, Mitt Romney responded to comments about his religion's being a cult. He is reported by The Washington Post ("Mitt Romney takes on Mormon ‘cult’ comments, takes fire from GOP rivals") to have said: "That idea that we should choose people based on their religion is the one that I find to be most troubling."
    Rick Perry was one of the rivals present. He's the governor of Texas. Article 1, Section 4 of the Texas state constitution states that

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments....

    Pretty good, eh? You might not have thought that one of Romney's opponents had such a convenient rug for Romney to pull out from under him.
    Oh, but wait. The passage from the Texas state constitution specifies a provision:

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being [emphasis mine]¹.

    Hey, come on, Rick, Mitt passes that test.

The trouble here, of course, really is that business about acknowledging the existence of a Supreme Being (a Supreme Being?—aren't we monotheists, here in America?). You do pretty much have to do that to be electable to higher political office anywhere in America, and not just in Texas.
    Or at least you have to not deny it—if you can avoid being asked where you stand in the first place. But what are the chances of that in an American political campaign?
    We have every reason to doubt that Romney's self-serving response doesn't mean that if he were to be chosen, he would oppose "the idea that we should choose people based on their being religious."
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1. I didn't find this passage myself. A skeptical reader questioned one of my Christopher Hitchens quotes yesterday and did some fact-checking. Hitchens had said, "[Texas has] laws, I think, that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ you can’t run for sheriff." My skeptical reader reported that "The Hitchens quote is very close to the truth."

Cryptic quotes

This week's Cryptoquote solutions^* have included the following:

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.  –Anatole France (1844-1924)

    I suppose that Anatole France intended mainly to lampoon people who not only want—but believe that they are going to have—another, eternal life. (I could, of course, just be projecting that motive onto him.)
    Or did he, too, want that other life—but seriously doubt he'd get it? And did he himself perhaps not know, anymore than anyone else, what to do with his present, short life?
    At any rate, Anatole France seemed to believe that most people (if not all) did "not know what to do" with their lives.
    Is that true?

Walter Berglund, in the July 8 excerpt, commented that "Everybody just wants their [sic] normal life." Isn't "wanting your normal life" equivalent to "knowing what to do with your life"?
    In that case, it would seem that "wanting another which will be eternal" would be to want a whole lot of normal, for a very, very long time.
    [I don't actually believe that "wanting your normal life" is equivalent to "knowing what [you ought] to do with your life."]

But another cryptoquoted author seemed to view things differently:

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims of life is to enjoy it. –Samuel Butler (1612-1680 or 1835-1902?); the earlier Butler is credited with having said or written, "All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.")

    If Butler would have agreed with Walter that people want their normal life, he would seem to have thought that they mostly didn't enjoy it much, in which case they might not be too keen to want another, eternal life throughout which they'd have to endure a huge quantity of eventually extremely boring normality.
    Presumably Butler himself had learned to enjoy his life. Was he satisfied with its short-term enjoyment, or did he want another, eternal life to go on enjoying himself? Wouldn't eternal enjoyment of the same sort of thing eventually become excruciatingly boring?

If, as Ken supposes (for the sake of argument, I believe, in commenting on "In the sticks"), "Walter is seeing the world clearly and objectively," everybody's enjoying or not enjoying "their" normal life is leading to global disaster, in which case "they" might very well like to have another, eternal life in order to have another go at it.
    Would that normality go on literally forever, or would eternity, too, become a disaster? And would it forever remain a disaster, or somehow end and, presumably, not be eternal anymore?
    Oh, to be a theologian with some hope (however vain) of being able to figure this out!

I think, for now anyway, I'll just go about tending my garden—assuming that I have some choice in how to respond to this knowledge. But, as Sam Harris argues in his 2010 book, The Morale Landscape, such choice is a paradoxical thing, given that we are "manipulated by neurochemicals or childhood programming" [and other things]—which Ken supposes (for the sake of argument) that we aren't.
    Harris, in his blog essay, "Morality Without 'Free Will'," states that

In fact, the concept of free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically. There is simply no description of mental and physical causation that allows for this freedom that we habitually claim for ourselves and ascribe to others.

    The paradox is that, nevertheless,

Judgments of responsibility...depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect....Viewing human beings as forces of nature does not prevent us from thinking in terms of moral responsibility.

    That is, Harris seems to be implying, people are morally responsible for wanting their normal life, and responsible collectively for herding us toward global disaster, however un-free they may be to act otherwise.
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* My wife quickly solved the Cryptoquote by recognizing the coded shape of Anatole France's name; with the codes for a, c, e, f, l, n, o, r, & t all "broken," decoding what he said was child's play—but probably not as much fun as playing around with some of the questions the quotation raises, especially in the context of Jonathan Franzen's character Walter Berglund, Samuel Butler (whichever one it was), commenter Ken, and Sam Harris.

Parsing the explanation-of-evil half-gainer

Yesterday I said that I might nominate a certain explanation of evil for "lamest half-gainer performed from the theological diving board." Of course, I don't have a precise scale for judging one half-gainer lamer than the next. In my excitement I was exaggerating a little.
    I still think, though, that the theologian who came up with revelation of God (and had God speak in the first-person in the Old Testament) was undoubtedly a genius of the highest rank, and I can't think of a half-gainer any more adroit than that. But I'm not sure that yesterday's explanation for evil is literally the lamest. My nomination is pending the following investigation.

The explanation of evil went like this:

The "evil" that you speak of is put there for a reason, that we may all realize that there is none good, not one, and that left to ourselves we are all capable of the most heinous of crimes against God and against our fellow man.

Now, I had characterized the evil as having been influenced by the Bible (by persons presumably Christian):

...the murder and persecution of Jews—the ones who killed Christ!, the slaughter of Muslims during the Crusades, the persecution of "witches," the racking and burning at the stake of heretics, the showing to Galileo of the instruments of torture to force him to recant his scientific findings, etc.

    So, let's try to sort the explanation out. These evils, committed by Christians (and under the influence of the Bible), were "put there." Hmm, does the theologian mean that the Christians were manipulated like puppets and didn't really, morally commit the acts? Interesting!
    And who or what manipulated them? The passive voice leaves this to the imagination. I don't suppose that the Bible, through its "influence," is the manipulator, for if that were so the theologian would be conceding my point. (But it would tend to explain, perhaps, why one publisher titled his edition of the Bible The Living Bible. The living manipulator Bible!)
    Also, since the classes of acts I specified were just examples, standing for all evil acts that are (or will be) committed under the influence of the Bible, the theologian seems to be making the more general pronouncement that whenever Christians commit evil acts (under the influence of the Bible) they're being manipulated, so that their acts may be "put there" to make a point.
    Boy, that really does make you realize, doesn't it?
    But, oh, wait a minute. There's more to what we're thus made to realize; we're made to realize that, "left to ourselves, we are all capable of the most heinous of crimes against God and against our fellow man"! Uh-oh, problem here! All of these evil-doing Christians haven't been left to themselves; their acts have been "put there"—and to make a point, no less! It's getting kind of circular here maybe.
    You know, I think this half-gainer is still on the coach's drawing board. It's not ready for the diving platform yet. Nominations for performance awards for this candidate are ruled out of order.

Mamma Mia!

I felt sick yesterday morning, having spent some time during the night in agitation. Nu's latest email had posed two or three problems for me, not the least of which was that it stirred memories of old religious woundings—some very old, some not so old. As I said on Sunday (quoting one of my emails from the Friday interchange), "in my earlier days [in my youth, I] spent many hours praying"—for what I can't quite remember, but possibly for reassurance that I believed sufficiently to be "saved." Not fun to revisit all that. Children don't deserve to have religion foisted on them in that way. Santa Claus is bad enough, but parents admit that hoax eventually. Childhood woundings. The more recent woundings were suffered during my ill-fated attempt to form a friendship with a jehovah (Tom S), whose talking points and Bible quotations were, if anything, even more rehearsed than Nu's. I exited that interchange to preserve my sanity.
    Nu and I have been friendly and have referred to each other as friends. We discovered early that we shared some basic values, especially the sense that "everything is holy" (if anything is, as I qualified it). Ironically, Nu seems to have inferred from that that I must "believe in God" and "be a Christian," after all and in spite of my denial. Nu won't allow that morality has evolved, that evolved consciousness shapes spirituality. In my view, of course, the "revelations" of the Bible grew out of that evolved consciousness; they were not imposed from outside by "God."
    The tone (and the "love" words) of Nu's latest message suggest a parent-child thing, with me the child to her mother:

Morris, This will be my final reply to you on this subject.
    I am sad to see your response. I think that over the last several years I have communicated to you in a very loving way....

She had sent me at least two previous notes of talking points and Bible quotations, and I reminded her most recently—about a year ago—that I don't respond well to being "preached at."

The motives behind my words have been very transparent. I would think that ultimately they are the same for every true Bible-believing Christian who shares their beliefs with any who do not believe. It is a desire for all men to know God and to believe on His Name. A desire that all men would give Honor and Respect to the Creator of the Universe. In all genuineness and sincerity. It is NOT to win a debate, ever....

No one "knows God"; it's all words and ritual, same as is "believing on His Name"—as though mouthing formulas to win something could make any sense. The Bible isn't all bunk, but John 3:16 certainly is.
    And we know virtually nothing about the creation of the universe. To say that "God created it" adds nothing to our understanding; it is a nullity. It's frankly hard even to see what wish it could fulfill, except perhaps in a primitive brain incapable of judging the inappropriateness to cosmology of the parent-child schema.
    Nu has nothing to sell; why is she trying so hard to sell it?

In closing, I will just add that the Bible was written so men might receive its message. The "evil" that you speak of is put there for a reason, that we may all realize that there is none good, not one, and that left to ourselves we are all capable of the most heinous of crimes against God and against our fellow man. This is patent throughout the entire Old Testament.

I might nominate this "explanation" of evil as "put there for a reason" for lamest half-gainer performed from the theological diving board. Pure twaddle.¹

The Good News of the New Testament is that although the heart of mankind was continually disobedient and rebellious to God, He did not leave us in that lost and hopeless estate, he sent a redeemer who was the only one qualified to satisfy God's holy requirements...He was conceived by the power of the holy ghost in the womb of the virgin Mary and born of her yet without sin.

Here, child, have another dose of this redeeming elixir!

The bible was written over a period of more than 1,500 years, by over forty different writers from every walk of life including kings, peasants, and fishermen in three different languages, and this message has been preserved and the integrity of the message has not changed. This is a miracle that could not be concocted or staged.

The books of the Old and New Testaments were variously selected by whoever wielded the power to decide; the dominant figures in the early church rejected dozens of other accounts of what people believed had happened. Whatever "integrity" the Bible has was an editorial decision, and "God" was not the editor.

In closing [yet again]: Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and Mohamed and all other great men inspired other men surely, but they died and are still decaying in their graves, but the One who claimed to be God and to breathe out the words of scripture Himself through His Holy Spirit (inspired) is not in His grave. He has risen, and is coming again to judge the world.

Says Nu, who obviously believes this without question and is impervious to any rational or skeptical challenge. Bible scholars disagree as to whether Jesus "claimed to be God." And the only use of the Bible's claim to be divinely inspired is to impress the gullible².

Dear Morris, that is all any of us care for you to know. We are not debaters or arrogant or any of the other things that you might be thinking. We are sincere and wish only God's richest blessings on you.

As if she cannot see that I am richly blessed, and certainly no less blessed than anyone in our email group.

This requires no response, please.

That "please," the unkindest cut of all!

And yet, that "Dear Morris"—heartfelt? Though not sure, one has to doubt it: the tone is too like that of a mother trying to manipulate a child. This has hurt me more than it has hurt you.
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1. Nomination subsequently ruled out of order.
2. From Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary:

   gull vt to take advantage of (one who is foolish or unwary)

Master's thesis

Olympic diving is judged on a scale of difficulty from 1.2 to 3.8 or more, with the reverse 3½ somersaults being among those rated 3.5 (or more, depending). This dive, as I pointed out on Wednesday, is the diving equivalent of theology's revelation of god.
    On my walk with Siegfried this morning, it occurred to me (a revelation of god?) that an ambitious student of theology might propose as his or her master's thesis to rate the major theological half-gainers down through history as to their relative difficulty on the same Olympic scale. The thesis would defend the researcher's standard for identifying major half-gainers and his or her method of deciding for each one which Olympic dive is its equivalent in difficulty.
    Surely some Department of Sports Studies somewhere in our Christian nation¹ would look with enthusiasm upon such a proposal.
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1. I but take up the hint from the title of Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation.

More theological loopholes (or half-gainers)

My recent discovery that a man celebrated as one of the foremost intellectuals of the twentieth century—William F. Buckley, Jr. [1925-2008]—devoted a considerable portion of his brain power to theology (the invention of loopholes to avoid certain problems of religious belief) has inspired me to revisit my March 30 post, "Definition of theology," and add a few more examples of theological concoction:

Problem to Avoid: It is unendurably sad to contemplate that after a loved one or I myself die, we shall never again see one another.
Loophole: We don't really die! We will be resurrected (so long as we believe the prescribed things) and will enjoy each other throughout eternity.

Problem to Avoid: But I can't stand many of the people I might have to spend eternity with.
Loophole: When people are resurrected, only their pure parts are revived. If they were personally insufferable and hideously ugly in real life, they will in heaven be exceedingly nice and gloriously beautiful to look upon.

Problem to Avoid: The good die young and even those who are not so terribly bad often die before their time.
Loophole: Whoever dies before his or her time (and believes the things prescribed to get into heaven) will be proportionally recompensed in heaven so that by the time eternity has elapsed, it will all have evened out and everyone will have gotten his or her precise due.
    ...And those who live beyond their time (perhaps because of having been put on life support against their DNR order) will be proportionally penalized, etc. As I said, it'll all have evened out by the time eternity has elapsed.

Problem to Avoid: But eternity will never elapse! In fact, heaven could become terribly boring at some point.
Loophole: The Director of Heavenly Amusements already has (and has always had, throughout preceding eternity) a continuously diverting program planned. No one will ever, ever get bored. For one thing, we will sit around a lot and play theology.

The half-gainer concocted by Buckley in his son's book (not that it was original with Buckley) isn't any more convincing than the ones above, now, is it? All such concoctions down through the ages (since those recorded in the Israelites' ancient literature) have similarly been in the service of trying to demolish unpleasant, inconvenient facts or beliefs about the world in which we live. It is ironic that some such concoctions (starting at least with the Israelites' attributing jealousy to their god in order to avoid the problem of his vengeful destruction of people who offended him) have been accorded special authority as "revelations of God": the author of Exodus 20:5 had his god "reveal" the attribute in his own voice: "...for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God." Revelation of God is the reverse 3½ somersaults of theology, and the writer in question was undoubtedly one of our earliest theological geniuses.

Theological half-gainers

In Christopher Buckley's unexpectedly caustic memoir about losing his parents, Patricia Taylor Buckley and William F. Buckley, Jr., he recounts his father's regret that a beloved friend whose ashes he and Christopher have just scattered was not a Catholic. "What do you mean, Pup?" Christopher asked.

He replied matter-of-factly that as Harry was not a Catholic, he had no expectation of seeing him again in heaven. This truly hit me like a smack in the face. Pup loved Harry wholeheartedly, but rules were—apparently—rules: The gates of heaven were shut against nonbelievers. I was crushed, for I too had loved Harry. I was, at the time (age twenty-eight), very much a believer, and I tended to take Pup's theological pronouncements as having ex cathedra papal authority.
    Sometime later, he spoke—with genuine relief in his voice—of his discovery of a loophole called "the doctrine of invincible ignorance," which, if I understand it—theological half-gainers can leave a lad's head spinning at times—means that the normal rules with respect to admission to heaven are suspended if you are incapable intellectually or culturally of accepting that the Catholic Church is the one true Church, the only means of redemption. How Pup smiled with relief as he explained it across the lunch table that summer day! –pp. 39-40, Losing Mum and Pup, Twelve, New York & Boston, 2009

Theological half-gainers! I wish I'd thought of that for my "definition of theology." Having only a vague sense that a "half-gainer" is some sort of dive, I looked it up (in yourdictionary.com):

gain·er (gnr): n. 2. Sports A dive in which the diver leaves the board facing forward, does a back somersault, and enters the water feet first.
half gainer: a fancy dive in which the diver springs from the board facing forward and does a back flip in the air so as to enter the water head first, facing the board.

What's fancy about a theological half-gainer is the believer's adroitness in positioning his head. Buckley is astute in classifying such theology a sport.

Definition of theology

Webster defines theology as "the study of God and his relation to the world." Since "God" almost certainly does not exist (and theology so defined has no subject matter), we need a more realistic definition, and I've thought of one:

The invention of loopholes¹ for trying to step around the moral, psychological, scientific, and philosophical problems that arise from the almost certainly false belief that "God" exists.

For example,

Problem to Avoid: Bad guys often make it big while good guys suffer and die young.
Loophole: There will be a day of judgment, after which the bad guys will burn in hell and the good guys will have seventy virgins—or is it raisins?

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1. [7-18-2009] Or, as Christopher Buckley suggests: half-gainers. But he agrees on loophole.