Nailed it (and no damn fooling)

The Letters editor of the Durham Herald-Sun telephoned me last night. She was going to run my letter in the morning.
    "You printed it this morning," I said.
    "No, tomorrow's will be your 'abominable things' letter."
    "I submitted that on Friday, right after reading Gordon Hansen's letter."
    "Oh?" she said. "I just received it this morning. Hmm, I'm going to have to check what else might not be being sent on to me....
    "You're right about religious rants," she said. "They do generate some interest. When letters have been kind of boring and one like that comes in, I'm glad to run it. And letters like yours, they're welcome anytime. Thank you for submitting them."

So, the game wasn't cancelled after all, although whatever happened that she didn't receive my letter immediately was a sort of rain delay.
    And it appears that I hadn't needed to soften my "Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe any damn fool thing they want" in Friday's letter to "Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe anything they want" in the one she printed yesterday.
    Good on you, Ms. Betsy O'Donovan!

Did you see my letter?" I asked my wife from the kitchen.
    "You nailed it," she said.
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Today's letter on the web

A former Baptist, that is

A fitting objet trouvé to accompany my letter in today's Durham Herald-Sun¹ sort of reached up this morning from p. 376 of Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, and tapped me on the shoulder. I found the objet in the chapter, "The Jewish Question," in which Hitchens explains how he discovered that he was a Jew and reports on his extensive investigations into his Semitic roots:

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions [I think these are the writings from which Mr. Gordon Hansen likes to select those that support his prejudices against gays and women], we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam....²

As ever and always, Christopher Hitchens, thank you, thank you for your mind and your heart.
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1. The rest of the paragraph:

   Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for "mind" or "intellect," and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over "exile" or "return." It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the "messianic" Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.

2. Today's letter on the web

A Baptist weighs in

Well, they haven't printed my letter in reply to Gordon Hansen, but they printed Larry Bumgardner's this morning, and that gives me an opportunity to try again:

Judging by Mr. Bumgardner's letter this morning ("Southern Baptists will apologize again"), my having been a Baptist^* confers on me, too, some authority to enter this conversation.
    Mr. Bumgardner writes: "Hanson [sic; “Hansen” according to the Sept. 30 edition] used scripture to justify hatred toward gays and a refusal to allow women to be pastors. If he were so disposed, he could use scripture to justify slavery…polygamy…stoning adulterous women…on and on."
    Quite right; the Bible is used to justify many incompatible things. What is one to conclude from this? God did NOT write the Bible; it is NOT His inspired word. Or, the Bible is no more inspired of God than, say, the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I can pick a word at random from the dictionary (or from any book whose language I can read) and "get an idea" that might (or might not) be helpful to me in solving a problem, being cheered up, making the right decision, or whatever I'm looking for. That's the nature of inspiration, the only inspiration we know.
    The First Amendment of our Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe anything they want, including that God wrote the Bible. That doesn't make it so—not when it flies in the face of facts and logic.
    If having been a Baptist qualifies me to say that, I suspect that Mr. Hansen would say that my use of logic disqualifies me.
    I’m not sure about Mr. Bumgardner. He too seems to be lapsed.

* Yes, I was a "First Baptist" for two or three years in high school, roughly fifty to fifty-five years ago. As well as I can remember, the church in the photo above—from somewhere on the Internet—could be the very one I attended (in Tulare, California).
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In case the Herald's letters page should not be available for long), I include Mr. Bumgardner's letter here:

Southern Baptists will apologize again
I’m happy that Gordon Hanson wrote his letter (Sept. 30) objecting to my comments about Southern Baptist behavior. His letter speaks perfectly to the mindset that his children or grandchildren will one day be ashamed of.
    I am particularly qualified to speak of Southern Baptists since I was raised in that tradition and, up until about 15 years ago, was affiliated with them. Their decision to break from a longtime theological position referred to as the “priesthood of the believer” and switch to a top-down authoritarian rule demanding a belief in biblical inerrancy has decimated Southern Baptist ranks. Membership and baptisms continue to fall. I suspect their apology for slavery was motivated by their desire to pick up membership from similarly disposed black churches.
    Hanson used scripture to justify hatred toward gays and a refusal to allow women to be pastors. If he were so disposed, he could use scripture to justify slavery as his church years ago certainly did. He could justify polygamy, if he were so disposed. He could justify stoning adulterous women. The list goes on and on.
    The Bible Belt states have the highest incidence of divorce of any states in the union. The most liberal state in the union, Massachusetts, has the lowest divorce rate. What is it those folks are trying to tell us about living a moral life? It sure isn’t by setting an example. Sooner or later, an apology or serious regret will be forthcoming. It’s just a matter of time.
                                    –Larry Bumgardner, Durham

The growing denomination "None"

Heartening news from Frank Rich's op-ed piece ("The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off") in yesterday's New York Times¹:

The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists). Another highly regarded poll, the General Social Survey, had an even more startling finding in its preliminary 2008 data released this month: Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion. How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.
    This, too, is a replay of the Great Depression. “One might have expected that in such a crisis great numbers of these people would have turned to the consolations of and inspirations of religion,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in “Since Yesterday,” his history of the 1930s published in 1940. But that did not happen: “The long slow retreat of the churches into less and less significance in the life of the country, and even in the lives of the majority of their members, continued almost unabated.”
    The new American faith, Allen wrote, was the “secular religion of social consciousness.” It took the form of campaigns for economic and social justice — as exemplified by the New Deal and those movements that challenged it from both the left and the right. It’s too early in our crisis and too early in the new administration to know whether this decade will so closely replicate the 1930s, but so far Obama has far more moral authority than any religious leader in America with the possible exception of his sometime ally, the Rev. Rick Warren.

I'm of course cavalier in calling the decline in church affiliation "heartening." But my regular readers will know why I say this. For example, just this morning on NPR, I was listening to a commentary about the need for Christians and Muslims to cooperate to further human rights. True enough that cooperation would be nice, but the commentary might more usefully have included some information about how both religions stand in the way of various human rights. Christians in the way of rights for gays, for example. Muslims in the way of rights for women. And on and on.
    As Sam Harris rightly recommended in his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, progress demands that religion not be given a free pass when it comes to criticism.
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1. It has come to my attention that columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. has also written about these findings, in his syndicated article, "Wake-Up Call for Organized Religion," in the Miami (FL) Herald, March 14, 2009.
       Pitts allows that "God and religion are not synonymous." I agree; god doesn't exist, religion does.

"Well, no, I don't believe that"

During lunch yesterday with a friend of my own age, I mentioned that I am reading Bertrand Russell's 1945 A History of Western Philosophy, and he in turn mentioned having read Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. I asked whether the book had influenced him, and he said he had long been an agnostic. I asked what "agnostic" meant to him, and he said "just not knowing, one way or the other, whether 'God' exists. I don't know. But," he added, "I do not believe that there's a personal god. If 'it' exists, it hasn't any interest in human affairs."

I said that perhaps he's atheist with respect to that particular brand of god? He didn't acknowledge it, which I took as an indication that he might need to think about that for a while to become comfortable with the label. (It didn't occur to me until later that I might have told him Dawkins's remark that we are all atheists when it comes to most of the gods mankind has believed in.)

Then we got to talking about whether or not our children "believe in god." I told him that my daughter recently wrote me (in a comment on my blog) that she had concluded as a kid that there's no god. And my friend told me a little story about his own daughter:

When she was three years old she had a friend whose family belonged to a fundamentalist church. One day she told us that her friend had invited her to go to church with them. She wanted to know what we thought. We told her fine, go ahead if she wanted to. So she did and went pretty regularly. She seemed to enjoy going.
    But came the time (three years later) when her friend's mother asked her whether she would like to join the church.
    Our daughter said, "I thought I was already a member."
    "No," they said, "there's a requirement for membership."
    "What's that?"
    "You have to believe."
    "Believe...what?"
    "You have to believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Personal Savior."
    Our daughter hesitated not a moment before answering, "Well, no, I don't believe that."
    She never went back.

This six-year-old knew what she believed—or didn't believe, at any rate. I didn't ask my own daughter what "as a kid" meant in her case, but when I read her comment I imagined her when she wore a pair of fairly large-rimmed eyeglasses and seemed particularly independent and inner-directed. That might have been about sixth or seventh grade, but I'm not sure. I hope she'll read this post and let me know!