Belated “Merry Christmas” to Ken

By Moristotle

[Originally published 11 years ago, on December 26, 2010]

Well, Ken [Marks], I’ll see what I can do about a few field observations in the persona you suggested of an anthropologist from an atheistic society:

Boldt Words & Images: On the anniversary of 9/11

The first airplane hit 15 year ago, at precisely 8:46:40 a.m.

Thor’s Day: Redemption beneath the stars

A Christian reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear

By Kyle Garza

Upon a first reading, King Lear seems like yet another Shakespearean tragedy wherein foolish characters, hanging their faults on their sleeves, lament their undoing in an unjust and cruel world. The characters all seem to fall into two worldview camps: One thinks that cruel higher powers torment us merely for their own sport, and we must endure their harsh torture as petty toys; the other thinks that the majority of evil in the world is the result of human sins, and there is a higher arbiter who orchestrates justice in the natural world. The latter in the play not only capture Shakespeare’s thematic intent more accurately, but they also demonstrate the core elements of the Christian gospel throughout King Lear’s five acts. It is clear by the end of the play that the wicked receive their comeuppances in a world with orchestrated justice, that the wicked cannot justify their wickedness by the predetermination of the stars, and that the characters of Edgar and Cordelia serve as Christ-figures that anchor the play to the Christian gospel.

Belated "Merry Christmas" to Ken

Well, Ken, I'll see what I can do about a few field observations in the persona you suggested of an anthropologist from an atheistic society:

I've spent a week in a little town in North Carolina called "Mebane." Quaint place, an interesting mixture of country and shopping malls and ubiquitous brick structures labeled "churches," with reports of "church activities" everyday in the local newspaper. Already, I have to tell you, I can't read the title of the paper's "Region" section without misreading it "Religion." The people here appear to be exceedingly superstitious.
    There have been many reports of locals' hoping for something they call a "white Christmas." In fact, there's a sappy song they listen to over and over on their radios, about someone dreaming of "a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know." There's some strong nostalgia going on here, or something.
    In fact, it snowed overnight here in Mebane. Over four inches of the white stuff, and still coming down. You'd think that the locals would be happy now, but I've heard quite a bit of bitching about road conditions. Either the bitchers weren't among those dreaming of a white Christmas, or there's some ambivalence going on too. I'll have to check this out.
    Everyone I've observed greets everyone else with the phrase, "Merry Christmas." It seems to refer to yesterday, though, for today I'm hearing, "I hope you had a merry Christmas."
    Not sure what "merry" means in this context. Most people look tired and unhappy, or worried. Perhaps because of another thing the paper has been reporting, something called "shopping." The "shoppers" may be worried about what'll happen when they can't pay their credit card bills?
    It isn't clear that Christmas has anything to do with religion, but the first syllable of the term seems to refer to someone called "Christ," and some of the greeting cards I've seen refer to "keeping Christ in Christmas." Maybe he's someone (a "god" to these people, apparently) who's supposed to help people be merry? Whatever, it doesn't seem to be working.
    Apparently, the religious don't expect their gods to actually be able to do anything. They presumably take some other comfort from religion, or get something else out of it, although I have so far been unable to discern what it might be. If it's simply a code of behavior for defining who's in and who's out, it's hard to say exactly what one is supposed to be in or out of.
    Christmas is a frenzied, ironically glum time, it appears.
    But I've only studied this for a week so far.

Sheep and goats

Dedicated to my friend Tom

After looking up at his students to see whether they seemed to be listening [most of them did], Bernard (in David Lodge's novel Paradise News) concludes the term's opening lecture:

"Modern theology therefore finds itself in a classic double bind: on the one hand the idea of a personal God responsible for creating a world with so much evil and suffering in it logically requires the idea of an afterlife in which these things are rectified and compensated for; on the other hand, traditional concepts of the afterlife no longer command intelligent belief, and new ones, like Rahner's, do not capture the popular imagination—indeed, they are incomprehensible to ordinary laypeople. It is not surprising that the focus of modern theology has turned more and more upon the Christian transformation of this life, whether in the form of Bonhoeffer's 'religionless Christianity,' or Tillich's Christian existentialism, or various types of Liberation Theology.
      "But if you purge Christianity of the promise of eternal life (and, let us be honest, the threat of eternal punishment) which traditionally underpinned it, are you left with anything that is distinguishable from secular humanism? One answer is to turn that question around and ask what secular humanism has got that isn't derived from Christianity.
      "There is a passage in Matthew, Chapter 25, which seems particularly relevant here. Matthew is the most explicitly apocalyptic of the synoptic gospels, and this section of it is sometimes referred to by scholars as the Sermon on the End. It concludes with the well-known description of the Second Coming and the Last Judgment:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, escorted by all the angels, then he will take his seat on the throne of glory. All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate men one from another as the shepherd separates sheep from goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left.

Pure myth. But on what grounds does Christ the King separate the sheep from the goats? Not, as you might expect, fervency of religious faith, or orthodoxy of religious doctrine, or regularity of worship, or observance of the Commandments, or indeed anything 'religious' at all.

Then the King will say to those on his right hand, 'Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.' Then the virtuous will say to him in reply, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, naked and clothe you, sick or in prison and go to see you?' And the King will answer, 'I tell you solemnly, insofar as you did this to the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.'

The virtuous seem quite surprised to be saved, or to be saved for this reason, doing good in an unselfish but pragmatic and essentially this-worldly sort of way. It's as if Jesus left this essentially humanist message knowing that one day all the supernatural mythology in which it was wrapped would have to be discarded."
      Bernard caught the eye of one of the nuns, and essayed an impromptu joke: "It's almost as if someone tipped him off." The nun reddened, and dropped her eyes. [pp. 282-283]

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Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of David Lodge). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. It's more like calling the friend over to my reading chair and saying, "Come here, look over my shoulder. What do you think of this?"

Magical Thinking

In 1990, after I came down with CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and its usually associated depression, I started seeing a psychotherapist. My "Youie Summer" of 1989 was then still recent and powerful in my psyche, so naturally I told him about it: the marvelous coincidences I had experienced, the wondrous signs I had seen. How taken aback I was when he characterized my experiences as "magical thinking." It had never occurred to me that that was a psychiatric term:

A conviction that thinking equates with doing. Occurs in dreams in children, in primitive peoples, and in patients under a variety of conditions. Characterized by lack of realistic relationship between cause and effect.^*

Of course, now that I've suggested that much of our thinking about God amounts to magical thinking, I'm wondering if it really is. And I'm wondering in what sense much of the thinking we humans engage in every day as we try to stay afloat might also be "magical thinking" in the psychiatric sense.
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* John F. Abess, M.D., his Glossary of Terms in the field of Psychiatry and Neurology. Note to myself: read The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion.

Babel

No, this isn't about Alejandro González Iñárritu's 2006 film. I haven't even seen it yet, but it's on my list.

Rather, this is à propos the one thing Freud knew for certain, which got me to thinking eight days ago about the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis, Chapter 11). I know that the surface story told there is that God "confused the people's language" and "scattered them abroad over the face of the earth." But whoever wrote the story was more likely promoting a myth to explain why there were, in fact, so many different languages.

What struck me about the myth of the Tower of Babel is that it could be a symbol not only for man's tendency to believe what he wishes to believe, but also for the rich mix of contrary wishes (or, in Freud's words, "judgments of value") that there in fact are on the face of the earth.

The very multiplicity of languages seems to reflect this diversity of values. In terms of the major religions (and speaking roughly, as a blogger does in his blabble, or blog babble), Hebrew is the language of Judaism, Greek and Latin (and the descending European languages) of Christianity, and Arabic of Islam—each intent on believing what it wishes to believe. The Christian believes Jesus was the Χριστός (the Messiah). The Jew believes he was no Christ. The Muslim believes that Jesus, far from even being the Son of God, was neither divine nor a Messiah but just another Messenger (and not even the last one, which honor is the Prophet Muhammad's).

And yet...and yet. "The world's just mad enough to have been made"...by a Creator who did, in some sense, scatter a diversity of wishes-to-believe and values over the face of the earth. Maybe the diversity is even something to celebrate rather than to try to homogenize for the sake of globalization, or spreading democracy, or enforcing religious fundamentalism—to celebrate, but to celebrate while continuing to look for overarching common wishes and values encompassing our diverging ones and enabling us, as a wise young woman put it to me, to "agree [amicably] to disagree."

Celebration may be an individual's choice and prerogative, but societies and cultures seem indisposed to celebrate. They seem to be swept up in the inertia of those global forces that threaten to engulf and destroy us.