When a belief is a tenet

Today's word of the day (at dictionary.com) is timely. No, not the word "timely," but the timely word "tenet" [TEN-it, noun], defined as "any opinion, principle, dogma, belief, or doctrine that a person holds or maintains as true."

A tenet, in the context of my previous post in which I stated that the probability value of a belief is less than 1 and more than 0, is a belief to which the believer in effect assigns a value of 1. It doesn't mean that the belief is in fact true, but only that, for the person holding the belief as a tenet, it is true. He acts as though it is true.

He might even become fanatical about it, although that is not necessary. I think it is possible, for example, for a person to hold as a tenet that Jesus was the Son of God, died for our sins, and rose again (a timely observation, given that we're now only two days away from Good Friday), and yet believe that the Prophet Muhammad was, as Muslims believe, a Messenger of God. Believe it, that is, in a fifty-fifty way of noncommitality that doesn't lead the person to throw himself down in prayer toward Mecca whenever the Muslims do.

Or vice versa: That a tenet-holding Muslim (and I'm getting the impression from my reading that Muslims as a group tend to be a good deal more "tenet-holding" than Christians as a group) could "believe fifty-fifty" that Jesus was the Son of God, etc.

Hmm, well, maybe not....

The Official Line

Maureen Dowd's op-ed piece in today's New York Times ("Goodness Gracious! The Truth!"), she writes (about Secretary of Defense nominee Robert Gates's Senate hearing):

After lunch the nominee clarified his remarks, saying he had not meant to criticize the troops, that the reversals in Iraq were not their fault. They don’t lose battles in Iraq because there are no battles. There’s just a counterinsurgency that they can’t see and that they weren’t prepared or equipped to fight.

My friend Keith S (who emphasizes the phrase in italics) comments:

[Gates's remark is] pure administration bull. Everyone but the twig and his neocon twigistas knew a counterinsurgency was coming. The generals saw it, so did the troops. The twig wouldn't provide the personnel, materiel, or training that our troops needed because it would make it look like "mission ain't accomplished." It would also require raising taxes on his wealthy cronies. So, our troops, our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our moms and dads, our aunts and uncles, our nieces and nephews, as well as the kid next door, are stuck in a horrible situation where the best euphemism for them is "target."

I myself am struck, in reading Colm Tóibín's novel about Henry James (The Master), how Henry James Sr. and Mrs. James didn't approve of their son Bob's cynical letters from his encampments during the U.S. Civil War. His mother wouldn't even open some of his letters after he became critical of the generals' poor planning, which ended up, Bob thought, in many needless deaths. Or she would open them, but regard only the "positive" remarks here and there, ignoring everything else. The James parents wanted to believe in their family's glorious participation in a glorious national endeavor. Mr. James chose to see the maiming of his son Wilkie as having the positive outcome of uniting the family and, no doubt, causing Wilkie to live a more uplifting moral life (should he survive his injuries and the woeful state of nineteenth century medical treatment for infection).

Alice James on meeting family members after death

Alice James was the invalid sister of the American philosopher William James and the "Anglo-American" writer Henry James. Apropos my post on the belief that we might be reunited with our relatives in the sweet by and by, Alice is represented in Colm Tóibín's novel about Henry, The Master, as having reservations about such a reunion:

[Henry] remembered a scene when Alice must have been sixteen. It was one of those long dinners with one or two guests, he remembered, and someone was talking about life after death, and meeting members of their family after death, or hoping to, or believing they might. Then one of the guests, or Aunt Kate, had suggested praying to meet the loved ones in the next life, when suddenly Alice's voice rose above all the others and everyone stopped and looked at her.

"One need pray for nothing," she said. "Reference to those whom we should meet again makes me shiver. It is an invasion of their sanctity. it is the sort of personal claim to which I am deeply opposed." [p. 49, Scribner edition, 2004]

A dogmatic believer's lament

One day we will meet and ride on a bike,
Eat at the same table, and take a long hike—
    My relatives and I,
    In the sweet by-and-by—
Even those I met once and didn't much like.

"A benefit of being born into a family," someone has said, "is that you get a chance to meet people you'd otherwise never have chosen to associate with."

That may be a bit cynical, but most of us do have some one or more relatives we don't like or at least don't care to see. And some traumatically abused people have good reason to abhor their parents and would rather not have been born, or at least not to those particular parents. But while many of us might not have chosen our parents, we nevertheless love them and basically have no regrets about having been born to them.

Yet we do have one or a few relatives we would never have chosen to associate with. Would we be comfortable believing, as some people dogmatically do, that we'll be reunited with them "in heaven"?

No End in Sight

Religious war burns on and beleaguers
Iraq's Sunni and Shiite besiegers,
    But it brings no relief
    From dogmatic belief
But for stone-dead dogmatic believers.

It's the economy, stupid?

There is a class of Christian businessman
Whose myth that Mary was God's courtesan
    They're yearly given to exploit,
    And even though they're maladroit,
They do it now again because they can.

It's more than a month before December 25, but the question, "Why Keep Christ in Christmas?" is being asked already by a paying advertiser in our local newspaper¹. I suppose, if the question weren't the title of a full-page ad, but were appearing on the comics page, one might retort something like, "But without 'Christ,' 'Christmas' would be more [Spanish 'mas']."

But it's an ad, and the page goes on:

Why is the Greeting
"Merry Christmas"
so important to the Christian
buying public at Christmas Time?

(Ah, the buying public!)

Because WE CAN NEVER forget
THE PERSON, THE MESSAGE,
and THE MISSION of
-JESUS CHRIST-
"THE SAVIOR OF THE WORLD"
"And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name
JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins."

-Matthew 1:21

From "the buying public's" sin of putting too much on their credit cards during shopping sprees? Was Christ's mission, then, to improve "the buying public's" finances?

Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason (1794), wrote that

It is not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born at a time when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing, at that time, to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion.

Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or Mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it.

...It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology...The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue...

Aha, revenue!

MANY OF YOU CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS BY PURCHASING
GIFTS TO GIVE TO OTHERS. PLEASE PATRONIZE
BUSINESSES THAT INCLUDE THE GREETING
"MERRY CHRISTMAS"

---

Without CHRIST
there would be no
CHRISTmas.

Tom Paine's final clause, following a semicolon;

...and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious² fraud.

And remains,

Too, perhaps, to ridicule with limericks,
To prick in verse with pointed rhymer's tricks,
    And, by means of jokes
    And of jibes and pokes,
To sting sharply with mocking laughter kicks?

_________________

1. The paid advertising was

   Sponsored By: Upper Room Church of God in Christ • Superintendent Patrick L. Wooden, Sr., Pastor • www.plwooden.org • Called2action.org
   96% of American consumers celebrate Christmas and 5% celebrate Hanukkah, & 2% celebrate Kwanzaa
   (FoxNews.com "Majority OK With Public Nativity Scenes" by Dana Blanton, June 18, 2004)

   "FoxNews"? Didn't you just know that the Busheviks' propaganda organ might be involved in this somehow?
    
2. "Amphibious"? I suppose Paine must have had in mind the word's sense of "combining two characteristics," not necessarily "able to live both on land and in water," but the myth that Jesus was "both god and man."