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| I took this photo in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris on April 27, 2016 |
God [if God exists] can communicate with us any damn way God pleases [that is, through the Bible, the Quran..., the angelic kindness of a stranger...]
By Moristotle.jpg)
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.
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.
Proposition 2 would ban factory farms from raising chickens, calves or hogs in small pens or cages.Kristof tells a poignant story of the Chinese white geese:
Livestock rights are already enshrined in the law in Florida, Arizona, Colorado and here in Oregon, but California’s referendum would go further and would be a major gain for the animal rights movement. And it’s part of a broader trend. Burger King announced last year that it would give preference to suppliers that treat animals better, and when a hamburger empire expostulates tenderly about the living conditions of cattle, you know public attitudes are changing.
Harvard Law School now offers a course on animal rights. Spain’s Parliament has taken a first step in granting rights to apes, and Austrian activists are campaigning to have a chimpanzee declared a person. Among philosophers, a sophisticated literature of animals rights has emerged.
Once a month or so, we would slaughter the geese. When I was 10 years old, my job was to lock the geese in the barn and then rush and grab one. Then I would take it out and hold it by its wings on the chopping block while my Dad or someone else swung the ax.Humans are not such special animals relative to others as most people seem to think. Ironically, many of them are abetted in the belief by one or another of their "holy books." Of course, if geese had written the Bible, "God" might be a super goose and geese the very most special of animals....
The 150 geese knew that something dreadful was happening and would cower in a far corner of the barn, and run away in terror as I approached. Then I would grab one and carry it away as it screeched and struggled in my arms.
Very often, one goose would bravely step away from the panicked flock and walk tremulously toward me. It would be the mate of the one I had caught, male or female, and it would step right up to me, protesting pitifully. It would be frightened out of its wits, but still determined to stand with and comfort its lover.
I have talked approvingly of what I understood to be Kierkegaard's view, on the question of belief in God, that it was nobler (as well as truer) to hang with one hand from one ledge of the narrow chasm of religious belief and with the other hand from the opposite ledge than to transfer either hand to join the other on the same ledge. Hanging precariously from both ledges symbolized doubt. Kierkegaard thought doubt nobler because it consigned the doubter to the perpetual angst of his uncertainty whether to believe or not to believe, since, as a matter of truth, the person could not be objectively sure which belief was right.When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. [The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, 13:11]I do have at least one remaining question. It has to do with the distinction between religion and spirituality. As a noble doubter, I felt that I could "be spiritual" even though I found it ridiculous to try to "be religious." The question is: Now that I've opted for being all out when it comes to religion, is spirituality still an option for me, and what does that mean?
Many years after C. S. Lewis had gone to his reward, a very serious young man named Barton Ehrman began to examine his own fundamentalist assumptions. He had attended the two most eminent Christian fundamentalist academies in the United States1, and was considered by the faithful to be among their champions. Fluent in Greek and Hebrew (he is now holder of a chair in religious studies [in Chapel Hill]), he eventually could not quite reconcile his faith with his scholarship. He was astonished to find that some of the best-known Jesus stories were scribbled into the canon long after the fact, and that this was true of perhaps the best-known of them all.____________________
This story is the celebrated one about the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3-11). Who has not heard or read of how the Jewish Pharisees, skilled in casuistry, dragged this poor woman before Jesus and demanded to know if he agreed with the Mosaic punishment of stoning her to death? If he did not, he violated the law. If he did, he made nonsense of his own preachings. One easily pictures the squalid zeal with which they pounced upon the woman. And the calm reply...—"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"—has entered our literature and our consciousness.
...Long before I read Ehrman2, I had some questions of my own. If the New Testament is supposed to vindicate Moses, why are the gruesome laws of the Pentateuch to be undermined? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the killing of witches may seem brutish and stupid, but if only non-sinners have the right to punish, then how could an imperfect society ever determine how to prosecute offenders? We should all be hypocrites. And what authority did Jesus have to "forgive"? Presumably, at least one wife or husband somewhere in the city felt cheated and outraged. Is Christianity, then, sheer sexual permissiveness? If so, it has been gravely misunderstood ever since...Furthermore, the story says that after the Pharisees and the crowd had melted away (presumably from embarrassment), nobody was left except Jesus and the woman. In that case, who is the narrator of what he said to her? For all that, I thought it a fine enough story.
Professor Ehrman goes further. He asks some more obvious questions. If the woman was "taken in adultery," which means in flagrante delicto, then where is her male partner? Mosaic law, adumbrated in Leviticus, makes it clear that both must undergo the stoning. I suddenly realized that the core of the story's charm is that of the shivering lonely girl, hissed at and dragged away by a crowd of sex-starved fanatics, and finally encountering a friendly face....
Overarching all this is the shocking fact that, as Ehrman concedes:The story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable; this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.I have again [after selecting C. S. Lewis] selected my source on the basis of "evidence against interest"; in other words from someone whose original scholarly and intellectual journey was not at all intended to challenge holy writ. The case for biblical consistency or authenticity or "inspiration" has been in tatters for some time, and the rents and tears only become more obvious with better research, and thus no "revelation" can be derived from that quarter. So, then, let the advocates and partisans of religion rely on faith alone, and let them be brave enough to admit that this is what they are doing.
As I was publishing Tuesday's post, I felt vaguely uncomfortable that the photographs I was including were not of Monet's (or any other human being's) art, but of "Nature's art." I remembered that when I looked out a window in one of the galleries and spied the pond, I felt more drawn to it than to any of the man-made objects inside. And I supposed that individuals all over the world, of whatever religion (or irreligion) probably respond more reliably to the beauty of a lily pond than they do to any man-made work of art. Respond to Nature, that is.
But do they? Like everything else, Nature leaves it to each of us how to interpret it, how to respond. A friend of mine seems to interpret Nature as obvious proof positive of the existence and benevolence of God (notwithstanding all of the suffering and destruction embodied in Nature's food chain, which she seems to forgive as a mysterious manifestation of the overarching understanding and provision of The Creator, etc.). Others of her faith, equally religious in their own way, interpret Nature as something grand to blow up (if it's in the enemy's territory or has situated within it the appropriate people to be blown up along with the site).
Christians too—and members of all other faiths of course—can respond as my friend does. But certain Christian businessmen (who may be fine Christians on Sunday morning) are more like those other members of my friend's faith the rest of the week...out there slowly blowing up Nature and making people sick or dead by subduing and polluting the planet's hills and streams and water tables and oceans with their smokestack gases and drainpipe effluents.
Some atheists (perhaps scientists in particular) get a thrill from observing and contemplating the grandeur of Nature itself—they may even feel that they're in the presence of some sort of transcendence. Other scientists are more workaday—blinkered technocrats working for corporations whose short-term financial interests they serve for pay. For them there's nothing transcendent about Nature at all, it's just a commodity.
What I'm thinking now, alas, is that there's probably nothing whatsoever that evokes the same response in everyone—not even the concept God. Maybe especially not the concept of God, being man-made as it is. A world religion seems to be utterly impossible. It's the Tower of Babel all over, or continuously. Suppose for a moment that God exists and that God could (and on a particular occasion would) speak to every individual on the planet. Do you think that everyone would hear Her? Or do you think that everyone who did hear Her would recognize that it was God? The Episcopal pastor in Peggy Payne's 1988 novel Revelation wasn't sure that that voice he heard in his backyard was God's or not, and his congregation was quite sure it wasn't.
Nor does a world irreligion (a sort of Sam Harris utopia) seem possible. Science (as a rational, intellectual inquiry) reports its findings continually and is, theoretically, available to everyone. But even if literally everyone did hear the reports, many wouldn't recognize what they were reporting, wouldn't understand them, would find them boring, or, more likely, would reject them out of hand and insist on...Creationism or some other improbable fantasy. They'd continue to imagine in their magical way that there's a Spiritual Something out there performing miracles despite—and in defiance of—the Laws of Nature.
Maybe this egalitarian response is as good a proof as we can get that God does exist, for maybe God is like James Joyce, who said that he took credit for all the interpretations by every Ulysses scholar in the world, whether or not any of them had occurred to him personally.*
Or maybe not. Maybe the egalitarian response is as good a proof as we can get that God doesn't exist. That it's every man and woman for himerself.
...[W]e aren't even sure what the Homeric poems are; something more than bronze-age entertainments, surely? Our efforts to assure ourselves that we know what we're valuing have constituted much of the history of our thought. At one time the Iliad and Odyssey were esteemed as a comprehensive curriculum in grammar, rhetoric, history, geography, navigation, strategy, even medicine. But by the mid-nineteenth century A.D. they no longer seemed to contain real information of any kind at all. Had there ever been a Trojan War? Scholars inclined to think not. much as connoisseurs of the West's other main book were doubting that there had been a Garden of Eden with an apple tree, or that planks of an Ark might have rotted atop Mount Ararat. Both books got rescued by identical stratagems; the Bible was turned into Literature, and so was Homer. That entailed redefining Literature, as something that's good for us however unfactual. That in turn meant Nobility, and also Style. It also required Longinus to supplant Aristotle as the prince of ancient critics, and Matthew Arnold to become the Longinus of Christian England. He said that Homer was rapid and plain and noble: by Longinian standards, Sublime*. Those were the qualities a translator should reach for, in part to sweep us past mere awkward nonfact. The Bible in the same way was edifying if you knew how to go about not believing it. [italics mine] [p. 13]Finding the concluding sentence seemed to me to be the same sort of discovery as the little scrap of paper marking my "definitive stop" quotation from Changing Places, a sign "designedly dropped," as Whitman wrote, a sign that despite my skepticism about books of revelation, there are revelations. Or is that but my wish-to-believe...or my overactive imagination?
Longinus, the name bestowed by a scribe's error on the author of the Greek critical treatise Περὶ ὕψους (On the Sublime) written probably in the 1st cent. AD. It locates the sources of poetic excellence in the profundity of the writer's emotions and the seriousness of his thought....
"You see before you," he began, "a man who once believed in the possibility of intepretation. That is, I thought that the goal of reading was to establish the meaning of texts. I used to be a Jane Austen man. I think I can say in all modesty that I was the Jane Austen man. I wrote five books on Jane Austen, the aim of which was trying to establish what her novels meant—and, naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant before. Then I began a commentary on the works of Jane Austen, the aim of which was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle—historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it. So that when each commentary was written, there would be nothing further to say about the novel in question.I wrote in my post "Definitive Stop" on May 24, after quoting the corresponding passage in Changing Places: "Wouldn't it be nice if someone would write such a definitive series on religion?"
"Of course, I never finished it. The project was not so much Utopian as self-defeating. By that I don't just mean that if successful it would have eventually put us all out of business. I mean that it couldn't succeed because it isn't possible, and it isn't possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is constantly being transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed.
"To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. But every decoding is another encoding, If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own words, that is, different words from the ones you used, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt whether I have really understood you. But if I use my words it follows that I have changed your meaning, however slightly; and even if I were, deviantly, to indicate my comprehension by repeating back to you your own unaltered words, that is no guarantee that I have duplicated your meaning in my head, because I bring a different experience of language, literature, and non-verbal reality to those words, therefore they mean something different to me from what they mean to you. And if you think I have not understood the meaning of your message, you do not simply repeat it in the same words, you try to explain it in different words, different from the ones you used originally; but then the it is no longer the it that you started with...." [pp. 24-25]
"Tell me, O Muhammad...how did it happen that thou hast come to live among the Arabs? And how didst thou come to embrace Islam?"As I continue my reading of Thomas Cleary's English translation of the Qur'an, I am trying to remain sufficiently open-minded to recognize, if possible, whether I too discover anything that "I have always known without knowing it."
"I will tell thee how it happened," interposes Zayd. "First he fell in love with the Arabs, and then with their faith. Isn't it true, O my uncle?" [Though Zayd is a few years older than Asad, he calls him uncle out of respect.]
"What Zayd says is true, O Mansur. Many years ago [it was actually well fewer than ten], when I first came to Arab lands, I was attracted by the way you people lived. And when I began to ask myself what you thought and what you believed in, I came to know about Islam."
"And didst though, O Muhammad, find all at once that Islam was the True Word of God?"
"Well, no, this did not come about so quickly. For one thing, I did not then believe that God had ever spoken directly to man, or that the books which men claimed to be His word were anything but the works of wise men..."
Mansur stares at me with utter incredulity: "How could that be, O Muhammad? Didst thou not even believe in the Scriptures which Moses brought, or the Gospel of Jesus? But I have always thought that the people of the West believe at least in them?"
"Some do, O Mansur, and others do not. I was one of those others..."
And I explain to him that many people in the West have long ceased to regard the Scriptures—their own as well as those of others—as true Revelations of God, but see in them rather the history of man's religious aspirations as they have evolved over the ages.
"But this view of mine was shaken as soon as I came to know something of Islam," I add. "I came to know about it when I found that the Muslims lived in a way quite different from what the Europeans thought should be man's way; and every time I learned something more about the teachings of Islam, I seemed to discover something that I had always known without knowing it..."
God [if God exists] can communicate with us any damn way God pleases [that is, through the Bible, the Quran..., the angelic kindness of a stranger...]This morning as I was about to enter the allergy clinic for my bimonthly antigen injection, a vibrant, dark-skinned young nurse called out to me from down the hall, "Hi! What's your name?"
I don't understand agnosticism, because it seems so uncommitted to anything.I must have read that not long after you submitted it, for at 10:01 I commented back to you:
And then how would you derive meaning to our existence? What's the point? Is there a point? Are we just a comical abberation of a universe gone wild?
I am really interested in the thought process, because as I have struggled in determining whether Islam is "the" path (and now I am settling for its [being] "a" path), I never questioned the existence of God...it just seems like everything would be too mundane for such a beautiful world.
I'[ll think] on these things...But know that I can't tell you when my muse is likely to strike with something like insight. She comes in her own time, but always faithfully responsive to my sincere desire for answers.Well, within about one hour my muse was already starting to whisper to me, urgently, while I was driving home after doing an errand. Already, while driving out of my yard to go do the errand, I had been thinking that if an agnostic is not committed to anything, then the term hardly seems to apply to me. I feel committed. I am passionate about responding impeccably to life, to "the human condition." I have never been a couch potato, a spectator, a blindly following dogmatist. I have tried to engage life, to have passed this way not in vain.
Free thinkers, free from received opinions about faith and science, pre-fabricated thought structures, and, perhaps most of all, other people's revelations, unless they accord with my own experience and the light of my own reason. Descartes tried to practice methodical doubt. In my own way, I have lately been trying to practice constructive skepticism.[Added on Monday: More whisperings followed, with some guidance on what God is.]
Maybe I'm not agnostic as to whether God is or is not, but rather as to what God is (beyond the I AM THAT I AM). For I do believe in...Something. Maybe it's just that I'm unwilling to say I know what it is (because I don't think I do).
There is a class of Christian businessmanIt'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']."
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.
Why is the Greeting(Ah, the buying public!)
"Merry Christmas"
so important to the Christian
buying public at Christmas Time?
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 1:21From "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?
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.Aha, revenue!
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...
MANY OF YOU CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS BY PURCHASINGTom Paine's final clause, following a semicolon;
GIFTS TO GIVE TO OTHERS. PLEASE PATRONIZE
BUSINESSES THAT INCLUDE THE GREETING
"MERRY CHRISTMAS"
Without CHRIST
there would be no
CHRISTmas.
...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?
Sponsored By: Upper Room Church of God in Christ • Superintendent Patrick L. Wooden, Sr., Pastor • www.plwooden.org • Called2action.org"FoxNews"? Didn't you just know that the Busheviks' propaganda organ might be involved in this somehow?
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)
...Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.In the October 29 footnote, I had written:
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication1, if He pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
...I don't count the existence of holy books as evidence that God is. They're just hearsay evidence that someone else may have had such a feeling [as I described in my post2]....I remember that I felt pretty good about labeling the Bible, the Koran, and other works purporting to be the Inspired Word of God as "hearsay." I even thought I was probably being original!
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication—after this it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him. When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernational intervention.3____________________
...A thing which everybody is required to believe requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act [the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ] was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part [Jesus's immaculate conception], the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the resurrection, and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.
