N.T. Wright on Charles Darwin
Theologian N.T. Wright thinks about Charles Darwin in the light of Lucretius, Epicurianism, and 18th century Deism:
Sarah Palin’s Orwellian Mind: She Can’t Call Things What They Are, and Words Can Shift Their Meaning Whenever They Are Useful to Her
Gail Collins caught these two Sarah Palin resignation speech Orwellisms this week:
“It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time … to BUILD UP.”
Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.
And:
“Life is about choices!” declared the nation’s most anti-choice politician.
For an Orwellism that I noticed in Palin’s speech, see here.
Henry Fairlie on the Iffy Desirability of Being an American Consumer
Back in the 1980s, Henry Fairlie wrote in the New Republic something that I think speaks to our own era as we go through a recession and Americans seem to be tightening their belts and trying to pay down (rather than run up) their credit cards:
If TNR were to choose a Man or Woman of the Year for its cover, my nomination for 1988 would be the five nuns of the Discalced Carmelites of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel in Morris Township, New Jersey, who this fall barricaded themselves in their monastery in protest against the introduction of modern comforts to their cloistered life. The worldly distractions against which they revolted, all introduced by Mother Teresa Hewitt since she took over the monastery a year ago, include “television, newspapers, radio, snacks, and a high-tech lighting system in the chapel,” according to the Catholic journal Crisis. These nuns are the sanest people of whom I have read all year, joyful models for us in this season of universal gorging and gouging. They are simply saying that they do not wish to clutter their lives. I never stroll through a shopping mall without observing that the display of goods includes almost none of the necessities of life. Shoes, we may think, are necessary; but then, of course, the Discalced Carmelites go unshod. The gross national product in America now feeds a gross national appetite for the conspicuous consumption of vanities. The “curse of plenty” against which Churchill warned is now a disease and daily distraction. The nuns are speaking to us. Perhaps it is the society as a whole that needs to take a vow of poverty.
No need of even shoes, huh?
The New Republic, in association with Yale University Press, just put out an anthology of Fairlie’s essays. Fairlie is long gone, but when he was alive his essays were always vigorous and cunning. If you were a New Republic subscriber in the 1980s (as I was), Fairlie was a compulsive read (someone you looked forward to and turned to first). You can have a look at his book here. (Yes, I perceive the irony of sending you over to a consumer site—Amazon—to have a look at the book of a person I just quoted as advocating anti-consumer behavior. But Fairlie would have also cast a suspicious and ironic eye on the Internet as a nervy distraction from a deeper life, and here we are.)
Interesting
The transcript of a 1948 debate between Frederick C. Copleston and Bertrand Russell on the existence of God here.
Quote for a Sunday
Physicist Paul Davies on the perplexities of the life and consciousness friendly universe and its origin:
The problem with saying God did it is that God himself or herself is unexplained, so you’re appealing to an unexplained designer. It doesn’t actually explain anything; it just shoves the problem off. But to say that the laws of physics just happen to permit life is no explanation either.
The Matter Delusion?
It occurs to me that somebody could write a scathing book titled, The Matter Delusion, mocking the irrationality and faith-based nature of those who believe that matter has just always existed or that matter popped literally out of nothing at the “beginning.”
These two beliefs are as bizarre, when you think about it, as anything that, say, Scientologists or fundamentalist Christians or Muslims believe. And yet millions of people have based their lives on the assumption that one of these two things, however mind-boggling, is probably somehow true.
I’m one of them. But people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. We are, all of us, guilty—atheists as well as theists—of spectacular gestures of cognitive dissonance.
We live in a riddle wrapped in an enigma. And we frequently put it out of mind. Thus perhaps the best that we can do is to tolerate—and even have some empathy for—our competing absurd assumptions about how the world “really” is.
Who, afterall, knows?
A little doubt all around might suit us better.
I like this quote from Robert Anton Wilson:
“Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.”
“In three days, live!”: A Book Review of Israel Knohl’s “Messiahs and Resurrection in ‘The Gabriel Revelation’” (Continuum 2009)
Israel Knohl’s book, Messiahs and Resurrection in The Gabriel Revelation, is an important event for students of Christian origins, for it is the first book-length treatment, by a prominent biblical scholar, of an unusually important archaeological artifact: A recently discovered and described text, written upon a stone from the Dead Sea area, and dubbed by scholars “The Gabriel Revelation.”
Because “The Gabriel Revelation” has been dated to a full generation prior to Jesus, and because it has a curious passage that may suggest that the angel Gabriel will command a slain messianic figure to “in three days, live”, it opens up the possibility that early Christianity’s understanding of Jewish messianism was not perhaps as “out of the blue” as once supposed.
One consequence of “The Gabriel Revelation” is that it resurrects a once apparently defunct scholarly theory known as the “Messianic Secret” (in which Jesus has a plan, known only to himself and a close circle of disciples, that he will suffer, die, and rise again on the third day). Here’s Knohl on a passage from Mark’s gospel: “‘The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.’ (Mark 9:31), might very well reflect Jesus’ original words” (87).
Barring appendices and notes, Knohl’s text is less than 100 pages long and is very clearly and concisely written. In the first two chapters, for example, Knohl translates the text of “The Gabriel Revelation” (which is only 87 lines long and fragmentary) and then literally does a line by line commentary on what we have, laying out its apocalyptic and messianic assumptions, the historical background for the statements, and the biblical allusions that the text renders. On reading Knohl’s translation and commentary, I came away from the book rather dazed, realizing that what Knohl has done is give the reader a window into the world of suffering-servant messianism and resurrection a full generation prior to Jesus’s crucifixion. It is a heady glimpse into an otherwise obscured past. As you read, you get the thrill of observing the religious outlook of an author who may literally be one of the intellectual precursors to the fully developed Christianity of a generation later. The author of “The Gabriel Revelation”, for example, clearly reads Daniel and Zechariah in ways recognizable to Christian interpreters today.
In addition to this intriguing look into a past just at the brink of evolving into full-blown Christianity, Knohl also addresses the “Antichrist” figures in the text, and draws some interesting parallels between “The Gabriel Revelation” and the Book of Revelation (particularly the eleventh chapter of Revelation, in which two messianic witnesses are slain and rise again). Knohl thinks that the Book of Revelation may have been, in places, echoing ideas from early first century pre-Christian texts like “The Gabriel Revelation.”
In short, Knohl’s book is an excellent and engaging survey of the text and implications of “The Gabriel Revelation”. Knohl is a respected biblical scholar at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his book is published by a good academic publisher (Continuum). It’s a great read for any serious student of Christian origins, and it may transform the way you understand the nature and mission of Jesus, and the evolution of early Christianity. To paraphrase and echo Charles Darwin in another context: From so humble a beginning an exotic religious form (Christianity) appears to have evolved. “The Gabriel Revelation” could be, as it were, the stone “Archaeopteryx”—a key transition—to Christianity’s flight. The author of “The Gabriel Revelation”, and the sect to which he belonged, may have made the imaginative biblical interpretive leaps concerning messianism that, by a series of unlikely contingencies, led to the global religion that we have today. Contemplating that fact alone makes Knohl’s book well worth reading.
The book at Amazon.com is here.
In Case You Missed It
Last week Keith Olbermann went after the anonymous atheist who donated $10,000 to the atheist bus ad campaign in New York, giving the anonymous donor the bronze for June 29th’s “Worst Persons in the World” segment:
Tonight’s worst persons in the world. The bronze: To the person who donated the scratch for ten thousand dollars worth of ads on the sides of buses in New York City, promoting atheism. They read, “You don’t have to believe in God to be a moral or ethical person.” The hope, from president Ken Bronstein of the group NYC Atheists, is to get people to stop hiding their non-belief — to stop hiding it. No complaint about the message — however, while Bronstein says, “We want to get atheists to come join us, to get out of the closet,” unfortunately the donor who made the ads possible is keeping his identity anonymous!
Notice that Olbermann did not attack atheism as such, but the idea that a person might hypocritically invite people into a movement for which he (or she) is obviously ashamed to have his (or her) name associated with. I think that is a fair critique. If you want others to get on the atheist bus, the least that you can do is not wear a paper bag over your head as you wave and shout atheist slogans from your atheist bus window. It’s hardly a profile in courage.
The same goes for those wealthy individuals who were outraged that their bigoted large-sum financial donations for Proposition 8 (the anti-gay rights bill in California) were made public. If you want to enter the political or religious arena of discourse, you should go in unmasked.
Notes from Underground
Who will speak from the insistent vantage of the ontological mystery? Against the best efforts of our contemporary advocates of scientism, positivism, and reductionism, below is a succinct explanation for why religion, poetry, Dostoevsky’s “underground man,” and Camus’s “Sisyphian hero” cannot just cede the field and go gentle into that good night:
Waiting for Coyne
Today I responded to biologist Jerry Coyne’s question, which he asked at his blog, about whether atheists should take theologians (or theological discussion) seriously.
Here’s what I wrote:
Professor Coyne:
I’m an agnostic who (from my previous posts here) obviously has some intellectual respect for the religious philosophical tradition, and so it’s not a hard question that you’ve asked.
I think that you should take seriously those theological discussions and theological thinkers that secular academic intellectuals and philosophers continue to take seriously. You should take seriously, for example, these five: Gabriel Marcel, Spinoza, Thomas A., Alvin Plantinga, and Reinhold Niebuhr. This is not because you might arrive at their identical conclusions about things, but because they might offer interesting and novel ways of thinking about issues of interest to atheists.
I’d like to challenge you, Professor Coyne, to read just one short theological/philosophical essay by Reinhold Niebuhr and then to comment on it here at your blog. It is the lead essay in an anthology of his writings that you can get at Amazon. The book is titled “The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr.” The essay is titled, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Religious Faith.” Whether you agree or disagree with Niebuhr’s conclusions in that essay, I’d nevertheless be curious to discover whether you find the way that he talks about the transcendent and atheism in that essay valuable or interesting.
Will you get the book, read that essay, and comment at your blog on it? I promise that I’m not leading you into a thicket of difficulty, or anything time consuming. The essay is only about 13 pages.
Here’s a link to the book at Amazon:
—Santi
It will be interesting to see if he responds, and reads the Niebuhr essay and comments on it. If you’ve never read it, by the way, it’s pretty good. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Human vitality has two primary sources, animal impulse and confidence in the meaningfulness of human existence. The more human consciousness arises to full self-consciousness and to a complete recognition of the total forces of the universe in which it finds itself, the more it requires not only animal vitality but confidence in the meaningfulness of its world to maintain a healthy will-to-live. This confidence in the meaningfulness of life is not something which results from a sophisticated analysis of the forces and factors which surround the human enterprise. It is something which is assumed in every healthy life. It is primary religion. Men may be quite unable to define the meaning of life, and yet live by a simple trust that it has meaning. This primary religion is the basic optimism of all vital and wholesome human life.
Quote for the Week
Friedrich Nietzsche (from The Twilight of the Idols ):
What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?
Michael Jackson Pedophile Reality Check: Is It Mean to Suspect that Michael Jackson Might Have Been a Pedophile?
The short answer is no, it’s not mean or irrational.
Under normal circumstances nobody gets to do what Michael Jackson did (bring unrelated children into his bedroom overnight). No adult man gets to do that without suspicion cast upon him by other adults. It’s simply not sane to give adult males that kind of latitude with the most vulnerable among us. And for Jackson to engage in that behavior—bringing children into his bedroom overnight—and then act put-upon by the public for being suspicious that he was a pedophile is outrageous.
An analogy: Every weekend a suburban woman goes to a street corner known to be frequented by prostitutes. She gets picked up by cruising men who drive her to nearby motels. Before they return her to the same street corner, they give her money. She tells people that she never has sex with the men. Never touches them. Never blows them. Never lets them put their hands on her. She just talks to them. They simply drive around. She feels compassion for the men. They’re lonely. She tells them about Jesus. She wants to help them. She doesn’t understand why all those around her suspect she’s a whore.
Jackson engaged in equally outrageous (and suspicion generating) actions—many of them characteristic of pedophiles—and then he is shocked—shocked!—that people might suspect that he is, well, a pedophile. And the power disparity between Jackson and the children who visited his bedroom for “sleep-overs” is enormous. A wealthy man in his forties was bringing children unrelated to him into his bedroom alone overnight. A person needs to absorb the import of that before suggesting that the suspicion directed toward Jackson is unreasonable and based on animus.
Furthermore, to treat pedophile-suspicion directed toward Michael Jackson as a form of persecution is to tell people it is wrong to speak plainly about what is evident. Jackson lived his life in ways characteristic of a pedophile. It doesn’t mean that he was one. It means that there is a real probability that he was one. No adult male gets to bring unrelated children into his bedroom alone overnight without suspicion being rendered by other adults. It would be a monstrous dereliction of duty toward the children involved not to cast that suspicion. And it would be Orwellian not to speak to others plainly about it.
I understand “innocent until proven guilty.” But I sure the hell wouldn’t have had him anywhere near my children. And the children that he did bring around him were oftentimes hugely vulnerable (cancer patients; boys of poor single mothers). An adult single male obsessed with Peter Pan and decorating his bedroom with children’s toys was bringing kids into his bedroom for “sleep-overs.” That should set off five alarm predator worries in any sane parent who is not stupid or tempted by greed. And Jackson showed zero evidence of having any serious impulse control. The older I get, the less patience I have for bullshitters. Michael Jackson was, in my view, a huge bullshitter who got away with spectacular amounts of bullshit. It’s like Rush Limbaugh, G. Beck, and Jimmy Swaggart. Everyday, bullshitters look at their bank accounts and say, “How stupid people are!” This, in my view, was what Jackson was doing. He was using his fame and wealth and “mystery power” to get away with things. It’s an old game. If you dress like a glitzy version of Captain Crunch (as Chris Rock noted that Jackson did), or put on the clothing of a priest, or have money, then you can cast spells on people and get away with stuff.
Jackson was a spell-caster.
Below is a video of reporter Martin Bashir speaking of Jackson. Bashir illustrates the problem. Note Bashir’s rhetorical tone-down of what it means to be a single man bringing young boys into his bedroom for “sleep-overs,” and his logically fallacious “I never saw anything” obscurantism. His emotional solemnity is also cloying. It’s all slight of hand and euphemism. Of course he wouldn’t have seen anything. It means nothing. I have a great deal of contempt for people who use language in ways that distort, rather than clarify, an issue. It’s like using “enhanced interrogation” for “torture.” Michael Jackson was suspected of being a pedophile because he brought vulnerable children into his orbit and took them into his bedroom overnight alone. At least Bashir, as a journalist, could describe things accurately. But, of course, he doesn’t. But the rest of us should.
I can see why the embedding of this video was disabled. Its complicity is shameful. But you can still get to it directly here.
Toaster Epistemology
An interesting article about the toaster and its meaning for art, philosophy, invisible-hand capitalism, and the universe here.
The Big Picture
If you’ve ever wondered how Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have attained such large followings via their daily dishing out of “thought terminating cliches“ and oversimplifications, here’s part of the answer:
