Prometheus Unbound

We’re about to find out because, at his website, he has announced that he will drop his pseudonym, and reveal his true name, on Thursday, November 19, 2009. The rather well know biblical scholar, James Tabor, says of Servetus the Evangelical:

There is a bit of buzz on the Internet these days, among Christian evangelical circles, regarding a modern writer who calls himself “Servetus the Evangelical,” who has penned a new book titled The Restitution of Jesus Christ. The author, who has chosen to remain anonymous, is apparently a well-known Evangelical Christian.

Servetus the Evangelical is a non-trinitarian. In other words, he is a strict monotheist who believes that there is only one God. That means that he does not believe that Jesus was (or is) God, but only the Son of God. Servetus the Evangelical takes his pseudonym from Michael Servetus, the 16th century anti-trinitarian who was burned at the stake for heresy by John Calvin and the city fathers of Geneva on October 27, 1553.

I listened to a bit of an interview with Servetus the Evangelical, and although his voice is masked, I thought it had cadences akin to Notre Dame philosopher, Alvin Plantinga’s. Wouldn’t that be a bombshell for Alvin Plantinga, who has long professed to be a Reformed Calvinist, to declare a change of mind about what the New Testament teaches with regard to the Trinity?

Anyway, we’ll find out who this fellow is on Thursday. Here’s an image of Michael Servetus:

Oh, and here’s what James Tabor says about Servetus the Evangelical’s book:

I obtained a copy of the book and I have to say I am much impressed. It runs 600 pages, is thoroughly researched and documented, and fully in touch with the massive amount of scholarly discussion currently available on the “Christology of the New Testament.”

This past summer Arizona Reverend Steven Anderson was spreading the love. This from AP:

In his August 16th sermon, Anderson quoted Old Testament passages about the kind of people that God hates, and said they apply to President Obama. Anderson told his congregation that he doesn’t advocate taking up arms, but he does pray that Obama will die for the good of the nation.

My guess is that the media attention doubled attendance at his church. Oh, and he doesn’t like Jews either:

And here he is ranting against President Obama:

In the 19th century Charles Darwin had a bulldog (T.H. Huxley), but in the 16th century Jesus had a bulldog too. And this bulldog didn’t just bite rhetorically. His name was John Calvin, and under the right circumstances he had no compunction about literally taking your head off. Here’s what John Calvin said about himself:

A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.

And Calvin spoke of hell and damnation with a matter-of-factness that chills the blood (at least it does mine):

God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.

2009 marks the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. Some are marking his birth in celebratory terms. Frankly, this baffles me. Could somebody please explain what he said or did that makes him someone worthy to look up to, or model oneself after, in the 21st century?

In any case, during his own era Calvin didn’t like Copernicus. I wonder what he would have made of Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin’s bulldog, T.H. Huxley. An encounter between John Calvin and Charles Darwin (or one of Charles Darwin’s supporters) might not have made a pretty picture, as this video by a conservative Christian group clearly intuits:

I think it is interesting, in this video, that Darwin is positioned, as it were, as the “other”—the crasher of a patriotic party—and as someone who, in a sense, haunts the psychological ring of the conservative psyche. Darwin must be violently knocked out of the center ring by a more powerful historical figure, a man who insisted on sola scriptura, John Calvin, God’s bulldog.

John Calvin was born 500 years ago, in 1509, but I have a hard time understanding what, exactly, we should celebrate about it, or how to celebrate it. John Calvin, afterall, looked askance at merriment, drinking, and dancing, so what exactly do you do to celebrate John Calvin’s birthday? In terms of what to celebrate, I know that John Calvin put quite a spin on the theological world, and I find some of his ideas interesting. I also know that Emile Durkheim used to attribute the evolution of capitalism to Calvinism, but really now! What does one celebrate about John Calvin in the 21st century? A Reader at Trinity Church, Norwich, said this about the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth:

Somewhat to my regret, I’ve made rather more this year of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth than I have of the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’ s birth.

What’s to regret about it? I don’t get it. Some help here? Wasn’t, for example, John Calvin’s Geneva a theocracy? What can be learned from such a social model in the 21st century (except to avoid it)? And Calvin was so retrogressive, even in his own time, that he didn’t even accept Copernicus’s science! I mean, aside from his theology (which you either believe, or you don’t), does Calvin really have anything to teach our global civilization, half a millenium later?

What exactly?

Below is a 16th century image of Calvin’s zealous followers trashing a Catholic cathedral. Do we celebrate John Calvin by simply looking the other way with regards to his actual practice of religion in 16th century Geneva? What does it mean to celebrate a theocrat and iconoclast who had no compunction about cutting off the heads of heretics and murdering “witches”? Maybe I’m missing something simply wonderful about John Calvin, but if so, what is it?

After Disneyland, the happiest place on Earth? Here’s the historian Will Durant, from his book The Reformation (1957, pp. 473-474), on what John Calvin’s Geneva was like in the 16th century:

Calvin himself, austere and severe, dreamed of a community so well regulated that its virtue would prove his theology, and would shame the Catholicism that had produced or tolerated the luxury and laxity of Rome. Discipline should be the backbone of personality, enabling it to rise out of the baseness of human nature to the erect stature of the self-conquered man. The clergy must lead by example as well as by precept; they may marry and beget, but they must abstain from hunting, gambling, feasting, commerce, and secular amusements, and accept annual visitation and moral scrutiny by their ecclesiastical superiors. To regulate lay conduct a system of domiciliary visits was established: one or another of the elders visited, yearly, each house in the quarter assigned to him, and questioned the occupants on all phases of their lives. Consistory and Council joined in the prohibition of gambling, card-playing, profanity, drunkenness, the frequenting of taverns, dancing (which was then enhanced by kisses and embraces), indecent or irreligious songs, excess in entertainment, extravagance in living, immodesty in dress. The allowable color and quantity of clothing, and the number of dishes permissable at a meal, were specified by law. Jewelry and lace were frowned upon. A woman was jailed for arranging her hair to an immoral height. Theatrical performances were limited to religious plays, and then these too were forbidden. Children were to be named not after saints in the Catholic calendar but preferably after Old Testament characters; an obstinate father served four days in prison for insisting on naming his son Claude instead of Abraham. Censorship of the press was taken over from Catholic and secular precedents, and enlarged (1560): books of erroneous religious doctrine, or of immoral tendency, were banned; Montaigne’s Essays  and Rousseau’s Emile  were later to fall under this proscription. To speak disrespectfully of Calvin or the clergy was a crime. A first violation of these ordinances was punished with a reprimand, further violation with fines, persistent violation with imprisonment or banishment. Fornication was to be punished with exile or drowning; adultery, blasphemy, or idolatry, with death. In one extraordinary instance a child was beheaded for striking its parents. In the years 1558-59 there were 414 prosecutions for moral offenses; between 1542 and 1564 there were seventy-six banishments and fifty-eight executions; the total population of Geneva was then about 20,000. As everywhere in the sixteenth century, torture was often used to obtain confessions or evidence.

Ah, the good old days! I’ll take Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia over John Calvin’s Geneva any day, thank you very much. But still, I bet that if you asked the average resident of Geneva at that time whether or not they were happy, my bet is that they would say: “On balance, yes.” Membership has its privileges. And there’s no fathoming the human heart and its willingness to exchange freedom for certainty and security. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor reminds us of that, as does John Calvin (and as does the Taliban).

Here’s the Taliban:

And here’s a 16th century depiction of Calvinists engaged in an iconoclastic “cleansing” of a Catholic cathedral:

I’m kind of weirded out by people who express nostalgia for John Calvin, and call themselves admirers of his. I think it a useful correction to this nostalgia to actually recall what it was like, exactly, to live in John Calvin’s Geneva in the 16th century. Here’s the historian Will Durant (from his book, The Reformation, 1957, pp. 478-479) on an incident of high religious tension in the city:

On June 27, 1547, Calvin found attached to his pulpit a placard reading:

“Gross hypocrite! You and your companions will gain little by your pains. If you do not save yourselves by flights, nobody shall prevent your overthrow, and you will curse the hour when you left your monkery. . . . After people have suffered long they avenge themselves. . . . Take care that you are not served like M. Verle [who had been killed]. . . . We will not have so many masters. . . .”

Jacques Gruet, a leading Libertin, was arrested on suspicion of having written the placard; no proof was adduced. It was claimed that he had, some days previously, uttered threats against Calvin. In his room were found papers, allegedly in his handwriting, calling Calvin a haughty and ambitious hypocrite, and ridiculing the inspiration of the Scriptures and the immortality of the soul. He was tortured twice daily for thirty days until he confessed—we do not know how truthfully—that he had affixed the placard and conspired with French agents against Calvin and Geneva. On July 26, half dead, he was tied to a stake, his feet nailed to it, and his head was cut off.

You can’t turn the other cheek if you don’t have a head, can you? In any event, this is the kind of “George Bush” Christianity that John Calvin practiced. (Oh, maybe that’s what people mean when they say that they admire John Calvin. He was like George Bush. Okay then. Never mind.)

Something that I’ve noticed about Evangelical intellectual culture is a certain nostalgic fond spot for John Calvin. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, for example, calls himself a Reformed Calvinist. But I think, before adopting John Calvin’s theology, that it might be useful to think about how, exactly, John Calvin’s beliefs played themselves out in the real world. In this regard I think it is fair to say that absolutely none of us would have wanted to live in John Calvin’s Geneva, or under John Calvin’s spiritual governance. John Calvin’s Geneva was a place where the mind of human beings was simply not free. John Calvin may have been a brilliant theologian, but his theology led him to the destruction of art, iconography, books—and, ultimately, people—both of male heretics competing with Calvin in the intellectual realm, and females who were supposedly indulging in “witchcraft.” It was, for example, routine for Calvinist city supervisors to do spot checks of people’s homes in Geneva, searching them for such things as dissenting religious books. In short, John Calvin’s world was an authoritarian world, and his religion was an authoritarian religion. Here, for example, is a 16th century depiction of iconoclastic Calvinists taking it upon themselves, in the name of Jesus (of all people!), to trash and “cleanse” a Catholic church:

Okay, Jesus cleansed a temple too, so maybe that’s not the fair contrast. But it’s hard to imagine how someone living in the 21st century could have any desire to revive John Calvin’s pre-Enlightenment ideology, or to build his or her own intellectual religious structure upon ideas that fit so comfortably with authoritarian aggression. Sometimes what people say they believe should be thought about in the light of what they actually do. It’s informative, and shouldn’t be too quickly decoupled. If, for example, it is informative to ask how the French Revolution, under the ideological direction of Robespierre, played out (as conservatives are inclined to do), it follows that it is also informative to ask how, exactly, it might have gone for a lesbian or religious dissenter trying to live and think and thrive in John Calvin’s Geneva.

If, for instance, someone were to say, with regard to Robespierre or Lenin, that—”Their ideas were good, but their practices accompanying them were flawed”—we might perhaps think that rather an odd position to take, and wonder if ideology and practice, especially in the cases of these two men, can be so easily unweaved. Likewise, I think that the same question can be fairly asked with regard to John Calvin. Those who would like to see John Calvin’s ideas and mindset find a revival in the 21st century might at least pause and ask the simple question: “How did all that go the first time around?”

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, is faith the last refuge of a failed thesis?

Or might faith be that place where you reach the end of all that you can figure and do, and, in outrage at the apparently absurd universe, you nevertheless choose hope?

If you believe in, say, the resurrection of Jesus or the historic existence of Cleopatra based on eyewitness testimony, why don’t you believe what these apparently sincere folks are saying as well? What makes some forms of eyewitness testimony more credible to you than others? Should we believe these people? Or shouldn’t we? Penn & Teller obviously have an opinion. What’s yours?

But in this clip he suggests that he is an agnostic, and rejects atheism because it “mirrors the certitude that is religion”:

Maher’s views in the clip mirror my own (straddling the confidence atheist and confidence theist divide). The clip dates to February of 2009, but in October of 2009 he accepted an award from an atheist group. Hmm. I just assumed that Maher was an atheist of the Richard Dawkins variety. Have Maher’s views shifted since this clip? Is he an atheist, or not?

If not, then we are sympatico.

Jerry Coyne, at his blog, summarized Daniel Dennett’s talk this weekend at the big atheist convention ho-down in Burbank, California this weekend (and which I went to) thus:

Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests and ministers who are atheists, and also mounted a hilarious attack on theologians like Karen Armstrong, who mouth pious nonsense like, “God is the God behind God.” Dennett calls this kind of language a “deepity”: a statement that has two meanings, one of which is true but superficial, the other which sounds profound but is meaningless. His exemplar of a deepity is the statement “Love is just a word.” True, it’s a word like “cheeseburger,” but the supposed deeper sense is wrong: love is an emotion, a feeling, a condition, and not just a word in the dictionary. He gave several examples of other deepities from academic theologians; when you see these things laid out — ripped from their texts — in a Powerpoint slide, they make you realize how truly fatuous are the lucubrations of people like Armstrong, Eagleton, and Haught. Sarcasm will be the best weapon against this stuff.

And to what Coyne said, Andrew Sullivan today offered this tart take-down:

They’re really charming, aren’t they? It is as if everything arrogant about the academy and everything sneering about cable news culture is combined into one big snarky smugfest. Maybe these atheists will indeed help push back the fundamentalist right. Maybe they will remind people that between these atheist bigots and these fundamentalist bigots, the appeal of the Christianity of the Gospels shines like the sun.

Now, now, Andrew. Love thy nay bear.

Oh, and here’s a nay bear:

And here’s two more nay bears (Jerry Coyne and Russell Blackford at the Burbank atheist conference):

And who is thy nay bear?

I’m coining the term for anybody who puts up a big bear yawn toward things of first-rank importance to you (such as your belief or disbelief in God, or UFOs, or evolution, or Buddhism, or Obama, or whatever). The nay bear is rough with the things you hold dear, and steals your metaphorical loaves and fishes from the trunks of your pampered and polished ideological cars. It’s very important to (at least once in a while) listen to your nay bears, and not push them away all the time, and defame them. We all have our nay bears, and we might be in the role of somebody else’s nay bear, and all of our nay bears are telling us something.

So love your nay bears, even if they take your shirt. Or your fish. This is my evening sermon for the soul (especially my usually narrow shrew of a soul). Good night, nay bears. Good night, soul. Good night. Yawn.

The Atheist Alliance International Annual Convention, held this year in Burbank, California (at the Marriot Hotel Convention Center next to Bob Hope Airport), happened to be not too far from where I live, and so I went. Ironically, the Marriot Convention Center was, just two weeks prior, the host to a UFO convention. (I went to that convention also. See here.)

In any case, I’ll take you on a little photo tour of the event. Here’s the Convention Center from the outside:

As you can see, it’s not a terribly large complex. The room that the conference was held in has a maximum capacity of 800 people, and the event attracted perhaps 700 people. Not bad, but no speaker (except Richard Dawkins in the evening) managed to fill the room to the gills. By comparison, the UFO conference that I attended in the same building a few weeks previous drew somewhat fewer people (perhaps 300-400). So it might be inferred that, in Los Angeles, atheist culture is a bit more popular of a draw than UFO culture (though not by much). No doubt some megachurch within a couple of miles of the Marriot Hotel pulled in more people on Sunday morning (and by orders of magnitude) than Atheist Alliance International managed to draw over a whole weekend (and that even with top-rate scientists and intellectuals speaking, and Richard Dawkins heading the bill). Of course, donut shops also vastly outnumber bookstores in Los Angeles. Nobody ever said the world was particularly just. 

I like bumper stickers, and I noticed that the parking lot was giving off a nice Southern California liberal sympatico  vibe:

And here was a car parked at the conference that had Arizona license plates (which I do not show in the photograph):

And inside were atheist vendors selling their atheist wares. The vendor below was selling a combination of atheist titles and libertarian/Ayn Rand titles. Free market libertarians make a respectable showing among atheists. You might be looked upon askance if you go to a homeopath, but not if you’re into Ludwig Von Mises. Skeptic  magazine publisher, Michael Shermer (for example), seems to also be a Reason  magazine kind of atheist guy:

No, the dude with the beret isn’t Michael Shermer. Here’s Michael Shermer (giving an interview, perhaps to a podcaster, just outside of the conference building):

The Libertarian book stall had political competition, but it was weak. The Marxist left had a little table with “Power to the people!” and “Communism is wonderful!” book titles, but it was a small set up, and off in a low trafficked back corner, and looked lonely. Ironically, it was nearly the only place where you might find nonwhites at this “international” atheist conference. By the average age, affluence, ethnic, and gender makeup of the conference (more men than women), you might well have imagined that you had stumbled upon a conference of Republican activists. I thought it was ironic that the nearly all white and affluent crowd mouthing off about the evils of religion were being catered to all weekend by a coterie of working class Hispanics who, on Sunday, would no doubt be at Catholic Mass or in attendance at one of the local Protestant megachurches. As the workers moved about the conference hall serving up salmon, beef, or vegan dishes to the comfy attendees, the workers didn’t seem to be listening (or caring to listen) all that closely to what was being said from the stage. Oh, and there were lots of “Darwin fish” around:

And here was the Skeptic  magazine vendor area. I bought several DVDs, one of which was of a debate on the Anthropic Principle that I attended a dozen or so years ago at Cal Tech (where a lot of Skeptic  events have occurred in the past):

This woman’s name is Priscilla Herochik. She’s an attorney, and she wrote a humanist positive novel, and was selling it. I bought her book:

There were also young bohemian atheists, mostly Gothic in their dress style, selling t-shirts, necklaces and bumper stickers. They were wise in where they set up their tables and racks (next to the bathrooms). Older men. Enlarged prostates. Lots of toilet runs. Ka-ching! Here were some of the bumper stickers that they sold:

And here’s the necklaces that some of them had made by hand. They were $18 dollars. You gotta make a living, right?:

Okay, so that was outside the conference hall proper. What happened when you entered the inner sanctum? Here’s what that looked like:

And as you approached the screen, it was like entering the theater of Dionysus, with all the chief priests of atheism gathered at the front and center tables closest to the stage, and sitting together in a clubby way. The best tables were reserved for VIPs. Some people had VIP on their name cards. Perhaps they made big contributions to the event. The rest of us were losers. We were not very important people. This two-tier system was at work throughout the day (or you might think of it as a three tier system if you count the virtually all Hispanic conference staff). Whatever else atheism is, it’s not a critique of hierarchy. Hierarchical religion may be bad, but hierarchical irreligion is, well, natural. Every train needs a caboose. And you gotta network, right? Here’s biologist Jerry Coyne and philosopher Russell Blackford at the center front table closest to the screen:

Sure they’re happy! They’re right up front with all the cool people. Indeed, they are the cool people. Atheism is great! Just like high school. At supper time, when all the nonwhite hotel workers were moving around vigorously, I noticed that Michael Shermer and PZ Myers were sitting together also, chuckling it up. Seeing all this front and center social bonding, I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. (Oh, so this is what the victorious revolution will look like!) And when you turn around at the charmed alpha-male center stage area, you might find yourself bumping into uber-atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, physicist Lawrence Krauss (who gave, by far, the most interesting talk of the weekend), and philosopher Daniel Dennett (I’ll avoid making any jokes about these three being one):

Krauss’s talk, by the way, was so intellectually stimulating (he talked about the multiverse hypothesis and the expansion of the universe, among other things) that, after he spoke in the morning, the rest of the talks on Saturday felt like let downs. Biologist Jerry Coyne, for example, said little that was fresh about evolution. (He rehearsed for a crowd that already believes in evolution the basic converging lines of evidence for evolution. Ho hum. It was like having a historian lay out the converging lines of evidence for the Holocaust to a gathering of Jews. We’re with you, rabbi. We get it.) Likewise, Daniel Dennett was not especially enlightening in his talk about the religious uses of language, and Richard Dawkins was, uncharacteristically, flat as a pancake, reading from his book, rehearsing his slides, and posting on the screen (too long) quotes from Darwin. By this point in the evening, some in the crowd seemed visibly distracted and bored. (In his defense, Dawkins had been introducing people on the stage all day, and he was probably tired).

In the late afternoon, there was an effort to break up all the inner sanctum intellectuality with some music. The organizers (or rather the Hispanic hotel workers) put out a wooden dance floor, and the guitarist below played some songs with atheist lyrics in them. Some people watched, but nobody danced. Too many ironists in the crowd to let go, I suppose:

After Dawkins’s talk ended around 9:30, I was pretty much done. I left a bit disappointed, and not really stimulated intellectually (as I had hoped for the day). Maybe Krauss’s unusually stimulating morning talk set too much expectation in me for how the rest of the day would play out. As I left, the dance floor was still not being danced upon. Perhaps people started dancing later in the evening, but I doubt it.

As an agnostic hanging out with committed atheists for the day, how did I feel? A bit like I needed a shower. I didn’t want to leave this way. From the start, I tried to stay Buddha-open to new ideas, compassion, and surprise. But (at least for me) there’s something dead about atheism that I can’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps it is its vampire like reductionisms (“we murder to dissect”), or its generally dismissive shrugs toward paradoxical and poetic language (Dennett called religious languages “deepities”. They appear deep, but don’t really say anything.) It feels like atheists (to echo the poet AR Ammons) walk the floor of existence even as they display little genuine astonishment that there is a floor to experience in the first place. Existence just is. It’s a quantum fluctuation. An inevitability. No big whoop. Now embrace the blind machine. I asked Dennett, over the lunch break, what he thought of qualia, and the best that I could get from him was: “Define qualia?” He knows what qualia are, and what I meant by the question, but he obviously didn’t care to deal with it. Qualia, he said, is “like God.” In other words, it’s another deepity for Dennett, something to shrug at, to pass over in silence. The ontological mystery, if spoken of at all, becomes just another function to deconstruct.

I drove home listening to my audio collection of poets reading poems. It was my way to detox. I might have danced.

I like these two segments from a long Zizek talk:

And:

Just when I think I’m getting warm and fuzzy towards religion, I encounter testimony like this. Poet Kate Gale grew up in a cult, and the whole creepy Philip Garrido incident gave her a bit of deja vu :

It reminds me of growing up at High View Church Farm School which was regularly investigated for child abuse.  They never found anything while I was there, but finally because of the constant scrutiny, the cult was moved to Canada.  Cults in the U.S. can only be closed down for stockpiling weapons and child abuse; you can’t just be closed down for being weirdos.

When New Hampshire officials would come to investigate, Gale recalls the role of strawberries in the ordeal:

[W]e smiled and clapped our hands.  We were well trained.  When the investigators left, we were given strawberries. The strawberries were good, and sometimes when we ate them, I couldn’t sit down because I’d been beaten to that point.  But the strawberries were tasty.

If you’re an atheist, what’s wonderful about the universe? I know it’s pretty in places, and really big and hard to comprehend in detail, but if you’ve concluded that the universe consists, ultimately, of chance matter shuffling in the void, without any mind behind it, what’s to be in awe of or to feel wonder about? In other words, does atheist wonder amount to a tepid substitute for religious wonder in which the mind of God is replaced with blind mechanisms that just happen to build wonderous things? 

Let me offer an analogy. Let’s say I encounter a book written entirely by the chance landings of hail upon an electric typewriter, and I read this sentence from it:

He halted in the wind, and—what was that

Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?

Is there anything to wonder about it? It was made by accident. It means nothing, right? It might be nice to know the blind mechanism that made it, but it has no intelligence behind it. It’s pretty and intricate, like a leaf in autumn, but to give it additional meaning you would have to treat it as if  it were made by intention. Absent intention, the meaning, wonder, interest, and admiration that you might have brought to it loses its salience. If it is a product of chance, then the human imagination either must make meaning of it, or else it is nothing.

And isn’t that also true of nature, if atheism is correct? Nature is a book without an author. It happens to be beautiful and complex despite itself, and that makes for wonder, for it appears designed by an author. It is the appearance of design in the absence of design that makes for atheist wonder, is that right? It’s the sheer power of chance and natural selection that holds the atheist’s awe. If the Christian says—”Jesus is awesome!”—the atheist says—”Darwin is awesome!”

Now if I discover that Robert Frost wrote the above lines of poetry (which he did), and not the hail, suddenly my interest returns to the text itself. The meaning no longer resides in me, it now resides outside of me also, in the mind of the author, and what the author has written. I’m curious about each word, and why it’s there, and what the author is up to. I want to know what he means by putting the words in the order that he has. I want to know what he chose to leave out, and what he means to imply. But words absent an author are akin to a material universe absent mind. An ontological mystery becomes a machine, a function, and nothing more than this. Perhaps it is interesting to discover the undirected mechanisms responsible for the machine, but ultimately a blind material universe belongs to (in Paul Tillich’s phrase) the “ontology of death.” 

This is one reason I’m an agnostic, and not an atheist. Agnosticism (for me) inhabits a middle position between two dubious certainties. I don’t know if the universe has an author. But the very possibility makes for an interest that atheism prohibits. Being an agnostic is like encountering a book where you don’t know whether it was written by hail or Frost (pun intended, I suppose). But so long as there is the possibility that Frost wrote it, there is something to consider outside yourself, and to speculate about some meaning out there, beyond you. Yet once you know the book is written by hail, then it loses it’s exterior meaning and wonder (unless you bring the meaning and wonder from within yourself, from your own imagination). You can’t, afterall, derive wonder or meaning outside yourself from one damn thing after another, can you?

There will always be atheists in the world—so I’m not talking about a demographic trend. I don’t know where atheism is heading with the masses. For all I know, it may be growing faster than any other religion in the world. Go team! But I’m not talking about who’s up and who’s down in the wars of religion. I’m asking about vitality. I’m asking the question: Is atheism a death cult, a premature closure on eccentricity and possibility?

And in this, as an agnostic, I must say that it is. It’s why I’m not an atheist.

I’ve asked myself more than a few times lately, Why do I call myself an agnostic and not an atheist? And I keep coming back to closure. Certainty (or near certainty) on matters approaching the ontological mystery feels ridiculous to me. Belief, any belief—including belief in atheism—appears the enemy of thought. And then, when watching this clip from Terence McKenna, it occurred to me: I don’t like atheism for exactly the same reason that I don’t like noncharismatic religion.

When I was a teenager, and attending Christian churches, I gravitated toward charismatic religion for the same reasons that I gravitate toward agnosticism today. I wanted an encounter with the ontological mystery, an experience. The noncharismatic churches I encountered (like the atheist “web congregations” of Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and PZ Myers) set themselves against a direct encounter with the ontological mystery and the transcendent. They demarcated life in such a way as to drive the wild eros from it.

And that’s what the new atheists do today. Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and PZ Myers are secular John MacArthurs. They function as the spike-collared rotweillers to William Blake’s Urizen, the dismissers, restricters, and policers of exotic imaginative energies:

And:

A world of Dawkins-style atheism would be as narrow and dead as one circumscribed by any noncharismatic version of religion. The wild plants must have their air and sunlight—and we are those wild plants. Atheists and noncharismatic religionists prematurely tame the ontological mystery, and they leave little space for the ecstatic. Can you, for instance, imagine Richard Dawkins or Ayn Rand submitting to glossolalia? Agnostics and charismatic experiencers of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but their chains!

In thinking about UFOs the past few weeks, I’m struck by similarities between UFO belief and God belief. Here are just some of the striking parallels that jump out at me:

• Like the God question, the UFO question could be solved by one mass visible sighting or clearly transmitted message. For example, God could just talk from the sky to everybody in a public announcement, and eliminate all doubts about his (her?) existence. Likewise, a UFO could simply land on the White House lawn with a big “Screw you!” written on its saucer belly, thereby sassing all UFO debunkers, past and present.
• The fact that neither God nor UFOs show themselves in a dramatic public fashion stands in need of explanation, and subsequently people who profess to believe in God or UFOs are in the tricky position of second guessing minds far in advance of their own, and to speculate on the motives of such minds, and why those minds choose not to reveal themselves more obviously.
• Both God and UFOs seem to have favorites among human beings, picking some for special direct encounters with them, and then leaving those people to testify to what they have seen and heard. These testimonies are often vivid, and sometimes even compelling, but the events witnessed invariably leave no obvious physical traces in the environment, and thus no clear evidence that the experiences of the testifiers actually happened. In other words, without physical evidence, both God and UFOs are heavily dependent upon the memories of testifiers to communicate news of their presence to humankind. Why neither God nor UFOs do something a bit more direct and unambiguous is a total mystery.
• Invariably, because neither God nor UFOs leave undisputable physical traces of their presence in our world, both God movements and UFO movements are easy prey for confidence men, hucksters, hoaxers, and cons who fake their religious or UFO experiences, and so ease money from the pockets and purses of the gullible. It’s very tricky to tell which people in God movements and UFO movements are sincere in their “witnessing,” and which ones are taking you for a ride.
• If God or UFOs exist, we have to rethink our scientific paradigms, for some of the things that God and UFOs are said to do in the world are hard to account for via our current understandings of what’s physically possible. Resurrecting the dead and time travel are two examples.
• Like God, aliens know an enormous amount about science and technology. But curiously, whenever God or aliens are said to talk to people, they never actually share anything scientific with them. Their alleged messages are invariably spiritual, moral, or cryptic, and never: “Here’s how to make cold fusion to solve your energy problems.”
• Neither God nor aliens, though in possession presumably of minds and emotions, never obviously intervene to reduce human suffering in the world, raising the question, How come? If they are good, and have the power to advance good things in the world, why don’t they?
• Like many God believers, many believers in UFOs think eschatologically. That is, they think that the moment of public and final revelation is just around the corner. But whether it is God or a UFO coming in the clouds, the actual event always seems to be just beyond a receding horizon.

I’d like to emphasize that none of these observations is meant to suggest that God or UFOs do not exist. Both God and UFOs (or one of them) may, in fact, exist. What is curious to me, as an agnostic, is the surprising convergences, on both the intellectual and the cultural level, of these two (at least apparently) wildly different phenomena. Perhaps because God is invisible and has a “supermind” and ETs are also invisible and have “superminds”, the rhetorical moves of God believers and UFO believers must necessarily arrive at similar apologetic convergences, and even similar social movement forms.

In any case, it is one of the biggest surprises (I might even say shocks) of the past few weeks of thinking about UFOs, that there are so many echoes of religion in it. I can’t help but wonder: Is the UFO movement a thinly veiled secular religious movement? I realize that’s an oxymoron—a religion without God—but religion seems to be a pretty good lens for thinking about UFOs and the UFO movement.

This past Saturday, I went to a UFO conference in Burbank, California. I wanted to get a feel for UFO culture firsthand, and it was very interesting. Below is a picture that I took of a sculpture that an artist was selling at the event. It looks like an ET version of the Virgin Mary, doesn’t it? In talking with the artist, I discovered that her intent was precisely this. She believes that visions of Mary are actually visions of an extraterrestrial.

I think Cynthia is a talented, if eccentric, sculptor, and I bought her (I thought brilliant) rendition of Egyptian queen Nefertiti as an alien. My ever fast-witted British wife promptly dubbed her “Nefer-ET”. Here’s an image of my Nefer-ET that I snapped alongside a Mojave desert road in the late afternoon Sunday sun. Nefer-ET cost me 70 bucks. I think she was worth it:

In case you missed it, Andrew Sullivan, at his blog yesterday, compared Richard Dawkins to the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

It’s telling that both Mohler and Dawkins are both dedicated to the maintenance of a certain brand of doubt-free, doctrinally absolutist, fundamentalist versions of faith. There are other kinds. And fighting for that center is an important task in a world being torn apart by politicized religion.

The short answer is no. But there is also a longer answer that qualifies this “no”, and atheists and agnostics should think about that qualified answer. It is certainly true that there is no logical necessity at work that tells the atheist that she must  embrace Social Darwinism to be an atheist, but it is also true that history matters. You can’t live in a hermetically sealed bubble of logic impervious to how that logic has played out in history and what that history suggests to you. Atheists and agnostics have things to learn from history, and history can help us think about alternative futures, and what we need to be cautious about. Thus atheists and agnostics need to be cautious about Social Darwinism and expressions of enthusiasm for eugenics for three very good reasons:

1. Language. We don’t have religious language, such as the Sermon on the Mount, to restrain our speculations in the areas of Social Darwinism and eugenics.
2. Intellectual coherence. A Nietzschean ethical system appears to be a more coherent fit for atheism than the syncretism of Christian ethics tacked on to atheism (which is what humanism is). In other words, humanism’s contradictions and “Christian hangovers” (such as belief in free will and altruism) may not always hold together within atheist movements. It may be “natural” over time for atheist movements to gravitate towards Nietzchean friendly ethical ideas (as opposed to Christian friendly ones).
3. History. History suggests that atheism can fall prey pretty easily to the logic of Social Darwinism and eugenics. The temptations are there. Let’s not pretend that contemporary atheists are immune to it.

Here’s an analogy: There is no logical necessity that requires a believer in Jesus to kill Jews. But we know that, historically, antisemitism has been a phenomenon among Christians, and Christians need to be cautious about it and give vigilant attention to incipient hints of it emerging in their midst. Just as Christianity has a Geist  around which a certain family of ideas attaches, so it is also true that atheism has a Geist  around which certain ideas attach. History tells us things. We’ve got to bring our ideas out for a drive once in a while and reality test them, don’t you think?