Mamet and Moses
posted on 11.04.2006 at 3:58 PM
In his new nonfiction book, The Wicked Son, playwright David Mamet rebukes, with a gusto and combativeness found in many of his characters, irreligious or anti-Zionist Jews -- "self-hating Jews," seems the term he prefers.
Where to begin? Perhaps with this interesting point Mamet made while discussing the book on WGN radio recently:
If you look at the five books of Moses, the Torah, it's a complete record of the people, the Jews, who don't like it.... The Abrahamic text is about this desert people who had this revelation and fought it tooth and nail every page until the end of Deuteronomy.
Mamet wants us to see this as evidence that faith has doubt under control. That the irreligious can find themselves -- and answers to their doubts -- in the Bible. We might instead wonder if faith can ever escape or subdue doubt -- even among people who claimed the most intimate experience of God. We might wonder if the whole miraculous production wasn't hard to credit even then.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 03:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Did Einstein Believe in God?
posted on 11.02.2006 at 11:47 PM
Here's Richard Dawkins:
When Einstein said 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' he meant 'Could the universe have begun in more than one way?' 'God does not play dice' was Einstein's poetic way of doubting Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle. Einstein was famously irritated when theists misunderstood him to mean a personal God. But what did he expect? The hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him. 'Religious' physicists usually turn out to be so only in the Einsteinian sense: they are atheists of a poetic disposition. So am I. But, given the widespread yearning for that great misunderstanding, deliberately to confuse Einsteinian pantheism with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason.
But isn't this a bit unfair? Pantheism -- seeing god (or gods) in everything -- is not the same as atheism or even poetic atheism. It would seem to find some sort of divine purpose or meaning where atheists find mere matter -- however attractive.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:47 PM | Comments (27) | TrackBack
Flaubert on Atheism
posted on 10.27.2006 at 2:27 PM
Found this in a review by James Wood in the New Republic, written a couple of years ago:
Flaubert is reported as telling the tale of a man taken fishing by an atheist friend. The atheist casts the net and draws up a stone on which is carved: "I do not exist. Signed: God." And the atheist exclaims: "What did I tell you!"
The opposite of this seems actually to happen: We see signs that so much, so wonderfully much, exists. But have difficulty with the fact that these signs are unsigned.
Or am I taking a clever line too seriously?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 02:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Ontological Argument: Holt vs. Dawkins
posted on 10.23.2006 at 7:12 PM
The ontological argument for the existence of God -- based only on the logic of "being," not on evidence -- dates back to Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury in the 11th century. His "logic" (streamlined a bit) runs as follows: God is...
something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought....Something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought exists in the mind....Surely that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought cannot exist in the mind alone. For if it exists solely in the mind, it can be thought to exist in reality also, which is greater....Therefore there is absolutely no doubt that something-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought exists both in the mind and in reality.
Hence: God.
A different version of the ontological argument was provided by Descartes, but it is hard to see that it is any stronger:
Certainly, the idea of God, or of a supremely perfect being, is one which I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number....Hence...I ought...to regard the existence of God as having at least the same level of certainty as I have hitherto attributed to the truths of mathematics.
In his new book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins dismisses such arguments as "infantile" and "dialectical prestidigitation." In a New York Times review, Jim Holt, a writer on science and philosophy I respect (though he is getting less funny), criticizes Dawkins for being too cavaliere here:
He seems unaware that this argument, though medieval in origin, comes in sophisticated modern versions that are not at all easy to refute.
The potential "sophisticated modern versions" of this argument that I am familiar with (thanks to Nicholas Everitt in his useful book, The Non-Existence of God) are by Plantinga, Malcolm and Hartshorne. Here are a few of the steps in Hartshorne's effort (as outlined by Everitt):
(i) Either it is necessarily true that a perfect being exists or it is necessarily true that such a being does not exist. (ii) It is not necessarily true that there is no perfect being. So: (iii) It is necessarily true that there is a perfect being.
Everitt collapses Hartshorne's argument into the following:
(i) If it is possible that God exists, then he exists. (ii) It is possible that God exists. So: (iii) God exists.
It is hard to see that Hartshorne has taken us beyond Anselm and Descartes -- in essence: God is too perfect not to exist. We could discuss exactly how such arguments fail (part of the problem, writes Everitt, "is the assumption that existence is a quality that things can be said to have or lack"). But it's hard not to agree with Dawkins' characterization of the ontological arguments. Holt's criticism of that characterization, unless I am missing some compelling new versions of those arguments, seems unfair. Here's Schopenhauer -- writing, to be sure, before all that modern "sophistication":
When considered generally and impartially, this famous ontological proof is really a most delightful farce.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 07:12 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Consciousness: Descartes' Error
posted on 10.20.2006 at 2:33 PM
The philosopher John Searle wades, with some confidence, through the swamp of attempts to make sense out of the forum in which we attempt to make sense: consciousness. Some of the issues in question are technical: "perception" versus "sensation," for example. But one of his points echoes one of the more significant moments in the history of disbelief: Descartes cogito ergo sum -- "I think therefore I exist."
Here's Searle saying "my consciousness exists":
Consciousness is real and ineliminable. It cannot be dismissed as some kind of an illusion, or reduced to some other phenomenon. Why not? It cannot be shown to be an illusion because if I consciously have the illusion that I am conscious, I already am conscious.
Descartes reaches this moment at the end of a brave effort to confront skepticism at its most scathing. Is there anything we could know, could believe in, even if some evil god were purposely trying to deceive us? This is not Searle's issue, at least in this article. But it is a very important issue in this history. For skepticism of this intensity, as Descartes understood, certainly includes among its targets the belief in a just God.
The place where Descartes manages to take a stand against skepticism is, as Searle is acknowledging, a reasonable one, though some would fiddle with the tense or a couple of the words. The problem comes when Descartes tries to move on from there. Having proven that there is something that we -- or more properly he -- could know, he makes a move that seems as clumsy as his original point was brilliant (unless it was somehow, shockingly tongue-in-cheek). Descartes concludes that since something he thought was true -- his own existence -- proves to be true, the rest of what he thought to be true must be true. Here's what he writes:
Accordingly it seems to me that already I can establish as a general rule that all things which I perceive very clearly and very distinctly are true.
Among those things that are, therefore, true, according to this odd reasoning, is, of course, God -- the precise Christian God that Descartes apparently perceived "clearly" and "distinctly."
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 02:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Pleasure v. Religion
posted on 10.18.2006 at 6:59 PM
Don't want to leave that noxious statement by Hitler at the top of the blogpile too long, so I'll elevate a discussion of the anacreontic attitude -- "sha, la, la, la, la, la live for today" -- from the comments. It is my thesis that in this attitude, which can be traced back to an Egyptian song more than 4,000 years ago, is a piece of the positive idea of atheism for which I am searching. For it puts the emphasis on earthly (and earthy) life and its wonders not on some putative, presumably perfect post-life.
JM reminds that we "post-ancients" are still sha-la-la-la-la-ing today. I certainly agree that this impulse to Have Pleasure Now ("and don't worry 'bout tomorrow") survives -- as obstacle, nightmare, tug or goal. Probably louder in (certain parts of) the culture now than it has been since the days of the Carvaka, Epicurus, the Cyrenaics and Anacreon himself (all of whom will get to sing their "alluring" songs in my book).
There is much that is alluring in this attitude, though I guess it is hard to build a life upon (even for members of the Allman Brothers Band). Efforts certainly are made to channel, contain, repress the unbridled pursuit of pleasure, but that doesn't mean this attitude would otherwise be so wild and free that it might avoid being encrusted with contradictions -- some having to do with the likely arrival of "tomorrow," some having to do with the fact that other people, with their own wants and desires, are required for the achievement of certain much-prized pleasures. Schisms have developed among anacreontics on the relative merits of physical pleasures, mental pleasures and the mere absence of distress.
Still, having a bit of fun -- now -- does seem an important component in a life strategy. And it does seem a mostly irreligious component.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 06:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Christianity and Slavery
posted on 10.04.2006 at 11:54 AM
I may have been too quick (as suggested in a few wise comments) to accept the assertion of my dinner companions that Christianity was responsible for the elimination of slavery in the Roman Empire . A few points (from Charles Freeman's excellent The Closing of the Western Mind):
1. The notion, which was indeed found among Christians, that slaves should be regarded as fellow human beings was not original to Christianity. It dates back to the Greek Stoics.
2. Christians -- always with an eye to another, better life beyond -- exhorted slaves to accept their fate. This is from a Christian text written in the year 90:
Slaves, be obedient to the men who are called your masters in the world, with deep respect and sincere loyalty as you are obedient to Christ....Work hard and willing...but do it for the sake of the Lord.
3. Christians, despite Jesus' apparent affection for the "meek" and suspicion of the "rich man," could fall into the karma-like notion that our lots here are our just rewards. Here's the sainted and, of course, hugely influential Augustine, writing when the western half of the Roman Empire was beginning to fall apart:
The primary cause of slavery...is sin...and this can only be by a judgment of God, in whom there is no unrighteousness, and who knows how to assign divers punishments according to the deserts of the sinners.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:54 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
Yom Kippur
posted on 10.02.2006 at 1:37 PM
I remain fascinated by this scene:
On only one day of the year, the Day of Atonement, the Jews' chief priest entered the Holy of Holies at the very heart of the Jewish temple. What he saw was an empty room.
Perhaps the priest filled it with his reverence and devotion to Yahweh. Perhaps he gloried in the absence of cheap, too-tangible statues or idols.
But might this priest also have noted the absence of the Ark of the Covenant, which was supposed to be kept in this room but had "somehow," as always ends up being the case, disappeared? Might he have felt the Wizard-of-Oz-like smallness of Yahweh's wispy presence? Might he have experienced in that room a nagging absence of meaning or purpose? Might he have seen the Holy of Holies as filled with hebel -- vapor -- as in Ecclesiastes? Might some sense of the absence of God have contributed to that emptiness?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 01:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Christianity: Minus
posted on 09.28.2006 at 12:46 PM
On the list of those who contributed to the remarkable spread of Christianity, the Roman emperor, Constantine, may rank with Paul and, oh yes, Jesus. Constantine, through his support and (late) conversion, enabled the religion to conquer the empire. The danger, of course, is that the empire might conquer the religion.
Certainly, this pillar of Christianity was a little weak in the "do-unto-others" area. The example that sticks in my mind: Constantine traveled to Rome in the year 326 with his wife, his son by another marriage, his step-nephew and his mother. By the time he arrived he had put to death – in fear of plots? because of rumors of sexual misbehavior? – all but his mother.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 12:46 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Christianity: Plus and Minus
posted on 09.27.2006 at 8:58 AM
Debate over dinner last night about the historical consequences of the spread of Christianity.
-- On the positive side: the end of slavery in the Roman Empire, where it had been as widespread as it ever has been; a new consciousness of the worth of each person.
-- On the negative side: the closing of the Academy in Athens (after 900 years) and the other (pagan) philosophy schools; the lapsing (in the Western empire at least) of scientific investigation; 900 or so years of intellectual regression or, at least, much less progress; the triumph of a religion that emphasized death or what happens after dead or the End of Days -- not life.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 08:58 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
All We Have Gained by Our Unbelief
posted on 09.26.2006 at 8:16 AM
This from Robert Browning's poem, "Bishop Blugram's Apology." The Bishop is holding forth before a skeptical journalist:
All we have gained then by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt:
We called the chess-board white,--we call it black.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 08:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Integrity Restored, Zeus Attacked
posted on 09.25.2006 at 9:50 AM
What a juicy contretemp (relatively speaking) followed the decision by the Raving Atheist to cease all attacks on Jesus and Christianity. Suffering from contretemps envy and in a moment of heightened cravenness, I contemplated withholding all attacks on Zeus and paganism. And, faithful (so to speak) readers will note that there has not been one attack on Zeus, Jupiter, Apollo, Athena or any of the Olympians in the past month.
However, my commitment to free and open discussion has proven stronger even than my desire for an attention-getting scandal. So blogosphere, you can forget your angry charges of hypocrisy (which, to be sure, seemed a bit slow in coming)! To demonstrate that this is once again a site where No God is Safe, I give you an attack on Zeus.
It is from one of the satires written by Lucian, the popular 2nd-century Greek writer. In it Zeus explains that he heard “Professor Anaxagoras" -- a pre-Socratic philosopher/scientist --"trying to convince his students that we gods are just nobodies.†Zeus’ response? He hurled his thunderbolt at him. “I threw it too hard,†the god acknowledges. And he missed, hitting a temple instead. (Thunderbolts hitting temples have always been among the signs from the heavens that interest disbelievers most.) Now, Lucian reports, the king of the gods is complaining that he needs to get his “thunderbolt…fixed.â€
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 09:50 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Violent Christians
posted on 09.17.2006 at 1:04 PM
It takes, of course, a certain amount of chutzpah or blindness (along with political insensitivity) for a Christian to criticize Muhammad for the "command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
Of the multitude of possible examples of Christians bringing, as Jesus says he does, "not...peace but a sword," my current favorite is the story of 4th- and 5th-century Alexandria's leading philosopher, Hypatia. This revered exponent of Plato and neoplatonism ran afoul of Cyril, the new patriarch of the Catholic Church (who had managed to chase away the city Jews). After Cyril's people spread rumors that Hypatia was a witch, a mob of Christian faithful entered her home stripped her, dragged her behind a chariot, and possibly chopped her body to pieces before burning it.
Cyril is now a saint in the church over which Benedict presides.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 01:04 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
One Fewer God
posted on 09.12.2006 at 1:23 AM
In that interview in Salon (which has, for the moment at least, disappeared from the Web) Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, uses this cool line:
Christians today might say, I don't believe in Zeus, that was a silly superstition. Yet for many people that was a real god. So it turns out there are 10,000 gods and yet only one right one. That means we're all atheists on 9,999 gods. The only difference between me and the believers is I'm an atheist on one more god.
I know I've heard this line before. According to the Web (which occasionally does have its limits as a source of knowledge), it was first used by someone named Stephen F. Roberts:
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Roberts even has a page in which he formally takes credit for it.
However, I suspect the line is much older than that. I found this Bertrand Russell quote which is close:
I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.
But I believe this has to go back further -- to Charles Bradlaugh or Baron d'Holbach or someone. Anybody know?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 01:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Bob Dylan and Religion
posted on 09.08.2006 at 8:13 PM
The number one album in the United States as I write is (no fooling!) Modern Times by an old goat some of us have been obsessing about for quite some time.
High on the list of Mr. Dylan's talents is the capacity -- while, as he puts it in a recent interview, conforming to his own "reality" -- for disappointing large portions of his fans. The secularists among those fans -- cheered, justifiably or not, by early songs such as With God on Our Side -- have taken some big hits.
However, here near the end of the last song on this new album is an elliptical lyric that seems to imply that the Deity may have exited, for a moment at least, from the Bard's world-view:
As I walked out in the mystic garden
On a hot summer day, a hot summer lawn
Excuse me, ma'am, I beg your pardon
There's no one here, the gardener is gone
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 08:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Agnosticism: "Because It Was Not the Sun"
posted on 09.05.2006 at 11:08 PM
Due sense of the general 'ignorance of man' would also beget in us a disposition to take up and rest satisfied with any evidence whatever, which is real....If a man were to walk by twilight, must he not follow his eyes as much as if it were broad day and clear sunshine? ...He might lament that the darkness concealed many extended prospects from his eyes, and wish for the sun to draw away the veil: but how ridiculous would it be to reject with scorn and disdain the guidance and direction which that lesser light might afford him, because it was not the sun itself!
This is from a sermon by the 18th-century Anglican clergyman, Joseph Butler, in response to Ecclesiastes. Rev. Butler's point is religious: "Let us adore that infinite wisdom, and power, and goodness, which is above our comprehension."
But might not this powerful image be used by atheists to counter agnostic arguments? No we can't see into ever nook and cranny of the universe to say with absolute, 100-percent surety that no God lurks there, but can't we see enough to determine that the presence of such a being would be highly, highly unlikely?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Labor Day Message
posted on 09.03.2006 at 9:27 PM
Herewith a selection from this book in progress, involving nineteenth-century British atheist leader Charles Bradlaugh. The point today is to note that atheism in Bradlaugh's day was a working-class movement:
In March 1859, Bradlaugh was scheduled to speak at the Guildhall in Doncaster, to the north of London. In response, a group calling itself “Friends of Religion†felt called upon to issue a “caution to the public†in which it advised the town’s population to make sure Bradlaugh would gaze “on the unpeopled interior of the Guildhall.†In fact, the interior of the Guildhall in Doncaster, when Bradlaugh mounted the stage, was “crowded to excess,†according to the Doncaster Herald, which nevertheless dubbed Bradlaugh’s talk a “frantic panegyric in honor of hell.â€
“There boldly, defiantly, recklessly,†that newspaper sneered, “stood the Creator’s work, toiling, sweating, laboring strenuously to heap slander upon his Creator.†The Herald’s correspondent expressed “disgust†and “horror†that a “young and accomplished man†could stand in front of a crowded hall “while the beauteous moon marches aloft in the vast and indefinable firmament†and dare state “that no God lives!â€
Bradlaugh returned to Doncaster later that year. This time the “Friends of Religion†were better organized: He was denied use of any of the town’s halls. So Bradlaugh spoke outdoors on a temporary platform erected under the roof of the corn market. “He is a person possessing great fluency of speech, of ready wit,†another paper, the Doncaster Chronicle, conceded, “and the declamatory style of his oratory is well calculated to excite and carry away a popular audience.†With no walls to restrict its size, the “popular audience†that evening was reported to include four thousand people. The city quickly forbade Bradlaugh from speaking in the market, so the next evening he spoke from a wagon in an open area near the market. The subject that night, a Bradlaugh standard, was the “History and Teaching of Jesus Christ.†More than seven thousand people turned out to hear him question that history and that teaching.
One defender of Christianity that evening managed to hit Bradlaugh in the head with a stone as he made his way back to his lodgings. Nonetheless, some percentage of the people of Doncaster clearly had an interest in the subject of atheism. Some percentage of the people – working-class people – evinced a similar interest in cities all across Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 09:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Missing the Point on Deuteronomy
posted on 09.02.2006 at 8:49 PM
One of the pleasures of this project has been the opportunity to read or reread much of the Bible. This has not always been easy to explain to friends, many of whom have spent considerable energy, particularly in their early teens, avoiding reading the Bible. Still, it is hard to turn a page -- in either Testament -- without getting a new take on a familiar line. a new perspective on an aspect of an old religion or a sense of the complex dance performed by belief and disbelief.
Knowing some history certainly helps, particularly with a book like Deuteronomy, which appeared magically and conveniently one day while the temple in Jerusalem was being renovated and just happened to support every argument the king, high priest and the rest of the Yahweh-alone forces had been making. The message that only one God should be worshipped (Yahweh), in only one place (that temple in Jerusalem) -- put in the mouth of Moses -- is repeated over and over. It is, consequently, in Deuteronomy, more than anywhere, that monotheism is being created. Along the way this one God has to demonstrate that he can handle alone what the whole heavenly host had previously managed: that he could handle weather like Baal, that he could handle fertility like Asherah. The book contains a fascinating mix of threats, bribes and bluster.
David Plotz' misbegotten "Blogging the Bible" feature on Slate, however, manages to read Deuteronomy without any sense of its history and significance. No new perspectives arrive. The screen fills, instead, with the muted gurglings of a writer in over his head.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 08:49 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Agnostic Unfair to Atheists
posted on 08.29.2006 at 8:43 PM
Here is Thomas Henry Huxley's explanation for his desire to coin a new term, "agnostic," to express his relationship to religion:
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker – I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis" - had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.
But this is unfair to atheists, is it not? What about atheism implies a solution to the problem of existence?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 08:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Is the Possibility of God Logical?
posted on 08.21.2006 at 10:09 PM
Some of the best thinking on this subject was done by Carneades, the second-century BCE Greek Skeptic. Here are some quotes from Sextus Empiricus' later account of Carneades' reasoning:
If the Divine exists, it is certainly...both virtuous and happy.... But it does not possess all the virtues unless it possesses both continence and fortitude. And it does not possess these virtues unless there are certain things which are hard for God to abstain from and hard to endure.... For it is the man who holds firm when he is being cut and burned that shows fortitude, and not the man who is drinking sweet wine. There will, then, exist certain things which are hard for God to endure and hard to abstain from... But if so, God is receptive of vexation and of change for the worse, and hence of decay also. So that if God exists, he is perishable....
This is an arguments that flaws are needed for virtues, and therefore that gods, which don't have flaws, can't have many of the virtues.
If the Divine is all-virtuous and possesses wisdom, it possesses sound-deliberation.... And if it deliberates, there is something which is non-evident to it.... It is impossible that...anything...should...be non-evident to God.... From which it follows that he does not exist at all.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 10:09 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
An Agnostic's Courage
posted on 08.16.2006 at 4:58 PM
In July 1860, Thomas Huxley engaged in his famous face-off with the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, over Darwin's theory.
Bishop Wilberforce: “If anyone were to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?â€
Huxley: “If then…the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape."
A couple of months later Huxley's beloved eldest son died.
Huxley is responsible for the neologism "agnoticism." In defense of his new creed he proclaimed:
In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.
However, Huxley was anything but uncertain in his opposition to "that clericalism, which in England, as everywhere else,…is the deadly enemy of science.â€
And when a friend implied, gently, after his son's death, that the biologist might miss the comforts of religion, Huxley's response could not have been more staunch and unbending:
Had I lived a couple of centuries earlier, I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me…and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is: Oh devil! Truth is better than much profit….If wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 04:58 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Atheism Defined
posted on 08.12.2006 at 6:40 PM
Here's Charles Bradlaugh, one of history's most important atheists and a major character in my book, with an unusual description of his (lack of) beliefs:
The Atheist does not say “there is no god,†but he says “I know not what you mean by god; I am without idea of god; the word god is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny god, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception."
Doesn't sound that far from agnosticism.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 06:40 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack
Deuteronomy -- III
posted on 08.04.2006 at 1:45 AM
It may not be easy, at this grim moment in world politics, to find signs of progress. But that is where the Bible can be helpful. For it sure seems we have progressed a bit, most of us, from the moral standards it promulgates. I am quoting, once again, the last book of the Torah:
If your brother, your own mother's son, or your son or daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your closest friend entices you in secret, saying, "Come let us worship other Gods".... Show him no pity or compassion, and do not shield him, but take his life.... Stone him to death.
No wishy-washy, politically correct indulgence in tolerance here.
And then there is this:
You shall destroy all the peoples that the Lord your god delivers to you, showing them no pity.
Few today -- even in the name of the Bible -- would "destroy all." Merely some. Progress.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 01:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Deuteronomy -- II
posted on 07.28.2006 at 7:59 PM
This -- the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible -- is compendium of intolerance. Various "abhorrent" practices are denounced: serving other gods, human sacrifices, worshiping idols, soothsaying, bowing down to the sun or the moon, intermarrying, crossdressing, inquiring about other gods, worshipping the Lord anywhere but in the temple in Jerusalem. Various "just" punishments are threatened : no rain for crops; a curse upon the issue of wombs; "consumption, fever and inflamation." One "just" punishment, in particular, is commanded: stoning to death.
However, nowhere to be found in Deuteronomy -- among these "abhorrent" practices, which are to receive these terrible punishments -- is failure to believe in the Lord. This God very, very much wants to be "obeyed," to have "His commandments and laws" followed. He does not seem concerned with whether His people think he exists.
Why? A standard answer is that this God, in essence, was secure enough in His existence so that He didn't need His nation to confirm it. Or that not believing in the existence of God (or gods) may simply have been inconceivable at the time. I'll add a third theory: that actual, outright disbelieve was too terrible to even mention.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 07:59 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
Deuteronomy
posted on 07.28.2006 at 1:16 AM
The temple in Jerusalem was being renovated during the reign of Josiah (639-609 BCE) -- who is treated with as much respect as any king in the Hebrew Bible -- and during the renovations the high priest "discovered" a "lost" text. That, most scholars agree, was an early version of Deuteronomy, which settled as the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible -- the last in the Torah or the books of Moses.
It is not hard to read this text as a justification for Josiah's attempt to consolidate the religion and the kingdom by cracking down on any forms of worship -- foreign, idolatrous, pantheistic, even Jewish -- besides those in the temple in Jerusalem. Monotheism was sharpened, if not invented, in the process:
The Lord alone is God; there is none beside Him.
Weren't too many religions in the 7th century BCE devoting themselves to morality. But Deuteronomy takes some significant steps beyond "thou shall not kill":
I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy kinsman in your land.
Still, the intolerance for other religions in this text is total:
Tear down their alters, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from the site.
And the treatment the Lord orders for local conquered nations is, even by contemporary standards, extreme:
You shall not let a soul remain alive.
Maybe we shouldn't be that surprised by what currently goes on in this area between peoples who profess to revere such texts.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 01:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Death -- Part I
posted on 07.26.2006 at 2:49 PM
Even those of us who don't get much of a kick out of heaven and hell, have to admit that some have had good fun with Death. There's Ingmar Bergman, of course; not to mention Woody Allen's takeoff on Bergman.
However, it is difficult to imagine anyone who had as entertaining a time with Death as Sisyphus. When Death came to get him -- a bit on the early side, as sometimes happens -- Sisyphus, instead, managed to get Death: chaining him up. This meant for a time, with Thanatos out of commission, that nobody could die -- a circumstance that put Ares, god of war, out of business. In order for armies to be able to resume killing each other (I know that the idea that armies once shot and bombed seems incomprehensible to us advanced 21st-century types), Ares had to go and free Death himself and make sure Sisyphus was sent safely on his way to Hades.
But Sisyphus, whom Homer describes as “the craftiest of all mankind,†was still not ready to go "gentle into that good night." He instructed his wife not to bury him, and then moaned to functionaries in Hades that he was unburied. They allowed him to go back up to earth to rectify things. Camus, in his essay on the Sisyphus myth, gives a good account of what happened next: “When he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness.†Having once again tricked the gods out of death, Sisyphus lived “many years more†experiencing, in Camus’ phrase, “the smiles of the earth.â€
Of course, in the end Death and the gods, as also happens, had the last laugh on old Sisyphus.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 02:49 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Absurd Hero
posted on 07.24.2006 at 10:44 PM
Camus on Sisyphus:
His scorn for the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which his whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.
For Camus this makes Sisyphus "the absurd hero." Might seem also to make him the atheist hero. Would that mean they are the same thing?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 10:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Atheism and Meaninglessness
posted on 07.21.2006 at 1:24 PM
Ecclesiastes makes much use of the Hebrew word hebel, הבל. This refrain begins and closes this book of the Hebrew Bible:
"Utterly senseless" says Qoheleth [the sage quoted in Ecclesiastes], "Utterly senseless, everything is senseless!"
The word translated here as "senseless" is hebel. You've heard it given as "vanity" -- but that relies on an out-of-date use of that word, one that doesn't imply a mirror fixation. "Meaningless" is another good candidate or, perhaps, "emptiness." "Vapor" or "vapors" would be more literal translations.
I'm thinking that this use of hebel introduces an important theme in atheistic thought -- one that may become the major theme of my third chapter. Surely, disbelievers have surrendered much meaning and sense: that good actions will be rewarded in an afterlife, for example; that we're all here for a purpose. What is left for the nonbeliever looking for purpose besides "vapors"?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 01:24 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Shelley Expelled
posted on 07.15.2006 at 11:56 PM
The British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is surely one of the most colorful characters in this history, and a case can be made that -- through his rabidly atheistic poems and the pamphlet, the Necessity of Atheism, which got him expelled from Oxford -- he is one of the more important. Outspoken freethinkers were hardly uncommon in nineteenth-century Britain, but they were very uncommon that early in nineteenth-century Britain. Shelley published his essay in 1811. Charles Bradlaugh was not born until 1834.
A poem, written by Shelley around the time of the Necessity of Atheism, has just been found -- after having been lost for almost 200 years. The article reporting on the discovery includes this recollection by Thomas Medwin about the young firebrand:
I remember, as if it occurred yesterday, his knocking at my door in Garden Court, in the Temple, at four o’clock in the morning, the second day after his expulsion. I think I hear his cracked voice, with his well-known pipe, – “Medwin, let me in, I am expelled;†here followed a sort of loud half-hysteric laugh, and a repetition of the words – “I am expelled,†with the addition of, “for Atheism.â€
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Great Moments in Religion: 1
posted on 07.13.2006 at 11:50 PM
Universe created on October 23, 4004 BCE. This is from A Geological Miscellany by G. Y. Craig and E. J. Jones:
James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin was highly regarded in his day as a churchman and as a scholar. Of his many works, his treatise on chronology has proved the most durable. Based on an intricate correlation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories and Holy writ, it was incorporated into an authorized version of the Bible printed in 1701, and thus came to be regarded with almost as much unquestioning reverence as the Bible itself. Having established the first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 BC..., Ussher calculated the dates of other biblical events, concluding, for example, that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4004 BC [making their stay almost as short as some of my recent vacations], and that the ark touched down on Mt Ararat on 5 May 2348 BC `on a Wednesday'.
I should add that Ussher's chronology was widely accepted in England in 1859, when Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Anthropology Attacked!
posted on 07.11.2006 at 1:31 PM
I think I want to take a swipe at anthropologists.
Many nineteenth-century European observers of preliterate peoples mislabeled them as disbelievers because whatever they might have believed sure didn't look like The One True Faith: Christianity. These explorers and missionaries have taken their share of abuse.
But I'm ready to conclude (in reworking my first chapter) that many twentieth-century anthropologists made a similar mistake: They mislabeled the peoples they observed as devout believers because the doubts and hesitations they did harbor sure didn't look like Logical, Consistent, Secular Humanist, Western, Enlightenment Rationalism.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 01:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
The Origin of the Species
posted on 07.08.2006 at 8:23 PM
In 1859 in England, Charles Bradlaugh was on the stump, attacking religion before huge working-class crowds; John Stuart Mill published On Liberty ("If all mankind minus one were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind") and Charles Darwin published his book. Not a bad year.
Here are some historians (none of whom I've heard of) on the importance of The Origin of the Species, which some still insist can sit comfortably next to Christianity:
The Origin of the Species came into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill -- Leo J. Henkin
I myself have little doubt that in England it was geology and the theory of evolution that changed us from a Christian to a pagan nation -- F. Sherwood Taylor
No rapproachement was possible between Darwinism as such and protestantism as such. The conceptions of Man were too divergent -- John Dillenberger
If we may estimate the importance of an idea by the change of thought which it effects, this idea of natural selection is unquestionably the most important that has ever been conceived by the mind of man -- George J. Romanes
(From The Victorian Crisis of Faith)
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 08:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Ecclesiastes
posted on 07.07.2006 at 11:49 PM
I'm new to the wonders of Koheleth, the cynical wise man who speaks in Ecclesiastes, and his version of carpe diem:
There is nothing better for people than to eat and drink and enjoy their toil.
It gets tougher:
Enjoy life with the wife whom you love all the days of your meaningless life, that is, all the meaningless days he has given you under the sun, for it is your reward in life and for the toil that you do under the sun.
All that your hand finds to do, do with your power, for there is no action or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going. (Translation by Tremper Longman III)
Ellen F. Davis reports that one Vietnam chaplain said this -- the term "meaningless" (hebel) appears in more than 30 passages -- "was the only part of the Bible that his soldiers were willing to hear."
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Holy of Holies
posted on 07.06.2006 at 9:04 PM
I'm writing, just now, of that stunning moment when Pompey, the Roman general, forces his way into the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and enters the Holy of Holies -- Yahweh's own sanctuary, a room that only one person, the high priest, was allowed to visit on only one day of the year, Yom Kippur.
And what does Pompey find?
It is empty.
Some of what the Jews contributed to the development of religion is apparent in this moment. But you could also build an anti-religion upon it.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 09:04 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
Founding Fathers
posted on 07.03.2006 at 10:06 PM
Remarkable, given current rhetoric, how traditionally religious America's Founding Fathers weren't. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin (not to mention Paine) -- Enlightenment gentlemen all -- are probably best described (like Voltaire) as deists. They seem to have believed something meaningful was out there, but did not seem too interested in intermediaries like Jesus, the Bible or the clergy. (Washington declined the attentions of a minister on his death bed.)
However, I haven't seen any evidence that any of the above were atheists or agnostics. (Madison, about whose beliefs the least seems to be known, would seem the best hope.) However, since most of these fellows were politicians, true disbelief, if they felt it, might not have been easy to reveal.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 10:06 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Precursor to the Evolution Debate
posted on 06.25.2006 at 2:07 PM
Edward O. Wilson again, writing in Harvard Magazine last year:
In all of the history of science only one other disparity of comparable magnitude to evolution has occurred between a scientific event and the impact it has had on the public mind. This was the discovery by Copernicus that Earth and therefore humanity are not the center of the universe, and the universe is not a closed spherical bubble. Copernicus delayed publication of his masterwork On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until the year of his death (1543). For his extension of the idea subsequently, Bruno was burned at the stake, and for its documentation Galileo was shown the instruments of torture at Rome and remained under house arrest for the remainder of his life.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 02:07 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Heroes of Disbelief
posted on 06.15.2006 at 11:04 PM
The Nobel Prize wining economist, Amartya Sen, in a quote from his new book, on his "identity" as:
at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident,...a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a nonbeliever in an afterlife (and also, in case the question is asked, a nonbeliever in a "before-life" as well).
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Angel of Death
posted on 06.14.2006 at 2:58 PM
A blond woman in a white raincoat wanders through the Garrison Keillor/Robert Altman film "Prairie Home Companion" -- occasionally cozying up to someone...who subsequently expires. She contributes a few religious/philosophical platitudes as she makes her rounds.
The film -- which is warm and folksy but slight and a bit deficient in, of all things, irony -- contains, according to Catholic Online, some "mild irreligiosity." (The Church did not insist, however, that it be labeled "fiction.") Certainly, it does not seem another one of those There's-A-Meaning-Behind-It-All, which-if-we-weren't-so-cynical-we-could-see, films. Hence, the Angel of Death here is probably to be taken as a literary device, an allusion, a metaphor.
My question is whether religion-reduced-to-metaphor qualifies as belief's last gasp or as a harbinger of disbelief's triumph. Is it, in other (very different) words, the pathogen or the vaccine?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 02:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Anacreon
posted on 06.10.2006 at 11:47 PM
As I research and write this book, new characters seem to drop from the sky (unfortunate as that metapher may be). The fifth-century BCE Greek poet Anacreon, who celebrated wine and love, is the latest. When asked why he never wrote hymns to the gods, the poet is said to have replied: "because our loves are our gods."
"Anacreontic" is a name for the irreligious notion that we should enjoy life now, rather than bother about a life after death.
The American national anthem is written to the tune of "The Anacreontic Song."
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Buddhism and Atheism, Another Look
posted on 06.03.2006 at 10:16 PM
Here is an intriguing version of Buddhism, which seems remarkably devoid of the supernatural, from Yew Han Hee:
Q: Is there a God in Buddhism as in Christianity?
A: It is very difficult to compare Buddhism with Christianity. One would have to say, however, there is no God in Buddhism in the way that God in Christianity is commonly understood.Q: What do Buddhists believe?
A: Different Buddhists believe different things, but the nature of belief is itself an important issue in Buddhism. Belief is to be seen as belief, not as fact. When we see our beliefs as facts, then we are deluding ourselves. When we see our beliefs as beliefs, then we are not. Seeing things in their true light is the most important thing in Buddhism. Deluding ourselves is the cause of much suffering. So Buddhists try to see beliefs as beliefs. They may still believe in certain things - that is their prerogative - but they do not cling to those beliefs; they do not mind or worry about whether their beliefs are true or not, nor do they try to prove that which they know cannot be proved. Ideally though, a Buddhist does not indulge in any kind of belief.Q: Does Buddhism teach reincarnation?
A: Reincarnation is not a teaching of the Buddha. In Buddhism the teaching is of rebirth, not of reincarnation.Q: What is the difference between reincarnation and rebirth?
A: The reincarnation idea is to believe in a soul or a being, separate from the body. At the death of the physical body, this soul is said to move into another state and then enter a womb to be born again.Rebirth is different and can be explained in this way. Take away the notion of a soul or a being living inside the body; take away all ideas of self existing either inside or outside the body. Also take away notions of past, present and future; in fact take away all notions of time. Now, without reference to time and self, there can be no before or after, no beginning or ending, no birth or death, no coming or going. Yet there is life! Rebirth is the experience of life in the moment, without birth, without death; it is the experience of life which is neither eternal nor subject to annihilation.
Though things do get a little mystical:
Q: Does that mean there is no such thing as birth and death? A: That which is born, dies. Forms come and go. All that comes into existence is impermanent; it is born and it dies. But the very essence of what "I" am -- the Buddha-nature -- is unborn and undying....
Q: But how can getting rid of ideas enables us to see deathlessness? A: The deathless is here all the while, but ideas block it out. It is like the sun because of the clouds. But as soon as the clouds are cleared away, there is the sun. Likewise, as soon as ideas are cleared away from the mind, there is the true state of birthlessness and deathlessness.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 10:16 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
Agriculture and Disbelief
posted on 06.02.2006 at 11:31 AM
The more you stumble about trying to follow some threads through the deep past, the more you realize the importance of agriculture. That's why the new report in Science on discovery of what may be humankind's earliest effort to domesticate a plant -- fig trees -- is so interesting. (A discovery made not in the Fertile Crescent but in the West Bank.)
Fig tree shoots jammed in the ground might have encouraged our peripatetic ancestors to settle down, and people living and working with larger numbers of other people in settlements require different, stricter moralities than hunter-gatherers. When you're living in a town, rather than in a band, you can't very well be killing the strangers you happen to encounter. Hence, the Thou-Shall-Not religions -- a change in human beliefs.
But Ofer Bar-Yosef, a co-author of the Science report, argues that there is also a connection between agriculture and disbelief. He is quoted in the New York Times:
"Eleven thousand years ago, there was a critical switch in the human mind — from exploiting the earth as it is, to actively changing the environment to suit our needs," Dr. Bar-Yosef said in a statement from Harvard. "People decided to intervene in nature and supply their own food rather than relying on what was provided by the gods."
Hence, possibly, There-Are-No-Gods irreligion?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:31 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Auden Believed...Kinda
posted on 05.19.2006 at 12:50 AM
This from his poem, As I Walked Out One Evening:
"O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless."
Is this sort-of belief or sort-of disbelief?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 12:50 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The Bible as Not History
posted on 05.15.2006 at 11:52 PM
Not only no evidence that there was ever an Abraham, but no evidence that a nation of Jews was ever in, let alone dramatically escaped from, Egypt, and no evidence that there was ever a Solomon or a great Jewish kingdom with a spectacular first Temple.
The archaeological evidence is reviewed in a new book, David and Solomon, though the authors seem to be bending over backwards not to offend the Biblically inclined.
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Poets and Prophets
posted on 05.14.2006 at 1:30 AM
Kierkegaard (quoted by Carlin Romano):
"Muhammad protests with all his might against being regarded as a poet, and the Koran as a poem. He wants to be a prophet. ... I protest with all my might at being regarded as a prophet, and want only to be a poet."
Either would be fine by me.
Actually haven't been that many atheists in either category. At least one world-class poet: Shelley. Some fine writers: Baron d"Holbach, Thomas Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, Nietzsche. At least one great writer: Virginia Woolf. Prophets? Odd term to apply to an atheist. Meslier? Nietzsche?
posted by Mitchell Stephens at 01:30 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
God is Dead -- The Original Announcement
posted on 04.28.2006 at 10:21 AM
Few statements of (idiosyncratic) disbelief have had the influence of Nietzsche's pronouncement, placed in the mouth of a madman (in The Gay Science). But its odd, haunting formulation is not well known. Here, for the record and for further discussion, it is (thanks Ben Vershbow):
"Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: 'I am looking for God! I am looking for God!'
"As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
"'Where has God gone?' he cried. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sidewards, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.'
"Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. 'I have come too early,' he said then; 'my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.'
posted by ben vershbow at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
Old Mill
posted on 04.25.2006 at 10:57 PM
Ric