Jon Cogburn's Blog

South puts off rising again for yet another year

In THIS POST I discussed reasons why conservative Christians are far more likely to have various forms of long term brain degeneration.

The video at left, with pastor Dennis Terry (from Louisiana's own Greenwell Springs Baptist Church), Tony Perkins (formerly Louisiana Representative, currently president of the hate group "the Family Research Council"), and presidential candidate Rick Santorum beautifully illustrates the dangerous pathology that is conservative Christianity.

I hate that these hypocrites get away with speaking for me as a Christian or as a Southerner. I hate that they claim to speak for Jesus.

Compare what Terry says in this video about praying in public with what Jesus says:

5. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [are]: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.  6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. 7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen [do]: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

Compare Terry's "Get out!" with the parable of the good samaritan or Jesus eating with and blessing prostitutes, adulterers, pagan soldiers and tax collectors. I mean, it's simply not possible for a non-brain damaged person to read the synoptic Gospels and claim to believe them while spouting Terry's dangerous nonsense.

As far as Santorum's cafeteria Catholocism, consider THIS LIST of Roman Catholic doctrines (also cf. Bobby Jindal, whose policies on unions directly contradict no less than five papal encyclicals):

1. So for instance, Pope John Paul II was against anyone going to war against Iraq I think you’ll find that Rick Santorum managed to ignore that Catholic teaching.

2.The Conference of Catholic Bishops requires that health care be provided to all Americans. I.e., Rick Santorum’s opposition to universal health care is a betrayal of the Catholic faith he is always trumpeting.

3. The Catholic Church opposes the death penalty for criminals in almost all situations. (Santorum largely supports executions.)

4. The US Conference of Bishops has urged that the federal minimum wage be increased, for the working poor. Santorum in the Senate repeatedly voted against the minimum wage.

5. The bishops want welfare for all needy families, saying “We reiterate our call for a minimum national welfare benefit that will permit children and their parents to live in dignity. A decent society will not balance its budget on the backs of poor children.” Santorum is a critic of welfare.

6. The US bishops say that “the basic rights of workers must be respected–the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions…”. Santorum, who used to be supportive of unions in the 1990s, has now, predictably, turned against them.

7. Catholic bishops demand the withdrawal of Israel from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Rick Santorum denies that there are any Palestinians, so I guess he doesn’t agree with the bishops on that one.

8. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops ripped into Arizona’s law on treatment of immigrants, Cardinal Roger Mahony characterized Arizona’s S.B. 1070 as “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law,” saying it is based on “totally flawed reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources.” He even suggested that the law is a harbinger of an American Nazism! Santorum attacks ‘anchor babies’ or the provision of any services to children of illegal immigrants born and brought up in the US.

9. The Bishops have urged that illegal immigrants not be treated as criminals and that their contribution to this country be recognized.

10. The US Conference of Bishops has denounced, as has the Pope, the Bush idea of ‘preventive war’, and has come out against an attack on Iran in the absence of a real and present threat of an Iranian assault on the US. In contrast, Santorum wants to play Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove and ride the rocket down on Isfahan himself.

One bit of good news is that I've noticed that my evangelical students and colleagues are now actually more likely to be left wing on all of the above issues, and others such as the usury that defines our civilization as well as the so-called "right to work" laws which are necessary part of hoovering wealth from the disappearing middle class up to the .01% (these laws unconstitutionally abrogate union's rights to make contracts, a right explicitly defended in the most recent encyclical on labor). So, at least with respect to educated people of good will, it is a mistake to equate either Roman Catholocism or evangelical christianity with hypocrites like Terry, Perkins, Jindal, and Santorum. This is a huge sea change from a decade ago.

But let's be honest. The flip side of this is that most people are neither educated or of good will (we Prebyterians call this "the depravity of man" and it's true), which means there will always be marks for the kind of religiouss hypocrites that Jesus condemned in his own day.

being "born again" is very bad for your health

New research HERE.

One thing nice about being born again is that "backsliding" permits a huge amount of recursion. I have friends who have been born again again and a few who have been born again again again.

As for the research, one should be clear they've just demonstrated correlation. It may just be the case that people with brain damage are massively more likely to adopt conservative religious beliefs, not that having conservative religious beliefs rots your brain. My guess is that both are true to some extent.

The scientists hypothesize that feeling oneself persecuted might raise stress levels that lead to long term brain damage. Having grown up in some conservative churches, I think it's actually much more complicated than that. There are at least three other huge stresses of being born again.

1. At some level everyone involved knows that they are faking it. I remember when one of my friend's family quite the church. They quite because my friend's brother in law died from cancer even after several epensive bouts of faith healing. The whole thing got crazy and of course there were pretty strong insinuations from other church members that the inability of the faith healing to take was the family's fault for not "giving it up the lord." Now here's the weird thing. My friend was one of the biggest practitioners of the "gifts of the spirit" in the whole church. He was often the first one to start speaking in tongues or prophesying after communion. So asked him what that was all about after we'd both quite the church, and he said that he'd been deeply anxious about whether or not he was faking it, and later realized that he was. This is very common among people have to embed themselves deeper and deeper into a tissue of vicious lies and absurdities. I'm certain that something similar is the case in North Korea. For conservative Christians, consider teh following: (a) that the Bible is literally true, (b) that homosexuality is wrong, (c) that when bad things happen to people it is to some extent their fault because they didn't get right with God, (d) that a God who would torture people for eternity for not kissing his posterior enough actualy deserves praise, (e) that Jesus didn't really mean most of what he clearly said (cf. wealth, usury, divorce, organized religion, poverty, etc.)
2. Related to (1), in conservative churchs you are never allowed to complain about anything you yourself are going through (it's fine to complain about other people though), because if you are anything less than 100% happy then you must not be right with God. This is incredibly taxing.
3. Anger. One of the best predictors for having a fatal second heart attack is how angry you are. But despite this, beneath the phony "everything is great in my life because God loves me" ethos of these churches there is a constant simmering rage, hate actually, against others. The researchers partly got this right, because the hate is to some extent fed by feelings of persecution. But the researchers don't realize that it is the constant diet of hate and anger that leads these people to want to feel persecuted, just so they can justify their hate. This kind of thing feels great in the moment. You get to feel superior to most of humanity. Nonetheless, like a lot of things that feel really nice in the moment, is really bad for your long term health.

This being said, I do also think that brain damaged people are more likely to adopt conservative religious views, so I'm not sure how powerful the above causes are. However, given the plausibiliy of the causal factors I've enumerated, then it's one more thing for religious conservatives to hang their heads about. Not only are they funding the murder of homosexuals in Uganda, trying to destroy education in the United States (cf. Plantinga "Synthese Affair"), but they are also literally destroying their own brains!

In any case, the article is interesting. Joe Bob says check it out.

nice Emory colloquium with Dalai Lama and friends

Pursuing Happiness with the Dalai Lama from On Being on Vimeo.

Great interview with Dalai Lama, Jonathan Sacks (chief rabbi of the Commonwealth), Katharine Jefferts Schori (presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church), and Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Final set of notes for Adult Sunday School Class

I just finished my lecture notes for the Adult Sunday School Class I've been teaching these past few months on Marcus and Borg's The Meaning of Jesus.

If anyone's interested they are on-line at projectbraintrust.com/cogburn/sundayschool/themeaningofjesus.doc . The most disappointing thing about the class was to discover just how much of a dishonest sophist is N.T. Wright. I hated to discover this, because I was a big fan of his book Simply Christian. Here's a quote from my final lecture:

Back to the good, the bad, and the ugly of Wright.

The good comes when we get a glimpse of Wright’s a priori apologetics and practical wisdom concerning things like the role of worship and liturgy. Many of his insights into the essence of Christianity are deep and valuable.

The bad comes with the blinders he wears that no respectable historian would.

1. Most of Wright’s historical claims are inconsistent with the scholarly consensus that Mark is the earliest Gospel and that Matthew and Luke incorporated and changed material in Mark (along with the Q sayings, which are much less altered, and other sources).
2. Wright acts as if the gap of over thirty years between the earliest gospel source and the death of Jesus (with the destruction of Palestine taking place in the meantime) would not significantly change the oral stories told about Jesus; he even tries to argue for this in a completely unconvincing way, unconvincing both because it is inconsistent with Markan priority, because it is inconsistent with common sense, and because there is no evidence that oral religious traditions work this way.
3. Wright does not taking into account Hellenistic influences on sources that were written in Greek (!), following well known Greek literary conventions (esp. John and Acts),  primarily about one figure from a highly Hellenized area (Galilee) and mostly by another figure whose ministry was to the Hellenistic world.
4. Wright does not take seriously the scholarly consensus on the dating of the Gospels. These books were all written at the very earliest after a war where up to a million Jews were killed. Our earliest extant versions of any fragments of any of them are from the 200s.

Wright continually writes as he has great historical knowledge about what life was like for normal Palestinian Jews in the first century C.E. and tries to interpret the Gospels as if they faithfully record accounts of people living in that milieu. Independent of the weirdness of making such a claim about the Gospel authors, I have absolutely zero confidence that he is correctly characterizing life in first century Palestine. He is just way too postmodernly cavalier with historical research concerning the Bible.

The ugly comes with what he does with the bad. Borg is too polite to point any of this out, but we must.

1. Wright’s vision of Jesus as primarily a “Jewish prophet” leads him to articulate views shockingly close (if not identical) to traditional Christian anti-semitism, where Jewish people deserve what they get because they haven’t accepted Jesus (Wright says as much about the Roman-Jewish war and the destruction of the temple).

1. Wright’s doesn’t seem to be aware of the extent to which the denigration of Hellenistic sources as well as his closeness to inerrancy is also part and parcel of a very ugly strain of know-nothing anti-Roman Catholicism, one that cripples us by preventing us from learning both from the collective wisdom of the Magisterium and from conclusions by groups such as the Jesus Seminar.
2. Wright’s poor historical standards lead to overall bad argumentative standards, committing the strawman fallacy multiple times in his disagreements with Borg. For example, Borg’s serious argument about whether the pre-Easter Jesus knew that he was the messiah concerns how Matthew and Luke edit the original meaning of passages in Mark. But Wright just continually latches onto Borg’s claim about the psychology of people who claim to be messiahs (disingenuously calling it “the standard objection” on page 210).
3. When Wright goes on about “the Enlightenment” and “post-modernism” he really is working above his pay grade, and his conclusions are dangerously anti-science in a way that no Christian needs to be. It is no accident that such fideist denigration of reason is both again of a piece with anti-Roman Catholicism and such to justify simply ignoring centuries of research into the historical basis of the Bible.

Again, I think that much of Wright’s theology, especially when he is doing apologetics, survives this. And we have been lucky to get enough glimpses into that while wading through the dreck. It might have been better to read his wonderful book Simply Christian alongside Borg’s chapters.

Oops. I just realized that the video at right is pretty remarkably inappropriate. Ha! But I can't help it. Before I was a Christian I got in the habit of posting it to my blog whenever I achieved some closure on a given step of a literary project, such as finishing a draft or a rewrite ("prick your finger, it is done"). I see no reason to stop. And the song rocks my socks.

Actually, now that I think about it, given what the song means in the context of Marilyn Manson's great trilogy of albums, maybe it's not so inappropriate (if this is puzzling, please meditate on the fact that Jonny Cash didn't really shoot anybody in Reno).

Anyhow, these lecture notes come in at 44,332 words. If nothing else doing these courses (this is my third in as many years) has been good practice for getting me to type up more lecture notes for upper level university courses, which I'm trying for the first time with my course on Harman (those notes are at www.projectbraintrust.com/cogburn/currentcourses/4952sp12/4952sp12syllabus.doc ). I'm a little behind on those, but finishing the Sunday School class will give me more time to devote to them.

Tebowie

5 And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

As well as being the funniest thing I've seen all month, this is really quite an extraordinary performance, especially at around 1:06 when Jesus starts to sing.

Michael Ruse on Alvin Plantinga's recent bout of sophistry

Chronicle Brainstorm article HERE. Takeway:

So this is my beef with Plantinga – as it is with others of his ilk, including those at his institution, Calvin College, that led to the theologian John Schneider getting the sack because he suggested that Adam and Eve are not literal figures. It is not that they are Christians or that they believe in the bible or design. My defense of the legitimacy of these views is what gets me into hot water with the likes of Dawkins and Coyne. It is rather that, because of their unsophisticated versions of these beliefs, they simply are not prepared to engage in mature, responsible scholarship. And they bully those who are.

 I kind of feel sorry for Plantinga, because I think it would be very hard to keep one's wits about oneself if one were deified to the extent that he is by so many people, especially analytic philosophers who are both religious and conservative.

As someone who grew up in a conservative, religious millieu I get this. It's kind of like C.S. Lewis. . . You have no idea how empowering the Narnia novels are for kids who love fantasy but whose parents don't let them read huge swaths of literature. For a lot of my friends Plantinga was like a grownup version of that. They could actually engage with reasonable philosophy in these really crude evangelical colleges where you are taught ludicrous things about scripture and the world. You have no idea how liberating just being allowed to discourse reasonably, reading good philosophy and literature, is in that kind of awful atmosphere. . .

But it seems clear to me that Plantinga now is complicit in this very atmosphere, with his actions regarding homosexual faculty, defaming people who support science education, and yes, before that with his awful "Advice to Christian Philosophers" paper.

To whom much is given. . .

Against N.T. Wright's Postmodernism

Below are notes for my Sunday School class this last weekend. It's on Chapter 2 of Wright and Borg's excellent The Meaning of Jesus. I should say that I love Wright's popular apologetics, especially Simply Christian, which is why I find it somewhat mystifying that he leaves so little room for the role that a priori apologetics play in his interpretation of scripture.

One of the coolest things about the class is that there are so many good history professors who attend University Presbyterian Church. Paul Hoffman gave a really fascinating take on the historian's task which went well beyond prediction and retro-diction but did not give in to postmodern lunacy. Professor Hoffman noted that historians marshall evidence to tell stories, but the biggest task is to get a sense of the people being described from the evidence and then to truly portray that sense in the story. This brings in lots of normative presuppositions, but presuppositions that allow your narrative to track the true better. As an example of a typically Presbyterian presupposition, he noted that you just will not be able to describe other people's depravity realistically unless you see the depravity in your own heart. It's amazing in these respects how honesty and dishonesty in literature track honesty and dishonesty in history. Reading below will demonstrate how nicely Hoffman's example undermines Wright's postmodernist presuppositions and naive dichotomy between (descriptive) science and faith.

Anyhow, in addition to defending liberal interpretations of the New Testament, I think the following contains a good popular lecture against postmodernism, and one that gets to the heart of my own philosophical commitments.

Another Christian University Bans the Least Among Us

Once again, the rest of us must humbly implore Jesus to protect us from his followers.

Shorter University in Rome Georgia, has just forced all 200 employees to sign a pledge testifying that they aren't homosexuals. Story HERE. Highpoint of the article:

Shorter President Don Dowless told WSBTV that the goal wasn’t to offend people, and that lots of Christian schools have similar pledges. "These are biblical positions," he said.

I should note that not one of these schools prohibit wearing different types of fabric at the same time or seeing a naked woman menstruating or having sex without the purpose of procreating (possibly one or two prohibit divorce, even though the divorce rate of conservative christians is much higher than it is for the rest of us). None of them encourage polygamy. Even though these are all much, much clearly"biblical positions" than anything one might think about homosexuality (please watch the video at right).

The point is, everyone has to pick and choose which biblical injunctions count as moral ones. If you are an unchristian bigot who uses the religion in the manifestly Luciferian pursuit of wanting to feel better than others, then you are going to pick parts of the bible that help you be an even crappier person. If you take Jesus' actual words with a modicum of the seriousness they deserve, you are not.

Things to do if you want to live longer

Nice Daily Beast article HERE. They didn't mention anything about driving, which as the number one killer of people in their teens and twenties, has one of the biggest impact on death rates. Anyhow, here are the things they do list, with the percentage effect on your chance of being dead within 20 years.

There's some interesting philosophy here. Given how literally toxic getting laid off is (you are 15-20% more likely to die within twenty years if you are laid off), shouldn't this be reflected in criminal proceedings against people whose criminal behavior results in lots of other people losing jobs?

Also, lots of these things effect men and women differently. For example, being Mormon is much better for male mortality rates than for women. Should this inform feminist critiques of Mormonism? More strikingly is the effect of marrying a spouse more than 7 years younger than you (which decreases mortality for men and increases it for women).

Also, it is really important not to confuse correlations with causation. For example, a lot of the sleep data is probably the result of the fact that people who sleep too much are likely to be sleeping off hangovers. So there is a common cause for sleeping too much and increased mortality, rather than sleeping too much causing increased mortality. I strongly suspect the optimist/pessimist thing is the same thing. If a large enough percentage of the pessimists and optimists are being rational, then whatever is causing the pessimism and optimism is whatever is causing decreased and increased mortality rates. This being said, I'm going to express all of the following as if they were causal, because it's more fun that way.

1. Don't get laid off: +15-20%.
2. Get and stay married: +20%.
3. If you are a married woman, not marrying someone over seven years younger than you: +20%; if you are a married man, marrying someone over seven years younger than you: +11%.
4. Do not  more than 8.5 hours a night: +15% (but sleeping less than 4 hours is horrible too).
5. If you are a woman, have a waste less than 35 inches; if you are a man have one less than 40 inches: +25%.
6. Be an optimist: +55%.
7. Sit less than 8 hours a day: +18%.
8. Go to church regularly and do the social stuff involved: +25%.
9. Be a Mormon- men: +6.7%, women: +3.2%.
10. Be rich: +15%.
11. Drink two glasses of red wine a day (and no more): +25%.
12. Don't watch television: -8% for every hour a day consumed.
13. Live in Hawaii (life expectancy 81.3 versus Louisiana with 74.2).
14. Be a woman (outlive men by 5.1 years)
15. Be literate: +50%.

Some thoughts after finishing Alan Campell's trilogy

I just finished Alan Campell's excellent Scar Night, Iron Angel, God of Clocks trilogy.

One of the interesting things in it is that for most of the three books, the world is  pretty relentlessly hostile to human beings in a way that is just profoundly disturbing. The gates of Heaven have been closed so everybody ends up going to Hell after they die. The gods expelled from Heaven are pathologically awful. And Campell's Hell is really very convincingly hellish. And this goes on for centuries across many possible universes (new universes are opened up when time travel goes awry). And when heaven is finally reopened (only because of our heroes, and it is clear it could have gone the other way), all but one of the universes in the multiverse has to be left to die out in order for reality to be saved.

Good fiction almost always makes you look at things a little differently. Campell's books made me realize how incredibly bizarre it is that almost all of the popular debate about theism concerns the extent to which the universe is either fundamentally benevolent, on the one hand, or, on the other, just indifferent to sapient life (Spinozism being the best one can (and should!) do with a fundamentally indifferent universe). In the popular press, it's almost always someone like Dawkins or Dennett (really just impoverished Spinozism) versus theists with their benevolent universe.

What's weird is that if you can conceive of the universe as being benevolent or indifferent, then you can certainly conceive of it as being fundamentally malevolent. I think that Schopenhauer is the only Western philosopher who really saw things that way, with the basic amount of animal pain on earth just sort of damning any possible justification for existence. Of great classic prose writers, perhaps only Lovecraft really calls forth a fundamentally maleficent universe. But he is a tremendously influential fiction writer. Both he and Schopenhauer are sort of literary equivalents to the Velvet Underground. Only a couple hundred people bought their albums, but every one of them went out and started a pretty good band.

But the popular debates about theism never consider the possibility that our actual universe may embody the most frightening aspects of Lovecraft and Schopenhauer! It's always a war between indifference and benevolence.

I don't know how any of this fits in with my own Christianity. For very selfish reasons I often equate my own faith with the belief that things are ultimately beneficent, that at the very least (and perhaps one can hope for more than just this) the universe is evolving the way it should. 

But the evidence we can measure certainly supports Schopenhauer's assessment of reality. And I'm not sure how the many comforts I get from Christian worship and faith fit in with Jesus' injunction to pick up the cross if you want to follow him.

I think the only way to square that circle is if you really do only enter into a state of grace (which Leonard Cohen likens to one ski sliding down a hill) when you manifest Jesus' love. The beneficence is that if you can manifest this love, then your suffering can have meaning and be justified. And the proper pleasure of Christian worship is when it inculcates this love.

Perhaps that's too nakedly utilitarian. I don't know. It fits with Schopenhauer to the extent that when in a state of grace we experience a loss of self. Though he would properly find it really perverse to describe that as union with God. I'm not sure too much hangs on whether it's described that way or not (certainly people who would not describe it that way have been in states of grace).

In any case, I highly recommend Campell's books. Great steampunk, fantastic characters, wonderful understated love story between an angel and failed assassin, and also one of the best extant literary descriptions of Hell.

Speaking of being in a state of grace, here's an example (keep watching if it's not clear at first; this kid really owns Cohen's masterpiece; it's a tremendously beautiful thing).

Q1 material (earliest material attributed to Jesus)

The Beatitudes

6:20-23 Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

 

Love of Enemies

6:27-37 But I say to you that hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from him who takes away your cloak do not withhold your coat as well. Give to every one who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. As you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

 

Judging Others

6:37-42 Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; and give and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully taught will be like his teacher. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.

 

Fruits

6:43-45 For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good man out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.

 

House on Rock

6:47-49 Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep, and built the foundation upon rock; and when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house, and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But he who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation, against which the stream broke, and immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.

 

On Following Jesus

9:57-62 As they were going along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” But he said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

 

Commissioning of the 70

10:2-12 He said to them, The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; salute no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house!’ And if a son of peace is there, your peace shall rest upon him; but if not, it shall return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking what they provide, for the laborer deserves his wages. Do not go from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you; heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ Whenever you enter a town and they do not receive you, go into its streets and say: ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off against you; nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’

 

The Lord’s Prayer

11:2-4 When you pray, say, ‘Father, hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread; and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us; and lead us not into temptation.’

 

Encouragement to Pray

11:9-13 Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. Everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

 

Fearless Confession

12:2-3 Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.

 

12:4-5 I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.  

 

12:6-7 Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.

 

 Anxiety

12:22-31 Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat nor about your body, what you shall put on. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens, they neither sow nor reap. They have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! Which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass which is alive in the field today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O men of little faith! Do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be of anxious mind. For all the nations of the world seek these things; and your Father knows that you need them. Instead seek his kingdom, and these things shall be yours as well.

 

Treasures in Heaven

12:33-34 Sell your possessions, and give alms; provide your selves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

 

Watchfulness and Faithfulness

12:39-40 If the householder had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would have been awake and would not have let his house to be broken into, you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

 

Leaven

13:20-21 He said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened.”

 

Great Supper

14:16-23 A man once gave a great banquet, and invited many and at the time of the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come for all is now ready.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it; I pray you, have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have bought a yoke of oxen, I pray you, have me excused,’ And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ So the servant came and reported this to his master. Then the householder in anger said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame,’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ The master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges, and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.’

 

Conditions of Discipleship

14:26-27 If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple.

 

Parable of Salt

14:34-35 Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is fit neither for the land nor for the dunghill; men throw it away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

 

Lost Sheep

15:4-10 What man among you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.  

saving religion from neo-Kantianism

(1) In a recent thread on Leiterreports concerning the philosophical incompetence of Stanley Fish (someone on whom I've published (with Silcox) an article in The British Journal of Aesthetics). Blinn Combs made a really interesting point against my attempt to argue that the contents of religious beliefs (including second order beliefs about the nature and role of religious beliefs themselves) are not determined by a vote of people who claim to be believers, but rather in terms of deference to experts, which can be non-circularly specified (that is, specified without presupposing the truth of religious doctrine) in terms of knowledge of the various languages and relevant history. The point I'd been trying ot make is that most experts in this sense who profess religious belief are not fundamentalists/bigots and realize that there is no sense in which religious texts can be claimed to be inerrant. I don't think his response to my point works (I responded in the thread), but in making his argument Combs says something really interesting:

That said, there's a straightforward explanation for why more vulgar religious beliefs become replaced by a contemplative/mystical streak the more one knows about history--the contents of those (still linguaform)beliefs are often severely undermined by a critical view of that history--not to mention knowledge of the relevant languages and texts. A plausible way to protect the remnants of the original belief will then be simply to compartmentalize it in a way that makes it immune to critique, reconceptualizing it as metaphorical, or mystical, meditative, or "non-linguaform."

What's really interesting to me about this is that Combs' account of the role mysticism plays for intellectuals it is so similar to J.L. Austin's theory of the role sense data played among early analytic philosophers (in my wretched historical ignorance, for all I know, Hegel made the same critique) in Sense and Sensibilia. One realizes at some point during the Cartesian quest for certainty that there is not much to be had, so what one does is move inward, saying that we can't be certain about the fact that there is a table in front of us, but we can be certain that we are experiencing table sense data (again, for all I know, this is strongly analogous to Heidegger's critique of Husserlian "bracketing".).

However, once you render beliefs about something immune from all criticism in this way, you are taking the concepts about it out of the "space of reasons" and Wittgensteinian private language arguments show that your talk lacks content (the theoretical term for this from recent logic-oriented technical philosophy is "bullshit"). In the case of the thing Combs so accurately describes, "God" becomes Wittgenstein's notorious invisible, weightless beetle in the box that would disappear were the box to be opened.

(2) As becomes very clear in different ways from Lee Braver and Graham Priest's work, the Wittgensteinian critique of private languages, as well as the related Sellarsian critique of the "myth of the given," bear a very strong resemblance to the "affection problem" faced by transcendental idealism. The affection problem is the problem of being forced to say things about the noumenal realm (such as that it exists, or that it causes phenomena) in the statement of transcendental idealism that are strictly speaking prohibited from being sayable by transcendental idealism. Ironically (given the animosity of the latter for the former), Hegel and Schopenhauer had the most insightful things to say about what one might do when you honestly face this problem.

As Priest is aware, in the context of religious epistemology, the view that gets critiqued is negative theology, which treats God as the noumenon/content that we cannot talk about, but which nonetheless still talks about God.

But in thinking about these things, I realized that at least the cartoon version of Plantinga's new epistemology is simply the neo-Kantian reverse of intellectual's negative theology, instead of God being the unknowable noumena, he is somehow presupposed by the conceptual scheme that is organizing the phenomena of the believer. But the same thing is happening that Combs asserts with the intellectual mystic, being presupposed by the scheme is the way to protect religious belief from rational criticism. I don't know if this is Plantinga's actual view (I read the stuff fifteen years ago), but I have a distressing number of otherwise smart fundamentalist students who use Plantinga's views in this very way.

And I think one should respond to the Plantingian position with the Hegelian, Austininian, Wittgensteinian, Sellarsian point that the strategy is only successful to the extent that it robs the beliefs in question of meaningful content.

(3) The core error of post-modern negative theology and Plantinganianism (again, possibly to be distinguished from what Plantinga actually says) is accepting the hyper-Protestant idea that religious faith as a kind of belief (this ties to the Cartesian equation of knowledge with propositional certainty), as opposed to the activity of being faithful.

In no way is my love and devotion for my wife representable by a set of beliefs about her (nor by a set of statements listing my behaviors for that matter). Why should love for, and devotion to, incarnations such as Jesus, Krishna, or the Buddha or prophets like Muhammad be different?

Note that this is not Phillips style neo-Wittgensteinian, because I don't think that the cognitive content of religious beliefs is really spelled out in terms of such affective stances and behaviors. I don't want to "leave everything as it is." I'm very happy to put forward views that entail that most religious people, including Saint Paul, have lots of false first and second order religious beliefs.

(4) Psychologically, I find it harder to critique "first-order" religious beliefs for some reason. Maybe because one should sympathize with the fear (fear of being removed from one's community, fear of death, fear of being gay) that leads people to morally and metaphysically problematic first-order religious beliefs and practices. Maybe also because of the danger of becoming a condescending moral scold in a manner inconsistent with Christian love.

One of the stranger things that Saint Paul said (that Heidegger rightfully found philosophically interesting, perhaps in part because it involves informative circularity) is that one of the tests for being a Christian is the ability to recognize Antichrists as Antichrists. In this very respect Christopher Hitchens is a much better Christians than either the vast hoard of people who send money to the likes of Pat Robertson or Jerry Fallwell, or the minority of academics (for some reason over-represented in Philosophy Departments) who defend a version of Christianity that creates such monstrosities.

That is:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.'

The point isn't that people who succumb to human lizards like Robertson are going to hell, but rather that while succumbing to the conservative "Christian" resentment that Nietzsche persuasively argues is absolutely foreign to Christ but all too typical of Christianity we remove ourselves from being in a state of grace.

Again, this is not a matter of belief (though failure results in false moral beliefs), but a matter of being faithful, being open to grace in the way taught by Jesus and the prophets, whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or aetheist (everyone should read and learn from Hitchens' excellent God is not Great). Islam and some branches of Hinduism are interesting here; the five pillars of Islam mostly concern practical behavior, as does the practice of yoga. Ideally, these are to open the faithful's heart in a way that leads to grace and community with all. This has nothing to do with belief, but is really more akin to a technology of the self (see discussion of Sloterdijk's new book HERE).

Of course, all faith traditions have their Pat Robertsons! But I'm responsible to and for those in mine.

interesting Leiter Reports thread on Stanley Fish

The thread is HERE. My comment is somewhere around #36.

interesting instance of distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility

I was talking about a nice John Hare paper with my metaphysics class yesterday and apparently Presbyterian ministers must in their ordination vows promise to accept damnation if doing so was to the greater glory of God.

I find this moving, but it is interesting and problematic for a lot of reasons. In class, Ben Dubroc noted that on many accounts it would be metaphysically impossible for someone to be damned in this way. So the ministers might be promising to accept something that is metaphysically impossible. That's weird!

I wonder if epistemic possibility helps here. Liberal Presbyterians accept that doubt and religious faith in no way contradict each other. So maybe the claim can be understood as holding that even though, for all we know, we might be wrong about this stuff (even if it's in fact true and metaphysically necessary), we would still be willing to pick up the cross ourselves.

[Some notes: Certain takes on this view are self-interested. My view that belief has nothing to do with faith is to the far, far left on what one could think and still call oneself a Christian (note that I am not a Phillips style Wittgensteinian who takes a non-cognitivist view of religious belief either). I also have pretty severe doubts about the very intelligibility, or the ultimate moral value, of the belief that the human ego survives death. Though that belief is such a consolation to the bereaved that of course I don't insist on this when outside of the philosophy classroom.]

thoughts on inerrancy

The chapter on God Games and the Euthyphro Dilemma of me and Mark's maybe released book (the date of release on the Amazon page is December 15th, but it's still only available for pre-order) we discussed a number of clear empirical contradictions in the Bible (e.g. number of generations between David and Jesus, who built the ark of the covenant, who anointed Jesus in Bethany, etc.) to provide some evidence (we have other arguments too) that the Bible also contains ethical contradictions.

I've been re-reading the Bible now and it weirds me out that the first contradiction actually occurs in the very first two chapters, e.g.:

(I) In Genesis 1.26 God creates Adam on the fifth day. In this version God creates, in this order, (1) heavens, earth, light, darkness, (2) water, dry land, vegetation/plants, (3) day, night, the seasons, the sun, the moon, (4) sea monsters, fish, birds, (5) animals, then after that humans (male and female).

(II) But then in Genesis Chapter 2 God creates man on the same day he made the earth and heavens and rain. This is explicitly stated to be before any plants exist ("for the Lord God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth").

So in the first chapter man is created four days after the heavens and earth (two days after plants) are created, and in the second he's created the same day as the heavens earth (and before plants) are created.

I think the composers of the various finished books (and Genesis was certainly an amalgamation of at least two distinct contradictory texts) wanted to start the whole thing off with something equivalent to saying, "IF YOU THINK OR EVEN RATIONALLY PRESUPPOSE THAT ALL OF THE SENTENCES HEREIN ARE LITERALLY TRUE, THEN YOU NEED MEDICAL ATTENTION." Or as an Episcopal Bishop once said, "Anyone who thinks the Bible is literally true, hasn't read it." Why else would you begin with such a clear contradiction?

 To be fair, the educated evangelicals of good will (and I know three very smart, decent, ones) tend to come up with pretty sophisticated accounts of what "literal truth" comes to such that they can affirm as a matter of faith the inerrancy of scripture and still have a pretty good idea of what scripture says. In my heart of hearts I can't help but feel that this is sophistical though. That in an anti-Kierkegaardian sense faith is being equated with belief in certain propositions, and then in an all-too-human sense, belief in certain propositions is being equated with the ability to affirm certain important sentences. So as long as you assert "The Bible is inerrant" with a serious expression, you are O.K. even if you end up adopting a ridiculous theory of truth to save yourself from the facts that: (1) empirical contradictions cannot be true, and (2) the Bible contains empirical contradictions.

I think this tendency goes way back in Christianity. The earliest Jesus groups saw Jesus as overturning The Law. As a result, non-Jews could worship a monotheistic God who gave a damn about the plight of the poor and oppressed. Rich and poor, foreigner and compatriate, pagan and Jew, could all dine together (a very big deal at the time, and a not nearly big enough deal today) and in fact developed something like communes (all of the various gospels, canonical or not, are texts for such groups) that tried to live according to Jesus' message: which (and this is according to Q, which is the oldest reconstructed gospel) took elements of the Greek cynicism that Jesus was exposed to as a youth (Galilee is not in Judea, and Jesus would have grown up within walking distance to over twenty Greek communities that hosted wandering cynic philosophers during that period in history) and made them into something that could sustain a society instead of just those who individually dropped out, and then combined that with the Jewish belief that the universe itself gave a damn about you. This caught on in the classical world in part because it was the Good News and in part because no extant religion was as consistent with the cosmopolitanism demanded by Roman expansion. Why it caught on in the East and survived there for almost a thousand  years until the Mongol degradations, and to what extent it was shaped by Buddhism, is another story (see the previous post).

But to paraphrase Iggy Pop explaining his drug problems- "it's terrible when people are always telling you to get with the program. I hated the program. The program was stupid and vile. But then after a few years you don't have any program at all. And that's just as bad." Many, if not most, of Saint Paul's efforts were an attempt to square Iggy Pop's circle, and as a result he says a lot of incoherent things about the Law.

And ever since, organized Christianity has been a battleground between those who read Jesus as a critic of the law (in favor of the law's spirit, which is fully present when one honors God and loves one's neighbors) and the new Pharisees, many of whom like Saint Paul are initially just trying to reign in the harm done to people when they get too far outside any program. In Paul's case was heroic, and yielded much beautiful writing, but it dragged the early Church away from the Jesus of Q. This was probalby inevitable, given our fallen nature.

Following Paul, in the West Roman Catholicism erected a huge new system of Law in its own right to accomplish this. John Calvin reacted accordingly, but then his followers at Princeton University in the 1700's again could not stand the freedom this gave people to work out for themselves their relationship with God. So they invented the doctrine of biblical innerancy. There is no faith in God himself, so people need an idol, only these idols are books and priests and politicians (many more dearly bought than gold).

The continuous re-institution of the Law is the cardinal sin of the Christian Church; it is a fundamental act of faithlessness, albeit a sin politically empowered groups of Christians will continue to commit throughout history. And it is no accident that those who do so end up doing egregiously more evil (e.g. inquisition, colonialism, holocaust, contemporary anti-gay hysteria, etc.) than the gnostics they recoil from. For example, today we see how Nixon's "silent majority" really was created simply by recoiling from the scary excesses of the hippies. This led to Reagen's "trickle down" economics, the religious right, Bush's torture program- and so much else destructive to the faith and morals of a supposedly Christian civilization. The gnostics are of necessity disorganized and pathetic, but politically empowered religions are anything but.

If you really had faith in Jesus, you would not need a priest or bible or slick politician or history of Catholic philosophical thought to tell you what to parrot. We do not live in a totalitarian universe that rewards those who parrot the correct line. This was so much a part of Jesus' point, that it's a travesty that so much of mainstream Protestant and Catholic Christianity is at variance with it.

In contrast to this, the truly faithful is the person who doesn't pretend to lack doubts, and who refuses to put their reason on hold, but still remains devoted to God and who is able to be more loving (to people, truth, beauty, the universe itself) as a consequence of this devotion. And the person who loves their neighbor and honors God by doing things like lessening pain and increasing beauty is much more a devotee than someone who parrots the line, even if our Pharisaical culture stupidly calls the the parrots "Christian."

Now obviously (to me at least) the rituals of church answer deep spiritual needs and help many people with their devotion. I'm not putting that down. But to confuse this role with getting people to pretend to believe dogma that they don't even understand, much of which is absurd, and some of which is evil and antithetical to the very concept of a loving deity. . . well that's just sad.

On a happier note, here's a lovely part of Mica (6:6-8)

With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?