Jon Cogburn's Blog

final version of sunday school lecture notes for now

Posting has been light. I've been really digging into no-luck epistemologies, in particular Keith DeRose's fantastic work. But all my thoughts are going into academic papers with Jeff Roland, and I almost never blog arguments that I'm putting into papers.

One other cool thing- Me and University Presbyterian Church Associate Pastor Clint Mitchell's notes on biblical interpretation and authority are finalized for the remainder of this semester's class and on-line HERE. A few conclusions:

1. Naive inerrancy (I assume some folks at Baylor have a more sophisticated version than the kind my evangelical students imbibe) is really daft. Independent of the clear contradictions, historical falsehoods, lack of surviving original texts, and also what we know about how the material got included- One of the great things about the Bible is how it is first and foremost a long chronicle of human failings. Why think that the same fallible humans who, for example, worshipped a golden calf after being freed from slavery and receiving miraculous food every morning, or who killed Jesus for that matter (and we all had a hand in that) would be competent enough to pen an innerrant text? This tension is actually I think one of the fundamental contradictions in much of the protestant tradition. The reformed tradition that started the doctrine of innerancy (at Princeton seminary) has kept the emphasis on human fallibility and rejected the dogma that scripture is inerrant, but the newer evangelicals have done the opposite
2. The "rule of love" by which a non-loving interpretation of Bible is wrong, is both historically and philosophically defensible. Historically, because the Jesus Seminar type tests for what Jesus actually might have said (involving research into the Q gospel) trace back to sayings about love trumping everything. This actually ties to innerancy- i.e. the written Law being neither sufficient (e.g. it's not good enough just to not committ adultery, or to follow the commandments) nor necessary (e.g. it's O.K. to heal on the sabbath). Philosophically, because Euthyphro dilemma type worries lead to a mystical identification of God with love.
3. After this study I'm even more glad I picked Presbyterianism when I rejoined a Christian spiritual community. The official church documents on authority and interpretation (linked to in Mitchell and me's document) are really very sensible, stressing the reformed traditions' emphasis on human fallibility, showing how PC(USA)  has moved away from inerrancy, as well as stressing the necessity of taking seriously academic research into the Bible.

three cheers for the Associate Baptist Press

Great article by Ken Camp and Robert Marus on the troubling propensity of many conservative Christians to believe and spread patent falsehoods HERE. Camp and Marus discuss a set of these involving Madeleine O Hare, Al Gore, and President Obama.

God bless snopes.com! Exploring it gives you a fascinating tour of America's psychic underbelly.

revised version of sunday school notes

I've uploaded a revised version of the Sunday School notes from me and UPC associate pastor Clint Mitchell HERE. I'm learning a huge amount of cool stuff by doing this, and I think the notes have really good resources for anyone interested in issues of biblical interpretation and authority. Joe Bob says check them out.

Heidi Silcox called my attention to this video. It's funny because I've just started rereading the Old Testament and my prime reaction is just how weird the early stuff Bowers is talking about is. I kind of interpret it along the lines of the philosophy professor in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, as the fallible record of people's attempts to make sense of a just and loving divinity. No sooner had they thought of a God who demands fairness and love than that they portray that God as telling Abraham to sacrifice his son. [Another really interesting take is Jack Miles' excellent God: A Biography. If you read the stuff in Hebrew in the Jewish ordering, God comes across as very fallible and somewhat pitiable. He just doesn't forsee much of the stuff that happens and often responds badly.]

Here's Leonard Cohen's take on the Abraham/Isaac thing. It's preferable to Kierkegaard's take I think, and has particular resonance in a country and age where the destruction of the New Deal social contract over the last thirty years just is the unconscionable theft our children's inheritance (environmental destruction, unsustainable debt, radical failure to invest in infrastructure, increasing income disparity, etc.).

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.  

notes for Sunday School

Just in case anybody is interested, HERE are the handouts I made for the Sunday School class I'm co-teaching with Pastor Clint Mitchell this semester. I'll probably make some changes to it as we get closer to the actual classes and I continue to read more.

The material concerns authority and interpretation of scripture, and includes among other things a whole Q gospel (the material identical in Luke and Matthew that is not in Mark) and some nice stuff on the Euthyphro dilemma from me and Mark's book (which you can purchase by clicking on the picture of the cover to the left). A couple of things have been really great in the research I've done for this: (1) how sensible and philosophically sensitive the Presbyterian guidelines for interpretation are, (2) how empirical research into the composition of Q now pretty strongly supports the pre-Schweitzer lefty interpretation of the historical Jesus. In the Schweitzer view, the historical Jesus was a radical preacher of apocalypse, and the moral stuff got added later when the apocalypse didn't happen. Recent research on layers of composition in Q and on the Thomas gospel (35% of which is made up of Q material!) show that the picture is if anything just the opposite. The apocalyptic stuff got added later when the communities who accepted the moral critique (the beatitudes, love your enemy, do not judge, and the beautiful injunctions about anxiety) experienced rejection and possibly persecution. And this was all added before the mythological stuff (and I don't mean that pejoratively, it's just a fact that strikingly similar versions of the virgin birth and resurrection stories were a central part of Greek and Egyptian mystery religions, religions that people in Galilee and Judea knew about, prior to Christianity) got added by the Mark community.

I'll post Mack's version of the first layer of Q in a bit. It's really remarkable to think that this is stuff that there is a good chance that Jesus actually said.

In the beginning. . .

I think it's pretty common for people to assume that if you are a students of philosophy and a Christian that the Gospel of John is going to be your favorite, usually because of the opening Stoic bit about the Logos.

This is really weird to me because I find John on its own to be pretty insufferable. I really don't like it. There are only two places in the whole Gospel that concern how we should live (to be fair, one of these is the story of Jesus stopping the stoning of the adulteress). It is massively redundant with an incoherent narrative structure, and (to me, trying to read it on its own) Jesus comes across like a bored, petulant, and ego-maniacal space alien. In addition, the author clearly has hurt feelings about his group being thrown out of the synagogue and is getting sublimated revenge against "the Jews" (and to this day John remains the main source of Christian anti-antisemitism).

It's so alien that I hypothesize that everyone around the group had access to other "sayings Gospels" (such as Q and Thomas) so didn't feel any need to include anything about what Jesus actually taught. It's only if you read it in light of the other Gospels that it becomes explicable. The author is angry because some other group didn't buy all of the mythology surrounding Christ and wrote John solely in order to argue the contrary (and castigate the other group). But who is this Christ he is writing about? Just reading John tells you almost nothing except for the mythology; the magic without the ethics is strangely more like portrayals of pagan Greek divinities than the Jesus of Matthew and Luke. But if the author of John is assuming that you know the beatitudes already because you've got access to the Q sayings, then there is a difference between Jesus and Dionysius.

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.]

Wheaton College Rescinds Job Offer to Socrates

Wheaton College was going to hire Socrates to be on their philosophy faculty (actually extending a job offer to him), but then someone on the hiring committee read the end of Plato's Charmides.

Charmides said: I am sure that I do not know, Socrates, whether I have or have not this gift of wisdom and temperance; for how can I know whether I have a thing, of which even you and Critias are, as you say, unable to discover the nature?-(not that I believe you.) And further, I am sure, Socrates, that I do need the charm, and as far as I am concerned, I shall be willing to be charmed by you daily, until you say that I have had enough.

Very good, Charmides, said Critias; if you do this I shall have a proof of your temperance, that is, if you allow yourself to be charmed by Socrates, and never desert him at all.

You may depend on my following and not deserting him, said Charmides: if you who are my guardian command me, I should be very wrong not to obey you.

And I do command you, he said.

Then I will do as you say, and begin this very day.

You sirs, I said, what are you conspiring about?

We are not conspiring, said Charmides, we have conspired already.

And are you about to use violence, without even going through the forms of justice?

Yes, I shall use violence, he replied, since he orders me; and therefore you had better consider well.

But the time for consideration has passed, I said, when violence is employed; and you, when you are determined on anything, and in the mood of violence, are irresistible.

Do not you resist me then, he said.

I will not resist you, I replied.

I don't know if the Wheaton hiring committee has gotten to the Symposium yet; that might have further influenced the revocation of the job offer. Poor Socrates.

The fact that Socrates (through Plato and Plotinus and Augustine) is one of the inventors of Christian theology did not tell sufficiently in his favor.

The fact that the Q Gospel (source material for two of the others) is very likely influenced by the traveling Socratic Cynic philosophers that Jesus saw as a child (he lived within walking distance of over twenty Greek communities, and one day's walk from Gadara, a center of Cynic philosophy) did not tell sufficiently in his favor. The professors at Wheaton College obviously know better than Jesus.

Should I Brush the Dust from my Feet?

The following twelve are people I know who have signed the counterpetition to Charles Hermes' original anti-discrimination petition.

• Daniel Bonevac (took classes with as an undergraduate)
• William Lane Craig (saw interesting lecture on special relativity)
• Ed Henderson (colleague in my department)
• Robert C. Koons (took classes with as an undergraduate)
• Jeffrey Koperski (went to graduate school with)
• R. Keith Loftin (recently graduated M.A. student of my department)
• Alasdair MacIntyre (a huge fan of his work)
• Roger Scruton (a fan of his work)
• Ed Song (a colleague in my department)
• Alvin Plantinga (ate dinner with once)
• Peter Van Inwagen (ate dinner with and got drinks with once)
• Linda Zagzebski (sat in on a class on her virtue epistemology book)

It's hard for me to be dispassionate about this, and I am in fact very depressed. (1) Among my gay friends, two were bullied sadistically and mercilessly in high school, another one died of AIDS, and another was beaten so bad that he spent days in intensive care. I can't help but to see this as more persecution of these people, as well as the other gay people I know and cherish. (2) I grew up for the most part in Montgomery, Alabama during the final parts of the original civil rights struggle (went to church with Julian McPhillips and was friends with Morris Dees' daughter). My early love of philosophy in part comes from learning it from people like McPhillips and Dees. (3) Hermes' original petition doesn't ask very much. It just says.

We, the undersigned, request that the American Philosophical Association either (1) enforce its policy and prohibit institutions that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation from advertising in 'Jobs for Philosophers' or (2) clearly mark institutions with these policies as institutions that violate our anti-discrimination policy. If the APA is unwilling to take either of these measures, we request that the APA publicly inform its members that it will not protect homosexual philosophers and remove its anti-discrimination policy to end the illusion that a primary function of the APA is to protect the rights of its members.

That is, the petition only asks that the APA honor its explicitly stated anti-discrimination platform, or to change that platform. Why do philosophers oppose a simple demand for consistency (and we're not talking about truth paradoxes and the kinds of thing that animate Graham Priest here)? (4) I see the kind of evangelicalism practiced by the discriminatory institutions (one that absurdly takes the Bible to be literally true, that viciously worships a God who would consign the vast majority of people to eternal perdition because of their metaphysical beliefs, one that persecutes homosexuals) as anti-Christian (and by "Christian" here I don't mean "what most Christians believe" but "what the historical Jesus had in mind"). (5) In pursuing my own salvation, I want to believe that some things (including, and especially, philosophy) are redemptive by their very nature. The manner in which the "Christian" philosophers on the relevant Leiter Reports threads so closely approximate the bigots of my youth has completely disabused me of this. These people have PhDs in philosophy. What a complete drag.

Arguments about Hermes' anti-discrimination petition can be found on Leiter Reports HERE. Arguments about the counter-petition can be found on Leiter Reports HERE. Anyone genuinely interested in philosophical issues concerning homosexuality should order  John Corvino's book. Anyone genuinely interested in the religious issues should order Jack Rogers' book.

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?

some thoughts for the coming festival of Saturnalia

Fascinating article in the Boston Globe today. Even if you bristle at the hyper-ecumenicalism of the author (and I know two opinionated readers of this blog will, one from the religious right and the other from the humanist left), the history presented about half-way through the article is really interesting.

In some of my (too slight) studies of the history of Indian philosophy, I've come to the working thesis that early Christian monastic communities (whose ascendancy Edward Gibbon in part blames for the ultimate fall of Rome) are imports from Buddhism: (1) the similarities between Buddhist and Christian monastic communities is so great that it strains credulity to think they arose independently, (2) the Buddhists are the first to have established such communities (predating Christianity by hundreds of years), and (3) the Buddhists and early Christians almost certainly interacted at length in northern India and Persia.

Jenkins' information about the history that led up to the Nestorian church I think maybe provides more support to this. At some point I want to graph out some time-lines of the relevant events.

In a broader sense this is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. It is clear that the doctrinal aspects of Christianity were strongly influenced by: (1) Judaism (well, duh), (2) Greco-Roman mythology (virgin birth, resurrection, early signs or greatness, disappearing in childhood, etc.), (3) popular Platonism (and this goes back to the neo-cynic (in the classical sense) historical (at least the closest we can get) Jesus of the book of Q; it is not just a later, Roman neo-Platonist addition), and (4) Egyptian mythology (Egypt was Christian for four hundred years, and a good argument can be made that the doctrine of the trinity bears the same relation to previous Egyptian beliefs as do the Catholic holidays (saints) to previous pagan festivals (divinities)). And I think the monastic aspect probably comes from Buddhism. So now the question is to what extent doctrine is influenced by Buddhism as well. Clearly there are overwhelming similarities, but to what extent did Christianity reinvent these, and to what extent were they imported from India?

For the record, none of the above is inconsistent with liberal Presbyterianism.