Holy fools

The Gutless Pacifist is upset at Christianity Today's coverage of Bono. I only read the main article, which is basically quite sympathetic, and includes an interesting bit about Dublin's religious atmosphere at the time Bono converted:

Bono's spirituality is more than just a reflection of antisectarianism, said Steve Stockman, a chaplain at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and author of Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 (Relevant, 2001). "At the time Bono was involved with Shalom, something unique was happening in Dublin," he explains. "There was a movement of the Holy Spirit that you simply cannot deny. In some ways I think it was the Jesus Movement hit Dublin eight years late. That radical, almost hippie attitude at some level, that this is a radical thing to live in the Spirit . . . It gave Dublin something that was vibrant and exciting and trendy, almost. Bono and [Alison] were certainly caught up in the middle of that. They've never been able to get over that, no matter how their faith has changed. The roots of what they're doing now are in whatever the Spirit was doing back then."

I have been thinking of this in context of what I wrote in the previous post, about American religious vitality vs. European secularism. There have been new religious movements in Europe, but they don't seem to really take off the way they do here. I don't know enough about European culture to really know why, but it does seem to follow that if you're in a society where almost everybody at least nominally belongs to one church, it'll be harder to bring in a new one.

Some hint of that attitude, I think, can be seen in the European moves against "cults." As the State Department reported, several European countries in the last few years have fought against small religious groups working in their countries. And their ideas of what makes a "cult" are, uh, different from Americans'. As the report says: "In Belgium, the Center for Information and Advice on Harmful Sectarian Organizations collects and disseminates information on harmful sectarian groups and devises evaluative criteria to assess the risk for brainwashing, financial exploitation, and isolation from family. The Belgian list of sects includes Baptists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, the Roman Catholic prelature of Opus Dei, and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)."

Any country that thinks the YWCA is a dangerous cult has got to be a tough place to start a new church! Although Americans have our own intolerances, of course, we seem to accept religious weirdness a lot more easily than Europeans. If it produces the occasional disaster like Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate, we accept that risk. So to reiterate my original point, I think cultural factors are influencing Europe's and Japan's secularization at least as much as wealth and education are. There's no rule that because it happened a certain way in a couple cultures, it will play out the same in all of them.

I can't help myself, it's a new religion

David Brooks opines in this month's Atlantic that predictions of the death of religion have been greatly exaggerated:

Until September 11 I accepted the notion that as the world becomes richer and better educated, it becomes less religious. Extrapolating from a tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity (in Western Europe and parts of North America), this theory holds that as history moves forward, science displaces dogma and reason replaces unthinking obedience. A region that has not yet had a reformation and an enlightenment, such as the Arab world, sooner or later will.

It's now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom...

Moreover, it is the denominations that refuse to adapt to secularism that are growing the fastest, while those that try to be "modern" and "relevant" are withering. Ecstatic forms of Christianity and "anti-modern" Islam are thriving. The Christian population in Africa, which was about 10 million in 1900 and is currently about 360 million, is expected to grow to 633 million by 2025, with conservative, evangelical, and syncretistic groups dominating. In Africa churches are becoming more influential than many nations, with both good and bad effects.

Chris Mooney begs to differ:

A recent poll of 44 nations by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that on the whole the secularization theory is correct, with the following exception: The U.S. is both modern and wealthy but also very religious. This puts us in start contrast with other industrialized nations in Europe and countries like Canada, South Korea, and Japan...

I think you'll find that he basically fudges the difference between developed and developing nations in order to support his thesis. But a comprehensive picture of the world does indeed show wealthy developed nations growing more secular -- with one glaring exception.

Let me try to split the difference here. Religiously speaking, modernization -- including the phenomena of increasing wealth and education -- has brought profound changes in both the U.S. and the other nations that have been through it. The difference is that, while a lot of people in other countries have responded by losing interest in religion altogether, the U.S. responds by generating new sects.

Brooks mentions a fact that often surprises observers, that it's the churches "refuse to adapt" that are growing fastest, rather than liberal ones. That's true in the sense that they tend to stay morally strict, but that does not mean they're identical to pre-modern churches. In fact, many of those churches and movements are new and non-traditional. As Brooks says elsewhere in the article, the biggest movement in Christianity today is Pentecostalism, which is just over 100 years old. And I can tell you that the Pentecostal church I attend, with its unstructured service, casual dress, and raucous approach to worship, is anything but traditional. (And then there's the funky business of speaking in tongues, which I've never actually seen in my church.)

Even fundamentalism, which often styles itself as the protector of old-time faith, is a new movement, even younger than Pentecostalism. And dispensational premillennialism -- the colorfully literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation featured in the Left Behind novels and a lot of cheesy movies -- only dates back to th 1820s. American Christianity has changed profoundly in the modern era. It just hasn't changed in ways that people expected.

America was initially colonized by followers of then-new religious movements, and it has continued that bottom-up approach to religion to this day. Europe and Japan have had state churches (if you can call Shintoism a church), and their top-down models haven't aged so well. What happens to the rest of the world as it modernizes depends on whether it's more like America or more like Europe/Japan. Outside of the Islamic world, poorer countries don't seem to be going for the state-religion approach. Africa has already turned into a major generator of new sects, much like early America. So it seems unlikely to me that, just because America is an anomaly today, it will always be so.

Fred Rogers

Jeanne d'Arc does a stunning tribute. What could I possibly add?

Loving your enemies

There's been a discussion going on among Catholic bloggers about praying for your enemies. Karen at Disordered Affections claims that some people (Hitler, Osama bin Laden) are "perfectly possessed," the embodiment of evil, and shouldn't be prayed for. Minute Particulars has a knockout post in response, pointing out, among other things, the actual nature of prayer:

Whatever it means to "pray for someone," it surely doesn't simply boil down to "wishing them well." But this seems to be a notion of prayer that many have, especially those who object to praying for the enemy or a human being who seems utterly evil. After all, the objection seems to be something like this:
Okay, let me get this right. You want me to pray for _________ so that ______________ will have health and prosperity . . . so _________ can then continue to slaughter the innocent!?.
This, of course, would be absurd and it's not what most have in mind when advocating that we pray for the enemy or a person who seems "the embodiment of evil."

I'm only beginning to pray in a halting sort of way (especially since Pentecostals, unlike Catholics, don't have any programmed prayers you can just recite), but I've always figured praying for someone doesn't mean asking God to give them whatever they want. In fact, I came up against this a few weeks ago when I was praying with Telford a few days before this Important Event he had coming up (I'm still not sure if he wants it public, so I'm still being vague). I wanted to pray for it to go well for him, but it felt kind of ridiculous to just ask that it turn out the way Telford hoped it would turn out. Aside from the fact that it felt vaguely like a child asking a parent for some toy that caught her fancy, I knew that I ultimately don't know, and he ultimately doesn't know, what's best for him in the long run. So I said something like, "Help Telford find his way in life, and find where he belongs."

I see no reason why I couldn't ask for the same thing for Saddam Hussein. If the Christian God exists, the best thing for Saddam in the long run is that he become Christian, and surely that's the last thing Saddam actually wants. It would probably get him killed, though it would win him eternity in heaven. Is it really Christian to hope he doesn't repent just so he stays out of heaven?

I don't know if "perfect possession" exists, but it seems arrogant to believe we can really know if someone's perfectly possessed. We can't look inside Hitler's and bin Laden's heads. If we pray for them and we're mistaken, is that so awful? When did Jesus ever criticize anybody for meaning too well, for being too merciful? (I mean being truly merciful as opposed to lazily letting things slide, like the authorities letting the money-changers in the temple.) I just remember him criticizing people for being too judgmental.

Glory days

Cinderella Bloggerfeller writes about the Hungarians, Romans, and ethnic origin myths:

Of course, as Molnar points out, providing an illustrious ancestry for your people or your dynasty was hardly confined to the Hungarians and, indeed, was pretty widespread in Medieval Europe. One of the most common ideas was the belief that your people were descended from the Trojans, presumably in an attempt to rival the Roman claim that the descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas founded their city. Molnar cites the example of the French. The capital of France is Paris, Paris was the prince who stole Helen- geddit?- so there is obviously a link between the French and the Trojans. Bad puns and wordplay are the stock-in-trade of the cranky linguistic genealogist. Actually, the name Paris comes from a local tribe, the Parisii. This didn’t stop the French from creating a mythical history in which their kings were ultimately descended from Francus, or Francio, a prince who had fled the sack of Troy. Across the Channel, Geoffrey of Monmouth provided a similar genealogy for the British, claiming their nation was founded by Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, meaning they had connections with both Troy and Rome. Brutus was said to have founded Troynovant, or New Troy, later renamed “London” (again, the name “Troynovant” was probably suggested by a local British tribe recorded as living in Essex, the Trinobantes). These fanciful myths often took on the status of official history, promoted for political reasons, and it was sometimes a very bad idea to challenge them. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the French scholar Nicolas Fréret was slung into the Bastille for claiming the Frankish founders of his country were in fact a Germanic tribe with no connection to the Trojans. As this site puts it: “At the end of the reign of Louis XIV, it wasn’t a good idea to contest his descent from King Priam.”

This brings to mind the amusing scene from Spenser's The Fairie Queene (which I'm sure Eve will recognize!) where the lady knight Britomart and some swain recount their genealogies over dinner, leading back to -- you guess it! -- Troy. It also reminds me of college, and the whole "Afrocentrism" debate. That seemed to be a similar quest: trying to descend yourself from "ancient greatness," however torturously.

The funny thing is, if you want to be on top today or in the near future, it seems like it's better not to be descended from ancient greatness. It means your best days are probably behind you. Look at the countries that have the longest and most storied histories today: Iraq, Egypt, Iran, India, Greece. Not exactly ruling the joint, are they? The younger offshoots are doing better: America is more powerful and dynamic than Europe, China has been eclipsed by upstart Japan.

Some old civilizations do resurge: China has had a few resurgences in its history, and it may yet have another. But overall, getting hung up on a glorious past seems like a good recipe for stasis. Give me a bunch of unlettered barbarians with big dreams, and I'll show you the rulers of tomorrow.

(Via Ideofact, who disputes part of what I quoted above. CB responds here.)

You can't beat the system

I went to Alpha again last night, although I seem to be attending less and less of the actual course part of the Alpha course as I go. Last week Telford and I got deep in conversation over dinner, and kept talking at the table while the singing was going on in the next room (since I was getting sick, I wasn't much up for singing anyway). This time we deliberately played hooky from the singing again to keep talking, but wound up talking all the way through the lecture too, so when the people came back for the discussion we were still sitting there.

Telford was embarrassed and apologized to the discussion leader, but she cheerfully said that this was what Alpha was for. And I suppose I knew that all along: the real purpose of Alpha is to get people together and talking about Jesus. The lectures explain basic concepts, but they are mostly there to provoke discussion. Of course, some of us need no provocation; we'll talk about God all night. And since the discussion leader knew Telford, I'm sure she figured I was in capable hands.

In this case, our conversation didn't even stop when the people came in, because there were so few of them. As I said before, the larger group broke into three for the discussion, but for some reason our usual people weren't there last night. So we were joined by just the leader and one other person, who was not a seeker (he had, in fact, just come back from evangelizing in Asia). It made for an intense evening, as I talked and questioned and debated with these three committed Christians. Being an introvert, I was totally exhausted by the time ten o'clock rolled around (unlike the extroverted Telf, who can keep talking till Judgment Day).

We discussed a lot of things, but the basic theme was systematic theology. There had been a bit of a strain developing between Telford and me about my basic approach to understanding Christianity. I tackled it pretty much the way I tackle anything intellectually, by trying to understand the system as a conceptual whole first, and then getting to the specifics. So I kept asking questions about the overarching structure, God's intent in creating the worlds, the origin and nature of evil, that sort of thing. Telford got frustrated by this and kept telling me that to understand Christianity I really needed to start with Jesus. That was part of what provoked the dying-for-sins discussion that some readers will remember from last month; I was trying to understand the Crucifixion as a starting point. But as you will recall, I approached that systematically too, trying to grasp it from theory and general principles. Again, I was told by a lot of people that I was looking at it the wrong way.

A couple days before Alpha, I wrote Telford an email basically saying: look, you can't ask me not to think systematically any more than you can ask me to turn my eyes blue. It's the way I think. I'm so fascinated by systems that back when I lived in northern California, and didn't have a car, I taught myself the whole public-transit system in my county. Partly because I used it, of course, but also for fun. (Yes, I have a weird idea of fun.) Whatever I seek to understand, I start with the big picture.

Once I explained it to Telford like that, he was more sympathetic. For me to walk into theology as a total outsider, he explained, was like walking into a room after there's been an argument: whatever I say, however innocently, might set people off again. In this case, my rationalist, systematic approach pushed his "anti-modernist" buttons, so he kept steering me towards Karl Barth and his anti-modern, Jesus-centered theology. But Telford's own area of specialty is actually systematic theology (somehow I hadn't quite realized that), so he understood my desire for conceptual scaffolding.

I think it has been hard for a lot of people, both in Alpha and in the blogosphere, to understand why I have such a burning need to see a system underlying everything. I think it's just one of those inborn differences in people's brains. A few days ago Mysterium Crucis reminded me, via the whimsical Bloginality, of the whole Myers-Briggs personality-type systems that I used to be into about 15 years ago. Like a lot of personality systems, it oversimplifies, but it serves the useful purpose of explaining people to other people who are vastly different from them. I have kind of a split personality in that system, because I'm about equal parts INTP (that's the rational systematist in me) and INFP (that's the quixotic God-seeker in me). The fact that I have both these personalities often clashing within me probably explains why I'm so terminally ambivalent, seeking faith and yet always arguing with the faithful. I appreciate the forbearance of those who have put up with my endless grappling, both in the blogosphere and in the flesh.

You'll put your eye out with that!

Mark Kleiman has an action movie pet peeve:

Just once, I’d like to see someone in an action flick get hit by a car as he or she blindly rushes across the street through heavy traffic, either pursuing or being pursued. It could be the good guy or the bad guy; I’m not picky. I mean, didn't their mothers ever tell them to look both ways before crossing?

Here's my peeve, or rather my whole family's peeve: people going through windows without a scratch. I say this because when I was about seven or eight I was playing Tag with my sister and her friends, and my sister's arms went through a window. She screamed like I have rarely heard her scream, because she had little shards of glass embedded in her skin all over her arms, and it hurt like a motherf@#$er. My father (who is, conveniently, a doctor) had to pick them all out and sew up some of the bigger holes. She still has visible scars.

So shattering glass may be a cool visual, but treat it with respect, boys and girls.

Blinking into the sunlight

Whenever I'm home sick for a few days I seem to go into this mental cave, completely inward and detached from things. I was back at church yesterday and at work today, but I'm still in a daze. An appropriate time, I suppose to read Jonathan Rauch's humorous piece about the care and feeding of introverts. Patrick Nielsen Hayden also blogged it, with a typically interesting comments discussion ensuing.

This reminds me that long ago I had a boyfriend who was that odd creature, a shy extrovert. It was proof that introversion/extroversion isn't the same as shyness/boldness, though they often overlap. My boyfriend was soft-spoken, awkward and easily embarrassed. Yet everywhere he went he seemed to make lots of friends, and whenever there was a social event he wound up in the middle of it. It was because he drew energy from being with people -- he felt a magnetic pull to wherever the social action was, even though he lacked confidence in his conversational abilities. This made him a charmingly good listener, in contrast to a lot of extroverts.

Sick days

Have caught a cold or something, so posting will be light for a while. Not as bad as poor Eve, apparently, but my brain is blurry...

Natural history

Since I didn't have anything special to do on the long weekend, I took myself to L.A.'s Natural History Museum today. I grew up loving the science and nature museums in San Francisco, so I was pleased to find that L.A. has some good ones. The NHM is in a big, beautiful 1930s-era building, and has a large and interesting collection of stuff. My only complaint is the sloppy upkeep -- some of the displays are unlabeled and many are underlit. But overall, it's a neat place to be.

Not surprisingly, I was sharing the museum with an awful lot of small children. I've wondered before why it is that, while art museums remain firmly adult territory, science museums have become so heavily child-oriented. There's nothing inherently childish about being interested in science, or wanting to see artifacts of nature. It's true that as I've grown older my scientific pursuits have gotten more intellectual and theoretical, but reading about, say, a T-Rex isn't the same as actually going and seeing the skeleton of a T-Rex looming over you.

It does seem that a lot of children are interested in animals. They figure heavily not just in things like science museums but in children's books and TV programs. I was certainly fascinated by them when I was a kid. Yet for a lot of people this interest is temporary. In our industrial world animals aren't part of most adults' lives -- except the occasional house pet -- and they ignore them. I've wondered if people are born with a natural interest in animals, but most lose it from disuse. There's also the odd business that happens to a lot of girls at around age 10 or 12: they become fascinated with horses. It didn't happen to me, so I really can't explain it. I suppose you could go all Jungian about horses as an image of masculine sexuality, but I wouldn't bet the bank on it.

I'm not one to idolize nature. My mother likes to go off camping in the boondocks, hiking and swimming in freezing lakes and that sort of thing, but I was never much into that. I like my creature comforts -- that's the sort of animal I am. But I do feel a deep connection to it; I'm aware always that it's out there, far bigger and far older than our human doings. I feel awe in the presence of its more impressive feats, like the windstorm a couple months ago. And I do feel a peculiar sympathy with animals, who occupy the same space that we do and yet live in different worlds. If I find God, I know he has to be big enough to encompass it all -- not just people and what we do to each other, but the whole thing, huge, ancient, complex, and awesome.

Crime and punishment

Since I hadn't been to Mysterium Crucis before today, I hadn't realized he'd weighed in on the Atonement debate last month. He pointed out that however God did the atonement, somebody was gonna be unhappy:

God could have snapped his fingers, in a spiritual sense of course, and instantaneously saved us. But I imagine if he had done that, theologians would sit around, nursing their pipes, pondering the ineffable mystery of the boring anticlimactic way in which God saved the world. Couldn't He have done it with a bit of flair? A little drama? Or perhaps God could have created this mandatory, purgatorial state that not only cleanses us of venial, but mortal and original sin. Which would have theologians and laymen rather angry, and I don't think the religion would taken off very fast. What? He's going to make us pay for all the things we did? That's not fair!

This brings back to my mind the fact that one way I seem to differ from a lot of Christians is in my attitude toward punishment. I mentioned before that when I last talked to Telford we had a digression about St. Anselm, and it hit on this subject. (I'm gonna milk that visit for all it's worth, apparently!) St. Anselm, apparently, wrote that once sin entered the world, God had three choices: destroy it all; forgive everything, which would be unjust because there'd be no punishment for sin; or do what he did, a substitutional atonement.

I objected to the premise of the second option. When I think about people who've wronged me, they were often people who were close to me; so I knew, even if I got extremely angry, that they were not all evil. If I could have removed the evil from within them, leaving everything else intact and healing the relationship, I wouldn't give a flip if they hadn't been punished.

Maybe it's my liberal humanist upbringing, but I think of punishment in practical rather than cosmic terms. It is, to me, a tool for minimizing evil. It can prevent people from doing something again; it can deter others; if properly designed, it might even make the wrongdoer learn something. But it's a crude instrument and it often doesn't work very well anyway, so if there is another way to minimize evil, I'm all for it.

It's for this reason that no matter how people try to spin it to me, I can't accept the concept of hell. Purgatory I can understand. Annihilation, even, I can understand. But what's the point of eternal punishment? Why keep someone around forever just to make them suffer? I don't see how that reduces the evil in the universe; in fact it's hard to imagine how, once the End Times have concluded, good can be said to have "won" if there's a pile of souls eternally in painful separation from God. I'm with the Zoroastrians here: good hasn't won until the gates of hell are closed forever. Until not just punishment but the need for punishment is gone.

The choice that isn't, part II

Tom at Disputations agrees with my complaints about the liar/lunatic/Lord gambit that was used at Alpha. He makes the added point that the choice assumes that the Scriptural account of Jesus is accurate, and a non-Christian wouldn't assume that.

Actually, I should say in Alpha's defense that it brought up the formulation after going over reasons why we should believe the Gospels are accurate. (Those weren't entirely convincing either, but that's a subject for another post.) The point I was making was that even if you grant that Jesus' personality was as it was portrayed in the Bible, the challenge still doesn't work. It assumes you can pidgeonhole people in a way you really can't.

Paul Zadik says in the comments that the three-way choice idea originally came from G.K. Chesterton to counter the then-common idea that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not actually divine. In that context, it's a good point: if you look at it that way, you'd have to discount so much of the Gospels that they become pretty useless as source material. And what you're left with is really not very helpful. Will at Mysterium Crucis (which Tom links to) puts it well:

Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Render unto Caesar. If you read the teachings of Jesus divorced from the context of his Godhood and divine mission, it's all pretty impractical. At its worse, it's self-evident nonsense. Take this little gem: the meek shall inherit the earth. Sure Jesus, whatever you say. Now if Jesus is God, and he can personally back up those words, I'll believe it. Barring that, the meek ain't gonna inherit jack sh!t.

The teachings of Christ only make sense when plugged into one interpretative matrix, one that assumes a set of transcendent absolutes that are morally right despite being devoid of any consideration for efficiency, practicality and self-preservation. Just read the Gospels. These aren't the teachings of a wise man. Wisdom is accrued over time, after the careful observation of a lifetime of experience. Wisdom says eliminate your enemies. Wisdom says fight back or you're going to live your entire life as a punching bag. Wisdom says screw Caesar. Wisdom says the devious and tenacious will inherit the earth.

Indeed. As I've said before, the real leap of faith in Christianity isn't recognizing Jesus' goodness, it's believing that goodness=God. I am reminded here of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi (or Mo-tzu, if you're being Wade-Giles about it), who preached the universal-altruism concept several centuries before Christ. His movement died shortly after he did, superseded by the much more practical Confucius. How could you possibly expect people to be as concerned with a stranger's welfare as they would be with a relative's? asked Confucius. It goes against human nature.

As Jesus (and that other successful preacher of selflessness, Buddha) knew, if you're going to tell people to so flagrantly go against their self-interest, you'd better back it up with some supernatural firepower. You are asking people to die to themselves, and you must reassure them that that kind of death is not simple annihilation. It leads to something better.

I've heard some progressive Christians argue that we should not even take the afterlife seriously; heaven and hell are simply metaphors for the worlds we'd leave our descendants if we behave well or badly. But if you're trying to build a good society, Jesus is a pretty lousy person to consult. He wasn't the least interested in building society; he told his followers to abandon their families and their jobs and be as carefree as the lilies of the field, and render the social order unto Caesar. That's why later builders of "Christian" societies wound up leaning heavily on the Old Testament, with all its helpfully detailed rules, and not on Jesus.

So I'm not inclined toward the "moral philosopher" idea of Jesus either. He was a real weirdo. Of course, so am I, so I gues there's something we have in common.

The choice that isn't

So, some of you might be wondering, how did the second Alpha go? It went all right. As with last time, the most interesting part of it was the discussion, but I don't feel free to talk about it.

The subject of the lecture this time was "Who is Jesus?" Like the last one, it said stuff I've heard before. But there was one formulation it raised that's stuck in my mind, because it irritates me so much. It basically says that there are three logical possibilities for Jesus: either he was lying, he was crazy, or he was everything he said he was. So, the theory goes, if he was a liar or a lunatic, how could he have said and done so many good things?

This is another idea I blame on C.S. Lewis, though I don't know if he originated it or just popularized it. It is based on a rather antiquated view of mental illness, to say the least, which had it that you could divide the world into the raving loonies and the perfectly sane, with no ambiguities. It also doesn't follow that someone who does something nefarious, like start a religious cult to serve his own ego, is incapable of saying or doing good things. In fact, many of them do say and do good things, which is why they attract followers. I suspect that many religious figures in the world, past and present, could pass the liar/lunatic/Lord test pretty well.

I doubt that Jesus was actually a fraud. It's hard to see what he gained from wandering the countryside with his scraggly band of followers; and certainly any con man worth his salt doesn't let himself get executed. I expect that something did happen when he got dunked by John the Baptist that convinced him (and maybe the Baptist too) that God had chosen him. I'm less certain that whatever happened was caused by God or that Jesus interpreted it correctly -- a lot of spiritual experiences are pretty ambiguous.

When I raised my objections in the discussion, the lecturer agreed with me. Everything she said had been evidence, not proof, she pointed out. Which makes me wonder what the point of it was. But I suppose I'd have to take that up with Alpha's inventor, who's back in England somewhere.

Trusting God, again

Mark Shea asked last week how atheists out there would feel if they met with incontrovertible proof of God (by which he meant the Catholic God), sparking a long, passionate comments thread. (Via Minute Particulars.)

He wasn't asking about seekers like me, but it got me thinking. It would, at least, simplify things. I would know to bone up on Catholicism, anyway, instead of going to a Pentecostal church and being haunted by the feeling that maybe I should really be off studying Catholicism or Buddhism or Islam. I would not have the same attitude as Jody, which is basically, "That God is a jerk, so I'm going to ignore him." I don't see how you could ignore him. And in any case, it seems arrogant to turn and judge your Creator in such a way. The human brain is a remarkable thing, but it's not capable of everything, and I would think assessing Supreme Beings would be outside its range. And if he created me, he could not have created anything unknown to him, including my morals.

Nonetheless, it would not put my worries entirely to rest. The questions and the problems that I've raised here (as well as many I haven't raised, and those raised by others, including Jody) would still be questions and problems. Yahweh's behavior has indeed been pretty alarming in a lot of ways. I think my biggest fear would be that he is not being honest with us. The Gnostics believed that the Old Testament God wasn't actually the Omnipotent Being, but one of a number of archons -- sort of limited deities like the Olympian gods -- who developed delusions of grandeur. That actually makes a disturbing amount of sense, judging by the OT. But if he were, how would we know? We humans are pretty puny, and a powerful being could flummox us without being the all-powerful being.

But I suppose the premise of Mark's question assumes proof of an all-powerful being (whatever that might look like). Even then I'd be worried, though, if God is really as he says he is. When I hear Christians go on about the goodness of God, and rationalize the suffering on earth and the concept of even more suffering in hell, I can't help feeling that they find God is so good to them that they can't deal with the idea that he might not be good to everybody.

This brings to sharp relief the difference between faith and trust. Even evidence that God exists would not make me trust him. What would? I don't know. I really wish I knew the answer to that one.

If you can't trust God, who can you trust, who can ya?

I'm going back to Alpha tomorrow, but without Telford, sadly. He has to get ready for an important happening the next morning. (Don't know if I'm at liberty to say what it is, but everybody pray or cross your fingers or whatever your belief system allows for him, OK?) In the meantime he wrote a post about how we have trouble communicating sometimes because he so implicitly trusts God, and I don't.

I think he had several reasons to be thinking that now, and one of them was probably the conversation we had at the last Alpha session. As I mentioned before, I started off talking about this post from Minute Particulars:

Our very existence is from God and is actively sustained by God, so much so that Aquinas claims that God could cause us not to exist, could annihilate us, without any prejudice to the goodness of His actions, i.e. He could annihilate us with perfect justice since He owes us, literally, nothing. Think about that for a bit because I think it's a very, very foreign notion. God creates freely and God creates everything that is. Not just all the "stuff" of the world, not just the space-time fabric of the universe, but existence itself if from God. There is no distinction sharper and simpler than that. God could reduce us to nothing with perfect justice.

Now consider that such a God has chosen to create each one of us, has given us free will to turn toward or away from Him, has chosen to send His only Son that we might know Him, has chosen to dwell among us, suffer and die at our hands, descend into Hell, and rise up in defeat of death.

There is no act more staggering in our history, in the history of all of Creation. It is staggering because it is something we could not deserve. It is staggering because every fiber of our being owes its existence to the One who created us and yet we can turn away from Him at any moment. It is staggering because He chose to redeem us from our turning from Him and show us the way back to Him.

I didn't mean for this to be pick-on-Mark week -- really, I didn't! But I was thinking about that comment after my convoluted discussion about sin with Tom and Louder Fenn, as well as after reading Isaiah. It all emphasized the unworthiness of humans before God, and how he was responsible for everything good about us but somehow we were responsible for everything bad.

I said to Telford that I didn't like this idea that God owes us nothing because he created us. God is constantly being compared to a parent, but isn't a parent responsible for his children? Don't you feel responsible for your children?

"But before God," he said. "So the analogy breaks down."

I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but I pushed on. If God is that powerful, the creator of everything, and yet we didn't turn out the way he wanted, isn't he responsible for that? Maybe not entirely responsible, but at least partly responsible?

Somewhat to my surprise, Telford warmed to the idea. When God makes a covenant with the Hebrews, he pointed out, he limits himself. He binds himself to keep his end of the deal, even when people let him down. That does seem to say something about God's character.

"I know," I said. "And actually, it's really tempting to think of Jesus as taking that responsibility. You know, coming down, taking on the burden of the world -- literally, in a way, taking up the cross... But no one ever spins it like that. It's all about how this was totally undeserved, and God just did it because he's such a nice guy."

We batted around the idea some more, and somehow got sidetracked on St. Anselm. Then the actual business of Alpha interrupted the talk. But after it was over we went on, lingering like the last couple drunks at a bar, sitting on a table because they were putting the chairs away. And to my surprise, Telford conceded still more. He said he thought this was something theology had not adequately covered, and he should look into it more.

"The thing that bothers me, though," I said, "is that you're always talking about the importance of looking to the tradition of the Church. And I don't see this in the tradition of the Church."

"It is in the tradition, though," he said. "Maybe not so much in the New Testament. But if you look at some of the Psalms, a lot of them are saying to God, 'Here's a problem. Do something.' Not 'Please please please help us,' but 'Well? What are you going to do?'"

"Yeah," I said. "You know, I don't know much about Judaism, but it seems to have more of a tradition of, I don't know..."

"Chutzpah?"

"Yeah. Actually, there's an interesting article in First Things this month by a rabbi, about the differences between Jewish and Christian attitudes about a lot of things. And part of it was about heaven. You know, Christians don't think they deserve to go there, so you can only get in by the grace of God. But Jews think they do deserve to go there. They followed the Law --"

"Yeah, but who gave them the Law, huh?" Telford said snarkily.

"I mean, I think they felt like they held up their end of the bargain. And he also describes how the Jews accepted the Law. God offered it to them, and they accepted by a sort of voice vote."

He smiled. "Yeah. That was pretty cool."

We haven't had a chance to talk about it further, but in an email the other day he remarked, "I haven't found a reason to take back my affirmation of your point that God has a responsibility to rescue the creation because he has invested it with his own glory. Hope that proves to be solid common ground for the conversations to come."

I don't know if that will help me trust God, but I do think I was put off by the feeling that God -- or his spokespeople on earth -- was evading a sort of parental duty by expecting the obligations to go only one way -- from us to him. Perhaps Mark's cosmic God who brings existence itself into being would look at it that way; it seems rather Calvinist, and hard to fathom how anything could have happened that he didn't intend. But if you're getting that cosmic, it's hard to see how we could deserve anything good or bad from God; what we deserve is what he decides we should have.

In any case, the God of the Bible doesn't seem like that. Otherwise, his anger and disappointment and regret would be an elaborate act. I don't know how to see such a human-seeming God as an omnipotent being. But as I said to Telford at one point in the evening, all I really have to go on is my sense of what's good. If the Christian God doesn't seem to harmonize with that, what can I do?

It seemed like a good idea...

I don't know why I get myself into these abortion debates, because I don't even have a firmly held opinion on the subject myself. But at any rate, Minute Particulars responded to my response to his post on the differing motivations of people opposed to and supporting legal abortion.

When I see the phrase "a study of _________" in an argument my lies-damned-lies-and-statistics sense tingles and lots of concerns click into play: correlation is not causation, many good studies are contradicted by other good studies, models of human behavior are probable at best and hollow when applied to the concrete particulars of individual actions, etc.

Well, you're right. I knew it was kind of weak to say that, especially since I don't have the study on hand and couldn't cite the authors or the methodology or anything like that. But it actually wasn't a data-points sort of study anyway; it was really a series of interviews with activists on both sides of the debate, illustrating their different worldviews. I just brought it up because I do remember many of the pro-life women they quoted really did sound personally threatened by abortion.

Actually, I don't have to imagine what a "devaluation of motherhood, and a shift in expectations of what women are supposed to be like" is like nor do I doubt the concern: I'm married to a mother and she combats it daily.


My wife's job makes demands on her that rarely include reasonable accommodations for nursing a child, general caring for a child, or even the plain fact that evenings and weekends -- time that she's not "officially" required to yield -- might be time she'd want to spend with her family, not with committee members who seem oblivious to the fact that she has a very young child at home.


I'm personally and painfully aware that our society sucks and that the world of work devalues motherhood and has reshaped expectations of what women are supposed to be like. But these are institutional trends and patterns, institutional concerns (cf. ENTERPRISES OF GREAT PITH AND MOMENT for an oblique comment on this) that are utterly trumped when compared with the concern for human life. My wife is not motivated in her position on abortion by discrimination or even the possibility of discrimination against her. She's motivated by the concrete reality of another human being unlike her in a predicament she'll never be in. And that motivation is different from the motivation of most moral issues.

Well, if you say so. I just can't help noticing how most people's view of whether a fetus is a person seems to frequently coincide with a lot of other social and sexual attitudes. Just as Mark would say the pro-choice folks are blinding themselves to the fetus' personhood for their own self-interest, most pro-choicers think the pro-life side is puffing up the status of the unborn because it serves their own ideas of how society and gender relations should be. Who's right? I dunno. It's this sort of issue that makes me pessimistic about really seeing anything without your bias glasses on.

Self and other

Minute Particulars has a post, whcih he admits at the outset might be half-baked, on the differences in motivation between those who favor and those who oppose legal abortion. The gist of it is that pro-choicers are motivated by self-interest -- I or someone like me might want to have an abortion -- while pro-lifers are only concerned for others, because no one's in danger of becoming a fetus.

That premise is half-baked, in my opinion. I actually blogged about this a while ago when Charles Murtaugh argued from the similarly half-baked premise that abortion is in the interest of all women and against the interest of all men. My post wasn't exactly baked to crispy brownness itself, but I brought up a study of pro-life and pro-choice women that I'd read about in college. Essentially, there was a disagreement between them about what makes women valuable. The pro-life women were heavily working-class, and found meaning and power in motherhood that they did not find in the workplace. The pro-choice women were the reverse: more affluent, more likely to see children as getting in the way of a career.

Now, you could say, that's all very well for women who choose not to have abortions themselves, but where the self-interest in trying to stop others from having them? The strong feeling I got from that study, as well as a lot of other pro-life rhetoric, was that the presence of abortion on demand leads to a cultural devaluation of motherhood, and a shift in expectations of what women are supposed to be like.

Connected to this fear is the fear of male irresponsiblity. In another past post I half-jokingly proposed a quick-and-dirty test to predict a woman's view of abortion: are you more afraid of a man controlling you, or running out on you? Pro-choice rhetoric is full of scare language about "controlling women's bodies," while pro-life language often expresses the fear of men screwing around without consequences. Just today Jane Galt wrote:

More troubling, the feminist movement has not merely tried to render the legal ability to choose that men have always had (and pro-life readers should remember that while the choice of men to abandon their children is not quite as final, it is nonetheless horribly detrimental). Rather, it has sought to make the choice to abandon a child created through consensual sexual activity not merely legal, but also an acceptable, even laudable, moral choice. In doing so they have also legitimated the decision of men to abandon their children, which makes them sound a bit thick when they complain about gents who have decided to retroactively excercise some reproductive choice by failing to pay their child support.

She's not the only one to feel that abortion has women importing some of the worst traits of men. Eve Tushnet characterized this as "making women equal by making us men--adapting women to a man-made world rather than adapting that world to women."

It's also worth noting, in a First Things article a couple months ago, how quickly Federica Mathewes-Green slid from talking about cultural attitudes toward abortion to talking about cultural attitudes toward sex in general. For many -- probably most -- pro-lifers, legal abortion is tied up in a complex of sexual mores that they find deeply threatening.

None of this says, necessarily, that there isn't an altruistic reason to oppose abortion. Just that I don't think you can reduce it to the simple binary that Mark does. I think that pro-choicers know this, and so if you try to persuade them you're in the cause purely out of the goodness of your heart, they're not going to believe you.

In the beginning

So as I wrote yesterday, I went to this Alpha course last night. In case it wasn't clear, this was at the church I've been attending, the Christian Assembly. The program actually started at a church in England, I believe, but it's been picked up by churches all over the world in many denominations.

Telford was also there, which was a definite plus. I suppose given how often I mention him on the blog it sounds like we've been hanging out together a lot; but actually, our contact really fell off in the last couple months, mostly because his schedule is so insane. (His blog has suffered from this too, sadly.) So the Alpha course, which meets weekly for ten weeks, seemed like a good opportunity for us to meet and talk at length in a regular way. Also, Telford had heard about the course but never been to one, and he was curious about it.

Anyway, the event itself was a mixed bag. It started with dinner (a free meal is always welcome!) which allowed attendants to meet and greet. Although actually I wound up talking entirely to Telford, since we got into a lively discussion about what (if anything) God owes us, inspired partly by this post from MInute Particulars. The discussion deserves its own post, and I don't think it's quite finished yet, so I won't go into it now.

Then there was music. It was essentially a smaller, shorter version of the same singalong we do in the services, and it didn't really work in this format. The big, spirited, Pentecostal sound can be uplifting in a large room with an enthusiastic crowd, but it's too much for a small room full of people at varying stages of spiritual certainty. It may be, as Telford said, that this church can't do anything without an electric guitar, but I think they should have restrained themselves this time.

Then there was a...I'm not sure what to call it, I guess a lecture. A man from the church basically outlined the reasons why Christianity matters, at a grade-school level pretty much. I knew I shouldn't expect anything at the intellectual level I get from Telford (or any of my other favorite Christian bloggers) but I was disappointed at how condescending it was. Surely no one is going to want to come to church to be talked to like an eight-year-old.

After that, the crowd split up in three separate rooms for dessert and discussion. That was more interesting. Everyone introduced themselves and talked about why they were there. People were in rather different places. There was one person like me, just showing up and not sure of anything; a man who said he had always felt "called," but various things got in the way; a woman who'd fallen out with the faith after a divorce, feeling Jesus had let her down; a woman who had just converted via her boyfriend. I do not want to go into detail about it because there was a promise of confidentiality (even though I'm anonymous, the church isn't, so I'm playing it safe). But the people were very honest about their struggles.

Telford didn't really like it. He disapproved of the singing even more than I did, and he was disappointed the discussion "didn't go anywhere." I reminded him we were all just getting to know each other. (Since Telford is never shy about talking God -- or about much of anything, really -- this was not an inhibition to him.) He didn't openly pass judgment on the event, but I noticed when somebody asked him if he'd come back next week, he responded by asking me if I was coming back. I said I was. I think it's worth it just for the talking. I don't meet anybody in my regular life who's going through what I am. If meeting them means putting up with a little schlock, well, them's the breaks.

Into the Alpha quadrant

I don't have much time to blog tonight because I'm going to Alpha, a program for nonbelievers and seekers and wobblers and what have you who want to learn more about Christianity. In other words, it's pretty much like what I've been doing on the blog, but more organized and in 3-D.

Speaking of which, I apologize to Tom and Louder Fenn for rudely ignoring their latest comments in our discussion. I meant to respond, but one thing or another drew me away. And now, frankly, I've kind of run out of energy for the discussion. But if I post about Alpha I wouldn't be surprised if it starts another one...

On another note, I'd been hoping biologist Charles Murtaugh would weigh in on l'affaire Dini, and he came through like a champ. He writes one of my favorite lines so far on the subject: "It may be true, as Theodosius Dobzhansky said, that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution, but then nothing actually makes that much sense in biology."

School days

I recently learned about the site No Indoctrination, which lets students anonymously post complaints about ideologically bullying professors. It also gives professors a chance to respond, as at least one of them did.

Reading over the complaints reminded me of my own college days. Most of my professors were quite good; they were just about all liberal, but that's OK. I don't mind a professor bringing opinions into the classroom; after all, some of my favorite bloggers are opinionated professors. But there is a point where it crosses the line.

There were actually two rather different types of inappropriate behavior I remember. One basically comes from professors living in their own little society and forgetting there students aren't from there. So they make comments and jokes as if there aren't any conservatives in the audience, and we all agree on these things. That's irritating, but so long as they're willing to listen to students who disagree, it's not really a problem.

The second type actually stems from the opposite assumption. This type of professor often comes from the '60s counterculture or some other protest movement, and so assumes that students are brainwashed children of the Establishment in need of enlightenment. Often, what they fight against is laughably out of date. My sister's Asian Civ professor apparently spent a lot of time disabusing students of the idea that Chiang Kai-shek was a hero, which he firmly (and wrongly) believed they all held.

But what's worse is that they often end up displacing the subject of the class with their own political rants. My Asian Religions professor was the worst offender I had this way. As any reader can tell, I'm keenly interested in religion, and his lectures were informative when he stuck to the topic. But he kept wandering off on left-wing diatribes. I was most bitterly disappointed the day before Thanksgiving, when we were supposed to have our lecture about Jainism. Many students had already left, so the class was small. Somehow, the professor convinced himself that this was reason enough to jettison the Jainism lecture and tell us his "personal thoughts on Thanksgiving." Which were a predictible rant about oppression of the Native Americans. Apparently, it didn't occur to him that the people who'd actually stuck around to hear the lecture might be more interested in Jainism.

No Indoctrination has examples like this. One student in a human geography course says the professor "will allow herself to stray so far off topic that by the end of the lecture she will have covered the reasons why the healthcare system needs to be nationalized, why the minimum wage needs to raised threefold, and why severely penalizing industries for their pollution is the only way to protect the environment." Oy, I can believe it.

Far scarier, though, is the Mesoamerican art professor:

During the second to last lecture, when we should have been learning what was going to be on the final, he started with his usual lecture about understanding these "oppressed" people in the middle east. He made us out to be the evil oppressors and said that we don't understand these people (Islamic Terrorists) until they BLOW it into us (in reference to September 11). He then got very animated and began to pretend that he was a terrorist. He made the point to the class (evil America) that if we tried to buy him, he would tell us to take our money and shove it up our asses. This all culminated in him pretending to strap a bomb to himself, sitting down next to a student, and saying something to the effect of, "If you try to get rid of us, we'll take you with us."

As with all the stuff on the site, this story is unverified. But if it's true, it makes my Asian Religion professor problem look piddling by comparison...

The heart of the matter

Thanks, O mighty bringer of blog hits, for your kind words!

I wondered a little if I was getting carried away in my reaction to the Dini controversy, but it seems to have brought a lot of passion on both sides. When Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted about it, it generated 117 comments and counting.

Somewhere in those comments Erik Olsen, and I think a few other people, made an argument that got me thinking. He claimed that Dini's question was justified as a test of scientific thinking. The basis of science is being willing to put aside beliefs when conflicting evidence appears, so he was testing students' ability to do that. That chimes with Dini's own rationale: "...good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs. This is the situation of those who deny the evolution of humans; such a one is throwing out information because it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs. Can a physician ignore data that s/he does not like and remain a physician for long?"

I have two problems with this. For one thing, this really only tests one group of students: creationists. Many people blindly accept Darwinism because they were brought up that way, so affirming their belief in it says nothing about their ability to think critically.

But the larger disagreement I have is with this attitude about "cherished beliefs" and data you don't "like." It's true that scientists often have their pet theories, and if they hang onto them in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, they make fools of themselves. But a pet thoery is a different order of magnitude than a religious belief. A scientific thoery (one hopes) does not give meaning to your existence or become central to your identity. But religion does that, which is why people are so loath to discard it.

Telford Work, in his FAQ section, wrote a number of responses to questions he commonly gets from creationist students (here, here and here). It's quite illuminating about how creationists think:

Lots of conservative churches have sold their people on this argument: If we can't trust the Bible to conform to our expectations of its accuracy in every detail, then we're allowed to disbelieve all of it. If there wasn't really a talking snake in the Garden, then Jesus might not really have risen from the dead, so we'd better hold the line and defend the fact that there was a talking snake in the Garden. I consider this strategy a form of theological coercion: Our faith in Jesus is used to hold entire churches hostage to literalism. But then the Bible (let alone Jesus) is no longer our ultimate authority; the ultimate authority is our presuppositions of what God's truth should look like. And under all this apparent confidence in the truth of the Bible runs a strong current of disbelief. Many churches have fostered not a calm confidence in Scripture, but a hard-line apologetic technique that I think secretly terrifies a lot of evangelicals: What if it's not all true? What if there really is a contradiction in Scripture, as liberals allege? Does it mean Jesus is still buried, and I'm still dead in my sins?

Clearly these students don't "like" creationism the way I like a good margarita, or even the way a physicist likes the mind-bending elegance of special relativity theory. Neither one of those things, if removed, threaten to leave a gaping existential hole in one's psyche. If students are lucky they'll have someone like Telford around to show them how they don't have to throw out the baby Jesus with the bathwater, so to speak. But a lot of people don't have that, so it's not surprising they go through mental contortions to protect that belief from scientific scrutiny.

For that reason, I don't think it's fair to say, "Oh, if they're not willing to throw out that belief, they won't throw out any belief or theory that they don't like." It's because of the special nature of this belief that people like Clayton Cramer's petroleum geologist can think perfectly rationally about everything except that.

Reading Telford's essay also reminds me of why Dini's words sound so cold-hearted and mean to me. These are kids we're talking about here. The way some people have been carrying on in Patrick's comments, you'd think these barely-out-of-the-nest striplings were the dead-eyed foot soldiers of militant fundamentalism. But they're the victims of the culture as much as the perpetrators. If they need to reconcile their faith with science, they deserve better than this.

UPDATE: A new article mentions that Dini is a devout Catholic. This came as a surprise to the Electrolite folks, who seemed to assume this was a Christian/atheist conflict. But Christians can discriminate against Christians. Dini is a Catholic, and I'd bet money that about 90% of his creationist students there in Texas are Southern Baptists. These are two groups that have historically not liked each other, to put it mildly.

By the way, I tend to agree with most commenters that this isn't really worth a lawsuit. But I think it's crummy pedagogy and a dubious defense of science, so I say so.

The evolving debate

Minute Particulars has an interesting post on the Dini business, in which he describes current Catholic thinking on human origins. He sums it up thus:

Human bodies give evidence of evolution (e.g. DNA similarities, vestigial organs, mammalian characteristics), but how a human being originated is not explained by evolution theory. A human being is an animal and has a principle of life that is similar to other animals in that it causes a body to be alive; but this same principle in the human being is responsible for operations like the ability to reason, understand, and choose freely, operations which any arrangement of matter cannot explain and which evolution theory cannot explain. Human beings are mammals and subject to biological principles as are other mammals and biological life in general. But, simply put, they are more than evolution can explain.

Would Dini have accepted that? It's hard to tell. But one reason the whole thing smells fishy to me is that the professor specifically asked about human origins. If he were really concerned about things like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, he could have asked about them, or for a general explanation of evolutionary theory. But in asking about human evolution he's punching the rawest nerve in the whole debate. That's where even Catholics, who generally accept evolution, start getting queasy.

Mark Kleiman also has another terrific post on this subject. Says everything I would have said, but probably better.

Under the stars

A few years ago I did an article about the Mars Society, a group lobbying for a future mission to Mars. I talked to some of their members who worked for NASA, and a grad student in aeronautical engineering (I loved his T-shirt -- "Yes, actually, I AM a rocket scientist!") He and some other youngsters in the group nurtured the dream that they would one day be on such a mission. Even the older guys who figured their chance was past harbored a wistful yearning for space, like the old sailors' songs yearned for the open sea. They knew how dangerous space missions are, but death did not seem as powerful as the call of other worlds.

If there's some comfort for the loss of seven astronauts today, it's that they probably died happy. I'm sure they longed for space the way the Mars buffs I talked to did. Few people get to where they did, though many wish to. May they rest in peace in the heavens.

Ever since Darwin

Mark Kleiman makes some excellent points about the Dini affair:

I think lots of people who say they don't believe in evolution don't actually have any fixed opinion about the origin of species; rather, they're denying an apparent implication of that belief: that, in reality, human beings are merely animals. Those people are holding out for the idea that humans have something of the divine nature. That view can be taken as a metaphysical proposition about human beings, but it can also be the expression of a moral stance: that it's wrong to treat human beings the way animals are treated. Neither the metaphysical proposition nor the moral stance is obviously false. (And if we take the the "divine nature" statement as an image rather than a propostion, a simple evaluation of truth or falsity isn't even appropriate.)

Linking those beliefs to a particular view about paleontology seems to me a mistake, but, given the intellectual history of the matter, not a silly mistake. Poorly understood Darwinian views can be, and have been, given very wicked practical applications. So if someone wants to make a principle of refusing to say that humans descended from animals by natural selection, nothing compels me to think the worse of him for doing so.

Right. I've been fussing in several recent blog posts over the question of what Darwinism does to our concepts of the human being and of original sin. That's the real conflict that the arguments over whether the earth was created in six days tend to distract us from. And Darwinism is so commonly misunderstood even by its defenders, and so closely identified with materialism and savagery, that it's not surprising many people object to it out of pure ethical distaste.

The problem is, a biology teacher has a good opportunity to cut through those misconceptions. But by stating upfront that he won't recommend creationists, Dini drives any creationist-leaning students out of his class. This is a cause he isn't helping.

Mark's "sermon" is also worth a read.

All over creation

Eugene Volokh has an interesting series of post on a religious-discrimination suit. (Start here and scroll up for more comments.) I don't know about the legal issues, but as an amateur science enthusiast I can't get behind Professor Dini's supposed defense of science.

For one thing, this is a medical student we're talking about. Dini's explanation of why beliefs about evolution matter to a doctor is pretty flimsy:

Whereas medicine is historically rooted first in the practice of magic and later in religion, modern medicine is an endeavor that springs from the sciences, biology first among these. The central, unifying principle of biology is the theory of evolution, which includes both micro- and macro-evolution, and which extends to ALL species. How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology? It is hard to imagine how this can be so, but it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the Darwinian aspects of medicine or the evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions. The current crisis in antibiotic resistance is the result of such decisions.

First of all, Dini is ignoring the fact that many creationists accept micro-evolution, in the development of disease-resistant bacteria and such things. What they don't accept is the idea that evolution accounts for the appearance of all species on earth, including us. (That's Intelligent Design theory in a nutshell.) Second, as Clayton Cramer points out, the appearance of such bacteria is hardly the result of rampant creationism.

It gets worse:

Good medicine, like good biology, is based on the collection and evaluation of physical evidence. So much physical evidence supports the evolution of humans from non-human ancestors that one can validly refer to the "fact" of human evolution, even if all of the details are not yet known. One can deny this evidence only at the risk of calling into question one’s understanding of science and of the method of science. Such an individual has committed malpractice regarding the method of science, for good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs. This is the situation of those who deny the evolution of humans; such a one is throwing out information because it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs. Can a physician ignore data that s/he does not like and remain a physician for long? No. If modern medicine is based on the method of science, then how can someone who denies the theory of evolution -- the very pinnacle of modern biological science -- ask to be recommended into a scientific profession by a professional scientist?

A while ago I blogged about the question of whether science is a religion, and pointed out that the basic difference between the two is that science puts its faith in a method of knowing, not it in a particular set of beliefs. Dini seems to have missed this point completely: if you believe in science, he says, you must believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution. This is a deeply unscientific attitude.

Consider the effect on scientific innovation if this were broadly applied. I am sure that before Einstein it seemed that no rational scientists could disagree with Newtonian physics. I am glad nobody excluded Einstein from the club. I don't think "creation science" is going anywhere, but that doesn't mean Darwinian theory is unassailable.

Intelligent, conscientious Christians are often embarrassed about the raving fundies who speak in their name, and that's how I feel about this guy. Why is he even asking students this before he'll write a letter of recommendation, and ranting on and on about it on his website? How can he say that not accepting Darwinism means you're incapable of rational thought about anything? We're all irrational about something. In Dini's case, apparently, it's about creationists.

Hey hey Boo Boo

Minute Particulars points to a post by a woman who calls her baby "Boo Boo" because he was an accident. "Our teenaged kids are convinced that this will someday land him on a psychiatrist's couch, explaining, 'My parents didn't plan to have me, and then they called me "the Boo Boo" for my first two years,'" she writes.

This reminds me of a few weeks ago when my mother was here, and we visited briefly with Telford and his brood. My mother was cooing over the baby when she remarked upon the obvious: he sure has a heck of a lot of kids.

"This one's the last," he said. "Well, the last one was supposed to be the last, but this one's the last last."

I suppose if you want to send your kid to the shrink by calling him a redundant nickname, you could do even better than Boo Boo by calling him Last Last. But I wouldn't want to give anyone ideas...

My reason for reasons

Tom from Disputations says in the comments to the previous post:

When Louder Fenn writes, "it is sin that corrupts the world," I take him to mean "world" in the sense of human life and society, rather than the purely natural world of earthquakes and hurricanes. The nature sin corrupted is human nature.

One of the primary absences in fallen human nature is that our reason has been clouded and no longer rules our emotions. Emotions, including anger, are themselves neither sins nor sinful, but since we aren't very good at properly reasoning about our emotions, they often do lead to sin.

Hermaphroditism isn't sinful either, of course, although my impression is that a hermaphrodite lacks the good of being either fully male or fully female.

So what the first sin removed from human nature is, among other things, the proper harmony between reason and passion.

In this formulation, by the way, sin is a kind of evil. Evil in general is the lack of something that a thing ought to have, so blindness can be said to be evil in a human but not in a rock. Sin is the type of evil caused by a person's free choice to be less than they are supposed to be.

I hauled this out of comments to answer here because my response is going to be long. (Is anyone surprised?) First of all, what is "reason" in this scheme, and what does it have to do with goodness? In the context of this particular discussion, what rational causes are there for saying that homosexuals and hermaphrodites can't have sex? Lots of rational people think otherwise.

Reason can, of course, be helpful in ethics -- making them more consistent, for instance. But ultimate judgments about good and evil aren't based on it. Consider St. Paul's concise summary of ethics in Romans 13:9:

The commandments, "Do not commit adultery," "Do not murder," "Do not steal," "Do not covet," and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

I don't see what reason has to do with that. (This line also, to my mind, goes against Louder Fenn's insistence that "what's right" can be abstractly detached from human suffering. But that's another subject.)

There also seems to me to be a fundamental conflict between what Tom is saying and what Louder Fenn said. LF says: "Yes, you are asking them to fight their nature ... Morality is all about fighting your nature -- your fallen nature, that is; your nature which is imperfect due to the imperfection of the world." He goes on to blame the imperfection of the world on human sin. Tom, meanwhile, seems to be saying there isn't anything sinful about, say, having certain feelings or being a hermaphrodite, you just can't act on it. Sin, apparently, comes from a lack of restraint on these things. Now, technically LF said "fallen" and "imperfect" rather than "sinful," but this seems like a distinction without a difference. LF seems to be saying that the need to control and suppress our feelings is an effect of our fallenness, while Tom seems to be saying that was in the original plan, we're just not doing it right. One version says being moral is fighting our nature, the other says it's harmonizing with it.

Both these views are problematic in terms of original sin. It occurs to me, now that I write this out, that Louder Fenn's argument is essentially circular. We sin because we give in to our fallen nature. Why is our nature fallen? Because we sin. Original sin is a chicken without an egg.

On Tom's side, we have the problem of what this "harmony" means in practical terms. In fact, homosexuality is an especially good example of this. This is an emotion that, in Catholic thinking, should never be acted upon. It serves no conceivable good purpose to feel it. So as a sin, it's an absence of...what? In a theoretical pre-fallen Eden, what happens to it?

It is the nature of feelings to impel action. They have no other reason to exist. In fact, in a sense feelings are actions. The physiologic changes that they bring to your body are preparing you to take a particular course of action -- fight, flee, have sex, etc. We can stop ourselves before it goes farther than that, of course, but in doing so we're already passing a value judgment over the feeling. So the logical wiggle that God didn't make us bad just because he gave us feelings that would be bad if acted upon seems nonsensical to me.

OK, gotta get back to work. Interview in 45 minutes...

Worms a-wriggling

Louder Fenn responds to my response to his post. Turns out he wasn't really responding to me originally, just to UnSpace, so I was getting a little excited over nothing. Now that I'm in, though, he has a few words:

Third, what I was trying to say regarding the categories of male and female is that they are the only categories. But I didn't say that very well. So let me try this: Male and female are not "archetypes" that are "real and meaningful" for the "vast majority of people" -- they are objective realities. Yes, there are those people who diverge; but such divergences do not constitute categories of being. They are -- to put it bluntly -- defects. Blindness is not a variant of sightedness. It is a defect. Being a hermaphrodite is not a variant of gender. It is a defect.

OK, so they're objective realities. I don't see how that's different from what I said, but I'm not gonna sweat the semantics. Although one thing I'm wondering here is, why does something have to belong to a category in order to be good?

Yes, you are asking them to fight their nature. We ask drunks to fight their nature. We ask rapists to fight their nature. We ask a child to fight his nature and not lie or punch his sister. We ask ourselves to fight our natures all day long. Morality is all about fighting your nature -- your fallen nature, that is; your nature which is imperfect due to the imperfection of the world.

I'm not saying God messed up in making anyone. He made the world and, yes, the world sucks a lot. Did God mess up? Or did we? Remember, it is sin that corrupts the world; our sin. You might ask why God would have made everything in the first place, if He knew we would sin, ruin everything, and essentially cause such pain and harship; but, as I said, that's a matter of theodicy, quite larger than the matter only of gay sex and gay marriage.

This is what drives me crazy about Christian arguments from nature. We can infer God's intent from nature by looking at it, such as the fact that male and female are objective realities. Except the bits of nature we don't like -- that nature was corrupted by our sin. Basically, you can argue anything you darn well please that way, because you get to rule out conflicting evidence. I realize this is not completely arbitrary -- it's ultimately based on moral law in the Bible -- but one wonders why Christians bother arguing from nature to begin with.

Also, I have discussed on this blog before, but it bears repeating, why I have trouble buying the argument that it was human sin that corrupted nature. Basically, it boils down to two reasons:

1) Unless you're a six-day creationist -- I don't know if Louder Fenn is, but I don't think any of my usual correspondents are -- you know that nature predated humanity by quite a bit, and evidence indicates it was always pretty much like it is now. I explicated that problem in this post. (Click here for Telford Work's response and here for my response to the response.)

2) It gives humans an inordinate amount of power. If humans basically created sin, and God did not, humans made it ex nihilo, and theoretically only God can make things ex nihilo. And if you buy into the notion that sin corrupted nature in this way, this is more than just "the choice to disobey God," as some have defined sin. It makes sin into a kind of creative entity itself, giving birth to defective children and weird desires and natural disasters and whatnot. As I complained in the November post I linked above, this seems to amount to a de facto dualism by Christians, as "sin" takes on godlike power.

Louder Fenn is right that this is a bigger topic then just sexual rules. It's the topic I've been worrying for months now, to no satisfactory conclusion.

Hyperactivate

Michael Fumento attacks the idea in some conservative circles that attention-deficit disorder is a big hoax.

One of my psych professors in college remarked that except for schizophrenia, which just about everybody recognizes as "crazy," most mental illnesses are an extreme form of something that's in everybody's experience. We have all had times that we tend toward depression, mania, phobia, compulsiveness and so on. This leads to an unfortunate tendency among a lot of people to think that the illness is essentially no different from what everybody goes through, so it's not a "disease." Everybody who has a mental disorder is going to meet somebody who says, "Why, that's no different from how I was when..." Except that it is different.

Fumento doesn't go into why conservatives, in particular, tend to think like this. But I expect it has to do with a couple subjects I've picked over on this blog before, free will and mind-body dualism. Religious conservatives in particular don't like to think that a lot of people's behavior comes from their brain chemistry. They want the solutions to behavior problems to be spiritual: parental discipline, self-mastery, and so on. Psychiatric explanations seem to undermine that. As Fumento says in his conclusion, the one doesn't necessarily negate the other. But they are two views of human nature that come in conflict, and there is no avoiding it.

Dare to be stupid

CalPundit theorizes about why European firms haven't seen technology-based productivity growth like the U.S. has:

I puzzled over all this for quite a while, and in the end my armchair theorizing added up to this: Europeans on average are actually more rational about technology than we are. They demanded rigorous ROI analysis before they would buy. They recognized that the technology didn't work as well as the hype. And they had a more realistic view of future growth prospects than Americans did.

But here's the weird part: it didn't matter. I think they were actually right more often than American business people were, but the Americans did better anyway. They drank the Kool-Aid, they invested heavily, they reorganized with gay abandon, and then a whole bunch of them went bankrupt. But the ones that stayed around ended up — by hook or by crook — with better businesses.

A week or two ago, I interviewed the CEO of a software company that does business in both Europe in the U.S., and he said something similar. Europeans, he said, are "smarter" about buying software than Americans. They stick with the tried-and-true and rely on established contacts and word-of-mouth rather than ad campaigns, while Americans tend to go for whatever the latest, hottest thing is.

Since this CEO ran an old-school firm, Europe had been taking up a greater and greater percentage of its revenue as the Americans went on to hipper products. But post-dot-com-crash, he said, Americans are starting to buy more like Europeans -- that is, more conservatively. That might have been wishful thinking on his part, but the firm is coming back financially, so maybe he's right. It would follow that Americans would be more cautious about tech buying than they were in the 1990s. If CalPundit is right, though, this may mean settling into European levels of productivity growth. Until the next craze comes along, of course, and then we'll be off and running again...

Let's talk about sex, bay-bee

Louder Fenn comments on the posts by UnSpace and myself about hermaphrodites and Christian sexual morality. His basic point is that he does not believe "compassion trumps moral law." Suffering is part of Christianity, and so we shouldn't change our morals around just to prevent people from suffering.

Rob reponded to this from a Christian theological perspective. Being merely a seeker, I can't speak with authority on these things. But I wanted to respond to a couple of things Louder Fenn said that I think mischaracterized my views.

First, he makes it sounds as if sympathy were the only reason to doubt the rules here -- as he puts it, "you can't let your feelings determine the answer." Actually, though it's true that my emotions are more on the side of the deviants here, I also have an intellectual problem that I tried to spell out in my post. Many Christians, including my pastor, argue that our sexuality was meant to be a certain way because God made us in a certain way. They tend to use Adam and Eve as a paradigm. But that story is, at best, a metaphor, while the evidence from people like hermaphrodites suggests that God did not make everybody according to a single paradigm.

This leads to another objection. Louder Fenn counters Rob's line, "Nature is not confined to simple categories of man and woman," with "That a person may be hermaphroditic does not mean male and female do not really exist -- or, more to the point, that male and female are not insistent categories with moral implications." I don't think anyone implied male and female don't exist. I think for the vast majority of people, the archetypes of maleness and femaleness are real and meaningful. I also said in my post that I can believe that heterosexual monogamy is the healthiest and most moral state for most people. But there are some people out there who don't fit the archetypes, and yet they are imbued with sexual desire just like everyone else. Why did God make them that way? I don't know. I don't know why God made blind people blind either. But we don't generally make a moral issue out of blindness.

I also felt LF overreached when he concluded, "And that some humans are not clearly male or female certainly does not mean males may do whatever they want with males." This is an irritating conflation that happens in these discussions -- somehow we got from gay marriage to "males may do whatever they want with males." I didn't actually discuss gay marriage before (though Rob did), but I think marriage is not "doing whatever you want." As I said in my earlier post, I do think that sex has an explosive power and needs to be handled with great care; and unlike Andrew Sullivan, apparently, I do think it belongs in moral teaching. My problem was with the concept that if you're sexually nonstandard in some way, you can't let yourself have a libido -- no marriage, no fantasizing, no whacking off, no nothing. It is not just that this makes people suffer; it is that you are asking them to fight their nature. It seems perilously close to saying God messed up in making them, so they have to make up the difference.

Why I like this town

It's been an unusually warm winter even for L.A. Today it hit 83 in my neighborhood, and we're just a couple miles from the ocean. I took a walk this evening and went by a house that was having an outdoor Superbowl party. They'd hauled the TV out to the patio, set up a bunch of deck chairs and invited about 20 friends over. People were watching, chatting, going indoors to get beer, even shooting hoops nearby. I imagine there are few other places in America where a Superbowl party looks so much like a Fourth of July fest. What a place!

Do for the other

I'd been thinking, even before I started going to church last fall, that I wanted to do some charity work. I've never been good about that, and it was bothering my conscience. I'd always felt that I didn't have money to spare, and I still don't; but I do have a lot of extra time. The question was, what should I do? How do I find who to volunteer for?

Once I became a regular at Christian Assembly it occurred to me that they must have something going on, and indeed they do. Yesterday morning I got up and went to a monthly event they do at a housing project in Watts. At the end of the month people's welfare checks are running out, and some are going hungry. So the CA volunteers go around to various local markets and pick up their surplus goods, take it to the parking lot of an associated Watts church, and give it away to whoever comes.

The food had already been picked up the day before, so I spent the morning helping prepare it for giveaway. I and a few other people were going through these huge bags of beans and rice, scooping out portions into plastic produce bags and tying them up. One of the people helping with that task I recognized as an usher I had spoken to the first time I ever went to CA, back in October. It was a Saturday night service -- the Saturday before I started this blog, in fact. (It was a week for starting things, I suppose.) I knew of the church because I'd been corresponding with Telford, and thought someday I might check it out. But that night I was lonely and depressed and felt I couldn't stand my own company anymore, so without telling him or anyone else, I went. The service actually didn't help me much -- I left feeling, if anything, even more depressed. But I remember before I left I gave that usher what was probably one of the oddest conversation starters she's ever experienced.

"I haven't been here before, but I have a friend who goes here," I said. "But I don't know what he looks like."

I had, at that point, never seen Telford; and neither had she. It was strange to think of that, and how much had changed. Here just barely more than three months later, I was shoveling rice in Watts. Who would have thought it?

It was also hard not to think of Jeanne d'Arc's post about her own childhood experience with a Christian charity involved in a similar activity. I was worried the Watts residents might look at us like that, since the CA denizens are, to a large extent, the kind of shiny-happy evangelicals that can be so irritating in that way.

Fortunately, I think the situation was a little better here. People came to us voluntarily, so there wasn't the sort of invasiveness that Jeanne described. What was also cool was that a lot of people who came to help us set up were actually there for food themselves -- they wanted to contribute something even though they had far less than I do. It could make communication a bit cumbersome because some of them didn't speak English -- despite Watts' reputation as a black neighborhood, and the fact that the church we were at was black, most of the people we gave food to were Latino. The inter-ethnic nature of the effort was one of the better things about it.

In a way, what we were doing was a small thing. I could imagine people from both left and right criticizing this -- from the left because it entailed no change in unjust social structures, from the right because we just handed stuff out without trying to sort out who was deserving. But the project is just a few years old, and you have to start somewhere. I do not know of any society that's arranged itself in such a way as to eliminate poverty. Sometimes the most you can do is say, if there are hungry people today, feed them.