Concerning the Requirement that we Believe in Fictional Beings

Instapundit linked an interesting post about morality today at Shrink Wrapped, whose author describes himself as a psychoanalyst. He avails himself of the recent arrest of a Columbia professor for incest to set forth his rationale for a belief that turns up in some of his other recent posts as well; that government must be based on Judeo-Christian morality. In his words,

…we should be careful of accepting the continual and continued accrual of transgressions against our bourgeois (i.e., Judeo-Christian) morality; at some point, just as termites can destroy a house by eroding its foundation in silence right until the moment, without warning, the house collapses, each small piece torn out of our moral fabric makes the collapse of our consensual culture more likely.

and (from a different post),

Our modern Western Culture and Civilization are emergent structures that rest upon a Judeo-Christian G-d; while religion may not be necessary for any one individual to behave in a moral manner, it has not yet been shown that any society can behave morally without religion.

Such ideas are common, but I have never heard them expressed by anyone who isn’t a Jew or a Christian. There is good reason for that. What the author is actually suggesting is that it’s necessary for us all to pretend we believe in one of those two religions, regardless of whether they are actually true. That’s something that all discussions of such issues as whether civilizations need a particular religion to survive, or whether religion is a force for good, or whether human behavior will be negatively or positively affected by the absence of one religion or another have in common. They all beg the question (and routinely ignore it) of whether or not the religion in question is actually true. What the author is really suggesting is that truth doesn’t matter. We must allow him and his co-religionists to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us, not because they are true, but because they are useful. I beg to differ. It seems to me more reasonable to base our actions on the truth than on falsehoods.

Proponents of the author’s idea are usually aware of this apparent absurdity in their argument at some level, but it’s a minor difficulty to them because, after all, they believe in the religion themselves. They commonly deal with dissenters by simply declaring that they are immoral. For example, again quoting the author (referring to the recent debate between Tony Blair and Chris Hitchens about whether religion is a force for good),

Finally these kinds of debates will always predispose to the victory by the Atheists for a few relatively simple, and therefore unacknowledged, reasons. First, the believer in G-d must, of necessity, admit to himself that such a belief can never be fully grounded in reason; the connection of faith to the irrational parts of our minds are implicit when not made explicit. We use terms like ineffable to make such a connection more acceptable to our reason but ultimately our belief is fueled and preserved by our awareness that it is based upon a mystery at the heart of existence. The Atheist has no such handicap. He is able, using his reason, to convince himself that Atheism has nothing to do with his irrationality. This exhibits, more than anything else, how adept homo rationalis has become at the grand arts of self deception, rationalization and intellectualization. By doing away with G-d, the Atheist has effectively replaced Him with man, without having to countenance his own arrogance.

In other words, the author is telling me that, if I don’t accept his irrational faith in the “mystery at the heart of existence,” and dare to use my brain, which his G-d has presumably given me to serve as something other than a convenient stuffing for my skull, to actually think about whether a God exists or not, I am guilty of the sin of “arrogance” if I come to the “wrong” conclusion, and decide that there is none. Again, the question of whether God really exists or not doesn’t matter. To avoid the charge of “arrogance,” I must somehow find a way to force myself to believe in something that I am perfectly convinced is a fantasy, more or less in the same way that Christian clinics “convert” homosexuals into heterosexuals. What could actually be more arrogant than the claim that anyone who dares to think is “arrogant” if they come to conclusions that happen to differ from those of the author?

There are many instances of similar silliness in the rest of the article. For example,

Yet if we do not privilege the Judeo-Christian ethics that are the underpinnings of our unconscious morality, we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality, i.e. I take what is yours and do what I want because I can and my god sanctions such behavior. In other words, once we have jettisoned our G-d, we have disarmed intellectually in the war with another’s god.

Where to begin? By arguing that we should “privilege Judeo-Christian ethics,” the author argues for the elimination of any wall of separation between church and state and in favor of a theocracy. That may be where the “progress of civilization” has been heading in Iran, but the same is most definitely not true of the United States and the western democracies, to our great good fortune. I, for one, have no desire to return to the days of Metternich and the Holy Alliance. We can count ourselves lucky if those days are behind us for good.

Judeo-Christian ethics are hardly the underpinnings of our unconscious morality. Rather, our unconscious morality, an evolved trait in our species, is the underpinning of Judeo-Christian ethics, which are merely one example among many of how an innate behavioral trait can be expressed in creatures with large brains. What does the author mean by “Judeo-Christian ethics?” That we should not suffer a witch to live? (Exodus 22:18) That homosexuality is an abomination? (Corinthians 6:9-10) That a man has an obligation to produce a child with his brother’s widow, and, if he refuses, his sister-in-law is to spit in his face in front of the elders. (Deuteronomy 25:5-9)? What about the killing of heretics, approved by St. Augustine, or the innumerable holy wars approved by a long line of popes? If not, what, exactly, are we to understand by the term “Judeo-Christian ethics?” Presumably they are only those bits and pieces of the morality set forth in the Bible or Torah that the author, inspired by his “ineffable awareness guided by a mystery at the heart of creation” agrees with.

How is it that, without Judeo-Christian ethics, “we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality,” if they seek to take what is ours or otherwise molest us? How about the answer of nuclear weapons? How is it that we are prohibited from defending ourselves unless we can answer one bogus belief with another? There is no better “intellectual armament in the war with another’s god” than to simply point out the obvious; that their god and their transcendental morality are both fantasies.

Again quoting from the article,

Once we have, as a culture, fully adopted an ethic of Just Do It as the apotheosis of our morality, we are helpless against those who wish to Just Do It in ways which are inimical to us.

In other words, unless we allow the author’s version of Judeo-Christian morality to be stuffed down our throats, we somehow implicitly accept “an ethic of Just Do It.” How odd that, somehow, other primates exhibit moral behavior in spite of the fact that no rabbis or priests have ever been found among them. Most of us, including myself, will not follow an ethic of Just Do It because, like other primates, the predispositions that give rise to morality are hard-wired in our brains. If it ever occurs to me that I need some logical reason not to adopt an ethic of Just Do It, I need only recall that creatures who practiced that ethic in eons long past failed to survive. We atheists have the same emotional attachment to survival as everyone else.

Again, the author has so bamboozled himself with morality that he believes that one is somehow prohibited from defending himself unless he can give a moral reason for doing so. If we cannot point out some moral reason for our attackers to avoid such behavior, we are “helpless,” and apparently constrained to stand idly by as they slaughter us. He doesn’t realize that morality preceded both religion and reason, not the other way around. His reasons are mere after the fact rationalizations. It’s as if one couldn’t enjoy sex without first having a reason. Continuing from the article,

The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger.

Yes, the wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to a danger, but not the one the author thinks. The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger of trying to apply morality to the governing of large states, or to the relationships between them, period. What would he have us believe? That the zealots of secular religions like Communism or Nazism were any less puritanical than the past and current zealots of the traditional spiritual ones? Is it really credible that they had a Just Do It ethic? Please! Look at the history of Stalin’s great purge trials, or the fate of the dissident generals in Germany after the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, or read a few accounts of the Great Cultural Revolution in China. These were all quintessentially moral phenomena, and the mayhem they caused was entirely akin to the Christian slaughter of witches, or their countless wars over trivial differences in religious doctrine, or their repeated mass murders of Jews. No, my friend, what we should have learned from the wreckage of the last century is the absurdity and destructiveness of our continued attempts to apply human morality in situations for which, given its real origins, there can be no reasonable expectation that it would be in the least applicable, or result in any other outcome than more wreckage.

There are consequences to basing our actions on lies, religious or otherwise. The wreckage will continue until we learn that.

UPDATE:  The author of Shrink Wrapped immediately deleted a comment I left on his site challenging his post.  Interestingly, intolerance of dissent is a traditional characteristic of both Christians and psychoanalysts.

Vignettes from 1925

These are from various articles and authors in the May 1925 issue of H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury.

Politics:

What shall the end be? Will that race of men who for a thousand years have asserted the “right of castle,” rejected governmental interference in domestic affairs, proclaimed the right of the free man to regulate his personal habits and to rear and govern his children in accordance with the law of conscience and of love, now become subject to a self-imposed statutory tyranny which from birth to death interferes in the smallest cocerns of life? Shall we endure a legal despotism, the equivalent of which would have provoked rebellion amongst the Saxons even when under the Norman heel?

I doubt not these statutory bonds will be eventually broken. The right of the free man to live his own life, limited only be the inhibition of non-infringement upon the rights of others, will again be asserted. But before that day arrives, will the splendid symmetry of our governmental structure have been destroyed?

Alas, my friend, there is yet no light at the end of the tunnel.  Next, from an article about the Mexican border towns entitled “Hell Along the Border,”

I have studiously observed the viciousness and even the mere faults of decorum in Juarez, largest of the corrupting foci, in season and out for a least twelve seasons. I have had my glimpses at the life of the equally ill-reputed Nogales, Mexicali and Tia Juana. I have been in confidential communication with habitual visitors to Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, Piedras Negras, and Agua Prieta. And I can find in all these towns no sins more gorgeous than those enjoyed by every Massachusetts lodge of Elks at its annual fish-fries prior to 1920.

Regarding the evangelical clergy, the televangelists of the day, immortalized by Sinclair Lewis in his Elmer Gantry,

The net result, as I say, is to inspire those of us who have any surviving respect for God with an unspeakable loathing. We gaze on all this traffic and, without knowing exactly why, we feel a sick, nauseated revulsion. We feel as we felt when we were children, and had a bright glamorous picture of Santo Claus, with his fat little belly and fairy reindeer, and then suddenly came on a vile old loafer ringing a bell over an iron pot. It seems a blasphemous mockery that men can preadch such vulgar nonsense, call it religion, and then belabor the rest of us for not being washed in the blood of the Lamb.

Concerning the latest in the hotel trade,

Whatever I might write were the latest wrinkle would not be the latest wrinkle by the time these lines get into type. But one of the latest, certainly, is radio service in every chamber.

Of anthropology, from an article entitled “The New History,”

The anthropologists have paralleled the achievements of the archeologists by making careful studies of existing primitive peoples. Ten years ago we possessed in this field only the chatty introduction by Marett, and Professor Boas’ highly scholarly but somewhat difficult little book, “The Mind of Primitive Man.” Today we have admirable general works by Goldenweiser, Lowie, Kroeber, Tozzer, Levy-Bruhl and Wissler with several more in immediate prospect. These deal acutely and lucidly with primitive institutions.

As the cognoscenti among my readers are no doubt aware, this was written on the very threshold of anthropology’s spiral into the dark ages of the Blank Slate, from which it has only recently emerged.  The good Professor Boas played a major role in pushing it over the cliff.

Concerning the value of morality in regulating society,

Once we give up the pestilent assumption that the only effective sanctions for conduct are those of law and morals, and begin to delimit clearly the field of manners, we shall be by way of discovering how powerful and how easily communicable the sense of manners is, and how efficiently it operates in the very regions where law and morals have so notoriously proven themselves inert. The authority of law and morals does relatively little to build up personal dignity, responsibility and self-respect, while the authority of manners does much… I also venture to emphasize for special notice by the Americanizers and hundred-per-centers among us, the observation of Edmund Burke that “there ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

and finally, from the collection of anecdotes Mencken always included under the heading Americana,

Effects of the Higher Learning at Yale, as revealed by the answers to a questionnaire submitted to the students there:

Favorite character in world history: Napoleon, 181; Cleopatra, 7; Jeanne d’Arc, 7; Woodrow Wilson, 7; Socrates, 5; Jesus Christ, 4; Mussolini, 3. Favorite prose author: Stevenson, 24; Dumas, 22; Sabatini, 11; Anatole France, 5; Cabell, 5; Bernard Shaw, 4. Favorite magazine: Saturday Evening Post, 94; Atlantic Monthly, 24, New Republic, 3; Time Current History, 3. Favorite political party: Republican, 304; Democratic, 84; none, 22; Independent, 3. Biggest world figure of today: Coolidge, 52; Dawes, 32, Mussolini, 3; Prince of Wales, 24; J. P. Morgan, 15; Einstein, 3; Bernard Shaw, 3. What subject would you like to see added to the curriculum: Elocution and Public Speaking, 24; Business course, 8; Deplomacy, 7; Drama, 4.

Times change in 85 years.

Of John Locke and Atheist Billboards

Apropos John Locke, he’s usually considered an Enlightenment avatar of tolerance. Author of the famous A Letter Concerning Toleration, he argued that toleration of multiple religious sects deterred civil unrest and promoted an orderly society. However, he added some caveats to his plea for diversity. One of them applied to atheists. For example, from An Essay concerning Human Understanding:

And perhaps, if we should with attention mind the lives and discourses of people not so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the magistrate’s sword, or their neighbor’s censure, tie up people’s tongues; which, were the apprehensions of punishment or shame taken away, would as openly proclaim their atheism as their lives do.

Atheists have generally been a minority with “different” beliefs, and, as such, a predictable outgroup in a species, such as our own, with an innate tendency to hate, ostracize and despise outgroups. Specious “good-sounding” reasons have always been invented to justify that hate, and Locke had his own, but the Amity-Enmity Complex has always been the real reason. Fortunately, we have been making encouraging progress towards gaining an understanding of human nature in recent years. There is some hope that society at large will finally grasp the significance of the Complex and its disastrous role in promoting the war and violence against minorities that has been so ubiquitous in human history. Perhaps the day will come when most of us will be able to immediately recognize irrational manifestations of ingroup-outgroup behavior, and ostracize and condemn those who fail to control that most destructive aspect of our nature instead of their victims. However, that day has not yet come, and so we remain on the treadmill of trying to stamp out each of the potentially infinite ways in which the Complex can manifest itself as if it were something new under the sun. We invent new names for each of them as the evil they cause becomes intolerable, whether racism, or anti-Semitism, or xenophobia, or homophobia, never seeming to realize that they all have the same root cause, and new isms and phobias will always be waiting just around the corner to take their place until we finally tear up the root itself.

So it is with atheists. Things being as they are, we too must fight our own little piece of the battle in detail. Billboards are one recent manifestation of that struggle. The Friendly Atheist notes a typical reaction to them, in this case from Marcia Segelstein at OneNewsNow:

I guess I just don’t understand. Christians (along with Jews and Muslims) gather in groups to worship. Atheists don’t gather not to worship, so why seek out members? What’s there to be a member of? And why should atheists care about stopping worshippers who are just “going through the motions”? Do they think they might get their hands on money once pledged to churches?

Trying to tear down the belief system of the world’s foremost religion — Christianity — is what seems intolerant to me. Placing prominent ads declaring the birth of Christ to be a myth seems downright hostile. To my mind, these campaigns feel defensive, as though atheists are weighted down with chips on their shoulders, or feel left out of some club.

Well, Marcia, atheists gather in groups for the same reason other people with like interests gather in groups; because we are by nature social animals.   The billboard campaigns certainly are defensive, and rightly so.  If you still don’t understand why, read Locke’s remark above about the “magistrate’s sword,” or peruse the history of Spain under the Inquisition.  If you think “it can’t happen here,” Sinclair Lewis wrote a book with that title that might interest you.  There is nothing hostile about disputing Christian or any other religious beliefs.  Is it really unimportant whether we base our lives and actions on the truth or not?  If the truth is important, how are we ever to approach it unless we are allowed to think about and discuss it?

John Locke and the Blank Slate

I’ve always been dubious of attempts to trace the origins of ideas back through generations of philosophers. They were, after all, individuals, and to understand them, one must take that into account. In creating such philosophical genealogies, one should consider the fact that, while thinkers separated in time by centuries may have had superficially similar ideas, it is far from certain that they understood the ideas in quite the same way, or endorsed them for the same reasons.

Take, for example, the case of John Locke. He is often cited as the father of the modern incarnation of the Blank Slate. In our own day, the “Blank Slate” refers to the notion that, for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as innate human nature, and our behavior is almost entirely determined by what we learn and experience. The idea was in vogue among behavioral scientists who should have known better through much of the 20th century before finally falling into the well-deserved disrepute it enjoys today. Locke seems a perfect candidate for the “father” of the idea. It’s all there in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The very title of Book I of the essay is, “Neither Principles nor Ideas are Innate.” The problem is that what Locke meant by “principles and ideas” was not quite the same thing as what later day anthropologists and psychologists understood under the rubric of “human nature,” nor is it likely that more than a handful of them would have agreed with his reasoning if they had actually taken the trouble to read his book. The idea that they were somehow “inspired” by him is the type of stuff that makes good filler in philosophy textbooks, but is highly questionable in fact.

For starters, Locke didn’t have the luxury of sitting on the shoulders of Darwin. An Englishman of the religion-drenched 17th century, nothing was more certain to him than the existence of God. He related his belief in God to his rejection of innate ideas in a way that one would look in vain to see repeated in 20th century journals of the behavioral sciences;

If the idea of God be not innate, not other can be supposed innate.

and he assumed that, if we had innate ideas, they must have been written on our minds by the hand of God. For example,

Hence naturally flows the great variety of opinions concerning moral rules which are to be found among men, according to the different sorts of happiness they have a prospect of, or propose to themselves; which could not be if practical principles were innate, and imprinted in our minds immediately by the hand of God.

and, referring to five supposed “innate ideas” set forth in a contemporary book by Lord Herbert,

First, that these five propositions are either not all, or more than all, those common notions written on our minds by the finger of God.

Locke also believed in a spiritual as surely as he believed in a physical world. Hence, if innate ideas existed, they would not have been written in the physical makeup of an organ like the brain, but on our souls. In his words,

It might very well be expected that these (innate) principles should be perfectly known to naturals; which being stamped immediately on the soul, (as these men suppose,) can have no dependence on the constitution or organs of the body, the only confessed difference between them and others.

When he spoke of “ideas and principles,” Locke had something very different in mind than the innate predispositions that we share with many animals, against the existence of which the Blank Slate orthodoxy of the 20th century thundered down its anathemas for so long in vain. Rather, Locke referred to principles that could be clearly set down in words and reasoned about in a way that excluded all other animals but ourselves. He referred to them as “speculative maxims,” and, since they were inscribed by the hand of God himself, they must necessarily be universal:

…this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that there are none such: because there are none to which all mankind give an universal assent.

and, referring to moral principles,

But, since it is certain that most men’s practices, and some men’s open professions, have either questioned or denied these principles, it is impossible to establish an universal consent, (though we should look for it only amongst grown men,) without which it is impossible to conclude them innate.

Innate morality was inconceivable to Locke because he could not conceptualize morality as other than a set of clear rules that could be spelled out in words, and the resulting moral “maxims” then reasoned about and proved:

Another reason that makes me doubt of any innate practical principles is, that I think there cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand and reason: which would be perfectly ridiculous and absurd if they were innate.

Furthermore, innate moral rules were impossible, because, if they existed, they must have been inscribed in our minds by God himself, and we could not be unaware that he had put them there, and would certainly punish their breach:

From what has been said, I think we may safely conclude, that whatever practical rule is in any place generally and with allowance broken, cannot be supposed innate; it being impossible that men should, without shame or fear, confidently and serenely, break a rule which they could not but evidently know that God had set up, and would certainly punish the breach of, (which they must, if it were innate,) to a degree to make it a very ill bargain to be the transgressor.

and,

If, therefore, anything be imprinted on the minds of all men as a law, all men must have a certain and unavoidable knowledge that certain and unavoidable punishment will attend the breach of it.

It would seem, then, that when we attempt to lump Locke’s Blank Slate with that of a 20th century anthropologist, we are comparing apples and oranges. It’s hard to imagine that knowledge of a source of innate morality as different from the hand of God as evolution by natural selection would have had no impact on his thought. He was far from rejecting any notion of “human nature” carte blanche. For example,

Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing.

and,

Principles of actions indeed there are lodged in men’s appetites.

In a word, then, it’s not really fair to tar Locke, or, for that matter, Rousseau and his “noble savage” with the same brush as the experts of a later day because they didn’t take the trouble to be born before the publication of The Origin of Species. The same excuse cannot be made for the obscurantist “behavioral scientists” of the 20th century.

Jesus and the Ants

The Smithsonian’s “A Fire in my Belly” video exhibit, which depicts Jesus on the cross being eaten by ants, at least has the virtue of accurately reflecting what the Institution has become and the nature of the people who run it. Bill Quick’s take at Daily Pundit:

You think you’re so “transgressive,” so “daring,” so “cutting edge,” you cheap-ass poseur pieces of shit?

I’ll show you daring. I’ll show you cutting edge.

Switch out your ant-drenched Jesus for an ant-riddled Mohammed.

Go ahead, you gutless, cowardly pussies calling yourselves artists. I dare you.

I’d say that’s about right, although expressed in somewhat intemperate language.

Hitch and Blair Debate Religion

The televised event took place before a 2700 strong audience in Toronto. According to an article in the Telegraph,

(Hitchens) appeared to win over the audience, which voted two-to-one in his favour following the debate, which argued the motion “be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world”.

With all due respect to the former Prime Minister, this one must have been like shooting fish in a barrel for the likes of Hitchens. It’s hard to argue that Christianity has been “a force for good in the world” in light of the tens of millions who lost their lives in the religious wars it inspired, or the institutionalized intolerance and bigotry it has been responsible for, or the hundreds of thousands of innocent women hung or burned as “witches” in Europe during the Middle Ages, or its promotion of the mass torture of “heretics,” or its repeated massacres of Jews and other religious minorities. As for Islam, it is not the predominant religion in North Africa, or Syria, or Turkey, or parts of Europe because it is a “religion of peace,” but because it was imposed by force. Anyone with any doubt about whether it is a “force for good in the world” in spite of its bloody history, its institutionalized oppression of women, and its rejection of the separation of mosque and state must have been asleep since 911.

It doesn’t really matter, though. What does matter is whether these religions are true or not. If one of them is true (and they can’t both be true at the same time because they are mutually exclusive), then the question of whether it’s a “force for good” becomes moot. We then become the subjects of an absolute tyrant with a smiley face, and we can like it or burn in hell for billions and trillions of years, just for starters. As Hitchens puts it, “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.” Edward Fitzgerald summed up our situation in similar, but more poetic terms, in his fanciful “translation” of the Rubaiyat. Don’t let the prospect depress you, though. For reasons set forth by a simple French priest named Jean Meslier in his Testament more than two and a half centuries ago, and improved on very little in the intervening years, the chances that we will sizzle in hell forever for the pleasure and edification of the elect are rather slim.

Jesus Interrupted: Bart Ehrman and the Contradictions in the Bible

The fact that there are many contradictions in the Bible has been known to scholars for centuries.  Martin Luther famously called the Book of James “ an epistle of straw” with “nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it . . . [It is] not the writing of any apostle,” added that the Book of Esther was “without boots or spurs,” and called the authorship of the Pentateuch and several other books into question.  The great 18th century atheist Jean Meslier cited numerous contradictions, as did Voltaire, and German scholars in the 19th century pretty much demolished the notion that the Bible is the “inerrant word of God.”  Enter Bart Ehrman and his remarkable book, Jesus, Interrupted.  Ehrman goes through many of the most important contradictions, noting how easy it is to see them if the books of the Bible are read side by side, or “horizontally,” as he puts it.  Beyond that, he guides the reader on a tour of the historical Bible, describing what we know about the authors, why they often weren’t who they claimed to be, and why it’s important to consider what each of them believed about Jesus and was trying to accomplish in writing their books.  In a word, he describes the Bible as very much a human rather than a divine product.

As I do not believe in supernatural beings myself, what surprised me about all this was not the fact that there are many contradictions in the Bible, but Ehrman’s claim that this historical-critical approach to it has been taught to most of the graduates of our religious seminaries for the better part of the last century.  Most of our clerics are well aware of the facts, accept them, but, for one reason or another, have decided not to pass the word along to their flocks.  In Ehrman’s words,

…the basic views that I’ve sketched here are widely known, widely taught, and widely accepted among New Testament scholars and their students, including the students who graduate from seminaries and go on to paster churches. Why do these students so rarely teach their congregations this information, but insist on approaching the Bible devotionally rather than historical-critically, not just in the pulpit (where a devotional approach would be expected) but also in their adult education classes? That has been one of my leading questions since I started writing this book.

Ehrman is a refreshing author to read.  He comes from an evangelical Christian background, but eventually became an agnostic, although not, as he claims because of any doubts about the divine authorship of the Bible.  Unlike some of the “new atheist” authors, he doesn’t write with his Amity/Enmity Complex on his sleeve.  In reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, for example, one often gets the impression spittle is literally flying off the pages as he rants about the “American Taliban” of evangelical Christians, getting so carried away in the process that he repeats an urban legend about how James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, had  told the U.S. Congress that protecting the environment was not important because Jesus would come back soon.  Ehrman, on the other hand, not only does not condemn Christian belief, but claims that the realization that the authorship of the Bible is human rather than divine need not undermine those beliefs.  In his words,

Some readers will find it surprising that I do not see the material in the preceding chapters as an attack on Christianity or an agnostic’s attempt to show that faith, even Christian faith, is meaningless and absurd. That is not what I think, and it is not what I have been trying to accomplish.

I have been trying, instead, to make serious scholarship on the Bible and earliest Christianity accessible and available to people who may be interested in the New Testament but who, for one reason or another, have never heard what scholars have long known and thought about it.

I suspect many evangelical Christians will agree with my own conclusion that this is rather an understatement of the degree to which the conclusion that the Bible is not only not divinely inspired, but full of contradictions, undermines Christian faith.  To believe that is to believe that, for more than a thousand years, God stood idly by and did nothing in particular to prevent generations of clerical charlatans from bamboozling his moral flock regarding matters that would have a critical bearing on their fate in the hereafter.  It is to believe that, 2000 years after the time of Christ, one can be a Christian, independently of any reliable information about what the man actually said and what his appearance on earth actually meant, just by making things up as you go along. 

I personally prefer to apply Occam’s razor.  The simplest explanation for all these Biblical contradictions is the conclusion that Christ was just another Middle Eastern soothsayer, like legions of others who flourished in the region for hundreds of years before and after his death, differing from them only in the fact that he was the most successful of them all.  It’s unsettling and a little scary to think that the great majority of the human beings on the planet actually believe in imaginary super beings. It’s more or less equivalent to the realization that we’re inmates in a giant asylum. 

It didn’t take Darwin to reveal all these religious impostures for what they are.  Meslier did a perfectly adequate job of it in his Testament more than 250 years ago.  The writings of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the rest are really just afterthoughts.  In spite of all their repetition of the obvious, our religious disconnect with reality continues unabated.  If we set any value on our own survival as a species, apparently it will be necessary for us to somehow find a way to become more intelligent.

Morality and the Metamorphosis of Secular Religion

Secular religions have taken the place of spiritual ones among many “progressive” intellectuals.  As I noted in an earlier post, they are distinguishable by an irrational belief in a disembodied “Good” as opposed to a more traditional “God.”  Communism was the quintessential example of such a religion, but there are many other variants, just as there are many Christian sects. 

There are many similarities between the true believers of both types of faith.  For example, pathologically pious secular zealots imagine themselves as saviors of mankind in this world, just as their spiritual brethren imagine themselves as saviors of souls in the next world.  Armed with an invincible faith in their intellectual superiority over other mortals, they would guide the rest of us benighted souls who would really prefer that they just leave us alone to a brave new world of “human flourishing,” just as earlier zealots felt duty-bound to herd us all towards the pearly gates. 

For many years, Communism was the most viral and toxic variant of either type of religion on the planet.  Since its demise, that honor has passed to radical Islam.  As Eric Hofer noted in “The True Believer,” there are remarkable psychological similarities among the zealots of all faiths, regardless of the particular dogmas that inspire them.  His observations have been abundantly confirmed in recent years, as “progressive” true believers, left high and dry by the collapse of Communism, have begun a counter-intuitive flirting with radical Islam like so many moths fascinated by a candle.  For them it represents, in a sense, the only game in town.

Secular religions are as vulnerable to the advance of human knowledge as the spiritual ones.  Fanatics of both types have a similar allergic reaction to the truth if it happens to challenge their dogmas.  For the secular faithful, one such dogma has long been the perfectibility of human beings, dependent on a belief that human behavioral traits are almost infinitely malleable.  Hypotheses to the effect that our behavior, including our moral behavior, is actually profoundly influenced by innate predispositions hard-wired in our brains flew in the face of this aspect of the secular narrative.  The faithful reacted furiously to such ideas, resisting them in the teeth of more than abundant confirming evidence until, in recent years, the weight of evidence became overwhelming.  Their intuitions were right; they had good reason to do so.

In fact, acceptance of innate behavior has been every bit as devastating to irrational belief in “The Good” as Darwin’s great theory was to irrational belief in God.  With respect to moral behavior, in particular, increasingly frequent and spectacular demonstrations of the physical and chemical basis of the associated emotions, the locations of their origins in the brain down to the level of neurons, and the precise bits of our genome that give rise to them, as well as the observation of analogous moral behavior in animals, have made it abundantly obvious that “The Good” is an artifact of moral emotions similar to those in other species, unremarkable except for the fact that they are experienced and cognitively interpreted in the minds of creatures of exceptionally high intelligence.  Our perception of “The Good” is entirely dependent for its existence on evolved traits that were added to our repertoire because, at various times in the distant past with no resemblance to the present, they happened to promote our survival.  As such, it cannot exist as a thing in itself, independent of individual human minds. 

Our moral emotions have and will continue to have an undeniable psychological power over virtually every one of us.  However, we have now learned much about the nature of those emotions, the causes that give rise to them in the brain, and the evolutionary nature of their origins.  It is no longer plausible or rational to claim that they have any transcendental significance as objective things independent of and existing for reasons unrelated to those origins.  That does not mean that the dogmas of secular religions will cease to exist.  It does mean that belief in those dogmas is no longer compatible with scientific fact or reason.  As a result, it will become increasingly necessary for secular true believers to defend them as spiritual true believers have done in the past; with obscurantism.

As noted in earlier posts, we have already begun to see this in the case of the “blank slate.”  The true believers have been forced to abandon it, at least in its most absurd incarnations, but have created a whole new narrative to replace it.  For example, the most brilliant, influential and articulate opponents of the “blank slate” in the 60s and 70s pointed out that there were negative aspects of innate human behavior that we would do well to understand if we were to have any hope of avoiding the endless repetition of warfare, violence, and mayhem in human history.  These are aspects of human behavior that are distinctly out of tune with the latest secular narrative.  As a result, regardless of the fact that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey were right and their opponents were wrong regarding one issue of overarching significance they were debating, the hypothesis of innate behavior, they are studiously ignored by modern secular zealots.  It is as if they never existed or, if they did, their ideas could be dismissed with a wave of the hand as “utterly and totally wrong.”  We are assured that “The Good” can still be achieved if we are just a bit more judicious about “adjusting the knobs” of our moral behavior, ushering in a wonderful new era of “human flourishing” in spite of the abundance of historical disasters associated with such noble plans, and their increasingly obvious disconnect with reality.  In the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary, “The Good,” lives on, an independent, objective thing dangling out there in never-never land.

The “proofs” offered up for the existence of “The Good” by the priests of secular religions yield nothing to the miscellaneous “proofs” of the existence of God devised over the years for their unabashed rejection of intellectual clarity and common sense.  Here’s an example taken from true believer Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”:

But just because our brains are prepared to think in certain ways, it does not follow that the objects of those thoughts are fictitious. Many of our faculties evolved to mesh with real entities in the world. Our perception of depth is the product of complicated circuitry in the brain, circuitry that is absent from other species. But that does not mean that there aren’t real trees and cliffs out there, or that the world is as flat as a pancake. And so it may be with more abstract entities. humans, like many animals, appear to have an innate sense of number, which can be explained by the advantages of reasoning about numerosity during our evolutionary history. (For example, if three bears go into a cave and two come out, is it safe to enter?) But the mere fact that a number faculty evolved does not mean that numbers are hallucinations. According to the Platonist conception of number favored by many mathematicians and philosophers, entities such as numbers and shapes have an existence independent of minds. The number three is not invented out of whole cloth; it has real properties that can be discovered and explored. No rational creature equipped with circuitry to understand the concept “two” and the concept of addition could discover that two plus one equals anything other than three. That is why we expect similar bodies of mathematical results to emerge from different cultures or even different planets. If so, the number sense evolved to grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the minds that grasp them.

Perhaps the same argument can be made for morality. According to the theory of moral realism, right and wrong exist, and have an inherent logic that licenses some moral arguments and not others.

Voila!  “The Good” ascends triumphant from its humble origin.  Like Pinocchio, it sheds its subjective strings and dances about before our noses, a real, honest-to-goodness thing-in-itself.  Let this serve as a lesson to you, dear reader.  Never let a secular religious zealot draw you into a conversation about the real existence of the number two.

Meanwhile, the Brave New World beckons!  A manifesto has just been released by attendees at the recent Edge Conference on “The New Science of Morality.”  Referred to by its signatories as a “Consensus Statement,” it includes eight sections, the first seven of which are a brief summary of what passes as the state-of-the-art in our scientific understanding of morality.  However, the eighth is a somewhat diffident incarnation of the latest version of the holy scriptures:

Moral systems support human flourishing, to varying degrees

The emergence of morality allowed much larger groups of people to live together and reap the benefits of trust, trade, shared security, long term planning, and a variety of other non-zero-sum interactions. Some moral systems do this better than others, and therefore it is possible to make some comparative judgments.

The existence of moral diversity as an empirical fact does not support an “anything-goes” version of moral relativism in which all moral systems must be judged to be equally good. We note, however, that moral evaluations across cultures must be made cautiously because there are multiple justifiable visions of flourishing and wellbeing, even within Western societies. Furthermore, because of the power of moral intuitions to influence reasoning, social scientists studying morality are at risk of being biased by their own culturally shaped values and desires.

It’s not quite as self-assured as something that, say, Calvin or Jonathan Edwards might have written, but you get the drift.  I’m sorry, dear reader, but it won’t help to suggest to these people that we might all “flourish” better if religious zealots, whether secular or spiritual, would refrain from foisting their dogmas on the rest of us.  The pathologically pious have ye always with you.  We’ve already had an abundant taste of how earlier versions of their sure-fire nostrums worked with Nazism, Communism, the Holy Inquisition, and a host of others.  Let us take heed, lest, sharing the fate of the millions of victims of earlier versions of “The Good” in the 20th century, the next time we “flourish” becomes our last.

Papal Bigotry

Apparently the pope showed the now blunted fangs of the other “Religion of Peace” in an address to the Queen during his visit to the UK. The BBC quotes him as follows:

Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.

The pope would do well to reflect on the record of the church he represents before he starts inveighing against “atheist extremism.” For example, it was responsible for the expulsion of Jews from the very country he was speaking in, not to mention his home country of Germany, as well as France, Spain and Portugal.  It was responsible for countless pogroms against Jews throughout its bloody history, murdering hundreds of thousands of them in massacres in Germany and many other European countries.  Other than that, it was directly responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of women as “witches,” countless bloody acts of repression against religious minorities, and the butchery of millions more in the wars it directly inspired.

As for the Nazis, the pope would do well to read “Mein Kampf.”  After all, it was written in his mother tongue.  In it Hitler invoked God many times, claiming, for example, that in fighting the Jews, he was doing the “Lord’s work.” 

The political right has a tradition of bigotry in matters of religion, most recently revealed in the prevailing fashion of blaming atheists for Nazism and Communism.  If the Nazis were atheist, how is it that Hitler constantly invoked God in his writings and speeches?  How is it that the millions of little memorial brochures the Nazis sent to the families of fallen soldiers with a picture of the deceased on one side always had Christian symbols and verses on the other?  Why did Nazi belt buckles and medals carry the inscription “God with us?”

Both Nazism and Communism were secular religions, differing from earlier versions only because they were unwise enough to promise heaven on earth, rather than pie in the sky when you die.  They were recognized as such by numerous contemporary writers, who often spoke of Communist and Nazi leaders as so many popes, bishops and priests. 

The Nazis and Communists didn’t murder because they were atheists.  They murdered because they were Nazis and Communists.  That remains a major distinction between atheists and Christians.  Atheists have never murdered simply by virtue of the fact that they don’t believe in God.  Christians have murdered millions by virtue of the fact that they do.

Jewish Expulsions in the Name of Christianity

Noah and Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh was first written down by an unknown Babylonian scribe around 2000 B.C.  It relates the heroic adventures of the semi-legendary ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk about 2700 B.C.  At one point, Gilgamesh seeks out an ancient sage by the name of Utnapishtim in order to discover how to avoid death.  It happens that the gods awarded immortality to Utnapishtim after he survived a great flood that wiped out all the rest of humanity by building a large boat at the behest of the god Ea.  In the manner of Noah, he collected his family and all manner of living things and took them along for the ride.  As the waters subside, his boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.  Quoting from the epic,

Sound familiar?  And yet people still stumble around on Mt. Ararat looking for the remains of Noah’s ark. Every few decades or so, they even find them, although they do tend to move around a bit.  Go figure.