I read some of Sam Harris’ writing today, trying to figure out whether Chris Hedges was totally off base with some of his insinuations about killing.   To be perfectly honest, I was surprised at some of Hedges insinuations because I didn’t remember Harris, for instance, ever condoning a nuclear attack.  Next trip to the library, I’ll try and get a hold of both End of Faith and I Don’t Believe in Atheists to try and figure out exactly what it is Hedges is talking about.

I went back through all of my posts from 2006.  I wrote a ton!  Here they are:

• Letter to a Christian Nation
• End of Faith: Reason in Exile
• End of Faith: A Science of Good and Evil
• The End of Faith
• Experiments in Consciousness

The problem I repeatedly bumped up against was the feeling that Harris was being completely unreasonable in his insistence that we eradicate religion in order to eradicate fundamentalism.  This is psychologically ridiculous.  Pushing fundamentalist belief up against the wall would do nothing more than strengthen unreasonable resolve.  Treat people reasonably, they generally behave reasonably.  But what Harris thinks is reasonable is viewed as completely unreasonable from the fundamentalist perspective.   He makes no effort to communicate whatsoever.  All he wants to do is enforce his reason upon their unreason which can’t work.  The reason fundamentalism exists is because people feel threatened.  And the more you threaten them, the stronger their resolve.

I think I probably found one of the quotes that Hedges used in regards to Harris’ sanction of force:

…the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of “moderate” Muslims. Unless Muslims can reshape their religion into an ideology that is basically benign - or outgrow it altogether - it is difficult to see how Islam and the West can avoid falling into a continual state of war, and on innumerable fronts….If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslims societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun. Muslims might then come to see the wisdom of moderating their thinking on a wide variety of subjects. Otherwise, we will be obliged to protect our interests in the world with force - continually. In this case, it seems all but certain that our newspapers will begin to read more and more like the book of Revelation.

This is completely inane.  Moderate Muslims did not create fundamentalist Muslims.  A much stronger case could be made for atheism having created today’s fundamentalism.  So maybe the atheists should take responsibility for what it is they have created and undo the harm they have bestowed upon the rest of the world through their communicative mindlessness!  OK - I’m just being facetious.  But atheism is at least as much to blame for fundamentalism as is religion.  Maybe more.

Fundamentalism didn’t exist in the form we have it today until after the Enlightenment.  People felt their beliefs were being threatened and so they took steps to protect them.  And some of what they are protecting isn’t totally unreasonable.  That’s what those in the church of reason don’t get because they think themselves so goddamned reasonable so don’t realize how they contribute to the unreasonable behavior of others.

I was watching Thomas Friedman on Charlie Rose, today, and he was talking about how people don’t listen with their ears, they listen with their stomachs.  People react to one another on gut levels, not reasonable levels.  Get someone to trust you, and you don’t have to fill in all the details.  Make someone distrust you, and you are going to have big problems!

If Harris wants to get rid of fundamentalism, he’s going about it in the completely wrong way!  If he truly wanted to eradicate fundamentalism, he’d be more psychologically savvy.  It’s kind of like Bush and his war on terrorism.  Maybe Bush truly believed he was eradicating evil.  But from the outside it seemed clear the goal was to empower U.S. control over the Middle East.  Maybe Harris truly does want to eradicate fundamentalism.  But from the outside it seems obvious that what he really wants to do is empower atheistic control over theism.

When you look at it this way, Hedges accusations don’t seem so far off base!

Reinhold Niebuhr quote used by Chris Hedges in I Don’t Believe in Atheists:

The idea of progress is compounded of many elements.  It is particularly important to consider one element of which modern culture is itself completely oblivious.  The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture.  It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaninglessness history of the Greeks.  But since the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of man is eliminated, a complicating factor in the Christian philosophy is removed and the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom.

From the Nature and Destiny of Man

I always recycle my stickies I put all over library books until they are no longer sticky so I know that I used only one less sticky on Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists than I did on Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which was a much longer book.   Hedges book is completely crowded with stickies!

This book touches on so much stuff I’ve been writing over the years in less than 200 pages.   Where do I begin?

With the prologue, I suppose:

• “After all, there is nothing intrinsically moral about being a believer or a nonbeliever.”  So true!  But there are plenty of atheists who say it is immoral to be religious and religious folks who say it is immoral to be atheistic.
• “The agenda of the new atheists, however, is disturbing.  These new atheists embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists.   They propose a route to collective salvation and the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason.  The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the iea that we are moving toward collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of the Christian faith and the Enlightenment.  All too often throughout history, those who believed in the possibility of this perfection (variously defined) have called for silencing or eradication of human beings who are impediments to human progress.  They turn their particular notion of the good into an inflexible standard of universal good.  They prove blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil.  They soon commit evil not for evil’s sake but to make the world better.”  Yes, yes, YES!!!  This is what I’ve been trying to say for years but never said it this well!  This is what Nietzsche’s mad man meant when he ran out into the crowd and exclaimed “God is dead” and then sadly walked away with the realization that nobody realized it yet.  What is dead is the the abstraction of values - they no longer serve us whether they be theistic or atheistic.
• “There is nothing in human nature of human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature.   We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally.  We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression, economic exploitation and to accelerate environmental degredation.  There is a good and a bad side to human progress.  We are not advancing toward a glorious utopia.”  I love this guy!  We all possess the Karamazov side!  We are all a mix of good and bad and will never be able to eradicate what we perceive as “bad” in favor of what we perceive to be good.  It is the belief that we can eradicate what is “bad” that creates so much hatred and terror in the world in the first place!   It’s like Kurosawa’s movie I just saw, The Bad Sleep Well.  The main character thinks he’s going to eradicate corruption, but he ends up being corrupt himself in order to accomplish it.   And so it goes.

We are not advancing morally.  Any atheist who claims we need to do away with religion in order to advance morally is every bit as delusional as the theist who claims we need to get rid of atheism in order to advance morally.   This is what the existentialists understood:  abstract values are inherently dangerous, be they theistic or atheistic.  Making the world more rational will not perfect us anymore than will making the world more religious because human beings are what they are:  imperfect!   What we need is compassion.  Not perfection.

All right - let me dig through the stickies and pick out the points I most want to remember for later:

• The belief in collective moral advancement ignores the inehrent flaws in human nature as well as the tragic nature of human history.
• We drift toward disaster with the comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our behalf.
• The industrial slaughter and genocides of the past century were all products of the Enlightenment and their satellite ideologies (liberal imperialism, communism, fascism…)  It renders all other values subservient to reason and science which divides humanity into superior and inferior species and sanctifies inhumane abuse of the weak to push humanity forward.
• Secular utopians, like Christian fundamentalists, are stunted products of a self-satisfied, materialistic middle class.  They seek moral justification for their own comfort.
• Both atheist fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists perpetuate their belief systems with fear of the other who seeks to destroy us and our way of life.
• The knowledge that we have the capacity to impose indignities on other human beings is the essence of dignity.  When we lose this capacity of empathy, when we see the other as someone who must be “educated” to embrace our values or eliminated, we step back into the world of animals.
• Democratic systems function because they begin from the premises that human nature is corrupt, and absolute power, as well as absolute truth, is antithetical to common good.
• To acknowledge the purposelessness of human history, to refuse to endow it with a linear march toward human perfection, is to give up the comforting idea that we are greater than those who came before us.  It is to accept our limitations and discard intoxicating utopianistic dreams.  It is to become human.
• It was Spencer, not Darwin, who argued that we were progressing as a species that would end with the perfect human being, but the new atheists continue to sanction violence through the argument that natural selection is social selection and that we are moving toward a final good.  This is not supported by human history or evolutionary biology.
• Nietzsche feared this sort of understanding of Darwin when he came up with his “Last Man” (the ultimate couch potato, as Solomon puts it).   Very often, those who are the least fittest to survive in the physical sense have contributed the most to human culture.   We create the “made to last man” and what do we have but a society of rudimentary human beings.
• Darwin wrote nothing to indicate that the human species had risen above its biological composition and he argued that morality was linked to the behavior of animals.  Those who claim, in the name of science, that we can overcome our imperfect human nature create a belief system that functions like religion.  It gives meaning, it gives purpose, it gives hope.  But it is a myth.  It is not true.  And there is nothing, when you cut through their scientific jargon, to support their absurd position.
• Theologists have said for a very long time that creation is the condition of there being something rather than nothing.  It didn’t happen a long time ago.  Creation is a constant in human existence.  New atheists pay little attention to this sort of theology, focusing instead on creationism which is both pseudotheology and pseudoscience.  They reside within the same narrow intellectual boundaries as do fundamentalist Christians.
• The belief that science or religion can eradicate human lust leads to the worship of human potential and human power.  The attempt to deny lust empowers it.
• The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has created tens of millions of “Last Men”.  Atheists such as Harris and Hitchins exemplify these Last Men.   They promote a consumerist Sparta.
• Our failure to judge the limits of our power has resulted in terrible blunders, first in Vietnam and now in Iraq.
• Science, the last century has shown us, has served the darkest and most violent projects of humankind.
• The United States is dependent on other countries, particularly those in the Middle East, for its natural resources.  It is hostage to foreign states which control the country’s mounting debt.  Its infrastructure is crumbling, its social services are in decline, and its education system is in shambles.  It is rotting from the inside out.  And in the midst of this decline, our secular and religious fundamentalists hold our society up as the paragon of human possibility and goodness.  Hedges quotes the same Neibuhr quote Bacevich did:  “One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
• We have no right to place ourselves on a higher moral plane than terrorists when we killed 370,000 people, 85 % civilian (many just school children on their way to school) with the Atomic Bomb.   Regretable but necessary?  No - it’s morally indefensible!
• Human evil is not a problem.  It can’t be solved.  It’s a mystery.  The forces of darkness are our own forces.  If we fail to acknowledge them, they will destroy us.  The idea that we can advance morally, that we can achieve human perfection, is itself and evil.  It provides a cover for criminality and abuse, a justification for murder.  It denies our own moral pollution.
• The danger we face does not come from religion, it comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture.
• The ancient Greeks held in high regard the command to “Know Thyself”.  To know ourselves is to accept our human limitations and imperfections.

Found this drawing by the Naked Pastor at The Website of Unknowing.  I love it!!

I like this (from Pema Chodron via James at The Buddhist Blog):

Nontheism (a.k.a. non-theism) is defined as the Oxford English Dictionary as: “… not having or involving a belief in God, especially as a being who reveals himself to humanity.” The author Pema Chödrön, when writing about Buddhism, states:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. … Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold. … Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves. … Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.”

My husband and I saw Religulous today and we laughed all the way through the film even though we realized that much of what we were laughing at really wasn’t funny at all.  Bill Maher is absolutely right.  If we don’t do something about the current state of religiosity, we are going to self-destruct.  We will have holy wars on a scale that makes what went on in the Middle Ages look like child’s play.

And he is also absolutely correct that inherent within religious belief is the desire for death because institutionalized religion assures us that what supposedly awaits us in the future is better than what we are living now.  As Bill Moyer’s wrote in Welcome to Doomsday, this belief is nothing to scoff at.  People are actively bringing on Doomsday because they believe that they will be saved from this world and life will be better for them in the “otherworld”.

It’s the quintessential narcisistic utopia.  If you don’t believe what they believe, you’ll be destroyed in what it is they have set in motion (which is really a sort of suicide mission) while they ride off to paradise on their white horse.  If people genuinely believe we are in the End of Times (and these people include our leaders), what motivation do we have to take care of the world?  I think Maher makes an excellent point!

I am definitely not as anti-religious as Maher, and throughout the movie I was wondering what it would be like to have a conversation with him.  I imagine he’d lump me into a category in which I don’t belong.  But maybe not.  There is just a bit of irony in his claim that he doesn’t know because he states it with such conviction.

I agree with him - if there is a God out there, we can’t know it, so it makes no sense whatsoever to discuss the facts about God or even argue the existence or non-existence of God.  It’s a ridiculous argument that can only go in circles.  Whether you believe God exists or doesn’t exist only points to the starting premise of your belief system.    It’s a mute point.  Who cares????   Lots and lots of people, unfortunately.

But I think Maher is preaching to the choir with this film.   Maybe he’d make some moderate religious folks re-think their beliefs, but if people are scared, they are going to come out shooting and I think this sort of film will make the scared even more scared.

I think the reason we have so much fundamentalism right now is because people are severely afraid and the worst thing we can do is add to their fears.  The “us and them” thing needs to end and we need to start being able to talk to one another.  Can’t say I’m exactly sure how to go about this, but inciting the 16% of non-believers to rally against the believers is probably going to make things worse, not better. But maybe I’m wrong?

Go see it!   Perhaps it will spark more dialog than hatred.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB8fPJ6zds8]

My brother in-law is in Chennai, India right now. It’s been so fun reading his blog!

Chennai used to be known as Madras. This was an interesting bit of information for me because our favorite Indian restaurant is a vegetarian South Indian chain in Texas called Madras Pavillion. I always wondered what the name meant. Now I know. (It’s fantastic vegetarian cuisine - truly! - I can taste it just thinking about it.)

Another bit of interesting information is that the name Madras may have come from an Islamic term - madrasah - which is the Arabic term for any type of school, religious or secular. It may also have been named after a prominent family because the term madra can also mean succeeding in years. India has such an incredibly rich history! Who knows? Wherever the name actually came from, it was thought to be a Portuguese name so was renamed Chennai, a Tamil term, in 1996.

Chennai was established by the British 350 years ago and they brought with them Christian Churches and Christian legends. There is no factual evidence for any of these legends, but they are certainly plausible!

According to my brother in-law, legend has it that St. Thomas (Doubting Thomas - who has gotten an unfair wrap like Judas), travelled to Chennai, India and died there and a Catholic Church is built upon his ruins. But there was a tomb excavated in the 1980s in Israel that claims to hold his remains, so who knows? (The Discovery channel had a show about this last year: The Lost Tomb of Jesus.) So when I read about Thomas dying in India, I had to find out more!

There is definitely a long held tradition that he traveled to India to spread the gospel. People have long speculated that Jesus traveled to India and met the Buddha, too. (Some claim he may have even been the Buddha. ) There were trade routes between the Middle East and India so it’s not really a far-fetched notion that Jesus or Thomas would have visited India. If Thomas was actually in India, that gives more credence to the idea that Buddhism and Christianity aren’t that different from one another. Especially if you cast aside the Greek rationalism that crept into Christianity through Paul and then was enthusiastically adopted by Roman Catholicism in the middle ages. Greek rationalism continues to be the basis for modern Christianity but it was not the basis of the original Jesus movement. Hebrew is a very different baby than is Greek. The marriage between Hebrew Individualism and Abstract Greek thought has produced some troubled off-spring.

As I mentioned previously, it is very likely that Thomas was buried in Israel. The truth is - there is no factual evidence for any of these claims. At this point they are all legend. We don’t even have any factual evidence that Jesus actually existed. People weren’t worried about factual evidence back then like we are now. Story, metaphor and life were important. Now it’s facts, rules and rationalism. We don’t like mystery - we want to KNOW without a doubt and we don’t like being questioned so we claim the questions represent a lack of faith because it challenges our so-called “knowing”.

Thomas seriously got the raw end of the deal in terms of how he has been handed down to modern Christianity. He is presented as sinful for questioning. But this is unfair. Thomas may have been a bit skeptical, but he wasn’t closed-minded. Maybe not even as closed-minded as some of the other disciples. For instance, when Lazarus was dying, all the other disciples tried to dissuade Jesus from going to him because he might get stoned, Thomas encouraged Jesus to go and said the other disciples should go too: “Let us also go, that we may die with Him” (John 11:16). So - maybe, on the one hand, that’s likewise a lack of faith. He thought Jesus would get stoned. But he was willing to get stoned with him! That says something, doesn’t it?

I should probably back up: Doubting Thomas got his name because he refused to believe that Jesus had been resurrected until Jesus showed his wounds to him. It’s significant that Jesus obliged him in this. He didn’t say, “screw you”. He showed him his wounds and allowed Thomas to touch them.

Now, if you are a literature major, perhaps you recognize this as metaphor? It would be one thing if Thomas only looked at the wound. But he touched them. He TOUCHED them!! Metaphorically speaking, he experienced Jesus’ wounds. It wasn’t mere observation. This actual experience is much deeper than a belief based upon observation (or upon so-called textual/factual “evidence”). It wasn’t the observable facts Thomas was after. He was after the experience. HUGE difference! He wasn’t after factual evidence. He was after experiential evidence. In the Gospel of Judas, he’s known as Thomas the Believer, not Doubting Thomas.

I read the Gospel of Thomas many moons ago - before marriage - with a little Methodist group. This is considered to be a Coptic version (Egyptian) and is comprised of 114 sayings that are attributed to Jesus.

Is it significant that Thomas’s text is Egyptian? What does that say about the Israeli and Indian claims to Thomas’s remains? Maybe his remains are in Egypt! Who knows?

But —- many scholars think this Gospel upholds the idea that Thomas traveled to India because the sayings of Jesus (which may have influenced other Gospel sayings) reflect Indian wisdom. It could have been exposure to Eastern mysticism that influenced Thomas’s gospel. (It could have been exposure to Eastern mysticism that influenced Jesus’ teachings, too.)

Thomas’s gospel is somewhat troubling for traditional Christianity. It claims that Jesus was married, for instance. But according to a scholarly priest at the Catholic Church we went to in Dallas, it would have been very weird for Jesus not to have been married. He would have been asking for trouble by not marrying. This particular Catholic priest had been granted access to some of the gospels that were discovered in the Middle East that have sense been locked up by the Muslims. He thinks that once these texts are released, Christians are going to have to question a lot of long held beliefs.

We have a difficult time realizing that people in the very old days didn’t care one iota about facts. They told stories that pointed to the truth but weren’t necessarily factually correct. Factual authenticity (journalism) is a modern phenomenon. It came about with the beginnings of fundamentalism which isn’t particularly surprising since fundamentalism is based upon factual belief in a modern technology - the written word.

So anyway - that church may very well be buried on St. Thomas’s bones. It would be very interesting to know what the practitioners at the church think of The Gospel of Thomas!

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I watched Fall From Grace tonight which was produced in 2007 by K. Ryan Jones (currently a senior at the University of Kansas) about Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. Very interesting film (and available to watch instantly on Netflix).

I first heard about Phelps from Michael Moore’s series The Awful Truth and the occasional news coverage here or there. According to Fall from Grace, Phelps doesn’t really have a following except for his family members. He had 13 kids - 4 of which left the church and the family. The other 9 remained, got married, had children, and so there is a rather large extended family that is very active in the church and that regularly pickets against homosexuality (and more recently, against dead American soldiers who they claim God has killed because America has tolerated homosexuality for far too long). All of the picketing you see on the news is just Phelpses. The vast majority are Fred Phelps’ grandchildren and great grand children who were brainwashed with the characteristic Phelps anger from birth.

The film interviewed two of Fred Phelps’ children (a son and daughter) who left the church and the family and have had nothing to do with the family or the church for decades. Both said that Phelps was an extremely violent father who beat his children regularly. The daughter said he had the emotional maturity of a 4th grader, if that. The son said that Phelps had been heavily emotionally scarred.

Not only was Phelps violent with his children, he had been a lawyer and was violent with his witnesses which caused him to be debarred. Both of his children said he is addicted to anger and always has to have a war going on somewhere. As group after group quit putting up with his antics, he turned to the church where he could use God as a spokesperson for this anger.

Both of his kids said that it’s no use trying to argue with the Phelps family picketers because they have been doing the picketing for a long time and know how to do it. They thrive on the anger and defenses of others so it is best to just walk away rather than try and engage them in debate.

A man interviewed at the very end of Fall From Grace agreed and said that what Fred Phelps really needs is our love even though he is the least deserving of it. The Awful Truth’s Gay Team, those Gay Ambassadors of Love and their Sodom mobile full of buggery, prove just this!! Watching Phelps encounter the dozen most determined, tactically trained and sensibly dressed gay men and lesbians Moore could find is, sadly, absolutely hilarious!! Poor Phelps just doesn’t know what to do with all that love!

From The Culture of Counter-Culture:

One ordinarily feels that one is a separate individual in confrontation with a world that is foreign to one’s self that is “not me”. In the mystical kind of experience, though, that separate individual finds itself to be of one and the same nature or identity as the outside world. In other words, the individual suddenly no longer feels like a stranger in the world; rather, the external world feels as if it were his or her own body.

The next aspect of the mystical feeling is even more difficult to assimilate into our ordinary practical intelligence. It is the overwhelming sense that everything that happens - everything that I or anybody else has ever done - is part of a harmonious design and that there is no error at all.

Now, I am not talking about philosophy; I am not talking about a rationalization or some sort of theory that somebody cooked up in order to explain the world and make it seem a tolerable place in which to live. I am talking about a rather whimsical, unpredictable experience that suddenly hits people - an experience that includes this feeling of the total harmoniousness of everything.

I realize that those words - the total harmoniousness of everything - can carry with them a sort of sentimental or pollyanna feeling. There are various religions in our society today that try to inculcate the belief that everything is harmonious unity. They want, in a sense, to propogandize the belief that everything is harmonious.

To my mind, that is a kind of pseudomysticism. It is an attempt to make the tail wag the dog or to make the effect produce the cause - because the authentic sensation of the true harmony of things is never brought about by insisting that everything is harmonious. When you do that - when you say to yourself, “All things are light, all things are God, all things are beautiful” - you are actually implying that they are not, because you wouldn’t be saying it if you really knew it to be true.

So the sensation of universal harmony cannot come to us when it is sought or when we look for it as an escape from the way we actually feel or as compensation for the way we actually feel. It comes out of the blue. And when it does, it is overwhelmingly, convincing. It is the foundation for most of mankind’s profound philosophical, mystical, metaphysical, and religious ideas. Someone who has experienced this sort of thing cannot restrain himself. He has to get up and tell everybody about it. And, alas, he becomes the founder of religion, because people say, “Look at that man, how happy he is, what conviction he has. He has no doubts. He seems so sure in everything he does.”

…..

And so, in the same way when somebody has an authentic mystical experience, it just comes forth. He just has to tell everybody about it, because he notices everybody around him looking dreadfully serious. Looking as if they had a problem. Looking as if the act of living were extremely difficult. But from the standpoint of the person who has had this experience, they look funny. They don’t understand that there isn’t any problem at all.

The mystic has seen that the meaning of being alive is just to be alive… It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. The funny thing is, they are not even quite sure what they need to achieve, but they are devilishly intent on achieving it.