Monk

“I do not think that there is any hope for the world or my country unless men can come to regard themselves as members of a common brotherhood. But the brotherhood of man is philosophically meaningless and practically unattainable except in the light of the universal Fatherhood of God…. The denial of the fatherhood of God is the root from which spring quite naturally the various heresies which have afflicted the species in our time, the doctrine of race and of class, the worship of the State, the philosophy of dialectical materialism, or the more pragmatic and not less popular creeds of Get-rich-quick, or All’s-fair-in-love-and-war.”

-- Quintin Hogg, “The Case for Conservatism” (1947)

In a fairly recent post, we were discussing the ebbing of liberal Christianity, and I posed the question: ‘Why call yourself a Christian if you cannot even accept the divinity of Christ and the hope of heaven?’ The quote at the top is linked to a book review that is squarely on point. In fact, the book is titled “Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians” by Marcello Pera.

And the answer seems to be that in the teachings of Christ we have the key foundational ideas that have undergirded Western civilization: the idea of equality as suited to beings all created in the image of God. Even if one cannot believe in the supernaturally imbued creed of divinity and afterlives, it is culturally beneficial to accept the message of Christianity; more than beneficial, it is culturally necessary.

The rebuttal, of course, is that the culture was not that wonderful when it was heavily and even fundamentalist in its Christianity - slavery, inquisitions, and people could still be cruel to each other. And we know that people can lead good, noble lives without religion. As the kids say, we don’t need to believe that God is love; it is enough to know that love is love.

Besides, at this point in our history, I think the only way that Christianity can regain that much of its former identity is through state coercion, by enforcing Christianity as a state religion. And that truly runs contrary to our developed sense of freedom and equality.

An interesting note on the differences in writing style between the years 1520 and 2008:

"The" was top in both 1520 and 2008. Common groups of words have changed, though. The most common three-word phrase in 2008 was "one of the"; in 1520, it was "of the Pope". References to religion featured heavily in early literature, Perc notes. For example, "the Pope and his followers", "the laws of the Church" and "the body and blood of Christ" all feature in the 10 most popular five-word phrases of 1520. By 2008, the most frequently written five-word phrases were along the lines of "at the end of the", "in the middle of the" and "on the other side of".

I guess our culture has opened up since the 16th century. We now focus on the relationship of things to each other, rather than on how everything relates to Christ. Though, I suppose the cost of this is that our culture is more fractured. We no longer believe the same things and think in the same way. Again, this sounds like a healthy, intelligent development, but we now have a lot more divisiveness. In America, today, liberals and Republicans barely speak the same language, and that is a serious problem.


(Source: Sully's Dish)

People were taken aback by an electronic Bible coming to hotel rooms? Wait until they hear about one establishment’s innovation – swapping out Bibles for copies of the runaway E L James erotic bestseller “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

-- Molly Driscoll at The Christian Science Monitor

This is not in America, in case this needs to be pointed out. Great Britain. Which can still be a little surprising, because I think we are still talking about the same sort of Anglo stuffiness. On the other hand, I take it that England is more like Europe in that it is not very Christian.

One critical response: why bother with any book at all? People can easily bring their own, or maybe quickly buy one at the corner convenience store. However, I can see how a person may be traveling, or may be on a quick jaunt from home, and one could be caught short for diversion, and a hotel room can be a pretty stark place without a little pleasant diversion, if one is stuck at a very basic and affordable hotel anyway. And as much as I appreciate the Bible as a literary cornerstone, I cannot count it as very enjoyable reading. Although I have been in moods when I would read it with some spiritual hunger, I have to say, in general, it is more a bowl of vegetables than like a pizza, if you know what I mean.

In short, a little fiction sounds like a fine amenity. A little choice might be good, too. I'm not talking about a library, but a little selection: a Stephen King book, a detective novel, maybe something from higher literature. Porn is great, of course, but after you get off, which often takes only a few minutes, one could use a less heated bit of escapism, though a little more heated than the Bible, in which even the killings and rapes are rendered surprisingly dull.

"Speaking for myself, anyway, I can say this much. When I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back. As a young man who had learned a little philosophy, I scoffed. But in later years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true."

-- Edward Feser

Well, I blew a good day on that, a long essay on that philosophical journey away from faith and then back again. In the end, no matter how smart and how educated you are, the real lesson seems to be that you always end up believing what you really want to believe anyway. If you are more intelligent and better learned, then you just have a lot more impressive evidence at your beck and call, and a lot more persuasive skill in laying out your case.

Daimon says, "You just cannot give up on it entirely, this God thing, cripes!"

Pi says, "I suspect Monk never truly will. There will always be this little part of him that is like a little boy on Christmas eve who still believes in Santa Claus and hopes there is a new bike under the Christmas tree."

I blame my busted life. Having failed this life so miserably, I badly need a second life. And I badly need the promise of paradise. And if one gets to enjoy bliss for an eternity, so much the better.

Daimon says, "Well, if you really believe what you say - that a person always ends up just believing what he wants to believe - then why don't you just simply believe that Christ popped out of a virgin snatch to save the world and lead the way to heaven?"

A deficiency of imagination?

Hunting through the news blurbs, I came across one that read “Christianity’s New F-Word”, and I clicked on it in hopes of reading about how fundamentalism is finally on its steep decline. In a sense, I was right, but not in the way and tone that I was hoping. The article was bemoaning how open and freely interpretive Christianity has indeed become. The new F-word is faith.

I also caught Ross Douthat’s argument in his Sunday column at the Times hitting back at those of us who deride the Catholic Church for its increasing fundamentalism, and on how we argue that the Church needs to become more liberalized if it hopes to carry on its mission in the decades and centuries to come. He flipped it on us and pointed to the troubles of the Episcopalian Church, which has gone the more liberal route that we wish on the Catholic Church, and Mr. Douthat practically chortles over the supposed decline of the Episcopalians.

So, which is it? Does Christianity need to be more liberalized or does it need to be more reactionary?

The debate has made me think that maybe there is a point in the idea that if you are not going to play the Christian game all the way and preach the divinity of Christ and the hope of heaven, as much as these precepts may grate on our twenty-first century rationality, maybe you just need to leave it all behind and close the book on Christianity, and leave it to the true believers, a very right-wing reactionary type, and just hope to circumscribe its influence on our laws and society.

But I do not give up entirely on the middle ground. Even Douthat argues for the value of a liberal Christianity. Maybe you can be against the idea that homosexuality is an abomination to God, and believe that it is alright for women to play leadership roles, and that one does not have to be an absolutist on abortion, and one does not have to trumpet the idea that Christianity is the only way to heaven and everybody else burns in an eternal fire. But you probably do have to embrace some transcendent supernatural tenets. Maybe the leaders of a liberal church should outwardly embrace the divinity of Christ and hold out eternal bliss in teaching virtue. Otherwise, why bother going to church and proclaiming yourself a Christian? You may as well sleep in on Sunday.

=======

Sungyak Kim, "Christiaity's New F-Word" at Relevant Magazine

Ross Douthat, "Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved" in The New York Times

Geoconger, "Rum, sodomy and the cash: The Episcopal Church 2012" at GetReligion.org

Darwin's idea was particularly devastating to religions, because it offered a complete explanation for the origin of life. God is completely unnecessary for evolution to work -– that's what makes it such a powerful idea. Yet, over 150 years later, religions are still flourishing, a sign that it's going to take a lot more than a monumental discovery to quash religious sentiment.

-- George Dvorsky

That suggests an interesting question: what would it take to quash religious sentiment?

I suspect that nothing short of the realization of eternal life here on earth by natural means, and, moreover, this life probably has to be a fairly contented one, at least for most people. Anything short of that would probably feed into that extreme form of wish fulfillment that we call religion.

The eternal conflict is not God’s test of humanity. It is not a machination of Satan. It is just the way things worked out. It might be the only way in the entire universe that human-level intelligence and social organization can evolve. We will find a way eventually to live with our inborn turmoil, and perhaps find pleasure in viewing it as a primary source of our creativity.

-- Edward O. Wilson at The New York Times

Our great moral battle is not between good and evil, so argues Wilson, but between individual-level selection and group-level selection. I doubt this can make as great a poetic epic as Milton's "Paradise Lost", but maybe it is science.


_ _ _

It might be supposed that the human condition is so distinctive and came so late in the history of life on Earth as to suggest the hand of a divine creator. Yet in a critical sense the human achievement was not unique at all. Biologists have identified about two dozen evolutionary lines in the modern world fauna that attained advanced social life based on some degree of altruistic division of labor. Most arose in the insects. Several were independent origins, in marine shrimp, and three appeared among the mammals, that is, in two African mole rats, and us. All reached this level through the same narrow gateway: solitary individuals, or mated pairs, or small groups of individuals built nests and foraged from the nest for food with which they progressively raised their offspring to maturity.

Until about three million years ago the ancestors of Homo sapiens were mostly vegetarians, and they most likely wandered in groups from site to site where fruit, tubers, and other vegetable food could be harvested. Their brains were only slightly larger than those of modern chimpanzees. By no later than half a million years ago, however, groups of the ancestral species Homo erectus were maintaining campsites with controlled fire — the equivalent of nests — from which they foraged and returned with food, including a substantial portion of meat. Their brain size had increased to midsize, between that of chimpanzees and modern Homo sapiens. The trend appears to have begun one to two million years previously, when the earlier prehuman ancestor Homo habilis turned increasingly to meat in its diet. With groups crowded together at a single site, and an advantage added by cooperative nest building and hunting, social intelligence grew, along with the centers of memory and reasoning in the prefrontal cortex.

Probably at this point, during the habiline period, a conflict ensued between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, versus group-level selection, with competition among groups. The latter force promoted altruism and cooperation among all the group members. It led to group-wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor. The competitor between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

So it appeared that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection. They are suspended in unstable and constantly changing locations between the two extreme forces that created us. We are unlikely to yield completely to either force as an ideal solution to our social and political turmoil. To yield completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would dissolve society. To surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots — students of insects call them ants.

-- Edward O. Wilson at The New York Times

“Quite frankly I believe, as Pope Benedict the XVIth said just before he became pope, that maybe a smaller church would be a better church.”

-- Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League

“It almost has to completely come apart before something new and beautiful can spring up.”

-- Sister Margie Henninger

Those quotes are from Bill Keller's column in the Times. The quotes seem to capture the debate over the Catholic Church, except as Mr. Keller notes, it is not really a debate, in that there is not the least promise of change in the Church, which apparently prefers to be leaner and meaner. I do not know if the Catholic Church was ever in its long, troubled history a faithful keeper of the Christian message of a loving God that has come to save a fallen world. It is easy to imagine this outfit crucifying a wayward carpenter.

It has been reassuring to see the Catholic Church getting a lot of critical blowback for its hunting down of liberal nuns, who exercise a more inclusive and caring role, as the Church insists on absolute intolerance when it comes to reproductive rights and gay marriage. George Weigel, a conservative thinker at National Review responds in defense of the Church, lambasting liberal thought as relativistic post-modern tripe:

The American mainstream media, reflecting deeper currents in American culture, typically treats “religion” as a private lifestyle choice: a personal option one may exercise to make sense out of life (and death) through certain rituals embodied in communities. That the “choice” in question has anything to do with adherence to the truth, as one is grasped and transformed by that truth; that those rituals embody religious truth in a unique way that links the believer to the very life of God; that those communities are formed by, and accountable to, truths that can be rationally explicated in a body of knowledge called “theology” — say what? To treat religion as a lifestyle choice leaves little room for the very concept of “truth,” unless it be the anorexic postmodern notion of “your truth” and “my truth” (which means that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad’s “truth” is just as much “truth” as Pope Benedict XVI’s). In the sandbox of self-absorption that is so much of postmodern culture, there is little or no room for the truth.

Or, if there really is a Christian truth with respect to a living God, it may be that we don't believe that your fundamentalist take is the absolute truth that we are seeking to understand. If the only choice we have for truth is between Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Pope Benedict XVI, I would rather be lost in post-modern meaninglessness.