Theophobia

[barracuda]

People put themselves on the defensive, your reactions are yours.

The accusation by Canadian_Watcher that people on the board are prejudiced against people who are spiritual either requires a defense or an acceptance, I think. I guess you could just ignore it, which to me is the same as acceptance. Eventually, the idea could be used any number of ways, as it has by the right wing. I don't see any good reason to let it go unchallenged.

[sunny]

I've never felt any prejudice on this board and I think I've made my [non-religious] Christianity pretty clear. My belief in the teachings of Jesus informs who I am, and who I am is pretty far to the left. The right-wing has done an excellent job of smearing the good name of those teachings and in that sense I can understand the reluctance to give credence to people who openly declare belief in them.

[brainpanhandler]

on edit: she wasn't christian in any popular american sense of that term, although if she lived now she would of course risk the possibility of being dismissed and lumped together with Pat Robertson et al.

I don't know man.... it's hard to believe the author of the following thoughts would ever be mistaken for Pat Robertson.

1. Why God is hiding?
"God could only create by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself."

-- Gravity and Grace

2. Waiting for God
"To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present....

"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©

3. How a little imagination protects us from God
"Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves."
"In no matter what circumstances, if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out, we have a void (the poor in spirit). In no matter what circumstances... imagination can fill the void. This is why the average human beings can become prisoners, slaves, prostitutes, and pass thru no matter what suffering without being purified."

"That is why we fly from the inner void, since God might steal into it. It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion for effort which causes sin, but fear of God. We know that we cannot see him face to face without dying, and we do not want to die."
-- Gravity and Grace

4. Evil is bad because it is boring
"Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. Never anything real, everything about it is imaginary. It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. A host of women (Don Juan) or of men (Celimene) etc. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself."
-- Gravity and Grace

5. What is real
"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams."
-- Gravity and Grace


excerpts as noted from GRAVITY AND GRACE by Simone Weil, New York, G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1952. edited and arranged by Gustave Thibon, translated by Emma Craufurd

French © Libraire Plon 1947
English © G.P.Putnam's & Sons 1956
All Rights Reserved

http://www.rivertext.com/weil3.html



An overtly christian author who had a profound influence on me was M. Scott Peck. I first read The Road Less Traveled when I was 20 or so and it occupied my mind for the better part of a few years.

I hadn't though about him for a long time when I found People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil on a friend's bookshelf and decided to read. It's one a few books in my life that I quite literally read cover to cover in one sitting. I wasn't prepared for that, but I couldn't put it down.

In Martin Buber's words, the malignantly narcissistic insist upon "affirmation independent of all findings." p 80 Self-criticism is a call to personality change...The evil are pathologically attached to the status quo of their personalities, which in their narcissism they consciously regard as perfect. I think it is quite possible that the evil may perceive even a small degree of change in their beloved selves as representing total annihilation. p 74

[Evil is] the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating. 119 A predominant characteristic...of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at any one who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection. p 73

Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad.

They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others...Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat, and the people I label as evil are chronic scapegoaters....The evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. p 73-74

http://www.geftakysassembly.com/Article ... issism.htm


I wonder if we have any threads around here on the nature of evil.

[sunny]

In Martin Buber's words, the malignantly narcissistic insist upon "affirmation independent of all findings." p 80 Self-criticism is a call to personality change...The evil are pathologically attached to the status quo of their personalities, which in their narcissism they consciously regard as perfect. I think it is quite possible that the evil may perceive even a small degree of change in their beloved selves as representing total annihilation. p 74

[Evil is] the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating. 119 A predominant characteristic...of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at any one who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection. p 73

Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad.

They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others...Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat, and the people I label as evil are chronic scapegoaters....The evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. p 73-74

http://www.geftakysassembly.com/Article ... issism.htm


.

So perfectly true.

[IanEye]

Ultimately I'd say that this "spirituality" thingie is best practiced through one's daily life and only to be considered abstractly after everyone has food in their belly.

viewtopic.php?p=181941#p181941

[Canadian_watcher]

I've never felt any prejudice on this board and I think I've made my [non-religious] Christianity pretty clear. My belief in the teachings of Jesus informs who I am, and who I am is pretty far to the left. The right-wing has done an excellent job of smearing the good name of those teachings and in that sense I can understand the reluctance to give credence to people who openly declare belief in them.

You haven't been called a faith based thunker yet, then, and no one has laughed off the people who you respect merely because those people believe in one religion or another?

That's good. But it does happen.

[Canadian_watcher]

^ sorry if my last post seemed a little... sour grapes-y? Not sure what to call it, but it does come off a little bitter. I'm keeping it there, though, because it seems like the proper thing to do.

[sunny]

But C_w, I'm not a faith based thinker in the sense you mean. My thinking informed my faith and my faith informs my thinking, in that order. I put faith in the teachings of Jesus because they make sense to me so I try to live my daily life with his philosophy in mind. If certain people don't like someone simply because of their particular religion or faith that's one thing, but if people don't like someone of a particular faith because of their stupidity and/or assholery that is something else entirely and perfectly understandable.

[vanlose kid]

on edit: she wasn't christian in any popular american sense of that term, although if she lived now she would of course risk the possibility of being dismissed and lumped together with Pat Robertson et al.

I don't know man.... it's hard to believe the author of the following thoughts would ever be mistaken for Pat Robertson.

...

you wouldn't. but that's you. what i meant is that i could imagine a committed hardcore proseletysing atheist tell Weil off and lumping her in with Khomeini and Robertson. Viz., "The God Delusion".

thanks for the Peck quotes.

*

[MacCruiskeen]

From a recent interview between Noam Chomsky and Rabbi Michael Lerner (the whole thing is worth reading):

...

What Do We Do about Religiophobia?

ML: As a side question, we in the NSP and Tikkun have found that our positions and analyses — which are in some ways more radical (going to the root) than many of the programs that you hear coming out of the Left, because we do have a class analysis and we do have an analysis of global capitalism — are nevertheless not paid much attention by the rest of the Left because of what we’ve experienced as a pervasive religiophobia. And that has also been experienced by people like Jim Wallis and those involved with Sojourners, and people around the Christian Century, and other progressive religious organizations. And I’m wondering if you have any advice to us on how to overcome that religiophobia, since it seems ludicrous to us that a secular left would not understand that, in a country where you have 80 percent of the population believing in God and 60 percent going to church at least once a month, it would be in their interest to have a unification with people who have a spiritual or religious consciousness.

NC: I think you should approach them, not just on the pragmatic grounds that it’s in their interest, but also on the grounds that it’s the right thing to do. I mean, personally, I’m completely secular, but I certainly recognize the right of people to have personal religious beliefs and the significance that it may have in their lives, though not for me. Though we can certainly understand each other at least that well, quite apart from pragmatic considerations. I mean, say if a mother is praying that she might see her dying child in heaven, it’s not my right to give her lectures on epistemology.

ML: But it’s not just issues of epistemology, because there we could have a good debate; it’s that there is a climate or a culture in the Left and the liberal arenas that simply assumes that anybody who would have a religious position must be intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown, or some other psychologically reductive analysis. That approach — a kind of ridicule of anybody who could possibly think that there was a spiritual dimension of reality, when it’s pervasive, pushes people away even if they agree with much of the rest of what the Left is saying. How does one raise that issue? How does one deal with that issue among lefties who are simply unaware of the elitism and offensiveness of these suppositions? There was a time when it was extremely difficult to raise the issue of patriarchy, sexism, or homophobia, because people thought, “well that’s ridiculous, it’s just not true, it’s not happening” — there was a huge level of denial. Do you have any advice for us on how to deal with that level of denial that exists in the culture of the Left? In my own study of this — I’ve done a rather extensive study of the psychodynamics of American society, which involved over 10,000 people — we found that this was a central issue for a lot of middle-income working people, who agreed with much of the Left’s positions, but felt dissed by the Left.

NC: Well, the way you approach people is to explain to them that not only is it not in their interest to diss other people, but it’s also morally and intellectually wrong. For example, one of the greatest dangers is secular religion — state worship. That’s a far more destructive factor in world affairs than religious belief, and it’s common on the Left. So you take a look at the very people who are passionately advocating struggling for atheism and repeating arguments that most of us understood when we were teenagers — those very same people are involved in highly destructive and murderous state worship, not all of them but some. Does that mean we should diss them? No, it means we should try to explain it to them.

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/overcomin ... am-chomsky

[Stephen Morgan]

In general, I find people on the left to be much more spiritual than those on the right, if by spiritual you mean non-materialistic rather than religious.

That's where we went wrong. The left has too much wishy-washy, namby-pamby, hippy-dippy bullshit, should have kept focused on the important business of improving material conditions for normal people.

[IanEye]

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktiv ... -newt.html

Which sect, Newt?

There's speculation that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is considering a run for president. Based on his recent speeches and interviews, though, it seems he has a different office in mind. Newt Gingrich wants to be pope.

Gingrich's latest slogan is a condemnation of "Obama's secular socialist machine."

The word "socialist" there is a deliberate lie. President Barack Obama is no socialist and Newt Gingrich knows this, but he is saying something he knows not to be true -- bearing false witness -- because he condescendingly believes it will appeal to ill-informed "base" (in every sense) voters who will, thanks to him, remain ill-informed. That's low and sleazy and evil, but it's not the worst part of his latest attack on the president.

The worst part is Gingrich's accurate accusation that President Obama is "secular."

He'd better be. As president, Barack Obama leads a secular government with secular policies. To do otherwise would be illegal. It would be unconstitutional and grounds for impeachment.

President Obama is himself a Christian and he often speaks openly and movingly about his faith. He even took the occasion of his Nobel speech to offer a lecture on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

But as president, Obama is sworn to uphold the Constitution and he does so. And that means he is and must be secular.

But Newt Gingrich thinks this is bad. Newt Gingrich thinks the American government ought to be sectarian.

This raises questions about how Gingrich proposes we go about rewriting America's laws and amending its Constitution to create this sectarian government. What will our new, rewritten First Amendment say? Once it establishes a religion and prescribes the proper exercise thereof, what sort of religious tests will it require of office holders?

As defender of the faith, what will be the new, sectarian president's official position on the Eucharist? On Baptism? Homoousia or homoiousia? Is glossalalia required or prohibited? What sort of head coverings will be required or prohibited in government offices? Will bishops be appointed by Rome or Canterbury? Or by the White House with Senate approval?

Or to summarize all of that and much, much, more into a single question: Which sect?

With Newt Gingrich standing before audiences and appearing on television to condemn America's secular Constitution and secular government, this is the only question anyone ought to be asking him. Audiences, interviewers, journalists, book editors, limo-drivers, waiters and bartenders need to be repeating this question to Gingrich, interrupting until he answers it.

And he has to answer it.

Which sect? If, like Gingrich, you oppose a secular Constitution and a secular government, then you must favor a sectarian Constitution and a sectarian government.

These are binary alternatives. Secular and sectarian are not points along a spectrum allowing for one to opt for some murky middle ground. There is no third way, no third option. If the government is not secular, the government must and will be sectarian.

Either the government will forbid the establishment of any official religious sect or an official religious sect will be established. Either the government will refuse to interfere with the free exercise of any religion or it will necessarily involve itself in the exercise of all of them.

Newt Gingrich is unambiguously in favor of establishing an official sect. So, then, which one?

Note that this question demands a scrupulously specific and particular answer. It doesn't allow for some vague blather about our "Judeo-Christian heritage." That's not a sect. No one belongs to a local Judeo-Christian congregation.

Nor will it suffice to say that "America is a Christian nation." That's still far too broad -- Orthodox? Roman Catholic? Protestant? And any of those answers is still too broad for the practical sectarian governance championed by Newt Gingrich. Presbyterian? Lutheran? Baptist? Still far too broad.

The official sect of any nonsecular government must be intensely specific. That sect, after all, will be privileged above all the others and so it must be clearly distinguished from those others. (These others needn't be wholly prohibited. They can be tolerated as religious minorities provided they keep their place and do not seek more than this second-class toleration.) Office-holders and appointed officials must be members in good standing of the official sect, and therefore a strict definition of correct and incorrect doctrine will be needed to clarify the status of these true believers. That will require sectarian officials who can inquire about that status to ensure its legitimacy, and that inquiry or inquisition cannot be so broad as to allow pretenders or disingenuous infidels to pass themselves off as law-abiding, loyal members of the official religion.

So again, which sect, Newt?

Gingrich himself is a convert to Roman Catholicism (the religion of his third wife). This does not necessarily mean that his advocacy of sectarian government implies a belief that Roman Catholicism ought to become the official, established sect written into America's Constitution. It may be, rather, that Gingrich wants to see some other sect codified as the legal religion of America's government and that he would gladly abandon his own religious beliefs to adopt this new official sect as his own, whatever it may be. But either way he has to answer the question.

Which sect?

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktiv ... -newt.html

[Canadian_watcher]

But C_w, I'm not a faith based thinker in the sense you mean.

and that's why, if you were to be so labeled, it would be an insult and demonstrate a prejudice towards you.

Like this (names changed to protect the .. well to hide the identities, of course:

yeah, it's happening here and now. does that somehow prove something about motivation? Do you know much about the subjects I brought up? What are your thoughts on them?

Do you mean metaphysics, conciousness and spirituality? You want me to provide my thoughts on all three, together, here now? Sounds like an invitation to a pissing match, thanks but no thanks, i'd rather talk about what an evil turd Alex Jones is. How about you, any problem with AJs racism?

As to your quote - it is meaningless. What is an absurdity to you might not be one to me. You are not more qualified to make that decision than I am.

Yes i am, for me, as you are amply qualified to decide for you. And while we can never decide for each other, we can do this groovy thing known as swapping evidence (however this is typically where dialogue with faith-based thunkers ends).

Whatever, it seems you'd agree that my unevidenced declarative statements carry no more weight than yours? Good, you'll be withdrawing your claim to secret knowledge then ..

..people who do not accept any sort of faith in their lives (not RELIGION, but FAITH) will never be able to realize the truth as I and others see it. ..

This is not a battle for control of resources based on the 3D plane.

I can have yours then?

and later from the same dude:

Faith - its a lobotomy.

Here's something from another poster, since I don't want it to appear that there's just one:

Again, *******, I ask you, is this your faith? I'm just wondering so that I may adjust my phobias accordingly. Also: that seems pretty vague.

*******'s a theist, deist, pantheist adherent of the Church of What's Happenin' Now.

Or as the blind man closest to the ground in the big shadow said 'An elephant is soft and mushy.'

[vanlose kid]

From a recent interview between Noam Chomsky and Rabbi Michael Lerner (the whole thing is worth reading):

...

What Do We Do about Religiophobia?

ML: As a side question, we in the NSP and Tikkun have found that our positions and analyses — which are in some ways more radical (going to the root) than many of the programs that you hear coming out of the Left, because we do have a class analysis and we do have an analysis of global capitalism — are nevertheless not paid much attention by the rest of the Left because of what we’ve experienced as a pervasive religiophobia. And that has also been experienced by people like Jim Wallis and those involved with Sojourners, and people around the Christian Century, and other progressive religious organizations. And I’m wondering if you have any advice to us on how to overcome that religiophobia, since it seems ludicrous to us that a secular left would not understand that, in a country where you have 80 percent of the population believing in God and 60 percent going to church at least once a month, it would be in their interest to have a unification with people who have a spiritual or religious consciousness.

NC: I think you should approach them, not just on the pragmatic grounds that it’s in their interest, but also on the grounds that it’s the right thing to do. I mean, personally, I’m completely secular, but I certainly recognize the right of people to have personal religious beliefs and the significance that it may have in their lives, though not for me. Though we can certainly understand each other at least that well, quite apart from pragmatic considerations. I mean, say if a mother is praying that she might see her dying child in heaven, it’s not my right to give her lectures on epistemology.

ML: But it’s not just issues of epistemology, because there we could have a good debate; it’s that there is a climate or a culture in the Left and the liberal arenas that simply assumes that anybody who would have a religious position must be intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown, or some other psychologically reductive analysis. That approach — a kind of ridicule of anybody who could possibly think that there was a spiritual dimension of reality, when it’s pervasive, pushes people away even if they agree with much of the rest of what the Left is saying. How does one raise that issue? How does one deal with that issue among lefties who are simply unaware of the elitism and offensiveness of these suppositions? There was a time when it was extremely difficult to raise the issue of patriarchy, sexism, or homophobia, because people thought, “well that’s ridiculous, it’s just not true, it’s not happening” — there was a huge level of denial. Do you have any advice for us on how to deal with that level of denial that exists in the culture of the Left? In my own study of this — I’ve done a rather extensive study of the psychodynamics of American society, which involved over 10,000 people — we found that this was a central issue for a lot of middle-income working people, who agreed with much of the Left’s positions, but felt dissed by the Left.

NC: Well, the way you approach people is to explain to them that not only is it not in their interest to diss other people, but it’s also morally and intellectually wrong. For example, one of the greatest dangers is secular religion — state worship. That’s a far more destructive factor in world affairs than religious belief, and it’s common on the Left. So you take a look at the very people who are passionately advocating struggling for atheism and repeating arguments that most of us understood when we were teenagers — those very same people are involved in highly destructive and murderous state worship, not all of them but some. Does that mean we should diss them? No, it means we should try to explain it to them.

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/overcomin ... am-chomsky

Mac, that was good. thanks.

i was about to address that in re the OP. one could place the OP in the context of right-wing extremism, as barracuda does, and it dismiss it at the outset. but one could also place it in the context which the author set it in, i.e. academia and it's an entirely different story.

as your post and many other pieces by Chomsky show, the problems are there and felt. also, another leftist, marxist and self-professed atheist who has also taken up the subject is Terry Eagleton:

Those ignorant atheists
In this witty book, Terry Eagleton argues that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk are shockingly ill-informed about the Christian faith.
By Andrew O'Hehir

Apr. 28, 2009 |

Here is how British literary critic Terry Eagleton begins his brisk, funny and challenging new book: "Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology." That's quite a start, especially when you consider that the point of Eagleton's "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" -- adapted from a series of lectures he delivered at Yale in April 2008 -- is to defend the theory and practice of religion against its most ardent contemporary critics.

But Eagleton, a professor of English literature and cultural theory who divides his time between the University of Lancaster and the National University of Ireland, is determined not to commit the same elementary errors he ascribes to such foes as biologist Richard Dawkins and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. (Those two, collectively dubbed "Ditchkins" by Eagleton, are the self-appointed leaders of public atheism and the authors of bestselling books on the subject, Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Hitchens' "God Is Not Great.") Atheists of the Ditchkins persuasion have raised valid points about the sordid social and political history of religion, with which Eagleton largely agrees. Yet their arguments are fatally undermined by their own unacknowledged dogmas and doctrines, he goes on to say, and they completely fail to understand Christian faith (or any other kind) except in its stupidest and most literal-minded form.

A few years ago, I read an article by a Roman Catholic theologian who wryly observed that the quality of Western atheism had gone steadily downhill since Nietzsche. Eagleton heartily concurs. He freely admits that what Christian doctrine teaches about the universe and the fate of man may not be true, or even plausible. But as he then puts it, "Critics of the most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook."

Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, Eagleton insists, are playing to the high-minded liberal-humanist prejudices of their elite audience and, in the process, are displaying a shocking ignorance of their supposed subject, one that would be deemed unacceptable in almost any other intellectual forum. Would anyone be permitted to write a book about courtly love in the Middle Ages based on several visits to a Renaissance Faire, or a book about Nazism based on episodes of "Hogan's Heroes"?

Yet the argument of "Reason, Faith, and Revolution" goes much further, and is much more complicated, than simply pointing out that St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas would roll their eyes in disbelief at the third-rate challenge to their God posed by the likes of Ditchkins. Like Lewis Carroll's White Queen, Eagleton is striving to believe several impossible things -- or at least remarkably unfashionable things -- before breakfast. He seeks to reclaim the transformative and even revolutionary potential of Christian faith, in the face of both liberal atheism and right-wing fundamentalism. And as perhaps the most prominent academic Marxist still in captivity, he puts his own faith in the possibility that socialism can survive its spectacular 20th-century self-immolation.

It's only a slight simplification to say that in this compact little tome, which runs less than 200 pages and is largely conversational in tone, Eagleton hopes to save Christianity from the Christians and Marxism from the Marxists. Yet the book's easy-breezy, wisecracking character is deceptive; I had to read it through twice before concluding that it's one of the most fascinating, most original and prickliest works of philosophy to emerge from the post-9/11 era.

I'm not sure there's a human being on earth, Terry Eagleton's family members included, who will agree with everything in "Reason, Faith, and Revolution" -- Eagleton seems delighted with the idea that he will outrage both the secular left and the religious right -- but it repeatedly challenges us to reconsider terms and ideas most of us take for granted most of the time. Is the apparent opposition between faith and reason inherent, or an ideological artifact? How is Western capitalism, agnostic and relativistic down to its roots, to confront a "full-blooded 'metaphysical' foe" (Islamic fundamentalism) that has no problem believing in absolute truth? Whether or not you like his answers, Eagleton approaches all such questions with an open and questioning mind.

As Eagleton ultimately admits, the discount-store atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens is something of a useful straw man, and his real differences with them are, in the main, not theological but political. Still, attacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes -- he depicts Dawkins as a tweedy, cloistered Oxford don sneering at the credulous nature of the common people, and Hitchens as a bootlicking neocon propagandist and secular jihadist -- lends his book considerable entertainment value. More importantly, it also allows him to develop an extended interpretive summary of what he describes as mainstream Christian doctrine, a subject about which (as he repeatedly reminds us) the Ditchkins duo, along with the Western intellectual elite in general, knows almost nothing.

Eagleton's terminology is deliberately provocative, and some Christians won't find his account of their beliefs, colored as it clearly is by the Catholic "liberation theology" of his youth, to be mainstream at all. Still, he is incontestably correct about two things: There is a long Judeo-Christian theological tradition that bears no resemblance to the caricature of religious faith found in Ditchkins, and atheists tend to take the most degraded and superstitious forms of religion as representative. It's a little like judging the entire institution of heterosexual marriage on the basis of Eliot Spitzer's conduct as a husband.

Many secular intellectuals, for instance, have claimed as Christian doctrine "the idea that God is some kind of superentity outside the universe, that he created the world rather as a carpenter might create a stool; that faith in this God means above all subscribing to the proposition that he exists; that there is a real me inside me called the soul, which a wrathful God may consign to hell if I am not egregiously well-behaved; that our utter dependency on this deity is what stops us thinking and acting for ourselves; that this God cares deeply about whether we are sinful or not, because if we are then he demands to be placated."

As Eagleton knows, some Christian believers, especially in the various strains of fundamentalism, would subscribe to most if not all of those propositions. But he's right that from the perspective of the past several centuries' worth of mainline Protestant and Catholic theology, none of those statements is true. In those terms, they range from crude distortions to outright idolatry. Aquinas would tell you that God is not an entity of any classifiable or verifiable kind and most certainly is not a mega-manufacturer who plotted out the universe on some celestial computer screen. Rather, "God is what sustains all things in being by his love, and ... is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever."

Biologist Stephen Jay Gould's famous pronouncement that science and religion were "non-overlapping Magisteria" has sometimes been viewed as a cop-out, or as a polite attempt to say that the former is real and the latter imaginary. Whatever Gould's intentions, Eagleton agrees wholeheartedly, and finds this view entirely consonant with Christian theology. Dawkins is making an error of category, he says, in seeing Christian belief as a counter-scientific theory about the creation of the universe. That's like saying that novels are botched and hopelessly unscientific works of sociology, so there's no point in reading Proust.

Christian theology cannot explain the workings of the universe and was never meant to, Eagleton says. Aquinas, like most religious thinkers that came after him, was happy to encompass all sorts of theories about the creation, including the possibility that the universe was infinite and had always existed. Indeed, Aquinas would concur with Dawkins' view that religious faith is irrelevant to scientific inquiry. But there are questions science cannot properly ask, let alone answer, questions about "why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us." That is where theology begins.

Eagleton further argues that not only is the Ditchkinsian version of traditional Judeo-Christian belief a travesty, in which God is envisioned as an unproven and improbable creature like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster, but that this strain of post-Enlightenment atheism cannot comprehend the character of religious faith at all. The creedal declaration "I believe in God" is a statement of action and will; it is performative rather than assertive. It is not equivalent to the claim that God exists (although Christians believe that too). It possesses the kind of certainty that belongs to such wistful sentences as "I love you" or "I believe the Mets are the best team in baseball." It clearly lacks the empirical certainty of the sentence "I believe this maple tree will turn red in October."

Among the many extraordinary positions Eagleton takes in this book, perhaps nothing is more startling than the highly original claim that the United States of America is not religious enough. All right, I am paraphrasing -- what he actually says is that our nation's nauseating, wall-to-wall public piety is strictly pro forma. It's a kind of ideological window dressing for a social and economic system based on the ruthless exploitation of human beings and natural resources, which is about as far from the teachings of that radical Jewish carpenter from Nazareth as you can possibly get.

In one of Eagleton's most ingenious turns of phrase, he describes contemporary Christian fundamentalists as faithless, because they specifically lack the kind of performative faith mentioned above. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek has described fundamentalism as a species of neurosis, in which a person keeps demanding proof that he is loved and never finds it sufficient. In trying to shoehorn anti-scientific hokum into schoolbooks, or wasting money and time on a "creationist science" that strives to prove that the Grand Canyon is less than 6,000 years old and that Noah, for reasons unknown, kicked T. rex off the ark, fundamentalists have become the mirror image of atheists. Unsatisfied with the transcendent and unknowable nature of the Almighty, they've stuffed and jammed him into a dinosaur diorama.

Much of the anti-religious fervor of the Ditchkins school, Eagleton says, derives from a high-Victorian idealism, in which humankind rides the upward-bound escalator of progress and civilization, held back only by the forces of unreason and irrationality. Its adherents see an absolute dichotomy between faith and reason, one that lacks any rigorous philosophical underpinning or an understanding of the inescapable relationship between the two. Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Fichte have all observed in different ways that unspoken assumptions about the world around us (that is, faith) are the precondition of all knowledge in the first place. As for the Enlightenment narrative of steady upward progress from superstition to reason, Eagleton is certainly not arguing that the first is superior to the second. He is suggesting, rather, that the escalator can go up and down at the same time.

What the rationalist myth sees in the modern age are the tremendous advances made in curing disease and in increasing agricultural yield, which neither believer nor atheist wants to do without. It views Zyklon-B and the hydrogen bomb as momentary setbacks, if it notices them at all, and it generally avoids comment about the contradictory and confused economic system our allegedly liberal-humanist age has produced. It's a system, as Eagleton sees it, that pretends to be entirely logical but produces a cruel and irrational result: the poor made poorer and the rich much richer. And what are the greenhouse effect and the melting of the glaciers, if not artifacts of the Enlightenment?

In fairness, neither Dawkins nor Hitchens has been silent about social and environmental questions, and neither they nor their liberal-humanist-atheist peers are directly to blame for the excesses of capitalism. But where they see an uplifting tale of a self-aware species ascending from the swamp of history into the Apollonian light of reason, throwing off the chains of superstition, Eagleton sees a tragic tale of overweening idealism, of men so blinded by their own arrogance that they're eager to throw away lessons taught long ago, by Aeschylus and Spinoza and William Blake and, yes, by Jesus Christ.

You can almost hear the steel chairs creaking as the last secular liberals rise to depart when Eagleton declares where his true disagreement with Richard Dawkins lies, which does not directly concern the existence of God or the role of science. "The difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself," he writes, "hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implications of this are for living."

Eagleton is cagey about the nature of his personal belief. On one hand, he says that he speaks on behalf of his Irish Catholic forebears, "against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void." On the other hand, he never makes any unambiguous truth claims for Christian doctrine, and he remarks that Marx and Nietzsche, unlike Ditchkins, are atheistic in "by and large the right kinds of ways." As he must realize, he is running the risk here of being dismissed as an apologist for not just one discredited faith but two different and nominally opposed ones.

Eagleton believes in Jesus -- believes, that is, in the profound symbolic potency of Jesus -- whether or not he believes that Jesus was the begotten son of God. It's a truism to say that contemporary Christianity has little to do with its eponymous founder, but Eagleton breathes new life into it. He describes Jesus as a Jewish "lifestyle revolutionary" who urged his followers to love their enemies, give away their possessions, and leave their dead unburied, who expressed his love and solidarity for whores, criminals and other "shit of the earth" (the phrase is Paul's), and was tortured and killed for it.

Such a figure, Eagleton suggests, represents "the truth of history," and those who deny it "are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress," a naive Enlightenment ideal expressed in our time by the likes of Ditchkins. I'm sure Eagleton would be delighted to imagine a resurgent 21st-century combination of democratic Marxism and left-wing Christianity, but he wishes to appear hard-headed and never quite comes out and says that such a thing might be possible. (One could argue that precisely that combination, which was never quite extinguished in Latin America, has made an unexpected comeback in the last few years.)

Having banished such embarrassing metaphysical matters as God and love to the private sector, and having put its faith in an economic system that seems much less eternal than it used to, Western civilization finds itself in quite a pickle. As Eagleton sees it, late-capitalist society believes in nothing except a limited marketplace vision of tolerance, which has spawned a surfeit of irrational belief systems, from fundamentalism to neoconservative imperialism to do-it-yourself New Age spirituality. He even agrees with the neocons and fundamentalists that we cannot successfully combat Islamist zealotry without any core beliefs of our own.

But the cures proposed by the fundies and neocons are worse than the disease, Eagleton makes clear, while the childish and arrogant idealism of the Ditchkins crowd bears no relationship to human history or contemporary social reality. He sees the potential for hope in a "tragic humanism," one informed by the likes of John Milton and Karl Marx but not necessarily religious or socialist in character, one that "shares liberal humanism's vision of the free flourishing of humanity," but believes "that this is possible only by confronting the very worst." We were sent a man who preached a message of love and we killed him; we were given a beautiful blue-green planet to live on and we killed it. What do we do now?

-- By Andrew O'Hehir

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/ ... print.html

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[IanEye]

It's pretty amusing to hear Chomsky speak of the dangers of State worship.
Since Chomsky takes it on faith that the State had nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination of JFK, the first Catholic president, to say nothing of the assassination of MLK.