Being in love is not always the same thing as eternal damnation

According to Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto, living in modern America, with its easy-going, good-natured inclusiveness, while also believing that your office-mate–who stayed up all night finishing your sales report so you could nurse your sick child–will burn in hell for eternity simply because he is Jewish, is no more puzzling an existential state than feeling that the woman you love is the “most important thing in the world,”  while also believing that all men are created equal. 

Only someone who suffers from a “poverty of imagination,” writes Taranto, would posit any tension between the lived experience of American tolerance and the knowledge of certain hell for a significant portion of one’s ethical fellow citizens.

With all due respect to my esteemed former City Journal colleague, in my view it may be he who suffers from a poverty of imagination.  It cannot be that he is taking the prospect of eternal damnation as seriously as it deserves if he thinks it is so easily reconciled with American openness.   I would hope that those who subscribe to the doctrine of divine retribution have struggled a little more than Taranto does with its worldly implications in an era of the rights of man. 

Americans have finally created a world in which creedal distinctions are irrelevant to almost all spheres of public and private life.  Yet American Christians are to believe that at death, this wonderful ecumenical indifference is yanked away and one’s religion determines whether one has a shot not just at Harvard but at heaven, all thanks to the dispensation of a loving God.  If that is not a source of potential cognitive dissonance, I don’t know what is. 

Taranto adopts a familiar tactic of religious apologists—the appeal to unreason.  “[I]t occurs to us that there are other areas of life that reason alone is inadequate to explain,” he writes.  (The appeal to unreason as a grounding for religious faith alternates regularly with the appeal to reason as a grounding for religious faith.)   Returning to his analogy between love and eternal damnation, he argues:

“She is the most important thing in the world” makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.

I will leave such gobbledygook to those more theologically gifted than I.  But let me flesh out Taranto’s analogy.

The statements:

“She is the most important thing in the world” makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.

are the same as saying:

“Children who die before being baptised will burn in hell despite possessing equal rights and human worth” makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.

James may find this analogy self-evident; I do not.   And it is an empirical matter, presumably verifiable after the Last Judgment, whether unbelievers and the unbaptised are eternally punished, not just a matter of feeling.

Pace Taranto, I have not accused Christians of being “insincere or confused.”  I hypothesized that because society has changed radically, unrecognizably, since the era when doctrines of eternal damnation were formulated, perhaps the content and experience of religious belief has as well.  This is hardly an impious proposition.  Ask a believer about Biblical injunctions to stone undevout family members or homosexuals, and you will get a stern lecture about the impropriety of taking such commandments literally in light of evolving faith.  Secular, Enlightenment tolerance has revised huge swathes of the Bible; it does not seem so implausible that it could have had a similar if subtler effect on the doctrine of damnation for wrong-believers and the unbaptised.  But if it hasn’t, I offer my apologies to all those who are keeping the faith.

P.S. Taranto agrees with me that we should not facilely ascribe bigotry to belief “except on the basis of attitudes toward worldly matters.”  Yet he also writes that “[i]t is bigoted to think Jews should not be allowed to . . . live in Hebron, regardless of whether that belief has a theological predicate.”  I’m confused.  Would it also be bigotry to believe that Palestinians should not live in Hebron? 

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38 Responses to Being in love is not always the same thing as eternal damnation

  1. Ploni Almoni says:

    Very well said. This argument has been going on for centuries, but Taranto’s version is especially ridiculous. Most recently it seems that Stanley Fish has been making this argument from the secular side, against pro-tolerance religionists such as Father Richard Neuhaus, who at least defends the official contemporary (i.e., Enlightenment liberal) Catholic position on this without appealing to unreason as Taranto does.

    One minor correction. You wrote,

    Ask a believer about Biblical injunctions to stone undevout family members or homosexuals, and you will get a stern lecture about the impropriety of taking such commandments literally in light of evolving faith.

    Actually, if the believer is Orthodox Jewish, which is the only kind of Judaism that has any real claim to legitimacy, he will say that the Law is the same now as when it was given at Sinai, and if you read the Written Torah separately from the Oral Torah then of course you’ll misunderstand it: you’re only reading parts of the Law, the “lecture notes” so to speak. Reform and secular Jews would agree with you that the change is due to a secular enlightenment, but will point out that the enlightenment in question was in Hellenistic, not modern times. Christians will say that the change was due to a New Covenant which superseded the Old. Some Christians and Jews will chalk it up to “evolving faith,” but the more serious ones will not.

  2. Ploni Almoni says:

    Correction: I meant to say above that Stanley Fish has been taking Heather Mac Donald’s side, not Taranto’s.

  3. Sheldon says:

    Ploni has this part right: Ask orthodox Jews about why they don’t subscribe to stoning adulterers and the like and they will tell you that in theory they do, but that acting on these biblical prescriptions awaits the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and the reinstitution of legitimate rabbinical courts after the arrival of the messiah. Changing values of the enlightenment has nothing to do with it.

  4. A-Bax says:

    Bam! Heather strikes again…..she’s throwing rocks tonight! 😉

  5. Ploni Almoni says:

    @Sheldon
    Re Sheldon’s comment, I don’t know about that commandment in particular, but I know that for “an eye for an eye” (the canonical example in these arguments) Orthodox Jews maintain that it never was meant the way it appears from the Written Torah alone, and that it was never applied literally. The Oral Torah, which was given with the Written one at Sinai, makes it clear that it refers to just compensation. Always did, always will.

    By the way, it’s interesting where and why Taranto goes wrong with his analogy. He apparently forgets that “importance” (in the sense of value) always means importance to someone, whether that someone is Taranto himself, God, or someone else. “She is the most important thing in the world” makes no logical sense to Taranto and seems outside the realm of reason because he doesn’t understand that it’s shorthand for “She is the most important thing in the world to me.” Phrased thus, the statement is obviously logically sensible, is either true or false (perhaps after being specified further to the particular circumstances), and is within the realm of reason. It obviously doesn’t mean she’s the most important thing to God, or that she’s most important “objectively,” which is the word the Enlightenment chose to replace God. Taranto’s mistake of ignoring the particular is unsurprising, though, given his aggressively universalist ideology. Kudos to Ms. Mac Donald for refuting such nonsense.

  6. Kevembuangga says:

    I wonder what’s the actual payoff of most arguments going on at SR.
    No matter how well tought out they will be dismissed with a sleight of hand by the believers since their so-called reasonning isn’t consistent to begin with.
    So what’s the purpose of SR?
    Scoring some “political points”, not likely.
    Preaching to the choir, building a sense a community among rightwing secularists, may be.
    Because, Holy Shit, there are NO bounds to the nonsense coming from religionists 😀

  7. Tim of Angle says:

    Do not make the mistake of thinking that everything said by people who call themselves Christian necessarily correctly reflect true Christian doctrine. Christ said “By their fruits shall you know them.” I rather think that He has a better handle on Christian doctrine than somebody sitting in a cubicle.

    Paul says, “What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit [is there] of circumcision? Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.” I rather think that Paul has a better handle on Christian doctrine than somebody sitting in a cubicle.

  8. Lily says:

    “… I have not accused Christians of being “insincere or confused.” I hypothesized that because society has changed radically, unrecognizably, since the era when doctrines of eternal damnation were formulated, perhaps the content and experience of religious belief has as well. This is hardly an impious proposition. Ask a believer about Biblical injunctions to stone undevout family members or homosexuals, and you will get a stern lecture about the impropriety of taking such commandments literally in light of evolving faith. Secular, Enlightenment tolerance has revised huge swathes of the Bible; it does not seem so implausible that it could have had a similar if subtler effect on the doctrine of damnation for wrong-believers and the unbaptised.”

    No, it is certainly not an impious proposition. It is a perfectly reasonable question. However, the faith is still what it has always been (the Nicene creed is a useful summary). The Enlightenment didn’t change the Bible, although it, naturally, raised new questions for the faithful to grapple with. I have been describing in various comments here that the Bible, like any text, gets read anew in every generation in every culture and that the encounter forces those who take it seriously to struggle to read it and apply its message in the light of new circumstances. The content of the Bible has not changed nor have its principles.

    We still believe that those who reject Christ will have their decision respected, since we are all free moral agents. The early Church supposed that unbaptized babies were excluded from the Beatific Vision (not damned)– limbo was a place of perfect natural happiness– because the Church was grappling with the meaning of original sin and were struggling to understand what would be the fate of infants who died without ever committing personal sin. They like everyone else are, however, tainted with original sin which is removed by baptism. Limbo was never settled doctrine which is why the Church could finally (and quite recently) say that infants are not excluded from the Beatific Vision.

    Outsiders will never get it right, if they don’t take the time to learn how seriously; how radically the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles broke with Old Testament tribal laws. There is nothing in the New Testament to support stoning homosexuals or disobedient children. Rather the opposite. There is a story recounted in one of the gospels about an adulterous woman being brought before Jesus. His critics, trying to catch him out, tell him that there is no doubt about her guilt and that the law says she should be stoned. What does he say? His answer is, I suppose, known to most everyone, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”.

    It is irrelevant for our purposes that the earliest manuscripts don’t have this story in them– even if it were entirely fictional, it still demonstrates that from earliest days, what the heart of Christian teaching is– we are none of us without sin and have no business casting stones, literally or figuratively. Working out the implications of this and the rest of Christ’s teachings has been going on for 2000 years and will go on until he comes again.

  9. Jon Rowe says:

    I’ve debated the eternal damnation thing with lots of Christians. And I agree that the traditional notion of the sinner burning or suffering terribly for eternally is just nuts, self-evidently unbelievable.

    And I think it’s so unbelievable that many who outwardly profess to believe in it really don’t. However, even among those that do believe in traditional orthodox notions of salvation flirt with different meanings of Hell that are a little kinder and gentler. One big one is annihilation where sinners simply don’t exist after death but believers get eternal life. That’s seems somewhat fairer at least to atheists because you are just getting what you expected anyway.

    Another notion of Hell is simply separation from God. But invariably when I further go down this road, this turns out to be something torturous as well. Like you live in eternal darkness with none of the five senses or any of your loved ones or folks to comfort you for all eternity.

    But I’ve offered them an alternate notion of separation from God — indeed one that folks would voluntarily choose (some believers note folks choose to go to Hell or actually send themselves there, to which I’ve constructed this theory). Okay maybe Hitler, Stalin and Mao get waterboarded for a long time because they caused so much pain. But for an ordinary unsaved person, Hell means being excluded from the perfect SINLESS happiness of being in God’s presence for all eternity, and is actually an imperfect sinful happiness where you get to enjoy your sins for all eternity separate from God. That is, you get to eat (gluttony), drink, smoke, gamble, fornicate, have sodomy, gossip for all eternity NOT in God’s presence (because HE won’t tolerate sin in His presence). And you get to do so in the company of your fellow unsaved loved ones and all of the unsaved figures from history. Think of Hell in this respect like an eternal Las Vegas Nightclub. Sin City indeed.

    Yet, orthodox believers just don’t seem willing to buy into this notion. Though a few of them to whom I have spoken are open to it. This is the only version of Hell that makes cosmic justice sense and I understand why so many folks would choose to go there.

  10. Lily says:

    Your scenario is not so very far-fetched but I don’t think you have thought it through. What would it be like to be around a bunch of greedy naked egos all clamoring “me” “me” “me” for all eternity? If you think x is an s.o.b now, what is he going to be like, unchecked, 2 centuries from now? A millenium from now? If your mother-in-law is a buttinski; your sister a whiner now, how about in 100 more years? How about 300?

    I am afraid that sin city is not a fun or happy place, even now. But for all eternity? Like C S Lewis said, there are no “ordinary” people. We are either destined to become perfect or we are going to become horrors. The choice is entirely ours.

  11. J. says:

    Dante’s Inferno (or at least the cliffsnotes in anglo) provides some clues to the hierarchy of Hell (viewed from even a secular and/or metaphorical perspective). Those guilty of the usual sins of the flesh–whores, sodomites, even murderers and thieves–live in nicer neighborhoods of Hades than those guilty of sins of the intellect, such as frauds and cheats, corrupt priests, politicians, military leaders, lawyers, etc. Brutus is in Lucifer’s mouth (along with Cassius and Judas): Dante then suggesting, Contra-Machiavelli (or contra a Hitchenesque realPolitik), that the ends don’t justify the means? Brutus did, in some sense, do the right thing, by killing the tyrant Caesar.

    Dante’s point (and that of catholic doctrine) was that goodness was rewarded, somehow–tho’ the mass complicates things. That’s not really protestant doctrine, which insists merely on faith. Believe, and do whatever you want to (tho’ make good appearances). However appalling a corrupt Pope might have been, the peasant-protestant rebellions were ultimately worse, even considered from a secular perspective.

  12. Kevembuangga says:

    The seemingly unpredictable “moderation” really pisses me off.
    I would like to know once and for all what “goes” and what doesn’t.
    Was it this link? (a test…)

  13. Ken Silber says:

    “She is the most important thing in the world” makes no sense as a logical proposition only because it is truncated from “She is the most important thing in the world to me.” In fact, the very concept of anybody or anything being important seems to me to depend on there being some actual or potential observer(s) who care about that person or thing.

  14. Jon Rowe says:

    Lily,

    As the late great Bon Scott put it (who is probably living it up down there now):

    “So spin that wheel, cut that pack
    And roll those loaded dice
    Bring on the dancing girls
    And put the champaign on ice

    “I’m going in to sin city….”

    Hear the sentiment put to music here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym016NijZXs

  15. Tim of Angle says:

    Jon, when you talk about “traditional orthodox notions of salvation”, it’s obvious that you’re not talking about “traditional Orthodox notions of salvation”, which may be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Christian_theology.

    Hell is the condition of experiencing God’s love as fire. Milton was close to the truth when he said “The mind is its own place, and of itself / Can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell.” God always forgives you, but you have to forgive yourself in order for it to work.

  16. Nordsieck says:

    Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment.

    Suppose I were to say, I respect other peoples’ free will too much to proselytize them.

    The child example is a red herring – they are clearly parents’ chattel

  17. ◄Dave► says:

    I find myself reluctantly reevaluating the value to me of participating here. It held such promise; yet I suppose I expected more political discourse, and a whole lot less theological debate. I really appreciate the quality of minds and discourse found here, both from the posters and the majority of commenters. This obviously speaks well of the moderators ability to consign moonbats’ comments to the bit bucket.

    I enjoy the philosophical and psychological discussions; but not the theological wrangling that so many threads devolve into. I perceive an existential need for those of us pining for maximum individual Liberty, and the minimal government necessary to secure it as envisioned by our Founders, to free ourselves from the dogmatic battle between the Politically Correct forces on the Left, and the Piously Correct forces on the Right.

    If our republic is truly meant to be secular, their competing moral codes have no relevance to good government. We make a huge mistake by allowing these two factions to frame the debate in elections for our representatives, with their litmus tests for conformance to their PC dogma. Their struggle is pointless to individuals with more enlightened moral codes of their own, which they have no desire to impose on others.

    We need a Secular Party that rejects the imposition of any particular moral code on individuals. Since the game is rigged against third parties, it seems more practical to hijack one of the two major ones. The Democrat Party is currently held hostage by the Marxists, who invented labor strife, socialism, environmentalism, and Political Correctness. The Republican Party is currently held hostage by the fundamentalist Christians; but at least it prefers capitalism for an economic model, even if corporatism seems to be gaining the upper hand over liassez faire.

    It thus seems more practical to target the Republican Party and throw its “faith based” religious leaders under the bus, so that all the true secularists on the Left, who are not PC Marxists or environmental wackos, could also feel at home among us. I posit that today we are the silent majority, and could get this country back on track if we just stopped legitimizing the moralists’ PC issues.

    I suspect that most individual Christians would be happy to let go of their need to bring their Piously Correct morality into the public square of political debate, if they were assured that the Politically Correct camp couldn’t impose theirs on us all either. The opposite may also be true, although I am less convinced of it. In any case, I would like to see more practical discussions regarding how to reverse the trend toward statism evinced by the last couple of elections.

    In the meantime, I will just have to learn to discipline myself not to waste time reading the likes of Lilly’s comments above, and the rebuttals they attract. I am sure she is a nice lady, and she writes of her beliefs well; but I moved past the slightest interest in what Jesus or the bible says forty years ago, and I just don’t see their relevance to practical discussions among the Secular Right.

    It may not be pleasant telling such people that their faith has no standing in our quest for good government, and I take no pleasure in offending them by doing so; but sooner or later we are going to have to, if we have any hope of saving our country from the trend toward a Marxist tyranny. The effectiveness of the messianic personality cult underlying Obama’s campaign was particularly disturbing. The faithful have become a decided hindrance to the cause of Liberty, even if they think they are trying to help. ◄Dave►

  18. Lily says:

    Dave: I am a little surprised myself that there is so much theo-talk here, too–given the premise of the blog. But it isn’t being invented in the comments but invited by the subject matter of the posts. The last 16 or so posts have addressed theological subjects and so the comments necessarily will line up with that.

    I suspect that as we approach the inauguration of the Annointed One, the subjects will get more political. Heaven knows, when Obama and his sidekicks get their hands on the reins of power, there will be plenty of non-theological topics to discuss. But to be perfectly blunt– the faithful are critical to any endeavor to get back our liberty for many reasons. The one you need to take seriously is the fact that we are the majority. You cannot recover or sustain liberty without us. There is plenty of common ground to be found in our shared wish to restore constitutional (limited) government and free enterprise.

  19. Jon Rowe says:

    Tim,

    Small o “orthodox” has its own meaning: That ground in orthodoxy found in the Nicene Creed that forms a lowest common denominator among evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, and capital O Orthodox Christians. Not that these creeds are monolithic on the nature of Hell.

  20. Jon Rowe says:

    Tim,

    “Hell is the condition of experiencing God’s love as fire. Milton was close to the truth when he said….”

    You have to wonder if Milton is even in Heaven now given that he probably was an Arian heretic not an orthodox Trinitarian.

  21. A-Bax says:

    ◄Dave► :

    ◄Dave►
    I find myself reluctantly reevaluating the value to me of participating here. It held such promise; yet I suppose I expected more political discourse, and a whole lot less theological debate. I really appreciate the quality of minds and discourse found here, both from the posters and the majority of commenters. This obviously speaks well of the moderators ability to consign moonbats’ comments to the bit bucket.
    I enjoy the philosophical and psychological discussions; but not the theological wrangling that so many threads devolve into.
    In the meantime, I will just have to learn to discipline myself not to waste time reading the likes of Lilly’s comments above, and the rebuttals they attract. I am sure she is a nice lady, and she writes of her beliefs well; but I moved past the slightest interest in what Jesus or the bible says forty years ago, and I just don’t see their relevance to practical discussions among the Secular Right.

    Dave, I hear you and I second that sentiment. I’m finding it a bit irksome to keep coming back again and again to Jebus and the bible.

    While I think Lily shows admirable restraint (she’s no Panopaea, thankfully), and she writes well, I find it terribly irksome to hear her courtiers’ replies over and over (however well written.) We unbelievers just “will never get it right, if they don’t take the time to learn how seriously; how radically the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles broke with Old Testament tribal laws.”

    Lily – how much time how you taken to learn about the Hadith? How can you be sure the Angel Gabriel did not, in fact, appear to Mohammed and dictate his most perfect truth? How much time have you taken to learn about Theravada Buddhism? How can you be sure the dharmic world-view is not the real deal, and the Abrahamic story just a cloud of smoke?

    My point here is not to pick on Lily, or to even challenge her beliefs. I just wish commenters to this blog would understand that the bulk of us do not care about their religion, and don’t want to hear it.

    Frankly, it’s becoming irritating to come across so much Jesusry in a purportedly secular blog.

    Best,

  22. ◄Dave► says:

    @Lily

    The last 16 or so posts have addressed theological subjects and so the comments necessarily will line up with that.

    Point taken.

    You cannot recover or sustain liberty without us.

    I didn’t intend to. I made the point that most Christians would accept a secular government in DC, if they could get the ACLU off their backs in Peoria. The question is, what would it take to get the abortion or gay issue off the table? These morality issues are losers, for here the Religious Right is decidedly outnumbered. By forcing Republican candidates to take a public stand on them to get the nomination, other secularists are driven into the camp of the Progressives as perhaps their lesser of two evils.

    Obama et al is permitted to claim to be a Christian and pro-choice/gay at the same time. Except in the North East, Republicans are not. The devout may take comfort in a President claiming to get on his knees and pray for guidance from his god; but there are a whole lot of folks that are made extremely nervous by such a notion.

    They would prefer a President who took responsibility for his own actions and mistakes, rather than smugly resting assured that he was following his god’s will, and the noisy vox populi be damned. The Progressive Public School factories are churning out these Politically Correct voters, much faster than the churches are creating Piously Correct voters. Fundamentalists are losing the demographics game, and increasingly are just playing the role of spoilers.

    I reckon that if there was only a Secular Party and a Progressive Party, most considering themselves among the Religious Right, would vote for the PC-neutral Secular candidate anyway. Perhaps as only the lesser of two evils; but the Secularists would get their votes by default, without any need to pander to them, which is what is inexorably killing the Republican Party.

    There is plenty of common ground to be found in our shared wish to restore constitutional (limited) government and free enterprise.

    Agreed. Help us devise a strategy for getting the PC morality debate off the table, and I will happily vote for you as Sarah Palin’s VP in ’12. :)◄Dave►

  23. mtraven says:

    Almoni said:

    Actually, if the believer is Orthodox Jewish, which is the only kind of Judaism that has any real claim to legitimacy…

    Says who? Where do a bunch of secularists get the right to declaim who gets to call themselves a Jew (or a Christian, as was discussed in another recent post here)? Under what possible secular theory could all the Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist Jews be termed illegitimate? Orthodox rabbis might make that claim, but is that the kind of authority you want to invoke here?

  24. mtraven says:

    @◄Dave►

    The Democrat Party is currently held hostage by the Marxists…

    Sorry, that is idiotic. If the Democratic party (note the correct name) is held hostage by anyone, it is to their vast array of corporate contributors, just like the Republicans. If the Democratic party was controlled by Marxists, they would have passed single-payer health care in the Clinton administration, rather than bending over backwards to not offend the insurance industry, which torpedoed the plan anyway.

    If your allegiance to the right is supported by such trite and false stereotypes, maybe it’s time to consider a change.

  25. ◄Dave► says:

    @mtraven

    I use the venerable phrase “Democrat Party” deliberately; because it puts a burr under the saddle of folks with poor reading comprehension, who like to use words like “idiotic” and “trite” in political discourse. 🙂

    I didn’t say “control” I said “held hostage.” It is now impossible to win the nomination as the Democratics’ candidate (does that sound better?), without pandering to the Marxists. It is impossible to win the nomination as the Republicans’ candidate, without pandering to the Fundamentalists. Neither necessarily “control” their Party’s overall agenda; but they sure have a veto over who gets to be a candidate.

    The Democratics didn’t even control congress the last six years of Clinton’s administration, so your argument fails to persuade a thinker. Check your premise – my only allegiance is to our Constitution as written; thus it could not be to either wing of the Incumbrepublocrat Party. ◄Dave►

  26. Ploni Almoni says:

    mtraven :

    mtraven

    Where do a bunch of secularists get the right to declaim who gets to call themselves a Jew (or a Christian, as was discussed in another recent post here)? Under what possible secular theory could all the Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist Jews be termed illegitimate?

    Well, I just threw that out as a troll offhand comment. But I see Orthodox legitimacy as based mostly on prescription: two thousand years’ worth of authority. Reform and Reconstructionist religions seem illegitimate to me mostly because they’re practically the only movements which called themselves Jewish which don’t accept the covenant at Sinai as binding. (How many others can you name in the last 3000 years?) Conservative Judaism is a closer call, but I’d say it’s illegitimate because they don’t follow the Orthodox rules on halakhah; but that’s something I don’t know much about.

    By the way, I’m secular but not a “secularist.”

  27. amcguinn says:

    I don’t know what Taranto meant, but I would take his most important person / men created equal distinction the other way. The claim that one person is the most important in the world is simple, meaningful, rational, and, while subjective, in no way problematic. The claim that all men are equal, on the other hand, is abstract, obscure, unprovable, and is in contradiction to every detail of everyday life. Defending one unreasonable belief (damnation) by comparing to another unreasonable belief (the equality of all men), doesn’t help it at all in my eyes.

  28. Tim of Angle says:

    Jon, small “o” orthodox does have its own meaning, and that meaning changes with everybody you talk to, which is why it is useless for discussion purposes. With respect to the Nicene Creed (strictly speaking, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed) forming any kind of basis for “o”rthodoxy, that would be useful if the groups you named understood it in the same sense as the people who adopted it back in the 4th century; unfortunately, “evangelical Protestants” and arguably Roman Catholics don’t any more. Shucks, “evangelical Protestants” (there’s an oxymoron for you) don’t even actually believe what’s in the Gospels, otherwise they’d accept the Real Presence that Jesus and Paul went to such lengths to explain.

    As for Milton’s Arianism, what he was in life is less important than what he became after death — and we don’t know whether he was given a final chance at metanoia and accepted salvation. In light of the parable of the Prodigal Son, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

  29. Kevembuangga says:

    if the Democratic party (note the correct name) is held hostage by anyone, it is to their vast array of corporate contributors, just like the Republicans.

    LOL, this is called democracy, the “rule of the majority”, if the majority is nuts everybody is screwed (including the majority 😀 )
    I see no remedy, do you?
    Mencken didn’t either, he was just “hoping” and ranting.

  30. mtraven says:

    @Ploni Almoni
    While the Orthodox might not consider Reform Jews legitimate for the reason you give, the Reform Jews themselves certainly do. They see themselves as reinterpreting the covenant. Whether you are secular or a secularist (the difference escapes me), what business is it of yours?

    I’m guessing, based on past experience, that the underlying goal is to define religion solely by its most rigid, primitive, fundamentalist, and literalist forms, because that makes it easier to attack (you see this more often with Xianity than Judaism, but I assume it’s the same dynamic). But makes for a really boring argument, one that has been done to death elsewhere.

  31. LH says:

    But I see Orthodox legitimacy as based mostly on prescription: two thousand years’ worth of authority.

    Whose “authority?” Jews don’t have a Vatican. And Rabbinic Judaism has the same authority to decide Who is Jew as does Woody Allen. “Covenant at Sinai?” Is that an historical fact or a fairy tale/urban legend drawn from a (great) literary work (Bible)? Indeed, there is no accepted definition of Who is a Jew, and Judaism itself can be described as religion, faith, culture, civilization, ethnicity, race, tribe, etc. In fact, the use of the term “Jew” to identify members of a specific group became common sometime during the Roman era, and for a long period the followers of Jesus (another product of an urban legend) were regarded as “Jews.” In short, most of the “organic” collective identities (as opposed to those based on shared legal terms like citizenship of a state) have been created by men (and during the feminist era also by women), intellectual and political (and religious) entrepreneurs for who draw benefits from the control of the group and its symbols and its mobilization against other groups.

  32. TGGP says:

    As Christ told the Pharisees when asked, he came not to overturn the law but to fulfill it. Lily is wrong. It was the Apostle Paul who de-Judaized Christianity to make it more palatable to gentiles, resulting in its much larger of adherents than Judaism today.

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  34. Charles Glenn says:

    Thanks for responding to Mr. Taranto’s argument. This is an entertaining distraction for me – you are both very enjoyable to read. I have to say, however, that I don’t believe you actually addressed Mr. Taranto’s initial objection. Of course, his response in today’s WSJ was equally “tangential” (to borrow his term), which was also disappointing. Based on the title of your post, I was expecting you to deal with the question head-on. Instead, you offered a very clever rebuttal that avoided it. I’m not accusing you of any kind of overt red-herringness, so to speak, but I would have enjoyed seeing you tackle this issue directly. After all, it seems to me that Taranto touched on the core of the dispute between belief and unbelief when he used romantic love as his analogy.

    You called it “gobbledygook.”

    Might I humbly suggest that this could be why the world has so few atheists and so very many believers?

  35. Peter J. O'Connell says:

    Most Christians do not believe that nonbelievers and the unbaptized will go to hell. They believe that believers will be saved, and the others they leave to God to do with as He will. Catholics hold that there is a “baptism of desire” under which nonbelievers and the un(water)baptized can be saved. In the 1950s the popular priest/poet Father Leonard Feeney was actually excommunicated for preaching that “outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation.” Now that’s irony for you!

  36. Ronald Wallenfang says:

    Per the Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 1260:

    “Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved.”

    Consistent with that teaching – often referred to as encompassing a “Baptism of desire” – one can engage in a good deal of speculation, e.g. does being “preached to” about the Gospel necessarily remove the referenced ignorance? At least where Catholic doctrine is concerned, it’s important to separate the speculation from the teaching, which confesses that God in His Wisdom has not seen fit to favor us with all the details.

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  38. McNease says:

    @Charles Glenn

    Excellent point Mr. Glenn. I was thiking the same thing today reading BotW. Taranto implicitly references the Kantian argument that there are things not of this world but still true. Ms. Mac Donald dismisses this argument out of hand.

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