On Judeo-Christian

Posted on January 15, 2009 by David Hume

I’ve recently triggered a round of discussion on several weblogs around the interwebs relating to the term “Judeo-Christianity,” especially when it comes to definiting the civilization of the West (as in, “our Judeo-Christian culture”).   I started the discussion here, to which Ross Douthat responded with his disagreement (also, my response to Ross, of a sort, here). Noah Millman and Sam Goldman lean toward my side, though with reservations.  James Poulos stayed neutral.  At Taki’s Mag I tried to show that the debate might have the faintest of relation with current events, while Richard Spencer responds with, Is Christianity Western?, where he considers some of the arguments in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity.  A quick answer to Richard’s query would be that though I would not say Christianity is necessarily Western, I do believe that the West as we understand it is necessarily Christian or post-Christian.  Even if we are not religious, I would say that Christianity is the religion we are not if we are Western.  Similarly, if one is Japanese, and not religious, Buddhism is the religion one is not, if you get my drift….

Posted in Definition, history, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 24 Comments

A secular perspective on politics?

Posted on January 14, 2009 by David Hume

I’ve been thinking of what it means to be of the “Secular Right” recently due to the comment threads where people asked us to weigh in on our specific political positions. Some people take the Secular Right to be libertarian (as evidence by that characterization in the inbound links). As an empirical matter this isn’t unfair. But there are non-libertarian Rightists who are not religious. My own political orientation is of a very squishy libertarian variety which I suspect most libertarians would claim heretical. On the other hand, I am socially liberal enough on many hot-button issues that I doubt traditionalists would accept that I could be any such thing (no less for the fact that I am not religious). In the past I have assumed that my secularity allowed me to have a particularly “reality based” outlook on the world. Yet even here, I don’t think that captures the reality on second thought. I don’t really think any political ideology is metaphysically true, rather, politics are presupposed on a particular set of norms.

Continue reading →

Posted in Definition, philosophy, politics | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Brother can you spare a bit of Arminianism?

Posted on January 14, 2009 by David Hume

Somewhat related to Heather’s post, God’s Problem, see this fascinating New York Times Magazine piece on neo-Calvinism, Who Would Jesus Smack Down?:

Mars Hill — with its conservative social teachings embedded in guitar solos and drum riffs, its megachurch presence in the heart of bohemian skepticism — thrives on paradox. Critics on the left and right alike predict that this delicate balance of opposites cannot last. Some are skeptical of a church so bent on staying perpetually “hip”: members have only recently begun to marry and have children, but surely those children will grow up, grow too cool for their cool church and rebel. Others say that Driscoll’s ego and taste for controversy will be Mars Hill’s Achilles’ heel. Lately he has made a concerted effort to tone down his language, and he insists that he has delegated much authority, but the heart of his message has not changed. Driscoll is still the one who gazes down upon Mars Hill’s seven congregations most Sundays, his sermons broadcast from the main campus to jumbo-size projection screens around the city. At one suburban campus that I visited, a huge yellow cross dominated center stage — until the projection screen unfurled and Driscoll’s face blocked the cross from view. Driscoll’s New Calvinism underscores a curious fact: the doctrine of total human depravity has always had a funny way of emboldening, rather than humbling, its adherents.

The author here points to the strange outcomes of the doctrine of Predestination. For a psychological explanation for why Calvinism can seem counterintuitive, read Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t.

Posted in philosophy | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Miscellany, January 14

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Walter Olson
  • Tattoo-parlor Calvinism at Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, blazing new trails in quien-es-mas-macho discipleship. P.S. DH and I independently noticed this story and posted on it only minutes apart. Read his post.
  • Latest in Michael Newdow’s suit over religious references in the President-Elect’s Oath of Office: he sent a process server to the home of Chief Justice John Roberts to serve him with the papers personally. Ann Althouse thinks part of Newdow’s rudeness is that he’s stepping on someone else’s event:

    Now, I’ve broken my silence on the atheist’s case about the oath. I don’t really want to talk about these attention-seekers, even though I teach Religion & the Constitution, because I resent the way they cause many people to despise the Establishment Clause and to think atheists are litigious louts. I detest the idea that Obama’s magic moment — turning into President — has been intruded upon by people doing PR for their crusade.

  • No, we don’t intend to link to every sex scandal involving a highly placed “faith-based outreach” political operative. Only the outstandingly juicy and tawdry ones. Besides, there wouldn’t be space.
  • Check out our Ayn Rand open thread, which is up to 155 comments, and where the conversation headed off in some (to me, at least) unforeseen directions.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Camille Paglia

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Walter Olson

How can it be that no posts on this site have mentioned her till now?

…I respect the Bible as one of the world’s greatest books, based on a magnificent body of oral poetry. It is a fundamental text that everyone, atheist or believer, should know. It speaks profoundly to everyone at each stage of life. And of course its hero sagas, from Moses to Christ, have been absorbed into the Western fine arts tradition.

But I do not accept the Bible as divinely inspired. Indeed, most scholars would agree that the New Testament was purposefully written as a point-by-point response to the Old Testament to prove that Jesus was indeed the Messiah whose arrival had been forecast for centuries. Therefore the details of Jesus’ life and experiences were tailored and shaped to echo the language and imagery of the Old Testament.

Personally, I do believe there was a historical Jesus….

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 4 Comments

God’s Problem

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

Several friends have recommended Martin Gardner’s review of Bart Ehrman’s God’s Problem in the New Criterion, the brilliant  journal of principled culture criticism.  Gardner, a math and science writer, lays out a Leibnizian explanation for life-destroying natural disasters: Any human-supportive universe which God created must obey physical laws in order to continue functioning; those laws cannot be suspended, even to prevent mass slaughter by earthquake or individual loss by car accident.  “If God were obliged to prevent all accidents that kill or injure, he would have to be constantly poking his fingers into millions of events around the globe. History would turn into a chaos of endless miracles,” writes Gardner. 
 
Perhaps this argument is a compelling answer to Ehrman’s argument for the irreconcilability of a benevolent God and human suffering (I haven’t read Ehrman’s book), but it strikes me almost irrelevant to actual religious practice and belief.  The vast majority of Christians, guided by their priests and pastors, assume a loving God who intervenes regularly in human affairs.  Christians pray to God to cure them from cancer or protect them from a plane crash.  (Intermediaries are also useful: A soon-to-be closed Catholic school in Brooklyn is called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, presumably because She does provide perpetual help, but not in this case.)  A politician and Baptist minister in Kentucky is promoting a law requiring the state’s office of homeland security to display a plaque that reads: “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.”  Apparently God is not just a co-founder of the United States but also a federalist, honoring state boundaries in his on again, off again solicitude for the country. 

Gardner argues that were God to start preventing some deadly accidents, he would have to prevent all such accidents, resulting in chaos.  The reality is far worse than that.   Since believers give credit to God for answering their prayers when they are saved from catastrophe or illness, they have to explain why he answered their prayers and not those other people’s prayers, why he saved these children from a tsunami and not those other children.  Any believer who today thanks God for making sure that his coronary bypass operation was successful has to explain why God allowed at least 37 peasants to be buried in a Guatemalan landslide on Sunday.  Such an explanation requires either extraordinary narcissism on the believer’s part or positing capricious injustice on the part of God. 

While I am more sympathetic to Gardner’s semi-stripped-down theism than to the full-blown Christian account of a loving, personal, prayer-answering God, the enterprise of trying to logically determine God’s intentions and actions by the use of reason strikes me as questionable, whatever its august pedigree.  The gulf that surely yawns between a being that is self-created and that created all of reality (even if such causal concepts apply to God) and our feeble mentation precludes any confidence that what we deem as logically necessary and thus binding on God actually does bind him or has the slightest relevance to him.   And why even posit as starting concepts goodness and justice?  Those are human desires and values.  They may be wholly irrelevant to something as massive and impenetrable as God.   Gardner seems to embrace a logical argument for the afterlife (proposition three below), since it is more consistent with a good, omnipotent God than several alternative propositions:

   1. God is unable to provide an afterlife, in which case his power seems unduly limited.
   2. God can provide an afterlife but chooses not to, in which case his goodness is tarnished.
   3. God is both able and willing to provide an afterlife.

If we’re going this far and attributing both will and ability to God, I see no reason why Gardner should not specify whether we get free will and justice in that afterlife, which he abjures doing.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 57 Comments

Evolution, Technology, and the Economy

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Bradlaugh

A reader draws my attention to this rather good systems-theoretic piece by Matt Ridley in the London Spectator.

Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago next month, has spent the 150 years since he published The Origin of Species [sic] fighting for the idea of common descent. Though physically dead, he is still doing battle for the notion that chimps are your cousins and cauliflowers your kin. It is a sufficiently weird concept to keep Darwin relevant, revered and resented in equal measure. But in some ways it is less radical and topical than his other, more philosophical legacy: that order can generate itself, that the living world is a “bottom-up” place. On the internet, Darwinian unordained order is now ubiquitous as never before.

Living beings are eddies in the stream of entropy …

Posted in economics, history, Science & Faith | Comments Off on Evolution, Technology, and the Economy

Science & society

Posted on January 12, 2009 by David Hume

I have a piece up at Taki’s Magazine, The Limits of Certitude. It might be read along with a post at ScienceBlogs, Science is rational; scientists are not. I might as well have labeled it “An argument for conservatism.”

Posted in philosophy, science, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Drive-through religion

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

“Christian publishers and retailers realize that today’s busy consumers are looking for . . . spiritual food that can be consumed in a convenient way,” said Bill Anderson, the [Christian Booksellers Association] president.

(“A closer, faster walk with thee.”)

Today’s religion advocates sometimes evince an almost child-like ahistoricism, it seems to me.  “Religion,” they say, is an essential component of a civilized  society.  Which religion, whose religion, and what era’s religion would that be?  The differences that separate an American believer and non-believer today are barely perceptible compared to the gulf that yawns between today’s cheerful Religion-lite, which has been defanged, homogenized, and told to mind its manners, and the monopolistic, crusading Christianity of centuries past.   How many of our conservative religious promoters would trade life in secular America for existence when Christianity was at the zenith of its power and made no apologies about trying to control as much of the temporal realm as possible?

Let’s not dwell on those outmoded religious activities that one is not supposed to remind religious advocates about, such as the burning of heretics and books; pitchforking the wrong type of Christian; and opposition to liberal political reform.  I do wonder, however, whether Michael Gerson, say, would be happy living under an admirably devout Catholic principality, or George Weigel under a Lutheran one, during the Thirty Years’ War.

But even less politically incorrect religious practices from the past seem equally remote.  Who’s still for hair shirts and flagellation?  Does the dispute over when baptismal regeneration takes place seem compelling enough that one can imagine Britain’s Privy Council addressing it, as it did in 1850?  How about spending virtually all day in church on Sunday, being instructed about the fires of hell?  I’ve never heard a theocon argue for reinstatement of Sunday blue laws, which would torpedo our retail sector, or even voluntary compliance with the Sabbath; could it be that the good of the economy trumps the clear commandments of God? 

The religious superstructure of centuries past has been dismantled.  Rising in its place is a remake of religion “in the image of mass-consumer capitalism,”  according to a sociologist of American religion at the University of Notre Dame.  That remake offers up easily digestible bits like the “5 Minute Theologian”  and “7 Minutes With God.”  Only a quarter of Americans attend church weekly.  Yet moral chaos has not broken out; society has grown more prosperous as secularism expands.  Empathy with others, an awareness of the necessity of the Golden Rule, survive the radical transformation of religious belief, it turns out.  Perhaps because a moral sense is the foundation, not the result, of religious ethics.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 25 Comments

Welcome to the Fold

Posted on January 11, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Spotted a new recruit today: New York Post weekend columnist Kyle Smith:

Andrew Breitbart … opened up a ballroom full of bumblebees: his blog Big Hollywood, which promises to organize a  network … of right-minded people who think entertainment could be a lot more interesting if it questioned liberal dogma once in a while … Breitbart’s beehive shouldn’t be open to everyone, but it should welcome similar species — say, wasps and hornets. Do I have to believe in supernatural beings? I became a conservative because I was skeptical of  unresponsive central authorities running everything and expecting be worshipped for it.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment