Secular Right

I did publish some reviews and columns during my absence, but probably the only such item that is much of a “fit” for Secular Right was my contribution to a symposium published in the June issue of The American Spectator.

The symposium was actually a group review of Peter Kreeft’s best-selling book about Heaven.  That is to say, myself and two other invitees ─ one Christian believer, one Jewish believer ─ all submitted reviews of the book, after a brief introduction by Bob Tyrrell, TAS editor.

My contribution is here.  Of the others, I liked Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s the better.  Very Jewish:  “Heaven, schmeaven ─ God wants us to be busy on Earth!”

I’m afraid I was not very kind to Kreeft’s book, which I described as warmed-over C.S. Lewis.  Which it is.

My review inspired a couple of spirited responses from Christians.

First came Roger Clegg, in the Letters columns of the July-August TAS.  His letter and my response are here.  My response is rather flippant: but then, Roger was impertinent and illogical.

Impertinent: He opens a window into my soul and asserts that: “Mr. Derbyshire, poor soul, is trying very hard not to believe.”

How does he know that? This is a standard Christian trope: That the atheist, poor fellow, is a believer really, but, like a naughty child, just won’t admit it.  Sooner or later the Hound of Heaven will get him!

My own religious history, hinted at clearly enough in my review, is precisely the opposite. For many years I tried very hard to believe, but just couldn’t. At last I sank gratefully into unbelief, which I found much more psychologically relaxing ─ better suited to my temperament ─ and not at all the agonized “trying very hard not to believe” posited by Roger. But then, I guess he knows my inner life better than I do.

Illogical: “Mr. Derbyshire demands ‘evidence’ of God and Heaven, but since there is plenty of evidence what he really seems to want is proof.”

No, it’s evidence. I describe myself plainly in my review (ninth paragraph) as “a rather severe empiricist.” If what I really wanted was proof, I would have described myself as “a rather severe rationalist,” wouldn’t I?  But again, perhaps Roger knows me much better than I know myself.

In the June TAS, not yet online, I get another scornful letter from L. Brent Bozell III of the Media Research Center. Brent fixes on my dismissal of C.S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma,” which argues that:

[Jesus of Nazareth] either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

To which I had responded, in my review: “Why couldn’t Jesus just have been mistaken?” Brent replies that anyone who mistakes himself for God Almighty must have been a lunatic. Jesus plainly wasn’t a lunatic.

I agree that the Jesus of the New Testament doesn’t seem to have been a lunatic, though it’s not impossible he was the kind of psychotic who’s terrifically good at faking sanity.  Not impossible; and way more possible than that Jesus was related by blood to the Creator of the Universe.

The things one might believe about oneself without being mad are many and various, though, and highly dependent on one’s time and place; and the limits of ordinary non-insane human self-deception are very wide, in my experience. My best guess is that Jesus really believed he was divine, but was mistaken. (This was also Martin Gardner’s opinion.)

I note, very incidentally, from my recent reading, that Abraham Lincoln seems not to have believed in an afterlife.  At any rate, I read this on page 56 of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals:

When his New Salem friend and neighbor Mrs. Samuel Hill asked him whether he believed in a future realm, he answered no.  “I’m afraid there isn’t,” he replied sorrowfully. “It isn’t a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.” Though later statements make reference to an omnipotent God or supreme power, there is no mention in any published document, the historian Robert Bruce observes ─ except in one ambiguous letter to his dying father ─ of any “faith in life after death.” To the end of his life, he was haunted by the finality of death and the evanescence of earthly accomplishments.

The notion of an afterlife ─ a “metaphysical Disneyland,” Thomas Metzinger calls it ─ seems to me the most extravagantly improbable of all theological concepts.  On this I agree with Lincoln, whose religious convictions are chewed over here (and no doubt in many other places).

Whatever he believed, Lincoln was undoubtedly a great-grand-master of “Ceremonial Deism” ─ but that’s an oratorical style, not a confession.

[I apologize for the long hiatus in posting.  I have been preoccupied with other issues.]

I’ve been trying to figure out what I found so annoying about this gathering of atheists.

A couple of things I can identify right away.  Cara Santa Maria has the worst case of vocal fry I have ever been assaulted with.  You could serve up her voice with black pudding and field mushrooms.  “Once considered a speech disorder,” says Science magazine.  Once?  She also, without any contextual or stylistic justification, lets loose a taboo word.  That’s not to mention her face iron and tattoos.  Is there a ranch somewhere breeding these types?

And then, the other panelists are all lefties.  They are the very nicest kind of lefties, thoughtful and erudite ─ the kind you’d invite to a dinner party ─ and of course I don’t mind their scoffing at virgin births, golden tablets, and the rest (though why does the Ganesh Milk Miracle never get a mention in these discussions?) but how do they manage to foul the air with so much cool, damp smugness?

Sure, these people are a lot smarter than the average bear.  Do they have to be quite so up-front about it, though?  Rich people used to wear shabby clothes and have beaten-up furniture.  There was much to be said for that.

And of course, the panelists are all Left Creationists.  Their enthusiasm for evolution by natural selection stops dead around 100K years ago so far as Homo sap. is concerned.  Why are they never called on this?

If you are baffled at why atheists are so disliked in the U.S.A., index your bafflement at 100.  Then watch that video clip (it’s 45 minutes).  The bafflement index, you’ll find, has dropped below 20.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank thinks that criticizing rollbacks in welfare reform shows a suspicious preoccupation with race—to put the most generous interpretation on his words–or, more bluntly, makes one a racist:

Events of the past few days make that happy chatter four years ago about a “post-racial” America seem especially naive. . . . On Tuesday, Mitt Romney began to attack President Obama as soft on welfare, an issue charged with race. On Wednesday, the Romney campaign hosted a conference call in which Newt Gingrich, who once leveled the racially loaded accusation that Obama was the “food-stamp president,” perpetuated the welfare accusations.

Let’s tease out the reasoning here. Romney’s criticism of the Obama Administration’s proposal regarding welfare work requirements was utterly race-neutral. And of course, more whites than blacks are on welfare. But because blacks have a higher welfare and food stamp usage rate than whites, one can’t talk about welfare policy—at least if one is calling for maintaining anything other than wide-open standards of eligibilty. To do so would stir up America’s always simmering racism and reveal one’s own hidden racial biases. Milbank would presumably also accuse Bill Clinton of racial demagoguery for his support of welfare reform. There are numerous other social problems where blacks are disproportionately represented—truancy, dropping out of school, out of wedlock childbearing, and crime, to name just a few. Are those also off the table as legitimate topics of policy debate?

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