{"id":7725,"date":"2012-08-21T15:44:17","date_gmt":"2012-08-21T15:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=7725"},"modified":"2012-08-21T15:44:17","modified_gmt":"2012-08-21T15:44:17","slug":"a-little-bit-of-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/a-little-bit-of-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"A Little Bit of Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The symposium was actually a group review of Peter Kreeft\u2019s best-selling book about Heaven<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0That is to say, myself and two other invitees \u2500 one Christian believer, one Jewish believer \u2500 all submitted reviews of the book, after a brief introduction<\/a> by Bob Tyrrell, TAS editor.<\/p>\n

My contribution is here<\/a>. \u00a0Of the others, I liked Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s<\/a> the better. \u00a0Very Jewish: \u00a0“Heaven, schmeaven \u2500 God wants us to be busy on Earth!”<\/p>\n

I’m afraid I was not very kind to Kreeft’s book, which I described as warmed-over C.S. Lewis. \u00a0Which it is.<\/p>\n

My review inspired a couple of spirited responses from Christians.<\/p>\n

First came Roger Clegg, in the Letters columns of the July-August TAS<\/em>. \u00a0His letter and my response are here<\/a>. \u00a0My response is rather flippant: but then, Roger was impertinent and illogical.<\/p>\n

Impertinent:<\/strong> He opens a window into my soul and asserts that: “Mr. Derbyshire, poor soul, is trying very hard not to believe.”<\/p>\n

How does he know that? This is a standard Christian trope: That the atheist, poor fellow, is a believer really<\/em>, but, like a naughty child, just won’t admit it. \u00a0Sooner or later the Hound of Heaven<\/a> will get him!<\/p>\n

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 \u2500 better suited to my temperament \u2500 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.<\/p>\n

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

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? \u00a0But again, perhaps Roger knows me much better than I know myself.<\/p>\n

In the June TAS<\/em>, 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:<\/p>\n

[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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

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. \u00a0Not impossible; and way<\/em> more possible than that Jesus was related by blood to the Creator of the Universe.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I note, very incidentally, from my recent reading, that Abraham Lincoln seems not to have believed in an afterlife. \u00a0At any rate, I read this on page 56 of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals<\/em>:<\/p>\n

When his New Salem friend and neighbor Mrs. Samuel Hill asked him whether he believed in a future realm, he answered no. \u00a0“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 \u2500 except in one ambiguous letter to his dying father \u2500 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The notion of an afterlife \u2500 a “metaphysical Disneyland,” Thomas Metzinger<\/a> calls it \u2500 seems to me the most extravagantly improbable of all theological concepts. \u00a0On this I agree with Lincoln, whose religious convictions are chewed over here<\/a> (and no doubt in many other places).<\/p>\n

Whatever he believed, Lincoln was undoubtedly a great-grand-master of “Ceremonial Deism” \u2500 but that’s an oratorical style, not a confession.<\/p>\n

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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. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7725"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7725"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7727,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7725\/revisions\/7727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}