Popule meus, quid feci tibi? Aut in quo constristavi te? Responde mihi.

Why do you look away?

Look at me: you put me here—

Is it the sight of a man alone,

Injured beyond repair,

Bones cracked, flesh flayed

That makes you turn away?

What drove you to it?

Old habits, too much wine,

A careless remark,

Or because I said the poor

Are happier than you

And the lovers of peace better

Than the lovers of war?

Or because I said a rich man

Will sit on a stool

And a humble woman

On an ivory throne

in my house.

You want me dead.

You want me out of the picture–

The rock strewn way,

The hard truth,

The inconspicuous life:

Not for you, no.

Ah! Now you are looking at me.

Any minute now, you say.

You hated me

As soon as I opened my mouth;

You tried to kill me then.

And now my mouth is dry,

And the words come slowly

And all I can say

Is forgive them,

Forgive them

Forgive them.

I gave you bread,

You give me vinegar.

I taught you mercy,

You give me justice.

I led you across a desert,

You pack me off to die.

Would you kill God

By killing me?

Or truth by siding with a lie?

You check the hour.

You must not miss your supper.

It is growing dark:

My mother is weeping

And my brothers

cannot console her.

She does not understand.

Her love is simple,

Pure, like your hate.

Soon, it will be finished

And I will say, My God

Why did you forget me?

I loved you

With a full heart

And you brought me here

To slit my side

And hold me to ransom–

Not like a son

Who could buy his way

Out of trouble,

But like a goat, a lamb,

A slave flogged for nothing

but being a slave.

.

Are you satisfied

With the outcome?

Are these smirking strangers

Entertained?

Have we reached

The conclusion?

Answer me!

You are as dark as your name

but is there something more?

What of the one who’s not the same

minute to minute, for

You specialize in being unknown–

Except for your shoulders or

Your breasts cupped, or a frown

That melts into a self-approving smile

When I am caught speechless

In beauty’s glare and bravery overtakes you.

I thought I loved your neck the most–

It has a fleshy resonance, a certain style–

But now, I think, I like the rest

Of you.  I have become a connoisseur

Who hopes like Moses for a sign

And waits, expecting you to lure

Samson from his sleep with naked thighs.

And will it come, this final vision?

Will you make my life dance

Like so many dervishes in fast

And furious step, until they chance

To say, Listen! The music’s done, at last.

Or will you, thighs clad,

Retreat into my lengthening past,

Like my shadow, like your mad

Ideas, by what this love will cost?

April 2012 5

“O  the woman God said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Genesis 3.16)

“If a husband calls his wife to his bed and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.” (Bukhari v.4, b.54, no.460).

“Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” (St Paul, I Corinthians 11.3)

Marital or spousal rape is now illegal in most of the developed and much of the developing world.  But it is one of those subjects that came late in the discussion of women’s rights and criminal sexual abuse.

As the West tries to redefine “traditional” marriage in a way that respects the concept of a consensual relationship between equal partners of either sex,  it needs to acknowledge that its own view of traditional marriage has actually been an impediment to solving a problem enshrined in that understanding: the idea of contractual privilege–superiority–of the man over the woman.

Most of the confusion in law stems from unacknowledged theological beliefs that have been papered over by a slew of case law, but like mildew keeps seeping through to reveal the ancient conceptual rot underneath.

A lot of this is blamed ( maybe rightly) on Saint Paul, who commended women in Christian marriage not to refuse their husbands their conjugal “rights” (1 Corinthians 7.5; cf 1 Cor. 11.13), and a half-mad interpreter of Paul who saw pregnancy as the fast track to salvation for obedient wives (1 Timothy 2.15). Not that the church invented this model of nuptial happiness: it was already a part of the family law of ancient Rome, before the Church came along. The paterfamilias–the pinnacle of patriarchal development in the West– had power of life and death over wife, children and slaves, with few legal constraints.  The Christian church made male authority canonical in the Church, where women were excluded from governance,  and in the family, and preserved the man-on-top philosophy for two millennia, with almost no one raising serious objections.

Christianity also went the Romans one step better: it declared that God wanted it this way.  In Book VI of his Confessions, Augustine recalls that he acquired a concubine, while waiting for his bride-in-waiting to become of marriageable age,  because “he was not a lover of marriage but a slave of lust”–a view of woman’s functionality that he scarcely budged from at any point in his career: “[O God] Thou hast granted to man that from others he should come to conclusions as to himself, and that he should believe many things concerning himself on the authority of feeble women (Conf. i)…. Woman who is simple and knoweth nothing (Conf. iii).”

Women’s consent in sexual matters was further compromised by the theological premise that they were lacking in reason, which only the male possessed in significant measure, and “nothing so casts down the manly mind from its heavenly heights as the fondling of woman and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state.” The woman is the source of pain and guilt, the incitement to lust, by God’s decree,  a permissible distraction for the eminently reasonable man who sometimes must take his fist to to the woman’s face to release his passion.

Along the way, inevitably, the theology of men on top–the male as dominant partner–seeped into the Common Law that formed the basis for the legal systems of America and the British Commonwealth. A famous 17th century treatise by Sir Matthew Hale (not published until 1736) called marital rape “an impossibility in law” because by virtue of marriage “the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.” The chatteled staus of the woman in the partnership was simply assumed as a point that need not be argued.

A number of movements in the nineteenth century began to eat away at the logic of Hale’s commentary.  Letters and diary entries from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony illustrate the intensity of  the struggle:

Stanton: “‘Woman’s degradation is in man’s idea of his sexual rights,’ Stanton wrote to Anthony. ‘How this marriage question grows on me. It lies at the very foundation of all progress.’”

Stone: “It is clear to me, that [the marriage] question underlies, this whole movement and all our little skirmishing for better laws, and the right to vote, will yet be swallowed up, in the real question, viz, has woman, as wife, a right to herself? It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property &c. if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right. Not one wife in a thousand can do that now, & so long as she suffers this bondage, all other rights will not help her to her true position.”

But after the nineteenth century there was real progress in understanding marrriage as a pact of equals–a fact not just reflected in the changing nature of marriage rituals (“love, honor and obey” becoming a rare form of the Anglican promise required of a bride after 1965) but the progressive criminalising of marital rape after 1970 and the United Nations declaration hat marital rape is a violation of human rights in 1993. In 2006, it was estimated that marital rape could be prosecuted in at least 104 countries, and since 2006 several other nations have outlawed spousal rape.  Surveys show that Islamic countries and most African countries have been the slowest to implement penalties for marital rape, and that even in those countries where the rape of a spouse has been criminalized, a category of exemptions and special considerations exists (for example, the notion that the marriage contract constitutes “implied consent”) that make prosecution of the crime a difficult matter.

HE question is at the center of the religion- and- state- issue that affects many countries around the world, but especially those trying to create a civil legal system against the backdrop of religious law and traditional attitudes about marriage.  Deference toward tradition affects not only couples living in the culture where the marriage conventions and laws were formed, but also dispersed populations, such as the Pakistani diaspora in the U.K., that embrace some but not all of the “western” values indigenous to liberal European democracies.

A recent article by Aneka Chohan highlights the problem in Islamic societies.  She puts the dilemma as starkly and forcefully as I have seen it:

When it comes to marital rape, women are often confused whether they have been raped or not. The scenario of a stranger raping a woman on the street is immediately identified as  rape, where as forceful acts by a husband upon a wife are considered acceptable. This is partly due to the cultural belief that is rooted in women’s minds that ‘submitting’ to their husband is a sign of a dutiful wife.

The West tends to feel terribly privileged and liberal in the discussion of marital rape, but the premises used by Islamic theologians and “experts” are hauntingly like the rationales used in Europe and America for centuries: it is based of a thelogy of opposites, discredited Aristotelian biology (which saw the male as “propagative” and the female as “nutritive”), and a system that was designed specifically to keep women in their place as help-meets to their masculine superiors.

Take for example the words of Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed, the president of the Islamic Sharia Council of Britain–a Muslim cleric living in England–where any report of spousal rape would be treated as a crime:

“Clearly there cannot be any rape with the marriage. Maybe aggression, maybe indecent activity…because when they got married, the understanding was that sexual intercourse was part of the marriage, so there cannot be anything against sex in marriage. Of course, if it happened without her desire, that is no good, that is not desirable….In Islamic sharia, rape is adultery by force. So long as the woman is his wife, it cannot be termed as rape. It is reprehensible, but we do not call it rape.”

There may be a superficial logic to this preposterous claim, but it has no more bearing on the nature of rape than the seveneteenth century notions of Sir Matthew Hale.   Add to this the lack of consensuality that precedes the marriage contract in much of Islamic society and the rape provision becomes even more invidious: a woman who did not marry a man of her choosing can be held accountable for not giving that man his conjugal “rights.” A girl taken by force and gang raped can be judicially executed (“honor killing”) for bringing shame on her family, as in the case of seventeen year old Kainrat Soomro who was declared a kiri (blackened woman) by a council of elders for losing her virginity outside marriage.   As Habibi Nosheen says in her superb Atlantic article from September 2011, “The most recent report from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan noted that in 2009 roughly 46 percent of all female murders in Pakistan that year were in the name of ‘honor’. The report noted that a total of 647 incidences of ‘honor killings’ were reported by the Pakistani press. However, experts say that actual incidences of ‘honor killings’ in Pakistan are much higher and never get reported to the police because they are passed off by the families as suicides.”

Underlying the judgments of the religious experts is more than two thousand years of male superstition, male insecurity, and male power.  Coercion and dominance within marriage is the last hurrah of a concept of marriage that keeps daddy on top and mother–as the writer of I Timothy advocates–barefoot and pregnant.

It keeps women ashamed to tell the truth about the thugs they married and daughters silent about the men who drugged them and bruised them and robbed them of the right to choose.

But it is not even that easy: Because in the first instance, spousal rape is not about choice. It is about power and the mythology that supports power.  The men who do such things are supported by a vicious theology that makes God, “the almighty father,” the “compassionate, the merciful,” the “hearer of prayers”– that God– the creator of a system that sees women as what the Catholic church used to call “occasions of sin”–visual enticements to lust and pleasure.  It’s all their fault; they earned their position by being the first to transgress God’s law, surrendering (as Augustine saw it) their natural rights to the man.

This theology has been chanted and sung and and said for two millennia by thousands of under-educated clerics in the book traditions who could not make an honest living if their lives depended on it, and hence prefer the easy road: tell people what God wants and what God the father expects of them. The God who told a virgin named Miriam not to tell anyone he’d got her pregnant.  The God who abused his only son and required him to be tortured to death. The God who teased Abraham with the promise of a son for a hundred years and drove his youngest wife into the desert. The God who told the Prophet that a nine year old wife would become the mother of believers. That God. Tell them that God wants it this way: your wives submissive and silent and your daughters obedient.  If that fails, there are always fists and knives.

by rjosephhoffmann

for HS 

HAT one day soon you’d look and find no word

from me. Or you’d say we must ‘stay in touch’, since friends

can love each other just as much or more

than incongruous lovers. So, love ends.

It ends because the half-unconscious heart

that skipped whole measures when I said, “Your eyes

are black as death,” closed me in their smart

and cunning stare. It ends because your tales

were false and I believed them, and you rained

like the hot rain of Pakistan on my desire.

And when it ended, and the winter trained

its white and honest judgement on the fire,

I thought, Just one more try, just one more try

For love.  It ended when you said, I am not Eve

And you were foolish ever to chase me

Among these thorns and call it Paradise.

RELIGION IN THE NEWS
Winter 2010, Vol. 12, No. 3
by Thea Button

International Blasphemy Day took place for the first time on September 30. Naturally it had its own Facebook page, which announced that its purpose was “to promote free speech and to stand up in a show of solidarity for the freedom to challenge, criticize, and satirize religion without fear of murder, litigation, or reprisal.”

And satire there was.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI), which selected the day to mark the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Mohammed cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllensposten, sponsored an exhibit in Washington by “atheist agnostic” artist Dana Ellyn featuring paintings with titles like “Jesus Does His Nails” and “Praying for a Hail Mary on Super Bowl Sunday.”

In Los Angeles, CFI Hollywood displayed several blasphemous short subjects: “Dear Father,” “Jesus Tells a Joke,” and “Timmy’s Wish.” In Toronto, supporters were urged to take up the “Blasphemy Challenge” by uploading their denials of faith to YouTube. Ken Peters of California won the online Blasphemy Day slogan contest with “Faith is No Reason,” and was awarded a CFI T-shirt and coffee mug.

But Blasphemy Day was only the most widely covered expression of Atheism on the March in 2009.

Taking a cue from England and Spain, billboards, buses, and subway stations across America were festooned with localized ads such as, “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?” From California and Arizona to Maryland and West Virginia, local chapters of the Coalition of Reason paid for billboards showing a blue sky with puffy white clouds and the legend, “Don’t Believe in God? You are not alone.”

The campaign took its cue from celebrated anti-religious intellectuals like science writer Richard Dawkins, historian Susan Jacoby, biologist P.Z. Myers, and—most notoriously—flame-throwing English ex-patriot journalist Christopher Hitchens. (“I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right,” Hitchens told a capacity crowd at the University of Toronto in October.)

“Most atheists I know don’t care for religion, obviously, but aren’t angry about it.” Dallas Morning Newscolumnist Rod Dreher wrote August 14. “Not so the true unbelievers—the Dawkinsons and their followers—who prove that you don’t have to be religious to be a fundamentalist.”

For the unbelievers, there were new churches as well as old to join. In an October 19 post on the New York Times City Room blog, Jennifer 8. Lee listed Flying Spaghetti Monster Meetup, New York City Brights, New York Philosophy, the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Richie’s List, and the Secular Humanist Society of New York, among others.

Online, Twitter provided a lively forum for atheist militants, who began referring to themselves as “Tweathens.” A December 16 tweet from BibleAlsoSays captured their spirit: “ALL Brands of Christianity can’t be right, but they can ALL be wrong! In other words, they are ALL Baloney!”

The new atheism did unsettle old atheists like former SUNY Buffalo philosophy professor Paul Kurtz, who established CFI in 1991 to bring together his Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation for Claims of the Paranormal.

In promoting the gospel of free thought, CFI had taken a moderate line, emphasizing toleration for unbelievers and a secular approach to government. When CFI opened an office in Washington in 2006, Kurtz issued “In Defense of Science and Secularism,” which asked politicians to “base public policy insofar as possible on empirical evidence instead of religious faith…[to] maintain a strict separation between church and state…[and to] protect and promote scientific inquiry.”

But last summer, Kurtz was overthrown as chairman of the organization in a palace coup led by lawyer and bioethicist Ronald Lindsay. As President and CEO, Lindsey shifted CFI  into a higher gear.

“When we defended the right of a Danish newspaper to publish cartoons deploring the violence of Muslim suicide bombers, we were supporting freedom of the press,” Kurtz told the online Christian Post October 1.

“The right to publish dissenting critiques of religion should be accepted as basic to freedom of expression. But for CFI itself to sponsor the lampooning of Christianity by encouraging anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant, or any other anti-religious cartoons goes beyond the bounds of civilized discourse in pluralistic society. It is not dissimilar to the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era. Yet there are some fundamentalist atheists who have resorted to such vulgar antics to gain press attention. In doing so they have dishonored the basic ethical principles of what the Center for Inquiry has resolutely stood for until now: the toleration of opposing viewpoints.”

Writing on his New American Mercury blog September 25, former CFI senior vice president R. Joseph Hoffmann called Blasphemy Day a “preposterous exercise in how to be religiously offensive.” It was “as tactless as it is pointless. Pointless because when it’s over I still won’t be able to buy wine after twilight in New York.”

For his part, Lindsay told CNN’s Moni Basu September 30, “We think religious beliefs should be subject to examination and criticism just as political beliefs are.”

And in a November 29 debate on the proposition “Atheism is the New Fundamentalism,” sponsored by the British debating forum Intelligence Squared, Dawkins vigorously asserted the negative. Atheists, he emphasized on his website
(www.RichardDawkins.net) the following day, have a commitment to exploring evidence and a readiness to embrace change, but the passion of their arguments or their refusal to remain silent should not be mistaken for fundamentalism.”

The passion did provoke a bit of counter-revolution, as Daniel Burke of the Religion News Service reported October 15: “The old atheists said there was no God. The so-called ‘New Atheists’ said there was no God, and they were vocally vicious about it. Now, the new ‘New Atheists’—call it Atheism 3.0—say there’s still no God, but maybe religion isn’t all that bad.”

P.Z. Myers, who earned his place in the New Atheist pantheon by driving a rusty nail through a communion wafer on YouTube, would have none of it. Atheism 3.0, he wrote on his blog Pharyngula December 8, is “atheism for people who don’t like atheism, or who want to neuter atheism so it doesn’t challenge a pious status quo…these guys seem to be more interested in hiding the significance of the nonexistence of gods so they can hide behind a façade of superficial religiosity, and appeal to a waffly, wishy-washy middle ground.”

But at the end of the day, Blasphemy Day (and its brethren media events) seemed less about causing offense than about the social construction of a new American atheist identity. For while, according to the 2008 Trinity American Religious Identity survey, the proportion of Americans who do not identify with a religion has doubled to 15 percent of the population since 1990, admitted atheists constitute only .7 percent.

“I think we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago,” Dawkins told Wiredmagazine in November 2006. “There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists.”

Interviewed on the Times’ City Room June 25, Ken Bronstein, the president of New York City Atheists, said, “I’ve had people call me in tears, and tell me they thought they’d never see a sign promoting atheism in New York.”

And Ken Loukinen, founder of Florida Atheists and Secular Humanists, told the Bismarck Tribune August 8, “If everybody who was atheist came out of the closet, you’d see how many of us there really are.”

by rjosephhoffmann

N ELEMENTARY school my class watched Robert Frost stammer through part of a poem he couldn’t quite read on a snowy and bitterly cold Washington day.

The occasion was the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic to be elected president of the United States. Choosing Frost, then in his eighties,  to lend dignity to a ceremony so prosaic  it can only be compared to buying stamps, was a stroke of genius–a tribute to Kennedy’s New England roots and the liberal protestant tradition that went with it.  Even Presbyterian schoolteachers in Raleigh loved his poetry.

Frost, reverting to “The Gift Outright”

Yes, the new guy was Catholic, the thinking went, but he was also a product of New England’s finest Yankee institutions,  Choate and Harvard.  Some of that must have had a civilizing effect, though few south of Maryland or west of Pennsylvania had heard of Choate and what they knew of Harvard they didn’t like much. They still don’t.

In that era, when there was still a “Catholic vote,” there was also little disagreement between Catholics and protestants over issues like abortion (illegal), contraception (risky, no pill), and  divorce (heinous for Catholics but not recommended for others with political designs, either).

The fear of protestants was not that Catholics would impose a socially conservative agenda on the country  but that America would become a colony of Rome and that the pope would rule in absentia.  Kennedy put a hole in that senseless idea in a famous speech in 1960 when he said,

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish – where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source – where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

How things have changed. The Catholic church is now as loud and politically obtrusive  as Kennedy required it not to be to win an election.  Though Catholics and protestants come out nearly even in surveys concerning prevalence of  ”pre-marital” sex (I know:  it sounds quaint, doesn’t it?), birth control and even the incidence of abortion in cases of unintended pregnancy (Protestants account for 37.4% of all abortions in the U.S.; Catholic women for 31.3%, Jewish women  for 1.3%, and women with no religious affiliation, 23,7%), the Catholic church has decided to make abortion its cause celebre in its battle for social and moral relevance.

HE Gospel of Life -obsession of the official Church is largely based on traditional Catholic moral teaching as expounded by the bewildering and now blessed John Paul II.  Along with its pre-modern understanding of human sexuality it carries with its sanctity- of -life prescription a European- friendly condemnation of capital punishment and anti-war bias, as well as a totally incoherent ban on contraception as a way of reducing the instances of unwanted pregnancy. –Call it the Mother Theresa Ultimatum.

The contraception phobia, which dates back to Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (and the birth-control hysteria of the 1960′s) had nothing to do with a consistent sexual “moral theory” but with a theory of human nature formulated by St Augustine in the fifth century, based on the notion that pleasure was never intended by God as a part of human good.   The equation between pleasure and sin is so firmly entrenched in Catholic psychology that it has to be seen as the root of orthodox Catholic moral theology: a celibate priesthood, the veiling of women religious  (nuns), a virgin birth, an immaculate conception, and a sexless apostolic community are just the doctrinal excrescences of an institutionalized fear of the flesh.

Curiously, alongside this partially disguised abhorrence of fleshly fulfillment the Catholic church still retains its admiration for the productivity of marriage and opposition to divorce.  But when you consider that Ted Kennedy, John Kerry,  andAndrew Cuomo, to name only prominent political figures, are forbidden (and with variable consistency have accepted that they are forbidden) to receive  the Church’s most revered sacrament, while ghoulish mock-Catholics like Rick Santorum and parody-Catholic, spouse-abandoning, thrice married Newt Gingrich get the Church’s seal of approval for their extreme “pro-life” commitments, it is high time for The Catholic Church to declare itself a mouthpiece for the Tea Party.

As if this isn’t bad enough, Santorum has decided to break ranks with the Kennedy legacy by repudiating JFK’s robust appeal to the First Amendment as the guaranty that religion plays no role in the affairs of state.  Calling the 1960 speech by Kennedy a “great mistke,” and a “radical statement that did much damage,” he said in a recent speech in Newton, Massachusetts:

We’re seeing how Catholic politicians, following the first Catholic president, have followed his lead, and have divorced faith not just from the public square, but from their own decision-making process. Jefferson is spinning in his grave.

Which of course is true.  At the ignorance of Rick Santorum.  Rob Boston says mildly and to the point,

Look, it’s bad enough that you run around talking trash about Kennedy, but adding Jefferson to your Festival of Ignorance is just too much. Leave the man out of it.  You apparently know nothing about him.  Jefferson spent his entire life opposing government-mandated religion and fought every member of the clergy who supported that foul idea. Here’s a famous example: During the election of 1800, presidential candidate Jefferson knew that many New England preachers were yearning to win favoritism for their faith from the federal government. He also knew that they hated him because they realized he would never let that happen. That’s why they spread wild tales about Jefferson being a libertine who, if elected, would burn Bibles.

Santorum

The social and moral “conservatism” of the Republican field is primarily an appeal to the ignorance of the American people.  It’s the ugliest kind of alliance between the Church’s need to remain relevant by appealing to uteral issues and the political need of soulless office-grubbers to appear moral.  Both are appeals to ignorance, to the Faithful, on the one side,  who are often willing to refer  moral responsibility to higher authorities and to The American People, on the other, who can usually be counted upon to follow their gut and are often shocked when their gut takes them in the wrong direction as it did in the 2010 congressional runnings.

HAT is even more depressing is that the ignorance of a Rick Santorum is probably real rather than Machiavellian.  He is as dumb about the history of his Church as he is about the history of his nation. And the machinations of the Catholic church–his church–while Machiavellian, are tragically self-centered and manifestly wicked.

Ever since the Jewish priestly class invented the story of cloddish Adam and compliant Eve, the hierarchy has known how to use an idiot to make a point: Do what you’re told.  Don’t ask too many questions.  Believe us:  you don’t want the responsibility of knowing the big picture.  Given those marching orders, it doesn’t matter what Jeferson really said or thought; it’s enough that there is an interpretation of him as a believing Christian who would spout, basically, the same things the Tea Party is saying if he were around today.    There is no difference between history and delusion in Rick Santorum’s world.

Kennedy ended the speech that Santorum calls a big mistake with the following:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute – where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote – where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference – and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

In a scant fifty years, how have we come so far from regarding this kind of rhetoric as fundamental, rational and wise to seeing it as radically mistaken? And how much guilt does the Church bear for encouraging this treason against the first principles of American democracy by egging on the clods?

by rjosephhoffmann

ELL, what did you think it was?  Let me guess.  You thought it was about not believing–and naturally not believing something is the opposite of belief.  And since the opposite of belief is fact, well there we are.

Of course atheism is just a belief.  One of my favourite websites says it best:

Strictly speaking, atheism is an indefensible position, just as theism is indefensible, for both are systems of belief and neither proposition has been (or is likely to be) proven anytime soon.

The rational position for the non-believer to take is to say that there is almost certainly no god, because no credible evidence exists to support the claim that god exists. This is a stronger position than agnosticism, which holds belief and non-belief on an equal footing.

So the debate between atheism is about the evidence and not about the status of propositions.  Oh, and what beliefs are in relation to personal identity.

Which question brings me to a recent post by Joshua Rosenau at his website– that often touches on some really interesting stuff.  This interesting stuff is directed against a not very interesting notion by Ophelia Benson that “beliefs are not really a part of identity and should not be treated as though they are. “

Rosenau says that

 What’s especially odd about Benson’s claim is that New Atheism is all about belief. The defining difference between New Atheism and other sorts of atheism is that the gnus don’t just want to assert their own belief that there is no god (or their lack of belief that there is a god, depending). They want to assert a belief that other people’s belief in god(s) is dangerous ipso facto. When folks say that belief is only bad if it leads people to do bad things, they reply by emphasizing just how important belief is in shaping personal identity, and arguing that belief matters on its own.

Of course, this has to be true if you are going argue, for example, that bad beliefs cause people to do bad things, and the Gnus think that this correlation goes a long way in explaining why Muslims behave irrationally and why fundamentalist Christians are personally annoying and politically dangerous.

Systematized bad beliefs, in the form of doctrine, are the worst because a fully constructed Catholic, or Muslim, will buy wholesale what his faith sells on the subject of sexual morality, suicide bombings, abortion, and who owns Palestine.  When someone says he’s a Catholic he’s making an identity claim, code for any number of agendas stock full of beliefs.  When someone says she’s a good Muslim, same thing.  There are no category errors here, unless you swallow the giddy notion that atheism is not a belief but a non-identity-imposing non-strait-jacketing opinion about belief.

I want to say that Rosenau’s point is elementary, in the sense that it’s fundamental to understanding that religion is identity-shaping.  Is the reason for this sly turn away from seeing belief as identity-forming purposeful among the Gnus?  Maybe it’s a slip of the keyboard: if so there is still time to back away from this preposterous claim.  But if it’s meant as a serious suggestion, somebody’s got some explaining to do.

Isn’t it true that Gnus have a catechism in the making and thus, you should pardon the expression, a fetal identity of their own?  Even though it may be short of the intellectual range of the Catholic Church or the Torah, at least their movement is beginning to resemble the bylaws of a local Masonic Temple. Every movement has to start somewhere.

More important for future development it has in common with these other systems the basic identity-shaping construct that all religions start with: We’re right. You’re wrong.

“The reach of naturalistic inquiry may be quite limited  (Chomsky 1994)

“We will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” (Chomsky 1988)

  THOUGHTFUL response from a reader asked me why I had stopped commenting on the excesses of “religion” and turned my attention to damning the excesses of atheism.

I haven’t. But it’s a good question. I replied that it would be like asking Luther why he stopped momentarily condemning the abuses of the Roman Catholic church and turned his attention to the marauding protestants. For everything nasty Luther had to say about the pope being the anti-Christ and Rome the whore of Babylon, he had equally vicious things to say about the religious militants in a treatise eirenically titled “Against the Thieving and Murderous Hordes of Peasants.”  Who were these “hordes”?

They were Luther’s supporters in the protestant cause, disillusioned that he hadn’t taken his revolution far enough. So others, like Thomas Müntzer, took it for him. Similar (harder to prove) theories have suggested the same dynamic at work in the transition between Jesus and his followers, and a definite comparison can be made in the transition from earliest Christianity to the studious nastiness of some of the Church fathers, the founders of “orthodoxy.”

Polemic–rhetorical sling-shotting–wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before.  It just spreads more quickly now.

I am not anti-atheist.  I am anti-excess, and everything about the Dawkins revolution has spelled excess.  No matter who tries to persuade me that I am making this excess up in my head,  it’s excess. Fueled by the repeated assertion of its promoters that it is (secularly) providential, righteous and true (just as all zealotry convinces itself), it is excess.

Sometimes, as Caspar Melville (editor of the New Humanist) mildy suggested in a Guardian article in 2010, it’s useful to hit the right targets–namely, an aggressive religious fundamentalism–hard, and in that regard “irascible, rhetorically florid, sweeping, intellectually arrogant New Atheism certainly has its place – some arguments are just asking for it.”  (Funny, those adjectives remind me of a few things said recently about yours truly: how can it be?).

But I know Caspar to be a smart guy, someone who still sees the humanities in the word humanist, so in reponse to the famous Dawkins dictum (spoken to Laurie Taylor way back in 2007)–that there is no more reason to pay attention to theology than to fairyology– I wasn’t surprised to find Caspar saying this:

Entertainment value aside it is surely false, as well as politically unwise and, well, pretty impolite, to say that “all theology” is irrelevant (some of it is moral reasoning, isn’t it?), still worse to say that “religion poisons everything”, or that without religion there would be no war, or that bringing a child up within a faith is tantamount to child abuse, or that moderate religious believers are worse than fundamentalists because they prepare the ground for extremism, or that “all” religion is this, or that, or “all” faith is misguided, or to suggest that those who believe in God are basically stupid, or that science, and only science, can answer our questions….The picture of religion that emerges from New Atheism is a caricature and both misrepresents and underestimates its real character.

ET me stay with that last point for a minute–the belief that only science can answer all of our questions.

No one with a semblance of a brain would ever suggest that science can’t do a lot, hasn’t done a lot,  and that the world science has explained for us doesn’t leave a lot of room for traditional religious beliefs, stories, and explanations of physical reality. It is a leap into nowhere, however, to say that accepting this as a fair description of the current state of knowledge requires someone to say, “Look, somebody who thinks the way I do doesn’t think theology is a subject at all,” as Dawkins does to Taylor.

First of course, we need to find out what the speaker means by “theology.”  Then we need to know what he thinks qualifies as “subject matter.” Presumably English literature qualifies because it exists.  But so do the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Pali texts, the movements those texts have produced and the cultures and ideologies they have influenced.  –Not to mention alphabets that were developed largely for the preservation of sacred writings.

What aspects of those topics, given the facile dismissal of theology, can be recognized as subject matter?  Have the revolutionaries acquitted themselves of all responsibility to subject matter in the denial of the existence of God?  Can the numinous collapsing of all empirical religious traditions into the word “religion” (equivalent to the equally mystical collapsing of all scientific inquiry into the word “science”) be justified on the basis of a prior assumption–because that’s what it is–that gods don’t exist?  If so, life is simple and the mortgage is paid.

But, if so, equally–if the texts and traditions of the world’s religions are really no different from stories about fairies and leprechauns–then attacking and ridiculing them is just as pointless as systematic exploration of their meaning–which is one of the things theology does.  Is the ridicule justified because while nobody believes in the story of the Frog King or Thumbelina (does anyone even know those stories any more?) a few do believe that Jonah was swallowed by a ravenous fish and (a few more) that Jesus walked on the sea of Galilee? I’d rather buy Plantinga’s argument for epistemic defeaters than that rationale for why ridicule is justified but explanation isn’t.

Or does “subject matter” mean a certain kind of theology?Or does it mean (I think is often does in new atheist harangues) apologetics–which is unknown in many religious traditions?  The analogy to fairies and leprechauns makes it difficult to know. If you say the analogies are all wrong, remember: I didn’t make them.

Predictably, I am going to say that the best theologians–those who still mistakenly think they have a “subject matter”–are aware of the sovereignty of science over theology in terms of explaining everything from the cosmos to human origins and nature. And they have seen it this way for a long time. Even many not very good theologians see things this way but pretend it’s none of their business.

The history of religion in the last two hundred years has been a history of religion redefining itself–a bit like Britain when it went from imperially great to little England.  Yet religion has done a pretty good job of doing just that: the “war between science and religion” is treated in history-of-culture classes as a topic in nineteenth century studies, especially in the work of Cornell’s first hard-headed, science-first president, Andrew Dickson White.  But if you look at the section headings of White’s famous book on the subject, you’ll see that he had a broad and humanistic definition of culture in which science played a magisterial, not an imperial role.  He was as impressed with the results of the higher biblical criticism as he was with development in chemistry and medicine.

Too many vaguely religious people aren’t aware of the “magisterium issue,” to use Stephen Jay Gould’s linguistic stab at declaring a truce.  Religion and science are compatible (to the extent it even occurs to ordinary people to wonder) because they don’t know much about either, and because they are encouraged in this superstition by dumb priests and ministers, the self-interest and reflexes of many churches, and the at-best tepid curiosity that characterizes their day to day life–whether in relation to politics, religion, world affairs, or national education policy. (And don’t mention vote-grubbing politicians who try to out-right-to-life their way into office by appealing to the worst instincts of NASCAR America. This may be the year that foetuses are declared citizens of the United States at seven months.)

What is the effect of this dumbness, this complacency? Loud, that’s what. Getting attention for your “message” by forcing people to pay attention to hate ads, grotesquery, libelous caricatures of ideas, and repeated falsehoods–all of it communicated in a kind of pidgin that can only be described as Dumbglish: these aren’t tactics that diminish and cheapen the American spirit. This is the language that American culture seems to require to wake it up.  It flows like poison soup in the veins of the internet. This is where the American spirit is.

After some thought, I have to concede that maybe the shouting is necessary.  Most people don’t pay attention to much of anything–not what politicians say, or what bishops teach, or what Atheists.org billboards shout at them along the highways.

The failure of the culture to inspire has led to the failure of people to be curious and a general acceptance of the status quo in most things–especially religion.  Why should people want to know more about anything when they have a thousand bucks in the bank, an iPhone, and a new MacDonalds opening up down the street?  Starbucks is for people with jobs.

American culture is not hardwired to evoke curiosity about science, religion, or anything else.  It’s designed to breed complacency.  If Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily in the onslaught of the latest economic data.

N indirect proof of that is an unbroken succession of wars, thousands of American dead, a broken Middle East, an Arab spring that looks like winter, and nary a protest movement to remind us that man is a moral animal [sic, or lol] who ought to oppose such things.  Bishops made noises and a few liberal protestants and Jews occasionally marched. Atheists, as usual, weren’t quite sure what to do because while many hated George W. Bush they hated Islam more and so–like Christopher Hitchens–they backed the wars. They were, in a phrase, paralyzed and morally invisible. No William Sloane Coffin emerged, no John Howard Yoder, no Elie Wiesel.   Complacency.

Rather than say Europe isn’t far behind in this, I’m going to say Europe is far ahead. Complacency is what killed European Christianity.  The fruits and comforts of the industrial revolution killed it.  Not education and science; not curiosity; not Darwin’s dangerous idea.  Just the creeping rot of not really giving a damn about anything.

The Christianity that Kierkegaard tried to resuscitate in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1843) became the Denmark where only 31% of the population believe in God but 82.1% are members of the Evangelical Lutheran (the State) Church.

How can this be?   It can be, according to Richard Norman, because religion ”is a human creation … a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected….Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That’s why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion.”

It follows as the night the day that Danish religion is not American religion.  British religion is not American religion, and I’m loath to say British atheism is therefore not American atheism. This cultural specularity has always been true, as when long ago German Christianity was not Roman Christianity.

HE opposite of complacency is not excess.  It is moderation, and if the argument against moderation is that it has nothing to show for itself, the counter- argument is that excess has much, much less.

The classical aphorism, σπεῦδε βραδέως, “make haste slowly” is a good motto for what needs to be done in the conversation between science and religion.  It was the motto of the Emperor Augustus who as a military commander deplored rashness.  Suetonius says that he would often tell the generals, “Better a safe commander than a bold,” and “That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.”

In the final tally, as long as rashness rules and shouting scores, the atheists worry me at least as much as people who believe in souls. Realizing that he is now a template for what I consider atheist rash, as in red and irritating, consider this of P Z Myers reviewing the conservative philosopher Alvin Plangtinga

I’ve read some of his work, but not much; it’s very bizarre stuff, and every time I get going on one of his papers I hit some ludicrous, literally stupid claim that makes me wonder why I’m wasting time with this pretentious clown, and I give up, throw the paper in the trash, and go read something from Science or Nature to cleanse my palate. Unfortunately, that means that what I have read is typically an indigestible muddled mess that I don’t have much interest in discussing.

After a scissors and paste attack on the philosopher punctuated by non sequiturs and hooplah that makes no sense, Myers says simply that it is all “muddled lunacy.” As a matter of fact, I don’t like Plantinga much either. The summary Myers attacks (fortunately for him) appeared as a piece in a religious periodical. But Plantinga deserves much better, even if only because once upon a time academics who despised each other didn’t mistake emotionalism for argument. A vestige of this is that not once in his summary does Plantinga call the proponents of naturalism “stupid.” The legacy of the Dawkins revolution will be to make this completely emotional, unquantifiable term and all of its sisters and cousins and aunts permissible discourse in the defense of science. I know, I know: I have had my lapses in calling screed-writers screed-writers in screeds of my own.

O let me revert to someone else.  Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his famous 1997 Natural History article a couple of paragraphs which would have caused his immediate expulsion from the atheist camp as an accommodationist or worse if he had written it in 2007.  He died in 2002.  With him at the Vatican meeting on NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) in 1984 was Carl Sagan, who had organized the event.

…I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the historical paradox that throughout Western history organized religion has fostered both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heart-rending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in the occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held such secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held similar power more briefly in Old Testament times, they committed just as many atrocities with many of the same rationales.)

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.

Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.

I stop what will be described as a tangent, a screed, a hateful assault, another outburst close to tears at Gould’s words.  The year he wrote this article (1997) was also the year of Carl Sagan’s death.  Sagan perhaps did more to make science magical–fascinating–than any other scientist of the twentieth century, though his primary celebrity was where it belonged and was most needed: in the United States. Gould commenting on Sagan’s death had this to say: “Carl shared my personal suspicion about the nonexistence of souls—but I cannot think of a better reason for hoping we are wrong than the prospect of spending eternity roaming the cosmos in friendship.”

That is the language we need.