QOTD: Donna Haraway and blasphemy as faith

(((Donna Haraway and "A Cyborg Manifesto;" cyborgs and blasphemy; religion, faith, and irony.)))

I came back to this today as part of a(n e-mail) conversation I was having about feminism and freedom (I am resisting the urge to put that word in quotation marks). There's a particularly great line about "the fathers of illegitimate offspring [like cyborgs]" being "inessential" that I remembered and wanted to grab. But in the course of doing so, I found myself once again for the first time in a long time re-reading parts of the essay. The opening is, well, lovely. It could go on a religion blog, like that other one I'm working on, but not before that blog has established a character and voice of its own that is not just this blog somewhere else. So I'll put it here for now, because (a) it fits, and (b) it's time to also revive this one and start posting again. But I do a lot with irony in my classes, and it occurs to me that they really probably should read this, as difficult as it is. Maybe not in 100 courses, but in 200 and up they should try to wrestle with it.

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

It could be taken as a reading of Colbert before Congress, come to think of it . . .

The Vatican Assimilates Marx

(((Marx turns out to have been pretty important, even from the point of view of Catholicism, which has traditionally not been so warm -- leaving aside, of course, a wing of the Society of Jesus.)))

I see that the Vatican has extended its recantation of past hostilities from Darwin to that other bete noir of contemporary piety, Karl Marx, the (grand)father of "godless" communism. Said The Times,

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said yesterday that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.

Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote in an article that Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.

“We have to ask ourselves, with Marx, whether the forms of alienation of which he spoke have their origin in the capitalist system,” Professor Sans wrote. “If money as such does not multiply on its own, how are we to explain the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few?”

With Darwin, Galileo, and Oscar Wilde now in the fold, what's an atheist to do? Is there nothing that is incompatible with Catholicism? Maybe this is like the parable of the rich man's banquet . . . they're out in the streets dragging in the scientists and atheists and social delinquents. That'll do.

Religion in a Nutshell

(((evolutionary pychology and cognitive studies in religion summed up brilliantly in under two minutes by a stand-up comic; yes, it leaves out some nuance . . . emphasis on some.)))

Patton Oswalt has a brilliant little bit on the development of religion. Hmm, maybe I can embed it. I never tried that.

It worked!

Anyway, if you follow this, then you've finished about half my intro to religion course. And this is cheaper, although maybe not funnier. Ahem.

QOTD: Some of My Best Friends Are Godless

(((Mike Huckabee talking to Tim Russert; religion, atheism, and public life; being human "deeper" than being Christian? rights and the distinction between animals and humans.)))

Mike Huckabee, responding to questions from Tim Russert about where his understanding of faith leaves American atheists:

No, I wouldn't have any problem at all appointing atheists. I probably had some working for me as governor.

Probably? Hey, I don't know, but I'm betting there were some atheists somewhere in my administration. I mean, if there are any in Arkansas. On the other hand, to be fair, this might be a reasonable indication that the guy applied no litmus test. That is, it at least looks like he at least didn't make an effort to exclude non-religious people from positions. Which would, of course, be discrimination.

But still, you know he was just one second thought away from claiming to have atheist best friends as evidence that he's not bigoted. I suppose we can say for him that he stopped short of that.

More interestingly, though, there's something else to be said for him. Maybe. When Russert in the same interview corners him on abortion and claims that Huckabee's position stems entirely from his Christian faith, here's how Huck replies:

But, no. It's not a faith belief. It's deeper than that. It's a human belief. It goes to the heart of who we are as a civilization. If I believe that your intrinsic worth is not changed by your ancestry, your last name, by your IQ, by your abilities or disabilities, if I value your life and respect it with dignity and worth because it is human, then that's what draws me to the inescapable conclusion that I should be for the sanctity of every and each human life.

Two things. First, it's very interesting that he makes the claim that his belief is "a human belief" that is "deeper than" his "faith belief," on two counts. Not only does it imply that if you're human, you ought to believe it, and one wonders what could count as the content of any such "belief," it also positions "human" as more central than "Christian." Mixed, but on balance this is positive. It's a ground for tolerance of other religious beliefs, including atheism, even if it's not at all clear what "human belief" could really mean.

But this leads to the second point, which is that "human belief" seems to mean something like a belief that human life as such is especially special, even unique. So, as is often the case with frameworks for fairly progressive human rights positions, at bottom his case is about the privilege of being human. You can't miss the irony in his argument, though, if you look closely. He says that when you're human, your ancestry doesn't matter. But of course, being human is precisely an ancestry. And if you're a Christian like Mike Huckabee, your understanding of human ancestry is that it goes back to Adam, who was created by God.

So, when you run it through the wash, Huck's pseudo- (or maybe quasi- is better)humanist position turns out to be thoroughly religious after all. And speciesist (which is not the same thing, but which follows in Huck's case).

There's a reason, after all, that he uses that word, "sanctity."

Quote of the Day: Not the Same as Believing It

(((Bible; Bible is really, really important, whether you believe it or not; does that mean understanding it is important? I don't know . . . is it important that we understand Hitler or Stalin? And yes I actually think there's way more interesting stuff going on in the Bible than in, say, Mein Kampf)))

The problem of not having the originals of the New Testament, though, is a problem for everyone, not simply for those who believe that the Bible is inspired by God. For all of us, I think, the Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization. It continues to be cited in public debates over gay rights, abortion, over whether to go to war with foreign countries, over how to organize and run our society. But how do we interpret the New Testament? It's hard to know what the words of the New Testament mean if we don't know what the words were.

This is Bart Ehrman, of UNC-Chapel Hill, in a lecture at Stanford. The part I'm quoting begins at about 7:25.

Briefly, two points from this. First, however much one might detest religion in general, and Christianity in particular, this antipathy is no excuse for ignorance (although many will claim their antipathy arises precisely from being smart and informed); the only ways to beat Bible-thumpers (so to speak) are to fight them on their own ground (the Bible) or to shift the ground in an effective way (which requires, if you ask me, knowing the ground they want). All this requires a reasonably nuanced understanding of what's going on in the Bible. It's why I have more perplexing but also (I suspect) more fruitful conversations with religious opponents than some of my more religio-phobic friends. I know how to talk the talk, and I know the Bible better than many believers I argue with.

Second, Ehrman notes that we don't really know very well what "the Bible" actually says. Which makes it hard to know what it means. This is actually worse news for believers than for the rest of us. I don't believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, or anyway certainly not in the way a Baptist does, or even in the way progressive Catholics might. So, that we can't settle on the text doesn't matter to me. And if your opponent settles on a text, you can bet it's a translation, which is already one step removed from the problem of establishing a text.

Because, you know, if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.

Thanks to my compañero for the pointer to this lecture, which is a great example of accessible religion scholarship.

Quote of the Day: The Rational Credentials of Western Civilization

(((Terry Eagleton's rediscovered Christianity/Catholicism; you can take the communist out of Catholic Ireland, but you can't take the Catholic Ireland out of the commie; the rational credentials of western liberals established in the blood of innocent Iraqis -- talk about someone else dying for your redemption . . .)))

In an interview with the Times about his recent Verso essay on the Gospels, noted Marxist literary-cultural critic Terry Eagleton is kind of forced to say something about his thinking about religion in general, and Jesus in particular. But I'm not going to quote that stuff. I'm more interested in a distinct, albeit closely related, set of comments on Amis and Hitchens, but in a way about Dawkins, as well.

There is an element of panic and even hysteria in the way that people are waving their rational credentials. What Amis is really talking about is a war between barbarism and civilisation. This is an old theme. It takes different forms, and now it's taking this one. If by civilisation you mean a West that's at present killing hundreds and thousands of innocent people in Iraq, then the smugness of that is extraordinary.

I wanted to stop with just that first sentence, in part because it speaks so clearly to the anti-religious attitude of so much secular progressivism, these days, but the importance of it isn't really evident until you get to the rest of the quote. "Smugness" isn't really what he wants, there, I think; maybe, "hypocrisy," or just "inconsistency." Do you have to be barbaric to protect civilization? The same people who I suspect would assent to this would have none of Lenin. Which seems odd to me. Lenin's bad because he was a communist. But, you know, it's ok for us because we're for democracy? Extremism in the defense of liberty is, as they say, no vice.

For myself, if we're going to claim we're civilized, that means being civilized regardless of whom we're dealing with. Otherwise, get off it and admit you're essentially being clannish and xenophobic.

Quote of the Day: O, God, You Are Soooooooo Big!

(((More Alfred North Whitehead; nonsense is nonsense, as Lewis said, even when you talk it about God; maybe there's a reason the "God of the philosophers" doesn't make any sense at all to people who aren't philosophers)))

Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments. (Science and the Modern World, 179)

So, yeah, God must be able to do anything, and God must at the same time be infinitely good, and so both desire to stop evil and be able to stop evil. So, what you think is "evil" actually isn't.

Yeah, that's intuitive.

God knows everything, even what hasn't happened, yet, and what might happen but won't, etc. etc., so God can know that you will do something that results in, say, the deaths of millions of people, but won't stop you. Also, God hereby knows non-existent things (things you haven't yet done aren't yet real; things you never do are never real). He doesn't have an opinion about them, mind you. He knows them.

Poppycock.

Quote of the Day: im in ur bibul, rewritin ur storiez

(((LOLCat Bible; genius; Matthew; annunciation and stuff)))

In the spirit of the season. You know. Sort of.

Da burth of Jesuz Christ

18 Now, teh burth of teh Christ was liek dis: After Marry and Joseph waz all "We's gonna get marrieded, kthnx", but before dey could had hankiez pankiez Mary was all pr3ggerz from Teh Forse.19 Joseph was liek "I has virjn - NOOOO dey be stealin my virjn! Must hied hur".20 But when he was tihnkin, zomg, a WallCat frm Ceiling Cat was liek, "Oh hai! I'm in ur dreemz, givin u messij. Don't be scairdy cat. Take Mary as ur wife - is virjn. But teh Forse is strong in tihs wun, lol! HoverCat is on hur, givn hur feetus, srsly.21 "And she gonna made a son, and you gonna call him Jeezus, cuz he save kittehs frum bein bad kittehs. Kthxbye."22 So all dis was all did cuz Ceiling Cat had sed it wud be. His proffet was all liek:23 "Hay guise, look! teh virjn iz all preggers, and dey gonna call him Immanuel", dat be joospeek for "Ceiling Cat wit us"24 Then Joseph waked up, done wat teh angel frm Ceiling Cat tolded him to, and was all liek "U wit me now lol" at Mary.25 And dey didnt has teh HARBL GOES WHERE!?!? til affer dey gets a son and calleded him Jeezus. Ktnx.

Quote of the Day: Joe Knows Witches

(((Nigeria; African Evangelical churches and practices; hunting child-witches; witch hunting and "deliverances" no more "essentially" Christian than sharia tribal honor practices "essentially" Muslim)))

Pastor Joe Ita of Liberty Gospel Church in Eket, Nigeria sez:

We know how they operate. A witch will put a spell on its mother's bra and the mother will get breast cancer. But we cannot attribute all things to witches, they work on inclinations too, so they don't create HIV, but if you are promiscuous then the witch will give you HIV. [ . . . ] We are the only ones who really know the secrets of witches.

Yeah, it kind of sounds funny, if you haven't been reading the horrifying descriptions of child mutilation and murder. Rich churchmen like Joe make tons of money charging parents for the "deliverance" of their children from witch-spirits. Of course, it turns out it's not enough to kill the children:

Parents don't come here with the intention of abandoning their children, but when a child is a witch then you have to say "what is that there? Not your child." The parents come to us when they see manifestations. But the secret is that, even if you abandon your child, the curse is still upon you, even if you kill your child the curse stays. So you have to come here to be delivered afterwards as well.

My point about sharia has always been that there is nothing "essentially" Muslim about it. It's not the Qur'an, and in fact early Islam was precisely all about overcoming certain aspects of tribal bullshit, like, for example, the abandonment and murder of female infants. Not that Muhammad was modern, just that murdering a woman for being raped is not some integral part of Qur'anic or even Muslim logic, without which the whole thing would fall apart or be unrecognizable. This witch hunting strikes me in a similar way:

Although old tribal beliefs in witch doctors are not so deeply buried in people's memories, and although there had been indigenous Christians in Nigeria since the 19th century, it is American and Scottish Pentecostal and evangelical missionaries of the past 50 years who have shaped these fanatical beliefs. Evil spirits, satanic possessions and miracles can be found aplenty in the Bible, references to killing witches turn up in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Galatians, and literal interpretation of scriptures is a popular crowd-pleaser.

Even if you think the "tribe/s" question is/are American and/or Scottish evangelicals and pentecostals, the point remains the same. Further, in Africa, there are not the same mitigating political, social, and cultural factors that at least prevent freaks who think their children are witches from burying them alive. Most of the time, anyway.

tags technorati : religion, nigeria, witches, africa

Shaolin Temple: The Fist of Love

(((Shaolin Temple; Buddhism and kung fu/wushu; trash talking with monks; could have and maybe should have been quote of the day, but it's not)))

China is trying to organize a wushu competition parallel to the Olympic Games and is all miffed that the Shaolin monks won't participate. The Chinese government, which of course wants to divorce the practice of kung fu completely from any spiritual anything, can't understand why Buddhist monks won't play along? The article quotes one of the monks:

Clad in saffron Buddhist robes, Dechao insists that real kung fu monks don't fight. They meditate and practice kung fu to reach enlightenment. "Every fist contains my love," says the 39-year-old Dechao, also known as Big Beard.

There are many interesting things about this, but at the moment, I want to focus on the dispute about the spirituality of kung fu practice, and about the bizarre attitude of some of the purely athletic practitioners, who insist that "Our goal is the medal[. . . . ]The monks in the temple do it as a hobby." This is mainly ignorant, but also an odd sort of denigration of tradition in the form of taunting Buddhist monks. For what, exactly? That they think kung fu as spiritual practice is different from kung fu as athletic competition aiming at honor? You can say they're wrong, you don't "believe in" Zen, or whatever, but to say that they practice as a "hobby" is just stupid.

The author of the article notes that the Shaolin abbot declining to participate in the competition organizes his own shows with ticket prices at $32. But I honestly don't see the contradiction. The point is not just that it's not about violence. The point is that it's not about competition.

Let's admit that if they did participate, we would all note that even the great monks of Shaolin came to hand out the smackdowns at a competition. If they lost a lot, we would say how they're pretenders. If they won, we would say they just wanted to show off, and the fact that they participated shows that there's nothing spiritual about it. So even if we don't buy the distinction made by the abbot (which I admit I do), I don't see anything in here that's incentive for participation.

tags technorati : Shaolin, Olympics, Kung fu, Wushu, China

How To: Not Be a Scientist

(((Evolution vs. creation; science vs. religious belief; (anti-)religious discrimination; "persecution" of believers for not abandoning their beliefs in the face of scientific evidence . . . even when they're scientists.)))

A certain self-described "Bible-believing Christian" is suing the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for dismissing him because he refused to subscribe to "Darwin's theory of evolution" (as if he might have been okay with, say, Lamarckian evolution). This is a little bit like saying it's discriminatory to not hire an Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christian to perform abortions at a clinic. Or to not hire me to preach at your church. I can read the Bible with the best of them, and speak better than most. But you might say I'm missing a crucial piece of the overall weltanschauung.

The fundamental discriminatory issue is whether Abraham, the man in question, could reasonably have performed his duties absent at least some general assent to evolution as the central reigning biological paradigm, one with broad, indeed, nearly unanimous, scientific assent. The Massachusetts agency that dismissed the case ruled that he could not.

But there are also other ways to consider it, namely, a general sense of basic scientific competence. Abraham complains that this condition, subscribing to "Darwinian evolution," was not in the job advertisement. But why should it be? If I advertise for a physicist, I don't ask them if they believe the earth revolves around the sun.

Oh, you say, but there's dispute about evolution as a "fact." No, there's not. Not from anyone who has any idea what they're talking about. The best traditional-theistic answer so far, "intelligent design," essentially argues that evolution is not "random" (which is not what evolutionary theory says, anyway), nor does it advance by way of natural selection, but that it was planned out by God like a series of dominoes lined up to fall in order. Never mind that this doesn't actually say very much, or that it's flawed for a variety of reasons. Notice instead that it essentially assents to the fundamental idea of evolution. The rest is all gobbledy-gook: bad undergraduate philosophizing masquerading as science, sounding enough like creationism to pull in "Bible-believers," and enough like science to piss the rest of us off.

What strikes me about this case is that evolution is perhaps a lot like global warming. We sat through years and years of obfuscatory pseudo-science funded mainly by the energy sector and other conservative hacks, and spewed out incessantly and self-righteously in the face of broad scientific consensus, and designed to prove that there was no consensus, or that such consensus as there was rested on mediocre and PC-motivated science. Now, however, we finally have none other than George W Bush admitting that there's a problem. What changed? Well, it wasn't that anyone proved the hacks were hacks. I don't know. Maybe it just became painfully obvious what bullshit it all was, but surely the urgency of the peril if global warming-naysayers were wrong played a role.

Evolution is like the weather, this way. The problem is that the reality of it is much less urgent, much less in our faces. What problems go unsolved if some people continue to not "believe in" evolution? But this reality does not change the other reality, that evolution, indeed natural selection, has achieved consensus, despite a bunch of confusing claptrap designed mainly to reassure those people who already want to believe in God instead of in evolution (as if this were not a false dilemma). This does not mean that we won't find something better to replace natural selection or even evolutionary theory as we now have it (although I suspect it's the Copernican revolution of biology).

But it does mean that anyone who considers themselves a scientist has to have something better to say than that they believe in God if they're going to reject evolution. It is simply not a scientific answer. And anyone who gives it as an answer casts doubt on the quality of their scientific thinking, and indeed on whether we ought to think of them as a scientist at all.

It's a little bit like trying to work for Newton and insisting that the earth rests immobile at the center of the universe, because that's clearly the implication of the passage in Joshua when the Sun stands still. Newton wouldn't just have fired you. He'd have laughed at you and smacked you all the way out the door. And Newton believed in God.

tags technorati : Nathaniel Abraham, Science, Religion, Philosophy, Biology, Evolution, Creation

Sean Taylor: Error or Irony?

(((Religious sports stars; Having your God cake and eating it (so to speak), too; What God does and doesn't do for us; Media and the use of celebrity religion)))

In the days since Sean Taylor was shot and killed in what appears to have been a burglary gone horribly wrong, I have noticed a trend at least in ESPN coverage. They really like to play the tape of him saying, "I've been blessed. God has looked out for me."

I suppose this is supposed to be poignant. And of course when any celebrity dies, every talking head trots out the religious platitudes, so I suppose this should be no different. Lots of Americans believe in God and believe in prayer. Fine.

What gets under my skin is this kind of crap—where the successful claim God's blessing has gotten them there. This is generally understood as humility, attributing to God what one could simply boast was the result of one's own skill or effort, and/or the skill and effort of other merely mortal beings (compare Lance Armstrong on overcoming cancer: it wasn't God; it was good doctors). But the end result is that you claim God's favor for yourself and your "side," whether that's a sports team (athletes who thank God when they win a game . . . what, the other side didn't offer enough sacrifices?), an ethnicity ("Gangs of New York" is great on this), or a nation-state (fighting in a foreign country, say, Iraq). Even if we thought they might be right, in what sense can this possibly be considered humble? God loves us because we are righteous, and we know that because we win. Otherwise, why would we win?

But then there are the backflips and other painful spiritual gymnastics forced on the faithful when they lose. God is testing them. Or, in its most radical version, God is simply asserting God's own authority. Because, as God, he occasionally has to prove he's God by being arbitrary and childish, instead of, I don't know, showing up and telling us not to be childish and arbitrary with each other.

So, God looked out for the 24-year-old Sean Taylor, until last weekend. But since God is ultimately responsible for everything, it has to have been part of God's plan. God blessed Sean Taylor, but then he didn't. He un-blessed him. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, as Job says.

I like the book of Job. There are many things to like about it, including God's assertion that only God is God, and Job's insistence that it still isn't fair (and God agrees). But the God of Job is in no sense a reassuring God. The God of Sean Taylor precisely is reassuring, despite his unpredictable behavior. But how are unpredictability and unreliability reassuring? The God of modern Christians is the reliable rock on which we are supposed to build the structure of our lives, but the God of Job goes to great lengths to remind us that, to put it in the terms of Ecclesiastes, the sun shines on both the wicked and the righteous.

God is teaching Job a lesson. God is undermining Job's pride, and Job's experience is of hubris, the pride of understanding that goes before a fall. But who pays for Job's lesson? This has also always bugged me, like an itch I can't scratch. Why is it that Job's children die to teach him this lesson? And why does this have to happen to Job to teach us the lesson?

And then, well, why does it have to happen to Sean Taylor to teach us the lesson? I wish I could with confidence argue that it doesn't, but in any case I'm pretty well convinced that if there's a God as smart and as powerful as most religious people (and even most theologians) like to think, that God could come up with better, less devastating and costly ways to teach lessons.

So what are we to make of the incessant repetition of Sean Taylor's pious, Job-like utterance? The only thing I can figure is that we're supposed to think that Sean Taylor was a pious man who lived a full life and was loved by God even though God "took him home" at age 24 in a pretty nasty way. Or, as Joe Gibbs would seem to have it, we're supposed to learn from it: the world, even—or perhaps especially—with a Christian God running it, is unpredictable, unreliable, and a special gift that many humans in the world get a lot less of than others.

Perhaps this is even true, but how is it different from a Godless world?

tags technorati : Sean Taylor, religion

Religion is Back! Of Course, It was Never Gone

Surprisingly good piece in the Economist, bringing together several of my own concerns: recognition that religion, as quintessentially human as anything else we do, is not going to go away ever; recognition that religion is a matter of conscience, and that the very idea that religion is a matter of conscience is a hard-won modern idea; that the best way to achieve peace in religionized conflicts is to involve religious leaders rather than to try to make them stop being religious. And so on. And of course a recognition that many "religious" conflicts are not at bottom, or certainly not entirely, "religious."

Many of those struggles, notably the Middle East, began as secular tribal disputes. Now that they have a religious component they are much harder to solve: if God granted you the West Bank, you are less likely to trade it. “Inter-faith dialogue” may sound a wishy-washy concept; but it is a more realistic idea than presenting a secular peace to competing faiths without the backing of religious leaders. Priests and pastors condemned violence from both sides in Northern Ireland; that has not really happened in the Holy Land.

tags technorati : religion, politics, inter-faith dialogue, middle east

The Moral Equivalent of [Religion]

Just reading a very interesting interview with Stephen Duncombe posted by Bruces to nettime.

His comments (quoting William James) reminded me of my efforts (documented on this site) to argue with programmatic/dogmatic atheists that you don't bring people over by telling them they're stupid or even simply by telling them they're wrong (and even "proving" it). Duncombe sez:

There is an essay that has stuck with me. I remember reading it when I was 18 and I went to a War Resisters meeting in San Franciso, we had herb tea and sat on the floor. It was William James’ “A Moral Equivalent to War.” James’s point was simple. Speaking to a group of pacifists, he said, “If we keep addressing pacifism by saying ‘war is bad, peace is good,’ we’re not going to get anyplace with any people except for people who already agree with us. What we have to figure out it is why people go to war.” And he says “look, whether we like it or not, war serves the purposes of honor, sacrifice. Of patriotism, and so on and these things are good qualities; what we have to do is figure out a pacifist equivalent that can actually allow people to feel honor, allow people to feel sacrifice about giving for the all, allow people to feel patriotism, but not in a way that kills other
people or gets people killed.” And then says “Once you acknowledge that, then you can move the point towards your own politics.” And that stuck with me.

Could say much the same thing to Thomas Frank and like-minded progressives re: Kansas . . .

tags technorati : religion atheism duncombe

The Truth Embedded in the Lie

And no, I don't mean Bush comparing Iraq to Vietnam. I mean in "fiction":

Poet and short story writer Grace Paley, a literary eminence and old-fashioned rebel who described herself as a "combative pacifist," has died. She was 84. [ . . . ]

"None of it happened, and yet every word of it is true," she once said of her fiction. "It's truth embedded in the lie." [ . . . ]

Born Grace Goodside in New York in 1922, she was one of three children of Russian Jews. Her family spoke English, Russian and Yiddish, but politics proved the universal language. Her parents had opposed the czar in Russia and were supporters of the New Deal. The bitterest neighborhood feuds were not among drug dealers, but between Trotskyites and Stalinists.

"I thought being Jewish meant you were a Socialist," Paley said. "Everyone on my block was a Socialist or a Communist. ... People would have serious, insane arguments, and it was nice. It makes you think the rest of the world is pretty bland."

Some of us would say that the Bible contains a lot of truth embedded in the lie. None of it ever happened, but a lot of it is true in some important way, even if it's not every word, or if it's true in some way that we wish it weren't. Because there are other kinds of truth than "factual" or "historical" truth. The Bible isn't a newspaper or a science or history textbook. But it is about order and justice, and a lot of it ain't pretty, and is even downright morally contemptible. But there's terrifying truth in a lot of that, as well.

I want to say something about her thinking that being Jewish meant being a Socialist, because I think there's a certain plausibility in that. Not that there aren't millennarian or apocalyptic strains of both Judaism and Marxism (see "Christianity," for example), but in general, both tend to be about achieving real justice in this life rather than the next. And when MLK said he had seen the promised land, he didn't mean heaven.

RIP Grace Paley. I hope I'm learning the right things from you.

tags technorati : Grace Paley, Religion, Bible, Fiction, Poetry

. . . But He Loves You

Much of George Carlin's monologue on religion is top-notch stuff. His dismantling of the logic of prayer, and of a god who is essentially a passive aggressive little dictator but is supposed to be understood as caring for you succeeds perfectly.

Other bits less so. Most interesting, perhaps, is that once he's so effectively made nonsense of the idea of a loving god who punishes us with lightning strikes and/or eternal damnation, his claim that there is no god ("Not one") is supposed to be demonstrated by asking god to strike him dead. We might reasonably take this as confirmation that the god he already made nonsense of doesn't exist, but that's only one of many possible conceptions of divinity, and while it may make the point about that One God (TM?), it doesn't go any further than that. In other words, he might be demonstrating that the One God who loves us in an omni-passive-aggressive way doesn't exist, but not that "not one" god exists. Depending, of course, on what the meaning of "exists" is.

All that said, the piece is not only funny, but a great example of humor/comedy as a powerful philosophical tool. This is the one thing the left in America seems to have gotten better than the right in America. Our answer to Bill O'Reilly is Jon Stewart. Our answer to Scarborough is Colbert. And our answer to Pat Robertson is George Carlin.

I wish I were that funny. But I'm not, so watch the 10-minute monologue.

tags technorati : Religion, Politics, George Carlin

Could They Just Handle Iraq for Us?

In a hilarious spat between England and the conservative Muslim world that reads like it would be a great Monty Python sketch, "leading Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Ahmad Khatami said during his Friday prayers sermon in Tehran [that] 'The old and decrepit government of Great Britain should know that the era of their empire is over and today they are a valet in the service of the United States.'"

Zing!

Apparently, this is supposed to provoke the UK into revoking Sir Salman's knighthood and turning him over, because, apparently, that old fatwa is still in effect.

In Karachi more than 1,000 people chanted their support for comments made on Monday by Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul Haq, that Rushdie's knighthood justified suicide bombings.

You have got to be fucking kidding. Right?

This one is stupid, but it's at least funny. Keep thinking Monty Python -- Eric Idle doing a BBC News report:

Pakistani traders offered a reward of 10 million rupees (165,000 dollars) late Thursday for anyone who beheads Rushdie, while a group of Islamic scholars awarded Osama bin Laden their highest honour in a tit-for-tat move.

Nyah-nyah.

Technorati Tags: Iran UK Rushdie Fatwa Pakistan Knighthood

It must be God!

Black holes exist, but they don't. Just like God!

Technorati Tags: Religion, Science, Black Holes

Gay Rights in . . . Colombia???

The Colombian legislature has voted to recognize same-sex unions.

"I think this is an incredible victory that should resonate across both continents, north and south," said Scott Long, director of the gay rights program at Human Rights Watch in New York. "It should definitely be an example to the United States. Colombia is a country that's Catholic, with a conservative government, and they still recognize that this is the right thing to do."

Colombia, like most Latin American countries, does not have fundamentalist groups with the kind of influence and funding to launch a national campaign against gay rights. But it does have a powerful Catholic Church, which argued that extending rights to same-sex couples would violate church doctrine. "This gives legal sanctity to families that are artificial and false," said José Galat, a prominent Catholic activist.

After a long public battle, advocates from groups such as Diverse Colombia slowly won over many lawmakers in Congress. Among those who support the bill is President Álvaro Uribe, a conservative Catholic. He is expected to sign the measure.

OK, there's still that matter of paramilitaries and of half of US military aid going right back to American contractors, but still . . .

The Real Scientific World

Scientism! The Reality TV Series

By FERDINAND THROTTLEGRIP, Associated Press Writer

31 Minutes Ago

LOS ANGELES, Calif - Television and movie producers, eager to cash in on the success of deity ass smacking books such as silver tonged Brit reductionist Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and bathtub gin distiller/ part time writer Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great" are running, not walking, to develop film and television projects based on the middle finger to the sky zeitgeist.

Noted reality tv producer Mark Burnett is currently in talks with Dawkins to create a new series tentatively named Shut the F*** Up, Sit the F*** Down and Have A Hot Cup of Science! It's also known as Hot Cup of Science, for short.

"We're very excited about this new project with Prof Dawkins" Burnett said during a recent Hollywood Reporter interview. "It's going to be a hard hitting show - this one's really going to ruffle some feathers, cause fur to stand on end, make grandmothers lose their false teeth, bring 19 year olds to orgasm and generally shake things up - which always means ratings and later, new private jets...for me."

The show will send Dawkins, dressed in a silver jumpsuit and accompanied by a space suited chimp named Reason, around the US. "Let's say there's a little Bible study group meeting in the basement of a quaint, Midwestern US town; Dawkins and Reason will pop in, uninvited of course, and tell everyone to sit the f*** down and enjoy a hot cup of science!"

When asked by Hollywood Reporter what the intrepid atheist team would do if everyone was already seated and provided with beverages, Burnett said "those details will be worked out as the show takes more solid shape."

[Posted to LBO-Talk by Dwayne]

tags technorati : science tv religion dawkins hitchens