Religion is Knowledge

A Bold Return To The Unique

Where could one expect, a priori, a more intensive dialogue throughout history than one between the "old" and the "new" Covenant? Real dialogue takes place where the issues are difficult and the results neither simple nor easy.

Pure, unmediated faith: this alone is life.

Careful: Hate Speech Post Here

Comparative Religion Says All Equal: Especially Yours

Ronald Knox once quipped that "the study of comparative religions is the best way to become comparatively religious." The reason, as G. K. Chesterton says, is that, according to most "scholars" of comparative religion, "Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism."

Another good read by P. Kreeft.

Despising Religion

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next, make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.

- B. Pascal

This sounds desperately familiar; as if personal to me. Perhaps it is.
Not contrary to reason.
Attractive: if only it were true.
True.

A Little Thought Experiment

Suppose you were a professional physicist. Suppose further that that you came across the writings of someone whose knowledge of quantum mechanics derived entirely from discussions with high school science students. She had picked up from them some of the jargon – “collapse of the wave function,” “Schrödinger’s cat,” “wave-particle duality,” and so forth – but because their explanations were amateurish at best – always oversimplified, usually at least partially mistaken, and sometimes even grotesquely off-base – they failed to convey to her anything close to an accurate picture of the subject. Bizarrely, though, she used the bad information she’d picked up from them as the basis for an attack on the intellectual respectability of quantum mechanics, presenting it as clear evidence of the irrationality of contemporary physicists. “These physics oddballs claim they have a cat in a lab somewhere that is both alive and dead at the same time! And they also believe in little magic particles floating on foamy cosmic waves, or some such thing. Oogedy-boogedy, as my friend Kathleen would say.”

So what are we to make of those whose pronouncements and/or writings on religion and faith are little more than warmed-over high-school gibberish?

Just Sayin'

If a football coach tells parents their son needs to memorize plays to be on the team, the parents agree. If a priest tells parents their child needs to memorize prayers or facts about their faith to be a better Catholic, the parents argue.

If a soccer coach tells parents they need to get their child to team practices three times a week, the parents change work schedules and arrange carpools. If a priest tells parents they need to get their child to a practice before a big liturgy, the parents complain.

If a cheerleading coach tells parents that they need to raise money so the team can go to a competition at Disney World, the parents sell candy bars and wash cars. If a priest tells parents that they need to raise money so the altar servers can get new robes, the parents remark that "It's always about money".

If a school teacher isn't pushing his/her students to read and do math beyond their grade level, then he/she isn't thought to be doing their job. If a religious education program pushes students to know and understand their faith beyond their grade level, then the program is thought to be "unrealistic".

What has happened to us?

Thanks to Fr. Jay Toborowsky.

More Angry Atheism

Voting Today: Third Party

Despite my desire to see John McCain and his brand of neocon-Republicanism soundly defeated, I can’t stand the idea of awarding my vote to his leftist, black-nationalist adversary Barack Obama. I’ll therefore do in this presidential race what I’ve done in every other presidential contest since 1992, that is, cast my ballot for neither national party . . .

I may vote for Chuck Baldwin. I am fully aware that Baldwin, who is a dignified, grammatical speaker as well as a pious Evangelical Christian, cannot possibly win the presidential race. But I am not voting for him because I think he could ever win this squalid, media-rigged contest. I support Baldwin because he is someone whose views I agree with and whose person and demeanor I respect. And I see in Baldwin a presidential candidate who would be suited for a less degenerate society than our own. He is the closest approximation to the kind of American leaders of an earlier generation whom I could admire, and since neither presidential frontrunner is a figure I would ever want to see in the presidency, I shall endorse my ideal instead of an odious caricature.

Thank you very much.

Real Men Live in Reality

What is your reality?

American Buddhism's Racial Divide

Is Buddhism in America split into two camps along ethnic, racial, and cultural lines? Some leading scholars of Buddhism think so. And a recent survey confirms their opinions. Pennsylvania State University's Charles Prebish believes Asian and non-Asian Buddhists represent "two completely distinct lines of development in American Buddhism." And Indiana University's Jan Nattier sees the divide as being between "ethnic" and "elite" Buddhism

Keep reading here.

Thank You St. Francis

For showing the Way:

On Religulous

Shameful Hinduism

ROMA, October 3, 2008 – In a little over a month, the victims of the wave of anti-Christian violence that began on August 24 in India have risen to 60. To these must be added more than 18,000 wounded, 178 churches destroyed, more than 4600 homes burned, and 13 schools and social centers devastated. At least 50,000 Christians have fled from their villages seeking shelter in refugee camps and in the forest.

On Hinduism

Hinduism: a peace loving religion, or a hateful movement of ignorant polytheistic pagans? You be the judge. This kind of thing is going on everyday in India now.

Poor, Ignorant and Easily Led

Some years back, the Washington Post editorial board apologized for an editorial calling evangelical Christians “poor, ignorant, and easily led.” Good thing, too.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway reports:

From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith–it’s what the empirical data tell us.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

It is not the case, however, that all new atheists and liberal Protestants are “poor, ignorant, and easily led." Reminds of the words of two prominent politicos (Obama and Marx (a new, new apology for Marx)), and by extension their supporters.

Apologizing to Darwin

From the First Things blog: Reuters brings us the latest in the ongoing quest to conflate the news so readers don’t have to:

“Evolution fine but no apology to Darwin: Vatican”

The Vatican said on Tuesday the theory of evolution was compatible with the Bible but planned no posthumous apology to Charles Darwin for the cold reception it gave him 150 years ago.

Wait a second. Why is the Church expected to apologize to Darwin in the first place? According to the very same news article,

Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans in 1950 and Pope John Paul reiterated that in 1996. . . . Darwin’s theories were “never condemned by the Catholic Church nor was his book ever banned”. . . .

Creationism is the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible. The Catholic Church does not read the Genesis account of creation literally, saying it is an allegory for the way God created the world.

Christian churches were long hostile to Darwin because his theory conflicted with the literal biblical account of creation.

Earlier this week a leading Anglican churchman, Rev. Malcolm Brown, said the Church of England owed Darwin an apology for the way his ideas were received by Anglicans in Britain.

Let me get things straight: Other Christian churches understand the creation story literally. An Anglican in Britain hopes his church apologizes for not adopting evolution from the start. Sounds like the Vatican has some explaining to do.

Another commentary on the state of "religious" reporting: the capabilities of "religion" reporters.

Elshtain On Sovereignty

Or, the case against the sovereign self.

Who gets the final say? This simple question is at the heart of religion, politics, and psychology. If I am a believer, God's decisions are authoritative: If he says that I shall not kill, I am obligated to follow his commands, fallen into sin though I may be. Political leaders, by contrast, claim that their word ought to be the last word: If I receive a tax bill from the government, pay it I must, or I risk going to jail. No to both, says the radical individualist: Modern psychology teaches that I am the captain of my own ship, quite capable of steering it in any direction I choose.

By now, there is next to no debate about which of these approaches to sovereignty is best. The idea that God's word is supreme is generally associated with an age of dogma and superstition unsuitable for the way we live now. Too many abuses of political authority exercised by totalitarian leaders properly make us cynical about the idea that political leaders ought to be trusted. Best, then, to locate sovereignty in the self; it has taken us a couple of thousand years to achieve freedom and autonomy, but now that we have, we can never go back to more authoritarian, or even authoritative, times.

Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (reviewed here), is not afraid to challenge this received wisdom from the ground up. To understand what impels the project of its author, Jean Elshtain, it is helpful to know how a group of conservative intellectuals, many attracted by various aspects of Catholic theology, approach America's culture wars. (Elshtain herself is not Catholic.) On March 31, 2005, a comatose Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, died. Republican politicians who had rushed to her defense were widely discredited; Americans across the board viewed them as interfering with a family's right to make its own decisions. But for thinkers such as Elshtain, Terri Schiavo's death became symbolic of everything that had gone wrong with liberalism. Here Terri Schiavo was: weak, dependent, unresponsive. By allowing her to be killed, her husband, the courts, and all those who supported them had chosen to use the power of the state to snuff out the life of one of God's creatures simply because her living existence was causing them discomfort.

How did modern society take such a barbaric turn? Elshtain argues that if we had lived in more theological times, we would have had greater appreciation of the mysteries of life. Had we understood that Terri Schiavo had been created by God, and that killing her meant substituting our judgment for his, we would surely have done everything in our power to sustain her existence. But instead of making God's word sovereign, we treat the individual as the final judge of right and wrong. Shifting the basis of sovereignty from God to the state to the self has left us, in Elshtain's view, unable to appreciate "common sense, decency, dignity" and has eroded "our sense of shame, our capacity for joy, our ability to recognize when our dignity is affronted, our ability to love, not just to use, others."

These are bold claims, and Elshtain has written a bold book, one meant to shake up the now-entrenched view that we are at center of the universe and the better for it. She argues that medieval theology offered anything but a blind worship of obedience. A long struggle between popes and kings ended with a standoff: a realm in which God was supreme and another ruled by the sword. As long as such a duality existed, absolutism could not; Christians could appeal to divine authority to protect themselves against the worldly dictates of a prince. From this point of view, the transfer of sovereignty from God to government was a giant step backward. Once the state takes over, the Christian right to resistance—and the sense of being responsible to God—atrophies.

Elshtain's point makes intuitive sense if the state is an absolutist one. But she carries her argument one step further by arguing that even liberal-democratic states are "monist." Unlike the medieval recognition of two ways of life, they accord public status only to one, recognizing claims based on secular reason. All authority is public authority. Those who insist on bringing God into the public sphere cannot be tolerated. This, too, is not justice in her view; it is rank prejudice, a failure to allow the appeals to divine authority religious believers were once given the freedom to make.

In more recent times, we have learned to question all public authority, including that of liberal-democratic states, invoking instead the sovereignty of individuals. For Elshtain, this represents one last step away from a just world. Once we believe that we can control nature, rather than acknowledging that we are controlled by it, we substitute ourselves for God—without being God. Seeking self-mastery, we set little store by those who, for no reason of their own, lack the capacity to direct their lives in the ways we assume all autonomous individuals must. The rise of the sovereign self therefore demands the destruction of those human lives that are deemed not worth living, including "the severely mentally disabled, the feeble elderly, a fetus, a comatose person, an Alzheimer's patient." Self-sovereignty, far from making us free, leads inexorably to the domination of the strong over the weak: the most unjust situation of all.

No one can read this book and not come away impressed by the compassion Elshtain shows toward society's most vulnerable human beings; compared with a philosopher such as Peter Singer, whose utilitarian calculations lead him to conclude that we might be better off killing babies with Down syndrome, Elshtain is someone I want on my side.

The American Heresy

From Jody Bottum's very fine essay on American Protestantism in the latest First Things, a brief analysis of the theology of Katherine Jefferts Schori, presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church:

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal ­reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world, and when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals ... Her Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld.

The Norman Vincent Peale bit, I think, is particularly telling, because it gets at something that I think is often missed about the current religious landscape: Namely, the extent to which Schori's theological premises are shared across the culture-war divide, by Christians who oppose gay marriage and abortion and voted eagerly for George W. Bush as well as by liberal Protestants who consider the contemporary GOP an abomination. Peale's heirs occupy the pulpits of what remains of the Protestant mainline, but they preach from the dais at numerous evangelical megachurches as well. The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they're imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush. Indeed, the big difference between the prosperity gospel that Osteen and his ilk are peddling and Schori's liberal Episcopalianism has less to do with any theological principle and more to do with what aspect of American life they want God to validate. And this difference, I suspect, has a great deal to do with social class. Osteen and Co.'s God wants us to pursue financial fulfillment because they're largely preaching to entrepreneurial, upwardly-mobile members of the middle class, whereas Schori's God wants us to pursue a more personal fulfillment - sexually, emotionally, philanthropically - because she's preaching to a demographic that, financially speaking, has already got it made. (Which, in turn, is why it isn't a surprise that as American evangelicals grow more prosperous, they're starting to discover their God's Dag Hammarskjöld side as well.)

Obviously the world of religious conservatism also includes lots of people who are invested in actual Christian orthodoxy, as opposed to the Osteen-Shori vision of God as a really powerful life coach. But the theological continuum that encompasses both Schori-style liberal Protestants and Oprah-watching, The Secret-reading spiritual seekers - call it moralistic therapeutic deism, call it gnosticism, call it the American heresy - extends way deeper into the "religious right" than a lot of people think.

- Ross Douthat, The Atlantic

A Little Philosophy

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth him about to religion again.

- Francis Bacon