Why Can't These People Say "Christmas"?

 I was startled to notice this morning that I first posted this five years ago --- five years ago yesterday, to be exact.  Startled because the Food Network is still doing the kind of weird crap I describe here, and because I can republish it with minimal revision.  I have changed the style a little to elevate the tone of moral disgust, also to add a new item at the end.

Watching the Food Network a couple of days after Thanksgiving, I noticed something that gave me the creeps. None of the regulars seemed to be able to say "Christmas." (No, this is not some Bill O'Reilly war-against-Christmas BS! At least I hope not. Please read on!) Tyler Florence pours red and green sauces on on enchilada and Guy Fieri says, "Boy those are some holiday colors!" Sandra Lee is wearing a red sweater and making evergreen-tree-shaped cookies, and she keeps calling the "holiday cookies."

Right away I got this weird feeling. These people are not free. Someone off-camera is pointing a gun at them. The evil gnomes who run the Food Network Corporate Borg are compelling them to speak this weird jargon, probably just to degrade and humiliate them. (This could also explain those creepy claymation figures -- see the picture above.) Is this going on at other channels? Has the whole world gone insane while I was paying attention to other things? I really don't know, as Food Network is almost the only channel I can stand to watch (and it sucks, but I won't go into that now).

What could possibly be the problem with saying the word "Christmas" in public? Below are some more or less random observations on this baffling question. Most of what I am about to say is pretty obvious and far from original, but I think it is worth saying anyway.  Apparently, it is not obvious to some people.

Yes, not everyone celebrates Christmas. And it might, conceivably, just barely conceivably, be unpleasant to be wished "Merry Christmas" when you do not. As a university professor, I sometimes find myself in a room full of people who are talking about how bad conservatives, Republicans, or libertarians are, as if they assume I am a Democrat like themselves. So I have some sympathy for people in that situation. But not very much. After all, the people in my roomful of Democrats are saying that people like me are morally or intellectually inferior to people like them. They are insulting me. The person who wishes you Merry Christmas is not. In fact, he or she is wishing you well. They are trying to be nice.

My Golden Rule is: Never, ever make someone sorry that they were nice to you.  Centuries ago, Thomas Hobbes said that this is one of the most basic rules of civil society.  He was right  Violating it is one of the most ignoble and stupid things you can do.

The problem is not that there are other holidays at this time of the year. You can celebrate more than one. In our house, we always celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas. Holidays don't exclude on another, religions do. By wishing somebody a Merry Christmas, or using the word to describe a cookie, you are not excluding anybody from anything.

Admittedly it is true that Kwanzaa was invented by the Marxist Prof. Ron Karenga as an "alternative" -- his word -- to Christmas. He did intend his holiday to be exclusionist. But apparently, the African-Americans who celebrate it today do not see it that way. (As often happens, the hearts of "ordinary" people have proved sounder than those of the supposedly wise men who seek to lead them for their own good.)

Nor is the problem that not everyone is a Christian. Even atheists love Christmas. As I have said, the problem, so far as there is one, is merely that not everyone celebrates Christmas. So try avoid wishing Merry Christmas to someone who does not celebrate it.

Often, banning the C-word is simply hypocrisy. None of the FN "holiday" specials that I saw contained a single reference to Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or anything but Christmas. By banning the C-word, they are pretending to an inclusiveness that they do not practice. To the minor sin of non-inclusiveness they add the major one of lying about it.

If you are talking about a holiday, and the holiday in question is indeed Christmas, there is no possible harm in calling it that. There is no excuse for saying "holiday cookie." None. If it is shaped like a dredl, call it a Hanukkah cookie. If it is shaped like one of those trees, call it a Christmas cookie. If you don't, you'll just sound like an idiot.

Please join me this "holiday" season in trying to avoid this canting hypocrisy.

Update:  And now, here is fellow atheist Penn Jillette, with a different take.  Notice that he is not answering the sort of argument I am giving here.  He is answering the O'Reilly notion that this is an "attack on Christianity."  That of course is not what I am saying.  On the other hand, he does seem to be saying one thing that I have been arguing against:  that refraining from "Christmas" is being inclusive.
 

Should Tiger Convert?

Is it my imagination, or do the other members of this panel look embarrassed by Brit Hume's out-of-his-depth comment?

Here's what I think is wrong with what he said. It's not exactly that he misunderstands Buddhism. In my outsider's view of the matter, it is true that Buddhism does not promise forgiveness of sins. I also think (though this would be controversial) that it is misleading at best to apply the word "redemption" to any important Buddhist idea.

Isn't that a flaw? How is Tiger, if he is actually a practicing Buddhist (which I rather doubt, but let's suppose for the sake of the argument) going to get forgiveness for his sins?

Well, the real problem with Hume's comment is that he seems to be treating sin and the resulting guilt as if they were facts of nature. In fact, they only exist within the context of world-views like the Christian one. As is pointed out here, Buddhists don't need forgiveness because they don't believe in sin in the first place.

The soothing balm of God's forgiveness is the solution to a very real problem, but it is a problem that is created by Christian morality in the first place.

Woods has made a terrible mess of his personal life and should strive to earn the forgiveness (if it is still possible) of his wife and, one day, of his children. To understand this situation we need certain moral concepts -- such as vice, betrayal, and offense -- which we find in all civilizations and all moralities. To these potent ideas the Christian adds a notion of even greater moral amperage: the idea of sin, which is an offense ultimately, not against human victims, but against God.

I don't mean to be flippant about this. I would imagine that there are people who do derive benefit from this extra dimension, from thinking that, in addition to all the others who are harmed and aggrieved by their wrongs and betrayals, they have also offended the Creator of the universe. Those same people also derive benefit from being forgiven by the Creator. But to offer that forgiveness to Woods is to offer him something that, if he does not already have a personal relationship with a highly moralistic God, he probably cannot use and does not need.

Commencement Week in the New America

Yesterday Pres. Obama gave his commencement address at Notre Dame U., where thousands of Roman Catholics interrupted him with roaring applause and multiple standing ovations. This for a man who, as recently as 2001, was a powerful supporter, not merely of abortion, but of infanticide as well.

Meanwhile, Cong. Ron Paul spoke to 14 graduating home-schooled teenagers in a Baptist church in Brazosport Texas.

Among his comments:

It’s very important we encourage home-schooling and make sure it’s always legal, and our governments never decide they know best. Too often, our government would like to be the parent. Home-schoolers know exactly who’s responsible for education, and that’s the parent.

He also said this:

Have a sense of values. That comes from family. That comes from church. That comes from community. Life is precious. Life and liberty are a gift of God. If we do not put the effort in to protect those liberties, we can lose them. The Constitution and our government are to protect our liberties. Ultimately, you will have to invest some time protecting liberty.

This was expected to be a quiet, obscure event, but so many people showed up there was standing room only.

After the speeches, there was a slide show with pictures of each of the students and sometimes-tearful testimonials from friends and relatives.

It sounds like those kids are getting a great start in life. To be honest, though, most likely so are the youngsters at Notre Dame. The ability to applaud, with sincere enthusiasm, the wielder of power, even when he or she is someone whom by your principles you should despise, may soon be a cardinal virtue, indispensable for life in the New America.

U. Ends Graduation Prayer: What Message Do They Send?

This morning on Fox News Meghan Kelly did a segment on the breaking news that the University of Maryland Senate has voted 32-to-14 to end the practice of a officially-offered prayer at graduation ceremonies.

Kelly and her guest from the Heritage Foundation made some alarmed sounds about threats to religion, displaying this recent Newsweek cover. My first thought was "32-to-14? Don't these people have a quorum rule?" My second was surprise that they still had a graduation prayer. U. of Maryland is obviously a government-funded institution. That was why own university dropped the prayer in 1976, as a result of a complaint from then-student Annie Laurie Gaylor.

A quick search revealed something that the beautiful and brilliant Kelly, who also happens to be an attorney, failed to mention: the legal argument for the move, which had nothing to do with whether America is a Christian civilization, was the separation of church and state.

One opponent of the vote argued that rescinding the practice could "send the message" that secular speech is superior and religious speech is inferior. Ah, yes. That argument. It really brought back some memories for me. I recalled that, during the tumultuous discussion leading to my own university rescinding the last of its speech codes a few years ago, one opponent argued that it will be difficult to abolish the code without "sending the message" to students of color that we don't care about them and might event think that racist speech is acceptable. I think this is a very common sort of concern. I am sure that one of the main reasons why we do not end the War on Drugs, despite its horrific expense in terms of the liberty, property, even the very lives of so many people, is that ending it would "send the message" that drugs are okay and possibly even a good idea.

As it turned out, ending our censorship code did not send a racist message at all. The reason is that the discussion that led up to it made it perfectly clear what the reasons for the move were. This is one of the reasons why democracy is better than dictatorship: there is always a discussion in which reasons are given and explained. Rulers can't just do things and let people guess what the reasons are (except of course when we can't have a rational discussion because it's an "emergency"). As long as there are not too many haters around who attribute dishonorable motives to their opponents, the principled grounds for policy changes can come clearly through.

Liberals and conservatives are united in trying to use institutional arrangements and coercive rules to send messages about their preferred values. I say, in the immortal words of Sam Goldwyn, if you want to send a message, go to Western Union. Do it at your own expense.

Defaming Religion

I suppose everyone knows by now that last week the grotesquely misnamed Uniited Nations Human Rights Commission has voted through a declaration that "defaming religion" is a human rights violation. It received 23 votes in favor (including various Muslim states and Hugo Chavez' Venezuela), 11 against, and 13 abstentions. I would love to know who the thirteen quivering weasels are who abstained, but I can't seem to find that information. Last November, the General Assembly passed a resolution calling on the governments of the world to punish people who "defame" religion.

I have been slow to comment on these developments because everything I could think of saying was pretty obvious, even hackneyed, viz:

• The notion of "defaming" an idea is a sinister and illegitimate concept.
• Individuals have rights, religions do not.
• Defaming religion is a human rights violation is a human rights violation.
• What do you expect from a club (the UN) all of whose members are states?
• It is no surprise that the UN Human Rights Commission has fallen into the hands of people who abuse, trample, and urinate on human rights.
• When countries like Canada and Germany (both of which have national hate-speech laws) vote against an attack on free speech, you know it's got to be outrageous.
• First they came for Alec Rawls, but I didn't agree with Alec so I didn't speak up...

... well, I still can't think of anything to say about this that hasn't been said before. There doesn't seem to be anything to be learned here that we didn't already know. However, sometimes the obvious must be said. Originality is a lot less important than freedom.

Ben Stein Should Stop Whining About This

Ben Stein's documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opened this weekend nationwide.

I have not seen it, but supposedly one of its central complaints is that that "intelligent design" is not allowed in America's public schools and institutions of higher education. This, he alleges, is censorship, injustice, oppression.

This seems to me a clear case of whining about nothing. Let me explain why. [Here I will be ignoring his allegation, which I see as a separate matter, that a pro-ID professor was denied tenure because of his religious views.]

ID is simply a version of the traditional "argument from design." This is the familiar watchmaker analogy, which says that just as a watch found on a beach would be evidence that there once was a watchmaker who designed it (watches don't grow on trees after all), so order in nature is evidence that there must be a supernatural intelligence that designed it. An early version of this argument is the fifth of Thomas Aquinas' "five ways" of proving the existence of God (you can find it here if you scroll down the page).

The only thing ID adds to this ancient tradition consists in simply applying the argument from design to specific issues in evolutionary theory. The Cambrian explosion of new species happened too fast (about 80 million years in one account) to be explained by natural selection, therefore a supernatural intelligence brought it about. Or some specific organ or organelle (such as the "motor" that drives the flagellum -- hat tip to Nat Hunt here) could not have evolved from an earlier, simpler structure that itself had some adaptive function that could have been selected for.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with trying to show that Darwinian mechanisms cannot explain various forms of natural order. Scientists have been discussing issues like these since Darwin's book was first published. This is just the sort of thing that scientists do.

But of course this is only half of what the IDer is talking about. The critics of ID point out that the rest of these arguments -- the supernaturalist conclusions -- transform the whole argument into non-science. It's just "religion masquerading as science." That explains why it isn't found in forums like public schools or secular universities.

These critics are right about one thing: these arguments are indeed not scientific in nature, because they deal with an Entity that is radically different from those with which science deals. But they are wrong about the other two points. These arguments are not merely religious and they are found in these forums. They are philosophical arguments. They are discussed in philosophy departments, where they belong. I myself have taught the classic argument from design a number of times. Of course, that is not quite the same thing as ID, which tends to focus on gritty micro-issues. But I'm sure my colleague Eliott Sober discusses such micro-arguments in his courses on the philosophy of biology all the time.

Given that fact, one has to wonder what Ben is whining about. Why should he and his comrades want to move this discussion from the philosophy department to the department of botany? What on Earth is the point? I suspect the only possible answer is what I call "epistemic hitchhiking". They want a ride on the science choo-choo without paying for a ticket to knowledge-town. They don't want to admit that they are just philosophizing. They want to be seen as doing science.

But they just don't qualify. Sorry Ben. Get a life.

The New Seven Deadlies

P. J. O'Rourke (yay!) has an interesting piece in The Weekly Standard (hiss! boo!). A certain Bishop Gianfranco Girotti (great name, by the way -- it could almost be something out of The Sopranos) has written up a new list of Seven Deadly Sins in the Vatican's own newspaper, evidently with the intention of supplementing Pope Gregory the Great's original seven deadlies (Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth, Pride, and Greed). Here is the Bishop's new list:

1. Drug abuse

2. Morally debatable experimentation

3. Environmental pollution

4. Causing poverty

5. Social inequality and injustice

6. Genetic manipulation

7. Accumulating excessive wealth

Wow. Comparing this list to Gregory's really brings home, like almost nothing else can, how far Christianity must have declined in the last fifteen centuries. There is so much about the new list that is morally and intellectually degraded that I don't quite know where to start. Maybe I can begin by repeating one point P. J. makes: there are some serious consistency problems with Bishop Girotti's list. If we were to stop committing 3 (pollution) altogether (and isn't that what you are supposed to do with sins?) we would thereby be committing 4 (causing poverty) and a vast scale. And modern economics has so far found no way to avoid 4 than by comming 7 -- i.e., by accumulating wealth on a scale that Girotti would no doubt regard as excessive. (Economists refer the this sort of wealth as "capital.") And speaking of consistency problems, why aren't the eye-popping stores wealth we see in the Vatican excessive?

I would add another sort of confusion. One item on the list can't possibly be a sin at all, because a sin is an act. Social inequality is not an act but a relation. This might sound like a very hair-splitty point, but I think it's important.

Inequality is one of those things that people make moral judgments about (so unfair!) even though they aren't per se something that anyone does. Nor is it necessarily in our power to know whether we are contributing to it. If I save up $100, I have committed the sin of contributing to inequality if nobody else has saved up that amount. Or have they committed the sin, by not saving that amount themselves? We have both contributed just as much to this unequal state of affairs. Do I commit the same sin, but in a different way, if everyone else has $200 and I (only) have $100? As far as equality is concerned, my own action is completely meaningless unless I know what others are doing, and even then its status as a sin or a non-sin may be completely undecidable. Consider the situation that actually exists, always and everywhere, in the real world: no one is equal to anyone. Some have more than me, and some have less. Am I committing the sin of being more-than-equal in relation to some people, and the mirror-opposite sin of being less-that-equal in relation to others? And what could I possibly do to avoid committing these sins?

If social inequality is a sin, then sin may be something I can piss and moan about, but it isn't necessarily something I have to do anything about.

The idea of sin draws life from its connection to other ideas, including responsibility and power. A thing can't be a sin if I can't be responsible for it, and I can't be responsible for it if avoiding it is not in my power (perhaps because it isn't even something that I do in the first place). If you preach that social inequality is a sin, you cut the very idea of sin off from the ideas that give it meaning and life. You kill the very idea of sin. And that, O my sisters and my brothers, is a sin. A real sin.

Does Religion "Poison Everything"?

I've been reading God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by the the always-amusing Christopher Hitchens.

His ornery sub-title raises a question that, believe it or not, I find myself taking seriously. Does it?

You know, of course, what prompted the "new atheism," the surge of books by Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennet, as well as lesser luminaries, some of whom burn hotter if not as brilliantly. It's because of 9/11, the day that changed everything.

That morning I rose late, about ten o'clock or so, and began what I expected would be a slow day. At noon my friend Don Downs of the Poli Sci Department was going to bring over some documents about a professor who had been de-tenured and fired by the Board of Regents, a case that we though raised some serious due process issues. We were thinking of trying to get the faculty senate to take a position on the case.

Quite unexpectedly, the front door bell rang. It was Don. I opened the door and looked at him sourly. "You're early," I said.

He looked at my bathrobe. "You haven't turned your TV on yet, have you?" he asked.

"Why? What happened?"

"Somebody flew a passenger plane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center and knocked it down."

"O my God," I said stupidly, "that must have killed hundreds of people."

"Oh, thousands," he corrected me.

The next thing I said was an angry outburst: "Do you see how wonderful religion is!? How it helps everyone to live together in peace?" Don looked startled.

How did I know, instantly, that this was a religious act? I don't think I was even sure right away which religion was involved, but that religion was at to bottom of this seemed beyond doubt. You have to admit that, wherever there is widespread and persistent violence in the world, especially irrational vioulence -- whether it is on Ireland, Lebanon, Israel, Aghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka -- it is usually caused by religious differences. Hitchens argues convincingly that the last European war, the civil war in Yugoslavia, was really about religion as much as anything else. "Ethnic cleansing" was really religious cleansing. It was Christians killing Muslims, and doing so because the Muslims were Muslims and, most particularly, because the Christians were Christians.

Years later, it occurred to me that there was a simpler explanation of how I knew that this was a religious act. The clue lay in the fact that the violence on 9/11 was obviously suicidal. The pilots of those planes must have died together with their innocent victims. When we secular humanists commit an atrocity to make the world a better place, it is because we selfishly want to live in that better world. If the atrocity can't possibly have that motive, one knows at once the motive was religious. The statement an Islamist once made to a reporter, "We will win because we love death as much as you love life," surely is a profoundly religious statement.

Hitchens would quickly point out, and he would be right, that this does not really undermine his thesis. After all, the very worldliness of the secular is a constraint. If I want to live here with you, that is a tie between us. My selfish desire to live is something you can appeal to when I grow too indifferent or hostile to your interests. In the gravest extremity, when all else has failed, it makes possible the ultima ratio, the last of all reasons, the threat of death. Religious fanatics, with their "self-sacrificing," "altruistic" behavior (which incidentally are a fake self-sacrifice and spurious altruism in people who think that they will be rewarded with eternal bliss) cannot be appealed to in this way.

In view of this, why do we persist in associating religion with peace and public order? I do it myself! To some extent I think it is a sort of illusion of perspective. We in the liberal West have a distorted view of what religion is really like. Our religions have been corrupted by two centuries of contact with peaceful secular humanists. The idea that peace and public order are good things is by no means a product of religion: the three great monotheistic religions resisted it quite violently for many centuries. It arises from the sort of thinking that secularists have been doing all along: naturalistic thinking about life on earth.

Cat's Cradle: Here's One that's Not Overrated

A while back I seriously annoyed people with a post that claimed Heller's Catch-22 is the most overrated novel of the twentieth century. Today I thought I'd point out a beloved novel from the same era, similar in themes and tone, which I think is not overrated at all, but deserves its status as a classic. (Warning: not only does this post contain spoilers, but I will also say a couple of negative things about the book. I can't help myself!)

From about 1960 to 1963, I was a member of the Doubleday science fiction book club. When I joined up, I got an omnibus volume that included a reprint of Alfred Bester's then-recent The Stars My Destination. During the following years, the monthly selections included Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Glory Road, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, Poul Anderson's Trader to the Stars, L. P. Hartley's sadly neglected little masterpiece, Facial Justice -- and perhaps most remarkable of all, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.

(Yes, it was a golden age. If there is anything nearly this interesting going on in scifi today, I would sure like to know about it. A glance at what the book club is offering today suggests that things have steeply fallen off.)

Reading this book as a teenager, I was dazzled. It made a strong impression on me intellectually. When I read it a second time last week, I still found it a brilliant piece of work.

It is a sort of rollicking satirical end of the world fantasy. It has to satirical foci. One centers on the imaginary religion of Bokononism. Bokonon, the founder of this religion, teaches that people ought to live in accordance with foma, which I guess I would translate as "expedient falsehoods." The point here seems to be that truth as a good is much overrated.

The other focus is political and centers on the fictional scientist Felix Hoenikker, "the father of the atom bomb." Just for the heck of it, as a sort of hobby, Hoenikker develops ice-9, a crystalline form of water which, if dropped into any ocean, lake or stream, will instantly transform all the water on earth so that its freezing point is 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit -- in other words, it will become solid. I think you can guess what happens.

Here the point is a very clever attack on the idea of pure research, the notion that knowledge as knowledge is an unqualified good, out of any relation to the needs of human life. At first Hoenikker is an appealing character. He says in his Nobel acceptance speech that he was just an eight-year-old boy dawdling on the way to school. He aimlessly follows the lead of his curiosity regardless of consequences. Long before his last discovery destroys the world, you realize that this cute old guy is an inhuman monster who should have been murdered in his crib.

I found this aspect of the book very convincing. Having been influenced by people like Plato and Aristotle, I have a certain tendency to lapse into thinking of knowledge and truth as context-free unlimited goods. This book is an effective cure for that error.

Having said that, I can't resist pointing out that Vonnegut seems clearly wrong on one point. He seems to think that the pure-research point of view is what created the atom bomb and, thereby, subjected humanity to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Nowadays, every schoolboy knows that this is not true. "The Bomb" was invented by social idealists like Robert Oppenheimer, who hated Hitler and wanted to blow him to smithereens, not by Aristotelian seekers after pure theoria. In other words, it was created by people who resembled Kurt Vonnegut a lot more than they resembled Felix Hoenikker.

More later...

[Tip o' the sombrero here to Ruchira for her Second Glance post.

Explaining Religion (Human Universals Part II)

A comment made anonymously on my last post reminded me of a dimension of this issue that had slipped my mind entirely. I had pointed out that my attraction toward the wild places of the earth seems to involve seeing them as sacred. Is this a sort of religiosity, I wondered? Anonymous asked, somewhat more specifically, "Why is it that when we step into certain natural settings we are enlivened with a feeling of exhilarated reverence...?" What struck me about this question was the "certain natural settings." I had been thinking of the question as one about wild places in general. But now that I think about it, well yes, the phenomenon I have in mind is really much more specific than that. There is a small lake a short distance from the one pictured in the post below, very similar to it in many ways, but my reaction to it is very different from my reaction to "my" lake. I visit my lake every chance I get. I would never stay overnight at the other one. But it isn't because it is physically inhospitable. I find it somehow gloomy and disturbing. Frankly, it gives me the creeps.

Why? Actually, I have a hypothesis about that, a guess. It also might explain a lot of religious experience as well. It involves a speculation about the evolution of the brain, a subject I know almost nothing about -- so consider the source! Anyway, here goes.

We have two fundamental, radically different ways of understanding the world, and we are amazingly good at using both, from a very early age.

One is to read human expressions. When Nat was less than a full day old, he was already smiling back at me and the hospital staff. I noticed it and so did the nurses, who insisted that this was indeed what he was doing. I found this absolutely amazing. In a room full of blinking lights and other interesting stuff, his gaze went straight to the human faces, as the most interesting and the most understandable things he could see. This was something he did not need to learn to do -- or maybe he was predisposed to learn it amazingly fast.

The other fundamental way of understanding is cause and effect. Starting very early, babies enjoy shaking a rattle in order to cause the rattling sound to happen. I can remember when Nat, still a babe in arms, repeatedly pushed a doorbell with his toe in order to be able to hear the doorbell ring inside the house (far away!). Nature is a push-pull toy, and kids learn that very quick!

So we have expression reading for understanding people, and cause-and-effect for understanding the physical world. Each has its home in a different explanatory context. The thing is, though, that each way of understanding is not attached by evolutionary hard wiring to its normal context. We are free to turn to the physical world and read its expression. That's when a lake can seem to be smiling at us. This explains the difference between the two lakes above: they have different "expressions." One lake is high on a mounded expanse of pure granite, exposed the the brilliant sky. The other is deep in a hollow, with dense, dark forest growing right up to the water's edge. It doesn't smile at all.

Where does religion come in? Well, it seems to me that this experience can characterize your response to the physical world in general. Nature can seem to have the sort of "meaning" that a face has. Then you can get the feeling that the world we see is merely a thin membrane stretched over another, hidden one, and that this other one is the real meaning of this one. Like the meaning behind the smile. Then nature becomes the stage of humanly-meaningful moral dramas, like sin, salvation, judgment, and so forth (as in Michelangelo's interpretation of that theme, above). When you pray, you really feel that you are talking to Someone, and the He/She/It is listening.

It seems to me that this hypothesis of mine might be able to explain some otherwise very mysterious facts about religious feeling and behavior. One is the fact that religious people often claim to be certain of their religious views, even in the total absence of anything that the rest of us can perceive as evidence for these views. It may be that some people are much more susceptible of this experience I have described -- that of feeling the universe as having the sort of meaning that human expressions have -- than other people are. It could also be that some people are much more prone to treat this experience as evidence, to draw conclusions from it. For untold thousands of years, human beings who have my experience of these two lakes would have drawn conclusions about the spirits attached to these two places. I do not.

This might also help to explain why religion is a human universal, why we find it everywhere and why it shows no sign of going away -- and why scientific thinking (ie., cause and effect thinking) completely fails to predict it. There may simply be no way for an entire culture to keep its expression-reading faculty attached to its home turf. It wanders, and people are influenced by the result. Have to be.

Human Universals: Part I

I just found out about this, and I have to tell you I find it fascinating. There is a list of "human universals," written by a certain David E. Brown. It achieved some fame when Stephen Pinker published it as an appendix to The Blank Slate (which I haven't read). I think it's worthwhile spending a pleasant hour reading and thinking about it. The thing that hit me, and hard, as I read through it was how many of these things are denied by many members of the chattering classes. For some reason this really bothers me. If something if found in every known culture, I find it hard to say that it is really a terrible idea. Of course there are plenty of philosophers and other intellectuals who have no such hesitations. What is the matter with them, anyway? Or is it something that is the matter with me?

From time to time I will blog on items from Brown's list, as fancy and the whims of the time-budgeting gods move me.

In alphabetical order, the first item that jumps out at me, as something that some intellectuals love to hate is:

belief in supernatural/religion

Every culture whatsoever, Brown is saying, has some form or other of such a belief.

Actually, this is a little embarrassing. This is a point on which I have to admit that I myself seem to be rather alienated from the rest of the human race. I disbelieve in everything that could possibly be called "supernatural." Nature is reality, and reality is nature. That's all there is. (Did I really just say "all"? Isn't that a helluva lot? Isn't the greatest show in the universe -- the universe?)

But what about religion? When my Mexican friend Ramiro asked me last time I visited what my religion is, I said La natura es mi Diós. Actually, I said this mainly because it would be less shocking to him than Soy ateo (like Camille Paglia, I am a non-religiophobic atheist) but I am not so sure it is totally inaccurate.

Note that the gods of the Greeks, and of the Germanic and Celtic peoples, were really natural forces. Among the religions of the world, it is mainly the three monotheistic ones that insist on the sharp contrast between their divinity and the entire system of nature.

Rather like Ishmael, who feels drawn to "the watery part of the world," I am powerfully drawn to the wild places of the earth, in particular to one wild place, which I return to whenever I can (see the picture above -- also the two small pictures at the top of the left sidebar were taken there as well). It is a nameless mountain tarn, near the crest of the northern Sierra Nevada. Ishmael suggests that his returns to the sea are merely a desperate cure for his own "hypos" (ie., depression), akin to Cato throwing himself on his sword. However, as in the case of the thousands of Manahattoes he describes as standing like silent sentinels "fixed in ocean reveries," there is surely more to it than that, and I suspect that the "more" partakes of the experience of the sacred or the holy. Each season that I make it back to my wild mountain tarn, I spend my first hours sitting and staring into the emerald water, like Melville's sentinels. What is it that I see there? Even I don't know. I think the most honest description of my own experience of these tameless places is that I experience them as sacred. I can't explain it, but undeniably there it is. Is this "religion"? Do I have religion after all, if not belief in the supernatural? Not sure.

State and Church

Someone -- I can't seem to find out who -- said that the state is the one institution that is only judged by what it promises to do, never by what it accomplishes.

Here is a literally frightening document: The CATO Interactive Map of Botched Paramilitary Police Raids in the US. All these horrors seem to have been drug raids (surprise, surprise!).

The reason the War on Drugs is renewed every year is not the results it is having: it's that what it is meant to do is so important. People respond to that. The program isn't going so well? We must need more of it!

Actually, there is another human institution, other than the state, that gets just this sort of free ride: the church. Two thousand years of sermons have failed to cause Christians to -- well, to act like Christians. What conclusion do we draw? We must need more sermons!

The greatest faith-based initiative of the twenty first century so far is, of course, the 9/11 attacks. But most of us will not draw any conclusions from that about whether religion is a good thing.

What else do these two institutions, state and church, have in common?

Here's a pretty obvious answer: Both are institutions that are regarded as authorities -- that is, as agents that may tell other agents what to do, or what to believe. We have an ages-old habit of accepting the say-so of these agents as a reason to do or believe what they say.

This could explain a certain irrational tendency to give them the benefit of every possible doubt!

One characteristic all such vested authorities seem to have, is something that might be called "the sacred." The sacred is that whose value is so fundamental that to deny this value, to question it, or even to privately doubt it, are all treated as sins. Sacred beings are unique repositories of value. To attack them is to attack Goodness itself.

Hence, things that would be evidence of failure in other institutions -- onces that are mere means to good things, rather than embodiments of The Good Itself -- are not taken that way here. Bungled police raids? Pedophile priests? Suicide bombers? They are simply evidence that we need more of ... The Good.

Dialogue across Religious Boundaries: Does It Exist?

There is a very thoughtful piece in National Review Online by John Cullinan, a Catholic intellectual. He is commenting on the Pope's meeting with Muslim diplomats last week in the Castel Gandolfo.

(BTW, what a totally cool name: The Castel Gandolfo! Whatever else you might think of Catholicism, it sure as Hell is OLD!!)

Anyway, at the meeting Benedict finally stopped apologizing (thank God!) and tried strengthen dialogue between the Church and Islam. Cullinan comments that there has always been a problem about Catholic/Muslim dialogue. Christians have always had (the possibility of) joint theological inquiry with Jews, who share some of the same heritage. By contrast, Muslims claim that the Quran supersedes the Christian Bible, something the Christians have never said about the Christian New Testament and the Jewish Old Testament. Furthermore, Catholics have always been a) Trinitarian and b) Jesus-centered, which Muslims interpret as a) blasphemous and b) idolatrous.

This is of course more of the we-aren't-dialoguiung-with-you-because-you-can't-talk-to-us stuff, which the Pope was throwing at the Western rationalists. You guys are the problem, not us!

Actually, I see a deeper, much more epidemic sort of problem. Suppose that you are trying to convince me of some opinion of yours, something I myself don't believe (yet). My first reaction will probably be that your evidence isn't really good enough, that it doesn't require me to change my mind. Rarely, if ever, will my reaction be that the stuff you are saying is just not evidence at all, that it is the wrong kind of thing to function as evidence. That's what I would say if you said, eg., "I know the Republicans will lose the next election because it came to me in a dream." Sheesh, what are you saying?!

The thing is, when a dialogue happens across the boundaries between religions, we have this problem all the time. The Muslim's reason will be "I know it's true because the Quran says so!" and the Christian's reason will be "... because the Bible says so!" Each does not recognize the stuff the other side is saying as constituting evidence at all: it's just not the right kind of thing to function as evidence, they think.

On the other hand, in the modern world, this is not true of dialogues between religionists on the one hand and secular rationalists on the other. Fundamentalists deny evolution, but they do not look at the evidence cited by Darwinians (the fossil record, structural similarities between many different organisms, etc.) and say "Sheesh, what are you talking about? It's as if you were citing your dreams as evidence!!" Huh-uh. They know very well that this is evidence, which they must answer somehow. On the other hand, they often do cite evidence which to the non-religionist is just not evidence at all (".. on the seventh day, He rested!").

At this point a Catholic might say: That was just the point that Benedict was making about rationalism, dummy! You guys can't possibly understand us! It's a crippling disability you have, you poor lost souls!

To which I say: Not at all! It's a disability you have as well, when you are trying to reason with Muslims, or believers in any revealed religion fundamentally different from your own. It's a problem that any such religion presents to anyone outside the religion, whether the outsider is religious or not. The problem is the religion itself!

The moral: If Benedict and the Muslims are going to have a dialogue, they can only do it by stepping outside the Christian and Muslim views of the world. Any dialogue between them will have to be carried on in the shared, common language of scientific rationalism. That is one of the beauties of the scientific view of the world, perhaps the greatest: it is meant to be shared and common. It makes mutual understanding possible! Religion, unfortunately, has a certain tendency to block it.

If you combine Benedict's notorius Regensburg speech with his comments at Castel Gandolfo, you get this message: He's giving up on dialogue with Western rationalists, they are hopless cases. He's going to pursue dialogue with the Muslims. After all, he points out, they have plenty in common, like their shared opposition to abortion. He might also have added, their shared loathing of homosexuals. I say that he has it exactly backwards. What makes dialogue possible is not shared prejudices but shared logic. He shares a logic with the rationalists and the Muslims share a logic with the rationalists. Neither religion shares a logic with each other. Each revealed religion is sealed off by its own logic in a schizoid little world of its own.

How the Rioters Proved the Pope Was Wrong

Here’s an additional irony for you. (For the ground-floor layer of irony, see "How About that Pope?" below.) The violent Islamist reaction to the Pope’s speech actually showed in a particularly dramatic way, that what the Pope was saying in the speech was wrong. I’m not referring that any thesis about whether Islam is or is not violent by nature. That wasn’t the main point of the Pope’s speech, as has been point ed out in an excellent editorial in The Times of London.

The main point was given in the conclusion of his talk. As translated by The Times:

“In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion to the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.”

The main point of his talk was to attack -- not some other religion, but -- their common enemy, the Western scientific rationalism that has gradually grown in influence since the Enlightenment. Ah, the irony of it! Here he is, telling us that the Enlightenment rationalists, people like me, cannot engage in a dialogue with other points of view, and the only people who refuse to dialogue with him about these issues, who try to violently shut down the discussion, are certain people who, like him, “supplement” reason with faith.

He is wrong in at least two ways. First, there is the obvious error, which I just pointed out. Second, we Western rationalists can and do enter into dialogue with those we disagree with: I am doing it now! Look Ma, no hands! In addition to that, and most curious of all, is the oddly twisted logic of the above quotation. He says that we rationalists are unable to talk to the denizens of the world's profoundly religious cultures. And what is the reason for this hobbling disability of ours? It is that they perceive our disagreeing with them “as an attack on their most profound convictions.”

Isn't there something obviously wrong with this line of reasoning? Yes, dialogue is blocked by the fact that certain religionists perceive the fact that others think differently as an “attack” on them. But that is not our disability, it is theirs! They are the ones who won’t enter into a dialogue, who still don’t get what a dialogue is and what it is for.

As a matter of fact, the idea of “dialogue” that the Pope is using here is not a Christian or religious idea. It was invented and developed by pagan philosophers and secular humanists. The fact that the Pope is now in favor of a dialogue between cultures represents a sort of progress. His intellectual ancestors spent centuries doing what the rioters are doing now: trying to stop it. I hereby welcome him aboard the liberal bandwagon. But he ought to figure out who the true friends of dialogue are.

How About that Pope?

Long, long ago, I started my first real teaching job, at a large state institution in the Chicago area. Almost my first day of class, as I came into the room, one of the students, thinking to strike up a conversation on a topic of can’t-fail, universal interest, said, “Say, how ‘bout them Bears?” He assumed that I, that all the world, would know about the latest adventures of his favorite team. Well, I was new to the midwest and was not sure whether the Bears play baseball, football, or left-handed badminton in the Special Olympics. (I was also not a sports fan. So sue me.)

Anyway, today I am tempted to say: Say, how ‘bout that Pope? I do tend to obsess about certain things, I admit. In case you haven’t heard, that guy is in the news again. Last week he made a speech in Germany, where he criticized Islam as being constitutionally violent, spreading itself by force since the time of Mohamed himself. This sparked vicious violence on the part of some Muslims, who burned churches in the West Bank (apparently not Catholic ones), while others shot a nun in the back in Somalia. For some reason, no one as far as I know has mentioned the obvious irony in this: How dare you call me violent! I’ll kill you for that! Maybe people are so used to this sort of blatant, defiant, in-your-face, fuck-you-asshole irrationality they do not notice it any more. So people who burn churches, and don’t even bother to burn the right kind of church, are not logically consistent. What else is new? I have to admit I almost feel foolish in mentioning it myself.

If you know anything about me, you know what I think is the real issue here. If the Pope takes my advice (unlikely: he has not been returning my calls) he will make this a free speech issue. Whatever arguments there are against what the Pope said, and I am not denying that that they might be weighty ones, his comments were historical and ethical opinions, well within the limits of civilized debate. They are in a completely different universe of discourse from the pure evil of shooting a sixty-five-year-old relief worker in the back.

One thing you will not see here is any of that a-pox-on-both-their-houses, murder-and-arson-are-naughty-but-the-Pope-was-naughty-too kind of talk you see in certain quarters. To say such a thing is to buy into the false premise that there is some moral comparability between an opinion (even an narrow and nasty one) and the use of brute force. You think the Pope is an ignorant bigot? Fine, enlighten him or ignore him. The answer to a stupid argument is a smart argument. It is never, ever a bullet. And it is not a mass demonstration, either, such as the ones that were held in Egypt in response to the Pope’s speech. Demonstrations are not rational arguments. They are meant to intimidate and silence. They are not moves in a dialogue, they are attempts to end the dialogue, to shut it down.

In the near term, the prospects for Christian/Muslim dialogue do not look good. They won’t brighten up very much as long as someone claims a brutal veto-power over what can be said.