Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

“Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages.”
Galileo Galilei 1564 – 1642

Five preachers, five non-believers, five fascinating stories of providing pastoral care while reconciling public faith with personal disbelief.

Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola just published a small study exploring how five stories of practising pastors dealing with personal and hidden disbeliefs in the Christian movements they are promoting. Financial and social dependences, family relationships, church loyalties, and fear of adverse public reactions keep them quiet and ultimately distressed with their circumstances.

The researchers discuss the philosophical and mental ploys used to reconcile their conflicts. Conflation of the concept of God with the actuality of God in discourse blurs the line between ’word use’ and ontological reality. The worshipper hears existence while the pastor means concept.

In (post) modern discourse, myths can be truthful without being factually true. So these pastors can talk about the (unsaid metaphorical) truth and meaning of Jesus’ resurrection with believers without acknowledging the event actually occurred. Again traditional believers continue to hear that the biblical event actually happened.

Ultimately the pastors feel they can make a difference, introduce more liberal thinking amongst parishioners. The pastors are unwilling to question the literal interpretations openly but hope to achieve this change through a sort of osmosis. The researchers are unsure how this could be achieved. Overall one can empathise with the humanity of their struggles and fears of rejection and hope they can find satisfactory resolutions.

Alex McCullie

What is ideology or poststructuralism? Are the relationships between science and religions always conflicting? I read extensively over a range of subjects – society, people, beliefs, science, and religion and therefore approach many academic disciplines unfamiliar to me. A Very Short Introduction books from Oxford University Press, OUP, offer to excellent quick introductions to academic subjects for the thoughtful reader (sounds pompous doesn’t it?). Each book are authored by an academic from the field and typically under 200 pages and pocketable. I’ve just finished Science and Religion by John Dixon, highly recommended, and now have started Ideology by Michael Freeden. The OUP site is http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/academic/series/general/vsi.do?sortby=bookTitleAscend.

A second recommendation is UK online bookseller is Book Depository (http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/) who offer free overseas postage to many countries in the world. I have purchased books from the Very Short Introduction series for around AU$7.50 to AU$9.00 delivered into Australia. Local pricing is around $24.00. Typically I have Amazon open at the same time to compare pricing when purchasing, but free postage makes all the difference!

Alex McCullie

Atheism, the word, is problematic for many atheists and so historical and colourful alternatives are proposed for fellow-travellers – brights, free-thinkers, non-believers, disbelievers, and the like. Harris in a 2007 address to an Atheist Alliance conference argued against all such words: the concept as a label is inherently flawed. See http://richarddawkins.net/articles/1702 for an on-line video and edited transcript.
 
Harris sees any non-belief label as hopefully anachronistic and unneeded as non-slavery or non-astrology are today. In Harris’ ideal future the religious would be the categorised ones with the normality of atheism making it “scarcely intelligible as a concept”.
 
Harris addresses more immediate problems with terms ‘atheism’ and ‘atheist’, the crass marginalisation of genuine criticisms of religious attitudes and the bluntness of simple rejection of all religions. Demands for evidence and reason to support religious claims are often sidelined by accusations of ‘militant atheism’ or ‘new atheism’. Also Harris advises that critics of religion to be more nuanced in their attitudes and attacks. They need to be aware of religious differences and the different threats they pose for a secular society. Harris sees extreme forms of Islam as being more dangerous (and popular) than their Christian equivalents.  He quotes a poll showing that 30% of British Muslims support death for apostasy, leaving the faith, and 68% support criminal prosecution for Islamic insults. Most problems with Christian fundamentalists are with child-abuse through narrow faith education. Again Harris returns to the need for critics to reject atheist labels and demand for evidence, reason and free thought to characterise our society.
 
Harris rightly comments that atheism is wrongly characterised as an alternative worldview to religion. That is simply not true. Atheism is a position on what exists (and not exists) in our reality - metaphysics in philosopher-speak. Atheism says nothing about origins of the universe, life, and human morality. It says nothing about moral or immoral behaviour. An atheist can live an upstanding life – many do – without any reference to his or her metaphysical position, or alternatively atheists like many Christians, Muslims, whites, blacks, Democrats, liberals, conversatives, and Jews may inflict considerable pain on others.
 
Finally Harris highlights the need for atheists (whomever they are) to recognise that people can have genuine contemplative experiences, ‘spiritual’ experiences in lieu of a better term. This does not mean accepting any notion of a soul but seeing spiritual, a horizontal version, coming from within us and our responses to the physical world – not mysterious but special.

Alex McCullie

For Australians like most in developed Western countries the traditional symbols come to mind: special places like churches; crucifixes, alters, and other special objects; groups praying and singing; biblical texts and hymn books; special rituals; and priests and ministers preaching. These represent the practices and beliefs we associate with religions or, at least, the ones we see or participate. On further reflection or after overseas travel we realise the narrowness of these conceptions. I am reminded on Mencken’s warning about seeking a simple answer to a complex issue as quoted on this page.

Theologians, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, biologists, and psychologists have studied religions to identify the illusive essence. Each have, not surprisingly, approached from the perspectives of their disciplines – the theological, social, philosophical, biological, and psychological. 

Here are a few definitions to broaden the thinking:
 
 

“Belief in spiritual beings” Edward Tylor, 1871
 
“A propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which is believed to direct and control the course of Nature and of human life.” James Frazer of The Golden Bough fame late nineteenth century.
 

 
“a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them.” Émile Durkheim, 1912
 

 
“religion is a system of beliefs and behaviours that formulates and answers questions that are important, recurrent, and must be answered.” Susan A. Johnston, The George Washington University, 2009, adapted from Arjun Appadurai. This definition appears in an recommended audio course on the anthropology of religion from the Modern Scholar series at http://audible.com.

 From the last definition a religion consists of beliefs and behaviours to varying degrees. We easily forget that Christianity is a very ‘bookish’ religion with an emphasis on correct belief, even from the early days of Christian history. Other religions often emphasise rituals ahead of doctrine. Religion is also a system embedded in culture often with a strong interdependence. For example Christian churches reflected and influenced their surrounding hierarchical political structures during development.
 
Religions not only answer the fundamental questions of life – our purpose, origin, and destination -, but also formulate the questions to be answered, a surprising, though not unreasonable, aspect of this definition.

Finally how does science compare with this definition of religion? Interesting!

Alex McCullie

The decline of the mainstream Christian churches is self-evidence in most parts of Western society. The world-wide increase of Christians comes from nations of Africa, Asia, and former Soviet republics. The latest casuality, much to my surprise as an Australian, is the confessional numbers in US Catholic churches. While older parishioners persist, young people are staying away, preferring to see “their faith as a spiritual and less an institutional concern”. An online Boston Globe article shows Boston Catholic churches desperately ‘spruiking’ the benefits of confession via radio and web-site campaigns. The best they seem to hope for is “planting the seed”.
 
Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church has more systemic image problems with the young, issues inconsistent with today’s community attitudes – explicitly anti-homosexual attitudes by Catholic leadership; rejection of women for religious leadership roles; continued rejection of condom use; celibacy of the priesthood; prolonged hiding of child-abuse by church officials; stigmatising many sexual behaviours as ‘sinful’; concept of being born with an original ‘sin’; the improbability of doctrines like ‘Transubstantiation’; and inability to explain problems of evil (all-powerful, loving God with needless suffering). Is any sort of advertising campaign, no matter how slick, going to overcome these impediments? This is especially so when combined with largely antiquated and irrelevant ceremonial practices often held in ostentatiously ornate buildings? These attitudes and practices, even if unfairly stereotyped at times, are condemned by so many in society as well as by the younger people.
 
Alex McCullie

According to The Age newspaper online ”Monash University Professor Gary Bouma says people without a specific faith are fuelling sectarian conflict and cause division in society.” He essentially blames atheists, treated as one homogeneous group, for saying that theists are stupid and also saying that religious discourse should be driven out of the public space. As always with these silly generalisations, some do and many do not, especially when 1.1 billion people world-wide are estimated to espouse some form of religious non-belief .

Even with espousing anti-religious comments, atheists can hardly be held responsible for different religious groups fighting amongst themselves. History shows otherwise. Over the last 1500 years, during the dominance of Abrahamic religions, faiths have claimed exclusive access to God and salvation and condemned others as heretical and deserving eradication. A compounding feature of Christianity and Islam has been their insatiable desire for new converts. The resulting religious fervour fueled conflict and violence as European history will attest. During most of this time atheist views, as total non-belief, were rarely openly expressed: very few people held them and the personal repercussions were too serious for open dissent – death, imprisonment, social isolation, and job loss.

How about church behaviour today? Many Western churches are more tolerant, reflecting broader social trends rather than changes to sacred texts, essentially unchanged over 1500 years. But despite these improvements, church intolerance still persists, unacceptable to our wider social values. Apostasy, the crime of leaving the faith, can still be punished by death, imprisonment, and forced social and family separation in different parts of the world. “But that’s not in Australia.”  Many Australian religious officials openly discriminate against fellow human beings on the basis of their sexuality. Christian theology sees unacceptable sexual practices as ‘sinful’. They will reject homosexuals participating in religious services as well as leading services; women are excluded from positions of religious authority; and unmarried woman with children are barred from church administration. Our broader society in Australia is thankfully more progressive and humane than those churches. All this seems highly hypocritical when the Christian faith professes Jesus as the founder, a Jesus ascribed with progressive messages of acceptance.

So what is Bouma’s problem with atheist criticism of religions, particularly of Christian churches? There is another possibility. Churches have limited social and political privileges to protect them with external criticism, exceptional for the churches’ history. The Catholic church learnt an early valuable lesson with its appointment as the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine after being treated as a marginised and despised religious sect. Church leaders realised they needed the support of the political regimes, no matter how oppressive, to ensure their on-going survival. Never again would the orthodox Christian religion – Catholic or Protestant – be an outsider of power. The plight of the poor, though important, comes second to the church’s survival to provide salvation and redemption for all. Our secular society creates an intractable barrier for religions seeking to impose their faith on others, no state sponsorship. Church apologists, like Bouma, will have to live with criticism – even strident criticism – of the veracity of their underlying beliefs as well as their practices. Unfortunately for atheists, though, special privileges still exist: tax-free statuses and exempted discriminary employment practices some to mind. We can only keep agitating no how much it irritates the faithful.

Alex McCullie

A Personal Rant

In a recent BBC Hardtalk interview with Stephen Sackur, Robert Winston, renowned British scientist and occasional Christian apologist, typecasts atheists as believing in the absolute and, therefore, unreasonable certainty of science. By implication many non-atheists take a more reasonable, nuanced view that scientific knowledge is probabilistic with some claims being more assured than others. Interestingly, Christians like Winston are quick to complain that critics generalise Christians as having a Middle Ages theology rather than acknowledge the ’new age’ Christian variants of today. Karen Armstrong has turned this claim into an industry.

Atheists typically reject beliefs in an ‘other’ (à la William James) reality extra to our physical world, especially one with ultimate influence or control. Also most atheists see science as our best shot at achieving reliable knowledge about our world rather than using the religious repertoire of personal revelations – imaginings, feelings, and guesses - and deference to traditional religious authorities. Scientists may admire Darwin or Newton but do not seriously use their data or conclusions as the basis for current research. This is typically not so in religious circles.

However being atheist does not mean being blind to the limitations of scientific endeavours: they are conducted by humans within social contexts and, therefore, subject to the same limitations as other human endeavours. However good science embraces attitudes of exploration; reproducible evidence and reasoning independent of personal faith; and welcomed public criticism and comment. Most importantly, unlike religious history, heretical namecalling should have no place in genuine search for knowledge. This does not mean accepting every new idea with substantial independent support from evidence and reasoning – not so open to new ideas that the brain drops out!

As a contrary example, most world-wide Christians, even today, accept the historicity of the physical resurrection of Jesus – reanimation of a dead body – and even apply that hope to the physical resurrection of all believers when God’s kingdom arrives in the future. All this is described in some clarity in the Christian bible. Remove the Christian faith – personal feelings and authority appeals - and its basis looks very shaky. In fact to non-Christians – religious believers or not – these claims, so fundamental to much Christian theology, look very fanciful and somewhat naive. Many Christians in western nations quietly walk away from these biblical claims though unwilling to publicly criticise these beliefs for fear of hurting fellow brethren.

So how do the claims of modern science look compared to religious claims of bodily resurrections?

Alex McCullie

I spend a lot of time travelling and, so, reading articles and books and listening to recorded lectures are my constant companions. My latest are interesting, a book – Jesus: Neither God nor Man by Earl Doherty and a talking book – Christianity, A Very Short Introduction (OUP) by Linda Woodhead.

Before discussing those, or at least my first reactions, here are two recommendations. I have traditionally bought books from Amazon and still do. However a serious alternative for Australians is http://bookdepository.co.uk (in UK) with its policy of free international postage. I typically check the prices between Book Depository and Amazon with postage costs to make the choice. One trap is the ease of ordering a single book from the UK booksellers while I would accumulate books at Amazon before commiting to purchase! For audio lectures and talking books check out the Amazon company, http://audible.com. I started with a gold membership with one download per month for $14.95 after a three month special. Their UK operation, http://audible.co.uk , has different pricing.

The reconstructions of the historical Jesus vary as widely as there are Jesus scholars. Conservatives see the gospel portrayals as essentially accurate. They often argue with mainstream historians about the inclusion of miracle stories in any historiography. I see N.T. (Tom) Wright, prolific author and Bishop of Durham, in this category. The vast majority of scholars take a middle position: the gospels give us clues as to the nature of Jesus. Now the similarity of these scholars end with vastly differing profiles: cynic philosopher, apocalyptic prophet, wise sage, and so. Then towards of the sceptical end of the spectrum we have Earl Doherty, one of a smaller number of scholars who dismiss the very existence of any recognisable Jesus as the founding figure of Christianity.

Jesus: Neither God nor Man is Doherty’s latest book, an expansion of his earlier The Jesus Puzzle. To give some sense of his arguments he argues that we read Paul’s letters, the earliest canonical writings, in light of the later gospels with their biographies of Jesus. Without the gospels, Paul’s writings talk nothing of a historical Jesus but a mystical God-like Christ Jesus who appeared to Paul as an incarnation of God. Doherty argues, quite cogently, that Paul refuted bad behaviour of ‘his’ fledgling Christian communities in the eastern Mediterranean with arguments from Jewish scripture and God’s revelations. Even though Jesus was later quoted in the gospels as saying something very relevant according to Christian traditions, Paul never used these sayings. This absence of a physical Jesus in Paul’s earlier writings is part of the Jesus puzzle.

Linda Woodhead’s Christianity is an excellent non-sectarian introduction to Christianity – faiths, history, and many forms – accessible to non-Christians and non-believers alike. She is Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University. The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press is a great series of short introductory texts of academic subjects for the enquiring non-specialist reader. Also check out Atheism by Julian Baggini, a very engaging British philosopher.

Alex McCullie

In US and Australia governments fund Christian charities to help the disadvantaged. The question is whether or not government-funded activities should be free of Christian proselytising. This area has always been problematic for supporters of a secular society: is it state-sponsored religion through the back door?

The Washington Post, drawing from a New York Civil Liberties Union article, has an interesting article outlining the problem for US legislators. US government agencies will monitor the charitable activities of the Salvation Army to ensure that the recipients are not subjected to Christian proselytising, perhaps a welcome change under President Obama.

According to the Post article though discriminatory recruitment practices are still acceptable – Christians to work for Christian organisations, syphoning off social tax dollars for religious conversions are not.

Alex McCullie