Leon Wieseltier vs. Tanya Luhrmann: is she enabling faith?

October 23, 2013 • 5:33 am

I’ve often reported on Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford who, after having studied an evangelical Christian sect in America—and published a Templeton-funded book on it, When God Talks Back—now writes prolifically about faith in popular magazines and newspapers. What galls me is that the New York Times has taken her aboard as a sort of pet accommodationist who writes weekly op-eds about the benefits of faith and prayer, how prayer works, and how getting God to hear you is hard. (See some of my posts here.) It’s not clear to me why the Times gave her a venue to spread such thin ideas about religion on a weekly basis. I’d much rather read a weekly column by someone like, say, Steve Pinker, who would actually say something interesting.

When I criticized Luhrmann for accommodationism, I got an email from one of her friends and colleagues, taking me to task for my posts.  She was, said the friend, only reporting the doings of the faithful as a good anthropologist, without passing judgment on them. But I don’t think that’s the case. True, she doesn’t come out and explicitly say that speaking in tongues is good, but she says it’s good for the practitioners and shouldn’t be stigmatized. And she maintains that faith isn’t really about belief, but about joy:

And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now.

That sounds like what I used to say in college when I was stoned.

Well, how much joy would a Muslim have if he knew for certain that Mohamed was fictional, or a Christian if she knew that Jesus was made up, like Santa Claus?  My impressions are that Luhrmann has a very blinkered view of religion, gleaned largely from the Vineyard sect she studied, and that she is in essence an apologist for faith, regardless of her cred as an anthropologist.  One can’t help read her book or columns without sensing an approbation of faith, a feeling that it’s good for you—what Dan Dennett calls “belief in belief.”

So I’m glad to see that Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, agrees with me on this. In a piece called “Tongues and Brains” in his Washington Diarist column (the piece is not online free, but judicious inquiry might yield it), he takes Luhrmann’s feel-good apologetics apart.

Now Leon (my editor for three pieces at TNR) is no New Atheist.  He’s a secular Jew, but far more religion-friendly than I. After his father died, he went to synagogue daily for a year, writing a book about his experience called Kaddish. He regularly goes after New Atheists, and you’ll remember him for his dust-up about scientism with Steve Pinker in The New Republic (see here, here, and here), where Leon was a severe critic of the hegemony of science. He also criticizes New Atheists like Dawkins, but this new piece shows that he has no love for Luhrmann, either.

His main beef is that she’s extolling a stupid rather than a thoughtful form of faith. Now I’d maintain that while there are “intellectual” versus “nonintellectual” forms of faith, in the end a thoughtful faith is no more credible than a stupid one. Nevertheless, Leon has some juicy snark about Luhrmann, grasping immediately, as did I, that she’s really an apologist. And he also levels some criticism about religion in general.

A few excerpts, which also show Leon’s ambivalence about faith:

Prayer without a plausible metaphysics is just me. In such circumstances, the cosmological picture is a cosmological fantasy; and fantasy provides pleasure, not certainty. It trivializes an attempt to change the world, which prayer is, when it suffices with the good feelings that are generated by the attempt. The question of delusion hangs over all good feelings. And so I have always sided with the cautionary observation of the rabbi in the Talmud who wryly warned that “whoever protracts and overly ponders his prayer will arrive at an aching heart.”

Clearly Leon,, like me, is a dolorous secular Jew. (Jewish telegram: “Start worrying. Details follow.”) The next pogrom could be right around the corner.

But The New York Times has been running promotions for praying in tongues, and for the usurpation of theology by psychology, which is the American innovation in religion. “Why We Talk in Tongues,” was the title of a recent column by T. M. Luhrmann. We? Luhrmann is an anthropologist at Stanford who not long ago authored an impressive study of evangelical religion in America, and it is the evangelicals, and their fervent wordlessness, that she is recommending in her columns to the hardened rationalists at smoked-fish counters everywhere. She notes that “18 percent of Americans spoke in tongues at least several times a year,” as if polling can settle a philosophical matter. She reports on her excitement at a charismatic Christian service in Ghana, where for three hours the worshippers spoke in tongues. They told her that they employed the same technique privately as well. “They said they did so because it was the one language the devil could not understand, but what I found so striking was how happy it seemed to make them.”

Ah, I love the reference to smoked-fish counters, for the hardened rationalists who patronize them are, of course, mostly Jewish.

You can see here some differences between Leon and me, for I don’t think that the “philosophical matter” of religion can be settled by anything, at least insofar as those matters involve truth claims. Nor do I even see religion as a “philosophical matter,” as philosophical matters are susceptible to reason, even if many of them can’t be settled. Nevertheless, Leon’s take on what the Times is doing is absolutely correct. He explains further:

Religious thinkers since Philo have been wrestling with the incomprehensibility of any concept of the deity that appropriately honors its sublimity. Luhrmann proposes that we give up and babble. “As a technique,” she explains, “tongues capture the attention but focus it on something meaningless (but understood by the speaker to be divine).” Myself, I would rather my nonsense not be sacred and my sacred not be nonsense. “There’s plenty here to alarm secular liberals,” she writes, invoking the stereotype that is designed to embarrass all skepticism. Actually, there’s plenty here to alarm religious conservatives, too. Many of the world’s great religious traditions have consecrated themselves to the ideal of spiritual articulateness, and to the discovery of valid propositional content for the substance of faith. All this, for Luhrmann, is only “abstract and intellectual,” when it is merely the natural activity of thinking creatures who seek.

Finally, a zinger or two:

“The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated,” Luhrmann declares, “as anthropologists have long known.” Who gave anthropology the last word? This is like saying that the role of beauty in art is greatly overstated because there is so much ugliness in art. My fellow Americans, there are questions that do not allow of empirical answers! I leave aside the place of ideas in the evangelicism that Luhrmann adores. Are we really suffering from a surfeit of thoughtful belief? Have we been neglecting our felicity? “Secular liberalism,” with its demand for the justification of metaphysical opinions, has more to offer religion than the immediate gratifications of a credulous joyriding. Luhrmann is peddling another intellectual argument for anti-intellectualism, another glorifcation of emotion in a culture enslaved to emotion. I choose to shun the unintelligent light and remain in the intelligent darkness, and sweat it.

Again, the concept of “thoughtful belief” seems oxymoronic to me. There is belief that involves thought, and can be expressed in fancy words (viz., Alvin Plantinga and Karen Armstrong), but the substantive content of that thought always turns out to be nil.  It is simply hope expressed in academic language.

But in the end Leon’s accusation is correct: Luhrmann is telling Americans to just give up and abandon themselves to the Great Unknown. Don’t bother trying to figure out if there’s a God, because that’s not useful. Instead (and this is a trope of John Haught), just voluntarily immerse yourself in the Mystery Behind the Universe.

I approve of thoughtful religion rather than speaking-in-tongues-and-talking-to-God religion for one reason only: if you dedicate yourself to thought, there’s a decent chance you’ll give up your faith completely.

89 thoughts on “Leon Wieseltier vs. Tanya Luhrmann: is she enabling faith?”

  1. You can’t really be saying that junk science promoter Pinker and pompous waffler Wieseltier are worthy allies in any argument(?). Are Gentiles expected to sit and read nonsense ejaculated from the secular shtetl? This woman is a dope but don’t use second-rate ideologues to take her down.

  2. Si je write comme ça, surely je parle en tongues. Works for English and French; why not for Aramaic and Greek? Doesn’t seem that big of a mystery to me where the idea came from.

    Slaínte.

    1. It kills me when they say that this is the one language that Satan can’t understand. Yeah, that’s because no one else can understand it either. I mean come on, let’s just for one minute pretend Satan is for realz. A fallen angel. A supernatural being. Eternal. Dude must know everything and all the languages. Therefore your language is fake. QED. 😀

      1. Ah, but it gives them power over Satan, and, since Satan is the biggest badass ever, that means that they must be even bigger and badassier than Satan.

        b&

  3. If belief is not an issue, if the propositions that the religious hold as true aren’t important, why are they over 41,000 sects of Christianity? Why have there been long discussions about the precise meaning of obscure words in Greek and Aramaic, discussions that at times have prompted wars? Why have people killed over the truth value of religious propositions?

    1. For the same reason there are thousands of different sports leagues rather than one. Lurhmann’s claim that religion is most importantly a social ritual (my summary, not her words) does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that every human will like the same social rituals.

      Having said that, her whole argument has a very tu quoque feel. She’s basically arguing that religous practice is okay because the social ritual aspect of religion is just as valid as any other social ritual. You go to church on Sundays where you stand up and sit down and chant…I go to a football game on Sundays where I stand up and sit down and chant. If those things bring us joy, they are both equally valid.

      That’s a fine point. But as a “defense” of religion, it trivializes it to an enormous extent. It is not surprising to me that Weiseltier and other religious intellectuals would take offense at that suggestion. You are making religious practice “equally valid” as other practices not by bringing the others up in metaphysical importance, but by reducing the metaphysical importance of religion to essentially zero.

      1. But heresies and crusades weren’t about “social rituals”, but about extremely fine points of theology, such as whether Jesus has one or two “substances”. Consider the huge proliferation of Protestant sects — their practices are often essentially the same, but the communities are split over highly specific theological issues (such pre- vs. post-millenial dispensationalism).

        If this were just a matter of social rituals, then the “guitar Mass” Catholics would be a completely different sect from those who like “smells and bells”. But both low and high Catholics are Catholics, and for the most part share beliefs that they feel distinguish them from other believers.

  5. As someone with a brother in Africa… a brother who once spent years in Ghana fixing pumps, teaching at all levels, building infrastructure… I can safely say the last thing they need there is large numbers people gathering for three-hour babbling sessions.

  6. I’m reminded of the fictional character Louis Wu in ‘The Ringworld Engineers’ (second in the series) by Larry Niven. The first few pages deal with Louis being a ‘current addict’ with a wire delivering current to the pleasure centres of his brain. Although Louis can react he has no motivation while under the wire.

    Which is a long way around to point out the potential (no pun intended) downsides of too much false joy, divorced from real life values and achievements. It is time lost, and in the long term destructive of human fulfillment and relationships.

    1. Speaking of science fiction references, I can’t help but think of Firefly/Serenity when I read Luhrmann’s advice to just give up and let go. I think about how in Serenity, they discover that the Reavers were created when the people of a settlement took a drug that made them peaceful. Either they went insane and became homicidal Reavers or they just laid down and died because they had no motivation to do anything. They didn’t even want to eat.

      I know it’s reductio ad absurdum but I can’t help but think it.

    2. I have to agree. We really are talking about “false joy” here. It cannot compare to the real joy one witnesses when someone is taught a practical skill (like fixing the village water pump) and a connection is made between understanding something and then being able to provide for your family and your community. Once that light bulb goes on, it is amazing how fast the chicken-sacrificing procedure is put on the back shelf.

      I’d be interested to know if Luhrmann ever… y’know… helps people in any real sense, rather than merely being content to observe and record behaviors, like a good anthropologist.

      1. My impression of Luhrmann is that in rebelling against !*intellectualism*! of which one definitions is “excessive emphasis on abstract or intellectual matters, especially with a lack of proper consideration for emotions” she has regrettably settled into !*emotionalism*! of which one definition is “strong or excessive appeal to the emotions”

        The sect which she analyzes, the Vineyard, has always struck me as especially cult-like mainly engaging in brainwashing and mind-control.

  7. I have several atheist friends who used to speak in tongues and now look back on it as total bunk. They laugh at what they did and consider it total stupidity in the light of the fact that there is no deity to speak to and no one else can write down and translate what a speaker has said. My wife and I once sat behind a couple at a funeral. The couple was not listening to the speaker who went on in tongues for several minutes. The couple was whispering back and forth to each other, giggling softly and were paying no attention to the “tongues message”. All of a sudden, the speaker in font of the chapel, called upon the inattentive couple, by name, to translate what he had said for the sake of visitors, such as my wife and I, who did not understand tongues. The young couple was totally surprised but both took turns translating what was said, although they were not listening. I could have done a better job than either of them. What total bunk!

    1. If I heard that I would have called a doctor assuming that either the speaker or me, the listener, had had a stroke! It is indeed utter crud.

    2. When my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer, the neurologist informed us that one of the symptoms of the glioblastoma reaching terminal stage could be glossolalia — speaking in tongues.
      I can still hear my mother’s laughter: “So I, an unbeliever, am going to die babbling like a raving Pentecostal? This tumor is bonkers!”

  8. Jerry says: “You can see here some differences between Leon and me, for I don’t think that the “philosophical matter” of religion can be settled by anything, at least insofar as those matters involve truth claims. Nor do I even see religion as a “philosophical matter,” as philosophical matters are susceptible to reason….”

    I’m not sure I understand your view here. I thought you agreed with the Problem of Evil—that an all good god is inconsistent with the existence of evil in the world—which is a philosophical objection to traditional theism. And I also thought you agreed with Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma—that ethics can be known to be independent of God’s will—which, again, is a philosophical argument against the divine command theory of ethics. I would have thought these are two cases where the philosophical matter of religion is settled or at least seriously challenged by philosophy.

  9. Is there not a classic problem of the anthropologist identifying with her subjects of study?
    “From the Native’s Point of View”: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding
    Clifford Geertz, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts Vol. 28, No. 1, Oct., 1974

    “psychology, which is the American innovation in religion” – I always assumed that was psychiatry?

    As for babbling in tongues – what that really means is babbling – “rhubarb rhubarb” as actors supposedly say in crowd scenes. Well anyone can pretend to do a nonsense ‘language’. Presumably 18% of Americans who ‘speak in tongues’ are from the monolingual community, or are they children of immigrants who actually DO speak other languages?

  10. Speaking in tongues: “…what I found so striking was how *happy* it seemed to make them.”

    Devotees who speak Klingon are happy, too. As are folk who attend bullfights and dog fights. So what?

  11. “Myself, I would rather my nonsense not be sacred and my sacred not be nonsense.”

    I am so stealing this — except I’m going to rephrase it into the second person: I would rather your nonsense not be sacred and your sacred not be nonsense.

    Myself, I don’t know what “sacred” even means other than “I want this to be true so much that I refuse to find out if it really is.”

        1. I think it would be this. I played with the word order a bit for how it reads:

          non sacras meas ineptias et non ineptia mea sacra malim.

          1. Google looses something in the translation:

            not my sacred nonsense and I would not sacrifice my toying

            Not sure we want to know about your toying that you’re not willing to sacrifice….

            b&

          2. Ha ha. I think google isn’t very good with Latin. It seems not to understand the subjunctive I rather (malo) is malim (I would rather).

          3. Fun Latin rhyme:

            Malo – I would rather be
            malo – in an apple tree
            malo – than a wicked man
            malo – in adversity.

          4. And because Latin is a noun-y language, it is sometimes hard to know what is a noun and what is a verb & Google had this problem, not knowing that mea sacra is “my sacred things” in the accusative plural.

          6. It is done so often these days! Did you ever think you’d live to see ‘text’ and friend’ become verbs?

          7. Those examples specifically? No. But, considering that, microwavablistically speaking, my dinner isn’t, I’m not too terribly surprised.

            And that’s all before we get into corporate newspeak! I know a company where people are no longer hired nor fired. They’re not even “terminated.” Instead, they’re “selected” and “separated,” as if they’re kittens being adopted and spouses being estranged.

            b&

          8. Ah yes. I can remember when they were ‘redacted.’ I was still in the corporate world when they all went from reorganizing to downsizing to resizing to re-engineering to refocusing, etc, etc, etc.

          9. What I can’t figure out is who they think they’re fooling.

            I mean, the people they fire are going to say they’ve been fired. The ones doing the firing are going to know that they’re firing people and are only using the Newspeak so they themselves don’t get fired. Everybody outside the company will say the people who’ve been fired have been fired. And no court is going to let them get out of any sort of obligations they might have because the company says they haven’t been fired, only separated.

            So what’s the point?

            b&

          11. Separated….holy euphemism! I thought the sentence “no longer with the company” was distancing!

          12. OK. My pet hates – “workshop” and “progress” as verbs. And even more, the current fad, “spend” as a noun. People who do that…. let’s just say I’ve got a little list…

          16. Yeah. Some words can be a noun and a verb, and some (as Ben noted) just can’t.

            I’m sure you got the Mikado reference…

  12. Are we really suffering from a surfeit of intellectual apologists of thoughtful belief? Oh yes, we so are. The babbling of all those religious thinkers since Philo amounts to one hell of a din.

  13. Leon closes with “I choose to shun the unintelligent light and remain in the intelligent darkness, and sweat it.”

    Jerry tops that with “if you dedicate yourself to thought, there’s a decent chance you’ll give up your faith completely”

    I hope Mr. Wieseltier reads WEIT.

  14. “That sounds like what I used to say in college when I was stoned”

    Hilarious! You crack me up.

  15. It trivializes an attempt to change the world, which prayer is, when it suffices with the good feelings that are generated by the attempt. [emphasis added]

    Thus clearly demonstrating that prayer really is no different from spellcasting, just with a different set of deities being bent to the will of the human.

    My, how powerful you must be to command even the very gods themselves by the force of your words. Who’m I to question you? I shall do exactly as you wish before you order your bitch Jesus to turn me into a newt.

    Cheers,

    b&

    1. Of course, you know Ambrose Bierce’s definition:

      “PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

    2. I don’t think Wieseltier means that. He simply reveals an intellectual snobbery for babbling joyfulness as reward for the wrong kind of prayer. Emotion, for God’s sake!

      He believes the reward of true prayer – he knows best – should be nothing but an intellectual change reflected in the way that one lives. Thus changing the world. Or something like that. I think.

      It’s all religio-babble, either way.

      1. If that’s the case, then Wieseltier would do well to stop playing at Humpty Dumpty, because what he wrote clearly indicates that he thinks prayer is for compelling the divine to bend to his will.

        b&

  16. I finally got around to reading Luhrmann’s Oct. 14 NYT piece. What I find so strange about her writing is the way she glides around what should be her most obvious conclusions in order to emphasize the benefits of religion. She cites in the NYT piece a guy who conjures up an invisible fox friend. In a piece in Stanford Magazine she mentions a class exercise in which students conjured up and ‘felt the presence’ of Leland Sanford. Clearly, evangelicals are similarly conjuring up a fake god. It is obvious why this should be hard: You are trying to maintain the felt presence of a fake fox/railroad baron/god. This can’t be easy.

    The fact that conjuring up invisible friends makes you feel good is interesting, but does it go any deeper than friends can’t disappoint and thus bring something like unconditional love? And I wonder if something like this is what benefits Sam Harris in his spiritual meditations.

    Regardless, the key conclusion I’d think she emphasize is that people who experience god are exactly like people who conjure up other invisible friends. Their ‘experience’ is clearly no evidence for the truth of their religious claims.

    1. I once had a Christian friend who told me that he was still religious not because he could prove his religion true but because he felt he had a close personal relationship with Jesus. Then, after reflecting for a moment, he said, “Of course, I’ve sometimes felt like I had a close personal relationship with Homer Simpson as well, so…”

      This friend is more self-aware than most, obviously. Still, it’s a reasonable point that our brains really do seem to treat certain vivid fictional characters as though they were real. After reading the Harry Potter books, it’s hard not to feel that Hermione Granger is someone you know personally.

      In fact, it’s more proof of the poverty of the Bible that it require so much work for the characters to seem real. A half decent writer can effortlessly make you feel like a fictional person is someone you know.

    2. Throughout my life, once I learn more of the people who have affected me, I feel very deeply connected to them…as if I know them, they are my personal buds. This is ubiquitous in my life. It is a way of thinking, “Wow, I feel connected to this bloak.” The list is virtually endless and I have never met these people. Like having breakfast with Paul Dirac, lunch with Georgia O’Keeffe, and dinner with Gustav Mahler.

      I think everyone likes to commission nonexistence friendships with people (real or fictional) we aspire to be, respect or love or all the above.

  17. One only need to browse around the web a little onto Christian sites with comments to see that fierce concern over the actual content of beliefs are not mere historical considerations. Hot debate about exactly what god wants people to do continues apace. Churches still split over “doctrinal” issues and routinely denounce each other for not following what god really wants them to be doing. Consider for example this recent kerfuffle that appeared just yesterday in my Facebook feed:

    http://bit.ly/197SXcF and http://bit.ly/1bFnizT

    The evangelical friend who posted these links was siding with the MacArthur fellow and thinks that the millions of “tongue speakers” really are going to Hell because what they are doing is make believe (!) and dishonors god. Such disagreements are commonplace and not at all of the character of “my team will kick your teams ass at the game”, but are of the character “god wants you to do X, but you are doing Y, and god’s wrath awaits you for your disobedience”.

    Now, I’ll grant that you can join a church and hang out with them and go along for a long while without having to deal with this ideological underpinning. You can stand up and sit down and sit quietly and reflect and enjoy the pot luck lunches and not bother yourself with whether it is any more real than a play about Santa. But sooner or later you will find that actual action in the real world will come to hinge on some belief claim and the fact that these people around you really do take it all seriously will slap you in the face.

    1. “I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!” “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!” He said, “Like what?” I said, “Well…are you religious or atheist?” He said, “Religious.” I said, “Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?” He said, “Christian.” I said, “Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?” He said, “Baptist!” I said,”Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?” He said, “Baptist church of god!” I said, “Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?” He said,”Reformed Baptist church of god!” I said, “Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?” He said, “Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!” I said, “Die, heretic scum”, and pushed him off.” — Emo Phillips

  20. Honestly, I can’t be bothered to go back and re-read the original piece. Two things struck me, though, reading this post. 1) Luhrmann says she observed Evangelicals? Did she talk to them? Perhaps Anthropological detachment is preventing her from interacting with her subjects. 2) The role of belief may be overstated, but surely not in a group self-selected and organized around belief.

  21. “That sounds like what I used to say in college when I was stoned.”

    Brilliant. I used to write everything I thought while in an altered state. Not much came of it, but if given the choice, drugs over religion is a no brainer. At least drugs are real.

    Great post.

  22. “That sounds like what I used to say in college when I was stoned.”

    That I believe is the crux of the biscuit. Religious belief and belief in God can elicit strong emotions that create a “spiritual high” affecting the reward centers of the brain, which in turn reinforce the belief. Addicted to God may not be far from the truth. Emotion trumps reason – always.

  23. If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy.

    What Luhrmann calls “the problem of belief” is supposed to be the whole damn point. The Evangelical is only joyful BECAUSE God exists, Jesus was His son, and salvation and an afterlife are true and real.

    She’s an anthropologist: why doesn’t she ASK them? Is the “evangelical view of the world” one which isn’t about God, but about how good it can feel to be an Evangelical? Do they not give a crap about anything they believe? Is “faitheism” (there’s no God but man do I looooove faith making people happy) enough?

    We know the answer. And so does Luhrmann. She’s gone into Anthropologist Mode not in order to describe and explain a set of people, but to celebrate and endorse their way of life. And she’ll show herself in the guise of open-minded tolerance even if she can only do so by stripping the religious of all sense of intellectual integrity and honesty. I’m not surprised that a pro-religion advocate like Wieseltier protests. If they truly understood and paid attention to Lurhrmann’s point, the Evangelicals themselves would denounce her.

    So why is Lurhmann considered “religion-friendly” when she’s more or less saying and doing the same things that atheists — yea, even the gnu atheists — have been saying and doing all along: reducing and analyzing religion as a cultural and psychological phenomenon, as opposed to the reasonable reaction to God’s existence? Why do the faithful seem to love what she writes?

    Because she’s smiling, that’s why. She’s giving them her approval. And she’s telling other atheists to shut up and stop telling people there’s no God because religion is so special and personal and connected to who you are. It belongs in the identity smorgasbord. Forget about the niggling little matter of judging truth and stop judging other people.

    She’s following the popular apologetic technique of CHANGING THE TOPIC. Defend the existence of God by defending something else, thus slyly framing the skeptic as someone who is meddling into business they’ve no need to meddle in. Atheists need to appreciate religion and not try to “take away” the faith of the Little People who need it. Thus Luhrmann at least sounds like an insider.

    She’s also flattering them. I’ve noticed that you can get away with some of the most devastating, vicious, incisive criticism if you just bring it out as if you were granting support to the idea. Smiles, nods, soothing reassurances that they’re okay and differences don’t matter …. all the while you’re slipping the knife into the very heart of the opposing idea.

    That is, you “get away with it” in the sense that you “will probably be misunderstood.” Wieseltier isn’t fooled. Every one of the anthropologist’s “defenses” of religion can be turned into an attack if you just stop smiling and nodding when you discuss them and refuse to follow the implications about them. But both Luhrmann and those misguided religious people who wax enthusiastically over the trappings of religion while gutting its content may indeed be successfully fooling themselves. Religion survives on fuzzy thinking, superficial resemblances, and category confusion.

    Like religion itself, faitheism can look good on the surface.

  24. -the benefits of faith and of prayer, how prayer works, and how getting God to hear you is hard.-

    It isn’t supposed to be hard to get God to hear you. Maybe he just doesn’t like her.

  25. What we all tend to forget is that for many and maybe most religious folk truth is not an important concept. It is a secondary motivation to the beliefs and emotions that support their sense of community and feeling of psychological well being however false that may be. Also we need to remember that the modern world tends to insulate us from the harsh realities of the natural world which makes acceptance of fantasy all the more safe. Trying to rely on the truth to turn people into athiests or secularists will come up against resistance because most people “can’t handle the truth” and quite frankly couldn’t care less!!

    1. I don’t know… Religion has been pretty influential in earlier times, less “insulated” days. It isn’t so much that believers don’t care about the truth. They just don’t have good tools for determining what it is. Religion trains people from childhood to take explanations from authority without questioning, to believe in things for which no evidence exists. It teaches people to use bad ways to determine what is true and what is not.

    2. Ah, the Little People who “can’t handle the truth.” For them, “truth is not an important concept.” They couldn’t care less.

      Right. Unlike us atheists, of course, who are apparently wiser, stronger, braver, more honest, and just plain more capable of accepting and dealing with reality, huh?

      Sorry, I don’t buy it. It’s just a little bit too self-flattering and not very likely. It’s also breathtakingly arrogant. I’m not saying that we’re not right; I’m not arguing that it doesn’t take a certain amount of wisdom, strength etc. to apply critical thinking to concepts which sooth and comfort. What bothers me is the divide.

      What you’re tending to forget I think is that people are people. The “religious folk” are not that different than us. They’re certainly not all a lot of feeble-minded and feeble-brained folk who couldn’t care less about whether their beliefs are true as long as they are comforted. Not all of them. For crying out loud.

      They at least hold to the ideal of knowledge, understanding, and enlightenment as virtues, as goals. It matters — they think it matters to them very much. From what I’ve seen very few will argue that they don’t consider truth to be an important element of their faith because they’re just in it for the side benefits — and those who do seem to admit this will usually take it back at some point (once the nasty skeptic goes away.)

  26. Speaking in tongues has to be, logically, nonsense (as well as being empirically nonsense). For the ‘speech’ to mean anything (rather than being just nonsense babble), the ‘words’ must have some lexical meaning, right? But if they have some meaning, you could make a dictionary and translate their meaning into a real language. But if you could do that, then so can the Devil understand what is said. So there’s no point in the exercise.

    So even granting the premise that the Devil exists, it’s still nonsense.

    1. Or maybe ‘speaking in tongues’ means literally what it says: speaking in mutlepil defifernet languages.

        1. That’d be speaking in Tongue, ye ken, och aye the noo. (Apologies to any true Scotsmen here…)

      2. Yeah yeah… I was referring to its usage by the pentecostalists or whoever-they-are that do it for religious purposes, which is definitely NOT multi-lingualism. I would like to be multi-lingual – that is, having a good command of several actual real languages, y’know?

  27. Wieseltier reveals Luhrmann’s deceit as mysticism which is the last resort of a powerless religion.

  28. So, this is more toward the Wieseltier/Pinker science/humanities exchange. I just found this article about why a philosopher has resigned his tenured position at the University of Missouri. In it, he talks about the devaluation of interdisciplinary work within departments by the department heads themselves, the inertial nature of academia and how the positions of influence are occupied by people who have gotten there because of their successful strategy of hewing to the insularity of their department, rather than expanding it.

    So it seems that it might not be in particular just an anti-science “paint them with scientism and dismiss them” sort of streak only — it might be a deeper departmental provincialism that stymies any cross-discipline work in humanities, whether it be with science or even if two different humanities departments tried to collaborate.

    I suggest a read.

    http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-i-jumped-out-of-ivory-tower.html

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