Professor Ceiling Cat is a bit low today for reasons I’ll describe in the next post. The upshot is that my brain hurts and I have nothing substantive to say, at least for a few hours. In light of that lacuna, let me call your attention to three articles that you may want to read.
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The first is Brother Jeffrey Tayler’s regular Sunday Sermon in Salon, a feature that you should be looking for and, though I don’t sanction Church Replacements for atheists, this beats all of them. As usual, it’s larded with anti-theism, but also with sound arguments for why we should be afraid of even “moderate” Islam. Tayler’s piece is “The left has Islam all wrong: Bill Maher, Pamela Geller and the reality progressives must face.” His subject is the first six words of the title: how progressives have had their brains co-opted by the “Islamophobia” meme because of our otherwise admirable concern for the oppressed. He suggests, and I now agree, that we need to dispense completely with the word “Islamophobia,” and when we see it we must press those who use it to describe exactly what they mean. The term, after all, has become a grab-bag for disparate issues, including dislike of Islam, dislike of individual Muslims (which can be justified if they espouse bad things), and general, unjustified bigotry of people simply because they’re Muslims.
Here are few excerpts, and we should all absorb this first one—especially the second paragraph (my emphasis):P
The canonical glorification of death for the sake Islam, or martyrdom, similarly belies those who would argue that the religion’s nature is pacific. If you, as a progressive, do not believe in the veracity of the Quran, then you have to accept Arthur C. Clarke’s diagnosis of those who “would rather fight to the death than abandon their illusions” as complying with the criteria of “the operational definition of insanity.” Insanity hardly engenders peace.
All those who, à la Reza Aslan, maintain that Muslims today do not necessarily read the Quran literally have lost the argument before it begins. What counts is that there are those (ISIS, say, and al-Qaida) who do, and they are taking action based on their beliefs. To the contention, “ISIS and al-Qaida don’t represent Islam!” the proper response is, “that’s what you say. They disagree.” No single recognized Muslim clerical body exists to refute them.
and this:
This is no call to disrespect Muslims as people, but we should not hesitate to speak frankly about the aspects of their faith we find problematic. But it’s not up to progressives to suggest how an ideology based on belief without evidence might be reformed. Rather, we should cease relativizing and proudly espouse, as alternatives to blind obedience to ancient texts, reason, progress, consensus-based solutions, and the wonderful panoply of other Enlightenment ideals underpinning our Constitution and the liberties characterizing Western countries.
. . . In doing as he urges [the call of Charlie Hebdo editor Gérard Biard to keep debating, writing, and satirizing religion], we will give the terrorists too many targets to attack and convince them that we will not surrender, not cede an inch. That means the media needs to begin showing Charlie Hedbo’s Muhammad cartoons. We must stop traducing reason by branding people “Islamophobes,” and start celebrating our secularism, remembering that only it offers true freedom for the religious and non-religious alike. And we should reaffirm our humanistic values, in our conviction that we have, as Carlyle wrote, “One life – a little gleam of time between two eternities,” and need to make the most of it for ourselves and others while we can. There is nothing else.
If Tayler isn’t yet a “horseman” (horseperson?), he’s got one foot in the stirrup.
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The other day, a friend told me she was an admirer of Karen Armstrong, and was about to start reading Fields of Blood, Armstrong’s widely-lauded book whose theme is that religion has never given rise to anything bad—ever. Anything that superficially looks like religiously-engendered violence, like the 9/11 terrorism, is, to Armstrong, the result of colonialism, disaffection, or other “political” factors. Just as Steve Gould defined “religion” tautologically in Rocks of Ages so that it could never say anything about reality (stuff like creationism he dismissed as “not real religion”), so Armstrong sees any religious views promoting terrorism as “not canonical religion”. It’s a duplicitous and tautological ploy, but because Armstrong writes what people want to hear (religion is benign at worst, but usually helpful), people osculate her rump.
The cure for the common but dangerous desire to apply one’s lips to Armstrong’s gluteus—a disease known as Tippett’s Syndrome—is, as I told my friend, to read David Nirenberg’s new, long, and critical review of her book in The Nation, “Power and piety.” There Nirenberg calls out Armstrong for her rhetorical trickery and double standards vis-à-vis politics vs. religion. I’m curious why other reviewers haven’t picked up on this, but of course many are blinkered by “belief in belief”. The review is mandatory reading for anyone who’s read, admired, or is contemplating reading Fields of Blood. I can give only one except; do read Nirenberg’s whole article:
Armstrong’s argument is simple: “From the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft.” By “organized theft,” she means the activities of the kings, aristocrats, warriors, and other leaders of the agrarian societies that began to appear in written records in Mesopotamia in the third millennium bce. In other words, not religion but politics—the struggle for power to seize the fruits of others’ labor—has always been responsible for violence. Yet in making this claim, Armstrong draws the very distinction between religion and nonreligion that she insists cannot be made before the modern period. This is a substantial inconsistency (Cavanaugh would call it incoherent), but it needn’t necessarily compromise her broader argument, which seems to be, here and throughout the book, that religion only becomes complicit with violence when it is captured and deformed by politics, or when believers are oppressed by injustice, poverty, and violence, or, more recently, when the faithful are humiliated by atheists.
According to this argument, in their origins and essences, religions are a benign and fundamental source of empathy, love of the other, and cognitive comfort in an otherwise incomprehensible cosmos. “The world’s great religious traditions share as one of their most essential tenets the imperative of treating others as one would wish to be treated oneself,” Armstrong writes. If religious movements become violent, it is either because they are driven to extreme measures by oppression and injustice, or because their teachings have been misinterpreted and so are blasphemous and not truly religious.
As an example, consider Armstrong’s account of the religious attitudes of Mohamed Atta and his accomplices in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and other targets. “The hijackers themselves certainly regarded the 9/11 atrocities as a religious act but one that bore very little resemblance to normative Islam.” (Armstrong’s grammar here is confusing; what she means is that although the hijackers understood their Islam as normative, according to her interpretation it was not.) True, the hijackers prayed constantly and repeatedly recited certain passages of the Koran during the attack, but according to Armstrong their thought must be categorized as “magical,” “primitive,” “superstitious,” or “psychotic” rather than “religious,” because it does not achieve what she understands as “the principal imperative of Islamic spirituality”: tawhid, or making one. The terrorists divided their mission into segments, whereas “Muslims truly understand the unity of God only if they integrate all their activities and thoughts.”
Armstrong’s point is that although Atta and his colleagues may have thought of themselves as religious, their actions proved them to be blasphemous and paranoid. We need not accept her definition of “true Islam” as total “integration” of all thoughts and actions, a definition that seems bizarre. By this standard, very few if any humans of any faith could be considered truly religious. But even if we were to reject her definition and pinpoint the ways in which Atta’s faith contributed to his acts, Armstrong would simply regard such complicity as proof of a (perhaps misguided) Muslim response to “the structural violence of the American-dominated Middle East.” Armstrong is fond of the phrase “structural violence,” by which she seems to mean something like the inequality created by political power, which is to say, oppression.
This is more or less the same tactic used by Gould to exculpate religion in Rocks of Ages.
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Finally, one of our readers, John Farrell, as written an analysis of Catholic dogma on evolution for Aeon magazine: “Still seeking Omega.” (Omega, you may recall, is the teleological “goal” of theistic evolution envisioned by Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin.) Farrell runs through the history of the Vatican’s love-hate relationship with evolution, noting that the only “official” statement about it comes from Pope Pius XII’s 1950 document Humani Generis, which reaffirms the historicity of Adam and Eve as the actual physical progenitors of all modern humans. (I discuss this inFaith vs. Fact.)
This, of course, creates a tension between science and the Vatican, for no scientist believes that the human species was ever as small as two individuals, much less the eight on Noah’s Ark (genetic evidence rules this out completely). While some later Popes issued “nonbinding” opinions that either promote or criticize evolution, Catholic doctrine as it stands flies in the face of science—something regularly ignored by accommodationists. By desperately trying to comport Adam and Eve with the facts, some Catholic theologians are skirting that doctrine.
The upshot is that the Church is confused about what to say about evolution, but can’t quite bring itself to endorse the facts, much less give up its silly view that humans differ from other species by possessing an immortal soul. Farrell sees this reluctance to embrace evolution as dangerous to the Church, and a cause for its attrition in many places. I’m not sure I agree about the reasons for attrition (the Church’s retrograde views on sexuality, marriage, and abortion surely must contribute), but I do agree with Farrell on the intellectual vacuity of accepting Adam and Eve in an age of science:
Perhaps in the end, the Vatican cannot integrate evolutionary science because it really is too threatening. It would require a thoughtful reinterpretation of the Church’s understanding of the doctrine of original sin – the fundamental idea that Adam and Eve’s epic act of disobedience wounded human nature for all who came after. Theologians from St Paul and St Augustine down to the present day have viewed the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as God’s ultimate response – the redemption for this sin.
Can such a theology be maintained within an evolutionary understanding of human origins? The few, scattered Catholic theologians exploring the issue largely believe that it can. But the Vatican’s long silence on the question suggests that it doesn’t agree.
And there’s a price to be paid for stalling. Millions of people are walking away from the Church. Not just because of the clerical abuse scandal, and not just because of disagreement over points of morality such as gay marriage or abortion. But because the Church no longer speaks to people in a way that is meaningful to humanity in this scientific age.
The result is a slow but steady implosion. The Church is slowly collapsing from within, in a sort of progressive diminution. ‘Instead of evolving, it is devolving,’ Delio writes, ‘its very presence is thinning out to the extent that in some areas of the world, such as parts of western Europe, it is dissolving into history.’
The Church has accepted the Big Bang, the start of the world’s evolutionary journey – but this isn’t enough. It must follow in Teilhard’s footsteps. Unless it embraces not just the evolution of the Universe, but the evolution of all life, including humans, and reclaims a truly cosmic view in which the faith makes sense, the Church is pulling the wool over its own eyes as its people continue to file out the door.
I suggest that the last thing the Church wants to do is follow exactly in Teilhard’s footsteps, since he envisioned a teleological, goal-directed view of evolution that contradicts everything we know about the process.
