Category: Religion and Atheism

Distinct from Biblical Studies. Includes studies in origins and nature of religious ideas; posts on religions in history and contemporary world (e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism.) Should this include post-biblical Christianity and rabbinical Judaism of late antiquity, the direct outgrowths of Second Temple era? Also includes various types of Christianity (e.g. fundamentalism) and debates with atheists. Posts on atheism and atheist world views per se are also included, of course. It does not include Islamism as the matrix of terrorism — that goes into Politics and Society. But here we get into a grey area. Compare social attitudes towards and criticisms of Islam related to Islamism and terrorism.

2024-06-29

Origin of Belief in a Supreme Moralizing God

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

What could have prompted individuals of our highly successful species to obey an unseen being who told them what they should and should not do?
— Peoples & Marlowe, 253

In my Origins of Religion post I focussed on anthropological evidence for the most fundamental of religious concepts that we can reasonably infer were found among our earliest homo sapiens ancestors. We saw there that the idea of a high god who is actively interested in humans, imposing on them moral codes and threatening to punish them for disobedience, was alien to our forebears just as it is generally alien to today’s hunter-gatherer societies.

So what is the evidence that informs us when and why the belief in a supreme moralizing god emerged?

The TL;DR version of this post:

In short, the explanation offered by Peoples and Marlowe is that belief in a supreme deity that actively rewards and punishes people according to their moral conduct arises in societies that have a very large population who rely on strong cooperation in order to maintain and protect the facilities and methods on which their survival depends. These are (mostly large) societies in need of controlled complex cooperation.

This time I rely heavily on another article by two of the authors (Peoples and Marlowe) who informed my earlier post. They ask two questions:

What circumstances could have triggered belief in a single creator, or gods that affect the lives of humans, or one all-powerful god of morality?

What characteristics of High Gods ensured that they would be culturally sustained, and why?

(255 — my formatting and bolding in all quotations)

The authors examined four types of societies across a sample of 168 in all:

Foragers

Who are the foragers? How do they live?

Foragers are the equivalent of the hunter-gatherer societies of the previous post, those among whom the idea of a moralizing high god was found to be an anomaly. (The article on which I drew for that post was published some years later than the one I am discussing now.)

High Gods are present in all types of societies, but far less often among foragers and horticulturalists. Foragers are far more likely to have inactive High Gods or no High Gods at all….

Among our sample of forager societies, 58% had no High God and 88% had either no High God or one that was inactive.

(258, 260)

The explanation given for this absence of belief:

Most foragers are self-sufficient and usually require less cooperative labor…. They are able to survive on a variety of resources and occupy a wide range of habitats…. Most foraging societies are egalitarian and by nature resistant to others dictating what they should do. They would resist the concept of a demanding High God, and thus be less susceptible to evangelism.

(263f)

Pastoralists

Who/what are pastoralists?

Pastoralists are more mobile than foragers but also more stratified. They are often on the move in small groups sparsely scattered throughout vast areas of land. Their most important and often main source of subsistence exists in the form of large, divisible amounts of energy and wealth which can be stolen: their herd animals.

(257)

And the likelihood that they will believe in an active moralizing deity?

According to the sample studied the pastoralists were highly likely to believe in a moralizing high god.

In contrast [to foragers], pastoralists are in constant and direct contact with their main source of subsistence and livelihood in a landscape filled with moment-to-moment contingencies. Situations often become quickly unstable (herds scattering) or dangerous (attacks by marauders or wild animals). Blood feuds within and among groups are not uncommon …. Pastoralists have the highest frequency of warfare across the four modes of subsistence …, which increases the need for collective action. Recurring environmental and ecological threats take on enhanced importance because of the self-generating wealth embodied in herded animals. When drought devastates pasture, disease decimates herds, and constant violence over grazing rights becomes unrelenting, a bond of cooperation within one group or tribe must provide a survival advantage when challenged by other feuding groups.

(264)

But how might the above influence a tendency to believe in such a god?

The conceptual seed of a paternalistic High God that meddles in human morality and promises social order probably originated several times in many societies. This type of monotheistic god found fertile ground in the threatening landscape of pastoralism. A broader contextual view, based on Whiting’s theory of psychocultural evolution (Worthman 2010), might suggest that belief in a High God is the projection of the pastoralists’ sense of insecurity in the face of unmitigated ecological threat.

(265)

Horticulturalists

Horticulturalists often combine cultivation with some foraging. They are close to foragers on the productivity-subsistence continuum but less mobile and less autonomous with respect to acquiring food. We might expect to see a pattern of High Gods among horticulturalists similar to that of foragers. But increased food production leads to larger villages and related social problems (crime, disease) that reduced mobility exacerbates. The beginnings of stratification appear among horticulturalists (and complex foragers) in the form of charismatic, entrepreneurial community leaders (“big men”) who begin to establish conventions that institutionalize social controls (Johnson and Earle 2000). These leaders would gain personal power, prestige, and enhanced reproductive success from their association with active High Gods who lend support to their initiatives. Even if they were not the originators of the concept of a High God they would likely have been promoters of it.

(256)

That was the prediction. What were the findings?

High Gods are present in all types of societies, but far less often among foragers and horticulturalists.

(258)

Agriculturalists

Agriculturalists reside at the far end of the continuum, excelling in production of resources while being sedentary. Emergence of early agricultural societies benefited from the efficiency and success of cooperative labor. The demands of public works such as construction of communal storage facilities, defensive perimeters, and irrigation networks overcame limits to growth and made possible the population booms that led to big city problems…. It is now clear that agriculture began in a range of habitats from dry to wet. But the high productivity of a managed irrigation system was fundamental to the formation of pristine states in the Mexican highlands, coastal Peru, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Middle East, and possibly China…. These societies were highly stratified and their leaders would gain the most from moral conventions that reduce chances of fissioning and also ensure high levels of cooperation. But the population as a whole would eventually benefit as the society expands at the expense of other competing groups.

(256)

And the results of the survey….

High Gods were present in 73% of agricultural societies, and of those where a High God was present, 62% were active or moral.

(260)

Why?

Peoples and Marlowe note that group size increases significantly among successful agriculturalists. This leads to a higher level of social stratification or inequality:

Group size will grow with increased food production, which may depend on cooperative efforts. Drought, disease, and social-action problems constantly threaten famine. If the costs of cooperation outweigh the benefits, groups will fission as individuals leave for less-competitive resource environments. When leaving is not a good alternative, a population may remain intact even though some individuals are at a disadvantage. The result is inequality (stratification) and exploitation of others by certain individuals or kin groups (Boone 1992).

(264)

Maintaining workable cooperation among ever larger populations presents new challenges for the successful functioning of the entire society — with its need to maintain storage facilities, defences against marauders, and increasing numbers of the community wanting to go their own way. The chances of an authority figure emerging in such a situation are high.

One scenario for achieving the levels of cooperation and prosociality needed to stabilize larger populations (or growing ones) suggests the emergence of an authority figure and the concept of an overpowering high god to leverage his authority would be appealing, Peoples and Marlowe suggest.

Proposed Explanation for Belief in a Supreme Moralizing God

We propose that belief in active or moral High Gods stemmed from challenges encountered by individuals employing modes of subsistence that demanded the effective manipulation and cooperation of others in order to produce, manage, and defend vital resources. Constant threats to subsistence and survival engendered, for pastoralists and some agriculturalists, the practical idea of promoting belief in a powerful spiritual force that could promise deliverance from the enemy, and punish those who did not follow the rules of cooperation and moral constraint. The coercive power of religion was used to facilitate cooperation for the benefit of higher-status individuals, which in turn benefitted the whole group. The success of this strategy was copied, and it led to the transformation of human societies into higher levels of collective, economic organization that sustained larger populations….

This research has shown the importance of High Gods to achieving cooperation in growing populations or those under environmental stress.

(265)

Peoples, Hervey C., and Frank W. Marlowe. “Subsistence and the Evolution of Religion.” Human Nature : An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective 23, no. 3 (September 2012): 253–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-012-9148-6.

2024-06-22

Wounded healers

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Chiron, the wounded healer (ChatGPT image)

Does a person who has a past history of depression (or any other “psychological issue”) and accordingly takes up a study of psychology inevitably become a bad psychologist?

Can a person who as a youth was involved in criminal acts ever in later years be qualified to be a social worker and role model for other youth?

Can a person who once belonged to a religious cult ever be qualified to help other cult members recover from their experiences?

Can a person who was once a fundamentalist ever be qualified to study religion and the Bible objectively and honestly?

Is it possible for a person who was once a theist and is now an atheist to have a genuine, scholarly understanding of the nature of belief in God? Or for an ex-Christian to be honest and fair about Christianity?

We know the answers to those questions, at least in theory. So I was intrigued to come across the following passage in the new book by the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse.

The positive role of rituals in human history has taken me a long time to appreciate, in part because I have had a difficult relationship with rituals personally.

This is not so unusual – many of my fellow academics study the things they find particularly difficult to master or understand.

Political scientists often strike me as poor strategists in departmental politics,

anthropologists struggle with the nuances of their own native groups,

and geographers are often the colleagues most in need of directions around campus.

Although my job is to study rituals, I find them rather aversive – particularly the routinized kind we were all obliged to participate in at school in the form of assemblies and chapel services. These activities seemed at the time to be not only pointless and dull but sometimes even menacingly oppressive and authoritarian. I am not alone in thinking this way, of course. As we will see in the final part of this book, many societies are shedding their ritual traditions at a rapid pace, not only through secularization but by dismissing as irrelevant or oppressive many long-established rituals associated with schooling, professional guilds, the institutions of government, and everyday domestic life. However, the more I have learned about the effects of participation in frequent collective rituals, the more I have come to appreciate their importance in fostering large-scale cohesion, cooperation, and future-mindedness. I have argued that ritual routinization helped the first farmers to settle down and create larger and larger cultural groups. But this was only the beginning of a much more complex process. . . .

Whitehouse, Harvey. Inheritance (p. 134). Cornerstone. Kindle Edition. – my formatting

Ditto!

And that is why this blog — despite my mixed background in religious experiences and current atheism — is not an “anti-Christian” blog. My interest is in understanding and learning from the latest research. My posts about the Bible are not efforts to “debunk” the Bible. It is about understanding its origins and accounting for its influence. The same for the question that seems to rile many people more than others: Did Jesus exist? That question has no interest for me. My interest is in understanding the origin and nature of the idea of Jesus in the history of religion. My interest is in applying the methods of professional research into all these questions — historical, psychological, anthropological.

Think of personal relevance. It is only natural and right and even beneficial if we take up studies in areas where our personal experiences and challenges have led us. The desire is to understand, overcome, and help others navigate similar circumstances and ideas.

2024-06-21

Hardwired to Venerate the Supernatural

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Natural intuitions feed into our social systems in strange and unexpected ways. To take just one example, our intuitions about supernatural beings are also associated with intuitions about social dominance in ways that are consistent across cultures. My colleagues and I have shown in lab experiments that when babies observe an agent capable of floating around like a ghost or a flying witch, they expect the levitator to win out in a confrontation with a rival who lacks such powers.⁷ To put it more pithily, we naturally look up to supernatural beings. This could help to explain not only why stories about superheroes – from Santa to Superman – are so popular with children but also why magical beings and their earthly embodiments are so often venerated in human societies.

⁷ Meng, Xianwei, Yo Nakawake, Kazuhide Hashiya, Emily Burdett, Jonathan Jong, and Harvey Whitehouse. “Preverbal Infants Expect Agents Exhibiting Counterintuitive Capacities to Gain Access to Contested Resources.” Scientific Reports 11, no. 1 (May 25, 2021): 10884. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89821-0.

Whitehouse, Harvey. Inheritance (p. 7). Cornerstone. Kindle Edition.

2024-05-29

Two Ages and the Inventions of Four Religions

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

One of my primary interests has been to understand how the religions of the Bible (Judaism and Christianity) and the Bible itself (both the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the Christian New Testament) came about. There are other far more important questions pressing on us at the moment and I will address those as well — but for now, it’s time to sum up what I have learned from reading through mountains of scholarly literature.

This post will only touch on the conclusions. The various roads to those conclusions, I hope, will follow — although much of the background relevant research has been posted over the years on this site.

Russell Gmirkin has published several scholarly books and articles that present a very plausible case for the the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), as well as some of the subsequent literature, being the work of authors and editors of the Hellenistic era (that is, from around 300 BC after the conquests of Alexander the Great) who were bringing together ideas and myths from the Samaritan-Judean worship of Yahweh into a new mix with Greek tropes and ideals. Such a notion is hard to accept at first if we have known nothing but the traditional Documentary Hypothesis (DH) of Biblical origins. The DH leads us to view the Bible as having is origins in the remote Iron Age (ca 1000 BCE, the purported time of David and Solomon) and through centuries of editorializing and additions it became what today we know as the “Jewish/Hebrew Bible” or the “Old Testament”. Niels Peter Lemche, according to my understanding, was the first to propose that we should rather look to the Hellenistic era (the time after the conquests of Alexander the Great from 334 BCE to his death in 323 BCE) for the origins of the Hebrew Bible. Since then, it would appear that Yonatan Adler has set out the archaeological evidence that would support the notion that the biblical religion did not emerge until the Hellenistic era.

Is the very idea that a new religious myth and a new concept of a supreme god could be “artificially” created and embraced by a mainstream of a community at all feasible? If we are to accept the view that the Hebrew Bible was an invention of scribes seeking to create a new myth of origins for disparate Yahweh worshipers (Samaritans and Judeans in particular, but also other Yahweh adherents), do we have any analogous enterprises that could help us accept that the such a development was to be expected — that it was not a bizarre outlier?

Yes we do. And not only does it exist, but it is located in the same time period and broader geographical area where we find the proposed Hellenistic origin of the Bible.

Not too long ago I attempted to illustrate the meaning of the term “Hellenism” or “Hellenistic” by pointing out that the term indicates an amalgam of Asian and Greek concepts. The Egyptian god Serapis was an invention of the Hellenistic era. This invention was an attempt to unite Greeks and Egyptians into a common community. The god had both Egyptian and Greek aspects merged into one. But there is more….

When Ptolemy I [a successor to Alexander] assumed power in Egypt, he faced the daunting task of uniting the various elements of the population—conquerors and conquered—to at least an extent where they tolerated each other. It has often been admired and extensively described how skillfully he proceeded, particularly in the perilous realm of religion, and how he managed to spare the feelings of the Egyptians without forcing the Greek spirit into the forms of Egyptian worship. As he set out to give the new center of the land a city deity—without such, no ancient foundation is conceivable, and here in Alexandria, as in Antioch, one stood entirely outside historical context, and therefore a city deity had to be created here as well—and as he began to establish a sacred center of his land in the new capital, he had to seek a god in whose worship Greeks and Egyptians could meet. No force on earth could have compelled the Egyptians to abandon their four-thousand-year tradition and turn to a Greek cult; but the king also did not want to make the Greeks Egyptians in their beliefs. Thus, it was only possible for something higher to unite both.

(Schmidt, translation from page 78 of Kultübertragungen [=Cult Transfers])

Continuing….

Those who created him must have been able to conceive of a god who had a part of the essence of each god and who therefore stood above them all; they may have had a sense that the countless gods worshiped by the world were ultimately only the emanation of a divine being, and they gave shape to this intuition and created a god whom they could interpret to the Greek as Greek and to the Egyptian as Egyptian: this was only possible if they created a universal god.

The details can wait for another post, but in short, the new god was Serapis. His statue looked Greek, but his name sounded Egyptian (a possible phonetic elision of Osiris and Apis). A myth of origin was created, too. It was declared that the first Greek ruler of Egypt (Ptolemy I) had a dream in which a numinous figure commanded him to send for a divine image from Sinope, a Greek area in northern Asia Minor. The newly created myth assured Greeks that Serapis was in many ways a familiar Greek god. Apart from looking Greek, his myth and name also contained hints of the Greek god Zeus of the underworld, or Pluto. The sound of the name Serapis, at the same time, strongly hinted at those thoroughly Egyptian deities of Osiris and Apis. So this new god was a creation of both Greek and Egyptian motifs. Its function was to bring Greeks and Egyptians together.

Serapis

But his name would hardly have been chosen if another element had not also played a role: that it was possible, through slight phonetic changes, to create the belief that the name Sarapis was simply the Greek form of the Egyptian wsr-hp (Osiris-Apis). Thus, the possibility was given to conceive Sarapis as an Egyptian god and to implant in the Egyptians the belief that they worshipped one of their ancient gods only in a new form.

And on the other hand, it has also been understood to represent the god referred to by the name Sarapis to the Greeks as a Greek one. His image shows it, and it is often emphasized in literature how closely related he is to Pluto, and in the legend that tells of his introduction from Sinope, it is even explicitly emphasized that he is none other than Pluto. And the existence of such a detailed narrative, as found in Tacitus and Plutarch, can only be explained if it was intentionally fabricated for a specific purpose: the purpose was to derive Sarapis from Greek belief.

(Schmidt 79f – translation)

On a lesser scale the Hellenistic era also witnessed the creation of many new religious myths and family cultic associations to promote the prestige of new rulers and city-states — as I referenced in another post not too long ago.

Prior to the Hellenistic era the Yahweh religion was polytheistic. Yahweh had a wife. The Bible presents Yahweh as the sole god. Genesis narrates the erection of shrines and appeals to various gods that the casual reader can easily assume are early names of the god Yahweh in the book of Exodus: El Shaddai, El Olam, El Elyon, Bethel ….

If it can be concluded that early in the Hellenistic era a new religious concept was built upon both the entrenched traditions of Greeks and Egyptians in such a way that neither tradition was offended, then it may not be too wide a step to imagine at the same time diverse Yahweh worshipers (viz. Samaritans and Judeans) constructing a narrative of mythical origins that both could embrace. The common god was, like Serapis, a universal deity, stripped of local particularizing appendages.

What of Christianity? We have here another potential analogue, also from the first two centuries of the Roman empire. In fact, the Schmidt work I quoted above came to my attention through a book by Troels Engberg-Pedersen discussing specific Greco-Roman influences on the shape of Christianity.

In the traditional (pre-Hellenistic and pre-Roman) Persian religion that we think of as Zoroastrianism, the god Mithras was not a major character. Yet in the second century CE the worship of Mithras, through a “mystery cult”, was widespread. This was the same period for which we have clear evidence of Christian growth.

The ancient [pre-Hellenistic and pre-Roman] cults in which Mithras appeared were public; in contrast, the Roman cult was secret, a mystery religion, and such religions appeared precisely during the Roman Empire.

Without the Roman world, in fact, they would not have been possible. Previously, all religions were closely tied to specific states or peoples; one was born into one of them. . . . They primarily addressed the spiritual needs of individuals and were generally “more religious” than other cults of the time. Initiates of Isis and Mithra, like Christians, were missionaries. Regardless of their country of origin, those who accepted the premises of the new cult and wished to join were welcomed, as it constituted a spiritual homeland.

Common to all these religions is the fact that they emerged from a people who had lost their political identity . . . .

(Merkelbach, 82 – translation)

If the founder(s) of the Christian religion, whether that was Paul or another, put an innovative twist on some branch or branches of Judaism to create their new faith, and did so at the time of the early Roman empire, they were not alone. Some unknown “genius” appears to have done something similar in relation to the orthodox Persian religion to create a new cult focusing on the worship of Mithras.

The mysteries of Mithras constituted a new faith that no longer had much in common with that of the ancient Persians, except for the name of the god and some mythical episodes.

Once fixed, the system . . . did not undergo any substantial modification over time. Therefore, it cannot be the result of a long evolution but was necessarily conceived and structured in its entirety once and for all. In Geschichte der griechischen Religion (vol 2 p. 675), M.P. Nilsson states that the mysteries of Mithras were created as a whole by an unknown genius, and we can only confirm his opinion.

The place of origin of this cult is unknown, but its creator was well acquainted with the Persian religion. It will be seen how, probably very soon, the center of the new religion became Rome, the capital of the empire, from where that cult then spread to the provinces.

(Merkelbach 82f – translation)

The reference was to Nilsson, who wrote:

The conclusion is inevitable that the Mithraic mysteries are a unique creation of an unknown religious genius, who, based on certain myths and rituals selected by him and incorporating elements from the astrology prevalent at the time and from Greek beliefs, created a form of religion capable of conquering a place in the Roman world.

(Nilsson 675)

I do not suggest that Christianity mutated from Mithraism. Not at all — despite the embarrassment of some early Church Fathers attempting to grapple with a few overt similarities between the two religions. Rather, what is of particular interest is the emergence of two comparable religions around the same period and place as a result of deliberate invention to meet what were arguably comparable public needs.

If both Mithraism and Christianity were “invented” to meet certain needs of individuals who found themselves looking for a new community and identity, they may have been little different, in essence and function, from two earlier Hellenistic religions that were created to meet specific community needs of their day.

Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. Paul in His Hellenistic Context. T&T Clark, 2004.

Merkelbach, Reinhold. Mithras. Konigstein/Ts : Hain, 1984.

Nilsson, Martin P. (Martin Persson). Geschichte der griechischen Religion. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1974.

Schmidt, Ernst. Kultübertragungen. Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1909.

2024-05-19

The Curse of Monotheism

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

I cited a book chapter by R.J. van der Spek in my previous post relating to the historical reality behind the myth of ancient Persia’s “tolerance” of religions of its subject peoples. Here I quote some other extracts that relate directly to the problem of religious tolerance and how that question relates to monotheism:

It is not a coincidence that suppression of religion often had something to do with monotheistic religions (persecution of Jews and Christians, who refused to accept gods other than their own; persecution of pagans under Christian emperors). Persecution of religious beliefs and practices were usually related to would-be disturbances of order (as in the case of the suppression of the Bacchanalia in Rome in 186 BC or, possibly, the prohibition of the Jewish cult in the temple of Jerusalem by Antiochus IV in 168 BC).⁸

⁸ For the development in the Graeco -Roman world from a situation in which religious commitment was predicated on civic identity to “a situation of competition and potential conflict between religious groups based on voluntary commitment,” see J. North, “The Development of Religious Pluralism,” in The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, edited by J. Lieu, J. North and T. Rajak (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 174-93, quotation from p. 187. A similar development is present in the ancient Near East from the early Sumerian city-states to the world empires in the first millennium BC. Still fundamental for the position of Judaism and Christianity in the Ancient world is A.D. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). For the relation of community and religion, the process of mobility of people and their gods, concept of syncretism, and the profusion of cults in the Roman empire, see J.B. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 105 -157. I owe these references to Jaap-Jan Flinterman.

(Spek 2014, 235)

Further…

Recognition of foreign gods is, in short, completely normal in the polytheistic mind frame and missionary activity is not to be expected. Recognition could take place with the acceptance of a new god or with identification of a foreign god with a god of one’s own pantheon. Indeed, the identification of foreign gods with gods of their own pantheon (‘syncretism’) is widely attested. Herodotus calls Marduk of Babylon Zeus Bēlos and Melqart of Tyrus Heracles.

Complications mainly occurred when monotheists were involved or when religion played a role during an insurrection. . . .

. . . Lebram argued that Antiochus IV was not a religiously intolerant persecutor; on the contrary, he recognized the foreign god and the sacredness of his temple precinct. For the orthodox, monotheistic Jews – in the end the victorious party – it was, however, unacceptable that foreigners intervened with the cult, identified the God of the Covenant with Ba`al Šamêm or Zeus Olympius, and introduced their own cultic practices.

(Spek 2014, 241)

And further yet….

The potential for conflict increased when the government itself was monotheistic. Typically, it was not satisfied with the recognition of the state god’s leadership, but demanded exclusive worship of this deity. This may be observed with the Egyptian king Akhenaton, who tried to erase the name of Amûn, and with countless emperors and kings in the Christian world, who did not even accept differing opinions about the correct cult of the one state god.

(Spek 2014, 241, italics original)

Finally….

Cyrus’ much-praised religious “tolerance” was not a new, but a time-honored policy pursued by many ancient Near Eastern kings, who wanted to have as many gods as possible on their side and hoped to gain the support of their worshippers. “Tolerance,” in antiquity, was almost never a matter of principle. If a conqueror deemed it useful, he could also forcefully compel a nation into submission, and Cyrus did not abstain from this policy. Such a harsh policy incidentally does not constitute evidence for religious “intolerance.” Destruction of temples, removal of cult images, and the like were not intended to prove that a particular god did not exist, or to prove the correctness of a dogma or creed. Repression of religious practices was rare in antiquity; it was, however, at issue when a monotheistic religion (of the victor or the vanquished) was involved, when religion had become the vehicle of rebellion, or was considered to be hostile toward the state.

(Spek 2014, 260)

Hold on…. there’s ~~one~~ two more…

The policy of polytheistic rulers is generally different from that of monotheistic kings and emperors who are inclined to impose worship of a single god and oppress deviant and foreign cults.²⁶

²⁶ G. J.D. Aalders H.Wzn, “The Tolerance of Polytheism in classical antiquity and its Limits” Free University Quarterly 9 (1964) 223-242; R. J. van der Spek, TvG 96 (1983) 6-10; Idem, Persica, 10 (1982) 278-283 (cf. supra n. 13); A. Kuhrt, “The Cyrus Cylinder and Achaemenid Imperial Policy”, Journal Stud. Old Test. 25 (1983) 83-97.

(Spek 1985, 546)

and

In the polytheistic mind every god, even the god of the most hated enemy, can exist and have power, and it is therefore better to remain on good terms with every god. Thus Sennacherib invoked Marduk in the inscription in which he described the destruction of Babylon. After the destruction of Athens in 480 B.C. Xerxes ordered that sacrifices be made to the Athenian gods according to Athenian practice (Hdt VIII,54), the Romans tried to “evoke” the gods of the cities they wished to conquer. Religious oppression is relatively exceptional. It occurs when religion plays a part in rebellion (e.g. the Jews against the Romans) or when monotheistic religion is concerned, either as the religion of subjects who cannot accept the existence of the deities of the rulers (Christians in the Roman empire), or as the religion of the rulers who wish to deny the right of the people to believe in more than one god or even to worship the state god in a manner not prescribed (Christian emperors and kings since Theodosius the Great).

(Spek 1982, 279f)

Spek, R.J. van der. “Cyrus the Great, Exiles and Foreign Gods.” In Extraction & Control: Studies in Honor of Matthew W. Stolper: 68, edited by Charles E. Jones, Christopher Woods, Michael Kozuh, and Wouter F. M. Henkelman, 233–64. Chicago, Illinois: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2014.

Spek, R. J. (Bert) van der. “The Babylonian Temple during the Macedonian and Parthian Domination.” Bibliotheca Orientalis 42 (1985): 541–62.

Spek, R. J. (Bert) van der. “Did Cyrus the Great Introduce a New Policy towards Subdued Nations? Cyrus in Assyrian Perspective.” Persica 10 (1982): 278–83.

2024-02-28

Bruno Bauer’s “Christianity Exposed” now open access

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Google Books has made Bruno Bauer’s famous “Christianity Exposed” public — though it is in German. BUT the even better news is that when I open it in Google Reader and run the cursor over the text a little box pops up giving me the option to have an instant translation of the selected text! Nice.

https://books.google.com.au/books/about … edir_esc=y Click on the Ebook link in the left margin.

2024-02-23

The Idol of Zionism, the Negation of Judaism — 1904

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Fortunately, I am not the only one raising my voice against the current, entirely misguided and long obsolete way of training rabbis. Protests are already being heard in rabbinic circles. However, not from the circles of the very youngest rabbis, who, trained in our days of chaplaincy, out of complete ignorance of the true essence of Judaism and despairing of its inner strength and future potential, throw themselves into the arms of the most recent day’s idol adorned with journalistic tinsel, called Zionism, which was recently aptly characterized by a perceptive scholar as the negation of Judaism. . . .

Original text:

Zum Glück bin ich nicht der einzige, der gegen die heutige, ganz verkehrte und längst verlebte Art, Rabbiner heranzubilden, seine Stimme erhebt. Es werden gegen dieselbe bereits in Rabbinerkreisen Proteste laut.Allerdings nicht in den Kreisen der allerjüngsten Rabbiner, die, herangebildet in unsern Tagen der Kaplanokratie, aus völliger Unkenntnis des wahren Wesens des Judentums und verzweifelnd an dessen innerer Kraft und Zukunftsstärke, sich dem jüngsten, mit journalistischem Flitter verbrämten Tagesgötzen, Zionismus genannt, den letzthin ein tiefblickender Gelehrter treffend als die Negation des Judentums charakterisierte, in die Arme werfen . . .

Friedländer, Moriz. Griechische Philosophie im alten Testament. Berlin: Reimer, 1904. http://archive.org/details/griechischephilo00frie. p. xvii

2023-11-27

Are Apostates a Threat to Believers?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

This post is directed to those who presume an anti-religious in any atheist who has left a religious past, especially one that was strict and authoritarian, and who arrives at views about the Bible and Christian origins that are at odds with the “conventional wisdom” of mainstream biblical scholars.

The stereotypical apostate from a deeply religious upbringing is said to “hate” their former religion and will be biased against it to such an extent that they will seek to undermine whenever the opportunity arises. “Once a fundamentalist always a fundamentalist” — only in the reverse direction — is a refrain that I have heard often enough from defenders of mainstream scholarship when they dismiss arguments that come from known “apostates”. I think that refrain is a lazy substitute for attempting to engage with the intellectual content of the criticisms whenever they are raised. If the apostate was once a member of a rigid, authoritarian or other kind of fundamentalist or cultish sect, then it is reasonable (the mainstream scholar’s thinking goes) to assume that the apostate is now just as brainwashed or closed-minded as ever, only now in a vengeful reaction against their former faith.

Is there evidence to support that portrayal of apostates?

Most people I have known personally who have left authoritarian cults have not the slightest interest in even thinking about their religious experiences. Those apostates are glad to engage in an entirely new life free from any reminders of that past. But that’s me — and I am merely one person’s anecdotal testimony and hearsay report.

It happens that right now I am reading a book for the purpose of reviewing it here and as early as page 31 I found myself pulled up and in dire need to to track down and skim another work that was cited on that page. Here’s what pulled I read:

Citing Burton Mack, Ellegård notes that the biblical scholar/theologian community has pretty much ignored this type of work, especially that of Wells. It’s not a surprise that Wells’s work has been subjected to rather vehement criticism from biblical scholars, some of whom accuse him of ‘anti-religious’ intentions.¹⁰⁴

¹⁰⁴ It always surprises me to note that many biblical scholars frequently accuse other scholars – some of them also biblical specialists – of ‘anti-religious’ intentions in their work. It’s a strange form of conspiracy theory which posits that a desire for, and search for, truth is somehow blasphemous. Canadian social psychologists Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger, in their book Amazing Conversions, studied the phenomenon and determined that it was the inculcation of the religious attitude that there is truth, and that it should be diligently sought, that disposes deeply honest people to turn that inquiry on their own beliefs. Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger, Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith & Others Abandon Religion (Prometheus Books, 1997)

From page 31 of Knight-Jadczyk, Laura. From Paul to Mark: PaleoChristianity. Red Pill Press, 2021. . Link is to a publicly available copy of the book at archive.org.

How had I missed Amazing Conversions given my zeal in seeking out and devouring that kind of book back in the late 1990s/early 2000s!

So now that I’ve caught up with Amazing Conversions, I’ll share some of its key findings on the way apostates from strict religious backgrounds approach anyone who presents as an inquirer into the truth about their religion. Surely an apostate’s attitude towards such a person tells us something meaningful about the likelihood that they might be reflexively predisposed to bias against establishment religions.

Amazing Conversions describes and discusses a 1995 study into persons who, contrary to the expectations we would have from their upbringing, became either apostates or devout believers.

This book hopes to provide some explanation of these two exceptional kinds of persons: individuals who — against the influences of their past and all the socialization theories in the world — swam against the tide and became, respectively, “Amazing Apostates” and “Amazing Believers.” It presents our research on rare persons who changed so mightily that they “crossed over” and became each other’s destiny. It tries to understand how such remarkable transformations could take place. (p. 12)

Who was selected for the study?

Most of these apostates had pretty nonreligious upbringings, and so their subsequent loss of belief does not come as a surprise. But a few — a very few came from relatively intensive religious backgrounds, and that is amazing. So we rounded up as many “Amazing Apostates” as we could and talked with them.

. . . .

We selected, as potential Amazing Apostates . . . all students who scored in the top quartile on the Religious Emphasis scale, and yet scored in the bottom quartile on the
Christian Orthodoxy scale.

Such persons proved quite rare. In 1994, eighteen were filtered out of 1,457 students who answered the screening booklet at the University of Manitoba. Fifteen turned up among 813 Wilfrid Laurier University students. In 1995, the figures were just 11/1,070 in Manitoba and 14/924 at Wilfrid Laurier. That works out to 1.4 percent of the sample being potential Amazing Apostates. We had to screen over 4,000 students to locate 58 of these rare beings. (pp 21, 26f of Amazing Conversions)

So this sample of 58 had travelled the road “from a strong religious childhood to religious disbelief”.

The question of particular interest here

Next we asked the AAs [=Amazing Apostates] to imagine that a younger member of their home religion came to them for advice. Religion had played a big role in this person’s life, but now questions were arising. This person wanted advice on what to do. What would they say? (p. 29)

I quote here the various descriptions of the responses to that question: Continue reading “Are Apostates a Threat to Believers?”

2023-11-26

REASONS NOT TO BELIEVE — P-L Couchoud

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Here is one more passage from Couchoud’s Théophile. What I like about Couchoud’s expressed sentiments is his sympathy, his compassion for humanity, his tolerance (in a positive sense of that word) and understanding. The New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, Sam Harris were angry, bitter, intolerant — and, I had to conclude, fundamentally ignorant about the nature of the religions they attacked and the reasons people believed in them. They created and attacked caricatures of both the faiths themselves and their adherents. At a certain level there was a truth behind those caricatures, and real harms have been committed by those religions, and I could to that extent laugh with their mockeries and feel some affinity with their disdain, but only at a superficial level. I was myself once deeply religious and had to admit that the religious believers in the world were, in fact, me. I was sincere, as far as I knew how to be sincere. I was, given my lights, as well intentioned as I knew how to be. I made horrendous mistakes, but in hindsight they were the result of ignorance, even if that ignorance was “ignorantly” self-induced, or from sheer weakness. If our own experiences are our primary guides to understanding “how others work”, I knew that there was something major lacking in the New Atheist attacks on religion. Couchoud, on the contrary, writes as a real humanist. If I was once a devout believer, I have no choice but to express the compassion and love Couchoud himself expresses for those who remain as constant reminders of ourselves.

Paul-Louis Couchoud had the following essay published in 1928 — again from his Théophile (pp 216-219) — as introduced in the previous post. Again, it is a translation from the French.

REASONS NOT TO BELIEVE

In every era, apologists try to find new “reasons to believe.” But the reasons not to believe also multiply and gradually coordinate. It is useful to occasionally take stock of them.

Our culture is characterized by the growing importance of sciences that have humanity as their object. The naturalist-type scientist, whose object of study is nature, contrasts with the humanist-type scientist, well-versed in the methods of historical, philological, and psychological sciences. To both of them, Christianity does not appear in the same way.

The naturalist scientist, in a way, ignores it and is uninterested in it. They simply exclude from the scope of their science the simplistic and ill-founded solutions that the Bible seems to impose. After doing that, they are inclined to grant religion a special domain for which they feel, according to their education, respect or disdain.

The humanist scientist behaves differently. Religion is at the very center of their study. It has an inexhaustible interest for them. However, they do not grant it a special place among human phenomena. They examine it in its historical and psychological context. They do not seek to refute it, but they aim to describe its genesis. They bring it down from the absolute and place it in the conditioned.

In our times, the mindset of the humanist scientist tends to spread. Yet, more than that of the naturalist scientist, it is fundamentally incompatible with religious faith, especially with Catholicism. For anyone who undertakes free research of this kind and wants to maintain the integral faith defined by the Council of Trent, an internal crisis is either open or latent.

It will not take much effort, indeed, to discover the historical illusions and psychological illusions on which the majestic edifice of faith is built.

Let’s consider only three psychological illusions here.

Through this special state of meditation called prayer, can we change the course of things?

It is a very dear desire of humans. It was the driving force behind all magics and religions. It bravely defies experience. In fact, prayer is a beneficial and fruitful state, akin to inspiration. It has an impact on the person who practices it and sometimes on the world through them. But to believe that in the depths of inner silence, one touches a very powerful person, be it a saint or God, is nothing but a common illusion of duplication.

Do miracles occur in Lourdes or Lisieux that go beyond nature?

An eternal illusion, as old as humankind, to which one wholeheartedly lends oneself, as the taste for the marvelous is deeply ingrained in humans. Miracles around tombs belong to popular religion, older and more vigorous than Christianity itself. They only testify to an old human desire.

Is our self or, as they say, our soul, immortal?

This is the deepest and most industrious aspiration of humans. It has built the most beautiful mysteries and the most subtle philosophies. Does that mean it can change realities? Alas! Nothing in experience corresponds to this. Human wishes are of one order, and realities are of another.

Will it be said that these illusions are beautiful and comforting? That is a matter for discussion. In any case, a religion reduced to pleading for beauty and utility is sick. Christianity is condemned to be true or to perish slowly. For it cannot prevent men from standing up to it and saying: harsh, desolate, cruel, it is the truth we seek. And on it alone, we want to rebuild our moral life, build our society.

Against the revolutionaries who want to go all the way with free inquiry, today’s Christians are reduced to defending their traditions because they are ancient and beautiful. In this, they resemble the last pagans much more than the first Christians.

Do the others, the new men, harbor hatred or contempt for Christianity? Certainly not.

Christianity is of humanity. That is why it is precious to humans. It carries within itself an immense human heritage. It is by studying it in all its aspects, in all its depths, not to seek God but to seek humanity, that we will discover the future destiny of humanity.

The one who passionately examines Christianity not to seek God but to seek humanity is sometimes more full of broad sympathy toward it than the one who strives to believe but feels the burning restraint placed on their intellectual freedom and critical sense everywhere.

2023-11-25

A FAREWELL TO CHRISTIANITY

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

I post here an interesting “Farewell to Christianity” statement by Paul-Louis Couchoud. I have relied heavily on ChatGPT to translate the original French text that appeared in Théophile ou L’étudiant des religions (1928), a compilation of his thoughts on a wide range of religious topics.

For other posts relating to Couchoud, see the posts listed under Couchoud: The Creation of Christ and Paul-Louis Couchoud. René Salm also has a detailed overview.

FAREWELL TO CHRISTIANITY

Christianity is within us like a long love to which it is time to bid farewell.

Parting is difficult; it is sad and poignant. It must be dignified. It is necessary.

For a century, Western people have struggled with Christianity, unable to either leave it or keep it. Sometimes they distance themselves from it with fury and contempt, and other times they return to it with a glimmer of hope, asking for what it can no longer provide.

The time has come for a calm farewell, where due respect will be paid to the memory and gratitude, a solemn farewell, a farewell without return.

The old religion can still speak to us in an unsettling, persuasive voice. It stretches out tired arms over us that we might find gentle. It cradled our youth. It has the words that trouble us to the deepest core. We must untangle ourselves from its embrace.

By parting from it, we venture into the unknown. It would be too good if another ready-made dwelling were prepared to welcome us!

We will have to build our new shelter. It will be a task spanning centuries. Many barracks have crumbled and will crumble before the solid, straight structure rises. We have to take our part in it.

We know the apparent failures of our predecessors. We are not discouraged by them.

The great romantics, Vigny, Lamennais, Michelet, Lamartine, Hugo were religious innovators, heretics, as one might have said in other centuries. They proclaimed the generous and confused gospel of new times. They did not establish anything visible. But the spiritual momentum they initiated will not stop. They have sounded the new Angelus.

Only Auguste Comte claimed to demolish Catholicism and rebuild it in three days. His dream seems childish. Yet, with profound instinct, he showed people what will probably be the object of the future religion: humanity.

Ernest Renan wanted to penetrate the origins of Christianity. He failed. His portrait of Jesus is as false and conventional as a painting by Ary Scheffer. He also wanted to turn the religion of science, which he shared with Taine and Berthelot, into dogmas. Today, scientism appears to be nothing more than a caricature of religion. But Renan’s work prepared for a sound and firm judgment on Christianity.

Alfred Loisy dreamed of reconciling Catholic dogma and historical criticism. He was harshly awakened. Patiently, he took up Renan’s program and Auguste Comte’s idea. He dissected the holy books of Christianity and outlined certain aspects of the religion of humanity.

Emile Durkheim attempted to explain the origins of religion. He too failed. His system was daringly built on too fragile foundations. But he ingeniously saw that religion is the primitive and necessary form that society took, and that the sacred is the social.

Shall we argue that these great failures should bring us back in submission to the withered bosom of the Church?

We would have to reject both the inconsistent and the solid, the sand and the stone.

No, the religious work of a century has not been entirely in vain. Holes have been dug, foundations laid, and a direction set. Through destruction and construction, something is happening. The spirit is in labor. Birth is foreseen.

Even if everything remains to be done, the efforts of the romantics, Comte, Renan, Loisy, and Durkheim would not be in vain. We cannot return to the old mistress of souls.

Her time was beautiful. Her time has passed. She is no longer what she was for forty generations of people: a closed universe, a safe haven, a haven of the spirit.

Poor, glorious old harbor! It held out against the winds and spray for a long time. Today, the dikes are submerged. The dismantled port has become the site of the worst storms.

If I were still willing to entrust myself to a submerged port, to a broken ship, if I still proclaimed myself a Christian, I would question myself in secret. I would thoroughly scrutinize my faith.

Is there a single fundamental dogma of Christianity to which, as a modern man, I can give my full acquiescence without hesitation?

Let’s go through them. There is no need for endless details. The views of reason are as quick as lightning.

Reason changes with every century because it is the living sum of human knowledge. Today it is less imbued with logic and algebra than in the 17th century. It has acquired a new acuteness since it forged the refined methods of historical sciences.

The problems that metaphysics has vainly pondered now arise from the perspective of history.

Let’s consider the essential questions: Scripture, Jesus, God. In the face of the Christian assertion, what is the immediate reaction of today’s reason?

The sacred character was initially attached to material objects: a tree, a stone, a spring. Transferring it to an intellectual object, such as the text of a book, was a tremendous advance in abstraction. It resulted in a great oppression of the mind, common to all religions of the book.

Is there, among books, a book that is not of man, a sacred book?

What prevents us from believing it is that we are beginning to see under what circumstances, by which priestly colleges, for what purpose, the parts of the Bible were successively declared sacred, and how theologians then disserted on the alleged divine inspiration. It is a very human history.

The circumstances that lead to the canonization of a book did not only occur among the Hebrews and Christians. The Persians before the Hebrews, and the Arabs after the Christians, had their sacred books. In this case, as in others, the sacred only expresses a social fact. How would today’s historian distinguish between the various sacred books of humanity?

The sacred character was initially attached to material objects: a tree, a stone, a spring. Transferring it to an intellectual object, such as the text of a book, was a tremendous advance in abstraction. It resulted in a great oppression of the mind, common to all religions of the book. A sacred stone will be revered in new ways over the ages. A sacred text imposes itself with a bruising rigidity. Three or four words from the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ have endlessly provoked the massacre of women.

The critical study of the sacred books of the Old and New Testaments shows that most of them were composed in successive layers. The wondrous things people thought they would find there disappear upon examination.

It was admired that Isaiah had mentioned the name of Cyrus two centuries before Cyrus’s birth. This was because it had not been noticed that the Book of Isaiah is made up of two parts, separated precisely by those centuries.

It was astonishing that the wise Daniel could predict exactly the wars and marriages of the Seleucid kings, until it became evident that the author of the Book of Daniel lived during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes.

Today, the true defenders of the Bible are those who find in it a rugged and proud testimony to humanity, not those who linger in search of enigmatic oracles.

These false wonders did a disservice to the Bible. Since we now see it as the literature of an ancient people, it has lost its divine character. It has gained powerful human interest.

Today, the true defenders of the Bible are those who find in it a rugged and proud testimony to humanity, not those who linger in search of enigmatic oracles.

Is there, among the men who have lived, a man of a different nature than all of them, a man-God?

The problem of Jesus is not resolved. Clarifying it will be one of the great tasks of our century. It is much more difficult than it seems.

So far, it has gone through four phases.

In the time of Renan and up until around 1900, it was believed possible to write a life of Jesus. This had to be abandoned. Critics recognized that there is a lack of materials for such an undertaking.

Then, immense efforts were made in Germany and France to extract a historical core from the gospel texts. What was believed to be known about Jesus was reduced to two traits: preaching the end of the world and being condemned to death in consequence..

This small historical core itself did not remain immune to criticism. Its determination is not without arbitrariness. The solidity attributed to it is only apparent.

In recent years, Germans have given up on knowing anything certain about Jesus. What we reach historically is not Jesus, but the early Christian groups. The idea they had of Jesus was not historical. It was subordinated to the cult they rendered to him and the divine legends that circulated in the ancient world.

Finally, others have wondered if Jesus is not a purely spiritual being. It is as God that he is attested from the beginning and has crossed the centuries. However high we go, we find him on altars, an object of worship. It is difficult to understand how he could have been made God from a man. It is easier to understand how God was humanized. After all, his earthly passion, passus sub Pontio Pilato, is just a dogma, inserted as such among others in the creed.

We cannot yet say to which final conception critical research will lead. But whether Jesus remains classified among men or among gods, he will be placed in a clear-cut category.

If he is a man, he is one of the messianic agitators of the 1st century of our era, and not the least chimerical, a Jewish martyr, and not the most touching, a rabbi of Israel, and not the wisest.

If he is God, he stands beside, or rather, above the other dead and resurrected gods. He is God who suffers. He is the most moving divine figure that suffering humanity has produced.

As for the idea of a God-man, it’s a confused idea, a behemoth like the centaur, which we’re forced to disentangle.

A man could have been deified, by an uncommon aberration of religious sentiment. A god could have been endowed with a human face and earthly adventures by the infinite fertility of religious imagination. In the first case, Jesus is a false god. In the second case, he is a false man. Man-God is an unthinkable thing, a purely verbal compound.

Obscure man or splendid God, Jesus will take his place in the line of men or in the line of figures created by humanity.

Jesus has everything to lose by being registered in the annals of history. Those who deny his historical existence will remain the only ones able to defend his spiritual reality.

He has everything to lose by being registered in the annals of history. Those who deny his historical existence will remain the only ones able to defend his spiritual reality.

Is there, in the world and beyond the world, a single and personal God who, among the peoples, saves only one people: the Jews in the past, the Christians today?

What prevents us from believing …. is a knowledge of history.

What prevents us from believing this is not a philosophy of the world, but a knowledge of history.

The old philosophical problem of the existence of God loses its interest as soon as we historically perceive the birth of God.

The supreme God whom Christians worship, on whom philosophers speculate, has historical origins. It is the ancient god of Israel, the barbaric Yahweh.

He was first a small god of the desert, a djinn, the local genius of a spring in a dreadful valley. He only had real existence during seasonal festivals when nomads, grouping their tents around the spring, created him. They believed they had captured his name, lah, lahou, or lahvé. Lots were cast to summon his judgment. Some very simple wishes were attributed to him, forming a small code. By accepting these rules, one was considered to make an alliance with him.

Mercenaries who escaped from Egypt and returned to a nomadic life made an alliance with him and formed a people around him.

When these insatiable Hebrews attacked Canaan, they believed they were taking Yahweh with them in a portable chest. They attributed their successful actions to him.

As soon as they were established, Yahweh became a Baal, that is, a land-owning god. He was endowed with temples, land, slaves, sacred prostitutes, and prophets. He usurped Babylonian cosmogonic legends that made him the creator of heaven and earth.

In the spiritual history of humanity, there is no greater episode than the rise of this god. One of the most recent and humblest among the gods, he managed to eliminate all the others in the West.

The power of a god lies in the faith one devotes to him. It is most evident in defeat. Yahweh grew through tremendous defeats.

His followers were torn apart by schism and almost annihilated. He was left with only one temple, that of Jerusalem. This was the basis of his glory. The god of the single temple began to be conceived as the one God.

Then he was completely defeated by the god of Babylon, Bel-Marduk. His temple was destroyed, his people partly exterminated, partly enslaved. It was then that he rose to the highest.

A prophet-poet whose name is unknown and whom we call the Second Isaiah formulated monotheism. Yahweh is not only superior to the other gods, he alone is God. The conqueror Cyrus, who does not know him, is nevertheless his instrument. An unprecedented idea.

God was born. It is a date in human history. The Second Isaiah founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in one stroke. Judaism, which he transformed from a national religion into a catholic religion. Christianity, because in a mysterious part of his poem, he outlined the figure of the Servant, martyr and redeemer, an early version of Jesus. Islam, which is only a repetition of the monotheistic message.

A solemn date! At the same time, in the sixth century BCE, Confucius and Laozi gave China the rites of wisdom, India was stirred by the immense Buddhism, Zarathustra in Persia changed a religion of princes into a religion of peasants, and Pythagoras in the West reformed the mysteries. And the Second Isaiah proclaimed a unique God destined to conquer half the world.

It seems that the entire planet is setting its religious destiny for a long time to come. It’s like the passage of a celestial body.

After the major religious reforms of the sixth century, the Christian revolution is secondary. Its main effect was to make the monotheism of Israel acceptable to the Western world by adding a myth of redemption.

Today, the idea of a single God has become so natural to us that we believe it to be essential to religion. It is not. In Buddhism and Confucianism, the idea of God or gods plays almost no role. An atheistic religion is perfectly conceivable. . . . Monotheism is neither truer nor more moral than polytheism.

Today, the idea of a single God has become so natural to us that we believe it to be essential to religion. It is not. In Buddhism and Confucianism, the idea of God or gods plays almost no role. An atheistic religion is perfectly conceivable.

Monotheism is neither truer nor more moral than polytheism. It is a mental habit, a way of speaking. It is a religious imagination that seduces with apparent simplicity and disappoints in the end if asked for a profound explanation of things.

God, in whom we are accustomed to symbolize the absolute, is the invention of a time and a place. It has intimate connections with ancient Palestine and the city of Jerusalem.

Around the hollow rock that bore the altar of burnt offerings, humble singers composed the Psalms that are endlessly repeated in all Western temples today. The Song of Solomon was murmured there for the first time so that, centuries later in Spain, Saint Teresa and thousands of women would be intoxicated by it.

In the countless Jewish, Christian and Muslim minds for whom Jerusalem is still a holy city, God exists

But His credit, compared to what it was in past centuries, has diminished.

All the great religious movements that began in the sixth century BCE have either exhausted themselves or seem to be declining.

God is fading.

Will the celestial body pass by again?

Couchoud, Paul Louis. Théophile ou L’étudiant des religions. Paris: André Delpeuch, 1928. pp 219-231 (Highlighting of selected quotations are my own additions)

2023-11-23

Two Months Jail for Writing God Prefers Grilled Chops to Boiled Cabbage

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

In Canada, Attorney Murphy brought a case against Mr. Ernest-Victor Slerry of Toronto, accused of writing the following lines:

The God of the Bible is portrayed as someone who walks in the Garden of Eden, talks to a woman, curses a snake, sews skins to make clothing, prefers the taste of roasted chops to the smell of boiled cabbage, sits in a burning bush, comes out from behind rocks, an old rascal that Moses had a hard time calming, who, in fits of rage, massacred hundreds of thousands of his chosen people, and who would have killed them all if cunning Moses hadn’t reminded him: What will the Egyptians say?

Obviously, these things are said without delicacy. But in the end, if the form is lacking, the substance is accurate. Not a word that cannot be supported by a reference. Long before the Christian era, the “anthropomorphisms” of the Bible shocked the Jews.

Under the blasphemy law, Mr. E.-V. Slerry was sentenced to two months in prison. The judge declared, “Our conception of God is an integral part of our national life. We view the Bible as the basis for all good laws in our country. It is the dearest and most precious book in the world to us.”

Couchoud, Paul Louis. Théophile ou L’étudiant des religions. Paris: André Delpeuch, 1928. p. 174 – ChatGPT translation
https://archive.org/details/couchoud-theophile

2023-06-30

Varieties of Atheism # 7 — The Drama of Atheism

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

With thanks to University of Chicago Press for granting me a review copy.

I was not ready for essays compiled by David Newheiser in Varieties of Atheism when I undertook to read them. My initial response to some of the quasi-theological views seeking alignment with certain atheistic thought was impatience. I could see no relevance to the direction I had set for my life. By the time I read the final chapter, however, I began to rethink some of what I had read earlier from a new perspective. Maybe I had been overlooking the likelihood that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

What does it mean to claim, as Furey does (by inverting Lubac) in the closing chapter of Varieties : “atheism that creates real drama represents a ‘living force’ capable of ‘replacing what it destroys.'”?

The contributors to the volume represent “theologians, intellectual historians, cultural critics, and literary scholars” who have “collectively refused narrow definitions of belief, tired arguments about normative versus descriptive claims, and simplistic metaphysical arguments.” They “read and thought about Nietzsche and Dante and Einstein, Hume and Dostoevsky and Eagleton . . . [They were] uninterested in denying or defending a literalist supernaturalism, united in [their] interest in atheism’s diversity, and intrigued by the possibility that new studies of atheism might unravel the single thread linking religion to belief.” (p. 200)

Contributors to Varieties of Atheism:

Constance M. Furey…. Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University …. cofounder of the Center for Religion and the Human…. Poetic Relations: Faith and Intimacy in the English Reformation (2016) and Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination (2021)

Vittorio Montemaggi …. Reader in Religion, Literature and the Arts in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London and Director of the Von Hügel Institute for Critical Catholic Inquiry at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge…. adjunct professor at the London Global Gateway of the University of Notre Dame and affiliate of Notre Dame’s Center for Italian Studies….

David Newheiser …. Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University and an affiliate of the university’s Gender and Women’s History Research Centre…. codirector of an interdisciplinary collaboration on the ritual dimensions of contemporary art. His current book project considers the link between premodern miracles and democratic imagination.

George Pattison …. retired scholar and Anglican priest…. Honorary Professional Research Fellow in the School of Critical Studies, at the University of Glasgow…. three part “philosophy of Christian life,” comprising A Phenomenology of the Devout Life (2018), A Rhetorics of the Word (2019), and A Metaphysics of Love (2021), …. coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2019).

Mary-Jane Rubenstein …. Professor of Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University…. Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (2022), Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2018), Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (2014), and Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (2009)…. coeditor …. Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (2017) and coauthor …. of Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination (2021).

Devin Singh …. Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College and faculty associate in Dartmouth’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality…. Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (2018) and Economy and Modern Christian Thought (2022), coeditor of Reimagining Leadership on the Commons (2021), and author of articles in Journal of Religious Ethics, Harvard Theological Review, Scottish Journal of Theology, Implicit Religion, Political Theology, Religions, and Telos.

Henning Tegtmeyer …. Associate Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion at KU Leuven…. Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Durham University…. Formbezug und Weltbezug. Die Deutungsoffenheit der Kunst (2006; 2008); Sinnkritisches Philosophieren (de Gruyter, 2013), coedited …. and Gott, Geist, Vernunft. Prinzipien und Probleme der Natürlichen Theologie (2013).

Susannah Ticciati …. Professor of Christian Theology at King’s College London. She is author of Reading Augustine: On Signs, Christ, Truth and the Interpretation of Scripture (2022), A New Apophaticism: Augustine and the Redemption of Signs (2013), and Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading beyond Barth (2005).

Denys Turner, formerly Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor at Yale University and Norris-Hulse Professor at Cambridge University, is now …. retired …. The Darkness of God, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, Thomas Aquinas, a Portrait, being among them, and forthcoming with Cambridge, Dante the Theologian….

Andre C. Willis …. Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University…. He is the author of Towards a Humean True Religion (2015) and is currently working on a manuscript about African American religion and politics that is tentatively titled Afro-theisms and Post-democracy. He has published …. Hume Studies, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Political Theology, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Radical America.

One example of the departure from simplistic “God! Alive or Dead? True or False?” style of argument is Devin Singh’s chapter, “Atheism and Politics: Abandonment, Absence, and the Empty Throne”. Singh’s analysis of the meaning of the ascension of Christ, or the departure of Jesus from those who remain on earth, at times reminded me of one particular interpretation of the earliest of the canonical gospels, the Gospel of Mark, that reads it as a message for Christians who are living in a time of abandonment, in the absence of their Saviour. But Singh’s interpretation of the core of Christian theology goes one step further than that by insisting that the absence of Christ lies at the very “heart of Christian thought”. Attempts to create the sense of Christ’s presence are illusions: talk of ineffable glory, for example, masks the reality of absence, as does talk of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Such concepts are coping mechanisms for the reality that Jesus is not with us. What follows from such a theological viewpoint is the idea that Christ’s representatives on earth have a responsibility to rule or influence rulers on His behalf pending His return. But why the delay — a delay that allows for all kinds of evil while waiting for the “good and just” God to intervene? Enter “protest atheism”.

“Protest atheism” takes the Christian claims about a good and just God on their own terms and turns them against the church. But Singh speaks of an “ascension atheism” by way of contrast:

. . . protest atheism reveals the true kernel for Christian theology after ascension. It is a theology that must assert and embrace the absent and missing Christ, and as such accepts its theological operation as an empty, broken fragment of a lost dream. In this sense it does not remain as protest, for it recognizes that the protest emerges from an expectation of arrival, a desire for manifestation. Protest atheism, on the one hand, believes too faithfully in the hiddenness of the righteous king, and shakes its fist at the absent God who refuses to appear, particularly among the poor and excluded.

Ascension atheism, on the other hand, moves past this righteous, justified, and understandable protest to a form of contrite acceptance. Facing the trauma of abandonment, it acknowledges the absurdity of the denial and cover up that is the very history of Christian theology and ecclesial tradition. . . . .

. . . ascension atheism suggests that there is no sovereign at all. (p. 146)

Furey summarizes Singh’s conclusion as denying the difference between atheism and theism,

focusing instead on the political implications of [Jesus’] tarrying: rather than hailing Christ as king of kings, Christians must realize that “all kings are dead and gone and that we have kept their myths alive too long.”

A section heading in Singh’s chapter is “The Impossibilities of Political Theology”. His conclusion relates to anarchist and communal philosophies:

According to the political terms explored in this chapter, what might emerge from the recognition of the ascension and loss of the king who was promised? As suggested at the outset and underscored by the empty throne, the suppressed transcript of ascension may be the exposure of absence lurking behind all claims to kingship and to sovereignty more broadly. More radical than critiques that point out the various supports marshaled by sovereign power to exalt itself and protect its position, ascension atheism suggests that there is no sovereign at all. It exposes the tendency to seek, await, and act as if the sovereign is present and real, thus providing space to interrogate why such moves appear necessary in human community at all. It may also help explain the tendency to correlate sovereignty with loss and expenditure, where sovereign assertions of supremacy, inasmuch as they emerge in contexts influenced by Christian thought, display the need to reenact this founding loss that marks visions of community in Christian tradition and in its secular wake [endnote points to Bataille, Agamben, Blanchot, Nancy (bis)]. It raises the watchful warning that when such models of sovereignty claim to represent the people, their own absence and invisibility may be required. It may also expose the problems inherent in Christian political critiques of sovereign power that assert an even more sovereign and exalted Christ in its place. Rather than relativizing earthly power under the supreme lordship of the King of Kings, accepting the abandoned and empty throne means proceeding with the proclamation that all kings are dead and gone and that we have kept their myths alive too long. (146f)

Furey shines a light on similar kinds of finds that are only exposed by digging well beneath the surface in other chapters, too. I feel I have often missed the main points with my relatively superficial coverages (link is to the archive of all posts on Varieties of Atheism). The volume opens up thoughts and questions from literary, philosophical, political and theological perspectives that enquire into what might serve as foundations for a richer life, a Dostoevskyian “religion of life”, or for what Newheiser says in another work is “an ethical practice of openness to the unexpected”, a practice that eschews “rigid adherence that is impervious to other possibilities” (156, 132 of Hope in a Secular Age). The thinking and ideas are at a level I have not been exposed to before. It’s a new world of reflection I had not hitherto even suspected existed.

Newheiser, David. Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Newheiser, David, ed. The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo182880666.html.

2023-06-26

Varieties of Atheism # 6 – Atheism and the Good of Humanity

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

With thanks to University of Chicago Press for granting me a review copy. — David Hume (left) and Richard Rorty

The second chapter in Varieties of Atheism was, for me, a thought-provoker. It touches on the fundamentals of “How do we know?” and why we cannot justifiably sink into a self-centred “Why should I care about anyone else if there is no God?” approach to life. The author, Andre C. Willis, in the chapter titled “Atheism and Society”, examines these questions through a discussion of two philosophers, the Enlightenment era’s David Hume and the Postmodernist Richard Rorty.

Willis opens with a challenge that made me question if I was going to enjoy the rest of his chapter:

Public disputes between those who hold the idea that God exists and those who reject this idea are often fanned on one side by hostility for the Abrahamic traditions and fueled on the other side by animus for skepticism. This is why these polemical and often performative debates between so-called theists and so-called atheists often strike me as disingenuous; they masquerade as serious intellectual argument as a way to conceal low-grade animus.

I may have once had some level of hostility towards “Abrahamic traditions” but did I not have some justification for that hostility, and did those feelings negate my reasoning about them, or the question of God’s existence? Might not a certain level of animus sometimes be a product of concern for a greater good?

A little later Willis throws out another challenge, drawing on the words of Denys Turner in “How to be an Atheist”:

The hubris of a confident theism that knows “all too well what [it] is affirming when [it] says ‘God exists’” is the “mirror image” of a bold atheism that “know (s) all too well what it [is] denying when [it] says ‘God does not exist.’”

Turner goes on to explain:

For both the affirmer and the denier are complicit in a sort of cosy and mutually reassuring idolatrous domesticity: in short, they keep each other in a job.

Are the grounds for each position the same? If not, can the atheist in that exchange really be a “mirror image” of the theist? Maybe Turner has in mind an atheist I am not so familiar with. I’d rather explore new and old ideas than hang around to argue such a point ….

…. like exploring once more the thoughts of Hume and Rorty, and understanding where I fit between the philosophical systems each of those names represents.

One thing I have discovered through my own reflections on life and beliefs since leaving religion behind is that I have independently made myself part of a larger “community” of nonbelievers who share similar ideas and fundamental values. So often I find myself inwardly smiling in recognition at hearing others espousing outlooks about life and humanity that it took me years to learn for myself. There is something in common binding us and I do “wonder” a little, but unlike Willis I draw back from suggesting that this “wonder” over “something” should have a religious or theistic dimension.

Certainly it is true that reason alone is not enough to explain “life” or persuade anyone to disbelieve in God:

The conventional pillars of the Western philosophical enterprise — rational certainty, formal argumentation, and ethical persuasion — which, to them [Hume and Rorty], had proved insufficient tools to combat idolatry. They recognized that literature (especially Rorty’s notion of philosophy as poetics), captivating narratives (especially Rorty’s idea of redescription as a literary practice), multivocality (Hume’s numerous dialogues), and close attention to literary form (especially Hume’s essays, philosophical treatises, political arguments, historical writings, and letters) were just as important as, if not more important than, the formal philosophical grammars of metaphysics and epistemology, particularly when it came to contending with belief in deities and embracing tenets of a religious tradition.

Another echo from my early days exploring a world without god: I used to say, when pushed, that I believe in poetry. Not quite sure why but I think what I was trying to say was that we resort to metaphors to convey certain experiences. That’s not spiritual but, I think, something wired into our cranial circuits. Such a “reductionist” explanation doesn’t rob it of meaning, though.

Hume worked through the logic of the arguments to conclude that there can be no reason to believe in God. Rorty concluded that all our knowledge and understanding is bound up in our language, the words and concepts we use, and we cannot go beyond those words and we may doubt that we can justify our set of words over another person’s set of words.

Like Rorty’s liberal ironist, who has continuing doubts about her final vocabulary, Hume’s moderate skeptic is “diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical convictions” . . . The similarities here are glaring.

The rationale might be different but the end result is the same – humility.

I have avoided repeating (or even explaining) here Willis’s explanations of the grounds of Hume’s and Rorty’s reasoning in the hope that interested readers will grasp some partial but sufficient sense of what each is about. Both believe in some kind of action that takes us beyond mere words or logic.

There are at least three resonances between Hume’s “easy philosophy” and the approach of Rorty’s liberal ironist that are worth noting. First, Hume says that it “borrows all helps from poetry.” Recall . . . Rorty’s . . . . philosophy as a form of poetry. Second, similar to the affective strengths of the Rortyan ironist, Hume’s “easy philosophy” appeals to our feelings and sentiments, not reason alone. And third, Hume’s easy philosophy understands humans as “born for action” in ways that the ironist is driven to the action of redescription.

As a lay outsider I find it surprising and encouraging to see some common ground between Enlightenment and Postmodernist thinking. Or rather than “thinking” should that be “feeling”? We are animals, after all, and we have feelings before we are able to “think” in any formal logical sense.

Rorty’s “urging” for a human solidarity that cannot be justified via any “philosophical presuppositions” aims, ultimately, to function as a way to link suffering human agents. To recognize our “similarities with respect to pain and humiliation” . . . is, for Rorty, to create togetherness across various divisions and to generate connections where it feels unnatural to do so. To my ear, this way of thinking about generating connections carries a religious residue, has a teleological dimension, and relies on, in some ways, something like a quasi-theological — or at least not-fully-comprehensible – power.

I hesitate once again. Maybe it’s a matter of definition. But does not the word “theological” (even if modified with “quasi”) throw in an unnecessary factor? Why not simply call it poetical? Does not our depth of experience and wonder prompt us to call upon metaphors? Is that not enough? Is that not enough to justify a communication with a theologian?

We are all the same, however different. We all have a natural investment in the good of “us”.

Newheiser, David, ed. The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo182880666.html.

Turner, Denys. “How to Be an Atheist.” New Blackfriars 83, no. 977/978 (2002): 317–35.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43249944

2023-06-18

Varieties of Atheism # 5 – Pantheism and Einstein

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Mary-Jane Rubenstein (photo from ICE Dartmouth)

I cover here another chapter in Varieties of Atheism: Mary-Jane Rubenstein‘s “Atheism and Science” discusses the relevance of Einstein’s “cosmic religious sense” to atheism.

On Albert Einstein’s “Cosmic Religious Sense”

Mary-Jane Rubenstein begins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where we find the relationship between science and religion taking shape. Our first view is that of the confusion between pantheism and atheism. Baruch Spinoza, could be described as both a “God-intoxicated man” and an atheist! If Spinoza could declare all Nature to be God, more rigid “believers” would react with despair that such an impersonal deity was no deity at all. Even philosophers are not all convinced: Arthur Schopenhauer dismissed pantheism as nothing but “a euphemism for atheism”; closer to home, Nancy Frankenberry writes

by assimilating God to Nature … [pantheists] raise the suspicion that one of the two of them is semantically superfluous. (quoted p. 21)

What does pantheism have to do with Einstein? Einstein (along with Niels Bohr) replaced Newton’s clockwork universe with an ever-shifting one, depending on where one lives and how one observes it. What sort of god does that make the world of nature? And what are the implications for religious debates?

It all began in April 1929….

. . . one week before a lavish gala at the Metropolitan Opera House in honor of Einstein’s fiftieth birthday, which would draw 3,500 people in support of the Jewish National Fund and the Zionist Organization of America. As American Jews prepared to celebrate their most famous kinsman, Boston cardinal William Henry O’Connell delivered an address to the New England Province of Catholic Clubs of America, urging their members to pay no attention to the Jewish pseudoprophet. Having previously denounced Hollywood and radio technology for proliferating a monstrous cadre of “masculine women” and “effeminate men,” the cardinal charged Einstein’s theory of relativity with endorsing the categorical indistinction of the topsy-turvy era. The theory, he insisted, was nothing more than “befogged speculation producing universal doubt about God and his creation, cloaking the ghastly apparition of atheism.” (Quoted from “Einstein Believes in ‘Spinoza’s God,”’ New York Times, April 25,1929 — Rubenstein, p. 21)

Relativity — what a word. As Rubenstein remarks,

. . . one can surmise from the ensuing controversies that the mere name of relativity connoted for O’Connell moral laxity . . . . In short, relativity’s denial of any absolute reference point for space and time seemed to O’Connell a denial of the Absolute altogether, and for that reason, it was both morally and empirically wrong. (p. 22)

Einstein appealed to Spinoza’s God, not explicitly in public, but in a telegram sent to an inquiring rabbi who made the telegram famously public:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of all things, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

Einstein or his supporters tried to repair some damage in subsequent publications and statements by stressing “the essentially mysterious” nature of the universe, declaring that he “confronts it with awe and reverence”. But that was not going to appease anyone devoted to a personal god. Eventually Einstein delivered a lecture on the question of science and religion. Rubenstein summarizes key points:

Science, he ventured, is concerned with “what is” whereas religion tells us “what should be”-, science uncovers “facts,” whereas religion prescribes “human thoughts and actions.” As such, neither is sufficient on its own; in Einstein’s now iconic words, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”.

Whence, then, comes the perceived opposition between these mutually beneficial regimes? The largest impediment to the harmony between science and religion, Einstein ventures, is in the concept of a personal God. Channeling Spinoza, Einstein argues that science cannot affirm the existence of an anthropomorphic power who from time to time violates the order of nature in response to human petition. In addition to being scientifically inadmissible, he explains, such a God is ethically useless, relieving human beings of responsibility for their own actions. . . . For ethical and scientific reasons alike, then, Einstein insists that “teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God”. Once people are free from this divine overlord, Einstein promises they will also be free from egoistic concerns (like having the largest gross domestic product or the biggest sport utility vehicle), eventually attaining that comportment his earlier essay called the cosmic religious sense: a humble feeling of reverence for the mysterious yet rational whole. And in this way, the religious person becomes affectively identical to the scientist. (pp. 24f – Rubenstein’s italics)

We can imagine the outrage among many mainstream clerics. Einstein’s view was denounced as opening up a world without any moral order, with no personal god to hold people to account. In fact, though, Einstein had made the opposite case: that if God were personal, then God would be responsible for human evil.

For Einstein, the words God and Nature were interchangeable. The world is “so rationally structured that we can think of it as divine.”

Channeling Spinoza, Einstein argues that science cannot affirm the existence of an anthropomorphic power who from time to time violates the order of nature in response to human petition. In addition to being scientifically inadmissible, he explains, such a God is ethically useless, relieving human beings of responsibility for their own actions. (p. 24)

Concerning “faith”, Einstein believed in the “rationality or intelligibility of the world”, and that’s where he ran into problems with Bohr’s quantum physics and unpredictable particles. Rubenstein quotes Einstein:

The basis of all scientific work is the conviction that the world is an ordered and comprehensive entity which is a religious sentiment. (p. 27)

I suppose it is a religious sentiment. But why can’t we say that religious sentiments are really poetically felt and expressed secular sentiments? (But that thought brings us to the next chapter and the next post.)

Mystery and comprehensibility went hand in hand for Einstein. But how could one make sense of an indeterminate universe of quantum mechanics? Rubenstein refers to the historian of science Gunther Stent’s article that interprets the Einstein-Bohr debate as less a debate about physical theory than about God.

What they were actually arguing about, Stent suggests, was whether or not there was a superrational power stabilizing the quantum-dicey universe, with Einstein holding onto “the traditional monotheistic viewpoint of modern science” and Bohr breaking through to a genuine, postmodern “atheism.” (p. 32)

When Rubenstein speaks of Einstein’s appeal to God (Does God play dice?) I take God to be another term for Nature. Bohr, she writes, was baffled by Einstein’s “presumption that God was a single, immutable order of things beyond the multitude of worldly phenomena.” She speaks of the “absolutism of determinism and the anthropocentrism of ‘reason'” underlying Einstein’s view of the “ordered universe”. (I had not thought of the “rational view” of the universe as being a projected anthropomorphism before.)

If God is equated with Nature, Rubenstein is suggesting that according to the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics we arrive at “a pluralistic, perspectival pantheism that would constitute even more of a threat than atheism to the anthropic father-friend of classical theism” (p. 21)

Such a “pantheology” would amount to atheism for some, but for others it would not, Rubenstein concludes.

(There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.)

The above post, I hope, gives a reliable small taste of a thought provoking chapter.

—-
Addendum:

From one of Rubenstein’s examples I am reminded of the disputes in Australia over landmarks that are sacred sites for some and sources of monetary wealth for others. That kind of conflict and its ultimate sources will in part be addressed in my next post when I look at the chapter by Andre C. Willis exploring how the Postmodernist Rorty was prefigured in certain ways by the Enlightenment philosopher Hume and what that means for a more compassionate and healthy society beyond any religious-atheist divide.

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Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “What is your view on the question? I am sure you have given it much more thought than I have.…” Nov 22, 06:04
Clarke W Owens on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “Other writers have said much the same thing, i.e., that the Gnostics considered the story of Jesus true, but taking…” Nov 22, 03:08
Clarke W Owens on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “This was from “The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul.” Signature Books 2012. Don’t have the page…” Nov 22, 03:02
LC on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 1: Historical Facts and Probability: “As far as I am aware historians are 100% certain (probability = 1) about the basic fact that Gaius Julius…” Nov 22, 01:49
Tim Widowfield on How Did We Get Here? Part 1: “That’s pretty much it. The problem for me will be to relate history that is rarely discussed and poorly understood…” Nov 22, 01:34
Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “Just one more thing while I prepare my next post….. In response to your point: You know that we have…” Nov 21, 23:28
Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “In my next post I might address more specifically some of the points you raise in your comment here. Carrier…” Nov 21, 22:46
Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History: “Can you give me the source for Price’s discussion? I don’t recall having read that one. I don’t see how…” Nov 21, 22:28
db on How Did We Get Here? Part 1: “As I understand, Tim will examine US historical events over a long-period, to understand the underlying structures and patterns that…” Nov 21, 18:36

Foragers

Pastoralists

Horticulturalists

Agriculturalists

Proposed Explanation for Belief in a Supreme Moralizing God

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Who was selected for the study?

The question of particular interest here

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REASONS NOT TO BELIEVE

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FAREWELL TO CHRISTIANITY

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On Albert Einstein’s “Cosmic Religious Sense”

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