Month: January 2009

Joe Carter and Conor Friedersdorf say goodbye to Culture11.

At Claremont-McKenna College last night, my thoughts on the stimulus package vote this week crystallized a little – they can do that when a bunch of feisty undergraduates are asking good questions. On the one hand, I’m delighted that the GOP has rediscovered fiscal conservatism after a long period of Bush insanity. On the other hand, they may have chosen the one moment in recent history when fiscal conservatism could be disastrous. Yes, I can understand why Obama’s bizarre idea of having Rahm Emmanuel deal with the House GOP back-fired (shouldn’t he just run the White House?). But I also see that Obama won the last election, the public rightly expects a real boost to demand, and more tax cuts simply won’t do enough.

So what to do? This is the smartest GOP approach I’ve seen yet:

Instead of fighting Dems on the dollar amount of spending, knowing that we would lose that fight in any event, we could have stood with Obama and called for large high-tech infrastructure projects that would employ large numbers of minorities in construction and white collar suburbanites in development. These projects (high speed rail corridors as an example) would also capture the imagination of the green close-in suburbs that are turning viciously against the GOP and have the strategic benefit of jamming up the young Dem members (Webb/Warner/Hagan/McCaskill) who depended on these voters for their victories.

Bring on the long term infrastructure investment.

A protest, in a way, against the tin-ear and reactionary compulsions of Pope Benedict, the German Pope who just brought anti-Semitism back into the church. Or can the truth ever be a protest?

I’ve been a little awed by the email responses to the recent discussions about faith, doubt and atheism. They have swamped the in-tray. One recurrent theme through the emails is actually very encouraging to someone like me: it is that doubt and darkness are not the antithesis of light and faith. Here’s a striking passage by a Benedictine nun, Joan Chittister, from "In My Own Words" that resonated:

It has not always been easy—I went through a terrible period as a young sister—to the point that I thought I would have to leave religious life because I doubted the divinity of Jesus. Only when I realized that I did believe deeply and profoundly in God could I come to peace with the fact that faith in God would have to be enough. It was a dark, empty time. It threw me back on the barest of beliefs but the deepest of beliefs. I hung on in hope like a spider on a thread. But the thread was enough for me. As a result, my faith actually deepened over the years. The humanity of Jesus gave promise to my own. Jesus ceased to be distant and ethereal and “perfect.” Jesus let no system, no matter how revered, keep him from a relationship with God. And that union with God, I came to understand, was divine. Then I also understood that questions are of the essence in a mature faith.

I don’t fear the questions any more. I know that they are all part of the process of coming to union with God and refusing to make an idol of anything less. The point is that during that difficult time I didn’t try to force anything. I simply lived in the desert believing that whatever life I found there was life enough for me. I believed that God was in the darkness. It is all part of the purification process and should be revered. It takes away from us our paltry little definitions of God and brings us face-to-face with the Transcendent. It is not to be feared. It is simply to be experienced. Then, God begins to live in us without benefit of recipes and rituals, laws, and “answers”—of which there are, in the final analysis, none at all.

Another word for this, perhaps, is hope.

(Photo: Johannes Simon/Getty.)

"No one knows who will live in [the Iron Cage] in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might be said:

‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved,’"

– Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905.

A reader noted this in response to my remark about consuming vs living.

A reader writes:

Your philosophy student reader’s email did a wonderful job of finding three ways to say the same simple point: Christianity is more than an infatuation with God as Deity. I think most atheists understand and accept this and a moment’s time exploring the writings of even the spittle-flecked atheist agitators shows that they understand that life still presents significant questions, both moral and existential, that religions claim to answer.

Your previous reader letter raised a similar point concerning the seeming lack of positive propositions from atheist thinkers, but the philosophy student goes a step further and insinuates that perhaps "real atheism" is close to impossible unless one can otherwise justify all of one’s existential beliefs without God.

Both of these readers, I think, conflate atheism with too much else. Atheism is a simple proposition: Sufficient, convincing evidence for existence of the Supreme Being(s) is lacking and claims that rely on the existence of God for their validity are therefore false. Atheism is not the idea that morality does not and cannot exist, it is simply the idea that God does not exist. To use your previous reader’s metaphor: Atheists claim we all actually live in the same country, but that our country is not God’s country even though most people believe that’s where they live.

And indeed, were atheists ever to "win" their argument, people would have to decide how to guide their conduct in the world without taking it for granted that certain things were deemed impermissible by the highest Authority in existence. These aren’t easy questions to answer and, to my mind, the naked fact that God does or does not exist, does little to help us with their answers. There are reasons to follow certain moral principles that are founded on more than God’s directives and lessons and stories that constitute so much of religious teachings bear this out. Atheist thought does, in fact, grapple with these issues as well… but it’s somewhat difficult getting religious people to devote lots of time to atheist study.

Your two previous reader letters started by implying that atheists haven’t yet earned a place in the discussion and finished by insinuating that it might be impossible for atheists to have anything to say once they get there. The problem is that they seem to expect to find people who identify themselves as "Atheist Philosophers" when in fact they should be looking for thinkers who happen not to believe in God. It may surprise them to learn, despite the Dawkins and Harrises of the world, that many atheists wake up in the morning without deciding how they can disprove God’s existence today. Many people who don’t believe in God have spent alot of time thinking about how to life a satisfying and proper life.

To put it another way: Just as religion is not an infatuation with God, atheism is not an infatuation with Nothing. The long and significant history of non-theistic philosophy and moral theory is full of the very positive arguments and metaphysical justifications your readers say they want. May I suggest a little Hume to start? Some Bentham or John Stuart Mill? Nietzsche (but always with a grain of salt). Ayn Rand – but only as a case study in how non-theistic theories can still be dogmatic.

Clinton’s state department just got livelier.

It’s hard to disagree with Ta-Nehisi:

For some truly disturbing video, watch a man who once–and apparently still does–crusade against gays, on Oprah talking about seeking therapy to curb his attraction to men. It may not be me right, but I felt enormously sad for him, and even sadder for his wife.

I watched the whole thing. I feel for Haggard – because he is trapped between who he is and his internalized belief that God cannot love him for who he is. But God can love him for being gay. And does love him for being gay. This is hard, I know. Accepting God’s unconditional love for me was the hardest part of keeping hold of my Christian faith. My childhood and adolescence were difficult to the point of agony, an agony my own church told me was my just desert. But I saw in my own life and those of countless others that the suppression of these core emotions and the denial of their resolution in love always always leads to personal distortion and compulsion and loss of perspective. Forcing gay people into molds they do not fit helps no one. It robs them of dignity and self-worth and the capacity for healthy relationships. It wrecks family, twists Christianity, violates humanity. It must end.

Haggard’s betrayal, his lies, his compulsions, his deceits are the excruciating function of this human dead end. What we have to do as Christians is open up this always-closing door, to find a way past the abstractions and neuroses of fundamentalism to a more honest and more human acceptance of gay people as God-like. Gay people, like all people, need love. We need family. And yet we are uniquely and cruelly denied these things. And no love and no family can be genuinely based on the deceit or self-hatred that are the alternatives.

That is why I am so insistent on marriage. It alone heals this deep wound and brings gay men and women into the human family where they can finally be allowed to flourish for who they are, rather than to become the contorted, distorted shapes the rest of the world is comfortable with. Anything else actually sustains the wound, because it imprints the indignity and perpetuates the pain.

Berkeley, California, 10.45 am

Ahem:

‘[…] Do you want to see my vagina? Have you ever looked at one?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why ‘of course’? Many men haven’t. Straight men. They’re scared to. It’s the Medusa’s head, that turns them to stone. Uh-oh. You’re losing your stoniness. I guess you’re not ready to think about vaginas yet.’

‘No. I am. I’ll get ready. But – ‘

‘I know, darling. I know.’

She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. He had wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his asshole, continued, but he didn’t know what name to call her. ‘Mrs Rougement’ was the name he had always known her by. God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea. The rhythmic relentless shushing returned to their ears. She laid her head on the pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism. Having got rid of it, there was an aftermath of sorrow in which he needed to be alone; but there was no getting rid of her. ‘Call me Sukie,’ she said, having read his mind. ‘I sucked your cock.’

‘You sure did. Thanks. Wow.’

– John Updike, Witches Of Eastwick.