Month: July 2014

Asher Elbein visited Toco Hills, a “Modern Orthodox enclave nestled near the edge of Midtown Atlanta,” and found that for many observent members of the community, it’s a struggle to make ends meet:

The stereotype that Jews are wealthy—or at least comfortably middle class—has long ignored the truth that many are struggling to get by. And Orthodox Jews, who often have higher living expenses than other Jews due to their observance and the limited choices they face when looking for a place to live, are especially vulnerable to shifts in the economic climate. For [Rabbi Ilan] Feldman, dealing with the correlation between religious observance and financial hardship is part of his job. “For someone making $60,000 a year, in America, that’s middle class,” Feldman said. “But in this Orthodox community, $60,000 means you aren’t going to make it.”

Elbein talked to people in the community about what keeps them connected to Toco Hills:

For [Tzivia] Silverstein, it comes down to value instead of cost. In terms of personal and spiritual fulfillment, she says, the neighborhood pays for itself. As heavy as the expenses are, they are necessary sacrifices for belonging to the community. “I see maybe one movie a year,” she said. “I choose to put my kids through religious school instead of buying a nicer car. It’s astounding, the amount of money that other people have, to spend on things like renovating their house or buying a bigger TV. To me, my most important relationship is with God. The material world is a means to an end.”

In an interview with Gary Gutting, philosophy professor Michael Ruse explains (NYT) why he doesn’t think evolution and theism are incompatible:

G.G.: Do you think that evolution lends support to the atheistic argument from evil: that it makes no sense to think that an all-good, all-powerful God would have used so wasteful and brutal a process as evolution to create living things?

M.R.: Although in some philosophy of religion circles it is now thought that we can counter the argument from evil, I don’t think this is so. More than that, I don’t want it to be so. I don’t want an argument that convinces me that the death under the guillotine of Sophie Scholl (one of the leaders of the White Rose group opposed to the Nazis) or of Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen ultimately contributes to the greater good. If my eternal salvation depends on the deaths of these two young women, then forget it.

This said, I have never really thought that the pains brought on by the evolutionary process, in particular the struggle for survival and reproduction, much affect the Christian conception of God. … If God is to do everything through unbroken law, and I can think of good theological reasons why this should be so, then pain and suffering are part of it all. Paradoxically and humorously I am with Dawkins here. He argues that the only way naturally you can get the design-like features of organisms — the hand and the eye — is through evolution by natural selection, brought on by the struggle. Other mechanisms just don’t work. So God is off the hook.

Rowan Williams offers a glimpse into his prayer life, which features meditative repetition of the Jesus Prayer – “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner” – along with physical disciplines, such as sitting and breathing in certain ways, all with the aim of “bringing the mind into the heart”:

The interest in uniting words with posture and breath is, of course, typical of non-Christian practices also; and over the years increasing exposure to and engagement with the Buddhist world in particular has made me aware of practices not unlike the “Jesus Prayer” and introduced me to disciplines that further enforce the stillness and physical focus that the prayer entails. Walking meditation, pacing very slowly and co-ordinating each step with an out-breath, is something I have found increasingly important as a preparation for a longer time of silence.

So: the regular ritual to begin the day when I’m in the house is a matter of an early rise and a brief walking meditation or sometimes a few slow prostrations, before squatting for 30 or 40 minutes (a low stool to support the thighs and reduce the weight on the lower legs) with the “Jesus Prayer”: repeating (usually silently) the words as I breathe out, leaving a moment between repetitions to notice the beating of the heart, which will slow down steadily over the period.

The prayer isn’t any kind of magical invo­cation or auto-suggestion – simply a vehicle to detach you slowly from distracted, wandering images and thoughts. These will happen, but you simply go on repeating the words and gently bringing attention back to them. If it is proceeding as it should, there is something like an indistinct picture or sensation of the inside of the body as a sort of hollow, a cave, in which breath comes and goes, with an underlying pulse. If you want to speak theologically about it, it’s a time when you are aware of your body as simply a place where life happens and where, therefore, God “happens”: a life lived in you.

(Image: Christ the Redeemer by Andrei Rublev, 1410, via Wikimedia Commons)

“Well, I had certainly been miserable enough, lately. My bridges were broken. I saw no way out. But still I couldn’t honestly say that I’d reached the despair line. My ultimate remedy for everything was sleep, unconsciousness – produced no matter how – by Seconal, alcohol, a movie, a crime story, or sex. And now here was Gerald [Heard] urging me in the opposite direction – towards greater wakefulness, consciousness, awareness. All my laziness hung back.

Nevertheless, what he now put before me was the most exciting proposition I had ever heard. He told me what Life is for. ‘And why was I never told this before?’ I kept asking myself, almost indignantly. It was an absurd question. I had been told ‘this’ many times. Every moment of my conscious existence had contained within itself this riddle, and its answer. Every event, every encounter, every person, and object had restated it in some new way. Only – I hadn’t been ready to listen.

Life, said Gerald, is for awareness. Awareness of our real nature and our actual situation. The day-to-day, space-time ‘reality’ is, in fact, no reality at all, but a cunning and deadly illusion. Space-time is evil. The process of meditation consists in excluding, as far as possible, our consciousness of the illusory world and turning the mind inward, in search of the knowledge which is locked within itself – the knowledge of its real nature. Our real nature is to be one with life, with consciousness, with everything else in the universe. This fact of oneness is the actual situation, the only absolute reality. Supposed knowledge of individuality, separateness and division is nothing but illusion and ignorance. Awareness is increased through love … and weakened by hatred,” – Christopher Isherwood, Diaries: Volume One, 1939-1960.

Nick Spencer’s Atheists: The Origins of the Species charges New Atheists with intellectual shallowness. In a review of the book, Michael Robbins laments the movement’s ignorance not just of the Christian tradition, but also of atheists from the past who did more than skewer religious fundamentalists. Above all, Robbins want them to grapple with Nietzsche, who “understands how much has been lost, how much there is to lose” after the death of God:

Nietzsche realized that the Enlightenment project to reconstruct morality from rational principles simply retained the character of Christian ethics without providing the foundational authority of the latter. Dispensing with his fantasy of the Übermensch, we are left with his dark diagnosis. To paraphrase the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our moral vocabulary has lost the contexts from which its significance derived, and no amount of Dawkins-style hand-waving about altruistic genes will make the problem go away. (Indeed, the ridiculous belief that our genes determine everything about human behavior and culture is a symptom of this very problem.)

The point is not that a coherent morality requires theism, but that the moral language taken for granted by liberal modernity is a fragmented ruin: It rejects metaphysics but exists only because of prior metaphysical commitments. A coherent atheism would understand this, because it would be aware of its own history. Instead, trendy atheism of the Dawkins variety has learned as little from its forebears as from Thomas Aquinas, preferring to advance a bland version of secular humanism. Spencer quotes John Gray, a not-New atheist: “Humanism is not an alternative to religious belief, but rather a degenerate and unwitting version of it.” How refreshing would be a popular atheism that did not shy from this insight and its consequences.

I’m not holding my breath. What’s most galling about evangelical atheists is their epistemic arrogance—and their triumphalist tone: If religious belief is like belief in the Easter Bunny, as they like to say, shouldn’t they be less proud of themselves for seeing through it?

(Photo of Nietzsche in 1869, via Wikimedia Commons)