Category: The Dish

A reader of Andrew W.K.’s Village Voice advice column wrote in frustrated about being asked to pray for an older brother diagnosed with cancer, describing it as “kneeling on the ground and mumbling superstitious nonsense.” W.K. responds this way:

Prayer is a type of thought. It’s a lot like meditation — a type of very concentrated mental focus with passionate emotion directed towards a concept or situation, or the lack thereof. But there’s a special X-factor ingredient that makes “prayer” different than meditation or other types of thought. That X-factor is humility. This is the most seemingly contradictory aspect of prayer and what many people dislike about the feeling of praying. “Getting down on your knees” is not about lowering your power or being a weakling, it’s about showing respect for the size and grandeur of what we call existence — it’s about being humble in the presence of the vastness of life, space, and sensation, and acknowledging our extremely limited understanding of what it all really means.

Being humble is very hard for many people because it makes them feel unimportant and helpless. To embrace our own smallness is not to say we’re dumb or that we don’t matter, but to realize how amazing it is that we exist at all in the midst of so much more. To be fully alive, we must realize how much else there is besides ourselves. We must accept how much we don’t know — and how much we still have to learn — about ourselves and the whole world. Kneeling down and fully comprehending the incomprehensible is the physical act of displaying our respect for everything that isn’t “us.” …

The paradoxical nature of this concept is difficult, but it is the key to unlocking the door of spirituality in general, and it remains the single biggest reason many people don’t like the idea of prayer or of spiritual pursuits in general — they feel it’s taking away their own power and it requires a dismantling of the reliable day-to-day life of the material world. In fact, it’s only by taking away the illusion of our own power and replacing it with a greater power — the power that comes from realizing that we don’t have to know everything — that we truly realize our full potential. And this type of power doesn’t require constant and exhausting efforts to hold-up and maintain, nor does it require us to endlessly convince ourselves and everyone else that we’re powerful, that we know what we’re doing, and that we’re in control of everything.

Morgan Guyton, who works for a Christian campus ministry, asks himself hard questions after reading this agnostic approach to prayer:

There’s so much disdain among my fellow clergy folk for “spiritual but not religious” people. The stereotype we have in our heads is the clueless hippie who thinks that s/he can attain spiritual groundedness by shopping organic and doing yoga. Andrew W.K. makes it hard to write him off as a goofy hippie. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I know that in my own head, my rage against spiritual but not religious people is largely an expression of my deep anxiety about spending the rest of my ministry career on a ship that’s rapidly sinking. What if I’m actually obsolete because people can become a loving, humble, mature community without the grape-juice-soaked chunk of communion bread that I have to offer?

Now that I’m working in a secular university, I’m meeting so many students who seem more compassionate, humble, and disciplined than I am, but they don’t seem to have any inclination or need to be anything other than secular. A response that clergy like me often make to atheists is to say, “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.” And then we talk about how the silly god-caricatures of popular Christianity are not the same thing as the true God, who is the “source of being” and “a complete mystery.” But how is the mysterious God that sophisticated Christians believe in different than what Andrew W.K. calls “the size and grandeur of what we call existence.”

How much do I know that what I’m doing when I pray is more than what Andrew describes as “gaining strength by admitting weakness” or “turning [myself] over to [my] own bewilderment”?

 

Simon Smart lauds Nick Spencer’s Atheists: The Origins of the Species, remarking that “the most challenging aspect of this work is the way it illuminates the inherently naïve optimism contained in New Atheism’s rendition of the ‘God is dead’ trope”:

While there has been no shortage of non-believers who viewed the demise of the divine as ushering in an era of untrammelled human progress, no less a figure than Friedrich Nietzsche understood the great shadow that would be cast across Europe if, as he hoped, the rejection of Christianity came to fruition. Such a move would signal the ruin of a civilisation, and he wrote about “the long dense succession of demolition, destruction, downfall, upheaval that now stands ahead.”

Something of a dark prophet, Nietzsche envisioned troubled times ahead – a prediction that the 20th century’s atheist regimes fulfilled with alarming efficiency. Nietzsche’s importance, writes Spencer, lies in his understanding that metaphysics and morals are inseparable. Nietzsche was under no illusion that you could hold on to Christian ethics – which he saw as degenerate slave mentality – while jettisoning the Christian faith.

In reply, PZ Myers expresses his exasperation with all the Nietzsche-love from believers:

And then Spencer and Smart drag out one of my pet peeves: Nietzsche. Not Nietzsche the philosopher, of course, but Nietzsche the dolorous atheist. Nietzsche the regretful non-Christian. Nietzsche the sorrowful, reluctant thinker who praises Jesus while weeping sincerely, and simultaneously predicting cultural cataclysm because we’re losing our faith. It’s the only atheist message the devout want to hear — if you’re going to abandon religion, at least be sure to stroke the pastor’s ego on your way out the door.

These guys always make Nietzsche sound like a 19th century S.E. Cupp, which is an awfully nasty insult to deliver to a guy you’re praising. …

You know what? Fuck the Christian cartoon Nietzsche. He’s wrong, he’s annoying, and I feel no obligation to respect his views of a lovely essential Christian dogma. Also, as noted above, if atheism is a reaction to false authority…why the hell do you think citing a philosopher who has been dead for over a hundred years will make us roll over and surrender? Nietzsche ain’t the atheist pope, either. Christians can keep trying to shoehorn atheism into obligatory tropes that they’re subject to, but all it does is convince us that Christians don’t know what they’re talking about.

Previous Dish on Nietzsche and atheism here, here, here, and here.

https://twitter.com/umamame/status/507385985076703232

Alice Robb flags some new research about the hijab and body image:

A study published in the August edition of the British Journal of Psychology suggests that the hijab actually offers some protection against the body dissatisfaction that plagues many Western women.

A team of psychologists, led by Malaysian-born British psychologist Viren Swami at the UK’s University of Westminster, interviewed 587 Muslim women in London, 369 of whom regularly wore some sort of hijab. Their ages ranged from 18 to 70; the mean age was 27. The majority – about 79 percent – were unmarried, and they represented several ethnic groups – Bengali, Pakistani, Indian, and Arab. More than three-quarters held an undergraduate degree.

Swami and his team gave the women several tests to measure their attitudes toward their bodies – and the women who wore Western dress scored higher on every scale of body dissatisfaction. When subjects were asked to look at several sketches of women’s bodies and pick the one they would most like to have, the choices of the women who wore the hijab more closely resembled the bodies they actually possessed. On a measure of “drive for thinness” – determined by answers to questions about preoccupation with body weight, fear of becoming fat, and excessive concern with dieting – women who didn’t wear the hijab scored, on average, 3.58 out of 6 points, compared to 2.87 for women who cover up. Women who wore Western dress also registered a higher degree of “social physique anxiety,” or concern with how others perceived their physical appearance: 3.26, versus 2.92, on the 6-point scale.

Previous Dish on veiling and beauty standards here.

Nigel Biggar praises Karen Armstrong’s forthcoming book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, as “a magisterial debunking of the secularist tale” that claims “religion is essentially and uniquely generative of division and violence.” A run down of why she finds that tale too simple:

Armstrong’s corrective, complicating history includes a number of nicely water-muddying, stereotype-confounding details. For example, in the so-called Wars of Religion, Protestants and Catholics not infrequently fought on the same side against imperial forces: in its final phase, during the Thirty Years War, Catholic France came to the rescue of Protestant Sweden. Second, whereas that famous son of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves, the inspiration for the abolitionist movement was originally and predominantly Christian. Third, the first genocide of the 20th century was committed by zealous secularists, the Young Turks, against (Christian) Armenians. Fourth, it was the Tamil Tigers, a non-religious, nationalist movement, which pioneered suicide bombing, and most suicide bombing in Lebanon during the 1980s was performed by secularists. Fifth, so deep-rooted were the habits of coexistence between Christians and Muslims in Bosnia that, during the 1990s, it took the Communist Slobodan Milošević three years of relentless nationalist propaganda to turn the former against the latter. Sixth, James Warren Jones, the instigator of the infamous Jonestown massacre in 1978, was not a religious zealot but a self-confessed atheist, who ridiculed conventional Christianity. Next, Ayatollah Khomeini’s critique of the regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s has much in common with Pope John XXIII’s contemporaneous critique of unfettered capitalism. And finally, what is striking about the 9/11 bombers is not how much they knew about Islam, but how little.

Ian Bell, however, points to questions that he believes Armstrong leaves unanswered:

What is it about humanity that allows it to receive and accept messages of love and compassion yet use faith in such precepts to justify mass murder? Freudian hokum invoking the trinity of id, ego and superego might once have been called upon. Armstrong prefers neuro-anatomy and a near-Marxist account of elites, class, oppression and exploitation.

“Each of us,” she writes, “has not one but three brains which co-exist uneasily.” We acquired this collection at various stages of evolution. The oldest is a reptilian remnant, utterly self-interested; the second, the limbic system, allows empathy; the youngest, acquired perhaps 20,000 years ago as the neocortex or “new brain”, grants us self-awareness. We can stand back, as Armstrong puts it, from our primitive instincts. We can also be imbued with faith and utterly murderous.

This is neat. It is also, for the sake of an argument, convenient. Armstrong understands religion in terms of the human search for – indeed, need for – meaning. Most of the major faiths make larger claims to do with a deity and absolute, eternal truth. If that is what is going on, surely the ugly, insistent claims of our buried “old brain” would be overwhelmed. It might be a mistake to claim, crudely, that religion causes war. But to put the question in the context of a fine and eloquent book: why has the impulse to faith failed to suppress our brutish taste for warfare?