The Dish

Noting that “genetic diversity in the human population is not consistent with what we would expect if all humans had descended from a single pair of individuals,” Loren Haarsma grapples with what that means for the Christian understanding of original sin:

A variety of scenarios are being proposed by Christian scholars today for how we might understand the Adam and Eve of Genesis 2, and their disobedience in Genesis 3, in light of modern science. Some scenarios propose Adam and Eve as two individuals living in Mesopotamia just a few thousand years ago, acting not as ancestors but as recent representatives of all humanity. As our representatives, their disobedience caused all of humanity to fall into sin. Other scenarios propose Adam and Eve as two individuals, or as literary representations of a small group of ancient representative-ancestors, selected out of a larger population, living in Africa over 100,000 years ago at the dawn of humanity; they were ancestors—but not the sole ancestors—of all humans today; they fell into disobedience against God over a relatively short period of time with a fairly distinct “before” and “after.” Other scenarios propose that Adam and Eve’s disobedience in Genesis 3 is a symbolic retelling of the story of every human who, over our long history, became aware of God’s claims on how they ought to live, and then disobeyed.

Jerry Coyne snarks:

Adam and Eve couldn’t have been the literal ancestors of all humanity. Normally, such a scientific trashing of scripture could be absorbed, at least by liberal theologians. They’d just reinterpret Adam and Eve as metaphors. But that causes big trouble on two counts.

First, if there really were 2,000 or more ancestors, then all of them must have transgressed to bring original sin into the world. That is hard to fathom: did everyone do something bad at the same time? Second, if Adam and Eve were metaphors, and the source of original sin is mysterious, then we have no idea why Jesus died. After all, his death and Resurrection occurred precisely to save us sinful humans from the transgressions of Adam and Eve. If you have to turn that story into a metaphor, then Jesus died for that metaphor. That’s not too palatable to Christians.

An easy and sensible way to solve this conundrum is to assume that the whole scenario is concocted: humans don’t have original sin; there was no Adam and Eve; and the Resurrection and divinity of Jesus were fictions. But Christians won’t have that, for the meaning of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is the final, non-negotiable “truth” of Christianity. You can see everything else as metaphorical, but not that. For if you metaphorize Jesus, you’re basically abandoning Christianity.

Recent Dish on original sin here.

Paula Marantz Cohen attempts to understand George Eliot’s desire for Christian morality without a Christian deity:

Eliot … was an enormously pious young girl. In Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, the young heroine, Maggie Tulliver (an autobiographical portrait of its author at that age) is obsessed with God. Maggie reads Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, a book that greatly influenced the young Eliot. But in 1853, her knowledge of German led her to another book, Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which she went on to translate. Feuerbach argued that God is not external to us but a projection of our best qualities as human beings. The Devil is the projection of our worst. This way of thinking came to inform Eliot’s view of God, and influenced her understanding of art and the task of the artist.

Last year, in an essay exploring Eliot’s attitude toward religion, Rohan Maitzen drew a parallel between Eliot and Marilynne Robinson:

“It seems to me,” the novelist Marilynne Robinson has said, “that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.”

Like Eliot, Robinson asserts continuities between belief and unbelief, but she does so by identifying as religious what Eliot saw as intrinsically human feelings. Call them “religious” if you like, Eliot might have said. “I have no longer any antagonism,” she wrote in her letters,

towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies.

Against those “argumentative tendencies” that seem to define the cultures of atheism and religion alike today, Eliot offers us novels like Silas Marner, novels that express her own faith that with sufficient understanding and attention to what is apart from themselves, people can be their own salvation.

Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, argues that in “the decades leading up to the Englightenment … open-minded questioning of religion became increasingly associated with an acceptance of suicide”:

Christianity did not initially reject suicide…. In fact, Jesus’ death was understood by many as voluntary. In the Book of John, Jesus says: “No man taketh [my life] from me, but I lay it down of myself.” Then came the martyrs. Some did not want to die, but many did. “I am yearning for death with all the passion of a lover,” wrote Ignatius of Antioch. … The rage for martyrdom went on for centuries. …

The defense of suicide was taken up most forcefully by David Hume in Britain and Baron d’Holbach in France. In their writings, neither man dwelled on the horror that a suicide can bring to family and friends, nor did they consider that suicides, if saved, might get over their misery, averting a tragic error. Hume poked fun at the church, arguing that if death were entirely the purview of God it would be a sin to avoid a stone that falls toward our head. D’Holbach pitied those forced by their belief in God to endure sadness rather than end their lives at will. Both Hume and d’Holbach considered suicide a valid escape from misery.

Hecht continues, “That view, now a defining stance of secular culture, is a mistake and needs rethinking”:

No matter how much of a burden a person thinks he is, it is nothing compared to the burden of his suicide. People do wrenching damage to their communities when they kill themselves. Studies have shown that when parents of children under 18 kill themselves, their children are three times more likely to kill themselves than children who make it to 18 with both parents alive. When one person in a community kills him or herself, the suicide rate in that community spikes. Sometimes it is called “suicidal clusters,” sometimes “suicidal contagion,” sometimes “social scripting,” but the sociology, epidemiology, and psychology literature clearly shows that if you kill yourself it is likely that others will follow you into the grave.

Suicide contagion has been most exhaustively studied in high schools and colleges. It seems that the first suicide normalizes suicide for those who follow; victims give each other the idea that suicide is an acceptable way to deal with problems.

Previous Dish on suicide here, here, and here.  The Dish thread “Suicide Leaves Behind Nothing” is here.

Paul Reitter explores how a Jewish perspective might have informed Bambi: A Life in the Woods, the 1923 novel by Austrian writer Felix Salten that was adapted into a Disney movie in 1942:

Writing about a Bambi spin-off in 1930, [Karl] Kraus claimed to detect the sound of Jewish dialect—or “jüdeln”—in the speech of Salten’s hares. Salten was a hunter (a humane one, he always insisted), and, as it happened, he had just published a piece about his love of hunting. Kraus joked that Salten’s hares had adopted a Yiddishy tone of voice in order to blend in with a special type of enemy—the Jewish hunter. The hares were “perhaps using mimicry as a defense against persecution.” When Salten died in 1945, an American critic found a more straightforward connection between the plight of some animal characters and that of the Jews. In his obituary for Salten, the critic, having noted Salten’s “Zionist sentiments,” maintained that the fox in Bambi not only comes across as the rapacious “Hitler of the forest,” but also has a mentality of hatred and rage that bears similarities with Goebbels’ anti-Semitism.

It was not until a decade ago, however, that an actual reading of the “Zionist overtones” in Bambi was proposed.

In an essay published in 2003, Iris Bruce argues broadly that the novel evokes the “experience of exclusion and discrimination.” But she also pays close attention to its language. Salten’s suggestive phrase for butterflies is “wandering flowers,” and Bambi describes them elsewhere as “beautiful losers” who have to keep moving, “because the best spots have already been taken.” Bruce stresses, as well, that the culture of the deer develops around the fact of their victimization: They tell their children tales that “are always full of horror and misery.”

Likening Bambi to Kafka’s talking-ape story “A Report to an Academy,” Bruce claims that Salten’s work, too, is a critique of assimilation. One of the deer uses the loaded verb verfolgen to ask whether humans and deer might get along: “Will they ever stop persecuting us?” When another deer answers that “reconciliation” with humans will eventually come about, Old Nettla, a third deer with vastly more experience of the world, will have none of it. Indeed, her response foreshadows a line from Salten’s Zionist book Neue Menschen auf alter Erde (loosely translated, new people on ancient ground), which expresses impatience with the enduring “dream of full integration.” Old Nettla seethes that humans, “have given us no peace and have murdered us for as long as we’ve existed.”

This lecture offers more on the subject.

(Video: Scene from Disney’s Bambi in Hebrew)

Bill Keller, an erstwhile Catholic, recently reiterated the case against priestly celibacy (NYT):

The arguments for lifting the requirement that priests forswear sex and marriage are not new, but they have become more urgent. Mandatory celibacy has driven away many good priests and prospects at a time when parishes in Europe and the United States are closing for lack of clergy. It deprives priests of experience that would make them more competent to counsel the families they minister. Celibacy — by breeding a culture of sexual exceptionalism and denial — surely played some role in the church’s shameful record of pedophilia and cover-up.

“Lots of people don’t see [celibacy] as some extraordinary act of witness,” said Thomas Groome, who heads the department of religious education and pastoral ministry at Boston College. “They see it as just a peculiar lifestyle, and one not to be trusted.” Groome was a priest for 17 years but left to be a husband and father. “The loneliness of it, I think, can drive people crazy,” he told me. “I’ve known hundreds of priests in my life,” from student days in an Irish seminary through the priesthood and decades as a theologian. “I don’t know too many diocesan priests, maybe three or four, who have lived a rich, life-giving, celibate lifestyle.”

James Martin, a Jesuit priest, read the piece with exasperation, noting that the article is “based largely on the opinions of two priests who left the priesthood and a sister who left her order, and [Keller’s] own speculation about what the celibate life must be like”:

Maybe it would have been helpful to look at some actual data.

Sure, there is some loneliness in the priesthood–and there are problems in married life too. But the picture that Mr. Keller paints is ridiculous. In the latest survey on priests from the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate in 2009, 95 percent report they would “definitely or probably choose priesthood again,” up from 79 percent in 1970. Wow. Must be pretty lonely.

And as for celibacy “surely” leading to pedophilia and cover-ups, that overlooks the fact that most sexual abuse happens in families, many cases are found in schools and sometimes even in macho places like the Penn State football program. The reasons for the sexual abuse crisis in the church are complex. As they are in families and in schools. But no one says that (a) marriage, (b) teaching or (c) football leads to abuse. Celibacy must be the main culprit in the church, say pundits, because it’s so “weird.”

Previous Dish on the subject here, here, and here.