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silveradeptGreetings. Anyone who might be new, on news posts and Thinkies alike, I tend not to use the cut. This may mean you have to scroll past walls of text to see other entries on your lists. I hope that you’ll stop and read, or at least bookmarks to make comment on later. Now, onward with the wall of text.
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In her haste to make a point that’s tenuous at best, a columnist skipped the bigger point without noticing. Our target for today? Ms. Coulter, who says that there's no way Barack Obama can be a Muslim. He's clearly an atheist, according to her. Reasoning? A lack of “real” church attendance in present and past, because Jeremiah Wright’s church isn’t actual Christianity, but liberation theology and atheism, a lack of Christian parents, his at least nominally pro-choice stance, and his “spiritual advisers”, who are all apparently not Real True Christians, or even Christians in name, and don’t count for anything. Oh, and he’s a liberal. All liberals are godless atheists. Except Mike Huckabee, who’s a liberal Christian. These were fairly standard attacks against liberals who weren’t being tagged with the Secret Muslim line. They’re not actually that interesting.
What is, though, is Ms. Coulter stone-skipping off of an important question without giving it the weight and answer it deserves. Quoting from her column, “[The idea that we should believe people when they say they belong to a religion or philosophy] would make professions of religious belief, unlike all other self-professions, unchallengeable...Doesn’t anyone question the Christianity of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker [sic]? How about the Satanists claiming to be Christians who stand outside soldiers’ funerals with signs that say ‘God Hates Fags’?” She uses examples of how people questioned Saint Reagan’s Christian beliefs when he was in office and how Bill Clinton’s Christian beliefs clashed with his affair with Monica Lewinsky to assert that religious beliefs should be objectively challengeable. Ms. Coulter is arguing both that there are such things as Real True Religious Folk, and that one can determine who they are through the use of entirely objective criteria. As the Gargoyle says when you tell him the Thieves’ Guild password is “Swordfish”, “That’s RIGHT! But that’s also WRONG!”
(As an aside, if at any point I mischaracterize someone’s belief system, or say something that’s not true, correct me. Doubly so if you’ve done scholarship on the matter more in-depth than my hummingbird-style flitting.)
At first blush, she seems to be sitting on solid ground - after all, the Foundational Writings of most religions and philosophies are usually pretty clear about what someone needs to profess, do, dress, behave, or believe to be part of the group. Islam has the Five Pillars, four of which are required and one is encouraged. The Torah are the books of Moses and the law of G-d. A communist works to put the means of production in the hands of the people. An atheist avows there is no God. It’s fairly cut and dried as to how that works, right? If you love me and keep my commandments, then you’re part of the Kingdom of God.
...except when you’re not. Good philosophy is notorious for followers being able to read in exactly what they want to hear into the text. For example, are you a Sunni, a Sufi, a Shi’ite? A Baptist, a Presbyterian, an Evangelical, a Catholic? Orthodox? Heterodox? Eastern Orthodox? Vatican II or St. Pius X? Maoist? Marxist? Stalinist? Agnostic? Deist? Someone thinks you’re not actually part of the group you claim to be. Yet most of those groups will lay claim to a larger title - Muslim, Christian, socialist, communist - and claim that they are the true followers of that discipline. (They will usually tolerate some amount of heterodoxy in relation to themselves for communities that are close, but not quite exactly their own, but they still claim they're the true descendants.) With so many groups claiming to be the One True Way, this only ends in one of three ways:
So let’s look at Ms. Coulter’s first premise - there are Real True Religious Folk out there. (For purposes of completeness, we’re including atheists as religious folk. We could use Scotsmen, of course, but that would be a knowing wink to logicians, who are intellectuals, and there’s still that strong anti-intellectual streak...) Unfortunately, until one of the three conditions above can be proven, there’s no way of knowing whether there is a finite group of Real True Religious Folk, everyone is part of Real True Religious Folk, or nobody is part of Real True Religious Folk. So let’s scope it down to that there is such a thing as a Real True Christian, a Real True Muslim, etc. That should be easier.
It’s not. Internecine warfare proves that particular point isn’t workable. There may be some doctrinal similarities, but the details are devilish and have been causing schisms, splits, reformations, revolutions, and renamings throughout history. So we’ll scope it down further and say there’s such a thing as a Real True Catholic. And then a Real True Member of the Vatican-II approving Catholic Church. And then a Real True Member of the American Vatican-II approving Catholic Church. And den... and den... and deennnnnnnn...
As you can guess, eventually you have to scope down to something that’s very close to the individual level. Premise One is a bit of a bust, at least for use in large sweeping generalizations. We have no idea whether there are such beings as Real True Religious Folk, but the more details we add on to our characterization, the closer we get to being able to say with confidence that there is one of a particular type of Real True Religious Folk. That ties into Premise Two, which at the macro-level also falls flat, but which also gets better the more micro we get. The more qualifiers we add onto what we’re looking for, the easier it becomes to assess whether a person fits those criteria. At least some of those qualifiers can be objective. For example, “Does Person X tithe 10 percent of their income to their church?” For some denominations, a no answer excludes Person X. “Does Person Y practice birth control?” If so, they’re not going to be Real True X in more than a few Christian denominations.
Thus, the Gargoyle’s response to Ms. Coulter’s password - you’re right, but you’re also wrong. If, instead, you tell him that you don’t know what the password is, he says, “At least, if you’re a thief, you’re ashamed enough to lie about it. Come on in.” That’s not quite the right phrasing for the intended Aesop, but work with us here. If you’re someone who is Real True Religious folk, odds are pretty good that you’ll win friends and influence people by right action and without trumpeting around proclaiming that you’ve got it all and everyone needs to listen to you. Wait, maybe that phrasing does work. Even if you are Real True Religious Folk, at least you’re cognizant enough to not go praying on the street corners like the Pharisees and the hypocrites do. Come on in.
Anyway, I think that while Ms. Coulter is trying to assert a universal in Premise One, for it to be truly universally applicable, it will have to be re-written as “There are people who think they are Real True Religious Folk”. Premise Two will still slot nicely into this - “You can tell who those people are using objective criteria.” Now, though, If you take the two together, it takes a significantly more left-handed turn, doesn’t it? No longer are we talking in the realm of confidence that there are good people in the world, only humans who think they’re good people. And you can measure the measure of their goodness with objective criteria...based in what you think of as good. Finally, we’ve hit the meat of the argument made to us - “Doesn’t anyone question the Christianity of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, of the Westboro Baptist Church, or of President Obama? Why should they be allowed to assert they are Christians when they clearly are committing evil acts?”
And thus, we open up the fascinating realm that is exegesis. Christians inherit some of their Foundational Writings from Judaism, and Judiasm has a long tradition of interpreting the Written Law in the Torah and the Oral Law of the mitzvot. Read up on the midrashim and how many different commentaries we still have in our modern times to see just how possible it is to interpret the same thing differently. And that’s in the root practices. The Christians and the Muslims both keep that tradition quite alive (speaking ex cathedra, the Protestant Reformation, or issuing fatwas, for obvious examples) and diverge in their conclusions to the point of schism, heresy, and heterodoxy. God Hates Fags is one conclusion, Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin is another, and yet another says that gays and lesbians can be ordained as ministers in the church and administer all its rites. If you ask each of them, they’ll all point back eventually to the Foundational Writings for justification (some may go through church law first, but they’ll get back to it eventually). If you believe that the Great Commandment of Matthew 22:36-37 (or Leviticus 19:18, if you like) trumps all other things, then other parts that talk about the law of the people aren’t as important as the requirement to love G-d with one’s whole being and treat one’s neighbor with the same respect as you treat yourself, then regardless of whether they’re gay, straight, or otherwise, everyone deserves to be treated with love. If you’re more partial to the laws of Moses than the laws of Jesus, and take the angry Jesus that drives out all the unclean businessmen from Temple as your model, then you probably end up in the God Hates Fags camp. Both sides can point to the texts as saying they’re right. So how do you tell which one is and which one isn’t? It depends on your conception of G-d. Angry G-d tends to emphasise the fact that we’re all going to be smote if we don’t reform ourselves accordingly, benevolent G-d says we need to work at bringing everyone into the happiness and love offered. Angry G-d often results in angry preaching, the need to go out and save everyone from the hell they richly deserve by whatever means needed, benevolent G-d says that good behavioral modeling as well as a sell that will appeal to people’s wants to be saved and protected and benefit from a positive relationship from G-d is a good idea. Same G-d, the one that created the flood and the one that sent the Israelites out of Egypt, the one that sent his son as a sacrifice and that will put the world through tribulations before returning in triumph.
As you can see, the God that fits us is the God we imagine in the world. There’s a commandment against murder, so clearly people who kill are not Christians...excepting for those people who killed others in the name of unborn babies. Jesus commanded his people to sell their possessions, give their proceeds to the poor, and live a life of poverty...unless, that is, he wants you to give generously to your church, in which you will be rewarded in your faith and actions many hundredfold and grow very wealthy and rich in this life and the next. God said people who are gay and lesbian will go to hell...unless he said only practicing gays and lesbians go to hell...or he wasn’t actually talking about gays and lesbians there, and he made us all exactly the way he wanted us. Baptism is something you do as infants...or when you reach the age of reason...or when you fully want to get committed to the church. Alcohol is an evil, evil thing or proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Each believer has their own image of what God should be. And each of those believers has objective criteria to tell whether or not the person next to them believes in the same God they do. Most of those criteria mesh, but not all.
Ms. Coulter is right, though - people should be questioning the Christianity of President Obama, Tammy Faye Baker, Rick Warren, Fred Phelps, Glenn Beck, Benedict XIII, Ann Coulter, and everyone else who claims to be a Christian. Take them at their word and then ask questions about whether or not they are living up to their own definitions of Christians, and whether their definitions of Christians are the kinds of definitions they want to be propagating to the next generation. Questioners should be looking at their own definitions, too - are they living up to the teachings they profess to? Are they accusing someone else of having a speck in their eye when there’s a freakin’ huge plank stuck in theirs? Do they blithely assume that their vision of God is the correct one and that they can judge all others as followers or not based on that single vision, making their own assertion unchallengeable, but everyone else’s challengeable? Do they loudly assert their beliefs in order to gain material power and trust from others who say they’re the same?
It probably says a lot about the dominance of one thought pattern in this country that someone like Ms. Coulter can skip right over this very deep pool of thought and assume that everyone she’s talking to understands her assumptions and agrees with them as “objective”, committing the very act she’s criticizing in her column without noticing it. I’m equally sure there’s some sort of Big Finish to this whole Thinky that someone else will find, whether it is that they have a great revelation and deepen their practice, or they accuse me of moral relativism for even daring to equate the One True Way with the heretics, heterodox, and pagans. Find your own ending, I guess, and keep your own beliefs under the microscope and try to have other people point out where you have differences. If you’ve followed me out to the rhetorical wasteland here, I guess you’ll have to find your own way back.
Happy journeys.
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In her haste to make a point that’s tenuous at best, a columnist skipped the bigger point without noticing. Our target for today? Ms. Coulter, who says that there's no way Barack Obama can be a Muslim. He's clearly an atheist, according to her. Reasoning? A lack of “real” church attendance in present and past, because Jeremiah Wright’s church isn’t actual Christianity, but liberation theology and atheism, a lack of Christian parents, his at least nominally pro-choice stance, and his “spiritual advisers”, who are all apparently not Real True Christians, or even Christians in name, and don’t count for anything. Oh, and he’s a liberal. All liberals are godless atheists. Except Mike Huckabee, who’s a liberal Christian. These were fairly standard attacks against liberals who weren’t being tagged with the Secret Muslim line. They’re not actually that interesting.
What is, though, is Ms. Coulter stone-skipping off of an important question without giving it the weight and answer it deserves. Quoting from her column, “[The idea that we should believe people when they say they belong to a religion or philosophy] would make professions of religious belief, unlike all other self-professions, unchallengeable...Doesn’t anyone question the Christianity of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker [sic]? How about the Satanists claiming to be Christians who stand outside soldiers’ funerals with signs that say ‘God Hates Fags’?” She uses examples of how people questioned Saint Reagan’s Christian beliefs when he was in office and how Bill Clinton’s Christian beliefs clashed with his affair with Monica Lewinsky to assert that religious beliefs should be objectively challengeable. Ms. Coulter is arguing both that there are such things as Real True Religious Folk, and that one can determine who they are through the use of entirely objective criteria. As the Gargoyle says when you tell him the Thieves’ Guild password is “Swordfish”, “That’s RIGHT! But that’s also WRONG!”
(As an aside, if at any point I mischaracterize someone’s belief system, or say something that’s not true, correct me. Doubly so if you’ve done scholarship on the matter more in-depth than my hummingbird-style flitting.)
At first blush, she seems to be sitting on solid ground - after all, the Foundational Writings of most religions and philosophies are usually pretty clear about what someone needs to profess, do, dress, behave, or believe to be part of the group. Islam has the Five Pillars, four of which are required and one is encouraged. The Torah are the books of Moses and the law of G-d. A communist works to put the means of production in the hands of the people. An atheist avows there is no God. It’s fairly cut and dried as to how that works, right? If you love me and keep my commandments, then you’re part of the Kingdom of God.
...except when you’re not. Good philosophy is notorious for followers being able to read in exactly what they want to hear into the text. For example, are you a Sunni, a Sufi, a Shi’ite? A Baptist, a Presbyterian, an Evangelical, a Catholic? Orthodox? Heterodox? Eastern Orthodox? Vatican II or St. Pius X? Maoist? Marxist? Stalinist? Agnostic? Deist? Someone thinks you’re not actually part of the group you claim to be. Yet most of those groups will lay claim to a larger title - Muslim, Christian, socialist, communist - and claim that they are the true followers of that discipline. (They will usually tolerate some amount of heterodoxy in relation to themselves for communities that are close, but not quite exactly their own, but they still claim they're the true descendants.) With so many groups claiming to be the One True Way, this only ends in one of three ways:
- There is a One True Way, and life and afterlife happen according to their dictates. This does not mean, necessarily, that the One True Way is in the group of people claiming they have it. It may turn out that the Zen Buddhists of 2050 are actually correct, and one of their precepts is that you never claim you are the correct way.
- There is more than one True Way, owing to differing gods and natural forces, and life and afterlife happen according to the dictates of whichever deity you follow or has claimed you as their own, or has cast you to the unforgiving nature of the impartial cosmos.
- There is no True Way. That can mean anthropomorphizing has led us all astray into creating gods, natural forces, and other bits of order out of the chaos, or everyone who has a philosophy has grasped some aspect of the True Way, but nobody can stitch it all together into a single path. (Which, would mean the Taoists are right on the aspect of the Way that can be named is not the eternal Way.)
So let’s look at Ms. Coulter’s first premise - there are Real True Religious Folk out there. (For purposes of completeness, we’re including atheists as religious folk. We could use Scotsmen, of course, but that would be a knowing wink to logicians, who are intellectuals, and there’s still that strong anti-intellectual streak...) Unfortunately, until one of the three conditions above can be proven, there’s no way of knowing whether there is a finite group of Real True Religious Folk, everyone is part of Real True Religious Folk, or nobody is part of Real True Religious Folk. So let’s scope it down to that there is such a thing as a Real True Christian, a Real True Muslim, etc. That should be easier.
It’s not. Internecine warfare proves that particular point isn’t workable. There may be some doctrinal similarities, but the details are devilish and have been causing schisms, splits, reformations, revolutions, and renamings throughout history. So we’ll scope it down further and say there’s such a thing as a Real True Catholic. And then a Real True Member of the Vatican-II approving Catholic Church. And then a Real True Member of the American Vatican-II approving Catholic Church. And den... and den... and deennnnnnnn...
As you can guess, eventually you have to scope down to something that’s very close to the individual level. Premise One is a bit of a bust, at least for use in large sweeping generalizations. We have no idea whether there are such beings as Real True Religious Folk, but the more details we add on to our characterization, the closer we get to being able to say with confidence that there is one of a particular type of Real True Religious Folk. That ties into Premise Two, which at the macro-level also falls flat, but which also gets better the more micro we get. The more qualifiers we add onto what we’re looking for, the easier it becomes to assess whether a person fits those criteria. At least some of those qualifiers can be objective. For example, “Does Person X tithe 10 percent of their income to their church?” For some denominations, a no answer excludes Person X. “Does Person Y practice birth control?” If so, they’re not going to be Real True X in more than a few Christian denominations.
Thus, the Gargoyle’s response to Ms. Coulter’s password - you’re right, but you’re also wrong. If, instead, you tell him that you don’t know what the password is, he says, “At least, if you’re a thief, you’re ashamed enough to lie about it. Come on in.” That’s not quite the right phrasing for the intended Aesop, but work with us here. If you’re someone who is Real True Religious folk, odds are pretty good that you’ll win friends and influence people by right action and without trumpeting around proclaiming that you’ve got it all and everyone needs to listen to you. Wait, maybe that phrasing does work. Even if you are Real True Religious Folk, at least you’re cognizant enough to not go praying on the street corners like the Pharisees and the hypocrites do. Come on in.
Anyway, I think that while Ms. Coulter is trying to assert a universal in Premise One, for it to be truly universally applicable, it will have to be re-written as “There are people who think they are Real True Religious Folk”. Premise Two will still slot nicely into this - “You can tell who those people are using objective criteria.” Now, though, If you take the two together, it takes a significantly more left-handed turn, doesn’t it? No longer are we talking in the realm of confidence that there are good people in the world, only humans who think they’re good people. And you can measure the measure of their goodness with objective criteria...based in what you think of as good. Finally, we’ve hit the meat of the argument made to us - “Doesn’t anyone question the Christianity of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, of the Westboro Baptist Church, or of President Obama? Why should they be allowed to assert they are Christians when they clearly are committing evil acts?”
And thus, we open up the fascinating realm that is exegesis. Christians inherit some of their Foundational Writings from Judaism, and Judiasm has a long tradition of interpreting the Written Law in the Torah and the Oral Law of the mitzvot. Read up on the midrashim and how many different commentaries we still have in our modern times to see just how possible it is to interpret the same thing differently. And that’s in the root practices. The Christians and the Muslims both keep that tradition quite alive (speaking ex cathedra, the Protestant Reformation, or issuing fatwas, for obvious examples) and diverge in their conclusions to the point of schism, heresy, and heterodoxy. God Hates Fags is one conclusion, Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin is another, and yet another says that gays and lesbians can be ordained as ministers in the church and administer all its rites. If you ask each of them, they’ll all point back eventually to the Foundational Writings for justification (some may go through church law first, but they’ll get back to it eventually). If you believe that the Great Commandment of Matthew 22:36-37 (or Leviticus 19:18, if you like) trumps all other things, then other parts that talk about the law of the people aren’t as important as the requirement to love G-d with one’s whole being and treat one’s neighbor with the same respect as you treat yourself, then regardless of whether they’re gay, straight, or otherwise, everyone deserves to be treated with love. If you’re more partial to the laws of Moses than the laws of Jesus, and take the angry Jesus that drives out all the unclean businessmen from Temple as your model, then you probably end up in the God Hates Fags camp. Both sides can point to the texts as saying they’re right. So how do you tell which one is and which one isn’t? It depends on your conception of G-d. Angry G-d tends to emphasise the fact that we’re all going to be smote if we don’t reform ourselves accordingly, benevolent G-d says we need to work at bringing everyone into the happiness and love offered. Angry G-d often results in angry preaching, the need to go out and save everyone from the hell they richly deserve by whatever means needed, benevolent G-d says that good behavioral modeling as well as a sell that will appeal to people’s wants to be saved and protected and benefit from a positive relationship from G-d is a good idea. Same G-d, the one that created the flood and the one that sent the Israelites out of Egypt, the one that sent his son as a sacrifice and that will put the world through tribulations before returning in triumph.
As you can see, the God that fits us is the God we imagine in the world. There’s a commandment against murder, so clearly people who kill are not Christians...excepting for those people who killed others in the name of unborn babies. Jesus commanded his people to sell their possessions, give their proceeds to the poor, and live a life of poverty...unless, that is, he wants you to give generously to your church, in which you will be rewarded in your faith and actions many hundredfold and grow very wealthy and rich in this life and the next. God said people who are gay and lesbian will go to hell...unless he said only practicing gays and lesbians go to hell...or he wasn’t actually talking about gays and lesbians there, and he made us all exactly the way he wanted us. Baptism is something you do as infants...or when you reach the age of reason...or when you fully want to get committed to the church. Alcohol is an evil, evil thing or proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Each believer has their own image of what God should be. And each of those believers has objective criteria to tell whether or not the person next to them believes in the same God they do. Most of those criteria mesh, but not all.
Ms. Coulter is right, though - people should be questioning the Christianity of President Obama, Tammy Faye Baker, Rick Warren, Fred Phelps, Glenn Beck, Benedict XIII, Ann Coulter, and everyone else who claims to be a Christian. Take them at their word and then ask questions about whether or not they are living up to their own definitions of Christians, and whether their definitions of Christians are the kinds of definitions they want to be propagating to the next generation. Questioners should be looking at their own definitions, too - are they living up to the teachings they profess to? Are they accusing someone else of having a speck in their eye when there’s a freakin’ huge plank stuck in theirs? Do they blithely assume that their vision of God is the correct one and that they can judge all others as followers or not based on that single vision, making their own assertion unchallengeable, but everyone else’s challengeable? Do they loudly assert their beliefs in order to gain material power and trust from others who say they’re the same?
It probably says a lot about the dominance of one thought pattern in this country that someone like Ms. Coulter can skip right over this very deep pool of thought and assume that everyone she’s talking to understands her assumptions and agrees with them as “objective”, committing the very act she’s criticizing in her column without noticing it. I’m equally sure there’s some sort of Big Finish to this whole Thinky that someone else will find, whether it is that they have a great revelation and deepen their practice, or they accuse me of moral relativism for even daring to equate the One True Way with the heretics, heterodox, and pagans. Find your own ending, I guess, and keep your own beliefs under the microscope and try to have other people point out where you have differences. If you’ve followed me out to the rhetorical wasteland here, I guess you’ll have to find your own way back.
Happy journeys.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-07 06:43 am (UTC)