January 31, 2007
Letter to a Christian Nation
Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen—the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.The book you are about to read is my response to this emergency…
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21 Responses to “Letter to a Christian Nation”
I wonder when we should stop faulting religion for people being poorly educated.
I think that’s a good point, John. The question of how to ‘educate’ a person who believes in the literal interpretation of the bible remains, however. If half of America believes (i.e. takes on faith) that the bible is the literal word of god, no amount of education can change that.
A dilemma.
What do you think?
Christians in many parts of this country apparently like to think of themselves as “the embattled ones,” subjected at every turn to persecution. But then when it comes to matters of separation of church and state, they will claim that this is and always has been a Christian nation. If you want to see freedom of religion put to the test–just pop into a town meeting in small-town America and let it slip that you are a non-believer. A lesson in persecution will be forthcoming. The reason Religion is so often equated with poor education is because there is, all across the country, a manifest assertion that the desire to critically examine one’s system of belief can only come from the Devil. That’s why there are so many students these days who attend college not in order to challenge themselves with new ways of looking at the world–but to simply confirm what they already believe and scout out the “enemy.” We should stop faulting religion for people being poorly educated when more religious people begin to actually seek an education.
I’m a contrarian, it’s a curse.
I believe every person is responsible for his/her own education, part of which involves, whether one is an atheist, an agnostic (as I am) or a deist, a working bullshit detector.
I don’t believe that religions function to educate people, but rather to provide a social structure for spirituality, thus giving millions and millions of people support, comfort, and hope instead of despair, not just in the abstract, but as represented by the people with whom they come together to worship.
I could rag on religions, but that position has already been staked out.
Oh, and by the way, two cheers for the Ten Commandments and the Sermon On the Mount. Oldies but goodies.
everything has its limitations
for Aristotle it was
[I]tertium non datur[/I]
(that took a few years to get over even though he questioned it himself)
for the Christian church…
well there’s a museum in Kentucky
I believe
for educational purposes.
Deron, Daryl, I agree. There is a dilemma. But I think the problem is this: most American Christians, as a reaction against Catholicism, lost their intellectual tradition. Therefore many of them believe things that are hardly reasonable. They believe many things, for that matter, that are hardly coherent, reasonable interpretations of Scripture, standing on its own.
What is even more lamentable is the loss of the intellectual tradition of the Catholic church, especially here in America.
I can’t speak for non-Catholics, but the Catholic church has always taught that truth is what it is; it is desirable, it is non-negotiable (so to speak), and that the search for it and the discovery of it is not only honorable, but a necessary part of human experience.
I don’t expect that you and I will agree about everything. I do believe that I can provide rational arguments to support anything my religion teaches. I believe that I should be able to defend any of my beliefs rationally. And, that where we disagree won’t be the result of poor logic or sophistry, but of a disagreement about fundamental principles. I do not think that all or even many atheists are stupid. (I would guess that ignorance is common to all men, believing or otherwise.) On the other hand, one would be stretching the limits of reason to call Aquinas a dummy.
Finally, people are people. There will be persecution with or without religion.
This is a very long, mostly unsubstantial comment. I apologize. It could, perhaps, be titled, “Meet the Flockers: John Pakaluk - Part II”.
the Catholic church has always taught that truth is what it is
Always? Didn’t Galileo, in a tight spot, mutter underneath his breath, “E pur si muove!”?
John, your “Meet the Flockers - Part II” (the intellectual autobiography?) resonated in a curious but stimulating way. I grew up in Dallas, Texas (quite a stronghold of anti-intellectual Christianity), the daughter of a pair of transplanted Connecticut Yankees who had no church affiliation whatsoever. “Mother is a Deist,” my mom explained to me, and then she explained. (Only much later did I learn that her dad was a lapsed Catholic and that she harbored deep memories of attending midnight Mass on Christmas Eve with him.)
Anyway, by sheer serendipity (so far as I can tell) I wound up going to college at the (Catholic) University of Dallas (yes, the University that just bowed out of the competition to host the GWB Presidential Library), and one consequence thereof is that I know Aristotle perhaps a bit better than some members of my generational/intellectual cohort. Another is that I do respect Christian intellectual tradition.
Still and all, my own take on Christianity is well encapsulated by a characterization uttered by the (fictional) Marcus Aurelius in Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian. I won’t repeat it here and now, not because it might be considered scurrilous, but because I don’t care to turn a warm blaze into a nasty conflagration by dribbling a few drops of gasoline onto it.
I do think that the antipathy to Christianity prevalent among many Flockers springs from the deeply anti-intellectual and virulently anti-Catholic Christianity that dominates much of Texas. (I mean, hey, if’n Lyndon hadn’t a’been ridin’ shotgun [so to speak], no way would JFK have got hisself elected President. “You want the Pope of Rome runnin’ America?”)
And I thank you for your thoughtful commentary.
Sheila, as usual, I enjoyed your friendly and insightful remarks. I don’t know the novel. Should I? And I hesitated posting the above for the same reason you left the quote out.
As a side note, I suppose the general disparagement of Aristotle for the last three hundred years is only fair, considering his weighty authority before then. It’s a shame, though, that he’s taken so lightly as a philosopher, when he compares so favorably to almost any other (at least of most, if not all, of the ones I’ve read).
Knotano, while there are some regrettable aspects concerning that event, I do believe that much of Galileo’s “e pur” has been clouded by myth and legend. Both Copernicus and Kepler had heliocentric theories, and Aristarchus 300 years before Christ. Keep in mind, high-ranking Catholic officials both promoted and endorsed Kepler’s hypotheses. Galileo was put under house arrest for theological errors (heresy) he made in interpreting his astronomy.
Oh, John, I do highly recommend the novel. It is fine. And I really don’t wish to make a great mystery here. The observation made by the fictional character is (and here I am quoting roughly and over a huge span of years) that Christianity is “a religion for children and slaves”. Not exactly earth-shattering, but I didn’t want to introduce it in a way that might prematurely taint my commentary.
I think Aristotle takes a tremendously bad rap, by the way, and that’s a position I’ve come to hold over several rounds of ‘yea’ and ‘nay’.
Well, I’m almost a child, and, according to Paul Erdos, soon to be a slave!
How regrettable was Giordano Bruno?
John, that was a good one.
This is certainly an interesting thread, and I’ve been thinking over Sheila’s suggestion that Texas itself is the root of much of the anti-Christian sentiments held by many Flockers. Texas and the entire American South have been (and largely remain) a haven for anti-intellectual Christianity. But most of my friends are from other parts of the country and other parts of the world, and on the whole we share the same views about religion in general and Christianity in particular.
What strikes me as the anomaly is not the experience of those of us in Texas, but the intellectual approach to Christianity often expressed here by John P and Andrew. Is it really the case that the rest of the country is filled with religious intellectuals, and I’m simply not hearing them because I’m stuck in Texas? Are the din and roar of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson drowning out the strong voices of intellectual Christians?
I’ve made this point before, but I want to say it without equivocation: Anyone concerned that Christians are getting a bad rap by Dawkins, Harris and others would better serve the cause by speaking out against the aggressively stupid who appear to have commandeered Christianity. Perpetuating a disdainful solidarity accomplishes nothing.
well said, Cindy. my distate for Christianity is only hightened by it’s southern form. in the end, I believe, and there is no way to say this unoffensively, what is there in Christianity to be intellectual about?
Cindy, I’ve said it before on a Clusterflock page: in my mind, people like Pat Robertson are as far from Aquinas as Dawkins. That Dawkins speaks so vituperously about Christianity is about as hurtful to me as an intellectual as a southern Christian loony ranting about evolution or the big bang. I think both are essentially equal in intellectual dishonesty and immaturity.
Deron: eternity, time, being, non-being, creation, truth, goodness, evil, will, consciousness, immortality, death, life, action, potency, motion, essense, morality, politics…
I ought to add: I am not offended, nor uncomfortable, nor etc.
It’s funny, no?, how what people believe hardly affects how they interact with real people in real life.
A strange fact: the majority of my close friends here at TAC freshman year were agnostic or protestant, who make up maybe %5 of the total population of the school.
Deron: I agree. I’m happy to see that John is not offended by this thread, and that his intellectual curiosity remains intact–but for me, one may “be” an intellectual only by way of a capacity to call all knowledge into question. This thought usually elicits the quick leap to much sneering about relativism, but as I have said before in other posts, all of us move through life by way of various kinds of faith, and sincerely questioning the basis for such faith doesn’t, therefore, make jelly of the questioner. But imagine a scientist who says he or she believes in the scientific method–some of the time. Dawkins points out that he has known people who went to the trouble of taking a PhD in Biology, only for the purpose of undermining specific concepts commonly held by other members of the field. The fact that a person can do this doesn’t make them a scientist or an intellectual, since an essential level of questioning will always be absent in a person who persists in such an approach. I have to say that I think the same with respect to those who, like the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, see philosophy as the mere handmaiden of theology. John speaks of Aristotle in glowing terms, but seems to underplay the centuries of intellectual gymnastics brought to the task of making Aristotle’s ideas conform to concepts the man would have argued against. What bothers me about the constant reshaping of “inconvenient” ideas that goes for intellectual rigor in some circles, is that there is seldom seen in it the courage to stand up and say: I will set aside a belief when the mind and perception I bring to the search for truth tells me that some other view is superior to the old one.
I don’t want to approach the world of ideas through a process of transforming all I encounter into that which makes a case for what I already know to be “true.”
I’m not getting into this discussion. Really, I’m not. But Knotano’s mention of Giordano Bruno above made me remember this poem by Heather McHugh: What He Thought.
John, I appreciate both your comments and though I recognize what I am about to say is offensive I say it not as a means to offend (if that distinction means anything useful in this case.)
what I meant by ‘what is intellectual about christianity’ is this:
what is intellectual about the virgin birth, original sin, walking on water, the divinity of christ, turning water into wine, the resurrection, etc.
these things can only be taken on faith, there is no intellectual component to them, just as there is no intellectual component to a belief in the flying spaghetti monster.
over time, an intellectual tradition can be built up around either of them, but that doesn’t negate the fact that, at its core, a belief in the flying spaghetti monster and a belief in christianity, or judiasm, or islam, requires the opposite of the intellect.
all of the extraneous things you mention have intellectual components to them but are not central to christian belief. they are components of the intellectual tradition of christianity.
there’s a big difference.
in that sense, there is no difference in a fundamentalist christian and an intellectual christian (I have been one), both believe in the divinity of christ, an article that can, again, only be based on faith.
which, again, has nothing to do with the intellect.
Thanks for the insight, India. That poem could almost be a movie.