Toward Attention

Shining Baubles and Luminous Ideals

I remember being told once by a biology professor (an Ichthyologist) that Cichlids love shiny objects (confirmed here) -- if I recall correctly, he actually said that they will collect them if they can.

If I were a Nietzschean, I'd say that this is what our ideals and ascetical commitments are biologically founded in -- a love of shiny things. We love the shiny thing, and we seek to mould ourselves to it, as a form of consumption, a very strange kind of acquisitiveness.

If that's true, however, religion will never go away. The question of why a form of life should be "shiny" is also one worth asking.

Man-Made Fires: For At Least 1.2 Million Years

Saving this for later: I really don't know what the Creationists would ever do with all of this. I suppose that forcing this -- and other considertions that, in concert with data like this, paint an overwhelming picture of our evolutionary history -- down the throats of Creationists, one is simply playing the robber, stealing, and providing no alternative. Better have a workable an alternative map in hand for them before you rob them of their belief.

Creationism

Creationism and Creationists weary me like few things can. I feel at a loss for how to fight this insidious, secluded and tenacious lie.

Religion, History, Science Truth

I thought that this article by Ward was a simple, good, superficial overview.

Adam's Rib

The Hebrew word for Man is Ish, and is written so:

איש

The Hebrew word for Wo-man is Isha, and is written so:

אשה

Notice that the difference between the words is only one character -- the middle character in the case of Ish (man) and the final character in the case of Isha (woman -- keep in mind that Hebrew reads from right to left).

Notice the middle character in the word for man: kind of looks like a rib, doesn't it? --a rib on the side of the word, no?

People need to wake up and love this story for its truth and its beauty -- and stop this Creationist nonsense.

Frederick Beiser on Hegel's Reception of Spinoza

In Frederick Beiser's marvelously-written book on Hegel, there are two paragraphs (bear with the first one to get to the second one) that reinforce my suspicions about the political motives present in the Protestant spirit from the beginning: or rather, it confirms my suspicions that the spirit of Protestantism tends towards a kind of political religion; or rather, that the spirit of Protestantism as a cultural movement always had a kind of political dimension to it that controlled other dogmatic concerns. It seems that the only way that this political tendency can be stopped from overturning traditional dogmas and from seeking its natural end is by other factors arresting it or steering it differently. 

What did Hegel and the young romantics get from Spinoza? What they saw in him was first and foremost his attempt to rationalize religion. Spinoza's famous dictum deus sive natura, his identification of God with the infinitude of nature, seemed to resolve the conflict between reason and faith that had preoccupied philosophers and theologians throughout the Enlightenment. Spinoza's dictum divinized nature as much as it naturalized the divine, and so it seemed to make a religion out of science, a science out of religion. If God were the same as "the one and all" -- if the divine were the creative force of nature, the dynamic unity behind all its laws -- then there would be no reason to oppose reason and faith. Instead, the objects of religion and science would be one and the same. The case for Spinozism seemed only strengthened by the weakness of its traditional rivals, theism and deism, which, by the end of the eighteenth century, were on their last legs. Theism not only rested its case on miracles, which were hard to square with science, but it also suffered greatly from the new biblical criticism. For its part, deism had simply collapsed under the relentless barrage of Hume's and Kant's criticism of the traditional proofs of God's existence. Only Spinoza's pantheism did not seem in danger of such obsolescence. The reality of Spinoza's God was as palpable as that of nature itself. Rather than being a mysterious spirit, like the God of traditional theism, or an irrelevant abstraction, like the God of deism, Spinoza's God is the whole of nature, and so equally present within everyone alike. Since we are all modes of the single infinite substance, we only have to reflect upon ourselves to find the divine within us.

It is important to see that the romantic attraction to Spinoza was not only religious but also political. To understand these political factors, it is worthwhile to keep  in mind a famous remark of Heinrich Heine: that pantheism had always been the secret religion of Germany, the faith of its cultural underground. Heine knew whereof he spoke. Since the end of the seventeenth century in Germany, Spinoza had become the patron saint of radical Protestants, of all those discontented reformers who accused Luther of selling out to the princes and betraying his two grand ideals: religious liberty and the priesthood of all believers. These radicals embraced Spinoza for a variety of reasons, all of them perfectly Protestant. They saw Spinoza's separation of church and state as a guarantee of religious liberty; they embraced his critique of the Bible because it freed Lutheranism from its biblicism, its deadening emphasis upon the letter as a rule of faith; and they loved his pantheism because it seemed to justify the equality and priesthood of all believers. After all, if God is infinitely present within everyone alike, we are all equal; and then there is no need for a priest or spiritual authority to mediate our relationship with God.

Genesis, Creationism, C. John Collins

I'm not a Creationist, if by Creationist one means (A) "someone who believes that the world is (very roughly) 6,000 years old and was made in seven literal 24-hour periods," (B) "Man did not develop from the lower animals, but is the immediate and special creation of God" or (C) "the Bible is literally true, and the Paradise story records historical events that one could have seen with a camcorder."

Nonetheless, the Fathers generally seem very clearly to favor the interpretation of an historical Adam (see St. John Chrysostom here), and this is such a widespread belief, that to deny it seems to call into question, for me, the assumptions of Orthodoxy regarding the inspiration of the Tradition as well as the inspiration of the Scriptures (which also seem to teach an obsolete cosmology -- which wouldn't be a problem for me if the obsolete cosmology did not seem inseparably tangled-up with dogmas such as the Ascension and the Fall and whatnot).

So I read and I read and I read on this topic, because it causes me such pain. The texts seems to me to have been written by a priestly school that did not understand them to be literal reports, but how to reconcile this with the Tradition? The function of Adam language is logically seperable from the question of the correlation of such statements to historical events. That seems the way to go.

Unfortunately, not everyone who is bothered by this issue is honest about it to the end. I don't really have a solution, only fragments. Some people, in their published writings on this topic, wish for you to grant them premises that are not obvious, would like to make it look like some things are plainly obvious to all that are not obvious (at least, not to me).

So I'm reading an article by a Protestant writer on this topic, Mr. C. John Collins. I came across it elsewhere, and I don't want to buy another book (the article is an abridgment of a book). It is frustrating to skim past what strikes me as superficially technical discussions of "story" and "history" (they're almost good at some points, but miss the mark), and especially "worldview" (such a meaningless word: it really can only mean "perspective"...if it's used to mean something else, reach for your purse, because you're being had).

He rightly touches upon the relation between the Church's dogmas and the historical affirmations they are bound up with. Though he fumbles with articulating the problem clearly, he clearly does get that there is a problem in this general area: people like me, who wish to schuck the early chapter of the Genesis text (and the Church's traditional interpretation of them) to any concrete historical Adam, Eve, or Garden, may not be able to hold on to the Church's corresponding teachings regarding Creation, Man, Evil, Theodicy, Salvation, etc.

Does the story carry the worldview, equate to it, communicate it, or something else? However we articulate this, there is one common affirmation: the worldview is not an abstraction derived from the story; one cannot treat the story simply as the husk, which we then discard once we have discovered the (perhaps timeless) concepts. Of course, there may well be transcendent truths (such as moral norms); but they gain their power from their place in the story—that is, they equip the members of a community to play their parts in the story meaningfully. It is the worldview story that, if well told, captures the imaginations of those who own it, thereby driving them on and holding their loyalty.

As you can see, the word "worldview" should be dropped. It brings needless obfuscation. How do we tell the story of the world and of salvation if we reject the historical nature of the Genesis texts, of their characters and events? Elsewhere he better states the problem:

[...] authors who say things like, “Genesis 1–11 aims to tell us, not history or science, but theology,”31 are trying to say something worth saying about Genesis 1–11, but they are indulging in a problematic disjunction. The theology is not separable from the story, as we can see from the fact that one of those “theological truths” is that the One who created the world is the good God who revealed himself to Israel, and not the capricious gods of the other peoples—a historical assertion!

If he's correct, then the Church will fade away: or rather, it will be broken, and her fragments, her components -- her corpse -- will be gathered up into new religious configurations. This seems to be already happening in some places (I dare not name them, for I may include some who ought to be excluded, or exclude some who ought to be included, or it may simply be ubiquitous, and Nietzsche's Death-of-God may truly have fallen upon us).

He'll make some OK distinctions about the different ways that people read the text, such as 

there are at least four possible ways of taking the material in Genesis:

1. The author intended to relay “straight” history, with a minimum of figurative language.

2. The author was talking about what he thought were actual events, using rhetorical and literary techniques to shape the readers’ attitudes toward those events.

3. The author intended to recount an imaginary history, using recognizable literary conventions to
convey “timeless truths” about God and humans.

4. The author told a story without even caring whether the events were real or imagined; his main goal was to convey various theological and moral truths.

(Unfortunately, Collins favors (2). He might be correct: but then the biblical author(s) of Genesis 1-3 would be wrong.) Then he goes on to write things that sound very sensible, followed by quotes that seem completely at odds with what he writes about them:

No one knows what materials the author of Genesis used in composing this story. Probably he had access to some versions of the Mesopotamian stories; but beyond that, God alone knows what else he might have had. Maybe there were Hebrew stories of the patriarchs, beginning with Abraham; some of them might even have been written. Perhaps Henri Blocher’s suggestion is best, that the author of Genesis “reconstructed” the past, working backwards from ordinary human experience to what must have caused it, giving us a tale that provided a contrast to the other stories:

"Genesis aims to supply the true reconstruction, guided and guaranteed by divine inspiration, over against the fantasies and errors reconstructed by the others. There is nothing in that which allows us to take the event as a symbol."

Finally,

Blocher also points out that “the presence of symbolic elements in the text in no way contradicts the historicity of its central meaning.”

Of course, as Collins presents it, and as it stands, Blocher is not really pointing out anything, but asserting something.

I'm still working my way through the article, but that's my two cents so far. Frustrating. Does anyone actually want to engage the science? No. Creationists, by definition, seem to always avoid dealing with the science in a direct, sustained way. They sometimes pick off bad science, it is true, but then they expand their legitimate critiques into the foundation for counter-positions, which they are not adequate for.

Gagarin and the Seven Heavens, Part 1

In the wake of Yuri Gagarin's historic ascent into "outer space" (a curious phrase), Nikita Khrushchev remarked "Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any God there." That is the quote as the Wikipedia entry on Yuri Gagarin has it. I read here, however, that the actual quote by Khrushchev is "Why should you clutch at God? Here is Gagarin who flew into space, but, he saw no God there." It's a remarkable saying, not least of which is the presumption that traditional talk about God "in the heavens" is actually (and can only be) referring to space that is above the sky, conceived of as a dome.

Thus, one example (i.e., "Heaven" -- which in the Greek is literally "Sky", as in "Our Father, Who art in the sky") of what are properly intelligible locations (Gehenna, She'ol/Hades, Paradise, Heaven) are interpreted by Khrushchev and others to be spatial locations (my mother's garden, France, Alpha Centauri). Christian Theology is yoked to a strange and (if it ever existed as presented) outdated cosmology. Is this yoking simply truthful, stating the essence of Christian faith properly against mutilating post-advent-of-Modern-Science re-interpretations, or is it forced?

Granted, so much traditional language about heaven, as well as art depicting the same, speak and represent the "location" of heaven this way, as a geographical place beyond the dome of the sky. I can't even enumerate how often I've seen Jesus depicted in the sky. Sometimes some fathers who write about heaven qualify such spatial language (as in St. Isaac the Syrian or St. Augustine of Hippo), and make it clear that these are not principally physical-spatial places. Usually they don't explicitly do this (even if they can -- rightly or wrongly -- be read to be on board with such a thing by their use of the phrases "Heaven" and whatnot), and sometimes some of them seem to speak of it literally in a way that may indicate they actually thought of it spatially.

N.T. Wright once used the metaphor "off stage" to describe the fundamental intention for placing the sphere of the heavens outside all the other celestial spheres. I remember reading in one of the now-conventional Orthodox "convert" books (I think perhaps it was The Orthodox Way by Metropolitan Bishop Kallistos Ware) that an Orthodox priest in Russia had responded to the Khrushchev quote, saying, "how will you see God in heaven if you do not see him on Earth?" I like the legend of this response, even if I have grave doubts about whether it's based in a historical event.

What is the truth of the matter? Is Khrushchev or this legendary priestly respondent offering the truth about Christian teaching?

Power and Control

Science, as I understand it, boils down to mathematical-mechanical representations that allow for technological mastery. It originates in the desire to control things and outcomes.

Religion is not properly about this, but about meaning. (I'm ignoring the voices that wish to make it more complicated -- I'd make several concessions to them and overturn several of their arguments, and I'd end up returning to this point.) Nonetheless, there are plenty of people all across the board who make it about control -- who turn religion into magic. This is obvious to us when we see it in primitive societies and in foreign cultures, but less obvious when it pops up in our backyard, or even our own hearts.

I recently had a series of short conversations with a Protestant acquaintance of mine that I've known for several years, and it became clear to me that he values the teaching of the sole infallibility of scripture because this teaching (A) gives him clarity and a foundation to (B) know with certainty what is true about topics that are otherwise impossible to achieve total certainty on (C) the same way that a master mechanic knows his way around an automobile to fix it, or to show other people how it works ("it's simple: see, this does that, and we know that this works because over here that valve is in there, and so this must be your problem," etc.).

In the end, I think that Protestantism comes into conflict so often with Scientistic varieties of Secularism precisely because they are interested in control. Look at how many Protestants in the U.S. are interested in imposing theocratic legislations, even when the legislation superficially has exclusively democratic language in it.

The Tower and the Wastes, I.ii.a

The dust of the earth

Modern scientific inquiry was praised near its genesis by Leibniz as “putting nature to the rack,” to extract her secrets. How were we put to such a relation with the world? The desire to dominate seeks the means to achieve its ends, and any intellect which serves a will so driven to any task by this desire will scour for such means that reliably deliver the ends sought. The desire to master the world has resulted in the rigorous pursuit of mechanistic cause-effect relationships between things in the world, by which ends might be produced and reproduced by means of a reliable method. Once swollen and severed from the desire for meaning (that is, the religious desire), instrumental reason turned the whole of the world into a closed system of mechanical causes and effects. Every perception associated with meaning was thus relegated to the dustbin of “appearance” or “subjectivity,” whose “truth” (if there was one) was to be found not in qualities about the world  but in quantities, while “essence” became the domain of mechanism – the sole criterion of intelligibility. The desire for meaning is thereafter consigned to live within the graveyard of the cosmic mechanism, and may not posit anything beyond it.

    Any reasonable pursuit of ends has pragmatic elements to it, but it is a peculiar condition of the modern age that it can produce men like “Le Corbusier,” who would strip the expression of noble ideals and meanings not only from airplanes, but turn even buildings into “machines for living.” The mechanical takes over our aesthetic, and prescribes to us as beautiful the mechanical life we have trapped ourselves in.

    We are now displaced. The universe, as mechanical, offers man no guidance: it is no theophany; it is no sacrament; there is nothing intelligible independent of matter; the world does not bear the Good – there is no real Good, and no way to talk about what such a thing might be in truth, aside from a reflection of our own vital concerns, a hopelessly divisive affair. Man’s intentions and interest and goals have no grounding in the world or beyond – only in him. The world is alien to his humanity – it is dead. And so the microcosmic buildings born from within this vision feel dead, and deaden us.