Best Christmas Hymn Ever

While there's still time, I'd like to make a pitch for my own favorite Christmas song.  In the past few years I've been introduced to my recent favorites, "Fairytale of New York" and "Baby It's Cold Outside," and I'm grateful for the exposure.  But when it comes to traditional Christmas songs, there's one that stands out more than any others, and you almost never hear it sung.  The hymn in question is "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence."  

I've loved the song ever since I first performed it in choir almost 25 years ago.  It's eerie and somber and speaks to the potential unearthly holiness of Christmas better than any other hymn out there.  (The medieval mode helps.)  Unfortunately, a truly great version that's free is very hard to find.  So I've offered two YouTubes here.  The first, a single voice, will give you a sense of the lyrics, and the second will demonstrate how it can sound when it's arranged all pretty.  

If you enjoy it, spread the word!  I'd love to hear some pop singer cover this instead of "Silent Night" for the gazillionth time.

Putting the "Why"s in Holy Days

So wait a minute--the bailout bill didn't pass...and now the lawmakers are going on vacation for two days? For what purpose, exactly? How is anything that happens during Rosh Hashanah more important than helping out the economy?

It's times like this that being an atheist makes me feel very alien indeed. I want to explain to everybody, "Rosh Hashanah is a very nice ritual, but come on! It's not even a real new year! Do you really think God, who knows everything, observes a lunar calendar? Do you really think the world is 5,769 years old? More importantly, do you really think God thinks its more important to sit still and do nothing for two days than to help prevent millions of Americans from losing everything? And even if God thinks so, isn't he wrong?"

And then I just sigh. We're wired for ritual. I understand that. And it's meaningful and cultural and historical and it roots us and gives us community and all that. But Jiminy. At a time like this, I'd expect my lawmakers to work through Christmas or Easter, or to postpone Thanksgiving, and if some holy book didn't order it otherwise, surely we'd be skipping Rosh Hashanah too.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a great time off. I hope nothing terrible happens. But if the worst occurs, I hope those apples and honey were REALLY tasty.

UPDATE: Okay. It looks like the non-celebrating legislators ARE in fact, still at work hammering out a bailout bill. So the only thing that's been delayed is an actual vote. That's still a little silly, but it's not as crazed as I thought it was. Whew! I always feel better when human beings make sense.

Why Evangelical Eschatology is Both Evil AND Batshit Crazy

I knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened: Hal Lindsey has begun to compare Barack Obama to the Antichrist.

As soon as Obama began turning heads in Europe, I knew it was coming.  In case you're not familiar with evangelical eschatology (i.e., their reading of how the world will end), a brief rundown is this: The Book of Revelation is a literal prediction of events that will occur in the future just before the end of time, and those events include all the standard apocalyptic goth signifiers: the ocean turning to blood, a third of the stars falling from the sky, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (famine, disease, war, and--in an astonishing triple redundancy--death).  As part of this, the world gets taken over by a one-world government run by a charismatic leader who offers world peace, but who is really pure evil and who has an agenda to destroy all the Christians by forcing them to deny Jesus (to "take the mark of the Beast") in order to buy anything.  

This has been a consistent theme of the nutcase right, who have been suspicious of the League of Nations, and then the U.N., and most recently the E.E.C., all of which are seen as an example of bringing the world together and thereby softening it up for demonic takeover.  It's a stupid way of looking at the world (and a completely irresponsible way of reading Revelation or of prophecy in general), but that didn't stop Hal Lindsey from writing The Late Great Planet Earth, which took a verse-by-verse analysis of Revelation (those locusts are clearly Soviet helicopters!) and which became the bestselling book of the entire 1970s.  So these terrible terrible ideas have found fierce purchase among an entire generation of naive literalists who were scared into Christianity (always an ugly motivation) and who will believe anything--anything, no matter how morally appalling--as long as the Bible "tells them" to do it.

Until now, the most obvious example of the pure evil of this concept was the reign of James Watt as Reagan's Secretary of the Interior.  His tenure was a disaster for the environment because he believed that Jesus was returning soon, so why not use up all our resources now?  It's a bit like saying, "Why not break all my toys, since Santa will replace them at Christmas?"  You'd be gambling a helluva lot of precious things on the existence of Santa Claus.  And someone else would eventually wind up paying for your delusion.  We the taxpayers aid for Watt's divinely inspired anti-management for years.  

The two main effects of this have been on U.S. foreign policy, in the knee-jerk resistance to anything the U.N. does, and the knee-jerk support of everything Israel does, for no better reason than that the Bible "says so."  (Israel needs to exist for the Armageddon countdown to be set in motion; Christian "prophecy" writers often talk about the creation of Israel as a modern miracle and fulfilment of Biblical prophecy.  They're less keen to observe that the prophecy was self-fulfilling; the hope for a Jewish state was kept alive through the 1930s and 1940s by Christian evangelicals in America and England.)  

Theologically, this has the same problem that I alluded to in my earlier post about the evangelical version of the sacrament: it's a mere checklist with no reason to exist; a pure knuckling under to what is seen as a Biblical injunction that has no obligation to make historical, ethical, psychological, scientific, or human sense.  (Bruce Bawer makes this point quite elegantly in his chapter on eschatology in Stealing Jesus.  He asks, why would God turn the oceans to blood and darken the sky forever?  What possible purpose does it serve, except to be creepy?  Why, at the end of time when his message is presumably most important, does God reveal himself to be profoundly and bafflingly weird, bloodthirsty, and terrifying?  And why, Bawer asks, do evangelical Christians not even seem disturbed by this presumably real face of their God of Love?)  

So far, so unpleasant.  But now that we have a Presidential candidate for the first time in ages who is actually, genuinely popular all over the world, the nutcase religious right is about to become completely unhinged: they will take this man--an obviously skilled politician who is smart, informed, pretty non-corrupt, and genuinely good at smoothing things out--and claim that precisely because of these traits, he is likely to be the most evil inhuman creature in all of world history.  

I trust that it won't work.  I trust that, if anything, it will further alienate the eschatological wing of fundamentalist Christianity from sensible mainstream Americans, and will further distance this approach to the Bible from that of the under-30 generation of Christians (as David Kinnaman has already noted is happening).  

What terrifies me about this, though, is that it only takes one deluded fuck to wield a rifle.  (To "deluded" you could add "frightened" and "hungry for importance" and every other unloving adjective that tends to motivate extreme religious types; they combine readily.)  And if ever a theology was perfectly designed to mass-produce assassinating lunatics, it's evangelical Christianity's completely unhinged, scholastically irresponsible, and generally unspeakably idiotic view of the end of the world.

Let me add, however, that I'm one of the few optimists I know when it comes to thinking about an Obama Presidency. Everyone keeps flashing back to Kennedy and MLK and worrying that Obama might get assassinated just like them. I disagree.  The world is different than it was in the '60s, we're not quite as culturally unsettled, and unlike either Kennedy or Luther King, Obama has made a career out of being careful and not pissing people off.   I don't see how any sensible person would have a strong objection to his candidacy, and I fully expect Obama to survive both terms (barring a catastrophic misstep somewhere or a choice to only do it once), and in so doing, change our national myth forever.  I would also point out that it's actually a little harder to kill people by surprise now than it was in the 60s, what with the expansion of surveillance and the interconnection possible via the Web.  It sucks that we have less privacy, but there is that upside to it.

But if I'm wrong, and someone does decide to try to kill Obama, I predict right now that it's going to be someone who ascribes to the evangelical view of the end of the world, and who uses that theology to justify his crime.  (And if, god forbid, Obama gets shot, with modern medicine there's good reason to assume he'll survive--and this will just inflame the apocalyptic idiots further, because the Antichrist is supposed to die of a head wound and come back to life too.  You literally can't win with these people.)  

Articles like Hal Lindsey's should be a warning sign to evangelicals: a demonstration that their helpless devotion to a literal reading of scripture--even of those parts that were never meant to be literal--has ugly side effects.  It leads to a worldview that can actually look directly at an opportunity for greater world peace and react with unthinking panic and fear and even hatred.  And the fact that some of them really think that this is what Jesus would do is an insult to Christianity, and to goodness in general.  It's possibly the greatest tragedy that a well-intentioned person can commit.  And that's the price of letting an ancient, inflexible book take your actual conscience hostage.

Sacramentables!

When I wrote my "non-book" of Christian Top Ten Lists back in 1992, one of the lists was "Top Ten Changes in the Church by the year 2050." And the item 7 on the list was, "Bread and wine in one tiny pill!"

Well, they've done it. I went to a church in my neighborhood this past weekend (long story, short version: I was taping interviews) and as I entered, I was handed a program and this, which I had never seen before:



There's a better picture here. It turns out they're now making communion in handy to-go combo cups, with the wafer right there in the top. No mess, no waiting, no crowding the aisles--and of course it's grape juice, not wine. The only thing missing is any actual sense of holiness or, God forbid, human touch.

The Catholic in me was horrified. The whole point of communion is to have an actual encounter with the body and blood of Christ, which is why you need a priest there in the first place. This sort of get-Christ-to-go approach could hardly be more blasphemous. The ecumenical part of me, though, was more ambivalent. Since it seems like superstition anyway, what better way to completely neuter it of any miraculous aura than to get a communion that was mass-produced by a machine?

Ultimately, though, I'm saddened by it. Not because it's tacky, though of course there's that. But because it's a symptom of what too many fundamentalist churches do when they misread the Bible. They get the bare score but none of the music. In his 1977 book Fundamentalism, James Barr points out that evangelicals tend to have an extremely empty theology: they believe in the virgin birth, not because virginity or Mary or any element of the story is a matter of great theological impact or reflection; it's because if you believe the Bible, then you have to believe a number of things in a checklist: the Flood; Adam and Eve; the Virgin Birth, etc. The important point is not the Virgin Birth itself; the important thing is checking it off, and then, having checked it off (thereby proving that you're not a liberal), to move on to the real center of contemporary Christianity in America: quiet times, Bible study, prayer and personal growth. A topic that has been the subject of Christian art for centuries has become, in Bible literalist hands and for all practical purposes, a mere shibboleth.

So in a sense, the Sacramentables are a symptom of a very real tendency in evangelical Christian thought: with no sacraments, no art, and a minimum of distracting symbols, the only reason they have communion is because the Bible tells them to. So why make it more important than it needs to be? A wafer in a prefilled thimble-sized plastic cup is as puny and comma-like a communion as you could conceive of. Of course, they'd never get rid of it entirely--that would be unbiblical! But they definitely show what they think about the Bible's demands by how they dress it up. (I should add, by the way, that this was a Pentecostal church, so you can also see how, in their interpretation of the Bible, direct communion with the Holy Spirit through tongues and miracles knocks a silly old wafer into a cocked miter. So I'm not saying they're spiritually starving, per se; I'm saying their focus has taken them way out of the mainstream of history and tradition.)

In the end, I think I'd prefer an actual meal--shared meals are part of religious ritual even in hunter-gatherer societies--with real wine and actual broken bread (no wafers please!) and no spiritualizing mumbo jumbo, so you could focus on what's really happening: the people, the conversation, the nourishment that all shared meals provide. Whatever all that adds up to, I think it's pretty clear that the Sacramentables offer the exact opposite.

You know what else it is, though? It's pretty fucking hilarious. Encapsulating the entire communion into that little package is just asking for abuse. I mean, how could a juggler resist?

'80s Christian Music on YouTube!

Thank god for the Internet! When I left Kansas City, I left behind my extremely heavy collection of vinyl, since it was intensely represented by Christian music, and I was a newly minted atheist who never listened to it anymore. But I've definitely missed some of those songs, and after that last post, I did a little poking and discovered that many of these songs live on in YouTube form. If you're completely unfamiliar with Christian music, this probably won't be representative--I was something of an alternakid in my tastes, so heavy on the new wave/indie sound instead of Amy Grant, Petra, and DeGarmo & Key. But you might find these songs fun. I do, however, repudiate all the visuals, which are either cobbled together by people at home, or produced in the '80s on Christian-music budgets. I actually can't decide which is worse. I advise you to listen with your eyes closed.

1. The Seventy Sevens, "Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba"



2. Daniel Amos, "(It's The Eighties, So Where's Our) Rocket Packs"



3. Tonio K., "What Women Want" (A bit retrograde, but listenable)



4. Larry Norman, "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus" (Radosh's pick; definitely the best Larry Norman song on YouTube. It's amazing what he got away with in the 70s.)



5. Prodigal, "Future Now"



and -- what the hell -- how about...

6. Crumbacher, "Glowing in the Dark"




By the way, if anyone out there is planning to release a few more of these lost singles on YouTube, may I make a few requests? There was a lot of Daniel Amos, but very few of my own favorite songs ("William Blake," "Dance Stop," "As the World Turns," "New Car!" "Darn Floor Big Bite"), and there was almost no Tonio K. (I'd love to see "Impressed," "True Confessions," and maybe "Romeo Loves Jane")...and, much to my shock, almost no Mark Heard (though lots of other people seem to be covering his "Strong Hand of Love"). Most of this work went out of print before it even went to CD, so really--anything you pirates can do, I'd love you for it.

Top 10 Christian Songs

I just found out that Daniel Radosh, the author of the amazing Rapture Ready (which is a funny and also beautifully nuanced and compassionate look at Christian pop culture; I recommend it to everyone, Christian or not), also put out a list of what are, in his opinion as an interested outsider, the top 10 Christian rock songs. It's been awhile, so I haven't heard most of these new bands he mentions, but I thought I'd weigh in--admittedly far after the fact--to make my own list. Since this dates from my own experiences in the '80s and '90s, I haven't heard Sufjan Stevens or Caedmon's Call or any of a dozen others.

My own Top Ten list, in something close to chronological order, is as follows:

1. "Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?" by Larry Norman (from Only Visiting This Planet). The granddaddy Christian music song that practically invented the entire genre, and it's still a helluva lot of fun to listen to.

2. "Future Now" by Prodigal (from Just Like Real Life).

3. "Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba" by The 77s (from All Fall Down).

4. "(It's the Eighties, So Where's Our) Rocket Packs" by Daniel Amos (from Vox Humana). Beautifully structured, with a Buggles-style tinny voice effect that's just perfect for its litany of sci-fi hopes about the future--many of which are quite close to coming true ("in every house a picture phone" and "a president of female gender"). Funny and sweet.

5. "True Confessions" by Tonio K. (from Romeo Unchained).

6. "River of Love" by Sam Phillips (from The Turning). This is the last "Christian" album she made, and these days it's been rereleased on a standard secular label. But at the time, this was an unusually difficult and ambiguous Christian album.

7. "Whatever Happened to Sin?" by Steve Taylor (from I Want to Be a Clone). This is a tough call, because Steve Taylor was very political, and (of course) conservative, and so almost every single part of the song is ugly to me now. (It's anti-choice and homophobic.) But it's such brilliant lyric writing--[particularly the never-seen-it-before-or-since use of a one-word gimmick in the rhyme scheme. This is what I always liked about him; he wrote the smartest songs, even if you didn't agree with them.

8. "Hero," by Steve Taylor (from Meltdown). Not only a lovely song, but a very honest look at what evangelical Christianity offers its adherents: the chance to be a real hero, and to have one that won't disappoint.

9. "House of Broken Dreams" by Mark Heard (from Dry Bones Dance)
10. "Another Day in Limbo" by Mark Heard (from Satellite Sky)

Mark Heard left us WAY too soon, but thank goodness he found his footing before he passed, with a series of three absolutely terrific albums (Dry Bones Dance, Second Hand, and Satellite Sky) whose songs are still being widely covered today--most recently by Buddy Miller, whose Universal United House of Prayer covers "Worry Too Much."

I was surprised that some of the songs I thought for sure I'd represent--Steve Taylor's "Meltdown," for instance--have not aged well at all, while others--like "Future Now"--haven't aged well either and yet I don't care for some reason. Who knows. All I know is, this stuff stays with you. Just a week or so ago I actually had a the chorus from "Royal Command Performance" pass through my brain--it was written by a Christian synth band called Crumbacher, on an album I never even liked very much. It gives me an idea for an absolutely impossible trivia game that I'll spare you all.

(P.S. I ignored mainstream bands like U2 or The Call--whose "I Still Believe" is still probably one of the most stirring religious anthems ever written--in order to keep this a ranking of bands that you really had to be a Christian in the 80s to have heard of. It's more fun that way.)

A Few Notes on Thinkiness and Astrology

A few nights ago I went with a female friend of mine to an art-discussion salon that was being held in Troy, New York. The speakers were as follows:

* a landscape designer who talked about the conflict between using "native" and "exotic" plants (the exotic plants often escape and start taking over the countryside from the natives), and the ways in which mythology sometimes influences the "nativist" plant movement (since some of our native plants began life as exotics themselves).

*a dancer who stood in the middle of the room and fell over. Then she dragged a chair over, stood on it, and fell to the floor again. She then bent over with the chair on her back (like she was sitting at a 90-degree angle) and walked around, saying, "I want you all to close your eyes, then open them and notice what you're seeing." She fell over, then she climbed up on the nearest table, facing the wall. She spread out her arms. "Because there's a difference between seeing and perceiving. Do you know what I mean? Are there any questions?" It went on like that for several minutes.

* a guy who refurbishes old houses and who talked about the difference between commerce and art and the way that his own artistic muse has grown in size (he used to just make furniture; now he redoes entire floors).

On the way home--it was an hour drive--my friend said, "Well, I got a little bit out of it," and I said, "Yeah, except for that dancer. What self-indulgent bullshit! She had no idea what the fuck she was doing." And my friend said, "Really? That's the only part of the whole evening that made sense to me."

I realized then that I was in the presence of a non-thinker. I mean that in as nonpejorative a sense as I can manage. Because if I learned anything while writing my sample chapters for How to Love God Without Being a Jerk, it's that there's definitely such a thing as thinking too much. And to a certain extent, the contempt that some more activist atheists have for religion in general--not just bad religion and bad religious people, but for all religion of any sort--stems, I think, from the same sort of cultural bafflement that makes evangelicals hostile to homosexuals: "How can those people even think that way? I can't make any sense of it."

I'm obviously an extremely thinky person myself. So while I'm aware that there's a limit to what pure rationality can do for us, I'm still trying to work out the exact shape of those limits; where they fall and why they're important; what's so damned great about intuition and myth, etc.

The example I keep coming back to is astrology. By any sensible measure--that is, if you tested astrology the way you'd test the statements of a person running for President--astrology is utterly worthless on every conceivable level. To assassinate the concept in a single sentence: Astrology posits that our personality is shaped by the constellations we're born under, even though those constellations aren't even in the sky when we're born anymore (the earth has slowed since the Middle Ages), and the constellations--which of course aren't a group of stars near each other but just stars that appear to be together from our angle--allegedly produce character traits based, not on the stars, but on what someone once thought the stars looked like (so Taurus means you're "bull-headed," Libra means you're into balance, etc.), which means that a different culture with different myths and different names for those same constellations would technically have a completely different read on people; and what about the Chinese Zodiac, anyway?

It is, in short, all so completely made up and bogus that you'd be better off just saying, "Sheila is anal and a compulsive talker" than saying, "Sheila is anal and chatty; that's just so Virgo of her!" Because it really really really really isn't Virgo of her, and never has been, and has never made a single lick of sense. I don't even mean it's not scientific. I mean that not even common sense applies here; astrology is held to a lower standard than we ask of advertisements.

And yet, broadly speaking, women are drawn to astrology. That's sociological fact: Women make up 80% of the consumers of astrology magazines, and that's why you find astrology columns in Glamour and O, but not in Popular Mechanics or (if memory serves) Boys' Life. Women may not take it very seriously (I know few who plan their days around it, Nancy-Reagan-style), but a helluva lot seem to find it at least fun to think about, and it does inform the way many women talk of, and interpret, the world and the people in it.

As a fair-minded but very thinky person, this puts me in a dangerous situation: if rationalism really is the best way to go, then women, demographically speaking, are idiots. That's obviously very uncharitable, and flies in the face of another fact: I really love women. I have always preferred their company over men, and their wisdom and care have added immeasurably to my life. If I dismissed people out of hand for believing in astrology, my life would be quite impoverished.

So that leaves the question: what the hell makes people--including many people I love--think astrology is worth a second's thought? And after talking to my dance-loving friend the other night, I have reached this theory: astrology is a shared cultural myth--something like a religion with no theology and no demands--and by invoking astrology ("Steve is such a Taurus!"), its adherents are sharing in a community and giving their beliefs about someone's psychology a more profound anchor. Steve isn't just aggressive out of nowhere; it's a mythical aggressiveness that we believers have all seen before. So we can pool our wisdom to talk about it, even if you don't know Steve personally.

The proof of this, I think, is that although people use astrology to make general pronouncements ("Pisces are very peaceful people"), only rarely do they say things that are actually counter-intuitive. They wouldn't say, for example, "Although Julian is an abusive wife-beater, he's really a peaceful person because he's a Pisces." Instead they say something more like, "Although he's a Pisces, he must have been born with Jupiter in retrograde to be such a violent jerk as well." I haven't read the latest astrology magazines about the Presidential candidates, but I can hazard a guess: the stars tell us that Hillary is aggressive and ambitious, that McCain is experienced but has a temper, and that Obama is idealistic and open to possibilities. Call me psychic. Astrology never trumps common sense; it serves to explain it.

In other words, astrology is layered over everyday observations--observations that aren't even particularly interesting--in order to imbue them with greater meaning, even if that greater meaning isn't that much greater or taken that much more seriously. So the fact that half the population is inclined to this way of thinking suggests that there's value in it. It suggests a whole series of things that I'm trying to take to heart as well: that in many cases it may be more important to create community than to be exhaustively factual (something all storytellers know); that the impact of a belief may need to be weighed more than its provable accuracy (which we see all the time in discussions of life after death, where materialists have a particularly hard sell to make); and that a happy life may be the one that doesn't worry the details to death.

It still doesn't make sense to me, but of course that may be much of the point; we can survive the loss of more sense than hyperrational people (like me) think we can. I'm still learning.

Of course it may also be the case that we need all types of people, from the extremely impractical energy-invoking dancer types to the hard-edged, taxonomy-wielding lexicographers, and maybe even advising people to do something about it is the wrong approach. But at present I'm convinced that the extremes are not entirely healthy, and that it's better, if possible, to aim yourself toward the middle. Even if you can't get all the way there, some balance, and more of it, is better than none.

Fireflies

I've been complaining about being in the boonies, because despite what E. O. Wilson says about biophilia (i.e., that we are evolutionarily wired to need connection with nature as part of a happy life), I'm basically a city mouse, and could live quite happily taking the subway to the library and back, with occasional forays into the odd museum or planetarium. Sunlight is optional; I'm part troll. The subway, in fact, along with skyscrapers and the lights of Times Square, feel like all the magic my life needs. But if I had to live someplace truly rural, I now know about one definite spiritual advantage which my friend's country house has in abundance: fireflies.

When I took a class in The Sociology of Religion with Andrew Greeley, at one point he gave us a list of experiences that people are most likely to identify as "religious." These experiences included:

1.) being on a mountaintop
2.) looking out over the ocean
3.) staring into the night sky
4.) being present at a birth
5.) engaging in powerfully moving sex
6.) certain drug trips

Of course, many people would add their own favorites to the list (hearing a great concert, dancing with strangers, and of course some people have what you might call "pure" spiritual experiences that aren't mediated by anything in the world around them). To my own list, I would now add "watching fireflies at night." I grew up in Tucson, where fireflies don't exist, and when I lived in Kansas City and Tallahassee, I lived in urban environments and never saw them. But out in the country they're out in staggering force.

It's frustrating to talk about because even as I've seen them in the evenings around the house, I despair of communicating what it's like. Their lights are too dim to really be captured by an over-the-counter camera. So I have to rely on my own words, which are always weak in the presence of something so ineffable.

I think I can explain it, though. All the of items 1 through 6 are experiences of feeling suddenly very small, and in the presence of something profound--something huge and meaningful that would be even terrifying if it didn't also seem beautiful. The fireflies are like that: they come out for a few weeks in the summer and communicate in a dance of winking lights--a mating ritual. So there's something already beautiful in the fact that what we're watching is a conversation about sexual connection; it's predicated on what humans think of as love.

What's most startling is how they transform the landscape. The first night I walked out and noticed them, the sun was down, and the cornfield was flooded with them as far as I could see. They hung low over the footpath; they moved high in the trees. Literally everywhere you looked there seemed to be a potential spark--if not now, then maybe next second, or the next. It forces you to notice everything.

And when you see that many of them, blinking and floating, your eye naturally draws lines--just like when alternating lights blink in a circle it looks like the circle is moving, so in this field it looks like lights are streaking this way and that in riot of stuttering indecision. When it's dark, you can't even tell how far away any of the lights are, so your very perspective is thrown off balance. And the light you just saw blinking has moved a little the next time you see it--up or down, left or right. They wander hopefully. In a final moving touch, they are silent--utterly silent. So I stepped out of the car and simply saw the fields and trees quietly pulsating in some mysterious network, and when I strained my senses, all I could hear was the chirp of distant frogs. After staring at it for ten or fifteen minutes, I looked up and saw the moon--this fierce wedge of brightness that was so blunt and stationary it seemed almost obscene.

Two days later around noon I was walking near these same high stalks of corn and startled a deer, which bounded high and away, showing its head every few steps. That was startling, but it wasn't as moving as watching the fireflies hovering over that same cornfield. I think what was missing was the connection--this sense of being a witness at a fairy conversation that is both completely meaningful and completely unfathomable. Faced with that profundity, a stray thought like "Hey, look! A deer!" really can't compete.

I tried to find clips on YouTube, but the one I've just posted is is the best I could find: the fireflies are sparse, and I could do without the music, but you do get a sense of the flies' weird movements, and how they make the entire landscape look random and how they can baffle your perspective. It's funny--if you look at that list of religious experiences, humans have invented gods for every one of them: mountain gods, sky gods, ocean gods, and so on. And yet as far as I know, humans have never thought to worship fireflies. I don't know how we missed that opportunity.

Atheists Going to Church, and Other Forms of Happiness

Interesting article here about atheists who attend churches. (via Andrew Sullivan.) It doesn't say anything particularly mind-blowing, but it does strike at the ways in which religion can be a positive force in the world, and the importance of a community. As it happens, I'm already up on the actual importance of community because...

...I just finished reading The Geography of Bliss, in which NPR correspondent Eric Weiner (writing in a style much like Bill Bryson) journeys to the happiest places on earth (Iceland, Bhutan, Switzerland) as well as some unhappy ones (including the unhappiest: Moldova) and comes to several consistently interesting conclusions about happiness. I expected it was just going to be a travelog-ish lark, and I've found instead that my thinking has been altered. Highly recommended.

Okay. Back to more writing.

Expelled Review

Here's a link to the New York Times's dismissive review of Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed. The review itself isn't much (but then, I want a detailed rebuttal, not a shrug and a grimace), but I laughed out loud at the very end where they sort of let the facade drop:

“Expelled” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has smoking guns and drunken logic.

(Still haven't seen it myself, but it might be fun to watch and then complain about. I'm just checking out other reviewers first for the sake of my blood pressure.)

Contra Ben Stein

Just found a website called Expelled Exposed that strives to correct the disinformation in the movie Expelled!, which I groused about in this post here. I particularly liked this section here which discusses how evolution actually works, along with other topics that I don't find covered often enough. Nice general grounding of information.

Note also the sections in the sidebar, which debunk the spurious claims of the few researchers the moviemakers were able to find, all of whom claim that they were hurt in the academy because they taught creationism...and all of whom are misrepresenting the issues. (In the case of the takedown of Caroline Crocker, I found myself wondering why anyone would hire this person at all. If you actually say, "Well, we have doubts about evolution because a cat has never turned into a dog in a laboratory," surely you're actually saying, "I don't know even the basic facts about what I've been hired to teach, and I wouldn't know a common ancestor if it offered me tenure." If a theology professor was fired because he taught that Catholics believe that the Holy Wafer is made of actual muscle tissue and that all Christians are cannibals, he'd wind up fired because of incompetence, not because of a conspiracy to hide some scandalous truth.)

The "film" (I think I'll call it a "dickumentary") opens tomorrow just ten minutes walk from here. I'm not sure I'll be able to resist. If you knew there was going to be a spectacularly stupid car crash nearby, wouldn't you want a seat? Of course, if it was an insultingly stupid car crash, I might have second thoughts. I still have to examine my conscience on this one.

UPDATE: I take it back. This is my favorite section of the site. It gives historical examples to show how scientists have, in fact, successfully challenge the scientific mainstream on evolution. In doing so, it repeatedly demonstrates how science progesses even when someone has an unpopular opinion: the researcher continues to present testable hypotheses and gather evidence so that other people can replicate the results. The fact that Intelligent Design people don't even bother to write scientific papers is exactly what damns them. (Of course, they don't write papers for good reason: "God did it by magic" isn't a scientific assertion so much as a demand to stop asking questions; it's the complete opposite of curiosity.) My favorite quote comes from here, after a section describing the paucity of Intelligent-Design research despite decades and decades of work and untold millions of dollars: "[T]he failure of intelligent design can readily be laid at the feet of its advocates, whose main activity appears to be to carp about the success of evolution."

Expunged!

Scientific American gives a nicely thoughtful review here of Ben Stein's Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed, the creationist celluloid delusion that will be entering a smattering of theaters on the 18th unless Jesus returns first.

As I've said before, it's on the question of evolution that I have the least patience with evangelicals, because it shows evangelicals at their most nakedly and willfully ignorant. But this movie in particular shows the absurdity from its very premise: Ben Stein goes around to various evolutionists and scientists (who, by the way, were lied to in order to obtain their footage, as P.Z. Meyers and Richard Dawkins have chronicled) and the repeated upshot is: If these scientists are so interested in theories, why are they so unfairly biased against the theory of intelligent design?

The most obvious question to ask such people is, "What fucking evidence do you fucking have for a single fucking element of your alleged fucking theory?" (Sorry. I told you this made me impatient.) Over and over again, in this movie (to judge from the reviews) and on innumerable websites and other writings, the pattern goes something like this:

a. evolution teaches that process x works in some specific way;
b. but here's an example of this process failing, and science can't explain it!
c. Therefore, God exists and Genesis is scientifically accurate.

I trust you can see the huge-ass leap being made here. But the creationist articles and stories (and the Creationism Museum) all tend to end with

d. Also, evolution is immoral, and that's why we have moral chaos like the Holocaust.

This is another easily dismantled argument. (if God provides morality, how come entire countries with no God--such as Buddhist Japan--are actually lower in crime than average? And if the only reason people are good is because God will punish us if we don't behave, then doesn't that mean that human beings really DON'T have any inherent value?) But it exhausts me to do so, because as I've shown in other posts, the answers aren't even the point.

What evangelicals really want in the evolution "debate" is to be able to nakedly assert the superiority of the Bible over against the knowledge we've actually amassed over the last several centuries--which is why the obvious compromise (to admit that evolution makes sense, but to assert that God set evolution in motion), which should technically satisfy evangelicals, is dropped as anathema. This isn't about science. This is a power play to try to get the rest of the world to worship the Bible the same way evangelicals do.

Of course, evangelicals don't see it this way--it's not like a conspiracy. What's happening from the evangelical perspective is that everyone seems to be adopting a scientific worldview that the evangelical finds morally uncomfortable. They shouldn't be troubled by it, but an evolution-based ethic, while not exactly hard to derive (we're all from the same stuff, we're not all that different from each other, therefore the Golden Rule is a sensible way to run things), it's still more subtle than the Bible-says-x system that evangelicals are accustomed to.

To put it another way, evolution's sin is not that it is obviously immoral. Its problem is that it introduces gray areas into our understanding of human life, and the evangelical, with her belief that humans are morally corrupt, can only assume that this gray area will be exploited to the worst possible effect. (That in many ways our life has improved--women's rights expanding everywhere, mostly no more slavery anywhere, greatly improved health and life expectancy, etc.--has little argumentative effect on people who are determined to worry.) If they had a little more faith in human decency, they'd be able to stop worrying so much--but of course, if they had faith in human decency, they'd stop being evangelicals.

I don't really have a solution to this, obviously. But I do think that the way to start is to quietly and patiently defuse the phantom fear that is animating the evangelicals' desperately wrongheaded assertions. But you can start with the facts, too. Maybe if they become rightly embarrassed about claims about a 6,000-year-old earth, an actual worldwide flood, and all the rest of the myths they helplessly literalize, we can at least have this conversation less often in public, and it'll retreat to the ghetto of the coffee-and-donuts narthex from whence it should never have escaped in the first place. Yeesh.

Sorry if this was angry. I really do have a hard time being patient with this stuff because it's all so embarrassingly weak and so obviously wrong. I want evangelicals to be worthy intellectual adversaries and proud participants in our cultural conversation. Evolution-didn't-happen is just amateur hour. Jesus deserves better from his alleged friends.

What's the Point Of Doubt?

In response to my posts about the Resurrection on Easter (Part One is here; Part Two is here), A reader writes:

My first thought, as I was reading your blog was "Dave, what do you have to gain by not believing in a bodily resurrection?"

What an interesting question! And it raises a larger one: what do you gain by being skeptical at all? (I promised I'd get back to this question, and tonight I finally have.)

The short answer is "peace of mind," or perhaps "epistomological coherence." But since evangelical Christians (and other religious types, but especially evangelicals) don't even see the point of epistemological coherence (which I will define in a moment), it's worth going a step or two back to look at evangelical belief in general.

I'm going to start with a potentially irritating example: Santa Claus. So let me state upfront that, unlike some atheists I could name, I don't think a belief in God is as dumb as a belief in Santa Claus. I'm using it as an outlier example so we can all see what’s going on. Now: what do we gain by not believing in Santa Claus? Goodness knows we give up a lot. It's a pretty nice story, it's full of magic, it makes everyone feel happy (at least here in the states, where Santa Claus never actually beats naughty children), and it's got some really interesting substories (like Rudolph). He gives gifts! He's a lovely guy! Why would you want to disbelieve in him? What possible motivation could you have? Do you hate niceness or something?

If you're like most people, Santa Claus did not survive into adulthood not because you made a choice to say, "screw it; I just won't believe it because I hate happy stories!" You stopped believing because it became practically unthinkable. To believe in Santa Claus today, you'd have to almost wall off a portion of your brain and its understanding of reality and say things like, "Well, I know velocity plus air friction causes space shuttle nose cones to glow with heat, but I also know that that doesn't apply to magical reindeer." You'd walk around with two realities: one real and boring, one magical and interesting.

If these two realities were constantly clashing, it would probably be unhealthy. But of course, the reason people ever believe in Santa Claus at all is because, even for children, this secondary belief is remote and doesn't cost much: Santa only appears once a year, and only when everyone's asleep, and the rest of the time he's way off at the North Pole where no one can see him. If you were trying to tell a story to children that, say, cats will talk if you feed them corn flakes, this belief would only survive among kids who had been too lazy to ever try it, and who refused to believe the testimony of their friends who had. Santa Claus is easier to believe than that—not any more probable, since both are completely false, but healthier for the brain to cope with.

But even belief in Santa Claus gets dropped by everyone--usually unwillingly--not because the disbeliever has decided to hate niceness, but because the story literally raises too many questions to make sustainable sense. The world doesn't work that way, not because the world contains no miracles, but because this particular set of miracles makes particuarly little sense. Elves? Flying reindeer? He sees you when you’re sleeping? The implausibilities mount to an impossible level long before you get to the more advanced questions like "How does he have time to visit every single house in a single evening?" and "What about the other Santa Clauses in other lands, plus that so-called ‘helper’ from the mall?"

There are ancillary benefits that come from disbelief in Santa Claus—like the approval of one’s more sophisticated peers—but the chief benefit is that you’re seeing life as it really is, and acting according to your best possible beliefs in that reality. After all, wouldn’t we despise a kid who decided not to believe in Santa Claus, not because it was troubling her that much, but in order to be popular? Because to do it that way really is to be disloyal to the concept of Christmas joy for the sake of social climbing. How ugly that would be! So at core, what we get from doubting Santa Claus is the joy of truth, and honesty with ourselves; a more mature engagement with, and understanding, of how the world really works. If this were not so, then only total jerks would ever stop believing in Santa. But as it turns out, the only thing more important than Christmas is integrity.

Now, the two weirdest beliefs often held by evangelical Christians—and pretty much only evangelical Christians—are as follows:

a.) the earth is 6,000 years old, there was a real Adam and Eve, a real Flood, and evolution didn’t happen; and

b.) we’re all going to get Raptured into heaven, and the Antichrist will form a one-world government, and then a dozen weird plagues will strike the earth and then there’s a happy ending forever.

As you might expect, these two sets of beliefs are only sustainable by sane human beings precisely because they’re temporally remote: the creation of the world is in the relatively distant past, and the Rapture is in the unforeseeable future. They don’t affect the believer’s day-to-day life in any serious way. Both beliefs are intellectually remote as well: arguments about evolution are too abstruse to intrude on an average person’s intellect (you have to try to learn evolution; it’s not obvious without training), so creation-evolution looks like a simple he-said, she-said argument if you’re sufficiently uninformed; and the Rapture scenario, while it’s in many ways incoherent (How could there be a one-world government without people recognizing the signs of an Antichrist? And why do those particular plagues happen in that particular order? What point is there to making everyone suffer right before you save them?) is placed by its adherents, along with the Old Testament, in a kind of mentally bifurcated “Bible space” where huge miracles happen according to some completely different set of rules than we live by today. (A common term among evangelicals for this “Bible space” is that these time periods exist in different “dispensations.”) Even people who believe that huge miracles can happen today in theory don’t actually act it out in practice…which is why (as Sam Harris points out) no believer in the absolute power of God ever prays for amputees to grow their limbs back. For whatever reason, God doesn’t work that way, and even the wildest faith healers know this. Therefore they never have to test this belief in the real world; it’s safe to sort of keep on the mental back burner in case it comes in handy if the rules we live by ever drastically change.

For the reasons I’ve just outlined, most evangelical Christians are capable of holding these beliefs because, for all practical purposes, and for most Christians who believe them, from an outsider’s perspective they’re nothing more than harmless delusions. It’s when these beliefs start to have actual impact on your daily behavior—when you move to Jerusalem to train to fight the Antichrist’s army—that it starts to be very unhealthy.

But some evangelical Christians, like the kind I was, are more than usually sensitive to inconsistencies and weirdness. These people tend to shed weird beliefs sooner—and, I would bet, these are the evangelicals who are more likely to grudgingly accept evolution.

I’ll do as an example. I’d always believed that all truth is God’s truth, and that if what the Bible says is true, then it should be as obvious to unbiased observers as any other set of historical facts. We shouldn’t have to weasel out of our own Bible, the way the Mormons do when they are forced to say, “Well, when the Book of Mormon describes huge tribes of warriors in America, they were really talking about parts of South America that we haven’t explored yet, and some of the numbers may have been mistranslated so it was hundreds of warriors instead of ten thousand.” When I left evangelical Christianity, what I got out of it was the same peace of mind that a Mormon presumably feels when she stops believing that Native Americans are genetically Jewish: the peace of mind that says, “At last, I no longer have to make excuses for things that don’t actually make sense to me either. The world really is the way it seems to be, not the way some ancient prescientific book imagined it.” Until you leave, you don’t actually notice how much energy this has been taking up in your head. But particularly for a contradiction-sensitive guy like me, the removal of that unconscious strain was a huge psychic relief.

That's epistemological coherence: the ability to think about your world without straining to make incompatible parts of it fit together.

That’s what I get out of doubt in general, but that’s not why I wrote the original post. So before I get to the final answer, I should remind everyone that, as an atheist, I don’t actually believe in any of this; I wrote the original post about the Resurrection not because I personally have anything to gain, but because I think Christians who do believe in the Resurrection would gain by rethinking it.

The short answer, then, is this: What Christians would gain from not believing in the bodily Resurrection would be a model of salvation that speaks to actual human need as we feel it today, instead of a series of intellectual justifications of a literalized myth that, even if it were true, would be off the main point.

(If this is unclear, think of it this way: if Christianity were designed to meet some other kind of hunger—let’s use physical hunger as an example—then it would be sensible for Christianity to find hungry people and offer them bread, saying, “Christianity offers the bread that human beings hunger for.” That’s what they should be doing! It would be quite another thing to say (as the Bible would say if there were a written myth of this bread story), “And the most amazing thing about this bread is that it contains spiritual atoms that can’t be measured in any way!” It would be even weirder to add (as St. Paul of the Church of Bread would add), “And in fact, if there aren’t spiritual atoms inside it, then our bread is worthless!” The point of the bread is that it feeds hungry people. That’s important to remember, especially if you’re the one trying to sell it.)

Quick Jews-and-Hell Question

I've just finished Shalom Auslander's Foreskin's Lament, his very funny book about his very harrowing upbringing as a fundamentalist Orthodox Jew in upstate New York. On the one hand, it was a terrific read for me: I recognized some of the same anxiety, the same fear of punishment, that I'd gone through in my own transition. (I had at least three nightmares about the Rapture in my first year of apostasy.)

On the other hand, it also made me really happy I'd been raised a Christian and not Orthodox. The Orthodox (says Auslander) have to say a specific blessing over every piece of food they eat (one for fruit, one for meat, one for grains, one for milk products, etc.), and they have to combine the blessings if the ingredients are combined (as in blueberry pie), and they have to do them in a particular order. The agonies he goes through for simply eating a muffin are heartbreaking. (And, of course, funny for the same reason.) They have a million rules about what they can't do on the Sabbath; a hundred strictures on the yarmulke, on the mingling of the sexes, all of that. It's exhausting. By contrast, Jesus's own neo-sectarian, let's-get-rid-of-the-sillier-laws theology seems to anticipate Reform Judaism by several centuries. I've got my quibbles with conserative Christianity, but even with those, there's no question but that Christianity made the religious life a whole helluva lot easier than it is for the Orthodox.

But I've also found the book oddly troubling, because Auslander is basically tormented by belief that if he screws up on any of these activities--and especially if he eats a cheeseburger--he'll be punished in hell for all eternity. Hell? Really?, I thought. My understanding was that Jews don't believe in hell. You don't find any reference to hell in the Torah, and the first time anything like hell gets mentioned in the macro-Bible is in the gospel of Matthew. Which, of course, isn't technically a Jewish scripture. The belief in hell surely came from somewhere (in what is sometimes called the inter-testamental period), but I had always thought it was a Christian innovation--which has been one of my reasons to encourage Christians not to take it too seriously. If "hell" as we think of it (eternal punitive torment) is really the way we're supposed to take Jesus's references to "Gehenna" and "Sheol," then the Bible would have said something about it long before 4BC. It would have been too important to overlook.

Now I'm changing my guess. My guess is that Reform and Conservative Jews don't believe in hell, but that the Orthodox do. Or that certain unusually harsh sects of the Orthodox do. But the next obvious question is, where did they get it from? (Babylon? The Greeks?) And how do they justify their belief from reading the Torah?

I know I have a lot of scholarly-minded Jewish readers, so I hope someone can enlighten me. I also accept book references.

CELEBRITY CONNECTION: Shalom and I both appeared on the same episode of This American Life: #332, "Ten Commandments." He had "Do Not Take the Lord's Name in Vain," and I was further down the list at "Adultery." His story opens the episode, and it's really cool. Check it out at http://www.thislife.org/.

Josh on Hil's Persistence, And Notes on Skepticism Pending

Here's Josh Marshall with the smartest take I've seen on why Hillary is going to stay in the race, and what it means. (Short version: there's no way she can stay in without attacking Obama ever more harshly.) My hope is she'll run out of money before she scorches too much earth.

By the way, I'm working on a response to the lively debate going on in the comments of my recent posts about the Resurrection. But I've been busy, between moving all my stuff and writing book stuff, and I even have some meetings tomorrow. But the first commenter (the Kansas City commenter) raised a really interesting question, which was echoed by Daniel: What do you gain from skepticism? Why pursue doubt in the first place?

I'm about halfway finished with my own pokings at the question, but in the meantime, I just thought I'd mention a neat thing I read by Brian McLaren (in his A Generous Orthodoxy, which I decided to reread today), where he distinguishes between the hermeneutic of skepticism and the hermeneutic of love. (I.e, a reading of the Bible that seeks to doubt everything, versus a reading of the Bible that's rather more hopeful and forgiving.) I think it's a sort of false dichotomy--since most scholars I know are actually Bible fans; they just find it easier to see what the book really says if they try not to impose their own faith on it--but it's also a helpful difference to notice from the sidelines if you want to have a conversation. It's a really good book, and if I had a highlighter, I'd have used it five times in the first four chapters. Check it out.

Comments on the Resurrection Post

[Moved up from the comments, with two new sentences added to the end, and the typo "fall" corrected to "wall."]

Daniel said...

David, I will have you know that I just wrote a brilliant and articulate rant about your mistreatment of that passage in 1 Corinthians. It was glorious and long, and it took me four hours to write, and then I mis-clicked in the browser window, and all was instantly lost.I'm too tired and disheartened to pick it up right now. I might try to re-create the magic tomorrow.Here is the only part that survived the event (on my clipboard during the tragic click):

To the particulars, Paul is not having the irrelevant conversation about the Holy Anatomy of The Risen Person you keep mentioning (though I am sure it would have been most engaging). Rather, he is arguing the importance of a historical event: that this thing happened, and the impact it has on our theology. He says if it didn't happen, in the end, we are to be pitied, because we conduct our lives on the basis of a lie. If there is no resurrection, then when we die, we rot. Furthermore, then Christ was never raised from the dead. If Christ was never raised, then he was not the Son of God, with proof that he has authority to forgive sins. If he cannot forgive us our sins, then we are still doomed, and we grossly misunderstand our relationship with God. And while we may believe something that gives us hope for the short time we have on earth, when we die, we rot. And we are to be pitied.

He has also called out this one truth as very important; not that all things ever written into the canon are weighed equally. I think this is where your entire criticism is going astray. Besides the fact that you want to read into it the goofiness you found in some poem, and use that to indite the entire canon of scripture. Regardless, it is a gross overreach to come to your conclusions from what Paul has written here.So I guess I'm just saying you should prepare yourself -- maybe I'll post again tomorrow. But since I don't have the time or energy for a more articulate or involved reply right now, suffice it to say:Die, heretic! Die!

I reply:

Ouch! I feel for your loss. Stuff like that never used to happen with typewriters.

I think I can spare you SOME of the rewriting, however, since I like to think I deliberately avoided the worst of the poem's goofiness (the loom, angels made of quanta, etc.) and I would never suggest that Christians actually think this way.

(By the way, you're right that I was misremembering the central doctrinal nature of Paul's discussion in I Corinthians. I was trying to give him a little wiggle room, but I guess that won't stand. That was just a minor side tour, so let's not let it distract anyone.)

The point I was trying to make--but I published before I was sure I was clear, which also never used to happen with typewriters--is that Christians generally DON'T think this way--literal spiritual cells and all that-- but at the very same time, and sometimes in a parallel thought, they DO act as if the bodily resurrection were the point of the resurrection...despite the fact that they DON'T try to think through the obvious implications of it. It is somehow both literally and factually true, and yet scientifically incoherent. (And I don't mean in the standard way that all miracles stymie science; I mean you can literally barely picture it at all. The Red Sea would have looked like water under a microscope even when it was allegedly forming a wall around the Israelites. But what ever happened to that fish the resurrected Jesus ate at the end of John? Holy shit!)

You have to believe it and then stop thinking just before you get to the DNA question, and my point is that this is weird, exhausting, and unnecessary, and that's why liberal Christians made the move. Because just as Jesus scraped accretions off the law of Moses to get to the actual point of it underneath, "Christ Event" theologians are doing the same thing to the stories of the resurrection--which, it should be pointed out again, can't be reconciled with each other anyway. (And again, this isn't "miraculous" unscientificness, which you could at least make a case for; it's the simple incoherence of being unable to tell who saw what at the tomb when.)

Faced with a Bible that a.) seemed to be demanding belief in a physical resurrection, b.) seemed to be very unclear about the details of the resurrection or of Easter in general, and c.) seemed to be saying, like Paul, that bodily resurrection is essential when it clearly isn't, the liberal theologians eventually, I think, made the right call: focusing on how Jesus gives life, and that more abundantly, is a better use of everyone's time than making flow charts of who saw which angel when, and asking modern-minded people to accept a story that leaves open implicit weird questions like what, at the Ascension, was Jesus's escape velocity. Yes, it's a silly question. That's why the liberals decided God couldn't have wanted it to matter. They sacrificed the Bible in the process, but they were more interested in a Jesus they could actually think about, in the service of a God whose ways made at least a little modern sense.

The Surprising Irrelevance of the Bodily Resurrection

Quick Update first: It's official; as of yesterday I have signed with Adam Chromy of Artists & Artisans. We had a terrific conversation and I'm really happy. Today's work involves calling people half a continent away, and putting all my This American Life appearances on a single sampler CD. (Which sounds easy, but it's going to involve moving all my appearances, one at a time, from the computer that can get online to the computer that can burn CDs. And then finding some way to edit only my sections out. We'll see how it goes.)

But in the meantime, since I have a little time to kill, I thought I'd share some Easter-related thoughts on the Resurrection of Christ.

This was inspired, in part, by this Easter's posting of a famous poem by John Updike ("Seven Stanzas at Easter"), which talks dismissively of attempts to explain away the shocking reality implied by the Christian doctrine of Christ's rebirth. "Let us not mock God with metaphor,/analogy, sidestepping transcendence..." he says, culminating in what was my favorite stanza as a young evangelical hoping to create literary art:

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Of course, this overstates things by a bit--even as a Christian, the idea of angels working a loom would have been unspeakably silly. But I liked the sentiment beneath it: resurrection is real, not a metaphor. It should be rendered palpably. I not only wanted to believe it, but I was sure I needed to believe it, because, as Updike says about Christ's crucified body,

if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

As Christians know, Updike here is simply parroting St. Paul, who says "If Christ is not raised, then our faith is in vain; we are still in our sins, and we are of all men most to be pitied." [I'm approximating; this stuff no longer leaps to mind perfectly.]

I was about 20 years old when I first encountered a liberal religious scholar (the first of several) who described Jesus's Resurrection as "The Christ Event." This was a way to avoid the embarrassing magic-show accoutrements of the traditional Resurrection doctrine--the empty garment, the vanishing corpse, the dead man who can teleport through walls--and focus on the religious and existential essence: hope, joy, and life eternally renewing. "Faugh!" I said at the time. "What a silly liberal thing to do! They just can't handle miracles and they want to worship some sort of shell of resurrection so they don't have to believe the Bible! They take a world-shattering miracle and turn it into 'Don't Worry, Be Happy!'"

It was a stupid idea, I thought, but a little more reading showed that smart people of deep faith seemed to believe it, so I let it stick around to figure out what was up. But only a few years later, after that idea had wormed its way into my awareness, I read that very same passage of St. Paul's--if Christ is not raised, we live in vain--and it suddenly struck me that there was a logical error in the passage. Sort of. In that passage, Paul is essentially saying (if the fundy resurrection apologists are to be believed), "If I'm mistaken, and Jesus isn't currently living in a superperfect spiritual body with a heartbeat and a stomach and the rest, then the concept of salvation is pointless." And when you put it that way, the disconnect becomes quite obvious.

Because honestly, all we really want is life after death. Whether it takes place in what we'd think of as a body or not is pretty small potatoes compared to the possibility of living on at all. And that, I eventually realized, is what the liberal theologians were after: trying to focus on the answer to our human longing (eternal life) rather than the distracting side issues (which include questions like, "Is there spiritual skin? Is it made up spiritual cells? What about blood vessels?") I see now that it would be entirely consistent of a Christian to believe in the resurrection as a sign or a metaphoric proof that there is life after death. Whether Jesus was eating fish and leaving DNA fingerprints all over the place is sort of trivial in comparison.

If St. Paul had said, "If hell is not made of literal flames, then we are completely without morality!" I don't think anyone would take it seriously, any more than if a political commentator said, "Because Presidential candidate x made a factual error in a debate, we can never trust anything they say ever again!" That's another symptom of the all-or-nothing, catastrophizing tendency I've talked about in conservative Christianity before: the believer is impelled to believe things, not because they logically follow, but because someone TOLD them they logically follow. It's like pretending you've read Shakespeare when all you've read is one scholar's footnotes.

Which made me realize another odd point. When St. Paul says, "Jesus had some kind of magical physical-and-spiritual resurrection body, and if I'm wrong, everything else just collapses!" he's not talking about logical proof: he's essentially saying that if scripture is wrong in one area, then the entire thing is completely worthless and might as well be shitcanned. So what he's doing, in essence, is not demanding faith in Jesus Christ (his works, his preaching, his example), but faith in the point-by-point perfection of what the Bible says about Jesus Christ (the theological interpretations of his death and resurrection). And that's a terrible thing to do! Because the Bible has a whole host of inconsistencies and problems (just try piecing together the four gospels some time; the Easter story alone is almost impossible to make sense of), and a whole range of different answers to extremely basic questions like "what must I do to be saved?" So trusting in the Bible's perfection would tend to strangle faith in its crib. Not to mention that you're essentially worshipping the Bible. Idolatry! That's one of the big no-no's!

I'm obviously not a Christian anymore, but if I were, I think I'd be happy to realize that St. Paul is actually wrong in I Corinthians 15:17 (found the reference!). Or--to put it more charitably--perhaps his statement in I Corinthians was a specific address in a specific context, and he was using a bit of his usual hyperbole rather than trying to lay out a general statement that should be taken as gospel the way it historically has. In any event, when I surf the web on Easter, I see tons of people posting things like, "If Christ is not raised, our faith is in vain," and I hope they mean what they should mean: Christ's example teaches us (well, it teaches Christians, anyway) that there is eternal life available in heaven after we die. How much meat (spiritual or otherwise) is on our bones (if we have them) is not only beside the point, but it's exactly the wrong thing to worry about. And if you can't tell the difference, you don't even know the value of what you're selling.

Life and Music

I don't recall whether I've posted this before, but it's a lovely meditation--spoken by Alan Watts, animated by South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone--that seems like the sort of thing I'd like to be able to do with my own book, as a sort of viral-video way of getting the word out. (I'd even happily illustrate it myself, if someone else could do the animation. Is there Craigslist in Korea?) The only problem: this is a two-minute piece, which means it's only about 250 words. I can't think of a thing I've written that's quite that pithy. Maybe the Sunday School lesson about Adam and Eve? Maybe the Grinch discussion?

Anyway, here's "Life and Music," and it's great. Enjoy.




[thanks to my friend Charlene, who reminded me of this.]

Bush's Religion: Another Book Recommendation

Since this is apparently turning into Books-On-Religion-And-Politics Day, don't miss this series of excerpts from The Bush Tragedy, a rather partisanly-titled book whose author, Jacob Weisberg, does to George W. Bush what the author of Founding Fathers does to the original George W.: goes back into the publicly-available record to see what his religious beliefs actually are. The answers are fascinating, as Weisberg makes a pretty strong case that George Bush, Jr.'s Christianity is deeply and personally held, and at the same time almost completely devoid of content. (Interestingly, he explains how evangelicalism has made Bush more humble, not more arrogant.) I found the third excerpt particularly fascinating, as Weisberg uncovers tapes of Bush practicing how to speak to religious groups, and making decisions about how to pitch himself. Weisberg has, I think, a tendency to overpsychoanalyze Bush--every decision seems to come back to resolving some deep father-son conflict, in Weisberg's eyes--but it's really interesting to see Bush's religious statements sort of pureed together and to see, in consequence, what form of Jesus titrates out. It's not so much a Jesus of the Bible study (Bush never actually goes to church) as it is the vaguer Jesus of AA. Intriguing to know!

Amy Sullivan and the Alleged Evangelical Left

Amy Sullivan--no relation to Andy--is an evangelical Democrat who has long pleaded for the Democratic party to stop being asses and actually address themselves to evangelical voters and evangelical concerns. Apparently she has just written a book called The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap, and Washington Monthly (for whom she often writes) has a review here.

I remain skeptical about evangelicals' ability to change as quickly as everyone is saying--after all, they're still fighting evolution, in a century-out-of-date battle that literally no one but evangelical ideologues even takes seriously--but after reading this article, I started thinking about how well Barack Obama has done among even conservative evangelicals, and he has done so by making a specifically religious, but non-conservative, appeal. On abortion, for example, he has said that he disapproves of abortion personally, but that he thinks women are the ones best able to make the choice, and in the meantime he's hoping to reduce the number of abortions in America through education, condoms, etc. And it seems to be enough for certain evangelicals to overcome their resistance.

Similarly, on homosexuality, Obama has been uniquely brilliant in his use of religion: From one rally at a black church, there's this story:

"Now I’m a Christian, and I praise Jesus every Sunday,' he said, to a sudden wave of noisy applause and cheers. 'I hear people saying things that I don’t think are very Christian with respect to people who are gay and lesbian,' he said, and the crowd seemed to come along with him this time." (via Towleroad)

So it suddenly strikes me that Amy Sullivan has a point at almost exactly the same place where David Kirkpatrick's much-ballyhooed New York Times story "The Evangelical Crackup" fails to interpret what's happening: it's not that evangelicals are changing their personal religious views (though, as David Sessions, quoting David Kinnaman--lotta Davids here!--points out in this article, younger evangelicals are 15% more likely to not care about homosexuality as a moral issue), but that they are more likely to be able to square their personal religious views with voting for a Democratic candidate. So it's not a hugely significant moral or theological change--I imagine that even pro-gay evangelicals tend to focus, not on homosexuality, but on the call to chastity in general for all Christians, which doesn't help the gays all that much--but it has a lot of potential to change things politically.

And I suspect we have the record-setting unpopularity of George W. to thank for this. In the same way that he has inspired this incredibly early election season (as states crowded to the front of the line, impatient to be able to weigh in on Bush's replacement), Bush's effectively conservative-evangelical Presidency has finally inoculated a certain percentage of the evangelical voters against the idea of a theocracy after all. "Maybe religion can be separate from public life!" you can almost hear them saying.

It's a thoroughly pragmatic position. Just as "let's ban evolution!" lost in court and turned into "let's teach creation and evolution side by side," and then lost again and became "let's call it Intelligent Design and talk about God only obliquely" is a strategy of necessity--a way of fighting a losing battle by shrinking the arena without ever actually giving up--so maybe allowing America to treat anti-abortion and anti-homosexual ideas the way evangelicals have tended to treat help for the poor (it's a call to personal responsibility, not a necessary public policy everyone should be forced to follow) is a way of redefining the battlefield smaller so that evangelicals can maybe win it this time around. In this respect, you could say that nothing helps pragmatic democracy like the failure of an ideal.