Skeptical Observations

Tavris and Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Reading Notes

2011-05-04T22:55:00.000-04:00

A book arguing for the power of the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain “why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts” lacks one thing: a defensible explanation of what cognitive dissonance is.

The following is not a review but merely a comment on one particular point in the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson,¹ namely its failure to explain the concept and the associated theory that are the central theme of its argument. I ought perhaps to mention at this point, since you might think otherwise upon reading what follows, that I found the book immensely instructive and disturbing in a potentially very salutary way. Its strength lies in its description and analysis of the various ways in which our need to feel justified in what we think, say, and do drives us to think, say, and do wrong and harmful things. Its weakness lies in its failure to explain the rubric under which it does this work of description and analysis, the concept of cognitive dissonance.

* * *

BeforeI read this book, I was acquainted with the term “cognitive dissonance” but had only a rather vague notion of what it means. Having read the book, I have a better idea of what it means, and of the psychological research that is associated with it; but the book contains no satisfactory explanation either of what cognitive dissonance is or what cognitive dissonance theory is. The authors repeatedly say that cognitive dissonance theory predicts this and cognitive dissonance theory predicts that, but they never tell us what the theory is—an omission that diminishes not only the usefulness of their book but also the credibility of their argument. We cannot make any informed judgment of the value of the theory if we are never told what it is, but told only of its alleged predictive successes.

Aronson and Tavris offer an explanation of the term “cognitive dissonance” at one point; but it is quite inadequate. It occurs just after an account of the researches of social psychologist Leon Festinger and his collaborators on the response of the followers of a pretended seer, one Marian Keech, to the failure of her prophecy that on a certain date a spaceship would come to rescue them before the earth would be destroyed.² One might suppose, if one has not previously observed how the adherents of such prophecies behave when confronted with the failure of them, that the followers would be disillusioned and see that their faith in Mrs. Keech was misplaced. But Festinger, the authors report, made a more nuanced, specific, and, as it transpired, more accurate prediction:

The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren’t going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them. (12)

At the end, the authors observe, “Mrs. Keech’s prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger’s.” They then move on to the theory to which they credit this prediction—the theory of cognitive dissonance. They write:

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitivedissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn’t really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways. (13)

Theauthors cite the pair of thoughts “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day” as an example of “two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent.” But is there any inconsistency at all between these two thoughts? Certainly they are not logically inconsistent: it is possible for both to be true. Nor is there any kind of probabilistic conflict between the two: it does not defy probability that both should be true. The authors say, in the paragraph immediately following the one just quoted, “Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity . . .” But there is no contradiction between the two cognitions in the example.

The authors say that the two cognitions are psychologically inconsistent. But what is that supposed to mean? That no one can affirm both thoughts at the same time? But surely people can do so; if they could not, then this pair of cognitions could not be an example of cognitive dissonance! Wherein, then, is the “psychological inconsistency” supposed to consist? Perhaps in the fact that affirming both thoughts creates discomfort? But the discomfort was supposed to be the effect of a so-called psychological inconsistency. If the so-called inconsistency is nothing other than the discomfort itself, then the definition amounts to saying that psychological dissonance is the state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions that produce a state of tension—which tells us essentially nothing.

Itis a dismal failing for a book to give no satisfactory explanation of the very concept that is at the core of its argument. We are left to figure out for ourselves what the concept is from the evidence of the use that the authors make of it.

One pointabout the concept that is clear is that it has an immediate bearing on the common human proclivity for self-justification. It is, in fact, supposed to provide the answer to the question implied by the book’s subtitle: “why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts.” We justify, or attempt to justify, such things because it is difficult for us to accept that our beliefs have been foolish, our decisions bad, or our acts hurtful. It is surely these negative evaluations of ourselvesthat are the source of the discomfort of which the authors speak. In the example quoted above, there is, as I said earlier, no inconsistency between the thoughts “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day”; but the combination of those thoughts entails the thought “I do a dumb thing.” That implication, and not any inconsistency between the first two thoughts, is the source of our discomfort. To reduce dissonance, we must do things, or rather think things, that will allow us to avoid accepting that conclusion.

Itseems to me that all of the examples discussed by the authors fit under this explanation of the concept better than they fit under the explanation that they give. Marian Keech could not give up the idea that she had visionary powers because she had built so much of her understanding and evaluation of herself upon that idea. Her most devoted followers could not give up that idea precisely because they had devoted themselves to her in quite costly ways: to admit that their faith in her was misplaced would be to admit that they had been extravagantly foolish.

Further, it is evident that many cases that fit under the authors’ definition will not illustrate what they mean by cognitive dissonance. Suppose, for instance, that I remember distinctly, or seem to remember distinctly, leaving a book in a certain place a short time ago, but that when I return to that place, I don’t find the book there (and suppose also that I am alone in my room when this has gone on). This may cause me perplexity, consternation, irritation, frustration, and other unpleasant emotions, but it would give rise to what Aronson and Tavris seem to have in mind when they use the term “cognitive dissonance.” Certainly it will not drive me to try to explain the non-appearance of the book in self-justifying ways. Rather, my reaction will most likely be first to look around to see if the book has fallen down somewhere, and then, if that does not lead to the discovery of it, to conclude that my memory is at fault: I must have put the book somewhere else and forgotten doing so. Yet here we clearly have a case of discomfort produced by an inconsistent pair of cognitions—“I left the book right here (and no one else has been around to move it)” and “The book is not here.” There is no cognitive dissonance involved because the conflict between these two cognitions does not, or does not seriously, threaten my evaluation of myself. It does compel me to acknowledge the faultiness of my memory, but it will not be the first thing to have done that.

In sum, what the authors talk about under the heading of “cognitive dissonance” is not, as they say in their attempt at a definition of the term, an inconsistency between two cognitions, but an inconsistency between some body of cognitions and our estimation of ourselves.

* * *

After writing the comment above, I came across the following passage in the Wikipedia article “Cognitive Dissonance”:

An overarching principle of cognitive dissonance is that it involves the formation of an idea or emotion in conflict with a fundamental element of the self-concept, such as “I am a successful/functional person,” “I am a good person,” or “I made the right decision.”

I wish that I had a better source for the attribution of this principle to the concept or the theory of cognitive dissonance than Wikipedia, but as far as it goes, it confirms the argument that I developed independently. What puzzles me is that something so obviously important would fail to make its way into the argument of Mistakes Were Made. Elliot Aronson, also according to Wikipedia (the article on him), “is listed among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th Century,” “is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its major awards: for writing, for teaching, and for research,“ and “in 2007 . . . received the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science.” Why he and Carol Tavris failed to include this essential point in their exposition—which is virtually a non-exposition—of the central concept of their book, I do not know, but the fact that they did so confirms my suspicion that sloppiness in the handling of crucial concepts is very common in the discipline of psychology.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

¹Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Orlando, etc.: Harcourt, 2007)

²Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

Lewis Black on Creationism

2011-04-01T15:18:00.001-04:00

Lewis Black explains why Christians get the “Old Testament” wrong. I explain how Black gets George W. Bush wrong—to some degree.

Here is another comedy clip, from Red, White, and Screwed, a video of Lewis Black in performance in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Once again, I have provided a transcript, so that those who like to remind themselves of the best bits, as I do, can have the words in print before them. And as in my previous posting of a clip of a comic in performance, of course, I advise all readers to watch the video before reading the transcript.

This performance took place during that dark age of recent American history known as the presidency of George W. Bush. The clip begins at a somewhat awkward point, in mid-sentence, omitting context that would allow the viewer to understand immediately what Black is talking about. I have therefore supplied, in the transcript that follows, the sentence and a half preceding the words with which the clip begins. (The complete version can be heard at 3:50 in this clip.)

I should have known earlier about President Bush, but I gave him some rope—a lot of rope, and then—he hung all of us with it. I should have known it when I heard him say, “When it comes to evolution, the jury is still out.” What jury, where? The Scopes trial is over.

I never thought that during the course of my life, a president would be elected who didn’t believe in evolution, or at least kind of in the ball park of it, or thought m-m-m-maybe it’s got some MERIT! But NO! He believes that the earth was created in seven days. Whew! Takes my breath away. And why does he believe that? Because he read it in the Old Testament, which is the book of my people—the Jewish people. And that book wasn’t good enough for you Christians, was it? You went, “No, we’ve got a better book, with a better character, you’re going to LOVE him!” And you called your book NEW, and said our book was OLD!

And yet every Sunday I turn on the television set, and there’s a priest or a pastor reading from my book, and interpreting it, and their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong. It’s not their fault, because it’s not their book. You never see a rabbi on the TV interpreting the New Testament, do you? If you want to truly understand the Old Testament, if there is something you don’t quite get, there are Jews who walk among you, and THEY—I promise you this—will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you’re having trouble understanding. And we will do that, if, of course, the price is right.

Was the earth created in seven days? No. For those of you who believe it was, for you Christians, let me tell you that you do not understand the Jewish people. We Jews understand that it did not take place in seven days, and that’s because we know what we’re good at; and what we’re really good at is bullshit. This is a wonderful story that was told to the people in the desert in order to distract them from the fact that they did not have air conditioning. I would LOVE to have the FAITH to believe that it took place in seven days, but—I have thoughts. And that can really fuck up the faith thing. Just ask any Catholic priest.

And then, there are fossils. Whenever anybody tries to tell me that they believe it took place in seven days, I reach for a fossil and go, “Fossil!” And if they keep talking I throw it just over their head.

There are people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together, that they roamed the earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to in which they build dioramas to show them this. And what this is, purely and simply, is a clinical psychotic reaction. They are crazy. They are stone cold fuck nuts. I can’t be kind about this, because these people are watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary.

For me, the last paragraph, especially its last sentence, makes the whole speech worthwhile. But if the words preceding that line contain a serious error, does the worth of the speech as humor excuse it? I think not. Lewis Black is one of those comics whose performances largely owe their power to their truth. Of course, he often employs overstatement and fantasy, as around the middle of this excerpt; but he never, so far as I know, tries to pass them off as fact. So, as much as I relish making fun of the follies of Christian Biblical literalists and of former President Bush, I feel bound to correct Black’s lumping of the latter with the former.

Let us be clear that Black’s mention of the then-president at the beginning of the excerpt is mainly a transitional device, reflecting what he was saying just beforehand. He was talking about politics; now he wants to talk about the interpretation of Jewish scriptures by Christians, especially by those Christians who are Biblical literalists. Nonetheless, the excerpt begins with a misrepresentation of what President Bush, or rather, as he was at the time of uttering the words, presidential candidate Bush, said and meant. The utterance that Lewis Black approximately quotes was reported as follows in an article in The New York Times in October of 2000:

“From Scripture you can gain a lot of strength and solace and learnlife’s lessons. That’s what I believe, and I don’t necessarily believeevery single word is literally true. I think that, for example, on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth. . . . I don’t use the Bible as necessarily a way to predict the findings of science.” ¹

Black’s version incorporates a correction, probably made unwittingly, of the future president’s characteristic confusion of idiom. Bush seems to have conflated the idiomatic phrases “the jury is still out” and “a verdict has not yet been reached” into the mixed-up phrase “the verdict is still out.” This detail does not, however, affect the substance of the words quoted.

What does affect the substance is the remainder of the quotation, which makes Bush out to be less clearly on the side of Biblical literalism than Black would put him. In fact, it puts him on the other side entirely. Then-candidate Bush says explicitly that he does not take the Bible to be literally true in every particular, especially as an anticipation of “the findings of science.” He praises the Bible as a source of “strength and solace” and instruction in “life’s lessons,” and contrasts this with regarding it as a source of scientific knowledge.

One might go further in trying to separate Bush from Biblical literalists and creationists. For Bush does not exactly say that the jury (or the “verdict”) is still out on evolution itself but on “how God created the earth.” One might suggest that the “verdict” that he means is a theological conclusion on how God makes things happen from behind the scenes rather than a scientific one on how the earth and the living things on it came into being.

This, however, is exceedingly unlikely. Creationists have a notorious tendency to conflate questions of the origin of species with questions of the origin of the life, of the earth, and of the universe as a whole: “theory of evolution,” in their usage, often stands for all of these things. The construction of the quoted sentence shows the same confusion, or at least indicates that Bush is only concerned with the theory of evolution so far as it conflicts with the Biblical account of how the earth and what lives on it came into being. It is plainly on this conflict that he takes the jury to be “still out.” Finally, his words to a group of reporters five years later leave no room for doubt as to where he thought that there was room for doubt:

During a press conference with a group of Texas reporters on August 1, 2005, President George W. Bush responded to a question about teaching “intelligent design” in the public schools. The reporter referred to “what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus ‘intelligent design’” and asked, “What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?” In response, Bush referred to his days as governor of Texas, when “I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.” . . . Pressing the issue, the reporter asked, “So the answer accepts the validity of ‘intelligent design’ as an alternative to evolution?” Bush avoided a direct answer, construing the question instead as a fairness issue: “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”²

President Bush makes clear on this occasion that in his view the supposed “debate” concerning the theory of evolution and the so-called theory of intelligent design belongs within the curricula of public schools. It has to be presumed that he means that it belongs within the curricula of science classes, and therefore that he considers it to be a debate within science rather than a debate about science.

In sum, what George W. Bush said publicly does not indicate that he believes, following the Bible, that the earth was created in six days. In fact, it indicates clearly that he is not a Biblical literalist at all, and that he does not think that the Bible should be used as a basis for drawing conclusions in matters of science. However, his utterances also make clear that he considers the theory of evolution—meaning, in this instance, the whole enterprise of explaining speciation by reference to natural causes—to be a matter on which no scientific verdict has been reached.

REFERENCES

¹ Laurie Goodman, “The 2000 Campaign: Matters of Faith; Bush Uses Religion as Personal and Political Guide,” New York Times, October 22, 2000. Bold type added. A scan of the pertinent passage as it appeared in print can be seen here.

² Glenn Branch, “President Bush Addresses ‘Intelligent Design,’” Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 25 (2005): 13–14. For equivalent reportage see Peter Baker and Peter Slevin, “Bush Remarks On ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Fuel Debate,” Washington Post, August 3, 2005, or Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Remarks Roil Debate on Teaching of Evolution,” New York Times, August 3, 2005.

More on That False Truism

2011-03-24T20:40:00.003-04:00

How the saying “Everything happens for a reason” combines presumption with obtuseness.

Last week, I posted an entry examining and denigrating the saying “Everything happens for a reason” (“A False Truism,” March 13, 2011). I subsequently learned that, by a curious chance, an article appeared a few days later at Cracked.com under the title “Five Popular Phrases That Make You Look Like an Idiot,” in which the very same phrase appears at the head of the list (though at the end of the article). Reading another writer’s attempt to identify what makes this saying so irritating gives me occasion to reconsider my own analysis.

I was not surprised to find that the author, whose name is given as “Gladstone,” does not share my logical objections to the phrase. Perhaps no one without some years of study of philosophy will do so. Gladstone even gives the saying a pass as far as its literal meaning is concerned:

I suppose this cliché wouldn’t be intolerable if it were merely meant to be taken literally. Everything does happen for a reason. People die young because they get hit by trains or get cancer. People are maimed and disfigured in wars because of bombs. I mean, if that’s all this cliche were trying to convey then it would just be vaguely annoying. You’d assume the speaker were just some mental deficient who says things like “water is wet,” “ice cream is yummy,” or “Tosh is funny.”

I, of course, disagree. Gladstone in effect takes the phrase to be equivalent in literal meaning to the truism “For everything that happens, there is a reason why it happens.” But in my estimation he lets the phrase off too easily. Getting hit by a train or getting cancer may be the reason why someone dies young, but it is not a reason for which someone dies young. People do not die for a reason, as dying is not something that people do, or can do, intentionally. They can intentionally kill themselves or get themselves killed or let themselves die (i.e., refrain from taking action to prevent or delay their dying); but “dying” does not name a possible intentional action, nor even an action at all. Dying is something that befalls one; accordingly, it cannot intelligibly be said to be done “for a reason.” The same goes for any occurrence that is not an intentional action.

For the sake of simplicity, I will hereafter use the phrase “merehappening” for anything that happens that is not the intentional act ofan agent. Thus, for instance, someone’s dying is a mere happening;someone’s killing himself is an action.

I argued in my previous piece that the logical confusions in this saying contribute to its currency by allowing it to pass—in lazy, sloppy, or corrupt minds—for a truism. But even if that is so, perhaps logical confusion is not the most objectionable feature of the saying. It is happens to be the sort of feature that tends to attract my attention, because of my peculiar irritability toward logical confusion and the satisfaction that I find in exposing it. But the logical confusion is just the means by which the phrase conveys its pernicious half-hidden meaning. That meaning combines presumption and obtuseness, as Gladstone vividly points out:

But the annoying thing about this phrase is that the speaker believes he/she has some inside track to God or Fate or whatever mystic unseen hand controls the universe. As if there is a power and that power decided there was an actual reason to inflict a newborn baby with Trisomy 18 or have a woman get gang raped. And given the existence of this rational force—that operates only with justification and reason—who are you to question why someone ravaged your wife, or blew apart your son, or took your leg? This cliché insists that either happy endings always exist (“see, they never would have found that tumor, unless they were repairing that machete wound to your abdomen”) or if there is no happy ending for you then your suffering was part of some greater plan that benefited another (“don’t be sad that you were imprisoned for twenty years by a racist jury for a crime you didn’t commit, I mean, think about the valuable lesson you’ve taught us about bias in criminal juries!”)

To say “Everything happens fora reason” is in effect to deny that there are any of what I termed mere happenings, except perhaps by an arbitrary choice of phrasing. It is to hold that the occurrences that appear to us to be mere happenings, such as someone’s dying of cancer or the fall of a leaf, are actually made to happen by an agent—presumably an all-powerful one that works in ways beyond our powers of observation. That would be, in Gladstone’s words, “God or Fate or whatever mystic unseen hand controls the universe.”

This much is implied by the phrase; and by itself it is outrageous presumption enough. But, as Gladstone rightly observes, the person who says “Everything happens for a reason” typically claims even more than this. It would be compatible with this saying to believe that the universe is governed by a petty, jealous, unjust, vindictive, capricious bully of a deity—such as the YHWH of the Hebrew Bible, for instance (see the opening paragraph of chapter 2 of Richard Dawkins’s The God ~~Illusion~~ Delusion*). Even people who believe that collection of texts to be divinely revealed tend to have a more favorable conception of the invisible agent behind the world’s scenes. They tend to believe, in defiance of the text, that God is just, loving, forgiving, wise, and so forth. Certainly Scripture abounds with passages in which YHWH is described in just such terms; the fact remains that the deity’s record in other passages gives the lie to such white-washing. A father who brutally beats or kills his children for failing to honor him properly does not earn the epithets “just,” “loving,” etc., by behaving more generously on other occasions.

But Biblical exegesis is not the issue. The point is that those who say “Everything happens for a reason” mean more than that some intelligent power of unspecified character makes everything happen. They mean that this power does so only for ends that are of some earthly benefit, either to the victim of suffering or to others. That is why devotees of this saying are given to using it to offer consolation to the afflicted. But to do so merely crowns theological presumption with obtuseness toward human suffering. For whatever the human benefit might be for the sake of which God inflicts misfortune, in serious cases the victim would almost never accept the bargain if he or she had a choice in it. Moreover, if God, or whatever the great stage manager is supposed to be, makes everything happen for a reason, then it is difficult to forgive that party for effecting a good end by evil rather than by good means. If the invisible puppet master can, say, take away a couple’s child to teach them compassion (and if this does not seem a convincing example of this line of thought, some other equally puerile rubbish can be put in its place), surely he or she or it should be able to effect the same end without inflicting such tragedy upon people.

Gladstone concludes with these remarks:

I’m not saying all suffering is random and pointless, or that nothing good can ever come out of a bad situation, but the arrogance that comes from the belief that tragic events are always justified as part of a larger plan is just intolerable. I don’t know why bad things happen, but I do know that no one who throws this cliché around knows either. So to everyone keeping this miserable expression alive, please leave people to their misery and save your cliché for yourself the next time you’re walking in the woods and step into a bear trap after getting shot in the eye by a drunken hunter.

This paragraph might leave those who are given to saying “Everything happens for a reason” complacent in the opinion that they are doing no wrong as long as they refrain from offering that formula for the consolation of others. The declared subject of the article, after all, is “phrases that make you look [“look”? not “sound”?] like an idiot.” But the saying is to be despised on its own account, regardless of the social use to which it is put. It may be handy to have reasons for this summarized here.

(1) The saying is logically confused: it applies to mere happenings a form of expression that applies intelligibly only to intentional actions.

(2) By means of this logical confusion, it assumes the air of a truism, which it decidedly is not. To take it for a truism is foolish, and to offer it to others as a truism is chicanery.

(3) Its half-hidden meaning is that all mere happenings are effected by an inscrutable power for the sake of some benefit to those affected by those happenings. This is an extravagant presumption without foundation in any known facts. To assert it as fact is therefore a fatuous piece of self-conceit.

(4) It implies a theodicy according to which all suffering and misfortune is for the sake of a good that outweighs the evil. This trivializes all suffering and misfortune.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE

*Richard Dawkins, The God ~~Illusion~~ Delusion (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 51. (Thanks to Sarra for pointing out my error.)

Changing the Name of the Blog

2011-03-16T21:32:00.004-04:00

From “Skeptical Jew” to “Skeptical Observations.”

I have to confess that I have always been somewhat uncomfortable with the title that I originally chose for this weblog—Skeptical Jew. As I noted in one entry (“Funny Word, Funnier Concept”), the word “Jew,” perhaps in some degree because of its rather curt sound, carries with it an echo of the scornful tone with which it has at times been uttered—so much so that many non-Jews shy away from using it for fear of sounding anti-Jewish. I was perhaps depending on the insider’s prerogative in entitling my blog “Skeptical Jew”: “Jew” is the standard classificatory term in English for one of such origins as mine, so I can use it with impunity. But I am suspicious on principle of reliance on such insider’s privileges. What is more, I could still hear that echo. So I retained a degree of discomfort with putting the word, as a description of myself, into the title of my blog.

Recently, another consideration has added to my misgivings. Although I have made more frequent entries to the blog of late than I was doing for several months, I have found myself with less and less to say about Jewish topics. This was perhaps inevitable, my knowledge of Judaism being as meager as it is (meager, I mean, not by comparison with what people in general know, but by comparison with what Jews of extensive religious education know). One of the aims with which I started this blog was to reflect on my perplexing condition of being a Jew by something more than descent and upbringing alone, yet less than belief. But since writing three rather inconclusive entries on this topic early on (“Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish,” “Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity,” and “On Being Skeptical”), I have had no new thoughts about it.

I have decided, therefore, to drop the “Jewish” theme from my title while keeping the skeptical one. “Observations” is a loose enough term to capture anything that I may wish to do here, while “skeptical” describes my temperament and my epistemological orientation rather than an object of concern. I hope that I shall have further things to say about Judaism and being Jewish. But I will no longer make any effort to bend my thoughts toward them any more than they are naturally inclined to go.

A Rough Introduction to Critical Thinking

2011-03-16T05:02:00.001-04:00

A clip from the video Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny, with a partial transcript.

The clip embedded above is an excerpt from a video recording of Irish comic Dara Ó Briain (pronounced “dah-ra o-bree-an”) in performance at the Hammersmith Apollo Theatre in London in 2008. In this clip, he addresses himself to popular forms of ignorance and misunderstanding regarding matters of scientific knowledge (“a general kind of lack of knowledge about science,” as he says at 0:20). Ó Briain can be a bit rough on those who propagate defective forms of thinking (“Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves!”), and his performance, being stand-up comedy rather than a lecture, does not include much presentation of evidence pertinent to the evaluation of claims: hence my description of this as a “rough introduction” to critical thinking. But his act shares with critical thinking the aims of exposing folly and revealing truth.

Of course, a performance like this is made to be seen and heard, not to be read in transcribed form. Nonetheless, I find much of it so pithy and so well said that I like to have the words before my eyes. So by all means, watch the video before you read what follows. But once you have watched it, if you find Ó Briain’s words as well chosen as I do, you may want to refer to the following transcript of the stretch of this performance running from about 1:40 to 4:20.

But there’s a kind of notion that “Every opinion is equally valid.” Myarse! Bloke who’s a professor of dentistry for forty years does nothave a debate with some idiot [eejet] who removes his teeth with stringand a door, right? It’s nonsense! And this happens all the time withmedical stuff on the television. You’ll have a doctor on and they’lltalk to the doctor and be all “Doctor this” and “Doctor that,” and“What happened there?” and “Doctor, isn’t it awful?”, right? And thenthe doctor will be talking about something with all the benefit ofresearch and medical evidence, and they’ll turn away from thedoctor inthe name of “balance,” and turn to some—quack—witchdoctor—homeopath—horseshit peddler on the other side of thestudio!

And I’m sorry if you’re into homeopathy. It’s water! How often does itneed to be said? It’s just water. You’re healing yourself; why don’tyou give yourself the credit? Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves, withthe old “Well, science doesn’t know everything”! Well, science knowsit doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop. But it’s aware ofit, you know? Just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean that youcan fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

“Oh, well, the great thing about homeopathy is that you can’t overdose on it.”Well, you can fucking drown! I’m sorry: it seems harsh, and I used tobe much more generous about it, but right now I would take homeopathsand I would put them in a big sack with psychics, astrologers, andpriests, and I’d close the top of the sack with string, and I’d hit themall with sticks. And I really wouldn’t worry who got the worst of thebelt of the sticks, right? Anyone who in answer to the difficult questions in life, to “I don’tknow what happens after I die,” or “Please, what happens after my lovedones die?” or “How can I stop myself dying?”—the big questions—givesthem an easy bullshit answer, and you go, “Do you have any evidence forthat?”, and they go, “There’s more to life than evidence”: get in thefucking sack!

I’m sorry, “Herbal medicine! Oh, herbal medicine’s been around forthousands of years!” Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and thestuff that worked became “medicine,” and the rest of it is just a nicebowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out. “Chinesemedicine, oh, Chinese medicine! But there are billions of Chinese,Chinese medicine must be working.” Here’s the skinny on Chinesemedicine: A hundred years ago the life expectancy in China was 30. Thelife expectancy in China at the moment is 73. And it’s not feckin’tiger penis that turned it around for the Chinese. Didn’t do much forthe tiger either, if you don’t mind me pointing out.

There is one further joke at the expense of the Chinese before the next burst of laughter and applause from the audience, but I have omitted it, as I think it appears to disadvantage when transcribed.

A False Truism

2011-03-13T11:48:00.003-04:00

The common saying “Everything happens for a reason” is neither truenor atruism, but a swindle in which the preposterous is peddled in the guise of the obvious.

Logo of the True/False Film Festival

A truism is a statement that is self-evidently true. A false truismwould be a statementtaken for a truism that is in fact not one, either because it is truebut not self-evidently so or because it is not true at all. In thelatter case, it is doubly false: it is not a truism, and it isnot true. The saying “Everything happens for a reason” isa false trusim of this double-dyed sort.

How does a falsehood get mistaken for atruism? Typically by awoolly-minded, or a devious, confusion with a truism. The saying“Everything happens for a reason” gets its hold on people’s minds, orat least their mouths, by a confusion of elements of twotruths that are entirely distinct from it and from each other.

If you deny thesaying “Everything happens for a reason,” people who are attached to itmay react by saying, “So you think things can happen for no reason atall?” And now you may find yourself embarrassed; for anaffirmative answer seems to imply that you think that things canhappen without any cause. Thus, the saying in question gainssome appearance of cogency from its suggestion of the entirely distinct thought that foreverything that happens, there is a reason why it happens. Thelatterthought is, if not a truism, at least a truth, apart from such arcane reaches as quantum mechanicsand cosmogony.It meansmerely that everything that happens is a consequence of some cause orcauses.

Why, for example, does the sun go higher in the sky insummer than in winter? Because the earth’s axis is tilted relativeto its orbit, and summer is the time of year when the polar tilt in agiven hemisphere is toward the sun, winter the time when it isaway from the sun. Why has my car’s fuel mileagesuddenly gotten worse? I don’t know why, but I will take it to a repairshop so that a mechanic can find the reason. And so on.These are examples of the use of the concept of a reason whysomethinghappens.

The phrase “for a reason” hasan entirely different meaning andadifferent range of application. We can ask for what reason someone doesthis or that, but it makes no senseto ask about the reason for an occurrence that is not the act of anintelligent agent. Forinstance, say a creaking sound comes through the ceiling. We might ask:“Why does that happen?” The answer might be: “Someone is walking aroundinthe apartment upstairs.” That is the reason, or a reason, why thecreakinghappens. We might then ask further: “Why is the person upstairs walkingaround?” The answer might be: “She has things to do around herapartment (andwhyshouldn’t she walk around up there, anyway?).” That is the reason—or,again, a reason—for herwalking around, or her reasonfor walking around.

Now consider the question: “For what reason does the ceiling creak?” This is a conflationof two different forms of expression. The ceiling does not creak for areason; the ceiling does not have a reason for creaking. There is areason why the ceiling creaks, but that is another matter entirely. Itissenseless to attribute reasons to the ceiling because the ceiling isnot anintelligent agent. If the person asking this ill-formed question meantexactly what he or she says, then he or she would have to think that the ceiling is an agent and that creaking issomethingthat it does intentionally; for only then would it be intelligible toask for what reason it does so. More likely, though, the question isjust an affected or confused way of asking, “What causes the ceilingto creak?” (or more simply, “Why is the ceiling creaking?”).

So it is fair to say, “For everything that happens, there is areason why it happens,” or to say, “Everything thatis done intentionally is done for a reason.” The former is a truth, arguably a truism, and the latter certainly a truism, as it merely explicates the meaning of theexpressions “intentional” and “(to do something) for a reason.” Butwhenpeople say “Everything happens for a reason,” they do not mean eitherone of these things, though their utterance gains its appearance of plausibility from its suggestion of both. What do they mean? It is not easy toanswer thisquestion, as the utterance gains its hold on people’s minds preciselyby its confusion and obscurity.

One cannot translate nonsense intosense,but one can sometimes identify a coherent thought that is half-expressed, half-concealed in an incoherent utterance. In the case of the saying “Everything happensfor a reason,” the half-expressed, half-concealed thought is that everythingthat happensdoes so because some intelligent agent, whether human orsuperhuman, makes it happenfor some reason. But the saying can only appear truistic by omitting allmention of agency. It incoherently combines the expression “for areason,” which implies an agent, with “things happen,” which implies noagent (as I noted in my previous entry in this blog with reference to a recent utterance by Newt Gingrich).

Once theimplicit thought is made explicit, it loses all appearance of truism,and indeed of plausibility. If someone said, “Everything thathappens is intentionally made to happen by some agent or other,” the utterance, if it were not simply dismissed with a snort, would provoke such questions as “How do you know that? Whatagent or agents do you have in mind? Whatbasis can you possibly have for such an extravagant claim? Do youseriously mean to imply that when I sneeze, there is a sneeze-spirit ofsome kind that makes me sneeze? Or that God pushes the molecules around to tickle mynose?” And so on. Few people would be willing to commit themselves tosuch a fatuous claim. Yet millions of speakers areunashamed to utter and to accept a saying in which this very thought isconveyed by subterfuge.

The saying is not just confused, preposterous, and dishonest: it is alsoinsulting to victims of serious misfortune. Those who say to suchpersons, “Everything happens for a reason,” are almost certainlyplaying either Polyannasor Job’scomforters. The Polyannas mean that your misfortune serves some goodendbeyond itself. The Job’s comforters mean that you had it coming to you.Both meanings are obnoxious, as they trivialize the victim’s sufferingand even put the victim in the wrong for feeling it. I include thequalification “almost certainly” in my statement because itis just possible that such people intend a different meaning: theycould (though I doubt that many do) meanthat God, or whatever spirit caused your misfortune, did so for areason that has nothing to do with justice or goodness. The point is not to console the sufferers but to remind them that we are all helplessly in the shit together. This, to mymind, is the primary thought of the Book of Job, as I have argued in aprevious entry, contraRabbi Harold Kushner; though most people, Rabbi Kushner among them,prefer to impose a more conciliatory meaning upon that terrible tale.

How Many Forms of BS Can You Spot in This Utterance?

2011-03-11T12:24:00.002-05:00

Newt Gingrich on his dark past: “There’s no question that attimes in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt aboutthiscountry, that I worked far too hard, and that things happened in mylifethat were not appropriate.”

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently gave aninterview to David Brody of theChristian Broadcasting Network. The first of the three clips posted byBrody at CBN.com (March 8, 2011) begins with him asking Gingrich thefollowing ratherelliptical question (the transcriptions that follow are my own):

You know the question, and I’m not going to ask it the wayeverybody else will ask it, but as it relates to the past, and some ofthose personal issues that you’ve had. You’ve talked about how God is aforgiving God, and I’d like you to expand upon that: as you went throughsome of those difficulties, how you saw God’s forgiving nature in allof that.

Such is Brody’s delicacy that he never actually says what “thequestion” is. Perhaps he is presuming that hisviewers will know that Gingrich is now on his third marriage; that hisrelationship with the woman who became wife no. 2 started while he wasmarried to wife no. 1; that he initiated a divorce from wife no. 1 whenshe was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer; that hisrelationship with the woman who became wife no. 3 started while he wasmarried towife no. 2; that he initiated a divorce from wife no. 2 on the daywhen she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; and that he has ahistory of further marital infidelities. (For Gingrich’s maritalhistory, see thepages at About.com on Gingrich’s firstand secondmarriages; for his other infidelities, see thisarticle at Frontline.)These matters are presumably the “personal issues”to which Brody vaguely refers. Gingrichreplies:

Well, I mean, first of all, there’s no question that attimes in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt aboutthiscountry, that I worked far too hard, and that things happened in mylifethat were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I didthings that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I wasdoing things that were wrong, and yet—I was doing them. I found that Ifelt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness—not God’s understanding, butGod’s forgiveness—and that I do believe in a forgiving God. And I thinkmost people, deep down in their hearts, hope there’s a forgiving God.

Now, to be fair, Brody did not ask Gingrich to confess his misdeeds, but only to tell how he understood God’s forgiveness in relation to those misdeeds, whatever they were. Nonetheless, to speak intelligibly of being forgiven, one must at lest acknowledge misconduct. And Gingrich does indeed get around to saying that he “was doing things that were wrong.” It is interesting, though, to see how much evasion and obfuscation he commits before he gets there. Consider his firstsentence: Attimes in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt aboutthiscountry, I worked far too hard, and things happened in my lifethat were not appropriate. There are so many forms of dishonestyand cowardice packed into this fairly short utterance that it isinstructive to try to identify them individually.

(1) Let us start with the most obvious one: “partially driven by howpassionately I felt about this country.” One is reminded of SamuelJohnson’s remark upon the resort to patriotism by scoundrels. HereGingrich suggests that the ultimate motive of his marital misconductwas love of country—or, as the headline of an article by Jack Stuef at Wonkettemore satirically putsthe claim, that “Newt Gingrich committed adultery because America madehim horny.” By trying to attribute his bad conduct to a good motive,Gingrichfollows the most commonly practiced strategy of reply to thebullshit interview question “What do you consider your greatestweakness?”, namely to admit to a weakness that is really a strength. Infact, he virtually repeats the best-known bullshit answer: “I sometimescare about my work too much!”

(2) To be sure, Gingrich includes the qualifier “partially,” as ifsensing that, without it, his assertion might be a more blatant absurditythan even people who consider him a credible political figure would be able to accept. But that merely compounds thedisingenuousness of his statement. The absurdity is not the idea thatlove of country can be the solemotive to betraying one’s marriage partner, but that it can be such amotive at all. The addition of the word “partially” is a sop thrown to those credulous or dull-minded enough to miss this point.

(3) Perhaps what Gingrich means to attribute to his love of hiscountry is not his marital infidelities but only his working “far toohard,” with the implication that this in turn created the conditionsleading to such misconduct.But how so? We have only the bare conjunction of the phrases “I workedfar toohard” and “things happened in my lifethat were not appropriate.” There is no indication of how those twofacts are supposed to be related. The attempt to draw blame from hisconduct off into the forgivable or even laudable habit of “working toohard” is lost invagueness.

(4) Compare the following two phrases:

(a) I worked hard.
(b) Things happened.

Notice that the speaker of (a) identifies himself as an agent, whilethe speaker of (b) does not identify any agent at all, but only uses thevague grammatical subject “things.” When Gingrich isspeaking of conduct that may be reckoned to his credit, he identifieshimself as an agent: “I worked far too hard.” When he is speaking ofhis misconduct—perhaps to describe him as “speaking of it” giveshim too much credit; “obliquely alluding to it” seems nearer themark—he disappears in a puff of evasion: “things happened in my life.” This is, of course, a variant of that watchword of the inveterately irresponsible, “Mistakes were made.”

(5) “Not appropriate.” I have saved the worst for last. I know of nophrase whose use so concisely manifests the collapse of moralintelligence as does this one.But that collapse is not at all peculiar to Gingrich; it can beobserved wherever English is spoken. An epidemic of stultificationseems to have robbed people of the command of intelligent moralvocabulary. Having apparently lost command of terms like “outrageous”(now more commonly used, idiotically, as a term of praise),“unconscionable,” “irresponsible,” “cruel,” “selfish,” “base,”“dishonest,” and so forth, to say nothing of simple and obvious oneslike “bad” and “wrong,” people wishing to speak of misconduct findnothing at their disposal but a puffed-up term of etiquette.

Surely we all know what “appropriate” means. A fur hat is not appropriate to wear with a linen suit; “fuck” is an inappropriate word to use in polite company; a Phillips-head screwdriver is not appropriatefor driving slotted-head screws. The word “appropriate” is whatlogicians call a two-place predicate, one that indicates a relationbetween two things: paradigmatically, a is appropriate to b.What is not appropriate to one thing is typically appropriate to someother. To describe acts of marital infidelity as “things that were notappropriate” implies that their only fault is that they were done atthe wrong time, on the wrong occasion, or with the wrong person, insome sense of “wrong” not yet specified—as, for instance, a plaid tieis wrong (inappropriate) to wear with astriped shirt.

Of course, it is safe to presume that Gingrich, like all other peoplewho use this cretinous and obfuscating jargon, does not intend any ofthese implications. He surely does not mean that he chose the wrongwomen with whom to betray his wives, or the wrong occasions for doingso. But what does he mean? An associate with whom I was discussingGingrich’s interview on Facebook made the comment: “Thereal mistake here is thinking that Mr. Gingrich attaches any meaningother than dog-whistle meaning to his words.” Setting aside thequestion whether Gingrich has pitched his whistle correctly for theevangelical Christian audience that he hopes to influence, this seemsto me correct. When Gingrich describes his former conduct as “notappropriate,” there is not much to be said about what, if anything, hemeans by his words, in the sense of intending something capable ofbeing true or false. Yet he surely means to do something by utteringthose words. I would say that he means to indicate repentance withoutactually acknowledging misconduct. He does not admit to having actedselfishly, exploitatively, deceptively, cruelly, or irresponsibly; hedoes not admit to having acted at all; he simply describes “things thathappened” in his life as “not appropriate.”

Well, that’s my attempt to analyze the utterance of this paragon of dishonesty and moral cowardice. Does anyone see anything that I have missed?

Trivializing the Diaspora

2011-01-27T21:17:00.003-05:00

A new social-networking Web site adopts a tasteless and sophomoric name.

I have just learned that some enterprising morons have produced a new social-networking Web site on which they have conferred the name “Diaspora.” Do these boobs or their audience have any idea what the word means and what it refers to? Here is the entry for the word from the Oxford English Dictionary:

diaspora, n.

Pronunciation: /daɪˈæspərə/

Etymology: < Greek διασπορά dispersion, < διασπείρ-εινto disperse, < διά through + σπείρειν to sow,scatter

The Dispersion; i.e. (among the Hellenistic Jews) the whole body ofJews living dispersed among the Gentiles after the Captivity (John vii.35); (among the early Jewish Christians) the body of Jewish Christiansoutside of Palestine (Jas. i. 1, 1 Pet. i. 1). Hence transf.:see quots.

(Originating in Deut.xxviii. 25 (Septuagint), ἔση διασπορὰ ἐν πάσαις βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς,thoushalt be a diaspora (or dispersion) in all kingdoms of the earth.)

To call your social-networking business “Diaspora” is as grotesque a trivialization of history as coming up with a new brand of lighter fluid and calling it “Holocaust.”

Who Needs Science When You’ve Got the Bible?

2010-11-10T13:48:00.005-05:00

And what hope is there for secular government when you’ve got Republicans?

Rep. John Shimkus (R., Illinois) is a candidate for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In a meeting of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment on March 25, 2009,he opened a copy of the Bible and read passages from it, declaring themto be “the infallible word of God” and affirming on the basis of themthat “the earth will end only when God declares its time to be over.Man will not destroy this earth.” He also said that the concentrationof carbon in the atmosphere is a matter of “theological debate.” In theview of Mr. Shimkus, we must look to theology to answer questions ofthe composition of the earth’s atmosphere, and to the Bible to answerquestions of the earth’s future and of environmental policy.

Here is a transcript of Mr. Shimkus’s words, with my comments interjected (I have made available a transcript without the interruptions here):

The right of free speech is a great right that we have in this country, the very few times that we use it to espouse our theological or religious beliefs.

“The very few times” that we use the right of free speech to espouseour theological or religious beliefs?! I should think that this right is exercised by millions of Americans every day. But perhaps by “we” the Congressman means not “weAmericans” but “we members of the US Congress,” or perhaps by “free speech” he means speaking in a session of a subcommittee of that body. Yes, it is acomparatively rare occurrence for members of Congress to argue forpolicy positions on the basis of Bible tags, and no wonder: the very same Constitutional amendment that guarantees us (the people, not just the members of Congress) the right of free speech forbids the US Congress to make any law respecting an establishment of religion.

But we do have members of the clergy here as members of the panel, so I want to start with Genesis 8, verse 21 and 22.

Members of the clergy are present at a meeting of a congressional subcommittee, so let us read from the Bible: a curious reasoning. Mr. Shimkus seems to have been alluding to the fact that one of the witnesses before the committee on that day was Lutheran Bishop Callon Holloway, appearing on behalf of the National Council of Churches. The Bishop, according to the script of his testimony deposited in the records of the committee (PDF file), after mentioning that “for many people of faith, the conviction to be good stewards of the earth is grounded in God’s command in Genesis to keep and till the earth (Genesis 2:15),” made an argument for taking measures against global warming on purely secular grounds. But let us see how Mr. Shimkus argues:

“Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for His creation.

He is apparently reading from theNew International Version. Notice that the second sentence begins with the qualification “As longas the earth endures.” It looks to me as if God left himself an “out”there. If we render our planet uninhabitable, then the earth will have ceased to endure; and God doesn’t say that he won’t prevent that from happening, does he? But the lameness of Shimkus’s biblical exegesis is the least of his absurdities. He continues:

The second verse comes from Matthew 24. “And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.”

In the video, Mr. Shimkus’s manner of utterance makes it difficult to tell at what point he ceases to readand begins to speak in his own person; but one can confirm that the quotationends here by looking up the passage (Matthew 24:31).

The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.

My first thought when I read this was that destruction by a global flood is not exactly what we are concerned about. But then I reflected that one effect of global warming is a rise in sea levels; so perhaps Shimkus’s observation is not as irrelevant as it appears. If you think that the Bible gives us reliable information about the future of the earth, then this observation is relevant.

And I appreciate having panelists here who are men of faith so that we can get into the theological discourse of that position, but I do believe that God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.

The term “persons of faith” seems to have come into vogue as a device for making the class of religious believers seem comparable to the class of so-called “persons of color,” as if the former were burdened by a comparable history of unfair treatment. I have not known the term to be used to mean “members of the clergy.” In any case, as I noted earlier, the one clergyman in the lineup that day, though he made brief use of what might be termed “theological discourse,” offered it only as an indication of the source of his ethical stance and not as infallible and perfect truth. The good bishop, unlike the bad congressman, understood that arguments from scripture had no rightful place in the deliberations of a committee of the US Congress.

Two other issues, Mr. Chairman. Today we have about 388 parts per million in the atmosphere.

Actually, our atmosphere contains a million parts per million: all its parts are there! But presumably Mr. Shimkus means to speak of the concentration of carbondioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. His figure of 388 ppm is indeed thescientifically established figure for the moment at which he was speaking,though in the year and a half since that time it has risen above 389 ppm (source).

I think in the age of the dinosaurs where we had most flora and fauna we were probably at 4,000 parts per million.

I don’t know if Mr. Shimkus thinks that “the age of the dinosaurs” was tens of millions of years ago or just a few thousand years ago. If he believes that it was millions of years ago, then it might be interesting to know how he reconciles this with his belief that the Bible is the infallible, unchangeable, and perfect word of God. If he believes that it was only thousands of years ago, it would be interesting to know why he accepts scientific findings that he thinks support his political position but rejects those that do not.

No, on second thought, to learn those things would probably not be very interesting at all.

Anyway, the figure of 4,000 ppm of CO₂ in the earth’s atmosphere is indeed true of a time in the age of dinosaurs; but it does not support Mr. Shimkus’sview that we need not worry about global warming. Quite the contrary. A recently published article confirms the findings to which he is presumably alluding:

The first direct evidence supporting the idea thata recently-discovered period of global warming, one of the hottest inEarth’s history, was caused by CO₂ has been published this week. Before the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO), which occurred 40 million years ago, temperatures were much higher than today, but steadily falling. . . .

Bijl’steam found clear evidence of MECO warming, and relatively high alkenonelevels showed similar temperature and CO₂ profiles, with a matchingpeak in each. They found that the baseline CO₂ levels in the broaderEocene period [about 40 million years ago] were around 1000 to 2000parts per million (ppm). During the temperature peaks atmospheric CO₂ levels reached 4000 ppm or higher, backing the theory of the greenhouse gas cause.By comparison, current atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have grown fromaround 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution toalmost 390 ppm today. (“Prehistoric CO2 double-up gives warming data,” at Simple Climate, November 6, 2010)

So, yes, the concentration of CO₂ in the earth’s atmosphere was indeed once ten times as high as it is now: and the average temperature was higher by 4°C. That may have been fine for dinosaurs, but it would be dire for us human beings.

Shimkus adds:

There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet, not too much carbon. And the cost of a cap and trade on the poor is now being discovered.

He goes on to remark on the economic costs of the cap-and-trade legislation. I have no idea if his claims have any merit. Whether they do or not, at least they are arguments from empirical facts rather than from supposed divine promises revealed in scripture. But how on earth (if you’ll pardon the expression) the discipline of theology is supposed to be able to deliver findings on whether the earth has “too much” carbon I have no idea. Does Shimkus even understand that the question pertinent to the deliberations of his committee is not whether there is too much carbon in or on the earth—that is something that, so far as I understand, has changed very little since the planet was formed—but whether there is too much carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere and what should be done about it? Does he have any idea what he is talking about? Does he care at all whether he does or not?

Perhaps it doesn’t make much difference whether people derive their dogmatic idiocies from the Bible or from other sources. But it is peculiarly unsettling to see persons of influence in the US government invoking scripture as a basis—and not just any basis but one that is “infallible, unchanging, [and] perfect”—of beliefs about the natural environment and the effects of our actions upon it.

Related articles:

“Energy Committee Chairman Candidate Says Bible Shows No Catastrophic Climate Change Can Occur,” at Center for Inquiry, November 10, 2010

“‘Theplanet won’t be destroyed by global warming because God promised Noah,’says politician bidding to chair U.S. energy committee,” at Mail Online, November 10, 2010

Judaism, Jewry, and Jews

2010-09-19T22:57:00.002-04:00

The statement “Judaism is a people, not (just) a religion” seems like an important truth, but it is not even logically coherent. “Jewry is a people” is true and coherent, but banal. Here is how to capture both the truth and the importance without losing coherence.

GS on his blog OrthoModerndox posted an entry today with a title well calcluated to attract my interest: “Judaism as a nation, not [just] a religion” (the square brackets are part of the title). In this piece, GS offers some thoughts provoked by his reading The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel by Michael Wyschogrod.“One of his main themes,” he says of Wyschogrod, “is that Judaism is a people /nation rather than [just] a religion” (the square brackets are, again, in the originaltext). This is a topic on which I have written on this blog before (in “Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish” and “Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity”), andI’m not sure that there is anything new in what I have to say about it here. But that one sentence raised some thoughts in my mind of which I make an occasion for reviving myown blog. The new year (5771) seems like as good a time as any for doing such a thing.

Now, I don’t doubt that GS, like most bloggers, and in sharp contrast to me,writes quickly, without spending a lot of time recomposing his sentences, as I invariably do. Thetyping error in his first sentence (“intersting” for “interesting”) issufficient evidence of that. Nonetheless, I am going to pick on thestatement that I quoted from him, for the following reasons.

First, it is a verydifficult matter tostate the relation among the concepts of Judaism, religion, andpeoplehood. One can’t just make an incoherent statement on that pointand then say, “Well, you know what I mean.” If you can’t say what youmean, then you can’t assume that your audience knows what you mean,because you have not shown that you know what you mean.

Second, thestatement “Judaism is a people,” given the now current meaning of the word“Judaism” (more on that qualification in a moment),is not a coherent one. The predicate term “people” andthe subject term “Judaism” do not belong to the same logical category.Of course Judaism is a religion: that is what we have the word “Judaism” for, as contrasted with terms like “Jew,” “Jewry,” and “Jewish people” (as a singular or plural noun). To say “Judaism is a people” is as senseless as saying “Five is acolor.”

Now I have to admit one qualification here. I recently learned from the Oxford English Dictionarythat the term “Judaism” was at one time used in a sense correspondingto that of judaismus in medieval Latin, namely to mean “Jewry.” Thus,a source from 1884 (the latest example of this usage provided) says: “The revenue of the Judaism, as it was termed, wasmanaged by a separate branch of the exchequer, termed the exchequer ofthe Jews.”

If GS meant the term in this sense, then his statement is not logicallyincoherent at all. It was much as if he had written: “Jewry is apeople,” “The Jewish people is a people.” But, for one thing, I find itunlikely that he had in mind any such rare and antiquated sense of theword “Judaism.” For another, if he did mean this, then his statementis banal and uninteresting. I prefer to assume that he was trying to say something both true and interesting.

I think that what GS was trying to say can be most exactly expressed thus: “Thestatus of being a Jew is essentially a matter of belonging to theJewish people rather than one of professing or practicing the Jewishreligion.” This, I think, is an interesting statement, and a trueone as well (subject, of course, to questions about the meaning of thecrucial adverb “essentially”: more on that in a moment).

Butthe statement contains at least the suggestion of a falsehood. For itsuggests that the connection of being a Jew with the Jewish religion isaccidental: as if “Judaism” were the name of a religion that justhappened to be practiced by a large portion of the Jewishpopulation—as, e.g., Armenian Orthodox Christianity is practiced by alarge portion of the world’s Armenians, but is not what defines them asArmenians.

As a matter of history, such a suggestion (concerningthe Jewish people) is obviously false. The Jewish people have, throughmost of their history, defined themselves as the people of the Torah.In some sense, we still are so defined: that is, we are definable asthe descendants of the people of the Torah, even if we are not allpractitioners or believers of the Torah. Such a definition, whateverexactly it means, clearly depends religious terms.

Theslippage between “Jew” and “adherent (by profession or observance) ofJudaism” comes about because, according to the Torah that defines theJewish people collectively, the individual Jew is defined as such byhis or her birth. In terms of the category of “religion,” this meansthat it is a religious practice that defines that status, though itdefines it in terms of birth rather than in terms of belief orobservance.

So those who consider themselves Jews in somethingmore than a purely ethnic sense but who cannot accept Jewish (or any)religious beliefs have the problem that their self-identification asJews presupposes a religious practice whose fundamental beliefs theycannot accept. They are—that is, we are—in an inherentlyuncomfortable position.

This discomfort does not arise merely for those who are, like GS, “Orthoprax,” that is, observant of the ritual practices of Orthodox Judaism while rejecting most of the beliefs that support that practice (such as “TMS,” the doctrine that the whole Torah, oral and written, was given to the Israelites through Moses at Mount Sinai). It arises even for the “three-day-a-year” Jew, whose observances do not extend beyond partaking of a seder at Passover and going to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (something that I have bound myself to do every year by accepting a paid gig in the choir of a Reform temple), as long as he or she does so under some sense, however vague and unformulated, of an obligation other than an immediate social one. It applies to the unbelieving Jew who refrains from eating pork and shellfish for reasons that cannot be attributed to personal distaste or matters of health (false rationalizations notwithstanding). The unbelieving Jew who considers himself or herself under so much as one obligation—one mitzvah—merely because he or she is a Jew has this problem.

Jewish Education in America: A Historical Note

2010-06-24T22:47:00.001-04:00

Given the conditions of Jewish education in the United States, it is not surprising that so many children behave badly and learn little in Hebrew school. What is surprising is that this situation has existed for at least 140 years.

In a piece published on the Web in January of this year under the title “Stop Blaming Hebrew School,” Rabbi Benjamin Weiner responds to comments reportedly made by a prominent Jewish philanthropist in an interview on cable television. These comments included a characterization of the American institution of Hebrew school as “a shandah—an abysmal failure. . . . Can there be a worse term in the AmericanJewish lexicon than ‘Hebrew School’? There were six kids inthe 20th century who liked it!”

Weiner contests the claim that Hebrew school has been a failure: “Anyone who hasjockeyed disaffection with the Jewish establishment into a successfulcareer of personal expression on the American mass-media stage . . . should reflect on the debt of gratitude heor she owes to this half-assed system of religio-ethno-culturalindoctrination,” he writes. But his main point is that “such talk, toparaphrase Tevye, blames the cart for the inherent lameness of thehorse.” Weiner likens “the oft repeated claim that synagogue Hebrew schools are responsible for the decline of the Jewish people” to “stripping your parents’ house of all viablewoodwork, plumbing, and appliances and then wondering why they live insuch a dump.”He writes further:

What created the supposition that two to six hours a week ofafter-school guttarality could foment a firm commitment to the Jewishpeople? I don’t think this paradigm was determined deliberately fromthe outset, by committee. At the turn of the last century, there wereviable models of Jewish education, and there was a critical mass ofJewish community prepared to embody them. And then there was massimmigration, and genocide, and breakneck assimilation—from a flummoxedtraditional culture into a post-War America that was primed withpetroleum to give Jewish people the greatest thrill ride they had everexperienced in a Gentile world. And,at the end of the day, Hebrew School emerged because it was the best wewere allowed to do. Speaking, gloves off, as a working rabbi andeducation director, trying hard to find ways to reflect the “verbiage”of the Jewish religion “realistically upon our lives,” it isfrustrating that, by consensus of the parents of my community, I canonly educate their children for two hours a week with no homework, andthat those hours come well after regular school hours, and that theexpectations for behavior and attendance sometimes fall somewherebetween a railway station and a monkey house—despite the fact thatthey are all, without exception, great kids. But this is roughly theextent of the concession that many American Jewish families are willingto make these days to their Jewish identities, and there should be acategory of Nobel prize for whoever figures out how to put theseparameters to the best use.

The point is that historical circumstances have made the institution of Hebrew school, with all its limitations, the primary arrangement by which Jewish parents seek to transmit Jewish knowledge to their children. The results are dismal because the hours in the classroom are meager and no homework can be assigned—not that having longer hours or assigning homework is a serious option, given that the sessions are supplemental to the children’s weekday schooling.

My attention was arrested by Weiner’s felicitous observation that “theexpectations for behavior and attendance sometimes fall somewherebetween a railway station and a monkey house.” The phrase seemed to me exactly to describe my own experience of Jewish religious education, and moved me to post a comment under the heading “I have long wondered why we all hated Hebrew school so much,” in which I wrote:

I am ashamed to recall the way that I and my fellows behaved inreligious school. I had Sunday school at one Reform synagogue andevening classes once a week at another, with a different crowd at each,and we were all completely ineducable. As far as I recall, the onlyteacher who got any respect from us was a tough, sarcastic rabbi fromBrooklyn (in Seattle, such a creature was rather exotic) who had agreat knack for humorous abuse à la Don Rickles, and who would throwerasers at students whose answers he didn’t like. I can't speak for theother boys (I don’t recall the girls being as troublesome as we boyswere, though they may have been just as inattentive), but I wascertainly interested in the subjects that I studied in my secular dayschool, and it would never have occurred to me to misbehave in classthere.

The puzzle is that youngsters who, in their daily secular schools, showed at least a reasonable degree of interest in their subjects of study and a reasonable standard of behavior became inattentive and intractable during the measly two hours or so that they were expected to spend in learning about Judaism. Weiner, though he notes this disparity, does not attempt to explain it.

Reader Becca Lish, however, does so in a comment in which she writes that the Jewish philanthropist mentioned earlier “might wish to look to the vast majority of parents whoexpect our children to embrace beliefs and practices which we ourselveseschew. . . . The degree to which we integrate ‘Jewishness’ into actual familylife will always be the prevailing factor in determining both sentimentand practice in the next generation.” I am inclined to agree. In fact, just a few days before her comment appeared, I had written something in a similar vein in a comment on my own blog:

Though I was industrious and well-behaved in my weekday secular school,I and my classmates in religious school were rebellious, inattentive,and virtually unteachable. I think that the underlying cause was simplythat Jewish observance played so little role in our everyday lives thatany study of it or of the thinking on which it was based literallybored us silly.

As I ruefully concluded my comment on Weiner’s piece: “In my adulthood, I wish that I could havelearned much more [about Judaism when I was a child], but I don’t know how anyone could ever have taughtit to us.” The ineffectuality of Jewish education outside of day schools and yeshivot reflects the thinness of most American Jewish practice.

But why is so much American Jewish practice—at least, so much American Reform Jewish practice—so thin? I think it is thin because the underlying beliefs are thin; and I think that the beliefs are thin because modern scientific and historical knowledge has made them so. But I know too little about the subject for my historical speculations to be worth publishing here.

Recently, I have been making my way slowly through Michael A. Meyer’s compendious Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). The following passage—and this is really what this whole post has been leading up to—caught my attention:

Limited to a few hours a week, the religious school wasunable to undertake the intensive curriculum which had been taught inthe day schools. Most met as few as two hours per week. Hebrewespecially suffered, students but rarely achieving any real competencein the language. While in the majority of schools some Hebrew wastaught, it was often optional and in quite a few not taught at all.Children who behaved well in public school resented the additionalburden of weekend classes. As one observer noted, comparing the two: “Thereattention and quiet, here indifference, often wild noise; theredecent respectful behavior toward the teacher, here only theopposite.” (286)

I quote this passage here because, although it almost exactly describes my own experience of Hebrew school, it refers to the situation approximately 140 years ago: the quotation within the quoted passage is taken from a piece published in 1871! Rabbi Weiner, in a passage quoted earlier, claims that “at the turn of the last century”—that is, circa 1901, in contrast to developments in subsequent decades—“there wereviable models of Jewish education, and there was a critical mass ofJewish community prepared to embody them.” I don’t know how to square this with Meyers’s historical account. If the passage from that account quoted above is at all reliable, then the ineffectuality of Hebrew school and the refractory behavior of its recipients are not only not recent developments: one could fairly say that they belong to a Reform Jewish tradition.

Previous post: A Dilemma for NOMA

A Dilemma for NOMA

2010-06-10T20:38:00.001-04:00

The diversity of religions presents a stubborn problem for Gould’s idea that religion has its own magisterium. The idea that the teaching authority of religion pertains to practices rather than beliefs shifts the problem slightly but ultimately does not solve it. On the other hand. . . .

Stephen Jay Gould on The Simpsons (episode 908,“Lisa the Skeptic”)

To people who, like me, are neither religious nor anti-religious, Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis of non-overlapping magisteria (“NOMA”) holds considerable appeal.¹ To recapitulate it for the benefit of anyone not already familiar with it, this is the thesis that science has “teaching authority” withregard to questions of how the natural world works, while religion has such authority withregard to questions of ultimate meaning and value. I have argued in my two previous posts on the topic (“Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion” and “More on Gould on Science and Religion”) that, while a plausible rationale can be suggested for Gould’s account of the magisterium of science, his account of the magisterium of religion faces serious difficulties. Not only is it questionable whether religion has teaching authority in the domain that Gould assigns to it, but it is questionable whether religion has teaching authority in any domain whatever. In short, it is to be doubted whether there is any such thing as “the magisterium of religion.”

This conclusion can be reached by either of two ways of looking at the matter. The first way is to note the logical disparity between how the non-count noun “religion” relates to the count noun “religions” and the manner in which the corresponding nouns “science” and “sciences” relate to each other. A science is simply the science of a particular subject matter, and all sciences are parts of science. For all the differences of method and content among them, there is no incompatibility between one science and another. There are conflicts between theories within the various sciences, but the work of science consists largely in resolving such conflicts. Religions, by contrast, do not belong to a coherent whole. Different religions do not relate to one another as different sciences do, as parts of a whole, but in something closer to how one scientific theory relates to another theory concerning the same subject matter, that is, by mutual incompatibility. As a rule, one cannot coherently combine the teachings of one religion with the teachings of another. (I include the qualification “as a rule” not because I know of two religions that can be combined in this way but simply because I do not know that there are no two that can be so combined.)

From these reflections it emerges how dubious Gould’s attribution of teaching authority to religion is. Remember that his thesis is not that each religion has its magisterium, but that religion itself, in kind, has a magisterium. He elaborates what this means in the following passage:

Each domain of inquiry frames its own rules and admissible questions, and sets its own criteria for judgment and resolution. These accepted standards, and the procedures developed for debating and resolving legitimate issues, define the magisterium—or teaching authority—of any given realm. (Rocks of Ages, 52–3)

This passage seems perfectly adequate to characterize science as a domain of inquiry; it may also be applicable to the domains of individual religions, considered separately, and perhaps even to the procedures of some ecumenical religious councils. But applied to the entity “religion” in general, it is a non-starter. Religion considered in kind, as contrasted with individual religions, plainly has none of the attributes that Gould describes as constituting a magisterium.

Another way to arrive at the same conclusion is to consider the following dilemma. Take the body of beliefs that are taught by a given religion. Either that body of beliefs is founded in reason and experience—or in “natural reason,” as Thomas Aquinas would call it—or it is not. If it is, then there is no room for any specifically religious authority with regard to it: it falls within the magisterium of science, perhaps supplemented by (secular) philosophy. If, on the other hand, the body of beliefs is not founded in reason and experience, then no authority—that is, no power to determine the truth or falsehood of the beliefs—is possible with regard to it. At most, a political authority may determine what beliefs may be professed, and legislate penalties for heterodoxy. (I believe that this arrangement has been tried: it was called the middle ages, was it not?) Either way, there is no such thing as a specifically religious teaching authority. Therefore, there is no such thing as the magisterium of religion.

Those are the two arguments. What they have in common, besides their conclusion, is that they make use of two facts, (1) the incompatibilites among the teachings of different religions and (2) the unavailability of any specifically religious way—or perhaps it would be better to say generically religious way: i.e., a way belonging to religion in kind and not to any individual religion—of resolving those divergences of teaching. From these the conclusion is drawn that no teaching authority pertains to religion as such.

As with any well-formed argument, criticism of this one can focus either on the truth of premises or on their sufficiency to warrant the conclusion. Take premise 1 first—the assertion of the incompatibility among the teachings of different religions. There are those, like the present Dalai Lama, who like to emphasize what the world’s religions have in common and what adherents of one religion can learn from other religions.² But, so far as I know, not even those who believe in a common core of the world’s religious teachings deny the diversity and incompatibility among the less central elements. Nor is it evident that these disagreements are merely peripheral. The teaching that Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate is central to the Christian religion, while Jews and Muslims stoutly deny it. Disagreement of beliefs among the world’s religions is not a mere appearance to be explained away but an undeniable and unalterable fact.

What, then, about premise 2, the unavailability of any system of standards or procedures for adjudicating conflicts of belief among the world’s religions? Might one hold that such a system is not impossible but merely not yet formulated, or that it already exists and merely wants development? It is not easy to refute such vague and speculative suppositions. This much, however, can be said. First, the only known body of standards or procedures that can be applied to religious claims is the one that makes up the composite body of what we call scientific method, logic, and common sense. The existence of such a body of standards and procedures plainly provides no support to the idea of a specifically religious form of teaching authority. Second, if there is a body of standards or procedures belonging specifically to religion, no one has yet produced it; so to invoke it to establish the existence of a religious magisterium is as vain as to call upon a phantom to clean one’s house.

The premises of the argument, then, seem unassailable. This leaves only the question of their sufficiency to establish the conclusion. And here, as I suggested in my previous post on this topic, there is a bit of wiggle room. To begin with, suppose that we separate the idea of teaching from that of belief or truth claim. After all, there are plainly forms of teaching that have nothing to do with imparting beliefs: teaching someone how to cook a soufflé or how to play cards, for instance. The application to religion is not hard to see: religious life is manifestly not a mere matter of belief, but also, arguably even primarily, of observance. Religions are first of all practiced; to speak of “believing” a religion is surely a rather late, and I suspect a specifically Protestant, development in the grammar of religious language.

The idea here is not that religious teaching does not include religious beliefs, but that religious teaching authority does not extend to such beliefs. As far as religious authority is concerned, religious beliefs are, on this view, epiphenomena of religious practices. The incompatibility between one religion and another is then less like the logical incompatibility between two propositions than it is like the physical incompatibility between being in one location and being in another, separate location. That is, one person cannot coherently maintain two or more distinct religious practices (or at least, cannot do so in general); nonetheless, if two people practice two different religions, their mere practices are not in any inherent conflict, but only such practical conflict as may arise from circumstances.

Some people, I suspect, will find this idea far-fetched and bizarre. For my part, I find it very attractive, and I suspect that anyone who finds it unworthy of serious consideration is simply accustomed to the Protestant conception of religion as essentially a matter of belief. Still, there is no denying that it is strange, and, what is more to the point, I suspect that it fails to solve the problem at hand. The reason is that, even if we set aside the logical incompatibility between religions by making practices rather than beliefs the objects of religious authority, we still have the problem of diversity in those practices. Each religion teaches a particular practice: there is no common practice or body of practices that religion itself teaches. In fact, it is not clear that there is anything that religion itself teaches: there are only the diverse teachings of different religions. The fact of religious diversity remains a problem for the idea of a religious magisterium.

There remains, so far as I can see, one possible way out for NOMA. I have presumed so far that, where a “teaching authority” exists, only one possible teaching can be authorized. Would it make sense to suppose that mutually incompatible beliefs, and perhaps also mutually exclusive practices, can all be authorized within religion? A magisterium, according to Gould, comprises standards and procedures for “debating and resolving legitimate issues.” Well, then: why assume that incompatibilities between one religion and another are legitimate issues? Perhaps the only legitimate religious issues are doctrinal (and perhaps also practical) differences within a religion. Gould’s idea, then, would be that there is a common body of procedures or standards for resolving religious disputes, but it concerns only disputes within a religion, not between one religion and another. Disputes between religions are then not legitimate religious issues, but if anything secular issues, to be resolved on non-religious grounds if at all.

This conception of the magisterium of religion is one that I have not seen considered elsewhere. Perhaps, after I post this, I will find some fatal weakness in it, but for now, I offer it for consideration.

REFERENCES

¹See Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999) and “Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (1997).

²Tenzin Gyatso (the Fourteenth Dalai Lama), “Many Faiths, One Truth,” The New York Times, May 25, 2010.

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More on Gould on Science and Religion

2010-06-06T23:46:00.001-04:00

The criticisms that have been directed at Gould’s thesis of non-overlapping magisteria (for science, questions of how the natural world is; for religion, questions of ultimate meaning and value) can be reduced to one objection: Why should we believe that religion has any magisterium at all?

Stephen Jay Gould (source)

As I explained in a previous entry (“Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion”), Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis that science and religion have “non-overlapping magisteria” (“NOMA”) is meant neither as a description of the actual scope of claims made by practitioners of science and religion nor as a proposal for how those two activities can stay out of each other’s way, but rather as an account of the range within which each of the two has “teaching authority.” Science, on Gould’s view, has such authority with regard to questions of how the natural world works, and religion with regard to questions of ultimate meaning and value. There is, according to Gould, no conflict between science and religion as such, because their respective domains, though they adjoin each other, do not overlap. Claims about the natural world made on the supposed authority of religion as well as claims about ultimate meaning and value made on the supposed authority of science are one and all void.

Interestingly, while many defenders of science have been highly critical of Gould’s thesis, their principal complaint has been not that it grants too little to science (though some have made this objection: more on that on another occasion) but that it grants too much to religion. The objection is that, even if questions of ultimate meaning and value lie outside the competence of science, it does not follow that they lie within the competence, much less the exclusive competence, of religion. After all, such questions are and always have been prominent concerns of the discipline of philosophy. To hold that they can only be resolved by reliance on religious sources is itself a substantive philosophical position, and an unpopular one among professional philosophers at that.

At the same time, as I noted in my previous entry, these critics find fault with Gould for drawing the boundaries of religious authority in an implausibly utopian fashion. To hold, as Gould does, that such authority pertains only to questions of ultimate meaning and value and not to questions of natural fact excludes a vast body of actual religious claims, such as the historical narratives on which the Abrahamic religions depend. Gould’s assertion that the conflict between science and religion “exists only in people’s minds and social practices, not in the logicor proper utility of these entirely different, and equally vital,subjects” (Rocks of Ages, 3) requires so vast a disparity between the supposed “logic or proper utility” of religion and how religion “exists . . . in people’s minds and social practices” as to make his conception appear more wishful thinking than historical or philosophical analysis. In the satirical summation cited by Daniel Dennett,the thesis of NOMA says in effect: “Render unto Caesar that which isCaesar’s and unto God that which Caesar says God can have.” In otherwords, while Gould’s formulations make a show of giving to science and to religion each their respective shares, in effect it only allows to religion a portion of what is left over after science has done its work.

In this light it is all the more remarkable that religionists (if that is the term for those who follow some religion or other) who have commented on Gould’s thesis seem to be content with his delineation of the religious magisterium. Yet it is not difficult to guess the reason for this. Presumably, it is only the exponents of modern, liberal, intellectually catholic (with a small “c”) interpretations of religion—religionists well up in secular learning, who will not feel pinched or chafed by the strictures of NOMA—who have anything to say about Gould. For them, the role of the defender of the faith in relation to scientific findings that conflict with traditional beliefs is not to refute those findings but to reinterpret the tradition to accommodate them. By contrast, creationists and other religious reactionaries, who take their favored scriptures or clerics to be authoritative for all time and in all questions whatever, are not likely to pay attention to what an evolutionary biologist—a proponent of the hated doctrine of “Darwinism,” which they equate with atheism—has to say about the proper scope of religious claims. It’s either that, or I just haven’t heard their grumblings because they have not carried beyond their closed circle of communicants.

So, to sum up, the objections to Gould’s thesis of NOMA are (1) that it grants religion an authority that it lacks in questions of ultimate meaning and value, and (2) that, however attractive it may be as an ideal scheme, it is too remote from the actual practice of religion to be credible. Alternatively, one can sum up all the criticisms that have been directed at Gould’s thesis by defenders of science in one rhetorical question: By what right does Gould assume that religion has teaching authority about anything? Why, in other words, should we believe that religion has any magisterium at all?

There is an evident contrast with science on this point. Science, one could argue, is defined by a body of methods that can be derived from the inherent requirements of human epistemic rationality. Thus the definition of science—not the definition of the word “science” but the rule by which in practice science is identified—explains why science has the magisterium that it has, and a fortiori why it has any magisterium at all. Science has teaching authority with regard to how the world is because its methods are derived from the requirements for learning about how the world is. This is true not only of science as a whole but of any particular science. Particular sciences are individuated not as competing claims (there are competing claims in the sciences, but there is a commonly accepted methodology for adjudicating among them), but as the science of this or that particular subject matter.

With religion, things stand on an entirely different footing. The various religions of the world are not parts of a whole called “religion” except as a matter of verbal classification. As far as their beliefs are concerned, religions are not complementary at all but conflicting, and there is no common method or practice or principle of operation among them by appeal to which differences of doctrine can be resolved. Gould defines a magisterium as “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” (Rocks of Ages, 3). It may be fair to say that religion or the religious mode of teaching, whatever exactly that may be, holds the tools for meaningful discourse, but resolving differences of belief is precisely what it cannot do. Each religion may contain the tools for resolving internal doctrinal disputes, but no religion contains the tools for resolving differences between religions, except to the utterly parochial satisfaction of its particular adherents; much less does the abstract generic entity “religion” possess any such tools. Thus, while the existence and extent of the magisterium of science can be derived from the nature of science, consideration of the nature of religion only makes it difficult to sustain the claim that religion has any magisterium at all.

There is, I think, a way out of this, both for Gould and for religion. In making the case for the pedagogical incompetence of religion—the non-existence of anything that can be called its magisterium—I relied on a restriction of religious teaching to beliefs, or truth claims. If religious teaching is essentially concerned with telling us how things are, whether in “this” world (as if there were another) or in some putative world beyond it, then, I think, Gould’s atheistic critics are surely right, and religion has no teaching authority at all. But the assumption that religious teaching concerns beliefs may be called into question. Religion may have teaching authority with regard to something—I am not venturing to say what—that is not essentially a matter of belief at all. Another possibility is that the proper task and scope of religion is not captured by the idea of a magisterium. I hope to explore these possibilities in another entry.

* * *

Correction, added June 10, 2010: I overstated matters in my final paragraph, above, when I equated the non-existence of a religious magisterium with the“pedagogical incompetence” of religion. To lack teaching authority isnot the same as to lack competence to teach. Any religion is competentto teach what it will, in the sense that there is nothing inherent inreligion as such that prevents given religious teachings from beingauthorized by some non-parochial standard. But the only non-parochialstandards available are (as the term suggests) non-religious ones. Thus, forinstance, the fact that certain histories offered in the Bible areincorporated into Jewish or Christian doctrine does not render thosehistories rationally untenable. The point is merely that theirreligious status does not confer any authority on them either: whetherthey are true or false can and must be settled by the same standards asany other historical claims.

Previous entry: Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion

Next entry: A Dilemma for NOMA

Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion

2010-05-30T22:18:00.006-04:00

According to Stephen Jay Gould, science and religion have separate domains of teaching authority, or “non-overlapping magisteria.” If so, then it is not evident that any major revealed religion has ever confined itself to its proper magisterium. But that does not mean that Gould is wrong.

Jesus and Mo (image linked to site)

Not long before his untimely death in 2002, Stephen Jay Gould advanced what he described as “a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution” to “the supposed conflict between science and religion.”¹ “Supposed,” because the said conflict “exists only in people’s minds and social practices, not in the logic or proper utility of these entirely different, and equally vital, subjects.” By nature, according to Gould, science and religion do not and cannot conflict, because their respective concerns are entirely distinct:

Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve (4).

Gould adopted the Catholic ecclesiastical term “magisterium” (from the Latin magister, “teacher”) to describe these spheres of concern. “A magisterium . . . is a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” (5). Science and religion, on Gould’s view, are “non-overlapping magisteria”—a phrase that, perhaps for reasons of euphony, he abbreviated to “NOMA” (surely “NOM” would have been more accurate). The magisterium of science comprises “the empirical realm: what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory),” while that of religion “extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value” (6). No question belongs within both domains: hence their “non-overlapping” character.

Gould’s thesis has not been well received, as far as I know, among defenders of science. Members of this audience have argued that the thesis rests on a highly questionable dichotomy of fact and value; that it grants religion a dubious and undeserved authority in questions of meaning and value; and that it does not describe any state of affairs that has ever actually existed between science and religion.² In what follows, I will mostly be concerned with the last of these three criticisms, though I will have a bit to say about the second one toward the end.

Gould is well aware that many people have invoked and continue to invoke religious sources to make claims about the character of the natural world, as well as scientific sources for claims about meaning and value in human life. He notes that “NOMA does challenge certain particular (and popular) versions of religious belief . . . For example, if your particular form of religion demands a belief that the earth can only be about ten thousand years old (because you choose to read Genesis as a literal text, whatever such a claim might mean), then you stand in violation of NOMA” (93). The thesis of non-overlapping magisteria concerns the domains within which religion and science have their respective authorities, not the scope of actual claims that human beings make in the name of the one or the other.

What are commonly adduced as examples of the conflict between religion and science, such as the persistent conflict over the teaching of evolution in American public schools, are, according to Gould, typically political clashes between one group representing the interests of a specific religious group and an opposing group representing not merely scientific but very often opposing religious interests as well. In fact, Gould takes the battle over creationism in American public schools to illustrate rather than to counter his thesis:

Modern creationism, alas, has provoked a real battle, thus supporting NOMA with a positive example of the principle that all apparent struggles between science and religion really arise from violations of NOMA, when a small group allied to one magisterium tries to impose its irrelevant and illegitimate will upon the other’s domain. Such genuine historical battles, therefore, do not pit science against religion, and can only represent a power play by zealots formally allied to one side, and trying to impose their idiosyncratic and decidedly minority views upon the magisterium of the other side (125–6).

Similarly, social Darwinism—the real object of William Jennings Bryan’s opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools—was an ethical and political view based on an illegitimate inference from how nature works to how human beings should conduct themselves (162–3, 165–6).

As I said before, Gould’s thesis has not been well received among defenders of science. Thus Massimo Pigliucci offers the following as one of “several intrinsic reason why NOMA does not hold water”:

It isnot true that (most) religions do not make claims about the naturalworld. Besides the tens of millions of people who believe the Earth is6,000 years old, the Bible was never meant as a book of metaphors. Itis read that way by enlightened Christians today precisely because ofthe long battle between science and religion, with the latterconstantly on the losing side. (“Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria, A Review”)

Richard Dawkins, in a review of Gould’s book, writes in a similar vein with reference to certain doctrines of the Catholic Church:

TheVirgin Birth, the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Resurrection of Jesus,the survival of our own souls after death: these are all claims of a clearly scientificnature. Either Jesus had a corporeal father or he didn’t. This is not a question of “values” or “morals”; it is a question of sober fact. We may not havethe evidence to answer it, but it is a scientific question, nevertheless. You may be surethat, if any evidence supporting the claim were discovered, the Vatican would not bereticent in promoting it. (“When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf”)

And Daniel Dennett, responding to Gould’s thesis, says in an interview:

There are no factual assertions that religion can reasonably claim asits own, off limits to science. Many who readily grant this have notconsidered its implications. It means, for instance, that there are nofactual assertions about the origin of the universe or its futuretrajectory, or about historical events (floods, the parting of seas,burning bushes, etc.), about the goal or purpose of life, or about theexistence of an afterlife and so on, that are off limits to science.After all, assertions about the purpose or function of organs, the lackof purpose or function of, say, pebbles or galaxies, and assertionsabout the physical impossibility of psychokinesis, clairvoyance,poltergeists, trance channeling, etc. are all within the purview ofscience; so are the parallel assertions that strike closer to thetraditionally exempt dogmas of long-established religions. You can’tconsistently accept that expert scientific testimony can convict acharlatan of faking miracle cures and then deny that the same testimonycounts just as conclusively—“beyond a reasonable doubt”—against anyfactual claims of violations of physical law to be found in the Bibleor other religious texts or traditions. (“Daniel Dennett’s Darwinian Mind: An Interview with a ‘Dangerous’ Man”)

The common argument here seems to be, in briefest form, that because the actual beliefsof most religions include matters of natural fact, most religionsintrude upon the magisterium of science; therefore science andreligion do not have non-overlapping magisteria.

It is not difficult tosee how Gould could parry this objection. His thesis, as he says in apassage already quoted, does not concern the actual practices of theworld’s religions but rather “the logic or proper utility of these. . . subjects” (3). It concerns the respective domains in whichreligion and science hold the means of legitimately answeringquestions, not the domains in which people do in fact invoke religion orscience to answer questions.

Such a reply, however, merely displaces the force of the criticism toanother point in Gould’s conception. How plausible can a conception ofthe “logic and proper utility” of religion be if it implies that thegreater part of the world’s religions overstep the proper bounds ofreligion itself? As Pigliucci suggests in the passage quoted earlier, it is only because religion, as represented by its moreenlightened adherents, has been beating a retreat in the face ofscientific advance for the past 400 years or so that Gould’s conceptionof its proper sphere has even an appearance of being workable.

Now there is one part of Gould’s thesis on which none of these arguments cast any doubt, namely that religion has no teaching authority with regard toquestions of natural fact. Pigliucci, Dawkins, Dennett, and Gould are of one mind on this point. The trouble for the thesis of NOMA is that, at least historically,most of the adherents and most of the authorities of the world’sreligions have received and propounded teachings about suchquestions, and proponents of science have continually encountered resistance from religious quarters whenever their findings came into conflict with those teachings. One may miss this point if one confines one’s attention to questions of natural-scientific theory. In such matters, one may take it for granted that, apart from the views of those whom Gould rightly disparages as a minority of zealots, religion, for the most part, got out of that line of work long ago. But, as noted by Dawkins and Dennett, the questions on which religion has had to retreat include highlyspecific questions of human history, such as questions about the life of Jesus or, to return to the topic of one of my previous posts (“Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs”), the supposed exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and the supposed reception of the Torah by Moses at Mount Sinai.

To be sure, Gould is able to cite pronouncements by Popes Pius XII (Humani Generis, 1950) and John Paul (“Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences,” 1996) as illustrations of NOMA (76–82). There are plenty of Protestant denominations (I think the majority, though I don’t know) that have officially accepted the findings of modern science, evolutionary biology in particular. The liberal denominations of Judaism—Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist—have certainly been receptive to the findings of modern science, even, indeed perhaps especially, in questions of ancient history and the origins of Judaism’s sacred texts (see my post “What Beliefs Are Jewish Beliefs?”). On the other hand, Modern Orthodox Judaism, as I understand it, professes to accept the findings of science, but whether its rabbinate actually does so in practice is another matter (see my post “Dishonesty in Hertz’s Torah Commentary”).

In his interview, Dennett cites an unnamed or unknown “wag” who said that Gould’s thesis “amounts to rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which Caesar says God can have.” In other words, NOMA leaves science in charge of questions of how the world works, and leaves religion some subset of the leftover questions that science cannot answer. This subset, over time, has been getting smaller and smaller. As noted earlier, Gould’s critics have attacked his attempt to identifyit with the set of questions concerning meaning and value in humanlife. “Philosophy,” says Pigliucci, “using the tools of logic andinformed by the discoveries ofscience, seems to me a much better candidate for that magisterium.” I am inclined to agree; but I suspect that this is merely a point on which Gould’s thesis was underdeveloped, not a point on which it was flatly wrong.

Jesus and “Mo,” in the cartoon shown above, may be closer to the mark, or at least less susceptible of refutation, when they identify the proper sphere of religious claims as “the supernatural.” In an earlier post (“The Natural versus the Supernatural”), I identified the supernatural as a putative order superior to that of nature. Setting aside for the present the questions of what beliefs a human being might hold regarding such an order, how and why he or she might do so, and by what observances he or she might enter into relation with such an order, I am, at any rate, content to say that religion has its magisterium, which is the supernatural. The natural is the magisterium of science: a religion may contain beliefs regarding natural matters, but it has no authority with regard to them.

The sum of my consideration of Gould’s arguments and those of his critics is that the thesis of NOMA remains defensible, but implies, at least in historical terms, a radically revisionary and restrictive conception of religious authority. The “proper” sphere of religious claims is much, much smaller than what any of the Abarahamic faiths has historically claimed for itself, as it excludes most of what is narrated in scripture. Every religion is entitled to its own version of history, of course, but it cannot claim specific authority for versions of events that are unsupported by the available evidence, much less ones that are contrary to such evidence. On such a view, revelation can extend no further than a supposed supernatural realm. I can live with that, but I don’t know what proportion of the world’s religious believers can do so.

NOTES

¹Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 3. Gould presents his thesis more briefly in his essay “Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (1997).

²Such criticisms may be found in Richard Dawkins, “When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf,” Free Inquiry 18.2 (1998); Massimo Pigliucci, “Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria: A Review” (source unknown); and Chris Floyd, “Daniel Dennett’s Darwinian Mind: An Interview with a ‘Dangerous’ Man,” Search Magazine, May/June 2000.

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Tom Tomorrow on the BP Oil Disaster

2010-05-27T12:48:00.005-04:00

How political conservatism distorts thinking about dangers to the public and the environment.

An addendum to my previous entry, on the absence of prophetic responses to the great oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: Tom Tomorrow’s satirical reflection on the news (which you can read about in The Wall Street Journal here) that the spill might have been prevented if the Deepwater Horizon had used an emergency shutoff device called an acoustic trigger. “U.S. regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device onoffshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC,didn't have one. . . . An acoustic trigger costs about $500,000, industry officials said.”

Of course, it rather spoils the satirical fun if you also read in the article that “the efficacy of the devices is unclear. Major offshore oil-wellblowouts are rare, and it remained unclear Wednesday evening whetheracoustic switches have ever been put to the test in a real-worldaccident.”

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The Prophets Are Silent

2010-05-26T19:59:00.003-04:00

Self-fancied prophets, such as the Reverend Pat Robertson, have told us why God brought us the earthquake in Haiti, the volcanic eruption in Iceland, and other disasters; why have none been giving us the theological skinny on the big oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?

The Deepwater Horizon; photo by US Coast Guard

In previous entries, I have recounted—scornfully, I admit—the claims of certain religious persons to recognize the hand of God in natural disasters: Pat Robertson on the earthquake in Haiti (“Pat Robertson, Propagandist for Atheism?” and “Second Thoughts about What Pat Robertson Said”), Rabbi Lazer Brody and Rush Limbaugh on the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, and a Muslim cleric on earthquakes in Iran (“More Insights into the Ways of God”). I take it to be obvious that these buffoons are dressing up their benighted prejudices as insights into the ways of God, and thus in effect pretending to prophecy. I also take it that, whether there is such a thing as prophecy or not, these guys haven’t got it.

Only this evening, as I watched a television news report on the attempted “top kill” on the leaking oil well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, did it strike me that I have not heard of any similar prophetic pronouncements about a mishap that promises to be one of the worst ecological disasters of all time. Perhaps this is merely because no self-fancied prophet has made any pronouncements sufficiently outrageous to be widely reported in the news, not because none has spoken of it. But I suspect that human-made disasters simply are not as strong a stimulus to such pronouncements as natural ones.

But why should that be? Do we—non-experts—really have a better understanding of why the Deepwater Horizon exploded than we have of why the earth shook in Haiti or the volcano erupted in Iceland? Surely not, though we may expect that an inquiry into the event will eventually bring to light the causes. Is the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico less significant a disaster than the Haitian earthquake or the Icelandic volcano? Well, it has certainly been less destructive of human life than the earthquake; but the effects on commerce and on animal life look to be pretty dire.

Another possible explanation is that the prophetically inclined have no trouble with the idea of God pushing around tectonic plates or lava veins, but they balk at attributing the actions of human beings, even their errors and collective lapses of judgment, to divine intervention. But this is not true of ultra-Orthodox Jews, for instance, many of whom attribute the Holocaust to divine wrath at the abandonment of strict religious observance among Jews.

Well, I don’t know the answer. It is an interesting psychological question.

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The Natural versus the Supernatural

2010-05-25T16:40:00.003-04:00

Once you look into the meaning of “supernatural,” it becomes harder to sustain a distinction between “pure” and “mixed” supernatural beliefs. So I give up that distinction. Still, it is the natural rather than the supernatural beliefs that do most to bring religion into conflict with scientific knowledge.

Francisco Zurbarán, The Apotheosis of Thomas Aquinas

In a previous entry (“Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs,” May 20, 2010), I proposed a distinction among three kinds of religious beliefs, which I termed “natural,” “supernatural,” and “mixed,” i.e., beliefs concerning purely natural matters (e.g., that Moses wrote down the words of the Torah in the Sinai desert), beliefs concerning purely supernatural matters (e.g., that God exists), and beliefs concerning matters with both natural and supernatural elements (e.g., that the Torah was dictated to Moses by God). I did not, however, offer any explanation of the terms “natural” and“supernatural,” a deficiency which I would now like to make good.

As a matter of structure and derivation, “supernatural” signifies what is above nature, or what exceeds it. “Above” or “exceeding,” though, in what sense? I will answer this question by a brief excursion into the history of words and concepts. Anyone without the patience for such topics may skip the next section.

* * *

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the medieval Latin antecedent of “supernatural,” supernātūrālis, comes from the work of Thomas Aquinas. In a scholarly paper (reference below), Father Andrew Murray analyzes the several contexts in which Thomas uses the term “supernatural”: e.g., the supernatural change of consecrated bread into the body of Christ,the supernatural gift of divine grace, the supernatural good of eternallife, the supernatural knowledge that is prophecy, the supernaturaleffects that are miracles, and so on. He sums up his findings thus:

What then, does Thomas mean by “supernatural”? The term is used only as an adjective or infrequently as an adverb and then by way of distinction. It means that some power or effect or agent or gift or end or some such is not natural and that it is outside the order of nature on account of direct divine intervention. Thomas is clear, however, that God does not normally intervene in theworkings of nature[,] so that the supernatural is not a kind ofexplanation for things we do not understand. Supernatural events suchas prophecy and miracles occur only for the sake of salvation andmatters such as the nature of Christ and the sacraments are part ofthe order of salvation, the free gift of a personal God, who isdistinct from the created universe. (5)

So certain things are termed “supernatural” to indicate that they exceed what is possible in nature or by nature alone. Supernatural powers, acts, or occurrences may be deviations from the normal course of nature, as in the case of miracles; or they may be indistinguishable from natural occurrences, as in the case of the Eucharist, in which the body of Christ is indistinguishable from an ordinary wafer. What makes such occurrences supernatural is not that they appear to be contrary to the order of nature, for they may not so appear, i.e., the divine element may be indiscernible to our observation. What matters is that they come from a source superior to nature, namely God.

* * *

The supernatural, then, at least in the original sense of the term, is not necessarily something contrary to nature (though it may be) but rather something belonging to an order superior to nature. It does not merely indicate something that is unexplained or inexplicable in natural terms. Rather, the term implies an order superior to nature, such as a divine order: it does not take its meaning merely from the negation of the word “natural.”

This may be a narrower understanding of the term than is common today. The Wikipedia article “Supernatural” says, at least at the moment of my consulting it, that “the term ‘supernatural’ is often used interchangeably with ‘paranormal’ or ‘preternatural’.” Whatever the sense of the term in popular usage today, Saint Thomas’s sense is more pertinent to the application of the term to religious belief. Religious beliefs are supernatural in the sense with which I am concerned when they pertain to something belonging to an order superior to that of nature, specifically a divine one.

So understood, supernatural religious beliefs are not necessarily in conflict with what we know of nature. In fact, one might argue that purely supernatural beliefs cannot be in conflict with what we know of nature, because they simply do not concern anything in nature. But such a position faces difficulties. Consider, for example, the belief that the natural world is the creation of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving supreme being—in a word, God. This seems to be a fine example of a purely supernatural belief. But, as philosophers and theologians have recognized for centuries, it is not obvious how this belief is to be squared with the fact that all sorts of evils befall all sentient things, not least of all human beings, including ones of whom it seems inconceivable that they can have done anything to deserve their ill fortune (small children afflicted with terrible and fatal diseases, for instance). Whether or not there is a way to reconcile the existence of God, so conceived, with the existence of evil in the world, there is plainly at least prima facie a conflict between the belief in the former and the recognition of the latter, which suggests that purely supernatural beliefs can in fact conflict with natural facts.

There seem to me to be two possible ways to respond to this difficulty. One would be to restrict the term “purely supernatural belief” to beliefs which have no possible bearing on natural facts. This would preserve the thesis of non-conflict between supernatural beliefs and natural facts, but at the risk of restricting the application of the term “purely supernatural belief” so narrowly as to make it virtually if not actually useless. The other option would be to abandon or modify the threefold scheme that I originally proposed. I am inclined to take the latter way. I will give up the term “purely supernatural belief” and instead simply use the term “supernatural belief” for any belief that has a supernatural element, regardless of whether it also has bearing on natural facts. Instead of a threefold division, then, I offer a merely twofold one comprising natural and supernatural religious beliefs.

I think, though, that I can hold on to my main former contention, namely that natural religious beliefs do more than supernatural ones to bring religious beliefs into conflict with scientific knowledge. What troubles me now is that the thesis seems in danger of collapsing into the virtually trivial assertion that religious belief conflicts with knowledge of nature only when it bears on nature. But I don’t think that it reduces to that. The non-trivial point remains that a large part of religious belief, and specifically a large part of traditional Jewish belief, consists of beliefs about natural fact (by which term I mean to include, as I said before, facts of human history), and that it is these beliefs that bring it into conflict with scientific (including historical) knowledge.

REFERENCE

Andrew Murray, “The Spiritual and the Supernatural according to Thomas Aquinas,” paper delivered at the Biennial Conference in Philosophy, Religion and Culture, “The Supernatural,” Catholic Institute of Sydney, 3–4 October 1998 (PDF file).

Previous entry: Martin Gardner, 1914–2010

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Martin Gardner, 1914–2010

2010-05-22T22:17:00.006-04:00

Author Martin Gardner died today, May 22, 2010, at the age of 95. [Corrected date]

Martin Gardner with his The Annotated Alice

Portrait in background by Ken Knowlton (photo source)

A great expositor of science and mathematics and scourge of pseudo-science has passed: Martin Gardner died today at the age of 95. According to the article on him in Wikipedia, he published more than 70 books. I confess that the only one that I have read all the way through is his classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, originally published in 1952 and still in print. Here is a passage from chapter 1, “In the Name of Science”:

In the last analysis, the best means of combating the spread of pseudo-science is an enlightened public, able to distinguish the work of a reputable investigator from the work of the incompetent and the self-deluded. This is not as hard to do as one might think. Of course, there always will be borderline cases hard to classify, but the fact that black shades into white through many shades of gray does not mean that the distinction between black and white is difficult.

Delightful book. I do not know what his last days were like, but the man certainly had a good run.

(Credit to an entry by James Randi in the JREF Swift Blog for my learning of this event. And credit to the anonymous commenter who corrected my error about Gardner’s date of birth, which I originally took to be 1920, following—to my disgrace—the Wikipedia article cited above. The date of 1914 is given in this article by Phil Plait.)

Addendum, May 24, 2010: I notice that this entry has received some visits from a Google search for the text “Martin Gardner Jewish”—presumably from people curious to know whether Gardner was Jewish. I have seen no indication that he was so, even as a matter of descent, and the following passage from his book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999) seems to me positively to indicate that he was not:

Let me speak personally. By the grace of God I managed the leap [of faith] when I was in my teens. For me it was then bound up with an ugly Protestant fundamentalism. I outgrew this slowly, and eventually decided that I could not call myself a Christian without using language deceptively, but faith in God and immortality remained. (221)

The passage implies that in his early life, the option of religious belief presented itself to Gardner in the form of Protestant fundamentalism. (Gardner grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma.) In view of this, it seems very unlikely that he had any Jewish connections.

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What Beliefs Are Jewish Beliefs?

2010-05-21T14:47:00.004-04:00

Certainly some beliefs are Jewish beliefs; only it is difficult to say which ones. If the question is whether a belief is an Orthodox Jewish belief, the question can be easier to settle; but not always.

Rabbi Louis Jacobs (1920–2006)

Shilton HaSechel posted a comment on my previous entry, “Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs,” which has given me occasion to rethink some of what I wrote and to add a few further thoughts. Shilton writes:

After all the denial of Mosaic authorship although dear to many actually is not necessary to Judaism.

I concede the point. I probably ought to have specified “Orthodox Judaism” at certain points in my article, though even then I am not sure if that would have been an adequate qualification, as there may be a diversity of views on the pertinent points even among Orthodox rabbis, let alone Orthodox Jews (not a term capable of sharp definition) in general.

While I continue to hold that there is such a thing as “Jewish beliefs,” or beliefs characteristic of Judaism, it is no easy matter to say what those beliefs are and in exactly what sense they are “Jewish” or “characteristic of Judaism,” without making arbitrary or parochial assumptions. So, for instance, the belief that the Torah was given litteratim to Moses at Mount Sinai is certainly a Jewish belief in some sense: it is propounded in the Talmud; it has been maintained by rabbis for hundreds of years; it is still maintained by (most? many? some?) Orthodox rabbis. But, also obviously, that belief is not held by all, or even by most, Jews, and probably not even by most rabbis.

Continuing with Shilton’s comment:

Even Orthodox Judaism could do away with belief in Biblical history and still continue functioning pretty much the same. All you really need to believe is someway somehow God inspired/directed the holy writings of Judaism so therefore these writing are then themselves holy and contain God’s message.

In theory, perhaps; in practice, I very much doubt it. The “could” that Shilton suggests here is presumably what Rabbi Louis Jacobs assumed when he first published We Have Reason to Believe: Some Aspects of Jewish Theology Examined in the Light of Modern Thought in 1957. In that bracing book, he argued that imputing divine origins to the written and oral Torah is entirely compatible with a scientifically informed understanding of the historical process by which the pertinent texts were formed. And he did this without any fudging of the science à la J. H. Hertz.

The Orthodox establishment of Great Britain had quite different ideas, as Jacobs learned to his discomfiture a few years later when his promised appointment to the principality of Jews’ College (the London Orthodox rabbinical seminary) was thwarted by the intervention of the Chief Rabbi of the UK, Israel Brodie; and again a few years after that, when Brodie vetoed the appointment of Jacobs to a pulpit position at the New West End Synagogue of London. The vindictiveness of the Orthodox establishment toward Jacobs only worsened after he left the Orthodox rabbinate to found the Masorti movement, the British equivalent of Conservative Judaism in the US. In 1995, the present Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, published an article in the Jewish Tribune accusing Jacobs of “intellectual thievery” and, according to an article by Matt Plen, “alleging that Masorti’s claim to represent authentic Judaism was a subterfuge aimed at the destruction of the tradition.” In 2003, Jacobs was denied an aliyah at his granddaughter’s wedding because, as Rabbi Sacks and the head of the London Beth Din, Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu, wrote together in a publication, “had Jacobs uttered the words ‘Our God [. . .] who gave us the Torah of truth [. . .]’, he would have made a false statement” (source).

Of course, one could argue that this disgraceful history says more about the parochial rigidity (not to say meanness, mulishness, and sheer stupidity) of the British Orthodox establishment than it says about Orthodox Judaism per se. But when certain positions are maintained by such a prominent Orthodox authority, it is difficult to regard them as deviant or unrepresentative.

Finally, to answer Shilton’s closing question:

Are there any other natural beliefs you have in mind besides Mosaic authorship?

Well, pretty much all of the history in the Bible. I have been reading The Bible Unearthed (bibliographical information in note 2 of my previous entry), and I am continually impressed, first, by how much knowledge has been accumulated by scholars concerning the actual history of the ancient Near East, and second, how little truth it leaves in the accounts of events in the Bible. As Finkelstein and Silberman say at some point, even the histories of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which have a far closer relation to historical fact than anything in the Pentateuch, simply are not attempts at history as we understand it, but exercises in ideology in historical form.

Of course, those parts of the Bible have a less intimate relation to Jewish religious practice than have the contents of the Pentateuch. But they do support the important theme of how the Israelites earn divine retribution by repeatedly straying from the worship of the one true God. That is, they attribute the misfortunes of the Israelites to their collective failure to keep their part of their covenant with God. Finkelstein and Silberman’s findings show that even where the “natural” part of this history is concerned—the mere recounting of events, regardless of the theological interpretation that is put upon them—the Bible is untruthful.

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Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs

2010-05-20T22:26:00.004-04:00

Religious beliefs contain both natural and supernatural elements.The natural elements do more than the supernatural ones to make systemsof religious belief rationally untenable in light of science.

Moses at Sinai: lithograph by F. W. McCleave, 1877

There is a common tendency—at least, it seems to me very widespread—toequate religion with religious belief. Whatever convenience such anequation may have for thinking about Christianity, it makes nonsense of Judaism. Tosay that someone “practices Judaism” is perfectly intelligible; to saythat someone “believes Judaism” is a bizarre combination ofwords.

Nonetheless, it is plain that there are Jewish beliefs, that is,beliefs characteristic of Judaism, or at least of this or that varietyor denomination of Judaism. Some of these beliefs may even beconsidered to be foundational, in the sense that they provide arationale for religious observances. The nineteenth-century movement topreservetraditional Jewish observances called itself“Orthodoxy”—“correct belief”—for a reason: it also meant to preserve,or rather to establish, a body of specifically Jewish doctrine ordogma. [1]

But what sorts of beliefs may becounted as religious ones? Consider the following three propositions asexamples:

The Torah (i.e., the Pentateuch) was written down in the Sinaidesert by Moses more than three thousand years ago.
The Torah was dictated to Moses by God.
God exists.

All three of these are, I take it, Jewish religious beliefs. But theyare plainly different in their relation to natural fact.

The firstproposition does not imply, or at least need not beinterpreted as implying, any supernatural element. It concernsa matter of historical, or more broadly natural fact.

The second proposition has both a natural and a supernatural element.The natural element is just what is stated in (1), that theTorah was written down by Moses more than three thousand years ago. Thesupernatural element is the idea that this writing-down was a taking ofdivine dictation. (I use the phrase “written down” rather than simply“written” so as not to exclude that idea a priori: tosay that the Torah waswritten by Moses might be understood to imply that he wasits author rather than merely, as per (2), its original scribe.)

The third proposition I take to be of purely supernatural significance.Of course, I have not tried to define the terms “natural” and“supernatural,” but rather than take on that difficult task, I willsimply take the two terms to be sufficiently well understood for mypurposes. My three examples are meant to illustrate the distinctionthat I propose among three kinds of religious belief: (1) naturalbeliefs, (2) mixed natural–supernatural beliefs, and (3) purelysupernatural beliefs.

The points that I want to make about these three kinds of belief arethe following. First, while people tend to identify religious beliefwith beliefs of the third type, such as the belief that God exists orbeliefs about the divine nature, avery large part of religious belief consists of natural elements. Inconsequence, many religious beliefs are not essentially religious, in the sensethat they are such that it is possible for someone to believe themwithout accepting anyreligious doctrine that contains it. Someone might, for instance,believe that Moses wrote the Torah in the Sinai desert withoutbelieving that God had anything to do with the matter.

Second, natural and supernatural elements are often tightly connected.For instance, though someone might believe that Moses wrote down theTorah but not believe that he did so under divine dictation, no one canbelievethat God dictated the Torah to Moses without believing that Moses wroteit down. That is a matter of logic. Other connections are a matter ofpsychology. Thus, while it is possible to believe, say, that aworldwide flood killed all land animals but those on Noah’s ark withoutbelieving that God had any hand in it, it is not likely that anyone—anyadult of much education at any rate—would ever do so. That is, manynatural religious beliefs are held only because of someaccompanying supernatural religious belief.

Third, to the extent that a body of religious belief contains naturalelements, it is subject to critical examination in the light ofscience. If it were established that the Torah was written down byMoses in the desert more than three thousand years ago, scientificinvestigation would be powerless to settle the question whether he wastaking divine dictation. But the fact is that no such hypothesis isestablished, or, in view of the evidence, capable of being established.On the contrary, the findings of archaeological investigation as wellas textual analysis render the belief that the Torah was written all atonce, hundreds of years before the rise of the kingdoms of Israel andJudah, completely untenable. [2]

Fourth, even if the supernatural as such is beyond the reach of scientific criticism, mixed natural–supernatural beliefs are not. If it can be proved that the Torah was written hundreds of years after the time in which even the latest events recounted in it are purported to take place—which it can, unless one understands “prove” to signify a standard of certainty that is never attained in any empirical science—then the idea that Moses wrote it under divine dictation is also thereby refuted.

Fifth and finally—though this is not a point for which I shall besupplying the necessary argument in this entry—Judaism, likeChristianity, is thoroughly dependent on natural beliefs and mixednatural–supernatural beliefs that are rationally untenable in the lightof known evidence and scientific arguments. Even if purely supernaturalbeliefs, such as the belief in an almighty and supremely wise andbenign creator and ruler of the universe, are given a free pass,specific natural and mixed beliefs are required for supporting a bodyof specific religious observances; and some of the most important ofthose beliefs are not rationally tenable.

REFERENCES

[1] On the question of preserving versus establishing, see MenachemKellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything?(London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006).

[2] On archaeology, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s NewVision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts(New York: Free Press, 2001). On textual analysis of the Bible, seeRichard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York:HarperCollins, 1997).

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Funny Word, Funnier Concept

2010-05-16T23:34:00.004-04:00

The word “Jew” is odd enough considered merely as a phonetic phenomenon; it gets even funnier when you try to figure out exactly what it means.

Jerry Seinfeld

Is not the word “Jew” somewhat—well, funny? That a religious identity with three thousand years of often tragic history behind it, the source of some of the founding texts of Western and Near Eastern civilization, should be signified in our language by a paltry monosyllable is, to say the least, incongruous. More than that, the word has at least a potentially humorous ring to it. Thus an elective class at the religious school that I attended as a boy was whimsically titled “Jews in the News.” (That is the kind of measure to which a Reform Jewish Sunday school—and yes, it was held on Sundays, not Saturdays—resorted in its efforts to avoid boring us: elevating the hallowed pastime of Jew-spotting to an academic subject.) My classmates and I were inspired by this title to add “Jews in Trees” to the list of classes on a bulletin board. But the impulse to play around with the word started with the grown-ups, not with us.

Of course, it may well be that I can say such things only because I had the good fortune to grow up without hearing the word “Jew” used in hatred and contempt, something that I imagine most Jews of earlier generations in English-speaking countries cannot say (to say nothing of Jews in countries of other languages). Even today, many people, especially non-Jews, shy away from using the word and substitute the dainty phrase “Jewish person” for fear of giving offense. I suspect that I am not the only one who finds something jarring in the designation of a rabbinical college in London as “Jews’ College.” (I suspect that that is one reason why in 1999 it changed its name to “London School of Jewish Studies.”)

As far as its origins are concerned, the curtness of the word “Jew” says more about the eliding tendencies of the French language than about the sentiments of those who have used it. It was in French that the word for one belonging to the tribe or the kingdom of Judah, transmitted in trisyllabic form from Hebrew (y’hūdī) by way of Aramaic (y'hūdāi), Greek (ioudaios), and Latin (iūdæus), was reduced to a monosyllable, variously written giu, gyu, or giue, before ending up in English as “Jew.” (Source: Oxford English Dictionary.)

And yet, the very word that is innocent in one language can become a slur in another. In English, “Yid” is an ethnic slur; in Yiddish, it is just the word for “Jew.” “Zhid” (жид) in Russian is an offensive term, while a word of identical sound and origin in Czech (žid), Slovak (the same), and Polish (Żyd) carries no derisive connotation.

Whatever the oddities of the word “Jew” and its monosyllabic equivalents in some other languages, they are superficial compared to the oddities of the concept expressed by the word. In my first entry in this blog (“Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish,” December 27, 2009), I considered three possible ways of understanding what a Jew is: (1) one who belongs to the Jewish people, (2) one who practices Judaism, and (3) one who adheres to the Jewish faith. That last phrase, “the Jewish faith,” makes me cringe somewhat, as it so strongly suggests attempts to assimilate Judaism to a Christian, and more specifically a Protestant, model of religion as “faith.” Of course, Judaism is a religion and does involve faith, both in the sense of a body of theistic and eschatological beliefs and in the sense of trust in a divinity (at least in most of its varieties). But it would be an error to presume that the beliefs define the religion or that they are more fundamental than the observances.

The relation between belief and observance in Judaism is subject to endless disputation. Yet it is merely one “funny” element of the concept of being a Jew. Let us simplify the matter by distinguishing between only two rather than three aspects of Jewishness: belonging to the Jewish people on the one hand, and accepting—whether that means practicing, professing, or both—Judaism on the other. Now it seems plain that the first of these has priority; for one who is born into the Jewish people is a Jew, regardless of whether he or she accepts Judaism, while someone not born into the Jewish people and not converted by a rabbi is not a Jew no matter what practices or professions he or she may make.

Is the term then an ethnic designation, or a term of descent? Not at all. In the first place, one can become a Jew by conversion. There is no such thing as converting to an ethnic membership, and while one may be adopted into a family, one does not thereby acquire a new descent. In the second place, it is religious practice that determines membership in the Jewish people (a.k.a. Israel), not in the sense that you have to practice Judaism to count as a Jew, but in the sense that it is Jewish practice that determines the criteria for so counting. Traditionally, the primary criterion is that one is born of a Jewish woman. Reform Judaism also accepts patrilineal descent under certain conditions as sufficient for membership. Whatever the specifics, the important point is that the criteria of belonging are themselves a matter of religious practice. The Jewish religion determines both a religious condition (conversion) and a non-religious condition (descent) for belonging to the Jewish people; and the non-religious condition is the normal or default condition. A Jew is, by and large, such by dint of being the child of Jewish parents.

So the term “Jew” compresses into one syllable at least two pairs of divergent but mutually inseparable aspects of Jewish identity: religious belief and religious observance on the one hand, religious practice and descent on the other. Anyone who tries to impose an either–or on these matters and make the term unidimensionally a matter of, say, religious profession or observance or descent—just one and not any other—does not even understand what the word means.

Is this logically incoherent? Of course not. It merely refuses to conform to certain a priori expectations. Face it: it’s a funny word.

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You Have Been Spammed

2010-04-26T23:22:00.002-04:00

Attempted intrusions into the “comments” section by abusive visitors have compelled me to introduce, to my regret, moderation of comments.

Eric Idle and Graham Chapman
Image is linked to video clip of scene on YouTube

Mrs. Bun. Have you got anything without Spam in it?

Waitress. Well, Spam, eggs, sausage, and Spam—that’s not got much Spam in it.

Mrs. Bun. I don’t want any Spam!

—Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 25

On the Internet, we are all like Monty Python’s lady customer at the Viking restaurant: we don’t want any spam; but we can’t escape it.

I used to think that “spam,” in Internet parlance, referredonly to uninvited bulk advertising sent through e-mail; but the termapplies more broadly. One definition reads: “Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message,in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwisechoose to receive it.” I think that this captures the essence of the matter. Whether the content is advertising or something else, and whether it comes through e-mail or through a Web site, is not relevant. It is the tedious and insensate repetition made possible by the medium of the Internet that defines spam and makes it so revolting.

A few days ago, I posted a comment on an entry in John Loftus’s blog Debunking Christianity in response to another visitor’s comment on the same entry. As I subsequently learned, the writer of the comment—I have since learned who he is, but I shall refer to him here simply as “Mr. Loony”—has been posting the same text all over the Web since at least 2008. You can read about him, and about the threats he made on the life of one writer, here and here, and you can find the text of his comment by doing a Web search for the phrase “the really sharp end of Occam’s razor.” (This guy thinks that a razor is sharp on the end?) The comment is a blustering denunciation of skeptics and atheists, who, it says, “start begging when they start dying.” I responded:

Supposing—contrary to all evidence—that atheists start believing in God when they are facing death: is that supposed to strengthenthe case for belief in God? Surely it is rather evidence that suchbelief is a product of desperation and fear, as contrasted with soundjudgment. If you have to be scared out of your wits to believe in God,surely that is reason to conclude that belief in God is a superstition,not that it is true.

For the record, I do not believe that belief in God is in every instance a product of desperation and fear, or that it is in every instance a superstition. My point was merely that, if there were any truth to the assertion that theistic unbelievers become believers when facing death—an assertion that is often made by unsophisticated theistic apologists as if it somehow gave support to theism (see this video for a comparatively entertaining musical version of this argument)—it would not support theistic belief but rather the dismissal of it.

Mr. Loony’s comment also contained a rather comically ill-informed representation of a face-off between his atheistic and skeptical enemies on the one hand and himself and his allies on the other, in the form of two lists of names conjoined by “vs.” The first list named Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, P. Z. Myers, Richard Dawkins, and James Randi—a very just selection of prominent atheistic skeptics of the present day. But the list of their opponents was a bizarre mix. It comprised Nostradamus, Einstein, and a third name that I did not recognize, but which I later learned to be the real name of Mr. Loony.

Citing Einstein as a believer in God is another argument favored by naïve would-be defenders of faith. Like the argument previously mentioned, it suffers from weakness both in its premise and in the relation of that premise to the conclusion. As far as the relation to the conclusion is concerned, the supposed fact that Einstein believed in God is at best a very feeble piece of evidence—if it deserves to be called evidence at all—of the truth of that belief. As for that premise itself, when a rabbi asked Einstein, “Do you believe in God?”, Einstein’s reply was: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmonyof what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates andactions of human beings.” In other words, as far as belief in God is concerned, Einstein was at best a deist, and, like Spinoza, denied the existence of miracles, divine providence, and most of what gives content to most people’s belief in God. In my reply to Mr. Loony I cited this famous quotation and added some words of derision upon his argumentative capacities.

Some time later, the very same text was posted as a comment on the last entry in my blog. I immediately deleted it. Some time after that, it was posted again, along with the childish taunt: “Can’t handle the truth, huh?” No, Mr. Loony, I can handle the truth; I just can’t handle deranged cretins. Mr. Loony was then joined by another crank of much the same stripe, who before that had been posting abusive comments on Loftus’s blog and who apparently was led to my blog from the same source. I initially took the second crackpot to be the same person as the first, operating under a different name; but eventually it became clear that Crackpot Number Two differed from Mr. Loony in two important respects: one, he could express himself in coherent sentences; and two, he was a pretty serious Jew-hater. (One of his comments was signed “Schicklgruber.”)

Obviously, I did not care to have such obnoxious comments appear even momentarily on my blog. I was also concerned that they might be posted during times when I was away from my computer and would not know about them. So I had to introduce moderation of comments. This, of course, provoked the infuriated Crackpot Two to much the same kind of childish taunt as my deletion of Mr. Loony’s comments had provoked him. “Why do you [and John Loftus] have to hide, like rats, behind comment moderation?”, was his virtually self-answering question.

Now I don’t get a lot of comments on my blog, so I can’t afford to be picky. I am usually delighted to see that a reader has taken the trouble to write something in response to one of my posts. But I do not care to see my “comments” sections turned into a platform for lunatics, crackpots, and Jew-haters. So, at least for a little while, I am obliged to subject comments to moderation. I just wish that the likes of Mr. Loony and Crackpot Two would subject themselves to it.

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More Insights into the Ways of God

2010-04-22T22:01:00.003-04:00

The bright side of natural disasters: they always bring us prophets!

Eyjafjallajökull; photograph by Reuters from Telegraph.co.uk

Reading God’s intentions off natural events is a great game: any moron—and not only morons but even persons of intelligence, provided that they indulge in the intellectual habits of morons—can play it. The recent earthquake in China and the more recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, though disasters for millions of people, have brought forth a harvest of prophet-cretins. Here are three of them, one for each of the three Abrahamic religions:

For Judaism, Rabbi Lazer Brody, writing on his blog Lazer Beams on April 16:

Some people think they’re smart, like the British folks who run theBritish Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The day beforeyesterday, the senseless stuffed-shirts declared that the Western Walland the site of our Holy Temple in Jerusalem are not part of Israel, banning Israeli Tourist adverts that included photos of these holy sites.

The bumbling Brits didn’t realize that when you mess around with Jerusalem and the Wall, you mess around with Hashem. . . .

So what did Hashem do?

Hashem let a remote volcano in Icelanderupt, from the Icelandic mountain Eyjaffjalljokull [sic], whose ash cloudgrounded all air traffic above Britain yesterday, leaving thousands ofpassengers stranded.

Well, at least the events that Rabbi Brody regards as cause and effect had some geographical connection: the eruption of Eyjafjalljökull (if you want to learn how to pronounce it, spend a few minutes studying this page and practicing) did indeed ground all air traffic over Britain. Of course, it grounded traffic over most of continental Europe as well, which seems a rather excessive, not to say ineffective, way of punishing a few supposed “stuffed shirts” in the British Advertising Standards Authority; but I suppose that such grossness of aim and disregard of the innocent is nothing new in the record of God’s supposed exhibitions of wrath.

For Islam, Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, as reported on April 19 by the Associated Press:

“Many women who do not dress modestly . . . lead young men astray,corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which(consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi wasquoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran's acting Fridayprayer leader. . . .

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Sedighiasked during a prayer sermon Friday. “There is no other solution but totake refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes.”

Now I don’t want to make Sedighi appear more foolish than he actually is: as far as I know, he was speaking about earthquakes in Iran, rather than ones in far-off places like China!

Last and decidedly least, for Christianity, Rush Limbaugh (sorry, but Pat Robertson seems not to have spoken up on this occasion) on his radio show on April 16 (transcribed by me from this recording at Media Matters):

You know, a couple days after the health care bill had been signed into law, Obama ran around saying, “Hey! You know, I’m looking around here, the earth hasn’t opened up. No Armageddon out there, the birds are still chirping.” Well, I think the earth has opened up. God may have replied. This volcano in Iceland has grounded more—air space has been more affected than even after 9/11 because of this plume, because of this ash cloud, over northern and western Europe. . . . Earth has opened up. I don’t know whether it’s a rebirth or Armageddon. Hopefully, it’s a rebirth—God speaking.

In fairness to Limbaugh (not that he particularly deserves it), he does not flatly attribute the volcanic eruption to divine wrath over the passage of the health care bill, but says only that it may be God’s reply. Yes, it may be that God is a Republican and is offended by the health care bill, and that he reacts to legislation that offends his sensibilities with retribution, only a few weeks late and a few thousand miles wide of the mark. Or it may be that Rush Limbaugh has no idea of what he is talking about. The latter seems to me by far the more plausible explanation.

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Dishonesty in Hertz’s Torah Commentary

2010-03-16T21:42:00.006-04:00

Got a Torah passage that says something morally repugnant? No problem: just deny that it means what it says!

As I strive to catch up with the weekly Torah portion after some recent disruptive events, one of the sources that I have been consulting is the Soncino Press Pentateuch and Haftorahs, edited by J. H. Hertz, commonly known as the Hertz chumash. This is a work originally published in the 1930s containing the Hebrew text, an English translation (the Jewish Publication Society’s version of 1917), and a commentary by Rabbi Joseph Hertz, then the Chief Rabbi of Britain. It has been widely used for several decades in synagogues of all denominations, particularly Modern Orthodox ones. Hertz’s commentary seems to rest on the presumption (though Hertz nowhere asserts this, as far as I know) that there is nothing in the Torah that is repugnant to science, reason, or common sense, provided that it is correctly understood. I attribute this premise to Hertz because I do not know how otherwise to make sense of some of the perverted reasonings that I find in his commentary. Here I will discuss just one example.

Consider the following famous passage from Exodus, part of the preamble to the Ten Commandments:

. . . For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me. (Exodus 20:5; Hertz, pp. 295–6)

On the face of it, the passage seems to be saying that God punishes several generations for the sins of their forebears. But Hertz will have none of that. His comment on the phrase “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children” begins with the following bold assertion:

The Torah does not teach here or elsewhere that the sins of the guilty fathers shall be visited upon their innocent children.

It doesn’t? To read the pertinent line of Torah and then Hertz’s comment is like being presented with a brain teaser. How, one wonders, is Hertz going to reconcile such a comment with such a text? Where does the wiggle room lie between “God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me,” which is what the Torah says, and “God visits the sins of the guilty fathers upon their innocent children,” which is the idea that Hertz says is not in the Torah?

The only plausible way out seems to lie in the gap between “third and fourth generation of them that hate Me” and “innocent children.” If the offspring of some iniquitous progenitor “hate God,” then arguably they are not innocent. So in visiting the fathers’ sins upon them, God would not be punishing the innocent. (Of course, this would raise the question of why it should be of any relevance that the sins were committed by the fathers, and how hating God is supposed to make the descendants guilty of the ancestors’ sins: surely all that is relevant to punishing the following generations should be their sins. But let us set that question aside for the moment.)

Hertz does eventually offer an interpretation along these lines in his comment on the phrase “of them that hate Me,” where he writes: “The Rabbis refer these words to the children. The sins of the fathers will be visited upon them, only if they too transgress God’s commandments.” But the passage previously quoted comes from his comment on the preceding phrase, and is supported without reference to the phrase “of them that hate Me.” That comment continues thus:

The soul that sinneth it shall die proclaims the Prophet Ezekiel. And in the administration of justice by the state, the Torah distinctly lays down, ‘The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin’ (Deut. XXIV, 16).

The first thing to note about this is that it is at best a rather indirect argument for Hertz’s initial claim; or in other words, it is of doubtful relevance. The administration of justice by the state is one thing: what is at issue is what God does to the children of sinners. The line quoted from Ezekiel says what God does to sinners, but not what God does or does not do to their children. Perhaps Hertz was expecting the reader to call to mind the rest of the passage from Ezekiel of which he quotes only a fragment:

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear theiniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity ofthe son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and thewickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. (Ezekiel 18:20, King James Version; emphasis added)

This comes from a chapter that begins “The word of the LORD came unto me again, saying” (18:1); so Ezekiel is claiming to speak for God here, and in that capacity is expressly denying that the son “bears the iniquity” of the father—meaning, presumably, that he does not suffer the divinely ordained consequences of the iniquity.

Very well; but so what? Even if we assume that the prophet speaks with divine authority, the Book of Ezekiel must have been written hundreds of years after the Book of Exodus. Whether one regards both texts as the word of God or not, what one has on one’s hands here are two conflicting utterances. In Ezekiel, God says that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father; in Exodus, he says that the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon their children. Even if one could regard one text as simply canceling the other out, one would need an argument for saying that the Ezekiel passage overrules the Exodus one rather than the other way around.

Of course, one consideration that might influence one’s interpretation is the fact that the view expressed in the Ezekiel passage is morally appealing, while the one expressed in the Exodus passage is utterly repugnant. But that cannot possibly be a legitimate basis for taking one passage to represent the teaching of the Torah and the other not to do so (especially as it is the passage from the Torah that expresses the repugnant view). Whether one takes these texts to be the writings of human beings or of God, one cannot regard the passage from Ezekiel as making the passage in Exodus mean the opposite of what it says. The problem of interpreting the passage from Exodus remains.

But Hertz has another move to make. His comment continues:

However, human experience all too plainly teaches the moral interdependence of parents and children. The bad example set by a father frequently corrupts those that come after him. His most dreadful bequest to his children is not a liability to punishment, but a liability to the commission of fresh offences. In every parent, therefore, the love of God, as a restraining power from evil actions, should be reinforced by love for his children; that they should not inherit the tendency to commit, and suffer the consequences of, his transgressions.

Hertz’s claim here is that the children of a wicked father are likely to repeat his sins. If this is supposed to be relevant to the interpretation of the Exodus passage—and if it is not, then one has to wonder why Hertz would take up valuable space in his otherwise compactly written commentary with irrelevancies—then the plain implication is that when God says in Exodus that he “[visits] the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,” the Torah “does not [thereby] teach . . . that the sins of the guilty fathers shall be visited upon their innocent children,” because the children of sinful fathers are not innocent. They are guilty of the same sins—at least, they are so in many cases. So when God punishes them for their fathers’ sins, he is punishing them for their own sins—in many cases.

And for the other cases? Well, apparently Hertz sees the problem, because he offers yet another way of removing from the passage the morally repellent implication that God punishes innocent children for their forebears’ sins:

Another translation is, ‘remembering the sins of the fathers unto the children’; i.e., God remembers the sins of the fathers when about to punish the children. He distinguishes between the moral responsibility which falls exclusively upon the sinful parents, and the natural consequences and predisposition to sin, inherited by the descendants. He takes into account the evil environment and influence. He therefore tempers justice with mercy; and He does so to the third and fourth generation.

I can say nothing about the cogency of the alternative translation, but as an interpretation, this is patently desperate. Plainly, Hertz is reasoning from what he wants the text not to mean, namely, that God punishes people for the sins of their forebears up to three generations back—or in other words, just what the text says. Perhaps the Hebrew construction used here can be rendered in some contexts as “remember unto” rather than as “visit upon.” But only a will to make the text say something other than its plain meaning can make one read into it in this context the idea that this “remembering unto” may involve seeing that the children are guilty of no sin and therefore refraining from punishing them. If they are innocent, then of what possible relevance can it be that their fathers were guilty? If their forebears’ sins are irrelevant to their guilt—and surely they are—then why should God “remember” those sins “unto” them?

Of course, if the Torah is a document composed by human beings rather than dictated by God, none of these problems arise. But presumably that view is not an option for a Chief Rabbi.

I am still trying to learn what Modern Orthodox Judaism is. My present understanding is that, as far as beliefs are concerned, the word “modern” is supposed to signify an acceptance of the findings of science and other secular forms of inquiry, while the word “orthodox” signifies acceptance of certain traditional rabbinic beliefs, among them the belief that the Torah is of divine authorship. That is the idea, but in practice, as one sees repeatedly in Hertz’s commentary, one cannot have both without some very strange mental contortions. Of course, the notion that some text is of divine authorship is hardly transparent; and I imagine that among rabbis who would call themselves Modern Orthodox there is a great deal of diversity of views about what that means. But I strongly suspect that, in practice, it is always going to dictate the kind of move that we find Hertz making in his commentary: upon finding scriptural passages that mean something repugnant to reason, science, common sense, or common decency, take whatever measures are necessary to impute to them some other meaning.

Previous entry: From Satanism Libel to Blood Libel: This Time, It’s Coming from Haitians

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From Satanism Libel to Blood Libel: This Time, It’s Coming from Haitians

2010-01-26T19:34:00.008-05:00

The right-wing evangelical defamationof Voodoo does not end with themisrepresentation of the Bois Caïman gathering as a Satanic pact:itincludes the accusation of the ritual sacrifice of human beings, andthe propagators of the libel include Haiti’s ambassador to the UnitedStates.

In doing the research for my blog entry “TheRight-WingEvangelicalLibelagainstHaiti,” I was reminded attimes of the infamous bloodlibels against my own people, the Jews. For the enlightenment ofany reader not familiar with this quaint and venerable practice (do Ihave to explain that I amspeaking ironically? I suppose I must, to prevent stupidmisinterpretation.All right, then: I am, or rather was just now, speaking ironically), Iwill explain how it works. A gentile, usually a Christian boy, is founddead, or disappears, or is believed to have disappeared. (An actualhuman disappearance, or even a specific identity for the one supposedlymissing, is not necessary for the proceeding.) The story is then spreadthat the victim was abducted by Jews who used him for aritual sacrifice—insert here details of crucifixion or whatever elseexcitesviolent indignation—and drank his blood or used it in making matzah.Attacks on Jews, ranging from harrassment to mass killing andexpulsion, usually follow. The great age of blood libels was in thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries, but theycontinuetothisday. Forebears of mine suffered under them (thoughas far as I know they were not physicallyattacked or killed) in Rhodes and Damascus inthe year 1840. Needless to say, the practice reflects more on itsChristian inventors, who celebrate the onetime sacrifice of ahumanbeing by (at least in some denominations) ritually drinking his blood,than on thevictims, whose law expresslyforbidsthemtoconsumeeventhebloodofanimals (and no, humanblood,evenone’sown,doesnotgetapass).

The lie spread by right-wing evangelical Christians thatHaiti was born of a pact with the devil, and more generally thatHaitian Voodoo is a form of Satanism, struck me as similar to theanti-Jewish blood libel in that bothare cases in which people of strongly held but narrow, ill-founded, andill-informed opinions projecttheir superstitious fears upon others. In the end, though, Idid not include this comparison in the piece, as it seemed to me a bitof a stretch. For one thing, it does not seem to be a libel againstHaitians or vodouisants tosay that the fabled meeting at Bois Caïman involved the ritualsacrifice of a pig and the drinking of its blood: there is historicalevidence of such an event, and besides that, so far as Iknow, Haitians by and large find nothing offensive in the idea. (ThisHaitianwriter deems the ritual as recounted in the historical sources “atraditional Dahomeanbloodoath,” Dahomean religion being one of the African sources of HaitianVoodoo.)For another thing, what evangelicals impose on the story to defameVoodoo is not the sacrifice of an animal but the idea of a pact withthe devil—hardly as inflammatory a charge as attributing to someone theritualmurder of a child and the drinking of its blood. (Some Haitianshave been reported to believe the meetingat Bois Caïman to have involved the sacrifice of a human being: ablack slave in some versions, a French colonial soldier in others. SeeMarkel Thylefors, “‘OurGovernmentisinBwaKayiman’:AVodouCeremonyin1791and itsContemporary Significations,” StockholmReviewofLatinAmericanStudies, No. 4, March 2009 (PDF),p.79.Buteventheevangelicalshavenot,sofarasIknow,stoopedsolowasto try to get people to believe this.)

I was disconcerted, however, when I happened on an article published inthe New YorkSun on August 19, 2003 under the title “Disturbing Disclosures ofHuman Sacrifice” (for the moment I withhold the identity of the writer;the article can be found on line, but, apart from the version availablethrough the Lexis service, which I quote here, only in an unreliablealtered version). The article begins:

In the wake of several defections from the embattledHaitian regime, some disturbing disclosures about alleged humansacrifice have thrown a new light on the ruling authorities in Haiti.

Executions early in the year 2000, prior to the fraudulent elections ofthat summer and fall, were intended to ensure the return ofJean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency he had reluctantlyrelinquished in February 1996. So said Johnny Occilius, a member of themayoralty of Cite Soleil, who defected last month.

Among the most scandalous of his disclosures was the gruesome sacrificeof the first baby of a young mother, Nanoune Myrthil. The date wasimportant, Mr. Occilius said, in an interview. It was February 29, thelast day in a month that will recur in four years. And “the lamb” musthave been a first-born baby. Thus, the Myrthil baby was “at the rightplace at the wrong time,” Mr. Occilius said. The administrator of theState University Hospital in Port-au-Prince, also known as GeneralHospital, Marie-Antoinette Gauthier, made possible the snatching of thebaby only 72 hours after birth.

Somewhere in the countryside north of the capital, the sacrifice tookplace that same night. The live baby was crushed in a mortar with aheavy pestle. Officiating was Voodoo sorcerer Henri Antoine from St.Marc, the same thug who founded the pro-Aristide so-called popularorganization “Bale Wouze,” or “Clean Sweep” inEnglish. . . .

Meanwhile, Jean Michel Mercier, former assistant mayorof Port-au-Prince, confirmed the disclosures of Mr. Occilius and addedthat the execution last year of a powerful leader of a “popularorganization” was connected to the baby crime.

A baby stolen from the hospital and crushed to death in a mortar underthesupervision of a Voodoo sorcerer! And this in a report in The New York Sun—not exactly apublication of the first rank, but still a newspaper with someprofessional standards,one would think. Initially, my search for confirmation ordisconfirmation of the report turned up nothing decisive. I foundreports that confirmed that the newborn child of a woman named NanouneMyrthil had indeed been abducted from the General Hospital ofPort-au-Prince around that date. But the onlymaterials that I couldfind bearing on the alleged ritual sacrifice of the baby were reportsof the accusations of Occilius and Mercier that added nothingpertinent. (Note, by theway, that verifying that a baby was stolen from the hospital and neverfound, however shocking that fact is by itself, does not license theconclusion that the baby was sacrificed in a Voodoo ritual. Babies doget stolen, usually either by people who want to raise them as theirown or by people who want to sell them to others to raise.)

Several features of the article raise suspicions.The article appeared, not in the “Opinion” section, but in the“Foreign” section of the newspaper; yet it hardly reads like a piece ofreportage. Take the first sentence: how can amere allegation of humansacrifice constitute a revelationthat throws a new light on something? By what right does the writer,in the thirdparagraph (and in the title, though that may be an editor’scontribution), identify Mr. Occilius’s charges as a “disclosure,” aterm that implies veracity? Why, in the fourthparagraph, does the writer report the events of the alleged sacrificein direct speech, as if reporting facts, rather than attribute theassertions to Occilius? Thesentence that immediately follows it (which I omitted from thequotation above), far from calming thesesuspicions, only exacerbates them:

The bestial crime boggles the mind, and some peoplequestion the veracity of Mr. Occilius’s disclosures. But who would havethought that men infected with the AIDS virus in South Africa believethat they can be healed by having intercourse with a young virgin!

Who would have thought that the writer of a newsreport, rather than simply stating the facts of what a certain personsaid, would overtly take that person’s side? And who would have thoughtthat a news reporter would make use of emotional language, strainedanalogy, and rhetorical question?

Plainly the article is not the work of a competentprofessional reporter. But why would the writer, whoever he was (hisname was on the page, but at this point I made nothing of it), take sopartisan aposition in a news article? Further, the fact that my Web searchesturned upno otherreportage of so monstrous an act, other than a few other mentions ofOccilius’s allegations, intensified doubt about those allegations,though it did not constitute a refutation of them. Why would someonemake up such a story,anyway?

Then I found this:atranscriptandtranslationofaninterviewconductedinHaitianCreolewithSoniaDesrosiersLozan,a former employee of the National PortAuthority of Haiti who claims to havebeen present at the ritual killing of the child of Nanoune Myrthil.(The Webpageon which I found the transcript is dated October 30, 2009, but theinterview wascertainly conducted well before that date, as I found the sametranscript reproduced on apage dated March 5, 2007. The latter pagecontains a narrative, written by Stanley Lucas, of the night’s events,apparently reconstructedfrom the interview, but adding many details, as ifthe writer had himself been present.) Ms. Desrosiers reports that thesacrifice took place at the home of then-President Jean-BertrandAristide. She gives the names of several persons supposedly present:PresidentAristide; Grandra, the houngan(Voodoo priest; the embellished version by Lucas, who seems to havebeen misled by the word “priest,” has him initiallyappearing in the robes of aCatholic priest); Marie Antoinette Gauthier, the director of theGeneralHospital, who, according to Desrosiers, brought in the baby (Desrosierssays that it wasthis thatled her to conclude that the baby was the one taken from thehospital); General WiltanLherrisson, thehead of the Haitian army; Jocerlerme Privert, the minister of theinterior; Jean-MarieChérestal, prime minister of Haiti during 2001 and 2002;AnnetteAuguste, popularly known as “So Anne,” aHaitian singer and political activist for Lavalas,Aristide’s party; and others. (TheLucas version adds Aristide’s wife Mildred to the company and describesthe sweat on her upper lip.)

Accordingto Desrosiers, all the participants took turns working the mortar tocrush the baby, all the while “singing mystical songs and cryingthat Aristide’s five-year term was non-negotiable. . . .Mystical songs, throwing water, lighting candles, something totallydiabolic.” After the ceremony was completed,she says, the houngan gavethe president the heart of the baby in a bottle which he placedin his private room, and the baby’s remains were interred in thecemetery of Port-au-Prince, in “a sector wherethey put the remains of the ceremonies. . . . When theydo theseceremonies they always bury the remains of the dead so when they wantto light a candle and call the spirit back . . . they oftendo that.”

Is it possible that this woman believes in the truth of heraccount of events? Certainly. Indeed, it is likely that she does so:even withouthearing theoriginal broadcast, one gets the impression from the translation of herwordsthat she is entirely sincere. Is it possible that heraccount of events is true? Certainly; in the same respect that it ispossible that President Aristide and his associates are all humanoidaliens from another planet or gaseous entities made to appear fleshlybytelepathic mind control, namely that there is no logicalcontradiction involved in entertaining such bizarre and fantastichypotheses. But is there any reason to give this account of events anycredence?

On the “yes” side, there is the fact that Desrosiers seemssincere in her testimony, that she held an official position inPort-au-Prince at thetime of the reported event, that hernarrative is coherent and detailed, and that two other persons,Occilius and Mercier, make similar assertions. On the “no” side is the lack of hardevidence that Satanic ritual sacrifice has ever occurred anywhere,andthe extravagant improbability of such elements of her tale as thatthere couldbe a sector of the Port-au-Prince cemetery, known only to themalefactors, where the remains of sacrificial victims areregularly interred; that several highly placed governmentofficials including the president of the country and the director ofits largest hospital would conspire and participate in such an act; andthat, such a thing being done, noevidence of its occurrence would come to light besides thetestimony of one self-declared witness and two other persons. ThatMercier was not a witness, even purportedly, is evident from the transcript andtranslation of a broadcast of Radio Vision 2000 in Port-au-Princeon August 13, 2003 in which the reporter, after relaying Mercier’sclaims about the abduction and ritual murder of the Myrthil child, adds:

With this, Mercier confirms what Johnny Occilius said aboutthatissue.He says that he got that information from current Lavalas DeputyAndré Jeune Joseph, who apparently took part in thatmeeting.

I have not been able to discover any relevant further information aboutthis Mr. Joseph.

It is worth noting, by the way, that while Occilius is reported to havesaid that it was “important” to the perpetrators that the baby besnatched on February 29, a date that occurs only once in four years, anewsreportfromFebruaryof2001—two years before Occilius madehis allegations of ritual sacrifice and even longer before Desrosiersgave her interview—gives the date of the theft as the night of February26, 2000. Desrosier gives it as February 27. Also, Desrosiersidentifies the presiding hounganas a man named Grandra, while Occilius identifies him as Henri Antoine.Such divergences are hardly the weakest features of their stories, butthey do add weight to the “no” side of the balance.

Another way to look at the matter is to consider the testimony ofDesrosiers as a given fact and to consider what is the most credibleexplanation of it. There are three principal candidates: (1)that she really did experience the events that she recounts, or eventsmuch like them; (2) that she is lying; and (3) that she isconfabulating. It is obvious that, for the reasons given earlier, (2)and (3) have vastly greater probability than (1). Between the two ofthem, I consider (3) more probable than (2). Desrosiers’s story, withits lurid detail, has much in common with the “recoveredmemories”ofSatanicritualabuse that flourished in the 1980s inthis country and elsewhere, initiated by a fraudulent memoir called MichelleRemembers and spread by quacks whose trade consisted in “helping”people to “remember” similar events. Of course, the case of Desrosiersdoes not involve any claim of a memory repressed and recovered, and inany case, it concerns events from only a few years before her recitalof them. But her case exhibits the same conformity of apparentmemories to a widely used, pre-existent template.

Of course, to discredit the testimony of Desrosiers is not to provethat no such event occurred. As I said before, it is possible that suchan event did occur. But all probability is against it, no strongevidence is for it, and to believein its occurrence on the strength of the facts that have come to lightwould be preposterous and irresponsible.

So how did this tale arise? An interesting document to look at in thisconnection is this item,apagedatedJanuary21,2001writtenbyYvesA. Isidor, aHaitian-Americanprofessor of economics and spokesman of an anti-Aristide organization.Isidor asserts, citing “a senior member of Aristide’s Lavalas FamilyParty, also known as the party of Satan, the party of death, whopleaded with us for anonymity,” that Aristide “reportedly was bathed inNovember[of 2000, presumably] in the blood of a dead Haitian by voodoopriestess . . . Marie-AnneAuguste, commonly known as So An.” This could be a sketchy and garbledversion of the Desrosier-Occilius-Mercier story or anindependently developed rumor, but in view of the order of the reports,it is most likely the original story from which themoredetailed version was subsequently derived by combination with theactual event ofthe disappearance of the Myrthil baby. The unnamed senior member of the“party of Satan” who was Isidor’s source may be Mercier. Note that inIsidor’s version, the blood sacrifice took place in November rather thanFebruary of 2000. This is because, according to Isidor, the ritual wasdesigned to influence the American presidential election to secure thatthe presidency go to Gore, who was likely to be friendly to Aristide,rather than to Bush, who was likely to be hostile. (Clearly, thespirits of Voodoo were no match for the Florida voting system or thejustices of the US Supreme Court. —I kid, I kid.)

Finally, I return to the question of the motives of the peoplespreading thesetales. Obviously, they were actuated by animosity toward then-PresidentAristide. One element of that animosity that is of particular interestto me is thereligious one. Jean-BertrandAristide was ordained as a Catholic priest of the Salesian order in1983, though he was expelled from that order in 1988 on account of hisinvolvement in leftist politics and left the priesthood in 1994(source: Wikipedia).Idonotknow what position he may have taken in public regarding Voodooearly in his career, but the piece by Isidor from 2001 makes clear thatat least some of his political enemies imputed Voodoo practices to himlong before he gave legal recognition to Voodoo as a religion in Aprilof 2003.

Aristide’s recognition of Voodoo,according to thiscontemporarynewsreportfrom the BBC, “means that voodooceremonies such as marriages now have equal standing with Catholicones.” The meaning given to the event by evangelical Christians wasquite another matter, as the following passage from an articlepublished in Christianity Todayon October 1, 2003 indicates:

“The government said they are going to turn thecountryentirely to voodoo. The Christians say we are going to turn the countrytotally to the Lord Jesus Christ,” said Jean Berthony Paul, founder ofMission Evangelique du Nord D’Haiti. . . .

Pastors and missionaries in St. Marc organized a rally on August 14, akey voodooholiday, to counter the witchcraft they say voodoo involves.Missionaries have also circulated unconfirmed reports that a child wasabducted from the town hospital to be made a voodoo sacrifice.

They fear Aristide is planning to renew a 200-year-oldnational “pact with the devil” on January 1, 2004. Many Haitians creditthe country’s independence to voodoo.

The “voodoo holiday” of August 14 is the commemoration of the gatheringof rebel slaves at Bois Caïman in 1791. The content of the“unconfirmed reports” is, obviously, the blood libel against Aristide.And, as I reported in apreviouspost, evangelicals have identified Aristide’s officialrecognition of Voodoo as a religion as itself a renewal of Haiti’ssupposed pact with the devil. The interesting fact here is that“missionaries,” meaning, of course, evangelical missionaries, areidentified as the ones spreading the blood libel.

I have one final piece to add to the puzzle that I have been assemblinghere. In apreviousentry, I quoted the puzzling reply of the Haitianambassador to the remarks of Pat Robertson about the pact with thedevil supposedly formed by Haiti’s founders. Instead of dismissingRobertson’s tale as superstitious nonsense, the ambassador, afterdescribing the ways in which the revolt of the Haitian slaves againsttheir French masters has benefited the United States, said ambiguously:“So what pact theHaitian made with the devilhas helped the United States become what it is.” I was a long way intothe researches that I have presented in this entry before I realizedwhy the name of the author of the article from 2003 on the “disturbingdisclosures of human sacrifice” seemed familiar to me: it was the sameas the name of the Haitian ambassador, Raymond A. Joseph. The biographicalpageonAmbassador Joseph in theWebsite of the Embassy of Haiti in Washington, DC states that he is “mostly known as ajournalist.” The page states also that he translated the firstNew Testament and Psalms inHaitian Creolefor the American Bible Society,anevangelicalChristian organization, and that he is agraduate of Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College (Illinois), bothevangelical Christian institutions.

It is plain why the ambassador did not repudiate Robertson’s tale ofthe pact with Satan as the nonsense that it is: he believes in ithimself. He is an evangelical Christian, and he is himself part of theeffort to demonize Voodoo as Satanism, as well as the effort todemonize former President Aristide and his associates as practitionersof blood sacrifice. The evangelical libel campaign against Haiti andthe religion of many of its citizens may have originated outside thecountry, but it now has exponents among Haitians, including the one whorepresents his country to the United States.

I do not defend the political record of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, nor doI hold any brief for the practice or the beliefs of Voodoo. But thosewho use demonic fantasies to defame either the man or thereligion by that action alone set themselves in an even less credible,indeed a despicable, position. If they have legitimate objections tomake, either in politics or in religion, let them make them withoutlies, hysterical fantasies, and demagoguery. We have suffered enoughfrom blood libels.

Added 26 January 2010, 22.30 EST:

After writing and posting this entry I discovered a Web page that expounds in a concise and linear fashion most of the matters that I had so laboriously worked out by hours and hours of research, as well as much else concerning the preceding political developments: Richard Sanders, “Demonizing Democracy: Christianity vs. Vodoun and the Politics of Religion in Haiti,” from the magazine Press for Conversion, November 2008, published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT), a Canadian organization. I quote the most pertinent part, in which I have replaced the references that originally appeared in endnotes with links in brackets:

WhenAristideandthousandsinHaiti’spopulargovernmentwerethenillegally removed from power, the elite’soutrageous propaganda was actually taken seriously by thecoup-empowered regime. The de facto government’s CIDA-funded“Department of Justice” even used these outrageous rumours to arrestand illegally imprison prominent supporters of Aristide’s Lavalasgovernment. In mid-2004, a U.S. human rights delegation toHaitireported that:
Members of FanmiLavalas have been using the word witch-hunt to describe the ongoingrepression of Lavalas. . . . We were shocked to find that this term can betaken literally. While we were in Haiti, a wild story was beingcirculated by the media and Haitian authorities. It claimed that a babywas sacrificed during a ceremony attended by many members of Lavalas inthe year 2000. While we initially took this to be at the level oftabloid sensationalism, it became clear that this ludicrous charge isbeing pursued by the current de facto authorities.

On three occasionsindividuals have gone on National Television, reportedly at the behestof the Minister of Justice, to describe their participation at thisso-called ceremony. Despite the fact that the stories told by theseindividuals are not even consistent. . . . Haitian authorities are usingthese out of court, unverified statements as the basis for issuingarrest warrants for Lavalas officials. These charges are also thejustification for continuing to hold [prominent Lavalas activist andcommunity leader] Annette Auguste. [Ref.]
TwoparticularlyvirulentenemiesofHaitian democracy who have pushedthese absurd, religious smear campaigns are Yves A.Isidor, a professorof Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and RaymondJoseph, a former Wall Street Journal financial reporter whobecame the 2004 coup-regime’s ambassador in Washington.Isidor,whoaccusedMs.Auguste of being Aristide’s “voodoo medium,”said she bathed him in human blood to place a curse George W. Bush andto ensure the election of Al Gore in 2000. Isidor’s grotesquestory was later embellished by Joseph who said that as part of theirVodoun ritual, a newborn baby was crushed with a heavy pestle in agiant mortar. [Ref.]

Themostwell-connected figure who aided and abetted this particularpsychological warfare campaign is Stanley Lucas, director of theright-wing Washington Democracy Project’s program on LatinAmericaand the Caribbean. In 2007, this long-time Haitianrepresentative of the U.S. government-funded International RepublicanInstitute, disseminated extravagantly detailed slander regarding thealleged Vodoun infanticide that was supposedly engaged in by PresidentAristide and his closest political allies. [Ref.]

Toestablishhis credentials and lend credibility to these outrageouslies, Lucas’ website displayed dozens of photographs of himself posingwith business executives, Premier Jean Charest, U.S.-backed heads ofstate, Afghan “tribal leaders,” U.S. senators, congressmen,ambassadors, three former U.S. Secretaries of State, a former NationalSecurity Advisor, a former CIA director, and other such so-called“friends” of Haiti.

Yves Isidor, Raymond Joseph, Stanley Lucas—the very same sources to which I traced the story, though I like to think that I have added a bit of further substantiation to the case by combing through Sonia Desrosier’s testimony and the rest of it.

Previous entry: Parallel-EarthPatRobertson

Next entry: Dishonesty in Hertz’s Torah Commentary

Parallel-Earth Pat Robertson

2010-01-25T15:04:00.003-05:00

As envisaged by Tom Tomorrow:

I don’t think it adds much to the discussion, but it’s a nice break from the long and involved disquisitions that I have been posting here.

By the way, to see the real-world basis of what Parallel-Earth Pat says in the fourth panel, see my first entry on this subject.

Previous entry: The Right-Wing Evangelical Libel against Haiti

Next entry: From Satanism Libel to Blood Libel: This Time, It’s Coming from Haitians

The Right-Wing Evangelical Libel against Haiti

2010-01-24T10:40:00.005-05:00

The idea that the nation of Haiti was born of a pact withthe devil, far from being Pat Robertson’sinvention, is a libel widely circulated amongright-wing Evangelical Christians. Like many people who reject criticalrationality, they mistake repetition for confirmation and plausible detail for evidence.

Bois-Caïman: painter unknown; image found here

In two previous posts (”PatRobertson,PropagandistforAtheism?”, January 15; “SecondThoughts aboutWhatPatRobertsonSaid,” January 19), Idiscussed Pat Robertson’s attribution of Haiti’s dire historyto a pact with the devil supposedly sworn by a group of slaves in 1791.It turns out that the idea of such a pact is not aproduct of the brain of Pat Robertson at all: it is a libel that hasbeen circulated among Evangelical right-wingers for years. What is mostdisturbing about this libel is, first, the insidious way in which itmimics the procedures of history in order to promote a religious andpolitical agenda, and second, the success that it has had inpropagating itself among the Evangelical faithful.

For purposes of this investigation, it will be useful to distinguishclearly between the following two historical claims:

(1) That in mid-August of 1791, a group of slaves planning an uprisingagainst their French colonial masters met at Bois-Caïman toperform a Voodoo rite (thepreferred spelling among scholars seems to be “Vodou,”though Ihave also seen it spelled “Vaudou,” “Voudou,” and “Voudon”; I willfollow the popular spelling).Although there is a considerable amount of confusion and conflict inthe historical sources (which I hope to discuss in a subsequent post)over the specifics of this event, such as when it took place, who led the rite, and what kind of animal was sacrificed, and although one scholar has evendefended the thesis that no such event ever took place, there is nodenying either that there is credible historical evidence of such anevent or that it is widely believed and celebrated by Haitians as thestarting point of the founding of their nation. I will refer to thisevent as “the meeting at Bois Caïman.”

(2) That the participants in the meeting at Bois Caïman swore apact with the devil to serve him for 200 years. Note that this claimadmits of two different interpretations. It could be taken to meaneither (a) that those present at Bois Caïman went through themotions of sealing a pact with a supposed spirit, believed by them tobe real, and known as the devil or Satan; or (b) that they really didenter into a pact with a perfectly real devil. Plainly, it is only oninterpretation (a) that this claim can be considered withinthe discipline of history, for it is only on that interpretation thatit admits of confirmation or disconfirmation by evidence. Oninterpretation (b), the thesis is beyond the reach of possible evidenceand belongs to myth, or perhaps demonology, but not on any account to history. As it happens, there is no evidencethat supports this thesis even under interpretation (a). I will referto the uninterpreted and ambiguous thesis that the slaves at BoisCaïman “swore a pact with the devil” as “the Satan thesis.”

On the day on which Robertson’s inflammatory utterances were broadcaston The 700 Club (January 13, 2010), Chris Roslanof theChristian Broadcasting Network (CBN) posted a “StatementRegardingPatRobertson’sRemarksonHaiti.” The concluding part of the statementreads:

If you watch the entire video segment, Dr. Robertson’scompassion forthe people of Haiti is clear. He called for prayer for them. Hishumanitarian arm has been working to help thousands of people in Haitiover the last year, and they are currently launching a major relief andrecovery effort to help the victims of this disaster. They have sent ashipment of millions of dollars worth of medications that is now inHaiti, and their disaster team leaders are expected to arrive tomorrowand begin operations to ease the suffering.

So far as I can tell, this part of Roslan’s statement is entirely just.Thefinal words of Robertson in that notoriousnewssegment were: “Right now, we’re helping the suffering people, andthe suffering isunimaginable.” The Web site CharityNavigator gives Operation Blessing International, a relieforganizationbelonging to CBN—presumably what Roslan is referring to as “his [viz.,Robertson’s] humanitarian arm”—a ratingof 62.41, a rating that puts it in the highest possible ratingcategory. For comparison, Doctors Without BordersUSA gets 61.23and Oxfam America 63.01. So I no reason to doubt that Robertson’sorganization is on the up-and-up and is doing good work.

The first part of Roslan’s statement is another matter entirely:

His [viz., Robertson’s] comments were based on thewidely-discussed 1791 slaverebellion led by Boukman Dutty at Bois Caiman, where the slavesallegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victoryover the French. This history, combined with the horrible state of thecountry, has led countless scholars and religious figures over thecenturies to believe the country is cursed. Dr. Robertson never statedthat the earthquake was God’s wrath.

Let us work through this backward from the last sentence:

Dr. Robertson never statedthat the earthquake was God’s wrath.

Indeed he did not. But heplainly implied that Haiti’s long history of suffering is due to the “famous pact with the devil” that, as Roslan delicately puts it, “allegedly” was sworn at Bois Caïman in 1791. (I won’t quoteRobertson’s words again, but you can read them in my firstpostonthesubject. About that qualifier “allegedly,” more in a moment.) Onthat view, there are only two possible explanations: either theafflictions of Haiti are divine retribution for the pact, or they arereturns on the original bargain exacted by the devil himself. Eitherway, they are the fault of Haitians, whether collectively or in thepersons of the leaders of the rebellion that led to the founding of thenation.

This point was clearly grasped by an anonymous defender ofRobertson who on January 16 posted the following comment on Roslan’sstatement in a blogtitled MilennialPerspective, one of several blogs under the heading “RightlyConcerned” in the Website of the American Family Organization:

Leave it to the liberals, and those who do not understandthe differencebetween a curse, and the assumption that “God hates Haiti.”Point: If a person or a group of people make a deal, a pact withanother person or organization, then they are each beholden to theother to uphold the terms of that pact. Any other person, outside therealm of that pact, has no standing to interfere with the pact. So, theHaitians of that day made a deal with the devil. They got what theywanted, and in return, Satan got their souls. This contract will be ineffect until the Haitians, as a nation, reject that pact by confessingthat sin to the Father, God. Until that happens, He has no control—orlimited control—over what happens to them. So their suffering fallsupon their own shoulders, not His. Neither is the blame for thedisaster His fault.

(The quoted phrase “God hates Haiti” is presumably an allusion to a piece byLisa Miller that appeared in Newsweekon January 15 under that title.) The same position is taken by BryanFischer in an entry in his blog Focal Point, another blog in “RightlyConcerned,” in an entry titled “InDefenseof Pat Robertson” (January 15):

Robertson did not saythat the earthquake was a result of this curse, or was God’s fault.Instead, Robertson attributed Haiti’s grinding poverty to this compactwith Satan. Jesus himself said that the thief comes only to “steal andkill and destroy.”

But surely there is a theological problem here. I do not know how wellthe idea that God has “nocontrol, or limitedcontrol” over what befalls the Haitians squares with the views ofRobertson or of his followers, but the idea that the Almighty can havehis hands tied where Satanic pacts are concerned sounds highlyunorthodox to me. Such a view is squarely rejected by the Reverend Dr.GaryCass of the ChristianAnti-DefamationCommission, who, in a piece titled “1.7Billion Reasons to Defend Pat Robertson” (January 14), writesthe following sobering words:

The modern cynic chaffs [sic]at any suggestion that there may be a connection betweenhistorical realities and unseen spiritualinfluences, or as the Bible calls it God’s “blessing or cursing.”Although most people are very comfortable with the notion that Godblesses people, we are not at all comforted with the terrifyingprospect that Almighty God might also curse.

The overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God and /or moralcausality. Eastern religions call it Karma, but Christians call itGod’s Providence. I wonder if the reason that so many hate Pat isbecause he expressed what many Americans don’t want to face—the moraland spiritual dimension of our lives. . . .

Agree or disagree with what Pat said, it was well within the bounds ofhistoric Christian theology. Maybe that’s the real problem after all.

The last quoted paragraph is in agreement with the position of atheistRonald Lindsay, who, in ablogpost that I discussed in myfirstpostonthissubject, cited Robertson’s remarks as anexhibition of the irrationality of religious belief. Iargued in my own post that Lindsay’s conclusion was overstated, asthere arevarieties of religious belief that do not presume that it is possiblefor human beings to discern the effects of divine providence. When Iofferedthis criticism in a comment on Lindsay’s post (comment no. 6, under thename “Kritikos”), he generously granted the point, and restated his positionas follows (comment no. 8):

Kritikos is quite correct: my statement should have beenexplicitlyqualified. Robertson’s comments highlight the irrationality of beliefin a personal deity who can cause storms and earthquakes, intervenescontinually in human affairs, and responds to petitionary prayer, thatis, the type of deity that appears to be accepted by most believers.

To get back to the main point, though: whether Robertson thinks thatthe earthquake was God’s doing or the devil’s, he plainly implied thatitis a consequence of the actions of Haiti’s founders, and thereforeultimately their fault.

This history, combined with thehorrible state of thecountry, has led countless scholars and religious figures over thecenturies to believe the country is cursed.

The phrase “this history” hererefers to the pact with the devil supposedly sworn by Haiti’s originalliberators. But who has concluded that the country is cursed? Somereligious figures? Undoubtedly. “Countless” ones? Perhaps; ifrank-and-file believers are included, then certainly so. But“scholars”? What sort of “scholar” interprets historical facts, letalone tales of the supernatural presented as facts, as evidence of a“curse”? What sortofperson takes writers who so interpret history as “scholars”? I believethat the answer is to befound under “religious figures,” or more precisely among adherents ofPat Robertson’s variety of Evangelical Protestantism. It is not clearif this particularstatement is an argument from authority or an attempt to diffuse theresponsibility for Robertson’s outrageous claims among other, unnamedsources. Either way, it gives no credibility to the idea that Haiti isunder a curse.

(As a resident of greater Boston, whose baseball team washeld for 86 years to be under a “curse” that only ended in 2004 whenthe Red Soxfinally won the World Series, I must add at this point that Robertsonand company are not using the word “curse” in any kind of playful orironic spirit. I do not doubt that there are Red Sox fans who believejust as solemnly and sincerely in the reality of the Curseof theBambino as Robertson and his allies do in the reality of theHaitianpact with the devil. I merely wish to caution those who use the wordless seriously, as an ironic way of describing a persistent pattern ofmisfortune, that that is not whatis at issue here.)

His comments were based on thewidely-discussed 1791 slaverebellion led by Boukman Dutty at Bois Caiman, where the slavesallegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victoryover the French.

“Allegedly,” says Roslan; but alleged by whom? “Famous,” says Roslan;but famous among whom? Among Haitians what is famous, and muchcelebrated, is the story of how, in August 1791, a group of slaves metto plan an uprising against their French colonial masters, an occasionthat culminated in a Voodoo rite in which a pig was sacrificed. As Iindicated earlier, thereare divergent accounts of who took part inthis affair and where and when it took place. What is clear is thatnone of the historical sources make any mention of a pact with thedevil. Who or what, then, is the source of Roslan’s tale?

I cannot identify an ultimate source, but Roslan or whoever preparedthe page on which his statement appears offers a proximate one. Next tohis statementare several linksunder the heading “Related Information,” one of which reads “Haiti:Boukman, Aristide, Voodoo and the Church.” It leads to a piece under thattitlewritten by Elizabeth Kendal and dated 2004, on a page inthe Web site of the John Mark Ministries, an Evangelical Christianorganization in Australia.This appears to be the same Elizabeth Kendal who isidentified by the ChristianMonitor as Principal Researcher and Writer for the WorldEvangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission. Her version of thehistory of the founding of Haiti includes this passage:

On 14 August 1791, a black slave andwitch doctor named Boukman led the slaves in a voodoo ritual. Theysacrificed a pig and drank its blood to form a pact with the devil,whereby they agreed to serve the spirits of the island for 200 years inexchange for freedom from the French. The slave rebellion commenced on22 August 1791, and after 13 years of conflict, the slaves won theirindependence. On 1 January 1804 they declared Haiti the world’s firstindependent black republic. An iron statue of a pig stands inPort-au-Prince to commemorate the “Boukman Contract”.

I have found the contents of Kendal’s piece credulously reproducedonnumerous Web pages, including one in Polish, allposted since January13. The transformation of Dutty Boukman or Boukman Dutty (I have seenhis name given both ways) from a priest of the Voodoo religion into a “witch doctor” does not raise confidence in Kendal’s competence as ahistorian, though it does give the measure of what Chris Roslan had inmind when he invoked unnamed “scholars.”

But there is that bit at the end about the statue of a pig. Adetail of such specificity, concerning a present, or atleast recent, state of affairs, lends an air ofverisimilitude to the whole story. Bryan Fischer, in thepiececited previously, adds another such detail:

It is a matter ofhistorical record that Haiti’s independence from France is, in fact,rooted in a pact with the devil made on August 14, 1791 by a group ofvoodoo priests led by a former slave named Boukman. The pact was madeat a place called Bois-Caiman, and the tree under which a black pig wassacrificed in this ceremony is still a shrine in Haiti. Annual voodooceremonies are conducted every August 14 on this very site, essentiallyrenewing the covenant with darkness each summer.

So not only is there, according to these sources, a statue of a piginPort-au-Princethat commemorates the Boukman contract with the devil but the treeunder which theoriginal pig was sacrificed atBois-Caïman is a shrine at which Voodoo ceremonies are performedevery August 14. One can imagine the effect of such details onEvangelical readers of these materials: they would no doubt see them asdecisive proof of the truth of the story.

But any person examiningthese matters skeptically would have to wonder, first, whether thedetails are actual facts, and second, whether they constitute any sortof confirmation of the story of the pact with the devil.Take the pig first. Is there such a statue? On a message board forHaitian Americans, twoparticipants in a thread on this question recollect seeing an ironstatue of a pig at acertain location in Port-au-Prince (onelocates it at la Place de l’Italie auBicentenaire, . . . across from the old legislative palace,” theother “near the post office”; I do not know if these refer to the samelocation), but neither of them knows of any indication that the statueis connected in any way with Boukman. Remember that the question is notwhether Haitians celebrate the memory of the meeting at BoisCaïman: there is nodoubt that many do so. What is at issue is whether there was any pactwith the devil at that meeting. The existence of an iron statue of apig is no confirmation of this. The same applies to the supposed annualcommemorative gatherings. Such details provide concreteness, and thusmay have the psychological effect of enhancing the verisimilitude ofthe Satan thesis; but they constitute no evidence for it whatever.

[Added after posting, 23 January 2010, 15.40 EST: It has occurred to me that the pig statue, if it exists, could have been installed as a punning salute to the city itself: the first word of “Port-au-Prince” (the “t” is silent) is homophonous with “porc,” the French word for “pig.”]

The only other bit of evidencethat anyone in this crazy circuit, to my knowledge, has ever presentedto support the Satan thesis is Bryan Fischer’s assertion that “onnational TV, Haiti’sambassador to the U.S. openly admitted, while criticizing Robertson,that Haiti did in fact enter in to this pact with the devil.” He isreferring to the following remarks made by Ambassador Raymond Joseph ontheRachelMaddowShow on January 13:

I would like the whole world to know, Americaespecially, that theindependence of Haiti, when the slave rose up against the French anddefeated the French army, powerful army, the U.S was able to gaintheLouisiana Territory for $15 million. That’s 3 cents an acre. That’sthirteen states west of the Mississippi that the Haitian slaves’ revoltin Haiti provided America. . . . So what pact theHaitian made with the devilhas helped the United States become what it is.

But while Joseph speaks slowly and deliberately, and appears tohave a good command of English, the crucial last sentence is veryunclear. As it stands (and I have transcribed his utterances verbatim),it is simply ungrammatical: the phrase “what pact”does not make sense in that context. It is possible that by “whatpact” Joseph meant simply “the pact,” in which case he would indeed bemaking the admission that Fischer attributes to him. But while theambassador’s English is imperfect, it does not seem to be as crude asthat. It is far more likely that by “what pact” he meant “whateverpact.” On that assumption, he is most likely merely saying that,whether there was a pact with the devil or not, the actions of Haiti’soriginal liberators have benefited the United States.

Of course, it is possible that Ambassador Joseph does believe theSatan thesis. That would be at best exceedingly feebleevidence of its truth, but it would certainly be evidence that thethesis hasgained acceptance among Haitians. This finding was reported byJeanGelin, a Haitian-American agricultural scientist and Christianminister, in a three-part article titled “God, Satan, and the Birth ofHaiti,” published on the Web site Black and Christian in 2005. In thefirstpart, Gelin writes as follows:

Have you ever heard how some preachers or theologians tryto explain the unspeakable misery that is crippling most of Haiti’spopulation of 8 million? Everywhere you go, from your television screento the Internet, what you are most likely to find is a reference to aspiritual pact that the fathers of the nation supposedly made with thedevil to help them win their freedom from France. As a result of thatsatanic alliance, as they put it, God has placed a curse on the countrysome time around its birth, and that divine burden has madeit virtually impossible for the vast majority of Haitians to live inpeace and prosperity in their land. . . .

The worst partof the whole picture is that thestory is believed by many sincere Christians in America and around theworld; and not only do they believe it, they also spread it as fact.The tragedy of our age is that repeated lies are often mistaken for thetruth, especially when repeated long enough.

But did the idea of a pact with the devil originate abroad or in Haitiitself? Gelin does not take a firm position on that question:

It’s hard to know where the idea of a divine curse on Haitifollowing the purported satanic pact actually originated, whether fromforeign missionaries or from local church leaders. In his book RipeNow: A Haitian Congregation Responds to the Great Commission,Haitian pastor Frantz Lacombe identified a ‘dependence mentality’ inthe leadership of the Haitian church, which resulted from the way theChristian faith was brought to the country, historically and throughvarious denominations. Apparently, this unfortunate manner of thinking,which tends to emulate the worldview and culture of North American andEuropean Christian missionaries, has permeated the general philosophyof the Haitian church on many levels, including church planting, churchmanagement, music and even missionary activities.

In that context, I would not be surprised if the satanic pact idea(followed by the divine curse message) was put together first byforeign missionaries and later on picked up by local leaders. On theother hand, it is equally possible that some Haitian church leadersdeveloped the idea on their own using a theological framework borrowedfrom those same missionaries who subsequently propagated the messagearound the world.

Wherever the idea originated, it is now being spread over the world byEvangelical Christians. Though imposed on the story of the Bois Caïmanmeeting, a story which itself has a basis in historical evidence, thecrucial element of Satanism is a fabrication. I suspect that manyEvangelicals are unable to grasp this point because for them theidentification of Voodoo with Satanism seems self-evident. This can beseen, for instance, in a passage written by photographer Shawna Herringin a blog entry datedJanuary 15, 2009 concerning a visitto Haiti that she had recently made (ellipsis in original):

To clear up any superstitious idea here I want to justsay that Voodoois REAL. It’s not just some little revengeful idea with dolls andpins . . . it’s a real partnership that was made with thedevil himself. 203years ago [sic] when Haiti was under French rule, they were enslaved by themand in an effort to gain their freedom, Voodoo priests from all overcame together and literally signed a written contract and made a dealwith the Prince of darkness that stated that if he could grant theirfreedom, they would serve him for 200 years. He did and they have. It’sno joke.

Note the movement here from saying that Voodoo is real (which it is, inthe sense that it is a religion really practiced by many Haitians) tosaying that the “partnership with the devil” established more than 200years ago is real. For this writer, as for others of her religiousoutlook, the two are the same. The detail of a “written contract,”which I have not seen anywhere else, is also a nice touch. I suspectthat it is merely the product of misrecollection or faultytransmission, but it may be worth checking up later to see if othermembers of the crazy circuit are citing Ms. Herring’s statement asfurther proof of the Satan thesis.

By the way, if you are wondering how Evangelicals can believe thatHaiti is still suffering the consequences of a pact with the devilforged more than 200 years ago for a period of 200 years, the answeris, first, that the term of 200 years is supposed to have begun notwith the forging of the pact in 1791 but with the liberation of Haiti,which was effected on January 1, 1804; and second, that when PresidentJean-Bertrand Aristide, on April 8, 2003, gave official recognition toVoodoo as a religion in Haiti, he thereby, as Bryan Fischer puts it inthe post cited earlier, “extended the pact.” Fischer does not state theduration of the extension or the reason for which Aristide would dosuch a thing.

Of course, it is easy to see this detail as an instance of facts beinginterpreted, not to say rewritten, to suit a rigid belief. No doubt, itis that, but to ascribe it to that principle alone is to miss the pointthat for Evangelicals like Fischer, it is axiomatic that Voodoo isSatanism. I have little doubt that even if it were possible to lookinto the past as we look at old television shows and towatch the meeting at Bois-Caïman unfold, Fischer, Kendal, Robertson,and all of their like would find the proceedings to be a complete andthorough confirmation of their beliefs.

That rigidly held religious beliefs yield unsound anthropology—as they do unsound history, science, ethics, politics, and so on—is hardly news.The interesting thing about the Evangelical libel againstHaiti is the way in which its proponents not only offer it as a “truestory” (Robertson) and “a matter of historical record” (Fischer), butsupport it with historical and factual details that, however littlevalue they have as evidence, are well calculated to persuade theunwary.

One final reflection. As noted at the beginning of this piece, PatRobertson’s humanitarian organization Operation Blessing Internationalhas been contributing to the relief effort in Haiti. I have no doubtthat his followers and other people who propagate the libel of Haiti’sfounding pact with Satan have been making generous contributions, inmoney and labor, to that effort. Nor do I doubt the sincerity of those who receive and repeat this falsehood. Butit is a falsehood, and not an innocent one. It is blameworthy for thedisregard of evidence and fact that engender it, the superstitiousattitude that it sustains (it is almost amusing to see people whoattribute literally earth-shaking powers to the devil trying to pin thecharge of Satanism on others), and the damage that it does. This damageconsists in defaming the Haitian people and the founders of theirnation as Satanists; putting the blame on them for misfortunes that areno fault of theirs; shifting attention from the real causes, past and present, of Haiti’s afflictions, and thereby diminishing the chance of improving conditions there.

Further documentation of the use of the Satanism libel against Haiti may be found in a recent piece by Rachel Tabachnik: “PatRobertson Not Alone in Demonizing Haiti” (Talk to Action, January 14, 2010).

Previous entry: SecondThoughts aboutWhatPatRobertsonSaid

Next entry: Parallel-Earth Pat Robertson

Second Thoughts about What Pat Robertson Said

2010-01-19T18:09:00.007-05:00

What is wrong with what Robertson said is what is wrong with a great deal of religious thinking. Explaining wherein the fault lies is not easy.

William Blake, Job

I have some emendations to make to my previousentry, on PatRobertson’s theological explanation of the sorrows of Haiti.

(1) In that entry, Iobserved that, for all the outcry against Robertson’s remarks, therehasbeen almost nodiscussion of what exactly makes them sooutrageous. Subsequently, I discovered a piece by LisaMiller, published in Newsweekon line under the sardonic title “WhyGod Hates Haiti,” that addresses thequestion that I had thought neglected. After a brief account of Haiti’shistory of misfortune, Miller comments as follows on Robertson’sremarks:

In his narrow, malicious way, Robertson is making a FirstCommandment argument: when the God of Israel thunders from hismountaintop that “you shall have no other gods before me,” he means it.This God rains down disaster—floods and so forth—on those who disobey.

But Robertson’s is a fundamentalist view. It’s so unkind andself-righteous—and deaf, dumb, and blind to centuries of theologicaldiscourse on suffering by thinkers from Augustine to Elie Wiesel—thatone might easily call it backward. Every Western religious traditionteaches that mortals have no way of counting or weighing another’ssin.

I was heartened to read this piece, for two reasons. First, it goesbeyond a mere emotional reaction to Robertson’sremarks to address issues of the nature and consequences of religiousbelief, as I think that one must do to bring to light what itis about those remarks that makes them deserving of condemnation.Second, it reminds us thatRobertson’s remarks are deplorable even in a religiousperspective—perhaps especially so. Not just any old religious outlookwill lead one to the conclusion that Haiti’s afflictions are theconsequences of Haitians’ having done things displeasing to God, noteven if you throw in Robertson’s ignorant and bigoted identification ofthe Creole religion of (some) Haitians with a Satanic cult. No; ittakes, in Miller’s apt word, a particularly backward theology to dothat. (Ignorant, bigoted, backward, arrogant, callous, inhumane,smug, fatuous—one thing for which you have to give Pat Robertsoncredit is that he provides work for lots of adjectives!)

(2) It was rash of me to dismiss Robertson’s purported “true story”about a pact with the devil as “just more ofthe sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains ofright-wing religious fanatics like [him].” It is surely somethingmore baneful than that. I offered the surmisethat “in [Robertson’s]view any religious practice much different from the EvangelicalProtestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.” Thatmay be so, but it does not take account of the fact that the Haitiansare of largelyblack African origin, as is the Vodou religion whose rites Robertsonequates with Satanism. It is possible that Robertson’sbigotry is purely religious and not racial in nature, but, I think, notlikely.The suggestion of an underlying racial bias adds to the uglinessof his remarks.

(3) I think that I was a bit glib about the relation betweenbelieving in God and the habit of attributing specific events to divinedesigns. I took for granted that the latteris separable from the former—that it is possible to believe in Godwhile forswearing all judgments about divine intentions behind worldlyevents. Certainly the two are separable in principle. But the fact(assuming it to be a fact, as I think it is) that the vast majority ofreligious believers make such judgments is an indication of howdifficult it is to have the one without the other. To believe thateverything that happens does so in accordance with divine providencewhile making no judgments about how specific events bear aprovidential meaning would surely greatly reduce the comforts ofreligious life for most believers. On this point as on many others, themore that religiousbelief is purged of irrational elements, the less emotionalappeal it can hold for most people.

(4) In my attempt to account for what was outrageousin Robertson’s remarks, I think I conflated two questions that requireseparate answers: (a) whatprinciple led Robertson to such conclusions? and (b) whatmakes his conclusions so obnoxious? I would still say that his remarksrest on a presumption on his part of being able to identify God’sdesigns in worldly affairs.That presumption, combined with his bigoted assessment of Haitianhistory (see point (2) above), led Robertson to the conclusion thatHaiti’s misfortunes are thereturn on a Satanic bargain, whether they are effected by Satan himselfas part of the deal or by God in retribution for the original pact. The samepresumption plainly underlies Robertson’s grandiose,politically opportunistic explanations of the September 11 attacks, theflooding of New Orleans, the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, and theincapacitation of Ariel Sharon by a stroke (all explained in the previousentry).

But what makes suchconclusions obnoxious is something more. It is, as Lisa Miller pointsout in the passage that I quoted earlier (see (1) above), thepresumption of being able to identify and weigh the sins ofothers—always, of course, with favor to oneself and disfavor to theothers. Robertson embraces a religious doctrine according to whichbelievers of said doctrine are deserving of God’s favor andnon-believers deserving ofdivine retribution. To say that such a view is baseless, superstitious,or implausible (all of which I say it is) fails to touch on what ismost deplorable about it, namely its self-serving arrogance andpresumption. Robertson’s conclusions are certainly generated by faultsof reasoning and judgment, but what is most objectionable in them is amatter of the human posture that emerges from his faulty reasonings andjudgments. (I acknowledge that what I have written is not entirelyclear; it seems to me that the question that I have been trying toanswer—what is so outrageous about Robertson’s remarks?—does not yield to the familiar terms of either ethics or logic as commonly practiced.)

(5) A further point to be made about the evil done by Robertson andthose who share his fondness for imputing earthly disasters to divinecauses is that they reinforce a lack of interest in the demonstrablenatural causes of such disasters and thereby reduce the likelihood ofremedy. Elizabeth McAlister sums the matter up well in a piece for CNNtitled “WhyDoes Haiti Suffer So Much?” (January 18, 2010):

For social scientists, there is nothing metaphysical about thequestion “Why Haiti?” Longstanding structural reasons have produced adysfunctional system long in crisis. Beginning as a French slavesociety, the nation was founded at a severe disadvantage. Francedemanded enormous payment for abandoned property after the revolution,starting a cycle of debt that was never broken.

Deep and abidingracism prevented the U.S. and Europe from recognizing Haiti for 60years. Trade was never established on even terms. The military ruledthe state, culminating in the brutal Duvalier dictatorship, which theU.S. supported.

No robust civil society developed—there’s novigorous tradition of PTAs and town planning boards. A brain drainevacuated top talent from the country, while the U.S.-subsidized farmindustry sent surplus crops to Haiti, undercutting local prices there.Farmers abandoned their lands, flocked to the capital, and built theshanty towns that have now collapsed into rubble, burying the innocentand vulnerable, strong and powerful alike.

The suffering Haitians are enduring is a natural disaster worsenedbyhuman-made conditions.

Robertson cited the disparity between the comparatively goodfortunesof the Dominican Republic, on the eastern half of the island ofHispaniola, and the terrible ill fortunes of the Republic of Haiti, onthe western half of the same island, as evidence of the supernaturalcausation of Haiti’s misfortunes—as if no natural explanation werepossible. The more that people embrace this kind of superstitiousthinking, the less likely it is that anything will ever be done aboutthe actual causes of suffering. (Chances are bad enough; that is noexcuse for making them worse.) An earthquake is an uncontrollablenatural event; the substandardbuildingconstruction that makes an earthquake fatal to tens ofthousands of people is not. Heavy rains are an uncontrollable naturalevent; the deforestationthat makes such rains result in deadly landslides is not. And so on.

(6) Finally, no discussion of religious responses to the disaster inHaiti can be complete without some consideration of the Book of Job.Lisa Miller’s piece opens with the sentence: “Haiti is surely a Jobamong nations.” Subsequently, she quotes Rabbi Harold Kushner, the authorof When Bad Things Happen to Good People(New York: Anchor Books, 1981), which is among other things ameditation on the Book of Job. (What Kushner is quoted as saying, bythe way, is: “I think that it’s supreme hubris to think you can readGod's mind.” I was struck by the fact that the rabbi chose the Greek“hubris” rather than the Hebrew “chutzpah.” But on reflection, Isaw the justice of the choice: only the Greek word denotes atransgression upon divine prerogatives, the Heberew word signifying only atransgression upon human ones.) Plainly, if Haiti is a Job, thenRobertson is a Job’s comforter of the worst sort. Kushner in his bookprovides a useful schema for understanding what that means:

To try to understand the book [viz., Job] and its answer, let ustakenote of three statements which everyone in the book, and most of thereaders, would like to be able to believe:
A. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in theworld. Nothing happens without His willing it.

B. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what theydeserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.

C. Job is a good person.
As long as Job is health and wealthy, we can believe all three ofthosestatements at the same time with no difficulty. When Job suffers, whenhe loses his possessions, his family, and his health, we have aproblem. We can no longer make sense of all three propositionstogether. We can now affirm any two only by denying thethird. . . .

Job’s friends are prepared to stop believing (C), the assertionthatJob is a good person. (42–43)

A characteristic of the author of WhenBadThings Happen to Good Peoplethat impresses the reader from thebeginning is his humanity—a characteristicnot universal among bearers of clerical titles, as recent events remindus. In the first chapter of the book, titled “Why Do the RighteousSuffer?”, Kushner disposes of the familiar attempts to reconcile thesufferings of the innocent and the just with belief in God—“They didsomething to deserve it,” “It’s for their own good,” “It’s for the bestinthe long run,” “God will make it up to them in the next life,” and soon—not so much for being unconvincing answers to a theoreticalconundrum (though he does find them to be that) as for failing to offerthe afflicted a possibility for reconciliation with God. Hisalternative solution is that God doesnot cause or allow all of our suffering: some things really do justhappen, for no divinely providential reason at all. In terms of theschema above, Kushner gives up statement (A).In theological terms, he gives up the doctrines of divineomnipotence and providence: “God can’t do everything,” he says in thetitle of his seventh chapter (although, he adds, “he can do someimportant things”).

As strongly as Kushner’s ethosappeals to me, and as humane as I find his theological view, hisattempt to derive the latter from the Book of Job seems to me to havelittle textual foundation. To me, the view implied by the Book of Jobis just the view that Kushner attributes to Job himself:

Job sees God as being above notions of fairness, being so powerfulthat no moral rules apply to Him. God is seen as resembling an Orientalpotentate, with unchallenged power over the life and property of hissubjects. And in fact, the old fable of Job [i.e., the folk taleposited by biblical scholars as the antecedent of the scriptural text]does picture God in just that way, as a deity who afflicts Job withoutany moral qualms in order to test his loyalty, and who feels that Hehas “made it up” to Job afterward by rewarding him lavishly. (46–47)

This is, in fact, the only view of God that I find in the text. Tome it seems that God figuratively picks Job up by the scruff of theneck and thunders at him, “Can you compare your powers to mine? No, youcan’t! So shut up!” (38:1–40:2and 40:6–41:26);towhichJob meeklyreplies, “Yes, Sir; I will, Sir” (40:3–5and 42:1–6).The theological lesson taught by God’s answer to Job, so far as I cantell, is either that divine might makes right or that God’s power is sofar beyond our comprehension that it is senseless for us to apply ournotions of justice to God. If any of the three propositions inKushner’s scheme is to be given up, it must proposition (B), that Godis just—not because it is false, but because when we attribute justiceto God, we really have no idea of what we are talking about. Kushnertakes the passage about Leviathan (40:25–41:26)tomean,literally, that Godis only able with great effort to subdue the giant sea serpent, andthus to mean, figuratively, that “even God has a hard time keepingchaos in check and limiting the damage that evil can do” (49–50).Rabbi, you’re a mentsh for trying to find sucha humane view in scripture, but I justdon’t see it there.

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Next entry: The Right-Wing Evangelical Libel against Haiti

Pat Robertson, Propagandist for Atheism?

2010-01-15T15:11:00.005-05:00

There have been many reports of what Robertson said about Haiti andmany condemnations of it; what is missing from public discourse is anaccount of what exactly is outrageous about what he said.

First, just so that it’s clear what I’m talking about, here are the notorious words uttered by Pat Robertson on his program The 700 Club on January 13, 2010 (transcription from Media Matters, where the video can also be seen):

And, you know, Kristi, something happened a long time agoin Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were underthe heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And theygot together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serveyou if you will get us free from the French.” True story. And so, thedevil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” And they kicked the French out. Youknow, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since,they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor.That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. Onthe one side is Haiti; on the other side is the Dominican Republic.Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera.Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and weneed to pray for them a great turning to God.

Of course, Pat Robertson’s notion of what constitutes a “true story”can be gauged by the crackpot theory of a two-hundred-year-old plot forglobal domination by Jewish bankers, Freemasons, the “Illuminati,” andother Satanists that he expounded in his 1994 book The New World Order. An account of its contents may be found in Michael Lind’s Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 99–120, or on line in “New World Order, Old World Anti-Semitism,” an article by Ephraim Radner that appeared in Christian Century for September 13, 1995. A single paragraph from Radner’s article will give you the flavor of Robertson’s thinking:

Robertson traces the historical progress of thisconspiracy, back to Lucifer and his machinations in antiquity. In themodem era the conspiracy has been promoted through a small secretsociety founded in late 18th-century, Bavaria called the Illuminati,whose members purportedly infiltrated Freemasonry, organized the FrenchRevolution, recruited Friedrick Engels and other communists to theircause and orchestrated the Bolshexik takeover of Russia. Through theircontrol of international banking, the Illuminati-dominated servants ofSatan, according to Robertson, have imposed a system of national andprivate credit and interest that has saddled the nation withdebilitating and enslaving debt, robbing the American people at once oftheir independence and their control over their religious life.

Getting back to Robertson’s more recent outburst of paranoiac idiocy,one should note that his so-called “true story” actually has what mightbe described, if misleadingly, as a historical basis. The event thatpresumably caused his febrile brain to conceive that the Haitians sworea “pact to the devil” was a religious ceremony that reputedly tookplace on August 14, 1791, at Bois Caïman in what is now Haiti under theleadership of a slave and vodou priest or houdon named Dutty Boukman. (Whether this event actually occurred seems to be a matter of dispute.)Boukman reputedly prophesied on that occasion that the slaves ofSaint-Domingue (as the colony occupying the territory of what is nowthe Republic of Haiti was then called) would rise up and overthrowtheir white masters. On August 22, an uprising began, in the course ofwhich Boukman was captured and killed by the French authorities. Therevolt continued without him, and in two years’ time, slavery inSaint-Domingue was at an end. By the end of 1803, the Haitians hadoverthrown and expelled the French (who, by the way, were under therule of Napoleon Bonaparte at the time; Napoleon III was not born until1808).

The idea of a pact with Satan, as far as I can gather, is just more ofthe sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains ofright-wing religious fanatics like Robertson. I suspect that in hisview any religious practice much different from the EvangelicalProtestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.

But the benighted and delusional character of Robertson’s version ofhistory, however interesting, is really not the issue. What has madehis remarks notorious is the fact that they identify the earthquake inHaiti, and other misfortunes that have dogged the history of thatnation, as divine retribution. This sort of utterance on his part isnothing new. As Media Matters points out, Robertson has a record of indulging in such prophecy:

Remember when Jerry Falwell said, two days after the events ofSeptember 11, 2001, “I really believe that the pagans, and theabortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who areactively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the A.C.L.U.,People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularizeAmerica, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped thishappen’”? He said that when he was appearing as Robertson’s guest on The 700 Club,and Robertson’s reply was, “I totally concur.” Though Robertson seemssubsequently to have tried to put some distance between himself andFalwell’s remarks (he described themas “totally inappropriate,” a phrase that in the perverted moraldiscourse of the present day passes for severe condemnation, thoughreally it only faults Falwell’s choice of occasion and not the contentof what he said), he also issued a written statementthat made his stance on this issue perfectly clear: “We have insultedGod at the highest level of our government. Then, we say, ‘Why doesthis happen?’ It is happening because God Almighty is lifting Hisprotection from us.”

On The 700 Club for September 12, 2005, Robertsonintimated—though he did not plainly assert—that the occurrence of theHurricane Katrina disaster and terrorist attacks on the US was due tothe legality of abortion here (transcript again from Media Matters):

We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America. I was reading,yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to sayin the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he usedthe term that those who do this, “the land will vomit you out.” . . .You look at the book of Leviticus and see what it says there. And thisauthor of this said, “Well, ‘vomit out’ means you are not able todefend yourself.” But have we found we are unable somehow to defendourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us,either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they beconnected in some way? And he goes down the list of the things that Godsays will cause a nation to lose its possession, and to be vomited out.And the amazing thing is, a judge has now got to say, “I will supportthe wholesale slaughter of innocent children” in order to get confirmedto the bench.
On The 700 Club for January 5, 2006, Robertson attributedthe stroke that paralyzed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and themurder of his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin to their having tried to divideGod’s land, in defiance of biblical prophesy. Robertson said(transcript again from Media Matters):

The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against thosewho, quote, “divide my land.” God considers this land to be his. Youread the Bible, he says, “This is my land.” And for any prime ministerof Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says,“No. This is mine.” And the same thing—I had a wonderful meeting withYitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it wasterrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead. And nowAriel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful personto be with. I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the pointof death. He was dividing God’s land, and I would say woe unto anyprime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU,the United Nations or United States of America. God said, “This landbelongs to me, you better leave it alone.”
By the way, the passage to which Robertson alludes is this one:

For behold, in those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunesof Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and bring themdown to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment withthem there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up my land,and have cast lots for my people, and have traded a boy for aprostitute, and have sold a girl for wine and have drunk it. (Joel3:1–3, English Standard Version)
Setting aside the question of how anyone in his right mind can take abit of ancient literature purported to record divine utterances as atitle deed to an entire country, it is obvious that the passagepromises divine judgment upon foreign nations that have conquered theland of Israel and dispersed the Israelites among other nations, notupon Israelites in possession of the land who have given away some ofit.

So Robertson has been at this sort of thing for a while, and we canexpect that as long as he is with us he will provide more of it. What Ifind curious, and rather frustrating, about the reaction to his remarksin public written media is how elliptical the comments have been.Trolling through the Google and Google News search resultsfor “Pat Robertson Haiti,” what I find, besides bare reports of what hesaid, consists almost entirely of remarks or exclamations on howoutrageous, offensive, absurd, insane, moronic, insensitive, inhumane,and so on it is, or he is. What I have not found is an explanation ofwhat exactly is outrageous, offensive, and so on about it.

Perhaps it is felt that the point is too obvious to merit explanation. Well, I grant that it is obvious that what Robertson said is outrageous and so on. I do not question that for a moment. What I want to know is: why is it outrageous? What makes it so? Is it the idea that the catastrophes that have befallen the people of Haiti—mutatis mutandisthe people of New Orleans, of New York City, of the United States, andso on—are in some measure the fault of the victims? Is it the idea thatthe victims, or some of them, or some of their ancestors, have incurredGod’s wrath? Is it the pretense to prophetic knowledge of how God worksin the world? Is it not the thoughts themselves but merely the act ofgiving public utterance to them? (Were they merely, as Robertson saidof Jerry Falwell’s remarks about the September 11 attacks, “totallyinappropriate”?) It may well be that different people have differentreasons for being outraged by Robertson’s remarks. But if there are somany reasons, why have I heard so little about any of them?

I have, as of the moment of writing, seen only one published comment onRobertson’s remarks that contains any analysis or explanation at all:an entry by Ronald Lindsay in the blog of the Center for Inquiry underthe title “One Cheer (Amid a Chorus of Boos) for Pat Robertson.” Lindsay offers Robertson a left-handed commendation for exposing by his example the absurdity of religious belief. He writes:

In recent years, in response to increased critical examination ofreligion, many liberal religious apologists have claimed that thesecritiques of religion have it all wrong. There is no all-powerful,personal God, overseeing and intervening in our world, who guideshurricanes away or toward land depending on His will. Instead, there isonly some nebulous spirit or life-force that fills us with joy, andmakes us want to join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” In fact, some scholars,such as Karen Armstrong, argue that religion is not about belief in apersonal God at all, but about commitment and activity.

For the ordinary believer this is all rubbish. Ordinarybelievers—and they do believe—have faith in a robust God, who candeliver themfrom evil (or not). Pat Robertson reflects the views of the ordinarybeliever. You see them all the time on TV being interviewed after somenatural disaster. They claim they prayed to God to spare them from thetornado/hurricane/earthquake and God answered their prayers. Notably,the people who died can’t speak to the issue of why their prayers were not answered, but Robertson atleast tries to offer an explanation. The victims were cursed for somereason, and in the case of Haiti it was because of an imprudent pactwith the Devil. (Is there ever a prudent pact with the Devil?)

Of course, Pat Robertson’s claim is absurd. But his claim usefullyunderscores the absurdity of religious belief in general, instead ofobscuring it with a veil of touchy-feely doubletalk.

In other words, Robertson, in Lindsay’s view, is a reductio ad absurdum of religious belief, and thus a walking argument for atheism. Sophisticated apologists for religion like Karen Armstrongtry to disown the excesses of such cranks, but their notions of what itmeans to believe in God have little bearing on what ordinary religiouspeople actually believe. Ordinary religious people believe in a Godthat intervenes in the affairs of the world to reward the faithful andpunish the unfaithful—the God of Pat Robertson, or something very likeit. Many of them may dislike Robertson’s conclusions, but they arecommitted to the same premises and the same logic. His absurdities aretherefore theirs.

Thus Lindsay. Now there is an obvious non sequitur here.Granted that, as Lindsay claims, the lofty sophistications of theologydo not reflect the beliefs of ordinary religious people, and grantedthat, as he also claims, the beliefs of ordinary religious peopleentail the absurd conclusions of a Pat Robertson, it does not followthat Robertson’s conclusions exhibit “the absurdity of religious beliefin general.” All that follows is that they exhibit the absurdities ofcommon forms of religious belief.

That conclusion, however, seems to me notable by itself; and itsuggests to me an explanation of why so little has been said about whatwas outrageous in Robertson’s remarks. Most people who believe in God,I suspect, would disavow any claim to prophetic insight. They woulddeny that they know what worldly events may be attributed to God’sinfluence, or what God “means” by them. Yet nearly all such peoplebelieve that worldly events do show God’s influence and that God doesmean something by them. So even if they disclaim knowledgeof how God works in the world, they feel free—or perhaps “compelled”would be more like it—to venture judgments about such matters. The lonesurvivor of an automobile collision says, “God must have kept me alivefor a reason!” Oh, and did he cause everyone else to be killed for anequally good reason? Someone makes repeated efforts to succeed in acertain line of work before finally giving up: “God must have meant mefor other things.” Well, that is one way to reassure yourself that youmade the right choice: pretend that your perfectly ordinary humandecision had divine authorization. And so on.

People who think this way may find Robertson’s conclusions offensivebecause it is inhumane toward the victims of catastrophe to believesuch things; or they may condemn his giving public utterance to suchconclusions as “totally inappropriate”; neither objection has anythingto do with the truth or falsehood of the conclusions. Such objectionsleave standing the possibility that what Robertson says, his historicaldelusions aside, may be perfectly true: they merely fault him for saying or perhaps merely believingsuch things. I suspect that the reason why we do not hear much aboutwhat is outrageous in his remarks is that identifying it meansidentifying what is outrageous in widely and strongly held religiousbeliefs, namely the idea that God’s actions and intentions can bediscerned in worldly events.

Previous post: Carl Sagan on Science and Skepticism

Next post: Second Thoughts about What Pat Robertson Said

Carl Sagan on Science and Skepticism

2010-01-08T15:04:00.008-05:00

Carl Sagan’s work is a great reminder of the ethical aspect of skepticism: without the ability to distinguish between prejudice and “postjudice,” or between what is true and what feels good, we may “slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.”

I recently learned from a blog entry by D. J. Grothe of the availability of some writings of Carl Sagan (1934–1996) on the site of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Grothe comments:

One thing that stands out in them is how skepticism was for Carl Sagan a deeply ethical enterprise, not just a debunking hobby, or a way to show how smart we are compared to the numbskulls who believe nonsense. For Sagan, as for so many other leaders in skepticism—though it is not often framed like this—his skepticism came out of a kind of deep moral imperative. Because undue credulity causes so much measurable harm, it follows that there is an ethical obligation to work to mitigate it through speaking out and educating our neighbors. Whether you believe that space aliens are coming to Earth to solve all our problems so we don’t have to do any work to fix them ourselves, or you believe that going to a faith healer or New Age huckster rather than relying on medical science to heal you is the right course of medical care, believing in things uncritically can be bad for you and bad for society. Sagan felt that it was the right thing—the morally conscientious thing—to work against those trends.

That ethical concern seems to me well expressed in this passage from Sagan’s essay “The Burden of Skepticism” (1987):

Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven’t ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can’t be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.

It is salutary to remember such things when one is accused of being “closed-minded” (or “close-minded,” in the cretinous mangling of the phrase that seems to be coming into favor on the Web) for disparaging claims of events that run contrary to common experience and well-founded scientific conclusions. Being “open-minded” or unprejudiced does not mean refusing to draw conclusions. If Charlie Brown is a perfect skeptic, he must acknowledge that it is possible that, if he runs to kick the football this time, Lucy will let him do so. But, given that she has snatched the football away at the last moment on all previous occasions, he has good reason to believe that she will do the same thing to him this time. That is not a prejudice. That is a warranted conclusion from experience.

And here is a notable passage from “Wonder and Skepticism” (1994):

There’s another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. It’s a foreboding I have—maybe ill-placed—of an America in my children’s generation, or my grandchildren’s generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we’re a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by “the people” I mean the broad population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.

In a previous entry, I raised the question whether there is really any such thing as a “harmless superstition,” and suggested that there is no such thing, but only a distinction between less and more harmful superstitions. Sagan’s reflections seem to me in agreement with this thought.

Next entry: Pat Robertson, Propagandist for Atheism?

Previous entry: Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity

Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity

2010-01-06T20:02:00.007-05:00

There is more to belonging than just a sense of belonging: the entity to which you feel that you belong must really exist, and you must really be included in it. I belong to the Jewish people even though I do not accept Jewish beliefs, but only because of a practice that rests on those beliefs—which leaves me in an uneasy position.

Source

A few days ago, Rogueregime posted some comments on my first three blog entries to which I think any adequate reply would have to be somewhat lengthy. So here, as another entry rather than a mere comment, is my reply to one of them—his comment on my first entry, “Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish.” (I expect to reply to his other comments in subsequent entries.)

Responding to my having written, “It may be, for all I know, that my sense of belonging is in fact illusory and superstitious,” Rogueregime asks me:

I’m curious to know more about what you actually experience when you say you feel a “sense of belonging.” Certainly it can’t be illusory if you feel something, right? How does your sense of belonging to the Jewish people differ from, say, your sense of being an American? Is there a difference, and if so, what is it?

I will answer the rhetorical question in the second sentence first, because I think that it will clarify the other matters. Perhaps my expression was not as clear as it could have been, but I take it that someone may have a sense of belonging to some larger entity when in fact he does not, either because the entity does not include him or because it does not exist. Such a possibility is what I meant by an illusory sense of belonging: it is a sense of belonging that does not rest on an actual fact of belonging.

The application to my own case is that I feel that I belong to the Jewish people, but the veracity of that feeling is problematic for me because of my religious doubts. If the grammatically singular term “Jewish people” merely signifies the totality of those who are Jewish by either matrilineal descent or conversion to Judaism, then my belonging to that totality is a natural fact of which I may be assured, but it is hardly a matter of life-shaping importance. Why should it matter that I belong to a group that is defined in such an oddly disjunct manner? Why should a group be so defined?

The only kind of belonging to the Jewish people that could have what I called life-shaping importance, as far as I can make out, is one that derives from religious tradition. For instance, if I accepted the doctrine that the Jewish people (or the nation of Israel, of which the Jews of today are the surviving remnant) is constituted by a covenant with God made at Mount Sinai, then I would have no difficulty attributing a real basis to my sense of belonging, and explaining why and how my belonging matters to the conduct of my life. But I don’t accept that doctrine, and it seems to me unlikely that I shall ever do so.

What actually obtains is the following rather complicated arrangement: I am counted, by a Jewish tradition founded on beliefs that I do not share, as belonging, by virtue of a natural fact of descent, to a people constituted by a hereditary supernatural bond. The fact of my descent provides me, so to speak, with my membership; experience provides me with my sense of belonging; but in what way I actually do belong, and to what exactly I belong, are questions that I have not been able to answer. If this convoluted reasoning gives you a headache, I am sorry, but I can tell you that it is no easier to be the source and object of it!

Rogueregime also asks me what experiences I have in mind when I speak of this “sense of belonging,” and how it differs from my sense of being American. Well, in both cases I regard certain chapters of history to be in some sense “my” history, because they concern an entity to which I belong; in both cases, though there are things in that history that appall me, I tend to prickle when outsiders find fault with my “people”; in both cases, I recognize that my membership conditions my ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; so there are a lot of similarities. But, for one thing, I can imagine circumstances in which I might trade the political part of my American identity, that is, my citizenship, for another national identity, while I cannot imagine circumstances in which I would trade the religious part of my Jewish identity—even though it remains largely, so to speak, unused—for some other religious identity. I don’t know that I can honestly say that I would sooner die, but the feeling seems to me to come pretty close to that. More of that on another occasion, perhaps. The main point is that the Jewish identity, by my subjective estimate, goes deeper.

Finally, Rogueregime posed this question about my proposed three ways of looking at what it is to be Jewish:

Is there not a sense in which one is Jewish not because of anything you think, say or do, but because others see you as a Jew? The fourth “way” would then be “One who other Jews says is a Jew."

Well, the definition (if it can be called that) has an obvious circularity, though an analogous circularity has not deterred some philosophers of recent times from using similar tactics in formulating so-called conventionalist definitions of art. In my estimate, though, this way of looking at Jewish identity, like those definitions, achieves a tidy outcome by trivializing the question that it purports to answer. You illustrate the application of the definition with the case of an Israeli-born friend who recognizes that she counts as Jewish because her mother is Jewish, but to whom the identification has no value or significance. The proposed definition is well suited to the outlook of such a person, but it evades the question of why “other Jews” call someone Jewish. To say that they do so because the person’s mother is Jewish takes us to the question: why do they do that? The answer then must be in terms of Jewish tradition and Jewish law. And then we have to ask what kind of authority such tradition and law have. So if we are seriously trying to explain what a Jew is or what makes someone Jewish, we can’t avoid those difficult questions.

Previous entry: Superstition and Jewish Observance

Next entry: Carl Sagan on Science and Skepticism

Superstition and Jewish Observance

2010-01-04T21:16:00.005-05:00

Whether a religious practice is superstitious depends on what its practitioners think that they are doing: one and the same practice may be sustained by different beliefs, some superstitious and some not. Some superstitions are more harmful than others, but superstition is in itself a harm to the mind.

Don’t envy me my fine car! (Found at Flickr.com)

Recently I was searching the Web for the source of a passage from the Reform Jewish liturgy, engraved in my memory by repetition long ago, that had recently been returning to my mind. Through Google Books I found it in the old Union Prayer Book:

May the time not be distant, O God, when Thy name shall be worshiped in all the earth, when unbelief shall disappear and error be no more. Fervently we pray that the day may come when all men shall invoke Thy name, when corruption and evil shall give way to purity and goodness, when superstition shall no longer enslave the mind, nor idolatry blind the eye, when all who dwell on earth shall know that to Thee alone every knee must bend and every tongue give homage. O may all, created in Thine image, recognize that they are brethren, so that, one in spirit and one in fellowship, they may be forever united before Thee. Then shall Thy kingdom be established on earth and the word of Thine ancient seer be fulfilled: The Lord will reign forever and ever. (Union Prayer Book for Jewish Worship (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1940), 71–72)

To me this passage is sublime music. Not only do its iterations, its balanced phrases, and its elevated diction seduce my ear, but I am touched—deeply—by the faith and hope that it expresses. Yet I do not share that faith and hope. Nothing could be more welcome to me than a day “when superstition shall no longer enslave the mind nor idolatry blind the eye”; but I have no expectation that such a day will ever come. Nor do I see any reason why the alternative to superstition and idolatry should be worship of the supposed one true God, rather than simply the absence of worship. If belief in a creator and ruler of the universe is not itself a superstition, I have yet to understand how it differs from one.

Evidently I am not the only one on whom this passage has made a lasting impression. In searching the Web for it, I had the good fortune to happen on the text of a sermon given in 1997 by Rabbi Barry Block of Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, the title of which is adapted from the quoted passage: “Does Superstition Enslave Our Minds?” I have found much in this sermon to think about, as well as much that leaves me dissatisfied.

Rabbi Block begins by drawing a distinction between harmful superstitions and harmless ones. He offers as an example of a harmless superstition the saying among Yiddish-speaking Jews of the generation of his grandparents, “Tu, tu, kayn aynahora” (the “tu,” I take it, is not a Romance pronoun but a representation of spitting). They said this, according to Block, “to ward off ‘ayin ha-ra,’ the evil eye,” that is, “to prevent ill fortune from befalling us as a result of our having said something too good or too bad.”

(I can’t resist digressing at this point to mention that an equivalent expression existed among the Spanish-speaking Jews of the Ottoman Empire, to which my maternal grandparents and their siblings and cousins belonged. Among them the formula was “Mashalah!”, an expression derived from the Arabic “Mā šāʾ Allāh” and used in many parts of southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. As I am told, it means “God has willed it” or “Whatever God wills,” and is uttered to ward off the evil eye when notice has been taken of one’s good fortune. My Sephardic great-aunts used it, for example, as congratulation to a mother on her child—not that I appreciated its meaning when I was that child: to me, the word was merely the accompaniment to the dreaded and painful indignity of being firmly pinched on the cheek.)

So that is Block’s example of a harmless superstition: the practice of uttering a formula to ward off the evil eye or its effects. He provides the following anecdote as an example of a harmful superstition:

Some years ago, in Israel, an entire bus full of school children from one town were killed in a terrible accident. In the days following that horrible tragedy, the chief rabbi of the town announced that the accident had occurred because too many of the mezuzzot in town were not kosher. His pronouncement was based on the superstitious notion that the mezuzzah is a mere amulet, a magic spell meant to ward off evil.

In this case, as Block understands it, the superstition is the belief that mezuzot, provided that they are produced and maintained according to halakhic requirements, have the power to keep evil away. Anyone convinced of this, like the rabbi in the story, is likely to conclude that if you fail to maintain your mezuzot properly and misfortune befalls you or members of your household—if, for instance, your children are killed in a bus crash—then you are partly to blame. This superstition is harmful, Block says, first, “because it suggests that victims have brought on their own misfortunes,” and second, because “this kind of superstition can drive Jews away from Judaism. A sophisticated person, hearing that the mezuzzah wards off evil, may well assume that all of Judaism’s teachings are equally silly, and therefore unworthy of our attention.”

Block argues, however, that the fault lies not in the practice of keeping mezuzot but in the meaning that some Jews attribute to that practice. He notes that, while the founders of the Reform movement abandoned the practice as superstitious, it has returned in more recent times, and he proposes that the reasons for the return to the practice be understood in such terms as these:

Each time we enter our home, the mezuzzah reminds us that God should be present there, that we should treat the members of our families, and all who enter our doors, with the love and respect required of us by the words of Torah. When we leave home, and we see our mezuzzah once again, we should be reminded to practice our Judaism along our way, being ethical at work, loving our neighbors as ourselves. If we are so inspired by the mezuzzah, then perhaps it will act like an amulet, after all, even if the scroll inside it isn’t kosher. It won’t prevent bus wrecks, but our lives will be better. We will find blessing in our homes and on our way.

One might raise questions about whether this interpretation of the practice of keeping mezuzot is indeed free of superstition. The business about their reminding us to conduct ourselves ethically and making our lives better through such effects is all very well, but what of the idea of God’s presence and the idea of the Torah as a work of divine origin? For the moment, I want to set such thorny questions aside. Block’s most general point, which I accept, is just that not all superstitions are harmful, and not all ritual practices with which superstitious beliefs have been associated are necessarily superstitious themselves.

What bothers me is that, even with respect to this very general idea, Block’s examples do not seem to me as clear as he apparently would like them to be. Let me start with his discussion of the “evil eye.” Two meanings of this expression (or of “ayin ha-ra”) need to be distinguished. One is the underlying meaning of an envious gaze, or ill will toward another on account of that person’s good fortune. According to Rabbi Louis Jacobs, this is the sense that the expression bears in the Mishnah, in which “the ‘evil eye’ simply denoted that its possessor could not bear with equanimity the good fortune of others.” Taken in this sense, the evil eye is a mere natural phenomenon, an undeniable feature of human psychology. Human beings do, as a matter of plain fact, sometimes bear ill will toward others on account of their good fortune.

Quite distinct from this, though derived from it, is the use of the same expression to signify a supposed power of envious persons to bring actual misfortune upon others by their mere gaze. This sense, Jacobs notes, comes into play in the Babylonian Talmud, from which it passes into later Jewish traditions. (Besides the locus cited by Jacobs, other occurrences in the Talmud are noted by the anonymous purportedly rabbinical author of this piece.) So understood, the expression signifies not a natural phenomenon but something supernatural: a power to make bad things happen to another according to one’s wish by wish alone. Now this surely is superstitious (though for now I defer the question of what makes it so). It is in this sense that Rabbi Block interprets his elders’ utterances of “Kayn aynahora” as gestures to ward off the evil eye. But the interpretation of Rabbi Jacobs, like his Yiddish, is somewhat different:

Even today some people, when praising others, will add: “let it be without the evil eye” (in the Yiddish form, kenenhora), meaning I do not intend my praise to suggest that I am enviously casting a malevolent glance.

On this interpretation, the utterance is not meant to ward off the evil eye, in the supernatural sense, but to disavow the evil eye, in the natural sense. I cannot tell which meaning the users of the Yiddish expression in Block’s recollections had in mind. Indeed, there is no reason to assume that they all understood it the same way, or even that they could have explained what they meant by it, beyond the surface meaning of the words. It is enough that Jacobs’s interpretation shows that we cannot presume, as Block seems to do, that the use of the phrase was a manifestation of superstition. It might have been and it might not have been. In any case, the superstition, if there was any, lies not in the phrase itself or in the use of it, but in the understanding with which it was used.

In saying this, I am, in effect, playing one of Block’s own cards against him: for the distinction between a ritual practice and the superstition associated with it is just the point that he makes about the practice of keeping mezuzot. The trouble I see is that this distinction threatens to undercut the other distinction that he wishes to draw, that between harmless superstitions and harmful ones.

Supposedly, it is harmless to believe that saying “Kayn aynahora” keeps evil away, but harmful to believe that installing and maintaining a mezuzah keeps evil away. The latter point is supposed to be shown by the example of the Israeli rabbi who attributed the accidental death of children to the failure of their parents to maintain their mezuzot properly. But it is easy enough to invent scenarios in which something equally noxious might be said on the basis of the other belief. For instance, suppose that a young couple die in an accident shortly after they are married, and one of the in-laws is blamed for neglecting to say “Kayn aynahora.” The most that can be said to contrast the two examples is that the belief that saying “Kayn aynahora” wards off the evil eye (in the supernatural sense) did not, so far as Block knows—not that it cannot—cause harm, while the belief that keeping a mezuzah wards off misfortune, in the case that he cites, did cause harm.

One way to to link the harm more closely to the belief is to take the line that superstitious beliefs are intrinsically harmful, regardless of their consequences. Superstition, one could argue—and indeed I would argue—is the enslavement of the mind, and to undergo it is a harm whether one knows it or not. (A mind enslaved is impaired by that very bondage from recognizing its condition.) The distinction to be drawn is then not between harmless superstitions and harmful ones, but only between less and more serious forms of mental bondage; perhaps also between ones that do not have harmful effects beyond themselves and ones that do.

So what are we to make of Block’s examples? The practice of saying “Kayn aynahora” and the practice of keeping mezuzot on one’s doorposts alike may be based on a superstitious belief in some instances, and may not be so in other instances; that belief, though harmful in itself qua superstition, may do harm in some instances, or it may not. Does this hold for all Jewish ritual practices? I don’t know. I am, however, pretty sure that under any plausible interpretation, at least some such practices necessarily depend on a belief in their divine origin. It is difficult to conceive of a non-theistic rationale for keeping strict halakha, where that includes behavior that no one knows about but you (as against observance dictated by social pressures within an Orthodox community). So that leads me to the really difficult question: Is belief in God, or more specifically in a God who reveals himself through Torah, itself a superstition?

For the moment, I will only say, as I said at the beginning: if there is a difference between the two, I have never been able to see it. Whether that is because there is no difference or because I have not looked far enough, I am in no position to say. I do hope, however, to say more about this question, as well as about the question of what superstition is, in a subsequent post.

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Next post: Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity

IOU for Replies to Comments

2010-01-04T19:21:00.002-05:00

One hope that I had when I started this blog was that I would learn to write more quickly. I ought to have known better. I am the sort of writer who would fuss over drafts of a shopping list if I had to present it to someone else. Each of my posts so far has cost me at least six hours of composition time. Over the past several days, I have started drafts of several posts, but there is only one on which I have continued to work; and I have surely put more than ten hours into it so far. I think that it is nearly finished, but I can’t be sure of that: new complications have a way of continually emerging.

In the mean time, I have unexpectedly received some rather substantial comments on previous entries from tcs3600 and rogueregime. Each of them merits a thoughtful reply, and, knowing my own habits, I can’t count on being able to post replies to them soon. So my intention is to devote an entry to replying to those comments as soon as I have finished and posted the entry on which I am now working.

Previous entry: Why Are There So Few Non-Orthodox Jewish Blogs?

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Why Are There So Few Non-Orthodox Jewish Blogs?

2009-12-29T22:38:00.006-05:00

Why are there so few bloggers writing about Judaism and Jewishness from a perspective comparable to mine? Is it because too few non-Orthodox Jews care enough about Judaism to write about the topic, or is it because too few of them know enough about Judaism to do so?

(I couldn’t find a good photo of a guy in a kippa at a computer)

Rogueregime, a blogger on Jewish concerns from a Reform perspective, asks in a recent post, “Is anyone else like me out there?”

I have found lots of great frum (i.e., religious) and off-the derech (i.e., by former "observant" Jews) blogs out there, and I have even come across some right-wing sites that at the very least are giving me some food for thought. [. . .]

But I'm not finding other blogs written by people like me: Liberal, Reform Jews searching for a meaningful, authentic connection with the nitty-gritty of our faith.

Now I do not know how specifically Rogueregime intended the words “Liberal” and “Reform.” (Did he mean “Liberal” with a capital L or a small one? If the latter, did he mean liberal in religion or in politics?) Speaking for myself, I would be satisfied to find some blogs in which Jews who are not presently or formerly Orthodox—understood to include the whole range from Modern Orthodox to Ultra-Orthodox—address Jewish concerns. I don’t care whether they are Reform or Conservative or Reconstructionist or Liberal or Renewal or “other” (which would include “unaffiliated”). I would just like to be able to read some thoughtful blog writing about what it means to be Jewish from perspectives that are like mine to the extent of being completely outside of Orthodoxy. I have found Rogueregime’s blog and now the two that he cites in his post (The Reform Shuckle and Mah Rabu). There may be others out there, but, given how hard they have been to find, they cannot exist in the same profusion as Orthodox blogs. Why is that?

The first explanation that came to my mind when I asked myself this question was that there are not many non-Orthodox Jews who find being Jewish to be a topic of sufficient interest for a blog. But I think that a more plausible answer—and it is in some ways an even sadder one—is that there is simply not enough knowledge of Judaism among the non-Orthodox for many of them to blog about Jewish concerns, at least in any very interesting way. I may be overgeneralizing from a narrow experience, but it seems to me that the great majority of non-Orthodox Jews—Jews like me—have at best a smattering of second- and third-hand knowledge of the historical sources of Jewish law and doctrine. Many have not even that. Since most of us do not know Hebrew, let alone Aramaic (which I only recently learned to be the primary language of the Talmud: how ignorant is that? I also ask my non-Orthodox Jewish reader: did you know that?), we don't even have a vocabulary in which to express the pertinent concepts. At least, that is the impression that I get from reading Orthodox blogs, in which Hebrew words and phrases that I never knew are scattered like slang in the conversation of teenagers. (I have recently learned that this mode of expression is called Yeshivish.)

Now it is, of course, a celebrated fact about Jewish tradition that if you want to know what “the Jewish view” on X is, where X is a non-trivial topic, you are asking an essentially unanswerable question. There is no single Jewish view on any topic of significance: what there is is two thousand years of rabbinical disputation. What you have to learn is not what “the Jewish view” is, but how the argument has gone. The trouble is that if you grow up outside of strict Jewish observance, then that tradition is not likely to seem of anything but academic interest to you.

In writing even this much, I have run the risk of talking beyond my knowledge; so I am reluctant to take the topic much further. (Whatever shame there is in knowing that one is ignorant, it is less than the shame of learning that one has talked ignorantly, i.e., made statements with a presumption of knowledge when in fact one did not know what one was talking about.) From this point, I will try only to relate it to my own particular predicament.

I am willing to grant that there may be a form of belief in God that is not superstition. What I cannot conceive to be other than superstition is the attribution of particular events in history to God’s will, particular texts to his authorship (or “inspiration”—a bit of verbal evasion that either means essentially the same thing as authorship or means essentially nothing), or particular laws and observances to his authority. (For two thousand years our rabbis have inveighed against superstition: but it seems to me that in practice what they mean is just superstitions other than their own.)

Now from this point of view, it is difficult to conceive of a rationale for observing halakhah or bringing up one’s children within it. And among Jews who grow up and live without such observance, few are likely to feel much incentive to study the tradition of rabbinical literature and thought. But without study of that tradition, Jews really do not know what Judaism is. In my view, that means that they do not really know what they are. If they do not care about their ignorance, and either abandon Judaism or fail to pass it on to the next generation, they may be throwing away something of immeasurable value. I cannot say that I know that there is something of immeasurable value in Judaism; but I also do not know that there is not. For this reason, I am not willing to throw Judaism away.

So the sum of the matter is this: On the one hand, I cannot understand Judaism otherwise than as being founded on certain beliefs that I find to be inherently superstitious. On the other hand, there may be something of immeasurable value in Judaism. I cannot be in favor of throwing out something that, for all I know, may be of immeasurable value. I also cannot be in favor of superstition. I don’t know where to stand. My only consoling thought is that the Jews of the world—secular or religious, liberal or strict, skeptical or superstitious (but I don’t mean these three pairs of terms as equivalents!)—will go their various ways regardless of what I think or say.

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Hocus-Pocus about “Magical Thinking”

2009-12-29T00:00:00.008-05:00

Unquestionably, human beings have a deep and inescapable predisposition to magical thinking; but to identify all instances in which we attribute to things a meaning that goes beyond what we can observe in them as “magical thinking” simply muddies the waters. Ritual actions can have a power that owes nothing to magical beliefs.

In view of how little power we mortals have over what happens in our lives, it is not surprising that we are suckers for magical thinking. Some people manifest this tendency in obvious ways: traditional superstitions about broken mirrors, black cats, saying the name of “the Scottish play” inside a theater, and the like; “lucky” charms and tokens; ritual repetitions of acts that were once accidentally connected with a good outcome; and so on. But magical thinking also has its subtler forms. It is in play when we give vent to chagrin by exclaiming “Just my luck!” To the extent that such an utterance is meant seriously, it implies that a tutelary spirit or individual “luck” orders events for one’s particular disadvantage, or that the events of one’s life are shaped by an invisible power that makes things come out worse for oneself than for others. Of course, no one with a modicum of intellectual self-respect and the capacity for critical reflection seriously affirms such an idea. But the fact remains that, when uncontrollable and unforeseeable events have turned out against us, there is some consolation in entertaining such cosmically self-centered ideas. As I have heard some people say: “I’m not superstitious—just stitious.”

An article by Matthew Hutson, published in Psychology Today in March of 2008, purports to explore this very subject: the persistence of magical thinking even in people who are not aware of engaging in it. (The article is, at the moment of writing, the second hit on Google for “magical thinking,” right after the corresponding entry in Wikipedia.) After presenting an anecdote about a piano formerly owned by John Lennon (about which more in a moment), Hutson says:

Maybe you’re not a Beatles fan. Maybe you even hate peace and love. But you are wired to find meaning in the world, a predisposition that leaves you with less control over your beliefs than you may think. Even if you’re a hard-core atheist who walks under ladders and pronounces “new age” like “sewage,” you believe in magic.

Hutson’s first positive assertion—that we are all “wired to find meaning in the world”—is, I take it, indisputable and unobjectionable (apart perhaps from the ugliness of the computer-geek metaphor of describing human beings as being “wired” somehow). His second assertion, that this predisposition “leaves you with less control over your beliefs than you may think,” and that, even if you are of a skeptical bent, you believe in magic, is rather disturbing, at least to a skeptically minded person like me. Reading that claim makes me keen to know what evidence he has for such a bold assertion. Here is a sample of what Hutson offers:

Often we don’t even register our wacky beliefs. Seeing causality in coincidence can happen even before we have a chance to think about it; the misfiring is sometimes perceptual rather than rational. “Consider what happens when you honk your horn, and just at that moment a streetlight goes out,” observes Brian Scholl, director of Yale’s Perception and Cognition Laboratory. “You may never for a moment believe that your honk caused the light to go out, but you will irresistibly perceive that causal relation. The fact remains that our visual systems refuse to believe in coincidences.” Our overeager eyes, in effect, lay the groundwork for more detailed superstitious ideation. And it turns out that no matter how rational people consider themselves, if they place a high value on hunches they are hard-pressed to hit a baby’s photo on a dartboard. On some level they’re equating image with reality. Even our aim falls prey to intuition.

The first observation is that if a streetlight goes out just when you honk your horn, you “irresistibly perceive” a causal connection in virtue of the nature of your “visual system,” no matter how well aware you are that there is none. This is supposed to show that your “visual system” “believes” in a causal connection. The second observation is that if you throw darts at a photo of a baby on a dart board, your aim will be bad: this is supposed to show that “on some level” you are equating the photo of a baby with a baby.

Both arguments are utter rubbish. They turn on the strategic use of conceptual slippage. Of course, two events occurring at the same time may strike me as if they were causally connected; I might say that they look to me as if they were causally connected. But this is not tantamount to my believing that the events are causally connected.

In fact, Scholl (the psychologist quoted within the passage) seems to be aware of this point; he tries to avoid absurdity by saying that my visual system “believes” in a connection, even when I do not. But it makes no sense to attribute beliefs to a mere part of a human being. Whatever it means to say that my “visual system” “believes” something (if it means anything coherent at all), that does not mean that I believe it. The argument therefore gives no evidence of the occurrence of magical thinking. Similarly, in the case of the dart board, all that has been shown is that the photo has an effect on people that is similar to the effect of an actual baby: no evidence whatever has been provided to support the unverifiable and obscurantistic claim that “on some level” people believe that the photo is a baby.

Hutson’s entire argument rests on equivocations of this nature. His most villainous equivocation is perpetrated with the very term that forms the title of the article, “magical thinking”; for he uses it to cover both belief in unobservable causal connections and the attribution to things of a meaning that is not grounded in observable causal connections. By means of this conflation, he illegitimately counts instances of the latter (invested meaning) as instances of the former (magical thinking properly so called). Consider the anecdote with which the article opens, concerning a tour made by John Lennon’s piano years after the musician’s death.

“It gives off his spirit, and what he believed in, and what he preached for many years,” says Caroline True, the tour director and a colleague of the Steinway’s current owner, singer George Michael. Free of velvet ropes, it could be touched or played by anyone. According to Libra LaGrone, whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, “It was like sleeping in your grandpa’s sweatshirt at night. Familiar, beautiful, and personal.”

“I never went anywhere saying this is a magic piano and it’s going to cure your ills,” True says. But she consistently saw even the most skeptical hearts warm to the experience—even in Virginia, where the piano landed just a month after the massacre [at Virginia Tech]. “I had no idea an inanimate object could give people so much.”

Where exactly is magical thinking supposed to be evident in this account? Hutson never says, though he presents the story as an illustration. He seems to think the presence of magical thinking too obvious to require explanation. Perhaps he reasons that, since the piano is not John Lennon himself, or an image or a recording of him, but is merely a piano that was once owned and used by him, anybody who regards it as anything other than an old piano must believe that Lennon is somehow actually present in it.

Any anthropologist who made such a leap in interpreting human behavior would be derided as incompetent. So I suggest a more charitable interpretation: Hutson has conflated the common human practice of endowing objects with a significance that goes beyond what can be observed in them with magical thinking properly so called. I find this interpretation confirmed by what he says further on in the article:

To some, John Lennon’s piano is sacred. Most married people consider their wedding rings sacred. Kids with no notion of sanctity will bust a lung wailing over their lost blanky. Personal investment in inanimate objects might delicately be called sentimentality, but what else is it if not magical thinking? There’s some invisible meaning attached to these things: an essence. A wedding ring or a childhood blanket could be replaced by identical or near-identical ones, but those impostors just wouldn’t be the same.

Hutson’s rhetorical question “What else is it if not magical thinking?” is either disingenuous or obtuse. The question of the nature of our attachment to particular possessions, when that attachment is grounded in the history of the items rather than in their observable characteristics, deserves to be posed seriously, not used as a mere rhetorical device for counting all instances of such attachment without examination as “magical thinking.” No doubt, some people do engage in magical thinking with regard to such things: some may believe that the items in question bring them luck, or that getting rid of them would bring disaster, or that they allow them to communicate with the spirit of the former owner, or things of that nature. But not everyone who cherishes a possession in this way holds such beliefs. I doubt that even most such people do.

A simple instance: A friend of mine once gave me a small stuffed toy as a kind of joke gift. For a long time, I kept it atop a dresser, where it would gather dust, because I had no particular use for it and it simply did not fit in with anything else that I own. After a few years, when I was cleaning the clutter out of my apartment, I included it with the items to be given away. Now for all that I knew, my friend might have forgotten that she ever gave me such a gift, or might not care the least whether I kept it or dumped it; I certainly hoped that, if she knew of my discarding the toy, she would not blame me for it. But I could not help feeling, as I think anyone in such a position would feel, that the act of getting rid of the toy had about it something of a desecration. Why? Because the toy was given to me by a friend and was a palpable token of our friendship.

I don’t think that anyone will have any difficulty understanding this fact. But to attribute my feelings about the toy to “magical thinking,” a term that properly designates a belief in supernatural agencies and occult causal connections, is groundless. Hutson’s leaps from observations on how people endow physical tokens with meaning to the conclusion that they are indulging in magical thinking is as groundless and irrational as (genuine) magical thinking itself.

One thing that particularly annoys me about people who reason in the way that Hutson does is that, while they claim to be uncovering the depths of irrationality in human beings, the arguments that they use actually presuppose an implausibly and dogmatically rationalistic way of regarding human behavior. They see people behave in ways that don’t make sense if you try to explain them as attempts to secure particular ends by means of observable causal connections. You might think that the logical conclusion to draw is that the behavior in question simply is not an attempt to secure any end beyond itself. But instead of drawing that conclusion, they conclude that the behavior must be an attempt to secure an end based on belief in an unobservable causal connection. I don’t deny that some people do things of this nature; but to interpret all ritualistic behavior by human beings in this way is a mere rationalistic prejudice. Hutson’s thinking not only makes magical thinking seem much more pervasive than it is, but gives too little credit to the inherent power and significance of ritual practices.

Bibliographical note

Readers of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” (available in the volume Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, edited by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 115–55) will recognize its influence on my critique of Hutson. For instance: “Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied” (123). Or this remark, which, whether or not it is fair to Frazer, is the best analysis I have seen of a certain kind of scientistic obtuseness: “His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves” (131). My observations on the senselessness of imputing beliefs to visual systems is also indebted to the work of Wittgenstein, by way of the work of his disciple Peter Hacker. See M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), ch. 3, “The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience.”

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On Being Skeptical

2009-12-27T20:20:00.018-05:00

“Skepticism” can signify a tendency to doubt, a devotion to critical inquiry, or a certain popular movement advocating scientific and critical thinking against magical and pseudo-scientific thinking. There is something of all three in the writer of this weblog.

Skeptical Hippo

The word “skeptical,” along with its relatives “skeptic” and “skepticism,” belongs to the set of words that have found their way from the vernacular of an ancient language into the jargon of philosophers, and from there back into the vernacular of modern languages, with shifts of sense occurring at each turn. In classical Greek, the noun σκέψις (skepsis), as glossed by Liddell and Scott (see bibliographical note below), bears the sense of “examination, speculation, consideration” and “inquiry into, speculation on,” while the adjective σκεπτικός (skeptikos) has the sense of “thoughtful, reflective.” The word only took on a sense recognizably close to its modern one in consequence of its being adopted by certain philosophers who made the raising of doubts their primary occupation—the original “skeptics” of ancient Greece.

It is difficult to say much about the ancient skeptics without getting involved in thorny problems of interpretation. (Anyone interested in reading more about them may consult the articles in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) I will add only this much about them, that in applying the word “skeptical” (or rather its Greek antecedent) to themselves they meant to describe themselves as inquiring, but they have become better known by their doubting, and it is the latter trait that has primarily been understood by the word in its popular use ever since. The river-dwelling quadruped shown above may not be convinced of this, but the image macro as a whole supports my point.

Lately there has arisen a popular movement that has restored to the word “skeptic” something of its original positive sense. A skeptic in this sense is a proponent and practitioner of critical thinking and of the application of scientific method to extraordinary claims. The term “extraordinary claims,” made popular by Carl Sagan’s famous saying, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” is not exactly a technical one, but as it is used by skeptics of this stripe, it seems to have a somewhat specialized meaning. My understanding is that it signifies claims that are contrary to well-founded scientific conclusions or to extensive common experience, such as those concerning ghosts, extraterrestrial visitors, creationism, much so-called alternative medicine, and so on.

On this understanding, a skeptic is not, per se, someone who finds these claims incredible, but someone whose estimate of them is based on a critical and scientific examination of the evidence. It just happens that in the vast majority of instances, such examination leads to the conclusion that the claims are unfounded. The Web site of the Skeptics’ Society puts the matter thus:

Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas — no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are “skeptical,” we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe.

In describing myself as a “skeptical Jew,” I had several meanings in mind. First, like the skeptics of the Skeptics’ Society, I am a proponent of critical thinking and scientific rationality, and an opponent of superstition and pseudo-science. So I am at least a fellow-traveler of the skeptical movement. Second, even before I had much idea of what critical thinking or scientific method was, I was devoted to the critical examination of important claims and assumptions. So I am in that respect a skeptic by natural disposition. And third, I am a skeptical, both in the special sense of applying critical reason and in the popular sense of being doubtful, where theistic and eschatological claims, such as those of Judaism, are concerned. I expect to exhibit something of my skepticism in each of these respects in my future posts in this blog. The third respect, though, is the one that I expect to get the most exercise.

Bibliographical note

“Liddell and Scott”: Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940); on line at the Perseus Digital Library. From this hefty work of reference two abridgements were derived, one of about half the size of the original and the other somewhat smaller than that. The three are known to students of classics as “Big Liddell” (the name is stressed on the first syllable), “Middle Liddell,” and “Little Liddell.”

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Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish

2009-12-27T02:56:00.010-05:00

My first version of the title of this post was “Three Ways of Looking at a Jew.” The parody held some charm for me (if you don't get the allusion, look here), but I chose to replace it with a title that better reflects the actual content to follow. The three aspects are: belonging to the Jewish people, practicing Judaism, and adhering to Jewish beliefs. Relations among the three are complicated.

Kahal Shalom Synagogue, Rhodes

Here are three ways in which one might think of what a Jew is:

One who belongs to the Jewish people.
One who practices Judaism.
One who adheres to the Jewish faith.

It would be nice, wouldn’t it—I mean, as far as intellectual comfort is concerned—if these three descriptions invariably coincided. For if they did, then any question of what it means to be a Jew would be, in the end, academic: a potentially interesting matter to think about, but not an urgent or a necessary one, and above all not a troubling one. But I cannot imagine a world in which those three descriptions invariably coincide—other than, I suppose, a world without Jews.

I could not define any of those three items without entangling myself in controversies that would soon take me out of my depth. Nonetheless, I believe that I fit the first description—“one who belongs to the Jewish people”—and that this by itself makes me a Jew. Or perhaps I should say that my being a Jew makes me a member of the Jewish people rather than the other way around. In any case, the fact that I practice almost no Jewish observances and accept none of the theistic and eschatological beliefs of Judaism does not raise any doubt in my mind about my Jewish identity. (I suppose that in the eyes of Orthodox Jews I would be a kind of virtual goy; but, since I was born of a Jewish mother, they would still count me as Jewish under halakhah.)

It may seem, then, that for me the question of what it means to be a Jew should be academic after all. For if I am sure that I am Jewish, regardless of my being without Jewish observances and beliefs, then what need is there for me to perplex myself about these various aspects of being Jewish? Let the believing Jews worry about such things!

But the matter is not so simple. For one thing, although the primary criterion of belonging to the Jewish people, and thus of being a Jew, is that one is born of a Jewish mother, this criterion is itself a product of religious law. So one who takes himself to belong by birth to the Jewish people, as I do, is thereby appealing to religious law, and thus to religious practice and belief. To be sure, one can belong to the Jewish people without believing or practicing Judaism, as one can believe without belonging or practicing, or practice without belonging or believing: the three items can occur independently of one another. But they cannot be conceived independently of one another. So the non-believing, non-practicing Jew who considers himself to belong to the Jewish people is thereby entangled in a problem that is anything but academic: how can I belong to a people defined by a religious law that I do not myself accept? If I don't accept the law—if I neither observe it nor accept the beliefs on which its authority rests—do I in fact belong?

One possible response to this problem is simply to give up the idea that one belongs to the Jewish people. Indeed, to be consistent, one would have to deny that there is any such thing as the Jewish people. One would not deny, of course, that there are Jewish people, that is, persons of Jewish descent, most of whom happen to profess a certain religion called Judaism; but one would have to deny that they constitute a people in any serious sense—a sense weighty enough to generate an obligation to continue the traditions of that people, for instance.

I know that many Jews do take this route. For them, being “Jewish” is purely a matter of descent, like being “Irish” or “Italian” as Americans commonly use those terms, meaning that one has forebears of the nationality in question. Such a way of regarding Jewish identity seems coherent and rationally defensible, at least on its face. That is more than I can say for the option that I have taken, that of regarding myself as a member of the Jewish people without accepting the religious beliefs or, for the most part (more on this qualification later), the practices on which that identification seems to rest.

It may be, for all I know, that my sense of belonging is in fact illusory and superstitious. But it may also be that it is not, and that I have simply been unable to figure out what it does in fact rest on. It could rest on accidents of personal history and emotional association, or it could rest on something immeasurably precious that I have so far failed to comprehend. The best bet for me, in my estimation, is simply to press on with my inquiries. A skeptic, as I use the term, is not simply one who doubts, but one who requires sufficient reason for any proposed conclusion in a matter that admits of reasonable doubt. In the present instance, that includes requiring rational substantiation of my own doubts: they may be founded on insights, or on blind spots. Thus I remain a skeptical Jew.

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