Maverick Philosopher

Is a Thinking Person's Afterlife Conceivable?

A repost from over five years ago. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode only once, do you?  No you don't. The savoring of the riches therein contained requires many viewings. Same with what follows, mutatis mutandis.  Resurrected due to its relevance to a recent thread on anti-natalism.

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As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' You get to do there, in a quasi-physical world behind the scenes, what you are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, is a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

     . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into
     which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own
     personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the
     'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely
     extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the
     Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be
     something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now
     is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan
     1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamor, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated, conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns you would not get through to them. For what they  need is not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City.  We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective. These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

On Indulgences

I linked recently to a piece hostile to Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of theism." (Schopenhauer) I now point out a problem with a rather happier and richer form of theism, that of the Roman Catholic Church. Here:

November is the month the Church especially dedicates to praying for the dead. To encourage this holy practice, the Church offers a daily plenary indulgence for the souls in Purgatory, under the usual conditions (right intention, confession, Communion, prayer for the intentions of the pope) to those who visit a cemetery in the period November 1-8. She offers a partial indulgence at other times.

Essential to anything worthy of the label 'religion' is the belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53.) (See The Essence of Religion for seven essential characteristics of religion.) What worries me, though, are those who claim to possess an exact cartography of the transcendent country beyond the senses and an exact understanding of the mechanics of salvation.

Purgatory is of course a sound and necessary idea within a classically theistic scheme inasmuch as almost none of us are worthy of immediate access to the Beatific Vision. (Besides, how many so-called Catholics would even want it? I suspect many of them believe in something along the lines of  'hillbilly heaven' complete with BBQs, fiddles and banjoes, cousin Jethro, and his old dog Blue.) Except for a few saints we will all need more or less purgation. For many this will take the form of a weaning-away from one's attachments to earthly loves and a gradual re-direction of one's misdirected desires upon the Absolute.  Death will detach us physically from our bodies, but it is highly naive to think that it will thereby detach us spiritually from our earthly loves.  It is a reasonable speculation that Hugh Hefner, if he survived his bodily death, is still lusting after nubile females; it is just that he no longer has the physical apparatus with which to implement his lust.

Now let's suppose that your child, who committed suicide, is in purgatory and that you are a Catholic.  A plenary indulgence is a full or total indulgence: it is a get-out-of-purgatory-right-now card.  So you do the things listed above, and your child is sprung from Purgatory.

But isn't this incredible?  I at  least find it hard to swallow. You could dismiss my misgivings as merely autobiographical remarks, but I suspect they are more.

What bothers me is the presumption on the part of the Church that it possesses exact knowledge of the afterlife and the mechanics of salvation. This pretense to detailed, indeed quantifiable, information about matters far, far beyond the human horizon strikes me as deeply dubious if not mendacious. Of course, there was something 'infinitely' worse, namely, the sale by greedy clerics of indulgences. That outrage, you will recall, was part of what fueled the protest of a certain failed monk by the name of Martin Luther.

How can I formulate my misgiving?  What bothers me, I suppose, is the dogmatic over-specification of the Unseen Order. Its 'satellite mapping,' if you will is a sort of secularization of the trans-secular which does not respect the transcendence and mystery of the trans-secular.  Appeal to mystery is often made by the Church in defense of doctrines (Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, et al.) that appear to flout the logical requirements of the discursive intellect; how does that appeal comport with the boringly prosaic  'green eyeshade' quantification and allotment of benefits and allowances pursuant upon so many Pater Nosters, this many Ave Marias, etc?

More later.  There are a number of deep issues here. 

Now, however, I have to take my wife, a good old-fashioned Catholic girl, God bless her, and an exemplar of the Eternal Feminine that leads us upward, to church.  Why do I go to church given how screwed-up the Roman church and its  clergy are (especially those of the American Catholic Bishops who  are leftists first and Catholics second in emulation of their leader Bergoglio the Benighted?)

The highest human pursuit is the pursuit of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One has to prosecute the pursuit  in different ways. One is by working from within one's own tradition, despite its manifold limitations and defects, penetrating into it as deeply as possible,  and taking what is good from it. 

Addendum

John B. writes,

I read your two recent posts on indulgences, and I would like to offer a clarification: indulgences obtained for the souls in purgatory operate  per modum suffragii. An indulgence obtained for the dead is seen as a prayer that the faithful can have special confidence in, since it is, after a fashion, an intercessory prayer made by the Church itself. But it remains a prayer and not a juridical act. The Church on earth does not claim to have jurisdiction over the souls of the dead.

 

I doubt that this resolves all of the problems that indulgences present for you. There are still the questions surrounding indulgences for the living, after all. To be honest, I have a hard time with indulgences myself, for a few reasons, and I'm Catholic.  But the clarification seemed worth making.

 

Bernhard Poschmann's Penance and the Anointing of the Sick includes a very good chapter on indulgences if you want to read more on how they are understood and have been understood historically, and how they arose. The whole book is excellent, and at times surprising.

 

Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?

A slightly redacted re-post from 26 September 2009. 

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The fact and extent of natural and moral evil make belief in a providential power difficult. But they also make belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also the opium of the intellectuals, the opium of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?

And isn’t it more difficult to believe in man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God and his powers.  Man is  impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way.

We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. As I write these lines, the prime minister of a Middle Eastern state calls brazenly and repeatedly for the destruction of another Middle Eastern state while the state of which he is the prime minister prepares the nuclear weapons to carry out the unspeakably evil deed.  Meanwhile the rest of the world is complacent and appeasing.  We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.

There is also the scarcely insignificant point that there is no such thing as Man, there are only individual men, men  at war with one another and with themselves.  We are divided, divisive, and duplicitous creatures.  But God is one. You say God does not exist? That may be so.

But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

On 'Devout'

One reads that so-and-so is a 'devout Catholic' or a 'devout Muslim.'

How would the writer know?  Devotion is an interior state inaccessible to observation from without. The practicing Catholic or observant Muslim, by contrast, can be seen to be such by others. So if what you mean to convey is that so-and-so is a practicing or observant Christian, Muslim, or Jew, then you should write that. It is obvious that the practitioner of a religion need not be particularly devout or devout at all.  And that includes priests, rabbis, and imams.

I grant that external practices are evidence of inner attitude. So, by the dictionary definition, you would not be wrong to call a regular practitioner of a religion 'devout.' But here at Maverick Philosopher our standards are a cut above those of a mere dictionary. We aim at precision in thought and speech. And sometimes we miss the mark.

So rather than bandy about, lemming-like, an oft-heard phrase, journalists should ask themselves whether the alternatives suggested above are more appropriate.

Language matters.

Speaking of dictionaries, The Dictionary Fallacy is a very good article in my biased opinion. It will cost you some effort, but a little hard work never hurt anybody.

Social Constructivism, Denial of Reality, and the Role of Religion

John Derbyshire gives the following as examples of reality denial:

All but a very tiny proportion of human beings are biologically male (an X and a Y chromosome in the genome) or female (two X chromosomes). A person who is biologically of one sex but believes himself to be of the other is in the grip of a delusion. That is what everybody would have said 50 years ago.

Some of those who said it would have followed up with an expression of disgust; some with unkind mockery; some with sympathy and suggestions for psychiatric counseling. Well-nigh nobody would have said: “Well, if he thinks he’s a gal, then he is a gal.” Yet that is the majority view nowadays. It is a flagrant denial of reality; but if you scoff at it, you place yourself out beyond the borders of acceptable opinion.

It is, of course, the same with race. I still blink in disbelief when I hear or read someone saying, “There is no such thing as race.” It falls on my ears much like “There are no such things as mountains,” or “There is no such thing as water.” Of course there is such a thing as race. Until recently, everyone knew this. As I like to remind people, the founder of the modern biological sciences surely knew it.

[. . .]

Reality denial is rampant on the Left.  Part of the explanation, according to Derbyshire, is the decline of religion. The rise in reality denial is due to the decline in religion!

 

Derb's idea is that in the past religion functioned like a lens to focus our wishful thinking on one nonexistent object, God, or rather on one set of nonexistent objects (God, angels, devils, incarnate, pre-incarnate, and dis-incarnate spirits) to the exclusion of all other nonexistent objects.  But with the decline of religion, the urge to deny reality becomes unfocused and can take almost any object, including denizens of the sublunary:

Religion as a lens: When people stop believing in God, the old quip goes, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.

Very serious, practical people—statesmen, generals, industrialists, engineers—often used to be deeply religious, holding the unreal—the transcendent, if you want to be polite—corralled in one part of their mind while the rest grappled with reality. Religion focused wishful thinking—kindly Sky Fathers listening to our prayers, wisps of immortal spirit-stuff in our heads—into a coherent set of ideas and habits.

With that focusing lens gone, wishful thinking runs amok. “I feel female/black, so I am female/black!” “Race creates tensions we don’t know how to manage, so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist!”

Nothing is real

And nothing to get hung about.

Strawberry Fields Forever . . . .

 An Alternative Theory

 

As a theist, I cannot of course accept Derbyshire's partial explanation of leftist reality denial. I of course agree that people engage in reality denial and wishful thinking, and I accept the examples given above as examples of reality denial. 

 

So here is an alternative partial explanation.

 

Atheists presuppose truth. That is, they presuppose that there is a total way things are that does not depend on the vagaries of human belief and desire. (An atheist will be quick to point out that desiring that there be a Heavenly Father is a very bad reason for thinking there is one.)  The characteristic atheist claim is that the nonexistence of God is a part of the way things are.  Theists, most of them anyway, also presuppose that there is a way things are. Their characteristic claim is that the existence of God is a part of the way things are.  The common presupposition, then, is that there is a total way things are. The question is not whether there is truth, but what the truth is.  The question is not whether there is a total way things are; the question is which states of affairs are included in and which excluded from the total way things are.

 

The death of God, however, brings in its train the death of truth as Nietzsche himself fully understood. The loss of belief in the Christian God calls into question whether there is truth at all.  For God is not just another being among beings, but the source of the Being of every being other than God, as well as the source of the intelligibility and value of every being other than God. But nothing is intelligible unless there is truth to be discovered. As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no truth.  And if no truth, then no intrinsic intelligibility. Next stop: perspectivism, Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine.  (The God-truth linkage can be rigorously argued in various ways; here is one.) 

 

Once truth goes by the boards, then nothing counts as true or real except what we want, desire, interpret in line with our interests, socially construct, or what enhances the feeling of power in us, 'empowers us' to use a leftist-POMO turn of phrase with roots in Nietzsche's perspectivism. As Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power #534:

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.

The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.

Once we get to this point in the history of the death of God/truth, a boy can choose to become a girl, and a white a black. Hell, a white boy could choose to become a black girl! Why not?  You just identify yourself that way, there being no fact of the matter to prevent you from choosing any self-identification you like.  Hence the absurdities decried by Derbyshire and the rest of the coalition of the sane, the absurdities of transgenderism and transracialism.

 

God, I am urging, is the support of the way things are. Kick away that support and Being dissolves into a Heraclitean flux of opinions and perspectives.

 

Summary

 

The fact that wants explaining is the fact of leftist reality denial. Two different explanations:

 

Derbyshire:  Time was when wishful thinking was focused on God and other nonexistent objects of religion. But God is now dead culturally speaking, among the elites of the West. (And this is good because, in fact, there is no God.) The need for wishful thinking, however, remains strong. It gets shunted onto sex and race and the results are the reality-denying absurdities of transgenderism ansd transracialism.  

 

Vallicella: God is real, but no longer believed to be real by the elites in the West. Man, seduced by the life-extension consequent upon advances in medical technology, and mesmerized and held in thrall by his 24/7 all-invasive and -pervasive communications technology, can no longer bring himself to believe in anything beyond the human horizon. The human horizon seems to extend limitlessly. The  death of God, however, brings with it the death of truth, and this opens the floodgate to any and all perspectives which are 'true' only in the sense that they reflect the identities and the power demands of those who are the subjects of the perspectives.

 

In short: God is not the focus of our  wishful thinking in such a way as to keep the rest of out thinking focused on reality; God is the support of truth and reality and thus the presupposition of the distinction between wishful thinking and reality-oriented thinking.

 

Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism

Philosophers contradict one another, but that is not the worst of it. The grandest philosophical conclusion is and can only be a proposition about reality and not reality itself. But it is reality itself that we want.

Can religion help? Its motor is belief. But belief is not knowledge, either propositional or direct. And if an appeal to divine revelation is made, then the question inevitably arises: how does one know that a putative revelation is genuine?

If you certify the revelation by appeal to the authority of your church, then I will ask how you know that your church is the true church.  After all, not every Christian is Catholic.   Are those stray dogs who refuse Rome recalcitrant rebels who simply reject the truth when it is plainly presented to them? I think not.

The motor of philosophy is discursive reason. The motor of religion is belief and obedient acquiescence in authority. Neither Athens nor Jerusalem seems to be a wholly satisfying destination.  Nor is straddling them with a leg in each a comfortable posture. 

That leaves Benares.

The motor of mysticism is meditation. Its goal is direct contact with ultimate truth. Direct: not discursive or round-about. Direct: not based on testimony.

So should we pack for Benares? Not so fast. It has its drawbacks. Later.

If I want to be read, I have to be brief.

See here for a richer development of these themes.

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To Understand the Religious Sensibility . . .

. . . two books are essential: Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you, if they do not move you, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility.

"He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne. The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.

Let us suppose that you do not have the time or the stamina or the education to read Augustine's great book itself. Then I recommend to you on this, the feast day of St. Augustine, Peter Kreeft's I Burned for Your Peace: Augustine's Confessions Unpacked (Ignatius Press, 2016). It consists of key quotations with commentary by Kreeft.

But don't expect a high level of philosophical rigor. It is a work of popular apologetics by a master of that genre. 

Kreeft's lack of philosophical rigor is illustrated by his view that "The refutation of this materialism is simple." (147)

For a long time Augustine struggled with the question of how there could be purely spiritual realities such as God and the soul. He was in the grip of a materialism according to which everything that is real must have a bodily nature and occupy space. But then he noticed that the mental acts by which we form bodily images are not themselves bodily images. My image of a cat, for example, has shape and color, but the mental act of imagination does not have shape and color.  As Kreeft puts it:

The imagination cannot imagine itself. The understanding, however, can understand itself. We can have a concept of the act of conceiving, and we can also have a concept of the act of imagining. [. . .] The light of the projection machine must transcend the images it projects on the machine. A material image cannot create an image; only an immaterial soul can.

It is exceedingly strange that many otherwise intelligent philosophers today simply cannot see this point when they embrace a materialist "solution" to the mind-body problem." (148)

Now I reject materialism about the mind, but surely this is a dubious argument.  

It is not obvious that there are mental acts, but let us suppose there are.  So we distinguish the act of imagining a cat, from the object imagined, the cat.  Now it must be granted that phenomenological reflection fails to note any physical or spatial feature in the act of imagining or in any act of any type. When we introspect the operations of our minds we find no evidence that they are brain processes. But lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.  The lack of evidence that mental acts are material is not evidence that they are not material.  It might be that mental acts are brain processes, but that we are unable to cognize them in their true nature.  That they do not appear to be material does not prove that they are immaterial.

That's one problem. Second is that Kreeft moves immediately from the immateriality of mental acts to an immaterial soul substance as subject of these acts. That move needs to be mediated by argument. 

Continence

The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.

Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.

Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.

Illustrate by adducing the sad case of Bill Cosby.

Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.'  Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short.

The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Don't expect much.

Brunton Quotes Muhammad

"Contemplation for an hour is better than formal worship for sixty years." (Paul Brunton, Notebooks vol. 15, Part I, p. 171, #16)

Brunton gives no source. Whatever the source, and whether or not Muhammad said it, it is true. Aquinas would agree. The ultimate goal of human existence for the doctor angelicus is the visio beata. The Beatific Vision is not formal worship but contemplation.

Islam may be the "saddest and poorest form of theism" as Schopenhauer says, and in its implementation more a scourge upon humanity than a boon, but it does have genuine religious value.  I would also add that for the benighted tribesmen whose religion it is it is better than no religion at all.

That last sentence is not obvious and if you disagree you may be able to marshal some good reasons.  

Why do I say that Islam for certain peoples is better than no religion at all? Because religion tames, civilizes, and teaches morality; it gives life structure and sense. Religion imparts morality in an effective way, even if the morality it imparts is inferior. You can't effectively impart morality to an 18-year-old at a university via ethics courses.  Those courses come too late; morality needs to be inculcated early.  (Reflect on the etymology of 'inculcate' and you will appreciate that it is exactly the right word.)  And then, after the stamping-in early on, ethical reflection has something to chew on.  Same with logic: logic courses are wasted on illogical people: one must already have acquired basic reasoning skills in concrete situations if there is to be anything for logical theory to 'chew on.'

Now this from the Scowl of Minerva:

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. F. J. Payne, vol. II (Dover, 1966), p. 162. This is from Chapter XVII, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" (emphases added and a paragraph break):

Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all countries and ages, in their splendour and spaciousness, testify to man's need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable, which follows close on the physical. The man of a satirical frame of mind could of course add that this need for metaphysics is a modest fellow content with meagre fare. Sometimes it lets itself be satisfied with clumsy fables and absurd fairy-tales. If only they are imprinted early enough, they are for man adequate explanations of his existence and supports for his morality.

Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need for countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. Such things show that the capacity for metaphysics does not go hand in hand with the need for it . . . .

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Books or Eternal Life?

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 94:

A priest who regrets having to leave his books when dying? Which proves that the intense pleasure of eternal life does not infinitely exceed the gentle company of books.

Come on, Al, be serious. Eternal life is an object of faith and hope, not of knowledge or sure expectation. The good padre regrets leaving the familiar and reliable pleasures that he knows and loves and is practically certain of, pleasures he need not have faith in or hope for, and is anxious over the wrenching transition that will pitch him headlong into Kingdom Come.

There are confirmed worldlings who simply do not understand religion. Camus is one of them.

Belief Skepticism, Justification Skepticism, and the Big Questions

1) The characteristic attitude of the skeptic is not denial, but doubt. There are three main mental attitudes toward a proposition: affirm, deny, suspend. To doubt is neither to affirm nor to deny. It can therefore be assimilated to suspension. Thus a skeptic neither affirms nor denies; he suspends judgment, withholds assent, takes no stand. This obvious distinction between doubting and denying is regularly ignored in political polemics. Thus  global warming skeptics are often unfairly tagged by leftists as global warming denialists as if they are willfully rejecting some well-known fact.

2) The skeptic is not a cynic. A cynic is a disillusioned idealist. The cynic affirms an ideal, notes that people fail to live up to it, allows himself to become inordinately upset over this failure, exaggerates the extent of the failure, and then either harshly judges his fellows or wrongly impugns their integrity. His attitude is predicated on the dogmatic affirmation of an ideal. Skeptics, by contrast are free, or try to be free, of dogmatic commitments, and of consequent moral umbrage.

Cynic: "All politicians are liars!" Skeptic: "What makes you think that scrupulous truth-telling is the best policy in all circumstances? And what makes you think that truth is a high value?"

3) One can be skeptical about a belief or a class of beliefs, but also about the rational justification for a belief or a class of beliefs. Thus skeptics divide into belief skeptics and justification skeptics. (See R. Fogelin, Walking the Tightrope of Reason, Oxford UP, 2003, 98) You can be one without the other. There are various combinatorially possible positions. Here are three of several interesting ones:

a) S doubts whether p is justified, but S does not doubt that p: he affirms that p.

b) S doubts whether p is justified, and in consequence doubts that p.

c) S doubts whether p is justified, and concludes that one ought to suspend judgment on p.

Ad (a). Suppose Tom canvasses the arguments for and against the existence of God and concludes that it's a wash: the arguments and considerations he is aware of balance and cancel out.  Tom finds himself in a state of evidential equipoise. As a result he doubts whether belief in God is justified.  But he decides to believe anyway.  In this example Tom does not doubt or deny that God exists; he affirms that God exists despite doubting whether the belief is rationally justified.  With respect to the existence of God, Tom is a justification skeptic but not a belief skeptic.

Ad (b). Like Tom, Tim doubts whether belief that God exists is justified. Unlike Tom, Tim transfers his doubt about the justification to the belief itself. Tim is both a justification skeptic and a belief skeptic.

Ad (c). And then there is Cliff. He thinks it is wrong always and everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Like Tim and Tom, he doubts whether the existence of God is justified and for the same reason: the arguments pro et contra balance and cancel.  He reasonably takes evidential equipoise as entailing that there is  insufficient evidence for either limb of a contradictory pair of theses. But, unlike Tom and Tim, Cliff infers a normative conclusion from his evidential equipoise: it is morally wrong, a violation of the ethics of belief, to believe that God exists given that the evidence is insufficient. 

For now I am concerned only with the rationality of doing as Tom does.  

Tom examines both sides of the question. He does his level best to be fair and balanced.  But he finds no argument or consideration to incline him one way or the other. Now it seems perfectly obvious to me that our man is free to believe anyway, that is, in our example either to affirm the existence of God or to reject the existence of God.  He is not psychologically compelled by his state of evidential equipoise to suspend belief.

But while Tom is free to affirm, would it be rational for him to affirm the existence of God? Yes, because for beings of our constitution it is prudentially (as opposed to theoretically) rational to believe beyond the evidence. Consider the case of

The Alpine Hiker

An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm.  He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure.  His only hope is to jump the chasm.  The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump.  But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jeffrey Jordan puts it.  If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it.  "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."

We should therefore admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not.  Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that (in consequence) it is not more probable than not that I have a higher destiny in communion with God.  

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence.  Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case.  He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it.  So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe.  You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.

What if he is wrong?  Then he dies.  But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly.  By believing beyond the evidence he lives his last moments better than he would have by giving up. He lives courageously and actively. He lives like a man.

Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump.  Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety.  And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.

It is the same with God and the soul.  The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real.  For suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big bloody joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what? 

What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.  Either way I am better off than  without the belief in God and the soul.  If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.

I am either right or wrong about God and the soul.  If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny.  If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.

So how can I lose?  Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits. 

Addendum

Dave Bagwill hits me with a powerful objection, which I will put in my own way.

It may be that mere intellectual assent to propositions about God and the soul "incurs no costs." But how could that be true for those who live their faith?  There are plenty of examples of those whose lived faith has cost them their liberty, their livelihoods, and their lives.  As we speak, Christians are being driven from their homes and slaughtered in the Middle East by adherents of the 'religion of peace.'  

This is a good objection and at the very least forces me to qualify what I wrote, perhaps along the following lines: religious belief and practice incur no real costs for those of us fortunate to live in societies in which there is freedom of religion.

How long freedom of religion can last in the USA is a good question given the leftist assault on religious liberty. Yet another reason to battle the leftist scum.  Luckily, we now have a chance with Trump as president.  

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More on the Question: Is Christianity Vain if not Historically True?

Just over the transom from Jacques:

Enjoying your posts as always!  Thanks for writing so regularly, at such a high level.  Reading your posts on Wittgenstein on religion I have a few quick thoughts about religion (or Christianity specifically).  When I first started reading Wittgenstein, I initially thought that he had in mind some very different reason for thinking that historical evidence or facts were irrelevant to religion.  Then I realized this was just what I wanted to think, for my own reasons; I think you've done a good job here of explaining what he and his followers probably have in mind, and why it seems so absurd.

Still, I have sympathy for his claim that it just wouldn't matter if it turned out that all the Gospels were fabrications (for example).  I'm not a Christian--at least, I don't think I am one?  But I have the strong intuition that the story of Christ is just true, in some ultimate sense, so that if it's not historically true that would only show that history is a superficial or irrelevant kind of truth--that it just doesn't matter what happened historically if we want to know about ultimate things like God, the soul, the afterlife.

If I learned that Christ never existed, for example, then I'd be inclined to interpret this "fiction" as some kind of intrusion of a higher reality into our lame little empirical world.  God might well pierce the Veil of Maya in a "fictional" story, right?  If this world is illusory or second-rate somehow, it wouldn't be that surprising if that's the way it works.  The prisoners in the Cave might first intuit the real world outside by seeing (similarly) "fictional" representations of the real world produced by the figures in front of the fire.

So I think Wittgenstein overlooks an important third possibility:  the truth of Christianity might be neither "historical" nor some set of "truths of reason" but instead some other truth that is just as "objective" (i.e., independent of any language games) but which is only grasped by means of a historically false narrative (or by means of participating in a certain language game for which questions of truth and falsity with respect to the empirical or historical world are irrelevant).  I realize this is kind of sketchy and vague!  Do you know what I mean? 

This is fascinating and I encourage Jacques to work out his ideas in detail and in depth.  

A comparison of Christianity with Buddhism suggests itself. As I understand Buddhism, its truth does not require the actual existence of a prince Siddartha who long ago attained Enlightenment by intense seated meditation under the Bodhi Tree and in so doing became Buddha. This is because one's own enlightenment does not depend on what some other person accomplished or failed to accomplish.  There is no Savior in Buddhism; or, if you will, one is one's own savior. Salvation is not vicarious, but individual. Buddhism is a religion of self-help, or 'own power': if one attains the salvific state one does so by one's own power and doing and not by the mediation or help of someone else. History, then, doesn't matter: there needn't have been someone in the past who did the work for us. The sutras might just be stories whose truth does not depend on past events, but is a function of their efficacy here and now in leading present persons to the salvific state (nibbana, nirvana).  Verification in the here and now is all that is needed.

What Jacques is saying sounds similar to this. The Christian story is true, but not because it records historical facts such as the crucifixion, death, and Resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth, who took the sins of the world upon himself, the sacrificial lamb of God who, by  taking the sins of mankind upon himself and expiating them on the cross, took away the sins: agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. Jacques is telling us that the Christian story is true whether or not it is historically true, and that its truth is therefore not the truth of an historical account.  And he agrees with Wittgenstein that the truths of Christianity are not propositions discernible by reason. I think Jacques is open to the idea that the truth of Christianity is revealed truth, a sort of revealed 'fiction' or 'myth' that illuminates our predicament.  But Jacques disagrees with Wittgenstein, and agrees with me, by denying that Christianity is a mere language game (Sprachspiel) and form of life (Lebensform).  That would subjectivize it, in contradiction to its being revealed truth. 

Jacques is proposing a fourth way: Christianity is the revelation by God of a sort of 'fictional' or 'mythical' truth that does not depend on what goes on "in our lame little empirical world."  To evaluate this one would have to know more about the sense in which Christianity is true on his reading. Buddhism doesn't need historical facts because its truth is a matter of the efficacy of its prescriptions and proscriptions in inducing in an individual an ever-deepening detachment from the samsaric world in the direction of an ultimate extinguishing of desire and the ego that feeds on it.  

I seem to recall Max Scheler saying somewhere that the Buddhist project is one of de-realizing the sensible world.  That is a good way of putting it. The Buddhist meditator aims to see through the world by penetrating its radical impermanence (anicca) which goes together with its total lack of self-nature or substantiality (anatta), the two together making it wholly 'ill' or 'unsatisfactory' (dukkha).

Christianity, however, is not life-denying in this sense. Christ says that he came so that we may have life and have it more abundantly.  This life is a transfigured life in which the self is not dissolved but transformed.  Christianity does not seek the eradication of desire, as does Buddhism, but its re-direction upon a worthy object.  

Orthodox -- not majuscule but miniscule 'o' -- Christianity is not susceptible to Jacques' reading. Christianity is a very strange religion blending as it does Platonic and Gnostic elements with Hebraic materialism and particularism.  (How odd of God to choose the Jews.) Although Gnosticism was rejected as heresy early on, Platonism is essential to Christianity as Joseph Ratzinger rightly argues in his Introduction to Christianity.  (Ratzinger was Pope before Bergoglio the Benighted. The German has a very good theological-philosophical head on his shoulders.) But Jewish materialism and particularism are also essential to Christianity.  No orthodox Christian can gainsay what Saul/Paul of Tarsus writes at 1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV)

How the mystical-Platonic-spiritual-universal  elements (Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, et al.) can be made to fit with the material-historical- particularist elements is not easy to say.  There are a number of tensions.

But the main thing that speaks against Jacques' interpretation is that Christianity does not propose an escape from this material world of space, time, flux, and history.  This world is not illusory or the veil of Maya as on such Indian systems as Advaita Vedanta, nor is it anicca, anatta, and dukkha in the precise senses that those terms have in original, Pali Buddhism.  This world is not a product of ignorance or avidya, and the task is not to see through it.  The goal is not to pierce the veil of Original Ignorance, but to accept Jesus Christ as one's savior from Original Sin. The material world is real, albeit derivatively real, as a created world. 

Is this world "second-rate"? Well, it does not possess the plenary reality of its Source, God.  It has a different and lesser mode of Being than God's mode of Being. And it is a fallen world.  On Christianity, it is not just mankind that is fallen, but the whole of creation.  What Christianity proposes is not an escape from this world into a purely spiritual world, but a redemption of this world that somehow spiritualizes the gross matter with which we are all too familiar.

So on my understanding of Christianity, the problem with the material world is not that it is material, but that it has been corrupted by some Event far in the past the negative effects of which can only be undone by subsequent historical events such as the birth of Christ, his atonement, and the Second Coming. History is essential to Christianity.

Like Jacques, I too have Platonic tendencies. That may come with being a philosopher.  Hence I sympathize with his sketch.  Maybe the truth lies in that direction.  But if we are trying to understand orthodox Christianity, then Jacques' approach is as unacceptable as Wittgenstein's. 

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1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, U. of Chicago Press, 1980, tr. Peter Winch, p. 32e, entry from 1937:

Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however because it concerns 'universal truths of reason'! Rather because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief.  This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else.

A believer's relation to these narratives is neither the relation to historical truth (probability), nor yet that to a theory consisting of 'truths of reason'. [ . . .] 

Central to the Gospel accounts is that Christ was seen alive by numerous witnesses after his crucifixion and death. Assuming that 'faith' and 'belief' are interchangeable in this context, Paul is saying that belief in Christ as savior is vain (empty, without substance) if the Gospel accounts are false.  Wittgenstein, however, is maintaining the exact opposite: Christian belief loses nothing of its substance even if the Gospel accounts could be proven to be false.

How can Wittgenstein maintain something so seemingly preposterous?

Christianity is a form of life, a language-game, self-contained, incommensurable with other language-games, under no threat from them, and to that extent insulated from logical, historical, and scientific objections, as well as from objections emanating from competing religious language-games.

This is why the "historical proof-game" is irrelevant to Christian belief.  The two language games are not in competition.

But is the Christian belief system true? Evasion of this question strikes me as impossible.

Here is where  the Wittgensteinian approach stops making sense for me.  No doubt a religion practiced is a form of life; but is it a reality-based form of life? When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, Pilate dismissed his claim with the skeptical, "What is truth?"  I for one  cannot likewise dismiss the question of the truth of Christianity in Pilate's world-weary way.  (Pilate comes across to me like a Pyrrhonian skeptic who is tired of these deep questions and just doesn't care any more.) If Christianity is true, it is objectively true; it corresponds to the way things are; it is not merely a set of beliefs  that a certain group of people internalize and live by, but has an objective reference beyond itself. 

And no doubt religions can be usefully viewed as language games.  But Schachspiel is also a Sprachspiel.  What then is the difference between Christianity and chess?  Chess does not, and does not purport to, refer to anything beyond itself.  Christianity does so purport.  This is why it is absurd when L. W claims, in other places, that Christianity is not a doctrine. Of course it is a doctrine. Its being much more than a doctrine does not show otherwise.  

So I say the following. If it is demonstrable that the Resurrection did not occur, then Christian faith is in vain. Paul is right and Ludwig is wrong. Historical investigation cannot be wholly irrelevant to Christian belief. On the other hand, at some point one has to make a faith commitment. This involves a doxastic leap since one cannot prove that the Resurrection did occur.  Will is superadded to intellect and one decides to believe.  It may help to reflect that unbelief is also a decision and also involves a leap. Given the infirmity of reason, and the welter of conflicting considerations, it is impossible to know which leap is more likely to be a leap onto solid ground. 

"Go on, believe! It does no harm." (CV, 45e)

Existentially, this may well be the decisive consideration. What, after all, does the believer lose if Christianity turns out to be false? Where is the harm in believing?  On the other hand, should it prove to be true . . . .

So while Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, takes an extreme, and ultimately untenable view, he has existential insights that need accommodation.

Here is an extended post on Wittgensteinian fideism.

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of  it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

We are spiritual beings, participants in the infinite and the absolute.  But we are also, undeniably, animals.  Our human condition is thus a  predicament, that of a spiritual animal.  As spirits we enjoy freedom of the will and the ability to encompass the whole universe in our thought.  As spirits we participate in the infinity and absoluteness of truth.  As animals, however, we are but indigent bits of the world's fauna exposed to and compromised by its vicissitudes.  As animals we are susceptible to pains and torments that swamp the spirit and obliterate the infinite in us reducing us in an instant to mere screaming animals.

Now if God were to become one of us, fully one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh?  Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery?  That is Weil's point.  The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all,  define being human. 

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis.  His spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh now nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed  to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment.  He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional. 

The darkest hour.  And then dawn.

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Ten Impediments to Religious Belief

Why is religious belief so hard to accept? Why is it so much harder to accept today than in past centuries?

Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter the path of the would-be believer of the present day.  Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question,  a normative question.  The following taxonomy is merely descriptive.  And probably incomplete.  This is a blog.  This is only a blog.

1. There is first of all the obtrusiveness and constancy and coherence of the deliverances of the senses, outer and inner.  The "unseen order" (William James), if such there be, is no match for the 'seen order.' The massive assault upon the sense organs has never been greater than at the present time given the high technology of distraction: radio, television, portable telephony, e-mail, Facebook and other social media, not to mention Twitter, perhaps the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.  

Here is some advice on how to avoid God from C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

If Lewis could only see us now.

2. The fact that there are many competing systems of religious belief and practice.  They overlap, but they also contradict. The extant contradictory systems cannot all be true, though they could all be false.  The fact that one's own system is contradicted by others doesn't make it false, but it does raise reasonable doubts as to whether it is true.  For a thinking person, this is a stumbling block to the naive and unthinking acceptance of the religion in which one has been brought up.

3. The specificity of religious belief systems and their excessively detailed dogmatic contents.  One is put off by the presumptuousness of those who claim to know what they cannot, or are not likely, to know.  For example, overconfident assurances as to the natures of  heaven, hell, and purgatory together with asseverations as to who went where.  Stalin in hell?  How do you know?  How do you even know that there is a place of everlasting punishment as opposed to such other options as simple annihilation of unrepentant miscreants?

There is the presumptuousness of those who fancy that they understand the economics of salvation to such a degree that they can confidently assert that so many Hail Mary's will remove so many years in purgatory.  For many, such presumptuousness is an abomination, though not as bad as the sale of indulgences.

The human mind, driven by doxastic security needs, is naturally dogmatic and naturally tends to make certainties of uncertainties. (It also does the opposite when in skeptical mode: it makes uncertainties of (practical) certainties.)

Related post:  Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

4.  The fact that the religions of the world, over millenia, haven't done much to improve us individually or collectively.  Even if one sets aside the intemperate fulminations of the New Atheists, that benighted crew uniquely blind to the good religion has done, there is the fact that religious belief and practice, even if protracted and sincere, do little toward the moral improvement of people.  To some this is an impediment to acceptance of a religion. 

Related point: the corruption of the churches.

Again, my task here is merely descriptive.  I am not claiming that one ought to be dissuaded from religion by its failure to improve people much or to maintain itself in institutional form without corruption.  One can always argue that we would have been much, much worse without religion. Even Islam, "The saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) has arguably improved the lot of the denizens of the lands in which it has held sway, civilizing them, and providing moral guidance.

5. The putative conflict between science and religion.  Competing magisteria each with a loud claim to be the proper guide to life.  Thinking people are bothered by this.

6. The tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (religion).  The battle between faith and reason. So many of the contents of religion are either absurd (logically contradictory) or else difficult to show to be rationally acceptable.

7.  The weight of concupiscence.  We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so largely unable to control our drives.  The thrust of desire valorizes the phenomenal thus conferring plenary reality upon the objects of the senses while occluding one's spiritual sight into the noumenal. See Simone Weil in the Light of Plato. Is it any surprise that the atheist Russell, even in old age, refused to be faithful to his wife?  It is reasonable to conjecture that his lust and his pride -- intellectuals tend to be very proud with outsized egos-- blinded him to spiritual realities.  Jean-Paul Sartre is another case in point.

8. Suggestibility.  We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not.  In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.

9. The apparent moral absurdities of some religious doctrines.   See Kant on Abraham and Isaac. 

10. The rise of life-extending technology. For some of us at least, life is a lot less nasty, brutish, and short than it used to be.  This aids and abets the illusion that this material life suffices and will continue indefinitely. The worst illusion sired by advanced technology, however, is the transhumanist fantasy which I discuss here. 

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Nature, Signs, and Religious Experience

Reader P. J. offers us for delectation and analysis the following quotation from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God:

[Brother Lawrence] was eighteen at the time, and still in the world. He told me that it had all happened one winter day, as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the tree's leaves were indeed gone, he knew that they would soon reappear, followed by blossoms and then fruit. This gave him a profound impression of God's providence and power which never left him. Brother Lawrence still maintains that his impression detached him entirely from the world and gave him such a great love for God that it hasn't changed in all of the forty years he has been walking with Him.

P. J. comments that

. . . nature is sometimes said to serve as a 'signpost' to God's existence, without the need for auxiliary premises such as the complexity of things, the orderly patterns of substances as described by the laws of nature, the intelligibility of the world, and so on and on. It is almost as if -- at least for Br. Lawrence -- nature, just by being there, served to point toward God in a primitive or non-inferential way. Nature, for him, pointed not simply to God's existence, but to a more positive account of God as the providential orderer of nature.

I admit that I don't know where to take this idea, or how far it can be taken, but it strikes me as an interesting topic to research in natural theology: the way(s) in which nature, without the aid of auxiliary premises, can point to God's existence, and to a more content-rich account of the divine attributes.

 

I agree that the question is interesting and important. Perhaps we can formulate it as the question whether nature can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God, and certain features of nature as natural signs of certain of the divine attributes. I will consider here only the first question.  Whether nature as a whole can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God will depend on what we understand by 'natural sign.' Suppose we adopt Laird Addis' definition: 

 

An entity is a natural sign if by its very nature, it represents some other entity or would-be entity, that is , if it is an intrinsically intentional entity. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple UP, 1989, p. 29)

 

I don't doubt that there are intrinsically intentional entities, thoughts (acts of thinking) being an example. Intrinsic intentionality is to be understood by contrast with derived intentionality. The intentionality or aboutness of a map, for example, is derivative, not intrinsic. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's intrinsic properties such as physical and geometrical properties.  Suppose a neutron bomb wipes out all minded organisms. Maps and chunks of terrain remain. Do the maps in this scenario map anything, mean anything? No. This is because there are no minds to give the maps meaning.

 

Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned and agreed upon by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater. The intentionality of the map and its features (contour lines, colors, etc.) is derivative from the intrinsic intentionality of minds.

 

So our question becomes this: Could nature be a natural sign in virtue of being intrinsically intentional?  I don't think so. Nature can be taken or interpreted or read as pointing to God, but that would be a case of derivative intentionality: we would then be assigning to nature the property of pointing to God.  But there is nothing intrinsic to nature that makes it point to God.

 

But of course one might mean something else by 'natural sign.' Fresh bear scat on a trail is a natural sign that a bear has been by recently.  A natural sign in this sense is a bit of the natural world, or a modification of the natural world, that typically has a natural cause and that by its presence 'refers' us to this cause.  The scat is the scat of a bear, but this 'of' is not the 'of' of intentionality.  Similarly with the tracks of a mountain lion.  They are typically caused by a mountain lion but they are not about a mountain lion.  

 

Note the difference between the subjective and the objective genitive. The tracks of a mountain lion are a mountain lion's tracks (genitivus subjectivus) whereas the hiker's fear of a mountain lion is not a mountain lion's fear but the hiker's fear (genitivus objectivus). Both genitives can occur in one and the same sentence. My favorite example: Timor domini initium sapientiae. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A second example: Obsidis metus mortis magnus est. The fear of death of the hostage is great. The hostage is the subject of fear; death the object. Analysis of this example in German here.    

 

But I digress.  

 

Could the natural world point to God in the way mountain lion tracks point to a mountain lion?  Yes, if the natural world is the effect of a divine cause. But how do we know this?  One cannot tell that the natural world is a created world just by observing it. Even if it is created, its createdness cannot be 'read off' from it. It can only be 'read into' it.

 

Now let me try to answer my reader's question.  I take him to be asking the following question:

 

Q. Does the the natural world, by its sheer existence, directly show (i.e., show without the aid of auxiliary premises), that there exists a transcendent creator of the natural world?

 

If (Q) is the question, my answer is in the negative.  This is invalid: the universe exists; ergo, God exists. This is valid: the universe exists; the universe is contingent; whatever contingently exists cannot exist as a matter of brute fact but must have a cause of its existence; nothing can cause its own existence; ergo, God as transcendent causa prima exists. Whether the second is a sound argument and how one would know it to be sound are of course further questions; it is, however, a valid argument.  

 

But we had to bring in auxiliary premises.  And similarly for this question:

 

Q*. Does the apparent designedness of the natural order directly show the existence of a transcendent designer?

 

And this one:

 

Q**. Does the beauty of "The starry skies above me" (Kant) directly show that this beauty has a transcendent Source which "all men call God" (Aquinas)?

 

Closely Related: Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20 

 

On the Misuse of 'Theology'

This is an addendum to my  post, On the Misuse of Religious Language.

In the left-wing rag of record, the NYT, we find:

“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”

So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably.  It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs.  In the 'theology' of a liberal, theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.

And then there is the misuse of 'metaphysics.' I'll save that rant for later.

Brevity is the soul of blog.

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On the Misuse of Religious Language

A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.

Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.

A catalog of currently misused religious terms would have to include ‘heaven,’ ‘seventh heaven,’ ‘hell,’ 'dark night of the soul,' and many others besides.

Take ‘retreat.’ Time was, when one went on a retreat to get away from the world to re-collect oneself, meditating on the state of one's soul and on first and last things. But now one retreats from the world to become even more worldly, to gear up for greater exertions in the realms of business or academe. One retreats from ordinary busy-ness to prepare for even greater busy- ness.

And then there is ‘spirituality.’ The trendy embrace the term but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.

Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern. Not to mention the irreligious and anti-religious Left for whom leftism is their 'religion.'

A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice in that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

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A Bad Reason for Thinking that Atheism is not a Religion

Atheism is not a religion.  But the following is not a good reason for thinking so:

Atheism (and here I mean the so-called “weak atheism” that does not claim proof that god does not exist), is just the lack of god-belief – nothing more and nothing less. And as someone once said, if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby.  That really ought to end the discussion right there. Clearly, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion.

Right, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion. But atheism is not a mere lack of belief in something.  If atheism is just the lack of god-belief, then tables and chairs are atheists.  For they lack god-belief. Am I being uncharitable? 

Suppose someone defines atheism more carefully as lack of god-belief in beings capable of having  beliefs.  That is still unacceptable.  Consider a child who lacks both god-belief and god-disbelief.  If lacking god-belief makes him an atheist, then lacking god-disbelief makes him a theist.  So he is both, which is absurd.

Obviously,  atheism is is not a mere lack of belief, but a definite belief, namely, the belief that the world is godless.  Atheism is a claim about the way things are: there is no such thing as the God of Judaism, or the God of Christianity, or the God of Islam, or the gods of the Greek pantheon, or . . . etc.  The atheist has a definite belief about the ontological inventory: it does not include God or gods or any reasonable facsimile thereof such as the Plotinian One, etc. 

Note also that if you deny that any god exists, then you are denying that the universe is created by God: you are saying something quite positive about the ontological status of the universe, namely, that it does not depend for its existence on a being transcendent of it.  And if it does not so depend, then that implies that it exists on its own as a brute fact or that it necessarily exists or that it causes itself to exist.  Without getting into all the details here, the point is that if you deny that God exists, this is not just a denial  of the existence of a certain being, but implies a positive claim about the ontological status of the universe.  What's more, if  there is no creator God, then the apparent order of the universe, its apparent designedness, is merely apparent.  This is a positive thesis about the nature of the physical universe.

Atheism, then, is not a mere lack of god-belief.  For it implies definite positive beliefs about reality as a whole and  about the nature and mode of existence of the physical universe.

Why then is atheism not a religion?  No good purpose is served by using 'religion' to refer to any set of action-guiding beliefs held with fervor and commitment.  For if one talks in that hopelessly loose way, then extreme environmentalism and Communism and leftism are religions.

Although it is not easy to craft a really satisfactory definition of religion, I would say that  all and only religions affirm the existence of a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For (Mahayana) Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana.  Since atheists precisely deny  any such transcendent reality, contact with which is our highest good and ultimate purpose, atheism is not a religion.

"But aren't militant atheists very much like certain zealous religionists?  Doesn't militant atheism function in their lives much as religion functions in the life of the religiously zealous?"  No doubt, but if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the other or is a species of the other.

And another thing.  If atheism is not a religion, then, while there can be atheist associations, there cannot be, in any serious sense of the word, an atheist church.

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Whether Atheism is a Religion

I have been objecting to the calling of leftism a religion.  Curiously, some people call atheism a religion.  I object to that too.

The question as to what religion is is not at all easy to answer.  It is not even clear that the question makes sense.  For when you ask 'What is religion?' you may be presupposing that it has an essence that can be captured in a definition that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions.  But it might be that the concept religion is a family resemblance concept like the concept game (to invoke Wittgenstein's famous example).  Think of all the different sorts of games there are. Is there any property or set of properties that all games have and that only games have?  Presumably not.  The concept game is a family resemblance concept to which no essence corresponds.  Noted philosophers of religion such as John Hick maintain the same with respect to the concept religion.

If you take this tack, then you can perhaps argue that Marxism and secular humanism and militant atheism are religions.

But it strikes me as decidedly odd to characterize  a militant anti-religionist as having a religion.  Indeed, it smacks of a cheap debating trick:  "How can you criticize religion when you yourself have a religion?" The tactic is an instance of the 'So's Your Old Man' Fallacy, more formally known as the argumentum ad hominem tu quoque.

I prefer to think along the following lines.

Start with belief-system as your genus and then distinguish two coordinate species: belief-systems that are theoretical, though they may have practical applications,  and belief-systems that are by their very nature oriented toward action.  Call the latter ideologies.  Accordingly, an ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs.  Then distinguish between religious and non-religious ideologies.  Marxism and militant atheism are examples of  non-religious ideologies while the Abrahamic religions and some of the Eastern religions are examples of religious ideologies.

I am using 'ideology' in a non-pejorative way.  One could also speak of Weltanschauungen or worldviews except that 'view' suggests spectatorship whereas action-guiding belief-systems embody prescriptions and proscriptions and all manner of prudential dos and don'ts for participants in the flux and shove of the real order.  We are not mere spectators of life's parade, but are 'condemned' to march in it too.

To repeat: there are theoretical belief-systems and belief-systems that are ineluctably action-guiding and purpose-positing.  Among the latter we distinguish two subspecies, the religious and the non-religious.

But this leaves me with the problem of specifying what it is that distinguishes religious from non-religious ideologies. To put it Peripatetically, what is the specific difference? Perhaps this: all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana.  But I expect the Theravadins to object that nibbana is nothing positive and transcendent, being only the extinguishing or dissolution of the (ultimately illusory) self.  I could of course simply deny that Theravada Buddhism is a religion, strictly speaking.  I could lump it together with Stoicism as a sort of higher psychotherapy, a set of techniques for achieving equanimity, a therapeutic wisdom-path rather than a religion strictu dictu.

There are a number of tricky and unresolved issues here, but I see little point in calling militant atheism a religion, though I concede it is like a religion in some ways.

But as I have been pointing out lately, if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the other or is a species of the other.

Is Islam a Religion? Buddhism?

Claude Boisson writes,

Given your criterion 3 for an ideology to be a religious doctrine, it is doubtful that Islam could be viewed as a religion (it is also a socio-political system with a supremacist agenda, but that is another matter).

 

In Islam, man can err, has to be obedient to Allah, but man is not fallen, and needs no redemption.

 

When he is born, a human being is pure (and a Muslim by nature). His primordial nature (fitra) is not wounded, corrupted, fallen, and needs no regeneration. 

 

Even more, according to the most extensive interpretation of the (belated and somewhat anti-Qur'anic) doctrine of ismah (the impeccability of prophets), prophets, including Muhammad, never sin intentionally. 

 

Here again are my tentatively proposed  seven criteria for an ideology's being a religion:

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is a spiritual reality and thus mind-like. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

 

As I understand Islam, a normative Muslim could accept my (1) and (2).  But as Professor Boisson makes clear, (3) implies that Islam is not a religion.

We can now argue in two ways: If anything is a religion, then its satisfies my criteria; Islam does not satisfy my criteria; ergo, Islam is not a religion.  Or one could insist that Islam is a religion and that my (3) ought to be jettisoned.

What about Buddhism? It is a religion of self-help, a religion of self-power as opposed to other-power.  Among the last words of the Tathagata:

Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Rely on yourselves, and do not rely on external help.

Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Seek salvation alone in the truth. Look not for assistance to anyone besides yourselves.

[. . .]

I now exhort you, saying: ‘All component things must grow old and be dissolved again. Seek ye for that which is permanent, and work out your own salvation with diligence.’

My (4) rules out self-help wisdom-paths.  We cannot achieve salvation by our own power. We need divine grace.  So if Buddhism is a religion, then (4) must be jettisoned.  If, however, (4) is upheld, then Buddhism does not count as a religion.

We note en passant that my (4) also rules out Stoicism and Pyrrhonian Skepticism as religions.

This leads to the thorny question of what one is doing when one sets forth criteria as I have done.  I am obviously not involved in a project of pure stipulation.  On the other hand I am not trying to give a lexical definition of 'religion.' Dictionary definitions are of little use in inquiries such as this one. (See The Dictionary Fallacy.) I am trying to pin down the normative essence or nature of religion.  

But does religion have an essence? Not clear. It may be that the concept of religion is a family resemblance concept, one to which no essence corresponds.  But even if religion does have an essence, how do I know that my criteria articulate this essence?  In particular, how do I justify (3) and (4)?

But suppose religion does have a normative essence and that I have captured it.  Then Islam and Buddhism are no more counterexamples to my definition than the existence of a three-legged cat is a counterexample to a definition of 'cat' that includes being four-legged as one of its essential marks.  A three-legged cat is not a normatively normal cat; it is a defective cat.  Islam and Buddhism are arguably not normatively normal religions; they are defective religions. They leave out essential features of the 'true' religion.

It is important to realize that none of these questions will ever be resolved, here below leastways, to the satisfaction of every competent practitioner of the relevant disciplines. It is therefore eminently stupid, besides being morally wrong, to violate and murder our ideological opponents, except in self-defense against the adherents of the 'religion of peace' to employ a contemporary example. 

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Progressivism and Religion Again

Malcolm Pollack writes,

Saw your post today. I really do think that modern Leftism is best understood as a religion. I realize also that understanding something as if it were a religion is different from saying it is a religion, and so I've just written a response to your post, in which I try to make the case that Progressivism is, in effect, a religion to the people who espouse it -- that it activates all the same behaviors and cognitive postures.

I'm hoping we might come to a "meeting of the minds" on this one, because I believe that seeing the Left as embodying a religion is, when it comes to having to deal with them, a helpful (and accurate) stance for the rest of us.

I will have to read Malcolm's lengthy response, but for now a couple of quick rejoinders.

1) Is leftism a religion to the people who espouse it?  I rather doubt it.  I don't think your average committed lefty would cop to being religious in his beliefs and practices. If you could find me a communist or other atheistic leftist who understands his stance as religious I would be very surprised.  Of course there are 'progressives' who are members of Christian and other churches.  They water down Christianity to bring it in line with their 'progressivism.' They are lefties first, and Christians second, if at all. But we are not talking about them.

2)  Why is it "helpful" for us in our battles with destructive leftists to view them as adhering to and promoting a religion?  I say it is not helpful. It is obfuscatory and inaccurate. It blurs important distinctions.  And it is unnecessary. 

But if people want to say that leftism functions in the psychic economy of a committed leftist in a manner closely analogous to the way religion functions in the psychic economy of a committed religionist, then I have no objection. Just don't say that leftism is a religion.  Or if you insist on using the sentence 'Leftism is a religion,' make sure you make it clear that you are using it to express the above proposition.

Just as a salt substitute is not salt, a substitute for religion in the life of a leftist is not a religion.

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Is Leftism a Religion?

Via Malcolm Pollack, I came to an essay by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar in which surprising claims are made with which Pollack agrees but I don't. Deresiewicz:

Selective private colleges have become religious schools. [Emphasis added.] The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

[. . .]

What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern. The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

Dennis Prager is another who considers leftism to be a religion:

For at least the last hundred years, the world’s most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam.

It has been leftism.

Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.

I begin with Prager and return to Deresiewicz.

While I agree with the rest of Prager's column, I have trouble with his characterization of leftism as a religion. 

It is true that leftism is like a religion in certain key respects.  But if one thing is like another it does not follow that the first is a species of the other. Whales are like fish in certain key respects, but a whale is not a fish but a mammal. Whales live in the ocean, can stay underwater for long periods of time and have strong tails to propel themselves. Just like many fish.  But whales are not fish.

I should think that correct taxonomies in the realm of ideas are just as important as correct taxonomies in the realm of flora and fauna.

Leftism is an anti-religious political ideology that functions in the lives of its adherents much like religions function in the lives of their adherents. This is the truth to which Prager alludes with his sloppy formulation, "leftism is a religion."  Leftism in theory is opposed to every religion as to an opiate of the masses, to employ the figure of Karl Marx.  In practice, however, today's leftists are rather strangely soft on the representatives of the 'religion of peace.'  (What's more, if leftism were a religion, then, given that leftism is opposed to religion, it follows that leftism is opposed to itself, except that it is not.)

Or you could say that leftism is an ersatz religion for leftists. 'Ersatz' here functions as an alienans adjective. It functions  like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.'  A decoy duck is not a duck.  A substitute for religion is not a religion.  Is golf a religion?  Animal rescue? 

An ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs.  That genus divides into the two species religious ideologies and nonreligious ideologies.  Leftism, being "overwhelmingly secular" just as Prager says, is a nonreligious ideology. It is not a religion, but it shares some characteristics with religions and functions for its adherents as a substitute for religion.

You might think to accuse me of pedantry.  What does it matter that Prager sometimes employs sloppy formulations? Surely it is more important that leftism be defeated than that it be fitted into an optimal taxonomy!

Well yes, slaying the dragon is Job One.  But we also need to persuade intelligent and discriminating people.  Precision in thought and speech is conducive to that end.  And that is why I say, once more:  Language matters!

Now let's consider the criteria that Deresiewicz adduces in support of his thesis that the elite liberal schools are religious.  There seem to be two: these institutions (i) promulgate dogmas (ii) opposition to which is heresy.  It is true that in religions there are dogmas and heresies. But communism was big on the promulgation of dogmas and the hounding of opponents as heretics.

Communism, however, is not a religion. At most, it is like a religion and functions like a religion in the lives of its adherents.  As I said above, if X is like Y, it does not follow that X is a species of Y.  If colleges and universities today are leftist seminaries -- places where the seeds of leftism are sown into skulls full of fertile mush -- it doesn't follow that these colleges and universities are religious seminaries.  After all, the collegiate mush-heads are not being taught religion but anti-religion.

Pace Deresiewicz, there is nothing religious or "sacred" about extreme environmentalism. After all it is a form of idolatry, nature idolatry, and insofar forth, anti-religious.

Why would a critic of leftism want to label it a religion?  Prager, who promotes religion, might be thinking along these lines: "You lefties cannot criticize religion since you have one too; it is just that yours is an inferior religion." Someone who opposes religion might be thinking along the following lines: "Religion is a Bad Thing, not conducive to human flourishing; leftism is a religion; ergo, leftism is a Bad Thing too."

This may be what is going on in Deresiewicz's mind. He is opposed to extreme leftism and thinks he can effectively attack it by labeling it a religion. This strategy encapsulates two mistakes. First, leftism is not a religion. Second, religion is a good thing. (I would even go so far as to argue that Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of theism" (Arthur Schopenhauer, reference and quotation here), has been of service to the benighted peoples who know no better religion: they are better off with Islam than with no religion at all.)  There is also the question whether dogmas are bad for us.

But now's not the time to worry about whether religion with its dogmas is good for humans. My present point is that leftism is not a religion, and that no good purpose is served by confusing it with a religion.

Isn't This All Just a Semantic Quibble?

I don't think so.  It goes to the question whether religion has an essence or nature. Some say it doesn't: the concept religion does not pick out an essence because it is a family-resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense.  I say religion has an essence and that the following points are ingredient in that essence:

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is a spiritual reality. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. 

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

If I have nailed down the essence of religion, then it follows that leftism, which is a form of secular humanism, is not a religion. Leftism collides with religion on all of these points.  This is not a semantic claim but an ontological one. And the issue is not a quibble because it is important.

In sum. We must try to think as clearly as we can. We must therefore not confuse what is distinct. Hence we ought not confuse leftism with a religion. 

Pollack link; Deresiewicz link; Prager link.

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The Pious Pyrrhonian: Is Beliefless Piety Possible?

Is it possible to be a religiously pious Pyrrhonian?  The Pyrrhonian skeptic, aspiring to tranquillity of mind, tries to live without beliefs. These of course include religious beliefs which are a prime cause of bitter and sometimes bloody contention.  So one might think that a skeptic of the stripe of Sextus would have nothing to do with religion.  But this is not the case. Skepticism does not require abstention from religion. What Pyrrhonian skepticism implies is the project of beliefless piety or beliefless religiosity.  Let me explain.

The Pyrrhonian skeptic is in quest of the human good. But he is convinced that theoretical inquiry will not lead us to it. His is a medicinal or therapeutic conception of philosophy. We are ill, and we need a cure, an empirical cure. ('Empiricus' is not Sextus' last name!)   Therapy, not theory! would make a good Pyrrhonian motto.  There may be truth, but certain knowledge of it is unavailable to us. We are thrown back upon beliefs. But beliefs are many, they conflict, cancel each other, and inflame ugly passions.  Belief conflict militates against that freedom from disturbance or ataraxia which Pyrrhonian skeptics deem essential to human well-being (eudaimonia). On their view the cacophany of competing belief claims is a prime source of kakadaimonia.  Beliefs are part of the problem.

The skeptical cure for our doxastic ills is suspension of belief and a tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian.  We emerged from the everyday to seek the truth that we thought would bring felicity, but the truth rebuffed us, proving unknowable. We were cast back upon beliefs and the strife of systems. We ought then to return to everyday living and everyday discourse. Hence my talk of re-insertion into the quotidian. It is in the service of tranquillity. Tranquillity, not truth! might serve as a good second Pyrrhonian motto.The tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian  involves acquiescence in the customs and traditions of one's time and place.  

Among the most widespread and deeply embedded customs and traditions are those of a religious nature.  Making his peace with the everyday and the ordinary, the Pyrrhonian makes his peace with the observances, rites, rituals, and verbal formulations of the religion practiced around him. He participates in the observances and assents verbally to the formulae of worship and belief. But he abstains from inner commitment.

A Pyrrhonian Catholic

A Pyrrhonian Catholic might attend mass and in that context recite and give verbal assent to the Apostles' Creed: "I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son . . . .  But while uttering sentences, our Pyrrhonian would not affirm or deny any propositions. Withholding assent from theological propositions, he would suspend judgment on such questions as whether or not God exists; whether or not the cosmos is ontologically derivative from a causa prima; whether and in what sense this First Cause is omnipotent; whether and in what sense this God has a Son, and so on.  Thus he would presumably not get into a fight with an atheist over the existence of God, or with a Muslim over the tripersonality of God.  Our Pyrrhonian would simply go along with the prevailing religious customs and usages of his time, place, and social group while (silently) withholding intellectual assent from propositions which purport to record the structure of reality apart from language games and forms of life, to employ, anachronistically, some Wittgensteinian turns of phrase. (The post-Tractarian Wittgenstein was also an exponent of philosophy as therapy.)  Time to quote an authority.

Terence Penelhum: "The skeptic continues with the rituals and the formulae of his tradition, self-consciously seeing it as a tradition and not believing it, yet not denying it." (God and Skepticism, D. Reidel 1983, p. 14, emphasis in original.)

A radical Pyrrhonian Catholic might take it a step further.  It is one thing to suspend judgment with respect to a proposition; a more radical thing to doubt whether there is any proposition to suspend judgment about. The radical Pyrrhonian Catholic grants only the verbal formula; he does not grant that it expresses a proposition.  For example, he might doubt, with respect to the formula "There is one God in three divine persons" whether there is any coherent proposition that this sentence expresses.  The sentence is a grammatically admissible  concatenation of individually meaningful words, but this leaves open the question whether there is a unitary sense, or Fregean Gedanke/proposition, that these words, taken collectively as forming a sentence, express. Our radical will not assert that there is no such proposition; he will express his being at a loss over the question. He will give vent to the mental state of aporia, the state of being at a loss, being perplexed, flummoxed, uncomprehending.

With respect to the Trinitarian formulation, the moderate Pyrrhonian Catholic grants that the formula expresses a proposition, but suspends judgment as to the truth or falsity of the proposition. The radical Pyrrhonian Catholic, by contrast, suspends judgment as to whether or not the formula expresses a proposition.

Let us now put the radical 'on the back burner' to stew in his juices.  We may revisit him later.

Is the Moderate Position on Pyrrhonian Piety Plausible?

It is widely agreed that it is impossible for a Pyrrhonian to have no beliefs at all. But this is not our question. Our question is whether it is possible, and if possible plausible, for a person to live religiously, talking the talk and walking the walk, playing the language game and participating in the form of life, without specifically religious or theological dogmatic commitments or adherences. Is beliefless religiosity possible? Is it possible to give merely verbal but nonetheless sincere assent to religious formulae while suspending belief as to the truth value of the propositions these formulae express or imply?

I say it is not possible and so not plausible. What would it be to give merely verbal sincere assent to "I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth . . . ." while suspending judgment with respect to such propositions as: God exists, God is omnipotent, God is a creator, The cosmos and its contents are creatures, and so on?  This is impossible if the mental state of suspension is one in which one is settled on suspension and ceases all further inquiry convinced that the truth values of the propositions in question are unknowable.  For then suspension is in the service of tranquillity, not truth.   One ceases caring about truth.  But then one cannot sincerely utter the formulae.  One cannot sincerely say the sentence 'God created the world' in the context of a religious service without accepting the proposition the sentence expresses.  Of course, not every utterance of a sentence is an assertive utterance; but a sincere utterance of a religious sentence in the context of divine worship cannot be other than assertive.  Or so say I.

But suppose suspension of judgment is not in the service of tranquillity, but in the service of cognition.  I suspend judgment pro tempore in the interests of inquiry the better to get at the truth.  But then one forsakes the Pyrrhonian stance as I understand it. Suppose I sincerely say "Christ was born of a virgin" in the context of a worship service. This seems compatible with suspending judgment on the proposition expressed so long as my suspension is in the service of ongoing inquiry and I allow the possibility of a future acceptance of the proposition in question.

We need to think further and harder about the distinction between suspension in the service of tranquillity and suspension in the service of cognition. I detect a tension between the two in the skeptic camp.  The skeptic qua inquirer cannot rest in tranquillity and quietism renouncing all concern for truth; but as a therapist out to cure us of ataraxia-busting belief, he must rest in tranquillity and renounce the quest for truth.

Is it not essential to the skeptical stance that attainment of the human good does not require participation in the truth? 

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Religious Reciprocity

I don't imagine that Mr. Trump or any of his staff read this weblog, but I have an idea for him.

He ought to announce a moratorium on the building of mosques in the USA until such time as Muslim states permit the building of churches, synagogues, ashrams, and zendos in their lands.

Does that not sound eminently reasonable?

A Religious Test for Immigration Unconstitutional? Schumer's Lie

Many Democrats use 'unconstitutional' rather broadly to refer to anything they don't like. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) apparently favors this broad (mis)use of the term. He claimed -- wait for it -- that President Donald Trump's temporary ban on Muslim immigration from seven Muslim countries is "unconstitutional" because it applies a religious test.

But of course it isn't. In Article VI, paragraph three of the United States Constitution we read that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." This has nothing to do with immigrants; it pertains to citizens who seek public office. (It is also worth noting that the clause says nothing about the states; it pertains to seekers of Federal offices. See here.)

So it is clear that Schumer made a false statement. Did he lie? Did he knowingly make a false statement? It is a good bet that he did given his leftist agenda. And he thought he could fool us, too. 

It is plain, then, that there is nothing unconstitutional about applying a religious test to immigrants. It might nevertheless be argued that a religious test is being applied, unconstitutional or not, and that there is something dubious about this.   "It is not who we are," some bien-pensant liberal will gush. But is the test religious?

Bear in mind that Islam is a hybrid worldview: it is as much a political ideology as a religion. The reason Muslims are singled out and subjected to a test for immigration-worthiness and found wanting is not because of their specifically religious views but because of their political views. As ought to be clear by now, Islamic law or Sharia is incompatible with the values of the United States. The state needn't care about anyone's views about abstruse theological questions such as the Trinity, the divinity or non-divinity of Christ, the exact mechanism of divine revelation, etc.  But every state has a right to defend itself against subversive elements.

"Is every Muslim a subversive element?" Don't be stupid.

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Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?

After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man.  Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct:

The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to hold traditional beliefs about marriage that were suddenly deemed backward and unacceptable (at least since 2012, when President Obama stopped pretending to share them). What else do you think drove all those religious voters to support a dissolute heathen?

Ironically, a pragmatic, Jacksonian populist worldling such as Donald J. Trump will probably do more for religion and religious liberty in the long run than a pious leftist such as Jimmy Carter.  

Mr. Carter famously confessed the lust in his heart in an interview in -- wait for it -- Playboy magazine.  We should all do likewise, though in private, not in Playboy. While it is presumptuous to attempt to peer into another's soul, I would bet that Mr. Trump is not much bothered by the lust in his heart, and I don't expect to hear any public confessions from his direction.

But what profiteth it to confess one's lust when one supports the destructive Dems, the abortion party, a party the members of which are so morally obtuse that they cannot even see the issue of the morality of abortion, dismissing it as a health issue or an issue of women's reproductive rights?  

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Intimations of Elsewhere Dismissed

A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience.  He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling.   He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance.  Vouchsafed a hint of what might have been a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating.  That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding. Especially in a philosopher!

It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of  the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.

I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously.  And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical.  But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating -- that puzzles me.

Ross Douthat assembles some examples similar to the case of my quondam colleague in his Christmas Eve column, Varieties of Religious Experience, a title he borrows from the eponymous masterpiece of William James.  Here is one:

As a young man in the 1960s, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of “RoboCop” and “Showgirls” fame, wandered into a Pentecostal church and suddenly felt “the Holy Ghost descending … as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was in the midst of dealing with his then-girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy; after they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision during a screening of “King Kong.” The combined experience actively propelled him away from anything metaphysical; the raw carnality of his most famous films, he suggested later, was an attempt to keep the numinous and destabilizing at bay.

That makes about as much sense to me as blinding oneself lest one see too radiant a light. 

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Two Different Christmas Day Meditations on the Incarnation

Last Year's:

"And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us" (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, entering between the legs of a poor girl in a stable.  Just like one of us, a slob like one of us. The notion is so mind-boggling that one is tempted to credit it for this very reason, for its affront to Reason, and to the natural man, accepting it because it is absurd,  or else dismissing  it as the height of absurdity. A third possibility is to accept it despite its being absurd, and a fourth is to argue that rational sense can be made of it. The conflict of these approaches, and of the positions within each, only serves to underscore the mind-boggling quality of the notion, a notion that to the eye and mind of faith is FACT.

The Most High freely lowers himself, accepting the indigence and misery of material existence, including a short temporal career that ends with the ultimate worldly failure: execution by the political authorities.  And not a civilized Athenian execution by hemlock as was the fate of that other great teacher of humanity, but execution by the worst method the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

Read the rest.

And here is one first posted in 2010 and re-posted on Christmas Day, 2014:

Incarnation Approached Subjectively: The Mystical Birth of God in the Soul

[. . .]

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts.  The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question.  The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

Read the rest.

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, entering between the legs of a poor girl in a stable.  Just like one of us, a slob like one of us. The notion is so mind-boggling that one is tempted to credit it for this very reason, for its affront to Reason, and to the natural man, accepting it because it is absurd,  or else dismissing  it as the height of absurdity. A third possibility is to accept it despite its being absurd, and a fourth is to argue that rational sense can be made of it. The conflict of these approaches, and of the positions within each, only serves to underscore the mind-boggling quality of the notion, a notion that to the eye and mind of faith is FACT.

The Most High freely lowers himself, accepting the indigence and misery of material existence, including a short temporal career that ends with the ultimate worldly failure: execution by the political authorities.  And not a civilized Athenian execution by hemlock as was the fate of that other great teacher of humanity, but execution by the worst method the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

Read the rest.

And here is one first posted in 2010 and re-posted on Christmas Day, 2014:

Incarnation Approached Subjectively: The Mystical Birth of God in the Soul

[. . .]

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts.  The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question.  The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

Read the rest.

[. . .]

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts.  The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question.  The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

Read the rest.

Searle on Religion

For some religion is too good to be true. For others it would be awful if true.  And then there are the indifferent for whom religion is simply not an issue.  Among the latter are those who consider talk of religion to be in bad taste in polite society.  

In Mind, Language and Society, John R. Searle writes:

In earlier generations, books like this one would have had to contain either an atheistic attack on or a theistic defense of traditional religion. [. . .] Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not to be discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

What has happened? [. . .] I believe that something much more radical than a decline in religious belief has taken place. For us, the educated members of society, the world has become demystified. . . . we no longer take the mysteries we see in the world as expressions of supernatural meaning. We no longer think of odd occurrences as cases of God performing speech acts in the language of miracles. Odd occurrences are just occurrences we do not understand. The result of this demystification is that we have gone beyond atheism to the point where the issue no longer matters in the way it did to earlier generations. (pp. 34-35)

My commentary on this Searle-y passage here.

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The Horror of Death and its Cure

There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.  

While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying.  This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object.  Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed -- but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.

For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of nonbeing, both the sliding and the state.  Can Epicurus help?  

If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead.  Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not.  So what is there to fear?  If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not.  Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state.  No thing, no state.

This reasoning strikes me as cogent.  On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists.  Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything.  Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear.  But it may help if one is committed to living rationally.  I'm a believer in the limited value of  'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.

I suffer from acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips.  On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge.  I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.  

Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical?  To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.

Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving.  My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us.  Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience.  But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on, keep it together.  We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go.  This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying.  And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.

So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.

I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying.  It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness.  But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying.  It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object.  The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality.  (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)

Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity  of consciousness and self-consciousness.  This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable.  My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death.  For if metaphysics transforms the  I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object.  (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object.  As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.

Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die."  Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion.  The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death.  It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.

Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view.  On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.

Is there then any cure for the horror of death?  In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come.  The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.  

In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3.   One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back.  Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.

Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."  The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit.  In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.  

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The Passion of Martin Scorsese

Not everything in the NYT is leftist crap.  The new Scorsese effort is based on the novel “Silence,” by Shusaku Endo.

My copy should be arriving today.  A tip of the hat to Karl White for informing me of it.

“The novel poses a very profound theological question,” Peter C. Phan, a Jesuit theologian at Georgetown who was born in Vietnam, told me. “The question is this: Are we allowed to do an essentially evil act to obtain a good result?

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Baptism

Catholicism as True Enough

Catholicism is true enough to provide moral guidance and spiritual sustenance for many, many people.  So if you are a lapsed Catholic, you could do far worse than to return to the arms of Holy Mother the Church. And this despite the deep post-Vatican II corruption. Better such a reversion than to persist in one's worldly ways like St. Augustine who, at age 30, confessed that he was "still caught fast in the same mire by a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me." (Confessions, Bk. 6, Ch. 11, Ryan tr., p. 149)

But if you are a Protestant like Tim McGrew or James Anderson, should you 'swim the Tiber'?  Some branches of Protestantism are also good enough and true enough to provide moral guidance and spiritual sustenance.  And this despite the problems of Protestantism.

I should think that practice is more important than doctrine.  Better to remove the lust from your heart than to write an erudite blog entry about it.  The doctrines will always be debated and contested.  Does the Incarnation make logical sense?  Is it perhaps true whether or not it makes sense to the discursive intellect?  We will never know here below.  

Would it not be folly to postpone the reform of one's life until one had solved intellectual difficulties that we have good reason to believe cannot be solved in our present state?  Orthopraxy trumps orthodoxy.  Three elements of Christian orthopraxy: follow the Ten Commandments; avoid the Seven Deadly Sins; try to live by  the Two Greatest Commandments.  You won't get very far without grace, but the trying may precipitate the grace.

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Religious Liberty and a Brooks Boner

The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are piss-poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading.  But the following from Brooks (28 October) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre­political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

Come on, man.  Don't be stupid.  The Left is out to suppress religious liberty.  This didn't start yesterday.  You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies.  Is that a legitimate use of state power?  And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue  Hillary will do when she gets power. It is not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it.  They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane.  What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?

The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion.  Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftist scum like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.  

The threat from the Left is very real indeed.  See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian.

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What Does Abortion Have to Do with Religion?

What follows is a re-post, slightly redacted, from 3 November 2012.  Occasioned by the Biden-Ryan Veep debate in 2012, it is equally applicable to the 2016 Kaine-Pence Veep debate, except that in 2016 only Kaine is (nominally) Catholic.

.......................

The abortion question is almost always raised in the context of religion.  The Vice-Presidential debate provides a good recent example.  The moderator  introduced the topic with these words: “We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I  would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your  own personal views on abortion.”  Why didn't the moderator just ask the candidates to state their positions on abortion?   Why did she bring up religion?  And why the phrase "personal views"?  Are views on foreign policy and the economy also personal views?  Below the surface lies the suggestion that opposition to abortion can only rest on antecedent religious commitments of a personal nature that have no place in the public square. 

A question that never gets asked, however, is the one I raise in this post:  What does the abortion issue have to do with religion?  But I need to make the question more precise.  Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infancticide.
Therefore
3. (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument. 

And as a matter of fact there are pro-life atheists. Nat Hentoff is one. In The Infanticide Candidate for President, he takes Barack Obama to task:

But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme  Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban  Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama -- in the Illinois Senate -- also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

Return to the above argument.  Suppose someone demands to know why one should accept the first premise.  Present this argument:

4. Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong.
5. Infanticide is the killing of innocent human beings.
Therefore
1. Infanticide is morally wrong.

This second argument, like the first, invokes no specifically religious premise.  Admittedly, the general prohibition of homicide -- general in the sense that it admits of exceptions -- comes from the Ten Commandments which isd part of our Judeo-Christian heritage.  But if you take that as showing that (4) is religious, then the generally accepted views that theft and lying are morally wrong would have to be adjudged religious as well.

But I don't want to digress onto the topic of the sources of our secular moral convictions, convictions that are then codified in the positive law.  My main point is that one can oppose abortion on secular grounds. A second point is that the two arguments I gave are very powerful.  If you are not convinced by them, you need to ask yourself why.

Some will reply by saying that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body.  This is the Woman's Body Argument:

6. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
7. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
8. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (6) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (7) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (7) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (7) is acceptable, but (6) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

I wrote "perhaps (7) is acceptable" because it is arguable that (7) is not acceptable. For a woman's body is an improper part of her body; hence if a woman has a right to do anything she wishes with her body, then she has a right to kill her body by blowing it up, say. One who has good reason to reject suicide, however, has good reason to reject (7) even when 'part' is construed narrowly. And even if we substitute 'proper part' for 'part' in the original argument, it is still not the case that a woman has a right to do whatever she wishes with any proper narrow part of her body. Arguably, she has no right to cut out her own heart, since that would lead to her death.

I am making two points about the Woman's Body Argument.  The first is that  my rejection of it does not rely on any religious premises.  The second is that the argument is unsound. 

Standing on solid, secular ground one has good reason to oppose abortion as immoral in the second and third trimesters (with some exceptions, e.g., threat to the life of the mother).  Now not everything immoral should be illegal.  But in this case the objective immorality of abortion entails that it ought to be illegal for the same reason that the objective immorality of the wanton killing of innocent adults requires that it be  illegal.

Of course it follows that you should not vote for the abortion party, a.k.a. the Dems.  And if you are a Catholic who votes Democratic then you are as foolish and confused as the benighted Joe Biden and the the benighted Tim Kaine.

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There is no Religious Liberty Under Leftism: The Albanian Example

Do you value religious liberty?  Then you must work to defeat Hillary Clinton, which is to say: you must vote for Donald Trump.

The Left, being totalitarian, brooks no opposition and is brutal in its suppression of religion. Consider the example of Fr. Ernest Simoni:

Persecution in Albania was exceptionally harsh, even for Communist Eastern Europe. Among the living martyrs who were present and greeted Francis was Fr. Ernest Simoni. He gave a moving account of his almost three decades spent in Albanian labor camps; Francis was visibly moved.

The history behind this personal story is worth recalling. The conflict between the Catholic Church and Communist state in Albania can be divided into three stages:

1) 1944-1948 when the government terrorized and persecuted believers and clergy;

2) 1949-1967 when the government tried to “nationalize” or Albanize the country’s religions, and to establish a National Albanian Catholic Church similar to the Patriotic Church created by Albania’s then-ally, Communist China. This stage reached its culmination with Albania proclaiming itself the world’s first atheist state;

3) 1990 to the present, during which the Albanian Church awoke after decades of martyrdom and persecution.

Fr. Simoni was arrested on December 24, 1963, just after he had finished celebrating the Christmas Vigil Mass in the village of Barbullush, Shkodër. Four officers from the Albanian Secret Police (Sigurimi) showed up at his church and presented him with arrest and execution orders. “They tied my hands behind my back and began beating me, while we were walking to the car,” he recalled.

He was brought to the interrogation facility and kept in complete isolation, suffering unbearable tortures for three consecutive months. The accusation was that he had been teaching his “philosophy.” He taught his people “to die for Christ.” During three months of confinement and interrogation, the persecutors tried to force him provide evidence against the Catholic hierarchy and his brother priests, which he refused.

There is an interesting American connection to his persecution. One of the accusations against Fr. Simoni was that he had celebrated a requiem Mass for the repose of President Kennedy’s soul, exactly a month after the Catholic president’s death. A journal found in Fr. Simoni’s room featured a picture of President Kennedy and was presented to the court as material proof – of something or other.

“By God’s grace, the execution was not carried out,” Fr. Simoni recalled. After the trial, he was sentenced to twenty-eight years of forced labor, working first in the mines and then as a sanitary and sewage worker, until the fall of Communism in 1991.

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Hillary's Nonsense About "No Religious Test"

Hillary got clobbered in last night's debate, but Trump missed an opportunity to refute her nonsensical claim that vetting Muslim immigrants involves the application of a "religious test."

In Article VI of the U. S. Constitution we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Two questions.  One concerns Muslim citizens of the U.S.  The other concerns Muslims who are attempting to immigrate.  The first question first.

Does it follow from the passage quoted that the U. S. Constitution allows a Muslim citizen who supports Sharia (Islamic law) to run for public office?  No!  For the same Constitution, in its First Amendment, enjoins a salutary separation of church/synagogue/mosque and state, though not in those words.  Sharia and the values and principles enshrined in the founding documents are incompatible.  On no sane interpretation is our great Constitution a suicide pact.

It is important to realize that Islam is as much  an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion.  It is an unholy hybrid of the political and the religious.  Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that Sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices. 

A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the "no religious Test" provision. On a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.

Or one might argue that Islam is not a religion at all.  Damn near anything can and will be called a religion by somebody.  Some say with a straight face that leftism is a religion, others that Communism is a religion.  Neither is a religion on any adequate definition of 'religion.'  I have heard it said that atheism is a religion.  Surely it isn't.  Is a heresy of a genuine religion itself a religion?  Arguably not.  Hillaire Belloc and others have maintained that Islam is a Christian heresy.  Or one could argue that Islam, or perhaps radical Islam, is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.  How to define religion is a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of religion. 

The point here is that "religious" in ". . . no religious Test shall ever be required" is subject to interpretation.  We are under no obligation to give it a latitudinarian reading that allows in a destructive ideology incompatible with our values and principles.

As for immigration, would-be immigrants have no rights under our Constitution.  So Article VI doesn't apply to them at all.

As for gaseous talk of blocking Sharia-supporting Muslims as being "not who we are," it suffices to say that 'liberals' who gas off like this ought simply to be ignored.

There is no right to immigrate, and a nation is under no obligation to allow in subversive elements.  But it does have every right to protect its culture and values.  Here alone is a decisive reason to vote for Trump and block Hillary.  Trump punched hard last night, but not hard enough.  He should have pointed out that Hillary is a destructive leftist globalist who aims at the same "fundamental transformation" that Obama called for.  He should have pointed out that no patriot calls for the fundamental transformation of his country.  For what that implies in our case is the destruction of the U.S. as it was founded to be.

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Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views

Univocity.  There is an absolute reality.  We can speak of it literally and sometimes truly using predicates of ordinary language that retain in their metaphysical use the very same sense they have in their mundane use.  For example, we can say of Socrates that he exists, and using 'exists' in the very same sense we can say of God that he exists.  Accordingly, 'exists' is univocal in application to creature and creator.  Corresponding to this sameness of sense there is a sameness in mode of Being: God and Socrates exist in the very same way.  No doubt God exists necessarily whereas Socrates exist contingently; but this is a mere different in modal status, not a difference in mode of Being.  It is the difference between existing in all possible worlds and existing in some, but not all, possible worlds.

And the same holds for non-existential predicates such as 'wise.' We can say of Socrates that he is wise, and using 'wise' in the very same sense we can say of God that he is wise.  Accordingly, 'wise' is univocal in application to creature and creator.  Corresponding to this sameness of sense there is sameness in mode of property-possession: God and Socrates both have wisdom by instantiating it.

Analogicity.  Theological language is literal, but analogical.  I won't discuss this view now.

Negative Theology.  The absolute reality is beyond all our concepts. God is utterly transcendent, radically other. Nothing can be truly predicated of God as he is in himself, not even that he exists, or does not.  The problem with this approach is that it threatens to render theological language unintelligible.

So why not adopt the Univocity View?  Is there any good reason not to adopt it?

I think there is a good reason, namely, that the UV implies that God is a being among beings; that God as absolute reality cannot be a being among beings;  ergo, etc.  

But what does it mean to say that God is a being among beings?  As I see it, to say that God is a being among beings is to say that God is no exception to the logical and ontological principles (pertaining to properties, property-possession, existence, modality, etc.) that govern anything that can be said to exist.  It is to say that God fits the ontological or general-metaphysical schema that everything else fits. It is to say that God is ontologically on a par with other beings despite the attributes (omniscience, etc.) that set him apart from other beings and indeed render him unique among beings. To spell it out.  If God is a being among beings, then:

a.  Properties. Some properties are such that God and creatures share them.  Consider the property of being a self.  For present purposes we may accept Dale's definition: "a being capable of consciousness, with intelligence, will, and the ability to intentionally act."  God is a self, but so is Socrates.  Both are selves in the very same sense of 'self.'  'Self' is being used univocally (not equivocally and not analogically) in 'God is a self' and 'Socrates is a self' just as 'wise' is being used univocally in 'God is wise' and 'Socrates is wise,' and so on.

Some are  uncomfortable with talk of properties and seem to prefer talk of concepts.  Well then, I can put my present point by saying that some concepts are such as to be common to both God and creatures, the concept self being one example.

b. Property-possession. God has properties in the same way that creatures do.  My first point was that there are some properties that both God and creatures share; my present point is a different one about property-possession: the having of these shared properties is the same in the divine and creaturely cases.  Both God and Socrates instantiate the property of being a self, where first-level instantiation is an asymmetrical relation or non-relational tie that connects individuals and properties construed as mind-independent universals.

The point could be put conceptualistically as follows.  Both God and Socrates fall under the concept self, where falling under is an asymmetrical relation that connects individuals and concepts construed as mind-dependent universals. 

c. Existence. God is in the same way that creatures are.  Given that God exists and that Socrates exists, it does not follow that they exist in the same way.  Or so I maintain.  But part of what it means to say that God is a being among beings is to say that God and Socrates do exist in the very same way.  Whatever it is for an item to exist, there is only one way for an item to exist, and God and Socrates exist in that very same way. For example, if what it is for x to exist is for x to be identical to some y, then this holds both for God and Socrates.

d. It follows from (a) and (b) taken together that God is really distinct from his properties, and that his properties are really distinct from one another.  God is in this respect no different from Socrates. Really distinct: distinct in reality, apart from our mental operations.  (What is really distinct need not be capable of separate existence.)  And both items have their properties by instantiating them.

e. It follows from (c) that God is really distinct from his existence (just as Socrates is really distinct from his existence) and that God is really distinct from existence (just as Socrates is distinct from existence). 

f. It follows from (d) and (e) taken together that God is not ontologically simple.  Contrapositively, if God is ontologically simple, then God is not a being among beings as I am using this phrase.  It is therefore no surprise that Dale Tuggy ansd other evangelical Christians reject divine simplicity whereas I am inclined to accept it.  See my SEP entry for more on this.

To conclude, my argument against the Univocity View is as follows: 

A. If the UV is true, then God is a being among beings in the sense explained.
B. If God is a being among beings, then God is not ontologically simple.
C. An absolute being must be ontologically simple.
D. God is the absolute being.
Ergo
E. God is ontologically simple.
Ergo
F. God is not a being among beings.
Ergo
G. The Univocity View is not true.

So I reject the UV.  If the other two views are also rationally rejectable, then we have an aporia, which, I suggest, is what we have. We are at an impasse, as usual in philosophy.  

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Is the Real a Tricycle? Plantinga versus Hick, Round One

In his Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford UP, 2000), Alvin Plantinga mounts a critique of John Hick's Kantianism in the philosophy of religion.  In this entry I will begin an evaluation of Plantinga's critique.  I will focus on just two and a half pages, pp. 43-45, and examine only one preliminary argument.

The question, very simply, is whether our concepts apply to the ultimately real.  If God is the ultimately real, as he is, then the question is whether or not our concepts apply to God.  If they don't, then we cannot refer to or think about God or make true and literal predications of him such as 'God is infinite.'  If so, we cannot have any beliefs about God.  Now Plantinga's project is to show that Christian belief (which of course includes beliefs about God) is warranted.  But a belief about X cannot be warranted unless there is that belief.  So there had better be beliefs about God, in which case there had better be true and literal predications about God.  This implies that God must have properties and that some of these properties must be such that we can conceive them, i.e., have concepts of them.  In brief, it must be possible for some of our concepts to apply to God.

For Hick, God is the ultimately real, or simply 'the Real' but our concepts do not apply to God/the Real. (43)  For present purposes, we needn't consider why Hick holds this except to say that it is for broadly Kantian reasons.  And we needn't consider all the nuances of Hick's position.  At present I am concerned only with Plantinga's refutation of the bald thesis that none of our concepts apply to God. Plantinga writes,

If Hick really means that none of our terms applies literally to the Real, then it isn't possible to make sense of what he says.  I take it the term 'tricycle' does not apply to the Real; the Real is not a tricycle.  But if the Real is not a tricycle, then 'is not a tricycle' applies literally to it; it is a nontricycle.  It could hardly be neither a tricycle nor a nontricycle, nor do I think that Hick would want to suggest that it could. (45)

Here again is what I am calling the Bald Thesis:  None of our terms/concepts apply literally and truly to the Real/God.  Has Plantinga refuted the Bald Thesis?  I am sure London Ed, who got me going on this, will answer affirmatively.  Plantinga has given us a simple, clear, and knock-down (i.e. dispositive or decisive) argument that blows the Bald Thesis clean out of the water.

Or Does It?

Here is a response that Ed won't like.

Plantinga assumes that everything that exists is subject to the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM), and the principle that everything instantiates properties, where if x instantiates property P, then x is distinct from P.  Reasonable assumptions!   These assumptions articulate (some of) what I will call the Discursive Framework, the framework within which all our discursive thinking takes place. On these assumptions the following tetrad is no tetralemma:

a. My wife is a tricycle
b. My wife  is not a tricycle.
c. My wife  is both.
d. My wife is neither.

This is no tetralemma since all limbs are false except (b).  My wife, delightful as she is, is not so wonderful as to be  'beyond all our concepts.'  She does not lie, or stand, beyond the Discursive Framework.  She is not a tricycle and therefore she falls under the concept nontricycle.  Now the same goes for the Real (or the Absolute, or the Plotinian One, etc.)  if the Real (the Absolute, etc.) is relevantly like my wife.

Now that is what Plantinga is assuming.  He is assuming that tricycles, and wives, and the Real  are all on a par in that each such item is a being among beings that necessarily has properties and has them by instantiating them, where property-instantiation is governed by LNC and LEM.  What's more, he assumes that everything that exists exists in the same way, which implies that there are not two or more different ways of existing, say, the way appropriate to a finite item such as my wife and the way appropriate to God.  For Aquinas, God is Being itself:  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  Everything else is really distinct from its being. But Plantinga will have none of that, implying as it does the doctrine of divine simplicity.  Everything exists in the same way and has properties in the same way.  The differences between wife and God are in the properties had, not in they way they are had, or in the way their subjects exist.

Plantinga also assumes that to talk sense one must remain with the confines of the Discursive Framework.  This is why he says, of Hick, that "it isn't possible to make sense of what he says."  We ought to concede the point in this form:  It makes no discursive sense. For discursive sense is governed by the above principles.  

If you say that no property can be predicated of the Real, then you predicate of the Real the property of being such that no property can be predicated of it, and you land in incoherence.  These quick little arguments come thick and fast to the mentally agile and have been around for ages.  But note that they presuppose the absolute and unrestricted validity of the Discursive Framework.

It is not that the Discursive Framework is irrational;  you could say it is constitutive of discursive rationality and meaningful speech. But how could someone within the Framework prove in a noncircular way its absolute and unrestricted validity?  How prove that it is not restricted to what our finite minds can think?  How prove that nothing lies beyond it?  Of course, anything that lies beyond it is Unsayable and cannot be thought in terms of the Framework.  And if all thought is subject to the strictures of the Framework, then what lies beyond cannot be thought. 

How then gain access to what is beyond thought?  Nondual awareness is one answer, one that Buddhists will like.  The visio beata of Thomas may be another.  But I don't need to give an answer for present purposes.  I merely have to POINT TO, even if I cannot SAY, the possibility that the Discursive Framework is not absolutely and unrestrictedly valid.  This is equivalent to the possibility that the Discursive Framework  is but a transcendental presupposition of our thinking without which we cannot think but is not legislative for all of Being. I am using 'transcendental' in the Kantian way.

The Framework cannot rationally ground its hegemony over all Being; it can only presuppose it.  We can conclude that Plantinga with his quick little argument has not refuted the Bald Thesis according to which there is a noumenal Reality that lies beyond our concepts and cannot be accessed as it is in itself by conceptual means.  He has rationally opposed the thesis, but in a way that begs the question. For he just assumes the absolute and unrestricted validity of the Discursive Framework when the question is precisely whether it is absolutely and unrestrictedly valid.

So I pronounce round one of Plantinga-Hick a draw. 

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Two Guises of Religion

Religion can appear under the guise of a childish refusal to face the supposed truth that we are but a species of clever land mammal with no higher origin or destiny. It can also appear under the guise of transcendence and maturity: the religious seek to transcend the childish and the merely human whereas worldlings wallow in it.

Religion must remain a riddle here below, as much of a riddle as the predicament it is supposed to cure.  If religion wants a symbol, let it be:

And if anyone should say that only the sick need medicine, then let the reply be:  We are all sick.

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Do You Care About Religious Liberty?

Then you had better vote for Trump.  

Martin Castro, an Obama appointee, is chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Here’s Mr. Castro: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”

Mr. Castro’s is the prevailing view among progressives. Barack Obama alluded to it when he derided small-town Americans bitterly clinging to guns or religion (i.e., the Second and First Amendments). Ditto for Mrs. Clinton, who in a remark about reproductive rights declared that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”  (William McGurn, WSJ, 12 September 2016)

We should thank Mr. Castro for giving us such a clear and concise insight into the mind of the Left.

Hypocrisy

Note first the liberal-left obsession with hypocrisy.    Why does it so exercise them if not because of their hatred of religion with its difficult-to-achieve moral demands?  ("He who so much as looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart."  I quote this hard saying from memory.  Too hard, a lefty might say: it drives people to hypocrisy.)  They hate the stringent moral demands religion makes and so they attack as hypocrites those who preach them. 

To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.'  It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself.   The very fact of preaching  shows one to be a hypocrite.  Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy.  When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.  

And therein lies the contradiction.  They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical.  But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.

Coded Speech and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

To understand the Left you must understand that central to their worldview is the hermeneutics of suspicion which is essentially a diluted amalgam of themes from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Thus nothing has the plain meaning that it has; every meaning must be deconstructed so as to lay bare its 'real meaning.'

Suppose a conservative says, sincerely, "The most qualified person should get the job."  Applying the hermeneutics of suspicion, the leftist takes the conservative to be speaking 'in code':  what he is really saying is something like:  "People of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race."

Or suppose a conservative refers to  a black malefactor as a thug.  What he has actually said, according to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is that the malefactor is a nigger.  But 'thug' does not mean 'nigger.'  'Thug' means thug.  There are thugs of all races.

Leftists often call for 'conversations' about this or that. Thus Eric Holder famously called for a 'conversation' about race.  But how can one have a conversation -- no sneer quotes -- about anything with people who refuse to take what one sincerely says at face value?

One of Trump's signature sayings is "Make America great again!"

To a leftist, this is a 'racist dog whistle.'  It doesn't mean what it manifestly  means; there is a latent sinister meaning  that we can thank Bill Clinton for exposing. It means -- wait for it -- “That message…America great again is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you. What it means is I’ll give you an economy you had 50 years ago and I’ll move you back up on the social totem and other people down.”

The irony is that Slick Willy used the same sentence himself!

Here we come to the nub of the matter.  The liberal is a piece of moral scum who refuses to treat his political opponents as rational beings, as persons.  He dehumanizes them and treats them as if they are nothing but big balls of such affects as fear and hate bereft of rational justification for the views they hold.

Now read this entry on the genetic fallacy. 

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Kolakowski on Religion: Man Does Not Live by Reason Alone

Leszek Kolakowski has a message for New Atheists, leftists, transhumanists and any other bunch of religion bashers who think religion will wither away, be put out of business by some technological advance, or will eventually be confined to the sphere of the merely private.  The following quotations are from an interview with the philosopher conducted by Nathan Gardels entitled Man Does Not Live by Reason Alone. (HT: Karl White)  Emphasis added.  For more on Kolakowski poke around in the Kolakowski category.

 ...........................

Moreover, the rationalist predictions about religion also turned out to be wrong. I don’t expect the death of religion or the death of God. Secularization hasn’t eradicated religious needs.

[. . .]

So, far from secularization inexorably leading to the death of religion, it has instead given birth to the search for new forms of religious life. The imminent victory of the Kingdom of Reason has never materialized.

As a whole, mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be excommunicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.

Gardels | The cultural catastrophe being that without a set of rules that comes from religious tradition there are no moral brakes on man, particularly on the gluttony of homo consumptus?

Kolakowski | Yes, no moral brakes. When culture loses its sacred sense, it loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposes limits on the perfection that can be attained by secular society, one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization arises—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes we can undergo, that society is an endlessly flexible thing subject to the arbitrary whims of our creative capacities.

[BV Comment:  You can see this today in the nonsensical social constructivism according to which people incoherently speak of race and sex as social constructs.]

In the end, as I have written in the essay “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture,” this illusion sows disastrous despair. The modern chimera, which would grant man total freedom from tradition or all pre-existing sense, far from opening before him the perspective of divine self-creation, suspends him in a darkness where all things are regarded with equal indifference.

To be totally free from religious heritage or historical tradition is to situate oneself in a void and thus to disintegrate. The utopian faith in man’s self-inventive capabilities, the utopian hope of unlimited perfection, may be the most efficient instrument of suicide human culture has ever invented.

To reject the sacred, which means also to reject sin, imperfection and evil, is to reject our own limits. To say that evil is contingent, as Sartre did, is to say that there is no evil, and therefore that we have no need of a sense given to us by tradition, fixed and imposed on us whether we will it or not.

As you put it, there are thus no moral brakes on the will to power. In the end, the ideal of total liberation is the sanctioning of greed, force and violence, and thus of despotism, the destruction of culture and the degradation of the earth.

The only way to ensure the endurance of civilization is to ensure that there are always people who think of the price paid for every step of what we call “progress.” The order of the sacred is also a sensitivity to evil—the only system of reference that allows us to contemplate that price and forces us to ask whether it is exorbitant.

The values whose vigor is so vital to culture cannot survive without being rooted in the realm of the sacred. This is true not only of the values of which Milosz spoke —honesty and personal dignity—but others as well.

[. . .]

Gardels | At the end of the last modern century, can secular man reintroduce the sacred? Can we base ethical values on reason instead of revolution? Must personal responsibility be rooted in transcendent beliefs?

Kolakowski | It is obviously possible for individuals to keep high moral standards and be irreligious. I strongly doubt whether it is possible for civilizations. Absent religious tradition, what reason is there for a society  to respect human rights and the dignity of man? What is human dignity, scientifically speaking? A superstition?

Empirically, men are demonstrably unequal. How can we justify equality? Human rights is an unscientific idea. As Milosz says, these values are rooted in a transcendent dimension.

Gardels | It strikes me that totalitarianism of a different kind could emerge from the new global capitalist order—a totalitarianism of immediate gratification in which reason is conditional to self-interest.

What is to defend dignity and human rights from total commercialization?

Kolakowski | The absence of a transcendent dimension in secular society weakens this social contract in which each supposedly limits his or her freedom in order to live in peace with others. 

Such universalism of interest is another aspect of the modern illusion. There is no such thing as scientifically based human solidarity.

To be sure, I can convince myself that it is in my interest not to rob other people, not to rape and murder, because I can convince myself that the risk is too great. This is the Hobbesian model of solidarity: greed moderated by fear.

But social chaos stands in the shadows of such moral  anarchy. When a society adheres to moral norms for no other reason than prudence, it is extremely weak and its fabric tears at the slightest crisis. In such a society, there is no basis for personal responsibility, charity or compassion.

Now, with the ecological imperative, a new ethos of species self-preservation is being discussed. To some extent, it may be true that we are instinctively programmed for self-preservation of the species. But the history of this last modern century has certainly demonstrated that we can destroy members of our own species without great inhibitions. If there is species solidarity at some deep biological level, it hasn’t saved us from civil destruction.

Thus, we need instruments of human solidarity that are not based on our own instincts, self-interest or on force. The communist attempt to institutionalize solidarity ended in disaster.

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Will Science Put Religion Out of Business? Against the Folly of Transhumanism

A correspondent writes:

Here's how I think science will eventually put religion out of business. Soon medical science is going to be able to offer serious life extension, not pie-in-the-sky soul survival or re-incarnation, but real life extension with possible rejuvenation. When science can offer and DELIVER what religion can only promise, religion is done.

1.  Religion is in the transcendence business.  The type of transcendence offered depends on the particular religion.  The highly sophisticated form of Christianity expounded by Thomas Aquinas offers the visio beata, the Beatific Vision.  In the BV -- you will forgive the abbreviation -- the soul does not lose its identity.  It maintains its identity, though in a transformed mode, while participating in the divine life.  Hinduism and Buddhism offer even more rarefied forms of transcendence in which the individual self is either absorbed into the eternal Atman/Brahman, thereby losing its individual identity, or extinguished altogether  by entry into Nirvana.  And there are cruder forms of transcendence, in popular forms of Christianity, in Islam, and in other faiths, in which the individual continues to exist after death  but with little or no transformation to enjoy delights that are commensurable with the ones enjoyed here below.  The crudest form, no doubt, is the popular Islamic notion of paradise as an endless sporting with 72 black-eyed virgins.  So on the one end of the spectrum: transcendence as something difficult to distinguish from utter extinction; on the other end, immortality mit Haut und Haar (to borrow a delightful phrase from Schopenhauer), "with skin and hair" in a realm of sensuous delights but without the usual negatives such as heartburn and erectile dysfunction. 

I think we can safely say that a religion that offers no form of transcendence, whether Here or Hereafter, is no religion at all.  Religion, then, is in the business of offering transcendence.

2.  I agree with my correspondent that if science can provide what religion promises, then science will put religion out  of business.  But as my crude little sketch above shows, different religions promise different things.  Now the crudest form of transcendence is physical immortality, immortality "with skin and hair."  Is it reasonable to hope that future science will give rise to a technology that will make us, or some of us, physically immortal, where 'physical' is understood as we understand it in the here and now?  I don't think so.  That would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics according to which the entropy of an irreversible process in an isolated system increases leading in the case of the universe (which is both isolated and irreversible) to the heat death of the universe and the end of all life.  Granted, that is way off in the future.  But that is irrelevant if the claim is that physical immortality is possible by purely physical means.  And if that is not the claim, then the use of the phrase 'physical immortality' is out of place.  In a serious discussion like this word games are strictly verboten.

3.  Physical immortality is nomologically impossible, impossible given the laws of nature.  Of course, a certain amount of life extension has been achieved and it is reasonable to expect that more will be achieved. So suppose the average life expectancy of people like us gets cranked up to 130 years.  To underscore the obvious, to live to 130 is not to live forever. Suppose you have made it to 130 and are now on your death bed.  If you have any spiritual depth at all, your lament is likely to be similar to that of Jacob's: "The length of my pilgrimage  has been one hundred and thirty years; short and wretched has been my life, nor does it compare with the years my fathers lived during their pilgrimage." (Genesis 47:9) 

The important point here is that once a period of time is over, it makes no difference how long it has lasted.  It is over and done with and accessible only in the flickering and dim light of intermittent and fallible memory.  The past 'telescopes' and 'scrunches up,' the years melt into one another; the past cannot be relived.  What was distinctly lived is now all a blur.  And now death looms before you.  What does it matter that you lived 130 or 260 years? You are going to die all the same, and be forgotten, and all your works with you. After a while it will be as if you never existed.

The problem is not that our lives are short; the problem is that we are in time at all.  No matter how long a life extends it is still a life in time, a life in which the past is no longer, the future not yet, and  the present a passing away.  This problem, the problem of the transitoriness of life, cannot be solved by life extension even if, per impossibile, physical immortality were possible.  This problem of the transitoriness and vanity of life is one that religion addresses.

So my first conclusion is this.  Even if we take religion in its crudest form, as promising physical immortality, "with skin and hair," science cannot put such a crude religion out of business.  For, first of all, physical immortality is physically impossible, and second, mere life extension, even unto the age of a Methuselah, does not solve the problem of the transitoriness of life.

4.  But I have just begun to scratch the surface of the absurdities of transhumanism. No higher religion is about providing natural goodies  by supernatural means, goodies  that cannot be had by natural means.   Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can only think in material terms and only believe in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament we find ourselves in in this life.  What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives.  It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.  We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder.  We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don't have and wouldn't satisfy us even if we had it.  We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived.  It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse.  It is not just that are hearts are cold; our hearts are foul.  You say none of this applies to you?  Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave.  You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.

Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil.  So my correspondent couldn't be more wrong.  No physical technology can do what religion tries to do.  Suppose a technology is developed that actually reverses the processes of aging and keeps us all alive indefinitely.  This is pure fantasy, of course, given the manifold contingencies of the world (nuclear and biological warfare, terrorism, natural disasters, etc.); but just suppose.  Our spiritual and moral predicament would remain as deeply fouled-up as it has always been and religion would remain in business.

5.  If, like my correspondent, you accept naturalism and scientism, then you ought to face what you take to be reality, namely, that we are all just clever animals slated to perish utterly in a few years, and not seek transcendence where it cannot be found.  Accept no substitutes!  Transhumanism is an ersatz religion.

It could be like this.  All religions are false; none can deliver what they promise.  Naturalism is true: reality is exhausted by the space-time system.  You are not unreasonable if you believe this.  But I say you are unreasonable if you think that technologies derived from the sciences of nature can deliver what religions have promised.

As long as there are human beings there will be religion.  The only way I can imagine religion withering away is if humanity allows itself to be gradually replaced by soulless robots.  But in that case it will not be that the promises of religion are fulfilled by science; it would be that no one would be around having religious needs.

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The Debate That Won't Go Away: Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

Not again!  Yes, again.  On 5 September 2016 anno domini, in the pages of Crisis Magazine, Fr. Brandon O'Brien opined (emphasis added):

While some similarities may exist between the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God, it is certain that the Christian who prays “Our Father, Who art in Heaven” each day is not praying to the same God as the Muslim who prays “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” This is because they are not worshipping the same God.

Certain!  How's that for theological chutzpah?

The title of the piece is "Why Christians and Muslims Worship Different Gods."  The reason  is that the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God are drastically different.  The doctrine of the Trinity is perhaps the key difference.  For normative Christians God is tri-une: one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  It is well-known that normative Muslims reject this trinitarian conception and hold to the radical unity of Allah.  God cannot have a son, either in heaven or on earth.  This key difference leads to the crucial difference.  For Christians, God, or rather God's Son, died on the cross (crux, crucis) for man's salvation, was resurrected, and ascended into heaven body and soul.  

So the conceptions of God in the two religions are radically different.  But how is it supposed to follow that Christians and Muslims worship numerically different Gods?  It doesn't follow!  Let me explain.

Suppose Sam's conception of the author of Das Kapital includes the false belief that the author is a Russian while Dave's conception includes the true belief that he is a German. This is consistent with there being one and same philosopher whom they have beliefs about and are referring to.  One and the same man, Karl Marx, is such that Sam has a false belief about him while Dave has a true belief about him.  

Now suppose Ali's conception of the divine being includes the false belief that said being is non-triune while Peter's conception includes the true belief that God is triune. This is consistent with there being one and same being whom they have beliefs about and are referring to.  One and the same god, God, is such that Ali has a false belief about him while Peter has a true belief about him.  

What I have just shown is that from the radically different, and indeed inconsistent, God-conceptions  one cannot validly infer that (normative) Christians and (normative) Muslims refer to and worship numerically different Gods.  For the difference in conceptions is consistent with sameness of referent.  So you can see that Fr. O'Brien has made a mistake.

But nota bene:  Difference in conceptions is also consistent with a difference in referent.  It could be that when a Christian uses 'God' he refers to something while a Muslim refers to nothing when he uses 'Allah.'   Consider God and Zeus.  Will you say that the Christian and the ancient Greek polytheist worship the same God except that the Greek has false beliefs about their common object of worship, believing as he does that Zeus is a superman who lives on a mountain top, literally hurls thunderbolts, etc.?   Or will you say that there is no one God that they worship, that the Christian worships a being that exists while the Greek worships a nonexistent object?  And if you say the latter, why not also say the same about God and Allah, namely, that there is no one being that they both worship, that the Christian worships the true God, the God that really exists, whereas Muslims worship  a God that does not exist?

In sum, difference in conceptions is logically consistent both with sameness of referent and difference of referent.

Apparently, this is difficult for some to see.  My good friend Dale Tuggy writes,

Christians and Muslims disagree about whether God has a Son, right? Then, they’re talking about the same (alleged) being. They may disagree about “who God is” in the sense of what he’s done, what attributes he has, how many “Persons” are in him, and whether Muhammad was really his Messenger,  etc. But disagreement assumes one subject-matter – here, one god.

Tuggy is saying in effect that disagreement presupposes, and thus entails, sameness of referent.

I think Tuggy is making a mistake here.  Surely disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x does not entail that there is in reality one and the same x under discussion, although it is logically consistent with it.

A dispute between me and Ed Feser, say, about whether our mutual acquaintance Tuggy has a son no doubt presupposes, and thus entails, that there is one and the same man whom we are talking about.  It would be absurd to maintain that there are two Tuggys, my Tuggy and Ed's, where mine has a son and Ed's does not.  It would be absurd for me to say, "I'm talking about the true Tuggy while you, Ed, are talking about a different Tuggy, one that doesn't exist. You are referencing, if not worshipping, a false Tuggy."  Why is this absurd? Because we are both acquainted with the man ('in the flesh,' by sense-perception and countless memories) and we are  arguing merely over the properties of the one and the same man  with whom we are both acquainted.  There is simply no question but that he exists and that we are both referring to him.  The dispute concerns his attributes.

But of course the situation is different with God.  We are not acquainted with God: God, unlike Tuggy, is not given to the senses.  Mystical intuition and revelation aside, we are thrown back upon our concepts of God.  And so it may be that the dispute over whether God is triune or not is not a dispute that presupposes that there is one subject-matter, but rather a dispute over whether the Christian concept of God (which includes the sub-concept triune) is instantiated or whether the Muslim concept (which does not include the subconcept  triune) is instantiated.  Note that they cannot both be instantiated by the same item. 

The point I am making is a subtle one, and you have to think hard to grasp it.  The point is that it is not at all obvious which of the following views is correct:

V1: Christian and Muslim worship the same God, even though one of them must have a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.

V2: Christian and Muslim worship different Gods precisely because they have mutually exclusive conceptions of God. So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.

The difference can be put in terms of the difference between heresy and idolatry.  If Islam is a Christian heresy, as has been maintained by G. K. Chesterton et al., then the Muslim has false beliefs about the same being about which the Christian has true beliefs.  If, on the other hand, the Muslim is an idolator, then he worships a god that does not exist, which obviously cannot be identical to the true God who does exist.

There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views. We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else? What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has? 

For the technical details see the entries collected here.

Summary 

Most of the writing on this topic is exasperatingly superficial and uninformed, even that by theologians.  Fr. O'Brien is a case in point.  He thinks the question easily resolved: you simply note the radical difference in the Christian and Muslim God-conceptions and your work is done.  Others make the opposite mistake.  They think that, of course, Christians and Muslims worship the same God either by making Tuggy's mistake above or by thinking that the considerable overlap in the two conceptions settles the issue.

My thesis is not that the one side is right or that the other side is right.  My thesis is that the question is a very difficult one that entangles us in controversial inquiries in the philosophies or mind and language.  

You might say it doesn't matter.  If Christians and Muslims worship the same God, then Muslims are heretics: they have false beliefs about the true God.  If Christians and Muslims worship different Gods, then the Muslims are idolaters: they worship a nonexistent god.  Not good either way.  This won't be acceptable to Muslims, of course, but why shouldn't a Christian say this and leave it at that? 

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Monasticism and the Monks of Mount Athos

In April of 2011, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos.  It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from liberals and leftists and the lamestream media is religion-bashing -- unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace -- but the segment in question was refreshingly objective.  It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough.  It didn't raise the underlying questions.  Which is why you need my blog. 

We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real.  For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though  philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality.  We don't know that there is any world other than this one.  We also don't know that there isn't.  Now here is an existential question for you:  Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinter world?  The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not.  It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is.  When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond. 

Let us be clear what the existential option is.  It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites.  It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death.  (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend.  I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)

The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions.  They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females -- there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.

Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being?  Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life?  The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth.  Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz.  There is a definite logic to their position.  If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters.  The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question. 

This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.'  Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it."  Marx and the commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means.  Millions of eggs were broken, though, and no omelet materialized.

Buddha, too, was famously opposed to speculation.  If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow.  The logic is the same, though the point is different.  The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, the extinguishing  of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara. 

If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then  by all means live in accordance with it.  Put it into practice.  But do you in fact have the truth?  For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded.  If the monks of Mt. Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.

But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions?  There is of course a secular analog.  I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions.  They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible.  Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example, who went to the electric chair as atomic spies.  Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up  enablers of  great evil.  In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.

So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being?  For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously.  I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry.  The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it.   But that can't come this side of the Great Divide.  Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize.  We can rest in dogma on the far side, although there we won't need it, seeing having replaced believing.

My Athenian thesis -- that the life of the philosopher is the highest life possible for a human being -- won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have serious doubts about it.  But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise.  For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.  

Philosophy is reason's search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  But reason is not reason unless it strives mightily  beyond itself to sources of truth that transcend it.  So the true philosopher must be open to divine revelation.  If it is the truth the philosopher seeks, then he cannot  confine himself to the truth accessible to discursive reason.

William Empson on Buddhism and Christianity

Karl White refers us to this quotation from a John Gray piece on William Empson in The New Statesman.

Empson’s attitude to Buddhism, like the images of the Buddha that he so loved, was asymmetrical. He valued the Buddhist view as an alternative to the Western outlook, in which satisfying one’s desires by acting in the world was the principal or only goal in life. At the same time he thought that by asserting the unsatisfactoriness of existence as such – whether earthly or heavenly – Buddhism was more life-negating and, in this regard, even worse than Christianity, which he loathed. Yet he also believed Buddhism, in practice, had been more life-enhancing. Buddhism was a paradox: a seeming contradiction that contained a vital truth.

Is Buddhism more life-negating than Christianity?  No doubt about it.  Empson is right on this point if not on the others.  I would put it like this.

Both Buddhism and Christianity are life-denying religions in that they both reject the ultimacy and satisfactoriness of this life taken as end-all and be-all.   But while Christianity denies this life for the sake of a higher life elsewhere and elsewhen, Buddhism denies this life for the sake of Nirvanic extinction.  The solution to the problem of suffering is to so attenuate desire and aversion that one comes to the realization that one never existed in the first place. 

Now that is one radical solution!  It should appeal to anti-natalists and Schopenhauerian pessimists.  And yet there is much to learn from Buddhism and its practices. Mindfulness exercises and other practices can be usefully employed by Christians.  Christianity and Buddhism  are the two highest religions.   My own view is that a spiritual practice that draws on the resources of both is the way to go.  They are of course incompatible in their metaphysics.  But metaphysics is a product of the discursive intellect and to be transcended in any case.  Both religions terminate, 'ultimate,' if you will, in the Mystical.  

For Buddhism the problem is suffering.  All is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory.  The cause is desire as such.  The solution is the extirpation of desire.  The way is the eight-fold path.  I have just summed up Buddhism in five sentences.

Pace the Buddhists, the problem is not desire as such, but desire inordinate and misdirected.

Buddha correctly understood the nature of desire as infinite, as finally unsatisfiable by any finite object. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, on the Buddhist conception, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

Christianity enjoins redirection of desire upon the Right Object.

The two great religions have this in common: both preach the nihilism of the finite.  I would say that any religion worth its salt must preach the nihilism of the finite, namely, the understanding that in the last analysis nothing finite is ultimately real.  In fact, I would erect this into a criterion of the religious nature.  If you have the insight into the nihilism of the finite, then you have a religious nature.  If you do not, then you do not.

But while both of these great religions preach the nihilism of the finite, Christianity in its highest manifestation -- Thomistic Catholicism you could call it -- takes a positive line with a respect to the Absolute: the ultimate state and goal is not one of  Nirvanic extinction and nonbeing, but of participation in the divine life via the Beatific Vision.

We are now hard by the boundary of the Sayable as we ought to be if we are serious truth seekers.

We can now define the worldling or secularist and the nihilist.

The worlding takes this world to be ultimately real, and the only reality.  He is spiritually dead to its ontological and axiological deficiency.  He is a Platonic troglodyte, if you catch my drift.  He is incapable of transcendental speleology since he cannot see the Cave as a Cave.

The nihilist  is spiritually awake as compared to the worldling.  The nihilist sees the nullity and the vanity (vanitas = emptiness) of the finite and transient, but thinks it exhausts the Real.  The adolescent nihilist's T-shirt reads:  The finite sucks! (on the front) and There's nothing else! (on the back).

Reference

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The Political and the Religious

I stated that the reason for carefully vetting Muslims who aim to immigrate into the USA is political rather than religious.  I had several points in mind, one of them being that it is the theocratic character of Islam that renders it incompatible with Western values, but not its specifically religious character. Theocracy is a form of political organization whereas there is nothing in the nature of the religious as such that requires that a religion be theocratic.  Theocracy is a political concept.  Religious character is -- wait for it -- a religious concept.  These are different concepts.  That should be obvious.  If it is not obvious, argument up ahead!

It struck me as important to make the distinction between the political and the religious because the political reasons for vetting or even excluding Muslims or some proper subset thereof, perhaps the 'Medina Muslims,' are consistent with the commitment to religious liberty enshrined in the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. According to this amendment, the government shall not interfere with the free exercise of religion.  Now while the First Amendment applies only to citizens, not to would-be citizens, it expresses a value that is universal in scope, that of religious liberty.   The value/right comes first; the amendment merely protects it.

Note also that according to the Article VI of the Constitution, there shall be no "religious Test" for would-be holders of public office.  So it is not the fact that Muslims have a different religion than most of us that supplies a reason for carefully vetting them; it is because their religion is a hybrid ideology, a political-religious ideology, the political component of which is manifestly incompatible with American political principles.  I hope it is obvious that a totalitarian theocracy is incompatible with limited government.

Canadian philosopher Jacques, however, questions my distinction between the political and the religious. He writes,

What are political grounds?  I doubt there could be any kind of political theory that isn't ultimately based in some (implicitly) religious attitude.  Consider the very idea that religion and politics are different realms, or should be or could be.  It's an idea that Protestants find easy enough to accept, because of their peculiar religious beliefs.  People in a Protestant-derived society such as the USA find it easy to accept because they have been shaped by Protestantism.  But if Islam is true, there is no such distinction. 

I am afraid I cannot agree with this.  First of  all, it is obvious that at the notional level there is distinction between the concept of the political and the concept of the religious. The distinction holds even if one or both concepts are empty.  The first  concept would be empty or uninstantiated if there were no states, just people organized in non-state or sub-state ways.  But there are, we know, states. We don't know, however, if there is anything corresponding to the concept of the religious.  Here are some typical religious 'objects': nirguna Brahman, saguna Brahman, Nirvana, The One of Plotinus, Deus qua ipsum esse subsistens (Aquinas), Allah, Yahweh, immortal souls . . . .  Suppose that naturalism is true and that there are no religious 'objects' at all, where naturalism is the thesis that reality is exhausted by space-time and its contents.  There would still be a distinction between the political and the religious.  They are clearly distinct at the conceptual level.  I hope Jacques is not denying the distinction at the notional or conceptual level.

Jacques appears to be claiming that every type of political theory is based in some implicitly religious attitude.  That would be false for the political theory of a naturalist.  I should think it is obvious that one could have a political doctrine that did not entail or presuppose any religious doctrine.  A libertarian doctrine of the state as outlined in, say, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is consistent with the view that religion is a purely private matter.

Jacques tells us that "if Islam is true, then there is no such distinction" as that between the political and the religious.  But surely if two concepts are extensionally equivalent, it does not follow that they are the same concept.  To borrow a Quinean example, x is a cordate iff x is a renate, but it doesn't follow that being cordate and being renate are the same property or concept.  So even if Islam is true -- God forbid! -- there would still be a distinction between the religious and political character of Islam.  And that is all I need for the points I am making.  

But if we think about this carefully, we see that there is not even an extensional equivalence.  Not every religious item in Islam is a political item.  For example, take the following doctrinal item:  There is no god but God!  Call it Radical Monotheism.  Consider it and all its entailments.  Among the entailments: God/Allah exists, is radically one, is not a trinity, is radically transcendent of the world, etc.  None of these metaphysical propositions has, by itself,  any political implication.  One could, in all logical consistency, accept all of these propositions and also accept American principles of government. Case in point: Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a moderate Muslim who battles what he calls "political Islam"  in A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot's Fight to Save his Faith, Simon and Shuster, 2012.  My tribute to Dr. Jasser here.  

A reformed Islam that is consistent with American values is not only possible but also  actual in the case of Dr. Jasser and a few others.  So, obviously, the political and religious aspects of Islam can be prised apart.  They are distinct.   I should add that, while there are a few moderate Muslims, the vast majority are not.  These are the ones that subscribe to Islamic law (sharia) and have no intention of assimilating to the West and its values.  I am afraid that Dr. Jasser's noble attempt at a reform of Islam is bound to fail.  But that is a separate issue.

Jacques continues:

Probably the same goes for Catholicism (on the most honest and coherent interpretation) and Hinduism or lots of Amerindian religions.  It makes no sense, on these various religious views, to isolate some particular realm of human affairs as being just 'political' rather than religious.  Just as it makes no sense, on most religious views, to isolate an area that is just 'ethical' or 'artistic' without also being religious.  Just as it makes no sense for progressives to isolate an area that's just 'personal' and not political. 

With respect to Catholicism, Jacques is on very shaky ground.  Jesus himself provides the charter for temple/church - state separation with his "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; render unto God the things that are God's."  That saying presupposes for its very sense that the political and the religious are not identical.  The saying occurs in all three of the synoptic gospels.  It is of course subject to different interpretations, but the Catholic reading is something like the following.  Although our main obligations are to God, we also have obligations to the political authorities, where 'Caesar' represents the political authorities of whatever time and place.  So of course the political and religious spheres are distinguishable.

And surely it is false that the concepts of the ethical and the religious coincide, or that no ethics is possible that does not rest on religious tenets.  This would have shocked old Aristotle whose eudaimonistic ethics rests on no religious bases.  There is of course a primum mobile in Aristotle's system, but it has no religious meaning.  The Prime Mover, just as such, is precisely NOT "what all men call God." (Aquinas, Quinque viae) 

Jacques tells us that progressives or as I call them, 'progressives,' do not separate the personal from the political.  But of course they have to, at the notional or conceptual level, if there are to be in a position to say something meaningful albeit stupid such as The personal is political.  This is an informative identity claim only if the senses of 'personal' and 'political' are different -- he said with side-long glance in the direction of Frege.  On the level of reference, however, it is true that the person is political for 'progressives.'  But so what?  They're wrong.  Jacques concludes:

Protestant theology holds up individualism and autonomy as very important values, ultimately for theological reasons.  Take away Protestantism, or some similar theology, and it's not clear why we should care so much about these things -- for example, why we should care that society has some tolerance for religious diversity or a non-religious conception of politics.  So I'm suggesting that, if Islam is not a 'pure' religion then western liberalism or conservatism is not a 'pure' political theory.

Jacques seems to be saying that there are no non-theological reasons for caring about the toleration of religious diversity.  Well, try this reason on for size: We tolerate religious diversity because we do not know which religion is true; nor do we know if any extant or possible religion is true.  Given deep and intractable disagreement within religions, across religions, and between religion and anti-religion,  toleration makes possible comity (social harmony) and prevents foolish, costly, and sometimes bloody conflicts.  There is no need for a theology to underpin this commitment to toleration.  Atheists and naturalists have no theology, but that does not prevent them from espousing toleration.

"So I'm suggesting that, if Islam is not a 'pure' religion then western liberalism or conservatism is not a 'pure' political theory."  I can't agree with this either. Islam itself -- not Islam 'lite,' some Jasserian reformed, de-politicized Islam -- is as much a political ideology as a religion.  It is very far from being just a religion.  But much of American conservatism is mostly free of religious elements.  Correct me if I am wrong, but nowhere in the U. S. Constitution or its Amendments is there any reference to God or to any religious doctrine.

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A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.

Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.

A catalog of currently misused religious terms would have to include ‘heaven,’ ‘seventh heaven,’ ‘hell,’ 'dark night of the soul,' and many others besides.

Take ‘retreat.’ Time was, when one went on a retreat to get away from the world to re-collect oneself, meditating on the state of one's soul and on first and last things. But now one retreats from the world to become even more worldly, to gear up for greater exertions in the realms of business or academe. One retreats from ordinary busy-ness to prepare for even greater busy- ness.

Instead of dropping 'retreat,' which would be the honest thing to do, the secularist drains it of its religious meaning and gives it a worldly one, but without entirely stripping it of its original sense.  In this way the secularist can attempt to profit from ancient associations without quitting his secularity.

And then there is ‘spirituality.’ The trendy embrace the term but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.

I didn't lay into the good lady as I perhaps should have, for her 'spiritual' good.  

Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern.

A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice in that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it.

One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

This gives new meaning to the phrase 'dharma bum.'

'Theology' is often misused.  In the reliably politically correct NYT, we find:

“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”

So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably.  It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs.  In the 'theology' of a liberal theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.

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