I’ve pretty much determined that agnosticism is the only reasonable conclusion I can make to the big questions of life. And yet, there are many times in our lives when we cannot not decide. We have to make at least a provisional decision.
The first is, how do you live, given the uncertainty?
The second is, what do you believe when you die?
For me, the answer to both is based in Jesus of Nazareth. The man, not the icon of doctrine that churches have created about him. I will live in such a manner in which I pursue, however imperfectly, those things that Jesus considered to be important: love of God (however vaguely I understand God) and love of humankind. Jesus also loved the Earth, upon which all humans (the poorest most directly) depend. And, at the moment of death, I will still not know whether there is something that will come afterward, or if Jesus is actually alive in some way, but if there is anyone in that afterlife, I believe it will be Jesus.
The uncertainty of my statements will not satisfy fundamentalists or even mainstream Christians. Certainly fundamentalists will call down the seals, trumpets, and plagues of Revelation upon my head. But if Jesus still exists and is waiting for us, I believe he will be happy with my sentiments. Not the Jesus on a white horse in Revelation trampling the grapes of wrath and beating the nations into a sorry pulp, but the Jesus who wandered on the hillsides of Judaea.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
On John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies
I recently read John Updike’s 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies. The late John Updike was one of the most empathetic writers who ever lived, at least as empathetic as Anton Chekhov. In this novel, Updike traces four generations of the Wilmot family: from a minister to a mail carrier to an actress to a religious cult member. Updike got inside the minds of these fictitious people, just the way he got inside the mind of a fictitious young Muslim in his novel Terrorist. What a diversity of people Updike could understand, and explain to us! In the Beauty of the Lilies was obviously inspired by the Branch Davidian event of 1993 just as Terrorist was inspired by the September 11 attacks.
Updike, in his autobiography Self-Consciousness, explained his religious views; they could be described as Christian agnosticism. Furthermore, Updike, more than any other mainstream novelist, was interested in the revelations about the world that science provides.
Updike began this novel in a way that editors would permit no other writers to begin: with religious and political concepts. But it was not mere exposition. The story of the Wilmot family begins about 1910 when a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, suddenly realizes that he no longer believes in God. He wanted to, but could not. His loss of faith was a palpable event to him. When his faith evaporated, the world became simpler and clearer for Clarence, but also horrifying. Updike wrote:
The clifflike riddle of predestination—how can Man have free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega ate His very own?—simply evaporated…And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal’s fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence’s own life would soon be, in a wink of earth’s tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting…The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy—the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem… There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness… [Theological books were] pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown…How little, could Darwin not have but noticed, had he left “Him” [God] to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor… [Theological books were] paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth.
I have never read such a beautiful description of what it feels like to lose faith in a Biblical sort of God.
A church official talked with Clarence about his loss of faith, and tried to get him to see that he could remain a clergyman even if he was an agnostic, because we cannot define the terms we are using anyway, and besides, a clergyman is supposed to minister to the needs of people here and now. The official told Clarence that the new insights from physics (e.g. Einstein) showed how little we understood the world just by looking at it. He also told Clarence that the Bible was not the end but the beginning of our explorations. But Clarence realized that the skeptics within Christianity had “burnt the ship beneath them and then [found that they] couldn’t walk on water.”
So Clarence eventually quit the ministry and ended up selling encyclopedias door to door, which was a dismal failure. In addition to the financial failure, Clarence felt an intellectual one: the encyclopedias boasted of being facts, all facts, just facts. Clarence felt “sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.”
Clarence Wilmot eventually died in poverty and with TB, and in utter hopelessness. How can we, even if we end up seeing the universe as agnostically as Clarence, avoid such hopelessness? What would I have said to someone like Clarence? At the very least, I would encourage him to not see the universe as just facts. I write encyclopedias, and my encyclopedias consist of more than just facts, but the structure of meaning that they create. Somewhere, in this meaning, one can find religious affirmation, even if not in a personal God.
I know this conclusion is not logically satisfying, but it is what I can do for now. Please feel free to share comments.
The conclusion of the novel comes almost full circle, when the pathetic playboy son of the actress (Clark Wilmot) undergoes a religious conversion in a cult. At the end, he realizes that it is a mental trap, and during the climax scene, he does not give up as his great-grandfather had done, but plays a heroic role. You have to read it to find out what it was.
Updike, in his autobiography Self-Consciousness, explained his religious views; they could be described as Christian agnosticism. Furthermore, Updike, more than any other mainstream novelist, was interested in the revelations about the world that science provides.
Updike began this novel in a way that editors would permit no other writers to begin: with religious and political concepts. But it was not mere exposition. The story of the Wilmot family begins about 1910 when a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, suddenly realizes that he no longer believes in God. He wanted to, but could not. His loss of faith was a palpable event to him. When his faith evaporated, the world became simpler and clearer for Clarence, but also horrifying. Updike wrote:
The clifflike riddle of predestination—how can Man have free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega ate His very own?—simply evaporated…And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal’s fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence’s own life would soon be, in a wink of earth’s tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting…The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy—the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem… There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness… [Theological books were] pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown…How little, could Darwin not have but noticed, had he left “Him” [God] to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor… [Theological books were] paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth.
I have never read such a beautiful description of what it feels like to lose faith in a Biblical sort of God.
A church official talked with Clarence about his loss of faith, and tried to get him to see that he could remain a clergyman even if he was an agnostic, because we cannot define the terms we are using anyway, and besides, a clergyman is supposed to minister to the needs of people here and now. The official told Clarence that the new insights from physics (e.g. Einstein) showed how little we understood the world just by looking at it. He also told Clarence that the Bible was not the end but the beginning of our explorations. But Clarence realized that the skeptics within Christianity had “burnt the ship beneath them and then [found that they] couldn’t walk on water.”
So Clarence eventually quit the ministry and ended up selling encyclopedias door to door, which was a dismal failure. In addition to the financial failure, Clarence felt an intellectual one: the encyclopedias boasted of being facts, all facts, just facts. Clarence felt “sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.”
Clarence Wilmot eventually died in poverty and with TB, and in utter hopelessness. How can we, even if we end up seeing the universe as agnostically as Clarence, avoid such hopelessness? What would I have said to someone like Clarence? At the very least, I would encourage him to not see the universe as just facts. I write encyclopedias, and my encyclopedias consist of more than just facts, but the structure of meaning that they create. Somewhere, in this meaning, one can find religious affirmation, even if not in a personal God.
I know this conclusion is not logically satisfying, but it is what I can do for now. Please feel free to share comments.
The conclusion of the novel comes almost full circle, when the pathetic playboy son of the actress (Clark Wilmot) undergoes a religious conversion in a cult. At the end, he realizes that it is a mental trap, and during the climax scene, he does not give up as his great-grandfather had done, but plays a heroic role. You have to read it to find out what it was.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Christianity and the Environment, part 3
We considered, in two preceding blog entries, how conservative Christianity has defined the nonhuman world as creation and therefore as something expendable by humans. Other religious traditions consider the Earth to be nature, from which humans evolved and of which humans are a part, just like every other species. Some of these religions are polytheistic, such as Buddhism and paganism, while others are more akin to spiritual philosophies, such as Taoism. There is even a little of this viewpoint in the Bible. The 104th psalm describes a world of creatures, of which humans are depicted as merely one component. Although these religions have not led their adherents on a deliberate conquest of the Earth, the homelands of these religions have suffered their share of environmental problems. The natives of North and South America experienced collapsed civilizations just like the Europeans.
The person most responsible for the emergence of environmental ethics based upon ecology was Aldo Leopold. As mentioned previously, Leopold made a pragmatic argument for the preservation of biodiversity. But he also promoted what he called the “land ethic,” and championed what he called “thinking like a mountain.” Humans, rather than rulers or even stewards, would be merely “plain member and citizen” of the world of species. Right and wrong were defined as those actions that contributed to or detracted from the health of nature. His essays in A Sand County Almanac remain a classic, even though they do not develop a complete ethical system. More recently, writer Wendell Berry has called for an ecological humility as the proper ethical system for humans. Biologist Wes Jackson promoted a very pragmatic view of the stewardship of natural resources, particularly soil, in New Roots for Agriculture and by founding The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Like Leopold, Jackson then went beyond pragmatism and calls for humans to recognize their membership in the world of interacting species.
Attention is now being given to evolution, as well as ecology, as a foundation for environmental ethics. Humans are one of several million species and, like the rest of them, evolved by natural selection; humans therefore have no rights not possessed by the other species. Some thinkers have gone so far as to develop a viewpoint known as Deep Ecology, in which the human species has become a disease upon the Earth, and needs to be brought into control.
Most environmentalists seek peaceful and orderly solutions to environmental problems—for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. A few organizations, however, use violent tactics to gain attention, even though they have little hope of actually counteracting the economic forces behind environmental destruction. These tactics usually take the form of arson on resorts that are closed for the season. Although no one has yet died from what conservatives call “environmental terrorism,” Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said that these organizations were the greatest threat of domestic terrorism in the United States. He said this even though Oklahoma was the site of the largest act of domestic terrorism that has ever occurred in the United States—the Oklahoma City bombing, which had nothing to do with environmentalism. Conservatives conveniently ignore acts of violence carried out by extremists on the political right (again, without deaths) against government agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, whose charge is to protect natural areas.
The approach that considers the ecological world to be nature, rather than creation, is largely—but not entirely—separate from Christian theology. You can derive environmental stewardship from Christianity, but it is not easy. Christian environmentalists such as Cal DeWitt, Fred Van Dyke, Joe Sheldon, Dick Wright, Tony Campolo, and Jeff Greenburg are trying very hard to do so. But the great mass of evangelical Christianity is solidly centered on materialism, on getting whatever we can from the Earth before Armageddon destroys it all anyway. I wish my Christian environmentalist friends all the luck in the world, but I do not foresee any hope for the ecosystem services, upon which millions of the world’s poorest people depend, coming from Christianity.
This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.
The person most responsible for the emergence of environmental ethics based upon ecology was Aldo Leopold. As mentioned previously, Leopold made a pragmatic argument for the preservation of biodiversity. But he also promoted what he called the “land ethic,” and championed what he called “thinking like a mountain.” Humans, rather than rulers or even stewards, would be merely “plain member and citizen” of the world of species. Right and wrong were defined as those actions that contributed to or detracted from the health of nature. His essays in A Sand County Almanac remain a classic, even though they do not develop a complete ethical system. More recently, writer Wendell Berry has called for an ecological humility as the proper ethical system for humans. Biologist Wes Jackson promoted a very pragmatic view of the stewardship of natural resources, particularly soil, in New Roots for Agriculture and by founding The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Like Leopold, Jackson then went beyond pragmatism and calls for humans to recognize their membership in the world of interacting species.
Attention is now being given to evolution, as well as ecology, as a foundation for environmental ethics. Humans are one of several million species and, like the rest of them, evolved by natural selection; humans therefore have no rights not possessed by the other species. Some thinkers have gone so far as to develop a viewpoint known as Deep Ecology, in which the human species has become a disease upon the Earth, and needs to be brought into control.
Most environmentalists seek peaceful and orderly solutions to environmental problems—for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. A few organizations, however, use violent tactics to gain attention, even though they have little hope of actually counteracting the economic forces behind environmental destruction. These tactics usually take the form of arson on resorts that are closed for the season. Although no one has yet died from what conservatives call “environmental terrorism,” Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said that these organizations were the greatest threat of domestic terrorism in the United States. He said this even though Oklahoma was the site of the largest act of domestic terrorism that has ever occurred in the United States—the Oklahoma City bombing, which had nothing to do with environmentalism. Conservatives conveniently ignore acts of violence carried out by extremists on the political right (again, without deaths) against government agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, whose charge is to protect natural areas.
The approach that considers the ecological world to be nature, rather than creation, is largely—but not entirely—separate from Christian theology. You can derive environmental stewardship from Christianity, but it is not easy. Christian environmentalists such as Cal DeWitt, Fred Van Dyke, Joe Sheldon, Dick Wright, Tony Campolo, and Jeff Greenburg are trying very hard to do so. But the great mass of evangelical Christianity is solidly centered on materialism, on getting whatever we can from the Earth before Armageddon destroys it all anyway. I wish my Christian environmentalist friends all the luck in the world, but I do not foresee any hope for the ecosystem services, upon which millions of the world’s poorest people depend, coming from Christianity.
This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Religion and Connection
Yesterday, September 8, was Antonín Dvořák’s birthday (1841). I celebrated it briefly by listening to two of my favorite pieces by this composer: the American Suite, and Wodník (usually called the Water Goblin). For me, this was an intense religious experience. The word religion comes from the Latin ligere, which means to connect. I felt connected not just to the beauty that flooded the composer’s mind as he wrote this music, even though he died over 50 years before I was born, but also the connection that he felt with the entire world of beauty.
This is an example of the connectedness of which religion, at its best, consists. There were no words, just music. But the music also told stories: I could just see the nineteenth-century American countryside in the American Suite, including the last movement that sounded like a wild dance of Native Americans; and the musical themes of the goblin and the young woman created images in my mind. Stories with words also create a feeling of connectedness: fictitious characters can provide a connection between you and thousands of people whom you will never meet. I felt this connection later in the evening when I read part of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies, one of his most empathetic novels.
What these experiences did not have was doctrine. These experiences carried with them no assertions to which I had to give assent.
Religious leaders enhance their own power (and often their own wealth) by insisting that you have to give assent to the doctrines that they purvey to you. You can’t just go out in the woods, or read the Bible stories for yourself. You have to receive salvation through their preaching. They ride the wild horse of religious feelings, whoop and whirl their hats, and proclaim that they and their doctrines are the source of the feelings; and then they lasso you into their domination. Then they say that those religious experiences do not exist outside of the little kingdom of their preaching.
This is an example of the connectedness of which religion, at its best, consists. There were no words, just music. But the music also told stories: I could just see the nineteenth-century American countryside in the American Suite, including the last movement that sounded like a wild dance of Native Americans; and the musical themes of the goblin and the young woman created images in my mind. Stories with words also create a feeling of connectedness: fictitious characters can provide a connection between you and thousands of people whom you will never meet. I felt this connection later in the evening when I read part of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies, one of his most empathetic novels.
What these experiences did not have was doctrine. These experiences carried with them no assertions to which I had to give assent.
Religious leaders enhance their own power (and often their own wealth) by insisting that you have to give assent to the doctrines that they purvey to you. You can’t just go out in the woods, or read the Bible stories for yourself. You have to receive salvation through their preaching. They ride the wild horse of religious feelings, whoop and whirl their hats, and proclaim that they and their doctrines are the source of the feelings; and then they lasso you into their domination. Then they say that those religious experiences do not exist outside of the little kingdom of their preaching.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Christianity and the Environment, Part 2
Even though many evangelical Christians criticized the 1967 paper by Lynn White, Jr. (see previous blog entry), he was right in his conclusion that conservative Christianity has encouraged a brutal conquest of nature. One reason is that the Bible is not a book. It is a collection of books, written by many people over many centuries, and it does not have a single coherent message. Most of the biblical books are themselves the product of editorial redaction from different primordial traditions. The first chapter of Genesis, correctly interpreted by White, presents a different view of creation from the second chapter, which was originally written by a different person. Each part of the Bible potentially contradicts every other part. An adherent of Christianity may choose to accept a Biblical image of conquering the Earth, or a Biblical image of taking care of it. It all depends on which passage is chosen. Adherents of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam can, however, force these passages into harmony, and in this way they can use the second chapter of Genesis to ameliorate the first.
White was right for another reason. Christian theologians have forced all the Biblical passages into harmony, and the climax of this harmonized Bible is the book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is the only example of an entire style of literature, popular in the Mediterranean world about 100 C.E., which is familiar to most modern readers. In this book, the entire biosphere of the Earth is destroyed during cosmic battles between good and evil, and those who are saved live in Heaven. The Heavenly City there described is the antithesis of biodiversity, and contains virtually nothing of the original creation. There is a river and a single tree. Everything else is gold and jewels—an utterly artificial environment. If this is, as about half of Americans believe, the future of the universe, what is the point of saving species and ecosystems? (See earlier blog entries for more on this idea.) For this reason also, if Christians are to participate in the rescue of the environment, they must look beyond the Bible and perhaps, as White suggests, emulate St. Francis.
The extreme popularity of apocalyptic Christianity meant that Christians, as a whole, were a feeble source of support for environmental protection. Their main passion was to support the politically conservative George W. Bush Administration, which rejected the evidence of global warming and paid little attention to environmental protection. In fact, after the end of the Bush administration, the full extent of conservative neglect for even the most basic environmental protection became obvious. The Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior was supposed to license fossil fuel extraction on federal lands with due consideration of the impact that this extraction would have on natural habitats. Instead, they gave licenses to corporations in return for bribes and sexual favors. When President Bush left the 2007 economic summit, he said, “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” making environmental ethics into what he considered to be a joke.
Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the world’s leading defender of biodiversity, wrote a book that was addressed to an unnamed Baptist minister. Wilson said that a conservative Christian could find common ground with even a secular humanist like himself by defending the Earth, which Wilson called the Creation. Wilson, however, wrote this book only after originally considering the Christian environmental movement to be a hopeless cause.
With the end of the Bush Administration and the disgrace of several leading Christian anti-environmentalists, a tide of opinion has turned towards Christian environmentalism. Despite this, many conservative Christians still consider the Earth to be unworthy of serious attention. They focus their attention instead on fighting against evolutionary science. When Edward O. Wilson visited Oklahoma in March 2009, a group of creationists disputed him about whether Charles Darwin did or did not believe in a Creator, and in the process Wilson’s impassioned plea for saving the Earth’s biodiversity was largely obscured. The view of the Earth that many conservative Christians have can be summarized in this way: “It’s okay to spit on it, to drive a truck over it, to spill oil on it, to chop it down, or to shoot it, so long as you don’t believe that it evolved!”
This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.
White was right for another reason. Christian theologians have forced all the Biblical passages into harmony, and the climax of this harmonized Bible is the book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is the only example of an entire style of literature, popular in the Mediterranean world about 100 C.E., which is familiar to most modern readers. In this book, the entire biosphere of the Earth is destroyed during cosmic battles between good and evil, and those who are saved live in Heaven. The Heavenly City there described is the antithesis of biodiversity, and contains virtually nothing of the original creation. There is a river and a single tree. Everything else is gold and jewels—an utterly artificial environment. If this is, as about half of Americans believe, the future of the universe, what is the point of saving species and ecosystems? (See earlier blog entries for more on this idea.) For this reason also, if Christians are to participate in the rescue of the environment, they must look beyond the Bible and perhaps, as White suggests, emulate St. Francis.
The extreme popularity of apocalyptic Christianity meant that Christians, as a whole, were a feeble source of support for environmental protection. Their main passion was to support the politically conservative George W. Bush Administration, which rejected the evidence of global warming and paid little attention to environmental protection. In fact, after the end of the Bush administration, the full extent of conservative neglect for even the most basic environmental protection became obvious. The Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior was supposed to license fossil fuel extraction on federal lands with due consideration of the impact that this extraction would have on natural habitats. Instead, they gave licenses to corporations in return for bribes and sexual favors. When President Bush left the 2007 economic summit, he said, “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” making environmental ethics into what he considered to be a joke.
Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the world’s leading defender of biodiversity, wrote a book that was addressed to an unnamed Baptist minister. Wilson said that a conservative Christian could find common ground with even a secular humanist like himself by defending the Earth, which Wilson called the Creation. Wilson, however, wrote this book only after originally considering the Christian environmental movement to be a hopeless cause.
With the end of the Bush Administration and the disgrace of several leading Christian anti-environmentalists, a tide of opinion has turned towards Christian environmentalism. Despite this, many conservative Christians still consider the Earth to be unworthy of serious attention. They focus their attention instead on fighting against evolutionary science. When Edward O. Wilson visited Oklahoma in March 2009, a group of creationists disputed him about whether Charles Darwin did or did not believe in a Creator, and in the process Wilson’s impassioned plea for saving the Earth’s biodiversity was largely obscured. The view of the Earth that many conservative Christians have can be summarized in this way: “It’s okay to spit on it, to drive a truck over it, to spill oil on it, to chop it down, or to shoot it, so long as you don’t believe that it evolved!”
This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.
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