Against the Stream

Here's My Beard, Ain't It Weird?

This is not the image I usually have of the Amish:

The leader of an Amish splinter sect accused of cutting the beards of religious enemies has received more than $2 million for oil rights to his 800-acre farm, yet continues to be represented by a taxpayer-financed public defender, according to a new court filing.

Federal prosecutors have asked a judge to require Samuel Mullet to hire a private attorney and to reimburse his public defender for work provided over the past five months. 

They also have asked that Mullet remain in jail pending his trial, citing fears that he and his followers might retreat to his farm and forcibly resist surrendering.

“The possibility of a violent encounter, this time with law enforcement, should not be readily dismissed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bridget Brennan wrote in the motion. “Accordingly, no amount of bond is sufficient to protect others from this defendant’s capacity for aggression.”

 

More on "Hunger Games" and Christian Love

Nancy French contemplates the differences between love in The Hunger Games and love in the Twilight novels. In Hunger Games, Katniss's love is projected outward into the world, while Bella's love in Twilight is always turned inward:

The love triangle in The Hunger Games centers on whether Katniss shold choose, childhood friend Gale or fellow contestant Peeta. However, the real story is the fight for survival, and the romance does not require characters to walk around without shirts for the duration of the film.  (In fact, there’s no sexual content in The Hunger Games.) Katniss Everdeen’s love causes her to bravely sacrifice on behalf of others – from taking care of her family to figuring out how to play a game in a way that hopefully won’t kill  her friend. As Rebecca pointed out, the love in the Twilight series is inwardly focused and makes you want to toss cold water on the characters’ heads. The love in The Hunger Games is outwardly focused, and movingly portrays characters acting in loving and courageous ways in the midst of tragedy.

As the father of daughters, it's very clear to me which of these protagonists I'd prefer my children to emulate.

Joel Osteen, Gay Marriage, and Discrimination

 

Someone needs to teach the unctuous Joel Osteen the meaning of the word "discrimination":

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked the pastor if being gay was a sin.

"I believe that the scripture says that being gay is a sin," Osteen smiled. "You know, every time I say that, Chris, I get people saying, 'You're a gay hater and you're a gay basher.' I'm not. I don't dislike anybody. Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world. But my faith is based on what the scripture says, and that's the way I read the scripture."

Wallace also pressed the preacher on the issue of marriage equality.

"I don't think we should discriminate against anybody," Osteen replied. "There was an issue where somebody couldn't go visit a gay loved one in the hospital. I don't think that's right. I think they love each other. So, I think there should be some [rights]."

"I'm not for gay marriage, but I'm not for discriminating against people."

Right. Because excluding an entire group of people from participation in a cornerstone social institution is ... not discrimination?

And, let's be honest: Osteen's alleged "faith" may be a lot of things, but one thing it absolutely isn't is "based in scripture."

Executing the Innocent

Andrew Gelman argues that you have to accept it if you favor the death penalty:

My larger perspective on the death penalty, informed by my research with Jim Liebman several years ago, is that you can only accept capital punishment if you’re willing to have innocent people executed every now and then. And, the more effective you want the death penalty to be, the more innocents you have to execute.

Ryan Runs from Rand on Religion

Paul Ryan has, on more than one occasion, praised the work of atheist libertarian whack-job Ayn Rand. Apparently, he's realized that might play so well at Georgetown:

"I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them," Ryan says. "They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman," a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. "But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist."

"I reject her philosophy," Ryan says firmly. "It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas," who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. "Don’t give me Ayn Rand," he says.

As Sarah Posner points out, Ryan's shift may have to do with the argument that he and some of his conservative Catholic kindred are attempting to make that liberal economic policies are contrary to Catholic social teaching and that their pro-rich, pro-ginormous corporations, pro-unfettered and uncontrolled capitalist policies are more authentically Catholic.

At the heart of their argument is a debate on the meaning of the Catholic term "subsidiarity," which means, as Dan Maguire explains, "that nothing should be done by a higher authority that can be done by active participation at lower levels." In other words, Catholic teaching has a preference for policies that originate and are controlled as close to the local level as possible. Conservative Catholics like Ryan believe that means that Catholic social teaching is "anti-statist" and thus opposed to the "statist" policies of the Obama administration. As Maguire notes, this is garbage and demonstrates a deep and abiding ignorance of Catholic thought.

Yet here is Ryan, throwing Rand under the bus and pledging alligience to Thomas Aquinas. Of course, he still buys Rand's economics, he just thinks Aquinas would too. Unfortunately for Ryan, Thomas Aquinas's position is very clear: Private property is necessary for the creation and maintainance of a good society, but only if it is used for the sake of the common good:

Two things are competent to man in respect of exterior things. One is the power to procure and dispense them, and in this regard it is lawful for man to possess property. Moreover this is necessary to human life for three reasons. First because every man is more careful to procure what is for himself alone than that which is common to many or to all: since each one would shirk the labor and leave to another that which concerns the community, as happens where there is a great number of servants. Secondly, because human affairs are conducted in more orderly fashion if each man is charged with taking care of some particular thing himself, whereas there would be confusion if everyone had to look after any one thing indeterminately. Thirdly, because a more peaceful state is ensured to man if each one is contented with his own. Hence it is to be observed that quarrels arise more frequently where there is no division of the things possessed.

The second thing that is competent to man with regard to external things is their use. On this respect man ought to possess external things, not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to others in their need.

Notice that last clause. It's important. We posses things, not as our own but as common, and are prepared to give them to others in their need. I invite you to consider whether this bears any resemblance at all to Republican attitudes on matters of economics and taxation. I don't believe it does.

Needless to say, the theological faculty at Georgetown were unimpressed:

In terms of understanding the Catholic Church’s doctrine on social issues, “we’d give that speech an F,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest at Georgetown’s Woodstock Theological Center. “Catholics believe that problems should be dealt with at the lowest levels. But if families could take care of themselves, and the local government could, we wouldn’t have the crisis that we’re facing right now.”

God and Politics: Robert Putnam vs. Chris Seiple Throwdown Edition

In Foreign Affairs, Chris Seiple takes on Robert Putnam and David Campbell's recent article entitled "God and Caesar in America." In that article, they argue that many younger Americans, turned off by the politicization of religion by the religious right, are getting out of the religion game altogether. Seiple argues by contrast:

Theologically orthodox (lowercaseo) and seeking to be biblically faithful, this sector is a relatively silent and leaderless but large. This group is of all ages, but they tend to be younger. They do not identify with capital-E Evangelicals -- whose national and global reputation is political, strident, and unforgiving.

Instead, if the people in this group use the term at all, they use it with a lowercase e. They want to be defined by what they are for -- an orthodox reading of scripture, the interpretation and application of which they must faithfully grapple with -- instead of what they are against. For example, they want to be seen as being "for marriage" and "pro-life" instead of anti-gay and anti-abortion. In other words, they largely hold the same values as Evangelicals, they just aren't angry about it.

What is up for grabs is their political support at home and abroad. They might find aspects of the Democratic Party appealing, especially its heart for the disenfranchised, and be "turned off" by the Republican religious narrative Putnam and Campbell describe. At the same time, they do not feel comfortable with a party that seemingly resists any public discussion of what it means to be pro-life and to believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Alternatively, the lower case e evangelicals might find much to love in the Republican Party, but not feel comfortable with a political narrative that treats Muslims and Hispanics as second-class citizens. For example, there are many evangelicals faithful to the Bible who believe that the Republican Party is shooting itself in both feet by not actively engaging those communities, which generally have a strong commitment to moral values. As a result, those groups are increasingly ready to follow the flight of the African-American community to the Democratic Party.

Certainly I can see some of these trends in the younger evangelical Christians that I've met, particularly the concern for the poor and disenfranchised, which was in no way a priority among the evangelicals I knew in college.

I'm less convinced, however, that Seiple is reading the situation correctly. What Putnam and Campbell are primarily concerned with, it seems to me, is the way that the stridant politics of the religious right have alienated so many young people that they've divested themselves from religious institutions that they see as no longer reflecting their values. What Seiple seems to be pointing to is a group of young people who are choosing to remain in these institutions despite the fact that they too do not see these institutions as reflecting their values. Acknowledgement of the first point does not negate the truth of the second.

But if, as Putnam and Campbell are arguing, the exodus of younger folks from the churches is an emerging trend that ought to give religious institutions cause to rethink the way they engage in public discourse. Seiple may known young people who don't fall into Putnam and Campbell's categories, but that doesn't mean that the issue is moot.

For Putnam, as anyone who has read his previous work knows, the central issue is social capital -- How it is acquired, how it is maintained, and how it is used. Social groups, including religious institutions, are important repositories of social captial, which means that if a large number of young people feel alienated from one of the chief vehicles for the transmission of social captial in society, this is a large problem for the maintanance of civil society and the creation of individuals able to participate in movements for social engagement.

The plight of the more liberal churches has been well documented now for decades. It cuts across generational and class divides. If we see a similar phenomenon taking place in conservative churches, that suggests a fundamental change in how individuals are relating to institutions. The question is whether churches, of the left or of the right, have the capacity to configure their identities in such a way that it will be attractive, rather than repulsive, to many young people.

 

Must Analytical Thought Reduce Belief In God?

Here's an interesting report from io9:

In four experiments with more than 650 volunteers in the U.S. and Canada, Norenzayan and his colleague Will Gervais then found a number of subtle ways to influence volunteers into thinking more analytically to see how it affected religious belief. This could simply involve looking at a picture of someone who looks like they are thinking hard about something, like Auguste Rodin's sculpture The Thinker, or looking at words such as "think," "ponder" or "rational." Even reading words in difficult-to-read fonts triggered analytical thinking.

The experiments revealed that volunteers prodded into thinking analytically increased disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, compared with people who did not receive the same cues. "It's a moderate-sized effect - not trivial," says Norenzayan.

The scientists expected plenty of misconceptions and public reaction over their research. "I'm bracing for a lot of hate mail," Norenzayan says.

They emphasized this work does not suggest that either analytical thinking or intuitive thinking is innately superior, because they promote either religious disbelief or belief. "All human beings have both systems of thinking - they both have costs and benefits in any given situation," Norenzayan tells io9.

Of course, I'd be interested to know what it means to "increase disbelief" in this context, particularly given the kinds of stimulous they used. This is the kind of report that I can see being easily misused to suggest that religious belief is irrational, though as the author of the study notes, theologians (and others) think rationally about religion all the time.

At the heart of the report is the distinction between analytic thinking and intuitive thinking. The argument is that analytic thinkers tend to be less religious than intuitive thinkers, or at least that the use of analytic thought makes you more skeptical as compared to intutive thought. There is some truth to that, but it needs to be unwound from the potentially misleading implications of the study.

What this demonstrates, to the extent that it demonstrates anything, is that religion is not something that you reason to, but something that you reason from. In other words, a person adheres to or accepts a religious worldview as true not because they have been convinced of its truth by rigorous analytical argumentation. Rather one believes a religion because the religion appears ("intuitively) to be true to one.

I often liken it to a gestalt shift, where an image that appeared to be one thing all of a sudden shifts to appear to be something else (like Wittgenstein's famous "duck/rabbit" or the goblet that becomes two faces). It's not that one way of viewing is wrong and the other correct, but that under the right circumstances things can come to seem differently to us when we shift our perceptual focus. This is the case with religion as much as with visual perception.

The core problem occurs when one way of reasoning is seen to be the exclusive domain of rationality. When you assume that your religious gestalt excludes any insight from rational analysis (or is subject to critique from that perspective) or when you assume that analytic or scientific ways of understanding the world exclude other means, you narrow the focus of human knowing to only that which fits within your perceptual aparatus, and thus fail to see the reason in things that may be very important and useful to know.

How Reinhold Niebuhr Dropped the Ball on Racism

In James Cone's new book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree he offers a sustained critique of Reinhold Niebuhr, arguing that Niebuhr, despite the principled radicalism of much of the rest of his writing, was notably mild when it came to the ugliness of racism in the United States. As John Blake writes:

Today, Niebuhr’s importance is acknowledged by both liberal and conservative Christian leaders. President Obama once called him one of his favorite philosophers. Niebuhr, the author of classics such as “The Irony of American History,” died in 1971 after a lifetime of political activism.

Cone, however, said neither Niebuhr nor any other famous white pastor at the time spoke out against the most brutal manifestation of white racism in the 20th century America: lynching.

Between 1880 and 1940, Cone says, an estimated 5,000 black men and women were lynched. Their murders were often treated as festive affairs. Women and children cut off the ears of lynching victims as souvenirs. People mailed postcards of lynchings. One postcard of a charred lynching victim read, “This is the barbeque we had last night.”

But Niebuhr said nothing about lynching, little about segregation, and once turned down King’s request to sign a petition calling on the president to protect black children integrating Southern schools, Cone said.

For Cone, this is a crucial omission because, he argues, "Niebuhr’s decision not to speak out against lynching encouraged other white theologians and ministers to follow suit" due to Niebuhr's prominance and status.

While I'm somewhat dubious of that last claim (I suspect many white pastors would have come up with plenty of reasons not to speak out irrespective of what Niebuhr did), the central point is no doubt right. Niebuhr was willing to go out on a limb for the things that mattered most to him -- In favor of economic justice, for defending England against Germany, against the Soviet Union -- but he stayed very close to the center when it came to race.

He certainly spoke out on behalf of racial equality, sometimes forcefully, but he took no risks for it, Cone argues. And any honest attempt to grapple with Niebuhr's legacy needs to take account of this reality. Even admirers of Niebuhr need to recognize where he fell short, and ask how he could have or should have done things differently.

Clergy Who Don't Believe

Daniel Dennet explores the phenomenon:

We want to know, ultimately, how this happens, and how common it is. It is apparently not rare - nobody knows what percentage of clergy fall into this category, not surprisingly. Our first study reported on five pastors in different Protestant denominations, who were interviewed in depth and in strict confidence by LaScola. Because it was published electronically (on the website On Faith) and under the headline "Preachers who are not believers" (Evolutionary Psychology, volume eight, issue one), this first pilot study has received considerable attention and brought us a host of new volunteers for our ongoing research.

There are many paths into this predicament, we find, but a common thread runs through most of them: a certain sort of innocence and a powerful desire, not for social prestige or riches, but rather the desire to lead a good life, to help other people as much as possible. The tragic trap is baited with goodness itself.

Here is how it often works: teenagers glowing with enthusiasm decide to devote their lives to a career of helping others and, looking around in their rather sheltered communities, they see no better, purer option than going into the clergy. When they get to seminary they find themselves being taught things that nobody told them in Sunday school. The more they learn of theology and the history of the composition of the Bible, the less believable they find their creed. Eventually they cease to believe altogether. But, alas, they have already made a substantial commitment in social capital - telling their families and communities about their goals - so the pressure is strong to find an accommodation, or at least to imagine that if they hang in there they will find one. Only a lucky few find either the energy or the right moment to break free. Those who don't break free then learn the tricks of the trade, the difference between what you can say from the pulpit and what you can say in the sanctum of the seminary, or in your heart. Some, of course, are unfazed by this.

While no doubt there are many clergy for whom this is all very sadly true, the problem is that Dennett is not a reliable analyst. For him, as for many neo-atheists, any religion which allows for doubt is "really" a form of covert atheism. So for all the examples he can no doubt evince of clergy who genuinely disbelieve in some definative way, there are probably many more who simply struggle, on a daily basis, to discern what they believe, and -- often in the face of very good reasons for doubt -- hold on to the thread of faith when it all evidence seems to be that the universe is a vast meaningless shell of matter in motion. To hold on to that belief, even by only a thread, is a very different thing than disbelieving.

On Resurrection

Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat sit down to discuss it:

 

There's much I agree with here, and some I don't, but it lays out many of the issues quite well.