Earlier this week, a Federal District Court ruled that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (CFSM) should not be considered a religion under U.S. law. According to an article on the ruling by the Religion News Service, this was based upon the fact that the Church was clearly intended to be satire, and not anything that could be considered a "genuine" religion.
In a 16-page decision, the U.S. District Court of Nebraska ruled that Pastafarianism is satire, not sacred, and that anyone who thinks it is a religion has made an error “of basic reading comprehension.”
“This is not a question of theology,” the ruling reads in part. “The FSM Gospel is plainly a work of satire, meant to entertain while making a pointed political statement. To read it as religious doctrine would be little different from grounding a ‘religious exercise’ on any other work of fiction.”
What I find interesting in the ruling is the fact that it makes a clear demarcation between something that is transparently satirical, and what would commonly be considered "genuine" faith. It raises a number of sticky issues, not least of which is "how can one go about distinguishing "genuine" from "inauthentic" religion. However, I don't think that the problem is nearly as difficult as the ruling's detractors are seeking to make it.
In the view of the CFSM's supporters, it is impossible to distinguish between a "real" religion and the CFSM, since everything that appears absurd about that faith is, in their estimation, no less absurd than the doctrines of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, or Scientology. By ruling against Pastafarianism (as the church is sometimes referred to), they argue that the court is making declarations about what constitutes "true" versus "false" religion.
However, that's not how I read the situation. The question is not whether the object of the religion is true or false, but whether the belief in the object of religious faith is sincerely held by adherents. The problem isn't that there is no Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's that absolutely no one really believes that there is one. As an act of satire, the CFSM has done its job too well. It has set itself up as such a transparent attempt to troll genuine religious belief, that no one can possibly take it seriously as a religious faith, to the extent that, even if someone were to claim to believe it sincerely, it would be quite clear that this is simply part of the act. (And if you don't believe me, try listening to or reading someone affirm the doctrines of Pastafarianism without conveying an obvious smirk).
This is in distinction from, say Scientology, which I have in the past defended as an "authentic" religion. By this I do not mean that I believe its doctrines to be true, or even remotely plausible. Rather, in thinking of Scientology as a religion, I recognize that there are many people who, for better or for worse, hold it as a sincere matter of faith. Now, I have heard from former Scientologists that much of the leadership of the Church is corrupt and abusive. This is probably completely true. I've heard enough similar reports to grant that a high degree of probability. But it's irrelevant to the question of whether it constitutes an authentic religion, because again, it's not about the truth or falsity of the doctrines, it's about the sincerity with which they are held. It's not about the virtuousness of the church's leadership, it's about the degree to which they are genuinely held in esteem by their followers, or can at least make a credible case that they are.
And this is the problem with the CFSM. One respondent in a conversation about this asked "why must it be the case that a belief is held sincerely in order for a religion to be authentic," to which I responded, "because the very nature of the word "belief" implied the idea that the thing believed is sincerely held to be true. There is simply no such thing as a genuine "belief" which is not sincerely held. Since nobody claiming to hold to the beliefs of the CFSM has been able to make even the most basic case that they hold those beliefs sincerely, it cannot be considered to a genuine religion. It's too successful as an act of satire. If the CFSM had wanted to be held as an actual religion, it would have had to do a better job cultivating a base of followers that could credibly claim that they sincerely believe it.
This, to be clear, has nothing to do with the question of whether one can "prove" the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster any more than one can "prove" the existence of God. The response that the FSM is just as credible as the Christian or Muslim God is, from a legal perspective, beside the point. This is not a matter of philosophical proof or comparative theology. It's a matter of what the courts often call the "reasonable person test." Would a reasonable person, looking at the CFSM conclude that its adherents held its beliefs sincerely, or merely for the purposes of satire. On that basis, I think a court could validly conclude that the CFSM is not a religion because it's precepts are not sincerely held.
Now, there may be other grounds on which one could make a case for the validity of the CFSM as a religion, but I'm of the opinion that, as New Religious Movements go, it's really not very interesting precisely because it's so obviously satirical. What I'd be interested in seeing would be a case where, for example, someone who followed the Jedi religion wanted that to be officially recognized. There are, after all, those who hold that Jedi-ism is a genuine religious belief, and they hold it sincerely. I think one could make a very compelling case, in a way that one can't for the CFSM in favor of adherents of Jedi religion, on much the same grounds as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Scientology.
Last night I had the opportunity to see The Hateful Eight (in its much vaunted 70mm, roadshow format, with a souvenir program and everything!). Tarantino's movies are, of course, always controversial, and this movie is no different. But as I discussed it afterwards with my companions, I realized that, despite the complaint that his movies revel in violence and nihilism, there is actually a moral core to Tarantino's work that is often overlooked.
There will be spoilers in what I am about to write, so consider yourself forewarned.
The Hateful Eight is Tarantino's homage to the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, but it's equally indebted to the drawing room mysteries of Agatha Christie. It tells the story of seven bad men and one bad woman trapped together in an isolated way station in the old west, waiting out a blizzard. Two of the men are bounty hunters. John "The Hangman" Ruth, always brings his bounties in alive to be tried and hanged. Major Marquis Warren is an African American Civil War veteran, who claims to be in possession of a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln. The woman, Daisy Domergue, is Ruth's bounty. Along the way, they also pick up a man who claims to be the town's new sheriff, but who also turns out to be an unrecalcitrant racist, who once belonged to a unit of Confederate soldiers who terrorized black towns in the name of "honor in defeat." Before we even arrive at the way station, tensions are running high among these four.
Once they arrive at the way station, they meet four more men. A Mexican named Bob who claims to be running the place, a cowboy on his way to spend Christmas with his mother (did I mention this is a Christmas movie?), the local hangman, and a former Confederate general. As the snow traps them, the central question driving the action is who is there to betray whom, and who will make it out alive.
It's no spoiler to say that not everyone does. Nor is it a spoiler to note that, along the way, enormous amounts of blood will be spilled. This is after all a Quentin Tarantino movie. If he really wanted to surprise us on this score, he'd make a movie with no violence at all.
However, that having been said, the level of violence is relatively muted for the first two hours of the movie. From the early panoramic scenes of a stagecoach traversing a mountain pass to the bulk of the time our cast of characters spends trapped together in the way house, most of the movie passes with relatively little violence (however, unfortunately most of the violence that does take place in those first segments is inflicted on the one woman in the cast). The third hour more than makes up for the slow burn, however, once the masks come off and the participants in the setup are revealed.
Here is your last warning about spoilers. After this point I will be revealing elements of the movie's plot that you might rather not know.
In the last act, it's revealed that Daisy's brother, along with the Mexican, the Brit, and the Cowboy, have staged an ambush at the way station in order to rescue her. After killing everyone there except the Confederate general, they set up the scene to appear innocent and then wait for Ruth to drop his guard. Eventually he does and gets himself poisoned to death along with their stage coach driver. At this point, Marquis and the Sheriff, who have every reason to hate one another, team up to figure out who the murderers are. They quickly establish that everyone except the two of them is now in on it (Marquis had killed the general right before the intermission, after a long scene where he described his humiliation and murder of the General's son, an act of revenge for the General's misdeeds during the war -- again, these are all bad people).
As violence, murder, and chaos descend on the cabin, everyone finds themselves dead except for Marquis, the Sheriff, and Daisy. Marquis is fatally wounded, and the Sheriff is not much better off. Daisy offers him a deal: If he will kill Marquis and let her go, he can cash in the bounties on the men her brother had brought to help rescue her.
Before I talk about what happens next, it's worth talking a bit about the connection between the western tropes that Tarantino is accessing (such as those in Sam Pekinpah and Sergio Leone) and naturalistic fiction. Naturalism stressed the struggle of human beings against their environment and their nature. It tended to be morally pessimistic, and leaned toward a degree of nihilism, in that it portrayed human beings as ultimately slaves to their own natures, and to the whims of fate. Watching the movie, I could see Tarantino dipping into that well, presenting us with eight characters who were not bound by any rules of morality of any sense of transcendent value, looking only to their own survival and sacrificing whoever and whatever was necessary in order to do so. At best, perhaps, they were bound by notions of kin and blood, whether Daisy's brother's attempt at bloody rescue, the Sheriff's lingering loyalty to the values of the Old South, or Marquis's desire to see justice done for the years of slavery and repression heaped on black Americans. But even there, one could argue that those bonds of blood and kin are tenuous at best, and can break under the right stressors. If this were a work of naturalistic fiction, then when those bonds were finally dissolved for the surviving characters, all that would be left would be the desire for survival and gain.
However, that's not what happens in the bloody aftermath, once everyone is dead except for Daisy, Marquis, and the Sheriff. After listening to Daisy's offer, and perhaps even seriously considering it for a moment, he instead rejects it, on the grounds that, as the Sheriff of Red Rock, he has a duty to perform, and furthermore, he doesn't believe Daisy's threat that, if he kills her, fifteen additional men are waiting in town to kill everyone. He is about to shoot her when Marquis insists that, for the sake of John Ruth, they enact a rough form of frontier justice and hang her themselves. Thus, as both men lay dying, and despite the fact that they each have good reason to hate one another, they overcome their mutual hatred in order to see some form of justice done.
Now, perhaps I'm stretching more than a bit in seeking to skim some form of moral redemption from this grand guignol, and there is certainly much to criticize in the way that Tarantino brings this drama to a conclusion. Certainly the violence is excessive. Certainly Tarantino seems to take far too much glee in acts of casual misogyny (directed mostly toward Daisy, though she is as thoroughly despicable as every other character), and in allowing the characters to express and explore their own depravity. And certainly the light of redemption at the end of this very deep and dark tunnel that Tarantino has led us down is very dim, yet I would still argue that it is there, and that, in spite of the racism, in spite of the misogyny, and in spite of the violence, Tarantino's message in this movie is about the possibility that, even under the most brutal circumstances, we can overcome even the most entrenched differences between us in the name of some transcendent reference point. Naturalism does not rule the day. In the end, our lives exist for the sake of something more than mere survival. John Ruth may not have been much of a moral guidepost for The Hateful Eight, but he did believe in the need for justice, and his example ultimately inspired the two remaining representatives of social order in that cabin to seek to bring about what justice they could, given the limited means at their disposal.
Benjamin Dueholm has a piece inReligion Dispatches today that adds a bit more to the ongoing Wheaton College controversy over whether Christians and Muslims worship the "same God." A few points that he raises are worth accenting. First, on the subject of how "monotheism" has traditionally functioned in Christian theology, he writes:
To some extent this may reflect the relative decline of classical philosophical monotheism in Christian discourse. Aquinas and his non-Christian influences had a common language for the nature of God—one, transcendent, necessary, eternal, not subject to change or decay, and so on. This language was at one time believed to be logically prior to revelation, and to be valid even if no revelation had confirmed it (this led thinkers of all three faiths into some risky territory with their co-religionists).
Moreover there were aspects of the revelations themselves—the “book” of which Dr. Hawkins spoke, quoting a common Islamic formula for the adherents of the monotheistic religions—that cohered in broadly shared themes. The world has an origin and a conclusion; humans are made for relationship with God; moral precepts are ordered to the knowledge and service of this God.
This philosophical language and these intertextual themes are less prominent in Christian thought today, especially among Protestants.
This point cannot be stressed enough. The theological positivism represented by way that Wheaton's administration has chosen to interpret Professor Hawkins' statements represents a failure to recognize the continuity of tradition in thinking about the question of monotheism. What Medieval Catholic theologians and Medieval Muslim scholars shared in common with one another allowed them to actually argue over the substance of their theological claims. These scholars were actually having a disagreement, whereas Wheaton College can't actually be said to be "disagreeing" with anyone because it's refusing to even engage in a substantive conversation with Islam over the nature of its differences. The best that can come -- the best -- from a religious dispute of this sort is a set of mutually dueling monologues, in which religious traditions talk past one another and refuse to recognize any common ground from which they can speak. Of course, the more common result of this refusal to engage on a set of common terms is violence, coming from both sides in the dispute. But if the goal of speech is understanding, then recognizing a common language for conversation is a necessary first step. We once had that in the conversation between Christians and Muslims, but we don't any longer.
Ben goes on to make another point:
Where Christianity’s similarities with the monotheisms—whether of Greeks, Jews, or Muslims—were once central to Christian interfaith apologetics, now it is the distinctive marks that predominate. Some evangelicals have adopted a sort of slogan that Christianity is “not a religion but a relationship,” fully severing the anguished familial bonds with Judaism and Islam.
In other circles it is now more common to describe religion as constituted by its practices and its distinctive narratives, diminishing the abstract notion of God to something of a cipher.
This point is even more perplexing to me coming from an evangelical institution such as Wheaton. Given the focus on conversion, and the need for apologetics, the fact that they would abandon what has been, since Paul's speech at the Areopagus, the central apologetic strategy of Christianity is really rather mind-boggling. It also raises troubling questions, as several commentators have noted, about the relationship between evangelical Christians and Jews, suggesting as it does that they do not believe that Jews worship the same God as Christians any more than Muslims do. As Daniel Kirk has noted, throwing around accusations of Marcionism is a bit of a cottage industry these days, yet I cannot be the only one to find traces of Marcionism in this implication. I was rather startled in my own exchanges over the past several days on this topic to realize that many Christians are actually quite happy to abandon the claim that Christians and Jews worship the same God, if that means that they don't have to accept that Muslims worship the same God as well.
But what this demonstrates is how the commitment to the exclusion of Muslims has led to an incoherent and tribalistic rhetoric in some evangelical circles, where evangelism simply consists of responding to every question with a Bible verse (as though that would convince anyone who didn't already hold the Bible as authoritative in some way, and as though those passages themselves don't require contextualization and interpretation), and where there is not even a scintilla of rational engagement with those with whom we disagree, or even an acknowledgment of a shared language. The problem is not, I think, that there are some people who just can't be bothered to rationally engage on these questions. There will always be people whose capacity and desire for such engagement is limited. The problem is that those who can't be bothered occupy positions of power and influence in educational institutions intended to represent the Christian intellectual tradition at its best.
For now at least, Wheaton's administration seems to have decided that it's given up on the business of education, in name of indoctrination. More's the pity for its excellent faculty and students.
Much as I've appreciated Miroslav Volf's defense of the argument that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, one passage in his Washington Post article jumped out at me as rather dissonant, but I didn't really feel qualified to comment on it. However, it turns out that my Catholic Theological Union colleague Scott Alexander noticed the same thing, and he is qualified to comment. Here's the passage from Volf:
In addition to contesting the Trinity and the Incarnation, Muslims also contest the Christian claim that God is love — unconditional and indiscriminate love. There is no claim in Islam that God ‘justifies the ungodly’ and no command to love one’s enemies. But these are the signature claims of the Christian faith. Take the redemption of the ungodly and the love of enemy out of the Christian faith, and you un-Christian it.
Clearly, Christians and Muslims disagree, just as Christians and Jews do, on the questions of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the Trinity. These are rather basic disagreements, though profound as they are, they do not nullify the underlying argument. Christians and Muslims may be said to worship the same God, even if they disagree about the nature and attributes of that God. However, what about this business about Muslims not believing that God is Love, or that God commands us to love our enemies? Scott Alexander writes in response to these assertions:
My experience with Muslim interlocutors of various types have taught me that, although they may reject the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, Muslims have their own different but equally powerful expressions of God’s love in profound divine-human intimacy.
Muslims personally testify in an abundance of ways to the immanence of God in their lives—the God whose active will is felt in the pulse of the very blood coursing through their veins. This sense of intimacy with a God who loves (His) creation is also echoed in classical interpretations of the two divine attributes attested in Islamic discourse above all others: “The One Who is (Him)self Compassion” and “The One Who Ceaselessly Acts Compassionately in (His) Relationships with All Creatures.”
I discussed this point with a Muslim colleague who pointed out that the Islamic emphasis on God’s rahma or “mercy” is the equivalent of Christian agape in that it is “flows eternally with no expectation of reciprocation.”
Alexander then goes on to address the assertion that Muslims aren't commanded to love their enemies:
In the context of burgeoning Islamophobia in the U.S. and rhetoric which propagates the falsehoods that Islam is an inherently violent faith and that Muslims are uniquely prone to violence in the name of their religion, Volf suddenly resurrects another age-old Christian anti-Muslim polemic. He declares, by way of implicit contrast with Islam, that “love of enemy” is “the signature claim of the Christian faith.”
This highly spurious declaration raises at least two questions.
The first is whether Prof. Volf is familiar with verses such as Q 41:34:
“[Given the fact that] goodness and evil are not equal, defend yourself [against evil] with what is greater in goodness, such that the one between whom and yourself there is enmity may be as though s/he had always been your intimate friend.”
He goes on to ask how any religion can be said to have a singular "central claim," the absence of which would make it cease to be what it is. He then concludes:
Volf seems to imply, Wheaton and other Evangelical Christian institutions and theologians can then get about the more important business of truly loving Muslims by showing them just how flawed their understanding of the God they worship really is.
As a Christian committed to the study of Islam and Christian-Muslim dialogue, I must respectfully offer my “thanks, but no thanks” to Prof. Volf’s well intentioned but ultimately troubling intervention in the controversy over Prof. Hawkins’s suspension.
I'm not as willing to throw over Volf's whole argument because of these flaws, but I do recognize that they are flaws in his argument. What Volf, Alexander, and I all share is a commitment to the creation of an ongoing conversation between Christians and Muslims, which recognizes and addresses the genuine core differences between them, but also engages in an honest assessment of what we share in common. When Volf argues that "Many Christians and many Muslims worship the same God," I understand him to be saying that those of us who recognize God as the common source and originator of our distinct faiths, and affirm that God wishes us to live in peaceful community with one another, then we are worshiping the same God. Of course, by that same argument, it can be said that Christians and Muslims who desire this share more in common with one another than they each do with members of their own faith that are committed, as far too many are, to the perpetuation of violence and conflict.
Wheaton College has made the news this week for putting a tenured professor on "administrative leave" for having asserted that Christians and Muslims worship "the same God." Here's a brief account of the details via Inside Higher Ed:
Wheaton College, a Christian institution in Illinois, has suspended Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science who has attracted considerable attention for saying she would wear a hijab throughout Advent to express solidarity with Muslims. A statement from the college said the suspension was not for her wearing the hijab, but because of "significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements" she has made. "Wheaton College faculty and staff make a commitment to accept and model our institution's faith foundations with integrity, compassion and theological clarity. As they participate in various causes, it is essential that faculty and staff engage in and speak about public issues in ways that faithfully represent the college's evangelical statement of faith," said the college's statement on the suspension.
The particular statement that got Professor Hawkins into trouble, as described by Christianity Today is this: "“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book, ... And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”
There are a number of strands of this controversy which are difficult to unravel. On the one hand, there's the question of academic freedom, in that as a faculty member at a university, Professor Hawkins should be permitted to make statements in her capacity as a professor without fear of institutional reprisal. Yet, at many religiously based colleges and universities today, those rights are to one degree or another curtailed. Yet it undermines Wheaton's credibility as the "Evangelical Harvard" as it claims to be.
Then there is the issue of Professor Hawkins' decision to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslims. Wheaton insists that this was not a factor in their decision. And perhaps it wasn't, but it's hard to disentangle her public display of solidarity from the words she used to express that solidarity. It seems that Wheaton was uncomfortable with the degree to which professor Hawkins was acting "too Muslim" for them. As Miroslav Volf noted in the Washington Post today: "When Hawkins justified her solidarity with Muslims by noting that as a Christian she worships the same God as Muslims, she committed the unpardonable sin of removing the enemy from the category of 'alien' and 'purely evil' other. She also drew attention to the simple fact that most Muslims aren’t enemies."
Then there is the issue of whether Professor Hawkins' defense of her position is "too Catholic" for Wheaton, given the school's history of firing faculty for the "crime" of converting to Catholicism. But at bottom, the school's claim is that she has violated its statement of faith via her assertion that Christians and Muslims worship "the same God." But why should this be controversial?
Certainly there are Christians who are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Christianity has anything at all in common with Islam, as well as those who can't comprehend how Christians and Muslims could worship the same God. However, Islam has always insisted that the God it worships is the God of Abraham, the same God attested to in the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. Thus it places itself firmly in the Abrahamic religious tradition. But the fact that Muslims believe they worship the same God as Christians and Jews doesn't necessarily require that Christians believe that, does it?
Well, Muslims assert that they worship the God who was revealed to Moses and the Prophets, just as Christians and Jews do. They assert that the God they follow is one God, just as Christians and Jews do. In many respects in fact, the way that Islam conceives of God is much closer to the Jewish conception of God than the Jewish conception of God is to the Christian conception of God. If Christians and Jews worship the same God, then in what sense would Muslims not do so?
Indeed, as Professor Hawkins statement notes, this position has been officially recognized within the Catholic Church. According to Nostra Aetate:
“The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth (Cf. St. Gregory VII, Letter III, 21 to Anazir [Al-Nasir], King of Mauretania PL, 148.451A.), who has spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God’s plan, to whose faith Muslims eagerly link their own. Although not acknowledging him as God, they venerate Jesus as a prophet, his Virgin Mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke. Further, they await the day of judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, alms-deeds and fasting.
Of course, as noted above, Wheaton has some issues with Catholics as well. But there is certainly nothing alien to the idea that Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship the same God. Of course, this is not the same thing as saying that we understand God in the same way. Our conceptions of God are relevantly similar, but not identical. This is again, clearest when one contrasts the Christian conception of God as one, but also triune, as eternally spirit, but also incarnate in the flesh of Jesus Christ. And in terms of salvation, as Christians we affirm that God saves humanity through Jesus Christ, while both Judaism and Islam believe that it is accomplished through God's law and covenant as attested in the Torah or the Quran. These are deep and relevant differences between these traditions, but acknowledging these differences is quite distinct from saying that each tradition is not, in its own way, seeking to follow the same God.
What's more, if, as many Christians affirm, all truth is one, then anyone seeking to faithfully follow God, whatever tradition they embrace, is following the same God. This position, which was powerfully illustrated by C. S. Lewis in his book The Last Battle implies that one can be mistaken in the substance of one's belief, while still truly following the true God. As Volf states:
All Christians don't worship the same God, and all Muslims don't worship the same God. But I think that Muslims and Christians who embrace the normative traditions of their faith refer to the same object, to the same Being, when they pray, when they worship, when they talk about God. The referent is the same. The description of God is partly different.
A key problem in understanding what is going on at Wheaton has to do with how they understand what it means to "do theology." This is a perennial problem within the evangelical community, and one that I've encountered in conversations with conservative Christians time and again. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: from the conservative Christian perspective, theology is not something that takes place in the context of a particular time and place. It is not a response to the revelation of God. It is not an attempt to engage in an understanding of the tradition to which we belong. Rather, conservative evangelical theology is about obedience to and adherence to authoritative texts, whether those texts from the Bible, particular creeds and confessions, or -- as in this case -- your school's statement of faith. This "received theology," is then declared to represent an uncrossable line, and the decision about who has or has not crossed that line winds up residing with authoritative bodies, like church bodies or university administrations. It constitutes a form of dogmatic theological positivism which does not allow allow any room for actual response to the contextual arena in which God is actually live and moving in the lives of believers.
Contextual theology, by contrast, recognizes that theological work is an ongoing and imperfect project, which takes place in the life of the church, in conversation with tradition and scripture, but always in light of the current situation in which it is being done. What it means to think contextually is to ask the question, as James Gustafson has put it: "What is God enabling and requiring us to do here and now?" This requires us to be open to the leading of God into new situations, to be willing to take risks on behalf of our faith in God, and to act confidently in God's grace when we stumble and fall. While the received, dogmatic theology of conservative evangelicalism is rooted in fear -- specifically fear that God will abandon us if we affirm the wrong propositions about the divine nature -- contextual theology reaches out to new situations in love, acting confidently in the knowledge that "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). Professor Hawkins was engaged in a contextual theology, rooted in love for her Muslim brothers and sisters, and in recognition that, as the God of Jesus Christ was the God of Abraham, both Christians and Muslims must worship the same God. Her response wasn't a rejection of Wheaton's Statement of Faith, but it also wasn't simply a dogmatic adherence to it. Rather, it was a contextualization of that statement in light of what God is enabling and requiring of us today.
In the final analysis, there is no good reason for Christians to assert that Muslims follow any other God than the one God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, even though they do not recognize our account of that revelation, or what we understand it to be telling us about God. What Wheaton has done is shameful, and as Volf notes, has more to do with Professor Hawkins' attempt to "de-other" Muslims, than with any matter of substance having to do with Christian faith or Wheaton's Statement of Faith. Professor Hawkins has done an admirable thing, and by doing so she has drawn attention to the continuing relevance of this key theological question to the ongoing relationship between Christians and Muslims in the United States. More's the pity that there are plenty of Christians around, happily condemning others to hell, who refuse to see the commonality between us and our Muslim brothers and sisters.
Another day, another mass gun murder in the United States. Of course, we've been here before, many times. Each time, we arrive where we started, but, contrary to T. S. Eliot's poem, we continually fail to know the place for the first time. Rather, our positions get further entrenched, our arguments more vitriolic, nothing changes, and we simply await the next mass shooting.
In the case of the Colorado Springs shooting at Planned Parenthood, we know that the perpetrator was a right wing Christian anti-abortion activist (despite the shameful attempts of some politicians to pretend otherwise), while in the case of the San Bernardino shooting, it is increasingly apparent that the perpetrators were jihadists. In other cases, the shooters have been right wing racists (as in South Carolina), or deranged psychotics (as in Arizona, and Connecticut, and Boulder, etc., etc., etc.). The motives are not always clear, and for the ones who are legitimately crazy, the question of motivation may not really be all that relevant. But in the case of these last two shootings, it was clear that both sets of perpetrators were motivated by religious zealotry and violent fanaticism. In both cases, it's clear that they were acts of religio-political terrorism (although, it's interesting to note, that the FBI has quickly labeled the San Bernardino shooters -- Muslims, with Middle Eastern last names -- as terrorists, while they have yet to do so in the case of the white, Christian Colorado Springs shooter).
And, if we want to widen the lens a bit, we can include the regular acts of violence that take place around the United States that don't qualify as "mass shootings" but still demonstrate the exceptional rate of gun homicide in the United States -- Chicago, Baltimore, every major urban area, and the many less publicized examples that take place in predominantly white, rural areas. We can add to that the many, many examples of people who inadvertently mishandle legally owned firearms and accidentally kill people every day, up to and including toddlers who manage to get their hands on mom's gun and shoot her in the store. It is -- there is no better word for it -- madness.
Given the prevalence of this kind of violence in the United States, why is it that we keep winding up back here at the same place? Another act of gun violence, another mass shooting, and yet nothing is done. The easy answer is that the National Rifle Association as so corrupted American politics on this issue that we have become completely incapable of addressing it. But the issue is more complicated than that. The NRA is able to corrupt politics to the degree that it does because it has so many willing dupes in American gun culture who are totally and completely incapable of recognizing a) that guns are a genuine cause of massive harm in the United States, b) that there are policies that can be implemented to address that and c) those policies need not in any meaningful way impair their much-vaunted "right to bear arms."
Part of this, as an article at Vox points out, has to do with the ideological mindset of conservatives in the United States who see every act of gun violence, not as a reason to limit gun possession, but as a reason to expand it. This is the showdown at the OK Corral approach to gun regulation. They believe, apparently sincerely, that if only more people had, and openly carried their guns, shooters would be less likely to engage in gun violence. This is, the article notes deeply rooted in a particular psychological state that is impervious, or at least resistant, to counter-argument:
To our gun owner, another mass shooting is not an argument for getting rid of guns. It's a confirmation of his every instinct, another sign of moral and societal decay, another reason to arm himself and defend what he's got left.
You can tell him about Canada and Australia until you're blue in the face — the lower rate of gun deaths, the hunting exemptions, the seemingly intact freedoms. You can cite high popular support for restrictions on gun and ammunition sales. You can tell him that not every incremental tightening of standards is a slippery slope, that no one wants to confiscate his guns.
But you're just another self-righteous liberal on another self-righteous crusade, too blind or stupid to see how governments always use people like you to disarm their citizenry. You've taken enough — of his taxes, his freedoms, his culture. He won't give you any more.
So, incidents of gun violence become part and parcel of the argument that gun regulation itself doesn't work. This meme emerged quickly in the wake of San Bernardino, as at least one of my more pro-gun Facebook friends posted something suggesting that, since this happened in California, which has strict state-wide gun laws, this demonstrates that strict gun laws don't work. So the only alternative is to loosen gun restrictions so that everyone can carry all the guns they want, openly and in public if they so desire.
Of course, in the gang-ridden areas of Chicago, where I live, there are plenty of guns, and everyone knows who has them. Far from reducing gun violence there, it simply leads to the kind of in-group versus out-group violence that characterizes gang culture. Gun violence in this context begets more gun violence, and it's not clear what the way out of the cycle of violence might be except to break it entirely (an argument that Spike Lee is attempting to make in a novel Aristophanean way in his latest film Chi-Raq). The solution here is clearly not more guns. We've got plenty of guns. That's the problem.
At the same time, it's necessary to state as clearly as possible the response to these conservative objections to increased gun violence, not because it will change their minds (as the Vox article notes, there is already ample argument to change the mind of anyone who cares to pay attention, if their minds are genuinely open, but they aren't). It's important to state the response so that we are without excuse. So that it's clear that we know the difference between argument and obfuscation, and that we can tell the difference between the corrupted pseudo-argument of the pro-gun lobby and its willing dupes and the actual construction of sound public policy. And in that regard, there are a few things that bear repeating.
First, the goal of gun regulation is not and has never been to take guns away from people who want to use them peacefully for purposes of hunting, or even self-defense. Now, for my part, I think it's abjectly stupid to own a gun. I mean, it's really, really stupid, given that your gun is 17-times more likely to kill someone in your own household than it is to ever protect you from an intruder.* If it were legal to own a tiger, and if it were affordable to own a tiger, and if I had many friends who told me repeatedly that it was my right to own a tiger, and that in fact a tiger could protect me from my enemies, and that owning a tiger was incredibly fun and if only I owned one I would see how awesome and necessary tiger ownership was, I would still not wish to own a tiger, because it's quite clear to me that a tiger is vastly more likely to eat one of my children than it will ever be to protect them. Owning a tiger is stupid, even if you had a right to own one. That's how I feel about guns. Nevertheless, no one wants to pass laws that take guns from the hands of people who know how to use them responsibly (just like no one wants to take Siegfried and Roy's tigers, even after Roy got mauled by one of them).
The goal has never been confiscation, but regulation (and, after all, even a Second Amendment purist can't evade the fact that the phrase "well-regulated" is right there in the text of the Second Amendment). The goal is to keep guns away from those who shouldn't have them. However, the trend that I've noticed since the gun-control debate really re-emerged in earnest in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre is the personalization of the anti-gun control argument. At least, among the people I've been in conversation with, or who have placed anti-gun control memes on their Facebook pages, there is an intense sense that gun owners tout court are being blamed for gun violence. So what I read is a great deal of defensiveness. "I've never harmed anyone with my gun, so why do you want to take it from me?" Leaving aside the fact that no one wants to take their guns, the fact is that there is nothing personal about this. It's not about viewing gun-owners as a group as being morally suspect, it's about ensuring that a potentially dangerous item is secured from those who would abuse it.
Another analogy, similar to the tiger one above. Let's say I was a nuclear physicist. A good, moral, peaceful nuclear physicist, who worked with radioactive isotopes. Assume that I wanted to do an experiment that required access to plutonium. As it turns out, plutonium is incredibly difficult to acquire. And I can't help but think that's a good thing. It's not a moral accusation of me as a nuclear physicist that I have to go through massive background and security checks in order to acquire plutonium. On the contrary, it's a recognition that, no matter how moral I am, the possibility of harm from misuse of plutonium is so great that even very moral people have to be very thoroughly screened in order to have access to it. It would be irresponsible if the Nuclear Regulatory Agency simply gave out plutonium to everyone who asked for it. Because it only takes one lunatic with a bit of plutonium to do enormous damage.
Even if I am a good, moral, and peaceful nuclear physicist, in fact especially if I am a good, moral, peaceful nuclear physicist, I should welcome that kind of scrutiny, not only because I don't want anything bad to happen through the misuse of plutonium, but because I recognize that if something bad did happen that as a nuclear physicist, I could be accused of culpability. In fact, if I were a nuclear physicist who lobbied strongly against the regulation of plutonium, I very arguably would be culpable if someone slipped through the very tattered regulatory safety net I had helped create. I think that this is certainly true by extension of the gun lobby, and the NRA in particular, and I think it is arguably also true of the many gun owners who give them moral support through their money and their resistance to regulation.
However, there is still the matter of the argument that statewide gun regulations such as those in California are actually ineffective as a means of controlling gun violence. Again, I'm reminded of an Onion headline that encapsulates the substance of this argument quite well: "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens." If there were truly no way to prevent this kind of thing, then we'd see it happening all the time in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and other modern industrialized countries. But we don't, at least not with the kind of regularity that it happens here. (Pointing to the recent attacks in Paris doesn't get you very far, since, horrid as they were, they were notable among other things for their rarity). So then, what is the response to people who point to ineffective gun laws?
The most direct answer is to agree: Gun laws of the kind we currently have are not effective, precisely because they only function on the state level. If the laws in California are strict, that's alright, because Nevada and Idaho aren't all that far away and the gun laws are much laxer there. Similarly, the very strict gun laws in Chicago are mocked given the degree of gun crime we experience. But anyone who is familiar with the city knows that it's the easiest thing on earth to get from Chicago to Indiana -- where the gun laws are much looser -- and back again in a couple of hours. State and local gun laws are ultimately ineffective precisely because they are not widely replicated in other states. Pro-gun advocates point to this as evidence that gun laws per se don't work. But this is simply fallacious: Poorly implemented local gun laws don't work, but a national law, which sought to both regulate guns at the point of purchase and also reduce the overall supply of guns available throughout the country, would be far more effective at controlling gun violence. The problem is one of easy availability. The solution is to make that availability much more difficult, both by increasing regulatory barriers (more and better background checks, longer waiting periods, etc.) and by decreasing the overall supply (through gun-buy back programs and requiring gun manufacturers and sellers to stop selling certain items, like extended magazines and armor piercing bullets). All by themselves these two policies (which would of course require a great deal more fleshing out than I can do here before they became law) would drastically reduce the possibility of gun violence, without severely restricting the rights of existing gun owners.
I would add another policy, which would undoubtedly be more controversial, but which shouldn't be: I would require a thorough psychological screening before anyone would be permitted to purchase a gun. To buy or possess a gun legally, you should be required to demonstrate to a competent professional that you are not a danger to yourself or others. It's been said repeatedly that the real problem of gun violence is largely a mental health problem. And while I don't think that's the entirety of the story, I am willing to concede that a non-trivial proportion of gun violence is perpetrated by people who are mentally ill. So, how to prevent it? Easily -- require all gun owners to undergo mental health screening. The goal here is not to stigmatize either gun owners or the mentally ill, but to recognize that some mentally ill people, given access to a gun, have the potential to use them violently, and the question must be how we keep the one from the other. Anyone want to take bets on how ready the NRA is to get behind this idea, despite their repeated claims that we should be concentrating on the mental health aspect of these attacks?
I could say a great deal more, but I'll leave it there for now. I will only add two things: First, I'm not claiming that this is an infallible path to the elimination of all gun crime. Certainly there will always bee the possibility that some gun crime will take place. But the goal is to reduce it to the degree that it becomes a rare and horrifying event, rather than the regular news item that it is now. Second, I have not yet addressed the other central aspect of these last two attacks, specifically the religious dimension. That conversation will have to wait for a subsequent post, which I hope to write in the next couple of days, time and jet lag permitting.
*Attempting to verify this statistic, I found studies suggesting anywhere from an 11-fold to a 43-fold increase in the likelihood of someone other than an intruder being killed by a firearm in the home. Difference in studies suggest different methodologies and data sets, but they all pain in the same direction: You are far more likely to see someone in your own home killed with your gun then you ever are to use it for protection. One of the best known studies suggests a factor as high as 43-times more likely.
Rene Girard, the anthropologist and social critic, died shortly before last month's Paris bombings. Today Religion Dispatches reflects on his life and legacy. A key paragraph on the relationship between religion and violence:
For over three decades, scholars of religion have drawn on Girard to inform their work. Christian theologians and New Testament scholars have found Girard’s insights on the scapegoat mechanism of special salience. Girard has argued that myths attest to the scapegoat mechanism from the perspective of persecutors: the victim of mob violence is guilty. By contrast, the Gospels break with myth to present the victim as innocent. Living at a time of social crisis, Jesus is the victim of mob action; but his innocence, attested to by the Gospels, breaks apart the scapegoat mechanism, forever shaking the foundations of a culture built on sacrifice. Even scholars who disagree with Girard about his insights attest to his influence on their work; as a consequence, Girard has had a pervasive impact, especially on scholars who want to understand the dynamics of ritual, the meaning of myth, the origins and history of violence, and the relationship between violence and religion.
For my part, I've always appreciated Giard's ability to interpret and translate the anthropological substance of religious ideas in creative and socially constructive ways. His work has also be extremely useful to me in understanding and interpreting the idea of the atonement in Christian theology. He will be missed.
The recent study on the relative altruism of religious and non-religious children has come in for a bit of criticism since it was released a few months ago, to much fanfare. Initially the reporting on the issue was somewhat breathless (and, among my atheist Facebook friends, kind of gleeful). At the time, I withheld judgment, on the premise that a) pretty quickly some criticisms would emerge and that b) regardless, there's not a lot you can determine on the basis of a single study.
Sure enough, criticism began to emerge relatively quickly, including claims that the study overstates the statistical variance between its religious and non-religious subjects, and that its methodology is unclear. Here, for example, is one critique:
P-values are rotten evidence for anything (click here to learn), (2) Regression is deeply flawed and not what you think (click here, here, or here to learn), (3) Probability models do not prove cause (click here, (4) Asinine studies like this are common (click here) or here). And don’t forget that altruism was not measured, but that kids sticking stickers in envelopes was. How much influence did the researchers have, especially with the younger kids? I mean, did kids stick stickers because they wanted to prove to the whitecoat they were compliant or because they wanted to be liked or because they wanted to share? Altruism forsooth!
Similarly, critics have noted that the central terms being measured in the article -- "religion" and "altruism" -- are themselves notoriously difficult to define. Added to that, there were a great many variables that the researchers did not control for. And again, the researchers apparently did not account for the fact that the bulk of their identified "non-religious" children were all from China:
How do I know all of this? Educated guesswork. I could be wrong. But here’s how the numbers break down: globally, 323 families in the study identified as non-religious. And 219 kids in the study came from China. It is extremely unlikely that more than a handful of the Chinese families identified themselves as Christian or Muslim, and we know for sure that they mostly avoided identifying as Buddhist, because just 18 families in the whole 1,170 kid dataset did so. Nobody identified as Confucian. Just six families, worldwide, said they were “other.”
By elimination, that leaves around 200 Chinese kids for the non-religious side of the ledger, or around 60% of the total non-religious pool.
So what the study is picking up on as "non-religiousness" may be better described as a quality of the particular sample pool that was predominantly non-religious, that is, Chinese children from the Guangzhou province.
None of this would really matter that much -- because again, you can't determine much from one study under any circumstances -- if the authors did not try to draw sweeping conclusions from it:
“Nonreligious children are more generous,” explained a headline at Science magazine. “It’s not like you have to be highly religious to be a good person,” Decety told Forbes. “Secularity—like having your own laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books—is better for everybody.” Forbes headlined the article “Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists.” (Decety tweeted a link to the piece). In the Forbes interview, Decety cautioned that there would be naysayers, at least among the anti-science crowd. “My guess is they’re just going to deny what I did—they don’t want science, they don’t believe in evolution, they don’t want Darwin to be taught in schools.”
See. Not only are non-religious children more generous, but secularity (defined, helpfully as "reason" over against "holy books") is "better for everybody." And, if you don't believe that this study proves that, it's not because the study is flawed, but because you're the kind of person who doesn't believe in science and wants to ban evolution.
Most of what I've gleaned here comes from an article at Religion Dispatches' The Cubit blog, which deals with issues at the intersection of religion and science. It goes over many of the problems with the study. But I want to stress that I think that the study is suggestive and bears follow up. It could very well be that a better constructed study, that does a better job accounting for independent variables, that has a clearer methodology, a larger sample size, and a more carefully defined central question, could reaffirm what this study does. It actually wouldn't surprise me much, because I don't think that religion of any kind necessarily makes a person better, or that its absence necessarily makes one worse. Religion is one factor among many in the construction of morality, and I'm Augustinian enough to know that sin lurks even in the hearts of the most pious. Yet, that said, I can't help but appreciate the conclusion of the Cubit writer, who writes:
In the past few decades, there has been a sharp divergence between those who study religion from within sociology and the humanities, and those who approach it from the side of social and evolutionary psychology. The humanists and sociologists have moved toward more and more granular snapshots of religious life, leaving behind the old, sweeping Religion is x, y, and z formulations that defined the good old days, when a dude in an office at Oxford could comfortably sketch out a theory of ritual based on secondhand ethnographies from remote tropical islands. Meanwhile, the social and evolutionary psychologists seem to be flying full-tilt in the direction of more and more grand theories of The Role of Religion in All Humanity.
From my semi-neutral post as a journalist who covers both fields, I’d like to suggest that the social and evolutionary psychologists are more full-of-shit than the humanists. The fact that someone like Decety feels comfortable taking his sticker games and making public comments about the fundamental nature of morality and secularity feels slightly surreal. (It’s not just in Forbes interviews. Here’s the final line of the paper: “More generally, [our findings] call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite.”)
The problem is not that Decety and his colleagues’ results aren’t interesting, or even that they’re wrong—for all I know, all the world over, kids who engage more with certain ritual experiences are less kind to their peers.
The problem is that, absent robust evidence for his generalizations about the Nature of all Christians and Muslims, it is difficult to tell where Decety’s grand claims emerge from actual evidence, and where they may owe a debt to politicized beliefs about how religion in general, or specific religious traditions (i.e. Islam), motivate people to do bad things.
The Satanic Temple has been in the news a great deal lately. They are the group behind the campaign to get Baphomet statues erected in public spaces around the country, and their leader has been in the news a great deal lately, often quite effectively flummoxing Fox news anchors who can't quite figure out what to make of him. At it's core, the Satanic Temple is a bit of atheist tricksterism, intended to infuriate conservative Christians and promote a thoroughly secular agenda.
Via James McGrath (to whom I am increasingly tempted to simply farm out all of my theo-blogging) I see that there has been some discussion of the so-called "7 Precepts" of the Satanic Temple, and their alleged moral superiority to the 10 Commandments of Judaism and Christianity. Apparently this has gotten some traction in the atheist blogosphere, and James decided to address it himself. The seven precepts, as the Satanic Temple defines them are:
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo your own.
Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.
People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may have been caused.
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Now, in some ways, this is not a bad starting point for a moral conversation, and I could probably get behind several of the principles on this list. Others would require a bit more discussion or clarification. For example, it's not at all clear to me that "the freedom to offend" is something that I should take at face value as morally permissible, or as something that I'm obligated to "respect." Similarly, it's not clear to me what moral status pertains to conforming our beliefs to science. Certainly that's true of areas that science addresses, but it's not clear to me how broadly that's intended to be applied. And it's not clear that either of these is more morally compelling than "Don't murder," "Don't Steal," "Don't Covet" and "Don't Commit Adultery." However, the general appeal to empathy, compassion, wisdom, and justice is all well and good.
But what's striking about this is how little it has to do with Satan or Satanism. Again, recognizing that the Satanic Temple is attempting to be provocative, it still associates itself with a set of symbols and with a religious movement that is best known for embodying none of those principles. Modern Satanism can be traced back to the formation of the Church of Satan by Aton LaVey in 1966. Certainly you can point to predecessors, such as Alastair Crowley, but any contemporary movement basically has its roots there. But LaVeyan Satanism was created to embody precisely the opposite of the values that the Satanic Temple claims to favor. It's best understood as a religious application of the principles of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- selfishness, hedonism, and the disregard of moral principles such as, for example, justice, empathy, and compassion. It's a sort of symbolically freighted neo-Nietzscheanism. Like LaVey's Church of Satan, the Satanic Temple is atheist, in that they don't believe in God or in a literal spiritual figure of Satan. But there is really nothing else to connect what the Satanic Temple claims to stand for with what is commonly known as Satanism.
Now, far be it from me to tell anyone that they can't call themselves Satanists if they want to. But it's a sort of a strange thing. It would sort of being like saying "Yeah, I'm a Gandhian, except for the non-violence part." Granted, there are a lot of Christians who say essentially that with regard to Jesus: "Sure, I'm a Christian, except for the whole 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' bit." But that's hardly a convincing argument for the use of the term.
But leaving that aside, James makes an important point about the difficulty of translating the morality of the Ten Commandments to a contemporary setting:
The ten commandments are an ancient human invention, not a divine one. The same goes for Satan, who emerges from a figure with the title “the Accuser” (ha-Satan in Hebrew) and develops into a rebellious angel, before becoming a figure who stands as a symbol for individualist and capitalist selfishness in the hands of Anton LaVey, and more recently as a teacher of empathy and compassion in the hands of The Satanic Temple.
Figuring out just what the continuing significance of the Ten Commandments is in the modern world, and who it applies to, is by no means a simple task. As James suggests, it's an ancient code. And I would suggest, it represents not the "divine word" on every dimension of human behavior, but rather a very human attempt to translate and understand what they felt God was calling them to do and be in their own specific time and place. It's also not at all clear to whom the Ten Commandments was intended to apply. Certainly it can be read as a set of universal moral principles, but it's far more likely that it was originally understood by the Israelites to embody their specific and particular covenant with their God. Thus, while one can glean universal moral principles from it (e.g., don't murder, don't steal again), that was probably not how it was originally intended.
As a Christian ethicist, a large part of what I do is attempt to understand just what the continuing relevance of the Christian tradition is to the moral problems facing the world today. The Bible is one of the sources to which I refer, not because it presents me with a list of infallible moral rules, but because I understand myself to be attempting to follow in my own context the same God that Jesus followed, and that the ancient Israelites followed in their own times and places. And just as the Biblical law was reinterpreted and reunderstood in different contexts throughout the Bible, so too we need to understand how God is speaking to us in this time and place, and what God is calling us to do and to be here and now. We read the Bible, not because it gives us answers, but because it helps us understand how others have framed the question, in confrontation with the same God we seek to follow.
On James's Facebook page, Hemant Mehta, The Friendly Atheist, makes an interesting observation:
[The Seven Precepts are] less about mocking (in my opinion) and more about how these values, which were essentially whipped up in a hurry, seem to contain more compassion than a list where nearly half of the commandments require everyone worship a particular deity and has been used by politicians to push Christian beliefs into policy decisions.
The "Satanic" aspect is the least important part. It could've been written by some dude in his basement. The point is: If it's so easy to come up with a set of worthwhile values, why do some people insist on putting up the Ten Commandments on public property instead?
Now, on the one hand, I'm no more in favor of attempts to plaster the Ten Commandments in every conceivable place than Hemant is. I tend to think they serve the same civic function as other ancient codes of law do -- to remind us that we are law-giving and law-obeying people. This, I take it, is the reason why it's carved on the Supreme Court building: Not because it's intended to be the foundational law of a democratic republic (which it emphatically is not), but because it represents a paradigm case of "law making as civilization making" and helps to remind us that we are a nation of laws. This is a far cry from the conservative Christian attempts to emblazon them everywhere as a testimony to the fact that we are a "Christian nation" (funny though, they aren't nearly as eager to do that with the Beatitudes).
However, I think Hemant doesn't really realize the import of what he's saying. Of course a set of moral precepts designed by modern, western, secular people (whether "whipped up in a hurry" or not) is going to appeal to modern, western, secular people. These rules are less normative in that sense than they are descriptive. They tell us what we as a liberal society already believe (and again, this has quite literally nothing to do with Satan, as he himself notes). It's not much of a moral challenge to tell people to do what they are already inclined to do anyway. For those of us who believe that we are called to a morality that transcends mere attempt to reflect who are are back to ourselves however, there is a much greater challenge: To try and relate our moral responsibilities here and now to the transcendent reference point that we strive to approximate in our specific time and place, and who we believe is testified to in a set of texts that is emphatically not of our time and place.
How this is to be done is not an easy task, and it's not a task that I need the Satanic Temple or Hemant Mehta to sign on for. But for me and those who work within my tradition, it is the central moral task, and again I would simply define it in this way (following James Gustafson): "What is God enabling and requiring us to do and be in this particular time and place."
And if I were to reconfigure the Ten Commandments in such a way as to help me answer that, I could certainly not do better than the words of Jesus: "To love God above all things, and to love your neighbor as yourself."
As sabers rattle in preparation for an escalation of the conflict in Syria -- putatively with ISIS, but really it's just an enormous open-fire scrum there now -- it's worth revisiting the debate in the run-up to the Iraq war. Check out this episode of Charlie Rose, vis Vox, in which Michael Walzer and Christopher Hitchens, among others, debate the prospect of war.
I've always been sympathetic to Walzer's approach to the morality of war -- not wholly pacifist, in favor of humanitarian interventions under some circumstances, but also demanding a high bar for the moral justification of armed conflict. Here he is a cogent voice of reason in response to Christopher Hitchens, who for his part offers nothing but smarm and condescension.
As the Vox piece notes, it's remarkable how much Walzer and David Rieff got right in their analysis:
Walzer and David Rieff, by contrast, aren't really representative of the debate as it occurred then, mostly because thoughtful, nuanced criticism of the case for war wasn't given a lot of voice in most media outlets. Walzer rightly notes that the war would require a huge occupying force and cost a fortune, at a time when conservative pundits were predicting the war would be a "cakewalk" and administration officials were saying it would be so cheap it could be paid for with Iraq's own oil revenue. Rieff predicts the "fragmentation of Iraq, a war between Shia and Sunni" with eerie prescience.
Observe, by contrast, just how much arrogance, and how little substance, there was to the pro-war side in 2002. It's much the same now. The issue is not that ISIS is not horrible and should not be stopped, the issue is whether the strategy currently being contemplated will stop them. And what the pro-war side has consistently failed to do, from 2002 till now, is explain in a convincing way just how their policies would actually lead to a positive outcome to the conflict, and for the region. The fact that Hitchens is incapable of responding to Walzer's objections with anything better than a confident "well, I don't think that will happen" or "I think that's trite" demonstrate the vacuity of his position. All he really knew was that he wanted a war, and therefore any objection was merely an obstacle in his way. He was more than happy to unleash his formidable rhetorical power in order to bypass those objections. It's the quintessence of sophistry, and Hitchens was a master of it.
We refused to listen to cautious and thoughtful voices then. Perhaps, just as a change of pace, we should listen to them now.