I dunno. When I drive through Huntington Beach, I don’t see much religion, but maybe I don’t know what to look for.• IT’S A PATRIOTIC THING. In yesterday’s OC Reg ('In God We Trust' goes up in Huntington Beach chambers), we learned that the city of Huntington Beach has now nailed its spankin’ new “In God We Trust” motto to a wall.
As the Reg explains, the city council voted in April to make a motto display, so they made one, and it’s round. They stuck it behind the dais in the council chambers.
In the Reg article, Councilman Joe Carchio offers my favorite quote of the day:
"To me it has nothing to do with religion…It is the motto of our county…it is a patriotic thing."A person so inclined could spend a nice afternoon unpacking that remark.
• THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE. Meanwhile, the Huntington Beach Union High School District must decide whether or not to offer a “Bible as literature” class, a proposal that was raised and then rejected (too little demand, etc.) a year and a half ago. (Huntington Beach trustees to discuss Bible class tonight.) Evidently, the matter is—or is perceived to be—a hot potato by school district trustees, for they’ve “refused” to discuss the matter for a year now, or so says the Reg. Could be they simply felt that the matter had been settled.
But in June, people showed up at the board meeting to support the class.
One trustee, Matthew Harper, had been pressing for the matter to be discussed for a year, but he finally got a colleague to help put the matter on the agenda three months ago.
So tonight’s the night.
“Bible as literature” courses are common at the college level. For instance, Irvine Valley College offers Literature 40, “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)” and Literature 41, “Introduction to the New Testament.”
Obviously, "Bible as literature" courses tend to approach “the Bible” as a piece of literature. But that may raise issues for those who view it as the Word.
Here’s how the above courses are described in the IVC course catalog:
LIT 40: This course offers a general introduction to the Hebrew Bible…, with particular focus on historical, textual, cultural, and literary issues. Students will consider the historical development of narrative, lyric, dramatic, and legal texts that eventually came to constitute the Hebrew Bible; explore questions of authorship and textual evolution; and study the processes and themes by which these writings exerted a formative influence on the development of Western Literature.
LIT 41: Lit 41 offers a non-doctrinal, literary and historical introduction to the New Testament and related texts. Of central interest in the course will be consideration of the various cultural, philosophical, and literary contexts out of which the Christian Bible emerged. Students will engage in such topics as the representation of Jesus; the influence of Paul; the nature and role of the early Christian churches; the variety of interpretive approaches to the text; the composition and formation of a canon; the relationship of Jewish eschatological and gnostic literature; and the influence of central New Testament themes, characters, and motifs on subsequent literature.
I think these courses are great, but taking one of them must be a weird experience for a believer. I mean, if the Bible is the word of God, then what's all this stuff about apocrypha and disputes and Babylonians? Textual evolution? I recall being a young believer. In my mind, the Word didn't evolve. It was spoken. And that was that.
Suppose you owned Moses' Ten Commandment tablets (I know, I know, but work with me). You've always taken them to be the writings of God, carved by lightning on a mountain top thousands of years ago.
But, one day, you notice some marks on the bottom of the tablets. You get out your glasses; you get really close. You read: "Made in China."
Kinda takes the starch out of the whole thing, doesn't it?
• GOD HATES YOU. Yesterday, Gustavo Arellano posted about local preacher Robert Morey—think of a cross between Charles Nelson Reilly and Elmer Gantry—who seems to be pissing people off and weirding them out. (ANOTHER FORMER ROBERT MOREY PARISHIONER LEAVES.)
Gustavo explains that some who leave Morey’s church in Irvine are spilling some cult beans. Gustavo includes a YouTube video of Morey, preaching about how God doesn’t love everybody. In fact, he hates "certain people." Probably you. Check it out:
OK, Morey's church isn't in Huntington Beach, but I bet he visits there a lot.
22 comments:
Wow, that Morey guy is mean. And nasty. Who would join this man's church?
The local faithful love meanness. Look at Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, and the thankfully dead Falwell. Nasty bastards, all of them.
I would like to know if Raghu thinks that Jesus is his personal Lord and Savior, and if not, why he sits silently by as others make such claims. How do other Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims feel about it.It's lucky Raghu wasn't born in the United States. He'd never pass the litmus test for President.
"...thankfully dead..." Pretty mean thing to say, 12:14.
Too bad you can't just murder your enemies, eh?
Sure it's mean, 1:15, and meant to be. Falwell was a vicious gasbag and the planet is well rid of him.
So, what's your point? That I'm not a hypocrite?
(See christian hatemongers for a context here.)
I think they should offer a class too.
"The Kama Sutra as Literature".
You won't have any problems with the little heathens falling asleep in class or doing their homework. Especially with doing their homework. I bet you get nearly 100% compliance and attendance.
You will have a problem with uptight parents and Bored members.
Oh and 1:28...Falwell wasn't vicious. He just thought that if you didn't believe you'll go the hell. Sheesh. See ya there 1:28! I'll save ya a seat!
Not for any of us to judge whether you're a hypocrite or not, 1:28. Just know that Jesus loves you and will forgive you of all of your sins.
Peace be with you.
A person's understanding of his/her religious faith should grow as he/she matures. From what Chunk writes, he may have rejected his boyhood religion as he understood it as a boy, rather than as it is. He may have rejected a childish religion rather than any real religion, not properly distinguishing the two.
Such is a common error. It also helps explain why some people think of all religion as childish: they never attain an adult understanding of it.
10:18, and just what is an "adult understanding" of religion?
10:18
I don't recall calling believers childish, though, obviously, some are childish.
I didn't reject my religion during childhood. Its hold on me grew weaker over a period of years, mostly during college and grad school.
Be careful you don't embrace an unfalsifiable position. It's easy to say that nonbelievers fail to believe because they never attained "mature" religiousness. Accordingly, all who fail to believe are children.
There is maturity, too, in rationality, and the problem is that it is difficult to see how one who is serious about reason can embrace a belief for which there is no good reason.
Lot to deal with.
For one, an adult understanding of religion involves, among other things, the view that a religious text can both "evolve" and still be "the Word." Chunk knows about some isolated nut named Morey, but I am willing to bet that he has never heard of N.T.Wright. I wouldn't be too surprised if the whoever teaches IVC's New Testament class also never heard of Wright, even though Wright is a top NT scholar.
Whatever else is the case, I would offer Wright's work as representing an "adult" (for lack of a better word right now) understanding of religion.
I don't recognize the potentially "unfalsifiable position" that you describe as anything I said or hold, Chunk, or as an implication of anything I said or hold.
I guess I just disagree with your statement that there is no good reason to have religious faith. There is a long tradition of founding faith on reason, a tradition that is alive and well.
Your unqualified statement that there is no good reason to believe indicates that there may not be sufficient common ground for us to have a fruitful discussion about the justification of religious belief. That's regrettable, at least from my point of view.
10:18->12:39
Maybe you didn't understand, I'll be more specific:
How, exactly, does a child's view of religion differ from that of an adult's perspective? I.e. what are the differences?
12:39, you seem to imply that I was using the appalling Irvine preacher as a stand-in for believers generally. I did not do so and have made clear previously that I am not inclined to do so. (See earlier posts, comments.)
Two can play the "I betcha never read" game. I'm sure there are many philosophers and philosophers of religion (et al.) that you've never read. This establishes nothing.
I am, of course, perfectly familiar with the natural theology tradition, to which you allude. Most philosphers are thus familiar, if only because they're read Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. They will also be familiar with Demea's famous remark about NR as well: that it drags religion down to the level of human perception and thus is guilty of, as he says, "anthropomorphism." In particular, the argument from design essentially compares creation (or some subset of it) to a watch, giving rise to attribution to a watchmaker, and it thus reduces God to something more or less human and comprehensible.
This talk of "mature" belief is interesting--though you have said virtually nothing about it--but it sidesteps the more fundamental issue: what "good reason" is there to believe in a Deity? The arguments for the existence of God are notoriously weak, and the seemingly favored "design" argument has the same flaws today that it had two hundred years ago--and is guilty of Demea's anthropomorphism besides.
"I shall be so free, ...said DEMEA, as to tell you that from the beginning I could not approve of your conclusion concerning the similarity of the Deity to men; still less can I approve of the mediums by which you endeavour to establish it. What! No demonstration of the Being of a God! No abstract arguments! No proofs a priori! Are these, which have hitherto been so much insisted on by philosophers, all fallacy, all sophism? Can we reach no farther in this subject than experience and probability? I will not say that this is betraying the cause of a Deity. But surely, by this affected candor, you give advantage to atheists which they never could obtain by the mere dint of argument and reasoning."
Good discussion here, and TB, please check out Falwell's statements about gays and lesbians, the ACLU, women who dare to exercise reproductive freedom, and the like. You'll find plenty of hate filled rhetoric.
Imagine the idea of spending eternity with the self righteous and unpleasant evangelicals.
Well, Chunk, you say that you are "not using the appalling Irvine preacher as a stand-in for believers generally," and you have made the same kind of point clear in previous posts, but you must be using him for something. You must find him somehow representative, having some meaning beyond himself and his small influence in Irvine.
I have been reflecting lately about your tendency to scour the area for turds and then shine your spotlight on them. You have tried to explain it to me (and your other fans) but your purpose remains beyond me. I guess I just don't see the value, and that's my fault.
Try this: Maybe today you'll go out onto your unspoiled property in the Santa Ana mountains and spend twenty minutes staring at a pile of shit, but I would invite you to raise your eyes to the sky, where you might see a nice Red-tailed Hawk. My point? Morey is (with all due respect to him) like the pile of shit, and Wright is like the hawk. Wright--or any scripture scholar who could help you raise your level of discourse about scripture above that of your original post--would be more worthy of your attention.
As for the "betcha never read" game-I agree that it's a cheap trick, and I didn't mean to play it. It can indeed be played "both ways" and it would certainly work if turned back on me. If that's what I did, I was wrong.
Your use of Hume is really interesting. I think that, as great as Hume is, you overrate him and rely too much on him in your philosophy of religion.
Anthropomorphism is a problem for theology only if it occurs in the order of being, but not necessarily a problem if it occurs in the order of knowledge.
A key question of religious philosophy these days--and ever since Feuerbach--is whether God made us or we made God, whether God created us (perhaps through a process of evolution by natural selection, etc.) or is a sort of projection of personhood onto the universe by human beings.
Now if God is just a human projection, then there is anthropomorphism in the order of being, and religion, whatever else it is, is not true in any traditional sense. There really is no God, in that case, at least as an independent reality from us. In that case, too, Chunk the Conservative and Atheist turns out to be quite right about everything.
On the other hand, if God is a real being and made us, and if some version of theism is true, then God made us with some similarity to God, in order that we may have some kind of knowing, interpersonal relationship with God. Then it would be possible to find out something about God from what we know of human beings, using reasoning by analogy. That would indeed be a kind of anthropomorphism, but anthropomorphism in the order of knowledge rather than the order of being. That would be a way to do theology consistent with theism, and the (included) belief that God is independent of us and made us, rather than the other way around.
So anthropomorphism is not necessarily fatal to theology; it can bring human experience and reason to bear on theology, and can thus be a legitimate tool of religious epistemology.
Hume's insight about anthropomorphism did not begin this discussion. (Not that you claimed that it did.) Thomas Aquinas was all over these issues five hundred years before Hume, in his (Thomas's) writing about "analogical predication" about God.
More to the point, Hume does not close the discussion, either. Your claim that
'the seemingly favored "design" argument has the same flaws today that it had two hundred years ago--and is guilty of Demea's anthropomorphism besides'
appears to take Hume as definitive, and ignores relevant insights into these issues from philosophy, theology, and physics since the eighteenth century.
Hume, for example, knew nothing about current "fine-tuning" versions of the design argument, developed from contemporary physics. Heck, Hume didn't even know that the universe has a beginning, which is pretty important for philosophy of religion, and which (not completely without controversy, admittedly) has only been established in our lifetime.
"Good reasons" to believe in a Deity can be developed from the universe having a beginning, from the origin of life, from moral conscience, from subjective consciousness itself, from widespread religious experience, and from historical evidence for various key claims of the New Testament.
You disagree, Chunk, and sometimes express outright contempt for such efforts (as when you discuss on DtB arguments about ID). I am not sure what sort of evidence or kind of reasons would move you toward religious belief, that you would accept as "good." Let me know, I will get to work to provide them to you. (You may have to wait a bit, of course.)
I certainly don't think that those who believe in God on the basis of the best available reasons are thereby irrational, stupid, or dishonest; such reasons seem at least "good" enough to defend believers against the usual charges of immaturity or irrationality.
Crap! Sorry about the length of the previous post.
Bohrstein? I can only suggest that you read the _Catechism of the Cathlolic Church_ for the best expression of "mature" and thoroughly developed religion that I know of. I'm on page 461, and I am deeply and positively impressed. (And no, I am not now, nor have even been officially Catholic, and am not a member of any church or denomination.)
I find this very interesting, because of where it leads, to issues such as the motivation, responsibility, and liability of this deity.
"On the other hand, if God is a real being and made us, and if some version of theism is true, then God made us with some similarity to God, in order that we may have some kind of knowing, interpersonal relationship with God."
So, god threw in cancer, earthquakes, and American Idol to plague his creations. Why?
2:53 - so... what? You answer my question with a book recommendation with which you are not impressed?
What gives man?
I'm just intrigued by your argument that something can "change" and still hold true as "The Word." It seems like you're implying that the religion is completely subjective to the individual, in which I honestly have to wonder... how is it THE word, when it is dependent on how someone is to interpret it.
2:39, you need to consider my perspective as a guy writing a blog. If you read this blog carefully, you’ll discern themes. For instance, to the degree possible, we try to “cover” events and issues of concern to the SOCCCD and its two colleges. Little occurs during the summer, of course.
Naturally, I try to stay on top of educational news and local news stories that relate in some way to our district and its issues. And since several SOCCCD players are widely-known political figures or are connected to such figures, we can cover a lot of ground that prima facie has no bearing on our colleges.
Three or four facts explain why I included the “Morey” story. First, the story was first reported by our friend Gustavo A, a lal writer Reb and I admire. Second, the Morey story was in some sense about religion at a time when the blog had focused on religion. It doesn’t hurt that Morey is in Irvine, and IVC is in Irvine. Finally, the video is pretty amazing, in my opinion. As a rule of thumb, I like to include interesting videos.
If there is a story within the parameters identified above that I am ignoring, let me know. Naturally, you and I may view this matter somewhat differently, but I only somewhat. Don’t just take easy shots. Show me what I should be covering.
By asserting that I “scour the area for turds,” your are addressing my motivations, and that brings you into ad hominem territory, my friend. In any case, I deny it. I focus on the things mentioned above. I cannot help it if so many stories are negative.
My own view is that blindness to big things is a common and persistent human failing. It is true that I try to keep my eyes on the big things. Like it or not, at the local or national level, we live in an ailing democracy in which vicious people have been given power by woefully ignorant voters (across the spectrum). In our district, we have a Chancellor and board that may well accomplish the astonishing deed of losing our colleges their accreditation. Amazing.
But you would have me concentrate on the loveliness of the landscaping. (BTW: those who read this blog cannot doubt that no one appreciates the loveliness of our campuses or our mountains more than I do.)
I did not mean to leave the impression that David Hume is, in my view, the last word on philosophical or cosmological issues. I am not a Humean (I’m a Wittgensteinian), but I do recognize Hume’s genius and, like many scholarly sorts, I I am in the habit of allowing a great and elegant writer to make my points for me. (Hume, for those who don’t know, is widely regarded as the greatest of the English-speaking philosophers.) If I were to point to a contemporary writer who has something to say about these issues, I would likely direct someone to the likes of Robert Addams, et al.
I am not persuaded by your points concerning anthropomorphism. I’m running out of space here.
As for the design argument: philosophers have known for centuries that many of the great arguments for God’s existence (including at least two of Thomas’ “proofs”—and, yes, I am quite familiar with his points about analogy) possess the following limitation: that, even if successful, they do not establish that the “prime mover” or “first cause” or “designing intelligence” is omniscient, or omnipotent, or omnibenevolent, or even that he/she/it is still alive.
You might have noticed that I have gone easier on “deism” than theism. That is precisely because deists (in a broad sense) do not apply these attributes to the Great Being. Gotta run.
More later.
My biggest issue in the God vs. No God debate is the undeniable existence of evil. I note in nature that there is this "balance" between all things. The structure of the atom for instance, is an example of an elegant construct of forces which balance each other and beget matter. So from observation I conclude; since there is evil there must be good. Balance in all things...
The "good" is God...I guess.
But all the Bible thumping, Koran Bleating, Torah chanting sways me not. I don't know.
I really appreciate the philosophy debates folks...keep it up!
Chunk,
"ad hominem territory?" C'mon! That "scour the area for turds and shine your light on them" was my best line, supposed to be funny!
Keep in mind that you are the most beloved SOB in the valley (or flood plain). Almost all of us are admirers, and on your side (overall).
OK, I'll give you that. The "turd" line was clever, although I'm not sure "scouring" is the right verb. I mean, I don't try to shine 'em up, do I?
I do shine my light upon them. I leave always hopeful that someone will flush them.
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