I love you, but I'm worried about your immortal soul

I'm not going to wade into a lengthy debate about whether laws purporting to "restore" religious liberties are really licenses to discriminate. I suspect that, in the current context, they are. No one seemed upset about catering or providing flowers for repeat trips to the altar in the past, but what do I know?

What does interest me is the discourse some religious full-bore supporters of discrimination against gays and lesbians engage in. It goes something like this: "I don't hate you. In fact I love you. And, I am concerned about your immortal soul and the souls of those you may influence. So, I think society and the law should discourage (punish) you for your life(style)." This can often trail off into talk of God's punishment. 

I suspect some of those who deal in this line do so sincerely, but it puts me in mind of another person who just wanted to see people converted—though he thought it as impossible as some modern day evangelists must see my conversion—and make sure they didn't adversely affect others. And, so, in the spirit of Christian love, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and their Lies. Because he found them incorrigible, he believed their homes and synagogues ought to be burned. And, he hoped it might lead to repentance, but failing that, at least good Christians would be saved from a malign influence. 

How different is that, at the end of the day, from those who merely want to save me from my own perfidious ways?

Works before faith: against orthodoxies

We seem to care much more about what people believe than what they do. Or, rather, we care more about what they affirm than what they do and what their actions show to be their real commitments.

Maybe this is the result of the Reformation with its talk of the Inner and Outer Man and salvation by Faith but not Works. Maybe it is an expression of the older mind/body dualism that those Reformers inherited from Augustine. Maybe it's just the result of reading a lot of Plato; here I jest. Most likely, it is at least partially a result of the fantasy that there is a real—more authentic, more virtuous, and fully private—me independent of my actions, a true and hidden character; the fantasy that let's people say things like, "I wasn't myself yesterday," and, "I'm sorry for what I said, that wasn't me." And, then we can be told, contrary to all behavioral evidence, what a person really believes or what her character really is.

Whatever the cause or causes, this emphasis on belief (as affirmed) over action feeds into real strife. At least in the United States, we prize orthodoxy. We judge one another based on our political and religious ideologies. And, we use these ideologies as epithets. Someone is just a stupid liberal or a heartless conservative, a godless atheist or a deluded believer. And, too often, when someone is on the other side of such a divide, we immediately dismiss them. Of course, this damages discourse, because we disengage, but it damages other kinds of human interaction even more deeply.
When someone disagrees with us we are quick, I think, to dismiss them as a cooperator. Because one of us is a liberal and the other a conservative, we are unwilling to work together, even when what we want is the same thing. Lots of people on the left and lots of people on parts of the right are very concerned about poverty and, believe it or not, mothers and children. Working together, though, is too often forestalled by ideological difference: I can't work with those socialists; I won't work with fascists.
I remember several years ago Hillary Clinton—I'm not generally a fan—calling for cooperation between the left and the right on abortion. Since she thought both sides had an interest in reducing the number of abortions, they should come together to discuss those things that they could both get behind to achieve a reduction. But orthodoxies and principle continue to keep anything like that from happening. As always, the perfect is made the enemy of the good.
One more personal reminiscence: The year between university and graduate school, I worked at a  Church-sponsored meal program and clinic for the homeless and near-homeless. As you might expect, most of the people involved were unreformed 60's-style liberals, with a fair smattering of Catholic Workers. But, there were also deeply conservative volunteers, including a far-right Republican police detective who washed dishes at the meal several days a week. Rather than seeing an ideological divide, he and the other volunteers worked together for something they both valued. The fact that they disagreed about sociopolitical causes and solutions to homelessness and poverty didn't matter at that moment. What mattered was the work. (And, the work they were doing probably said a lot more about what their real beliefs were than their stated ones.)
Now, I don't want to claim that beliefs as affirmed don't matter. Of course, the causes of poverty matter, but so does feeding the poor. And, as a philosopher, I care deeply about beliefs. But, in interpersonal relations, I care more about actions and the real beliefs they express.
It's all good to deride deluded Christians, but if they are fighting oppression and you are doing nothing, what does the right belief matter? It's wonderful to scream about godless atheists, but if they are fighting human rights abuses while you are reading a devotional, who cares? It's fun to talk about heartless conservatives, but if with their heartless beliefs they are also helping refugees, what is more important?
Only last week, I was told that I lacked principle—utterly true, if for different reasons—because I teach at a Catholic university, and no gay atheist should do that. Leaving aside the mischaracterization of my beliefs, I can only mourn a viewpoint that says I should have nothing to do with those whose orthodoxy or ideological purity is suspect, or that I cannot cooperate with them in a project that we both find worthwhile, e.g., education.
I have colleagues and students and friends who I think are utterly deluded about all sorts of things and I have pretty serious philosophical and political differences with my partner of 18 years, but at the end of the day, it is by their works that I judge them. As it should be.

Of dread and power

I've just read—maybe re-read, since I'm not sure—Thomas Merton's Contemplative Prayer. My library and interests are eclectic, to say the least. I had forgotten, if I ever knew, the connections Merton draws between his own analysis of religious contemplation and the existentialist account of absurdity and angst. In some ways, he sees contemplative prayer as a Nietzschean staring into the Abyss and waiting for the Abyss—in this case the ineffable Ground of Being—to embrace one. One of his central themes is dread.

This is something I know a lot more about than I do any mystical experiences. There was that one time I had something religious-experience-adjacent when walking the streets of my hometown trying to fix the adolescent depths of obsessive depression and, seeing a slug cross my path, I tasted sublimity. That was a one-off experience. Overall, my life experience has been more one of obsessive depression than of the sublime. But, I know dread, if only on one side.

For me dread is a recognition of lack of control. It is different to Sartrean anxiety at the absolute responsibility that comes with every choice, though I sometimes can be paralyzed by that, as well. Instead, it is a feeling that much of my life and what I value is determined by factors entirely out of my control, a recognition of the vicissitudes of Fortune. And, perhaps, a sub-rational belief that there is a way to counteract or control Fortune. 

I could give any number of examples, but the one closest at hand is the process we are currently in of selling our home and buying another. We have done our part. And, we have done it pretty well, it seems. What ultimately happens, however, depends on the actions of a number of other people: our buyer, our seller, our agent, the agents of both other parties, friends and relatives who might influence the buyer and seller, other people who might—in butterfly-effect ways—impact upon the lives of all these people. And, we have no control over any of these people. Of course, there could also be a number of natural events or disasters or water main breaks or who knows that could affect the whole mess in any number of ways.
If it seems like I've worried too much about this, I am a master of worrying. It runs in my blood and I have years of practice doing it.
Since, there are so many parts of this process—and everything that happens in my life—the rational thing would be not to worry. Or, rather only to worry about those parts of the process over which I can have some control or at least influence. Worrying about the rest of it seems counterproductive. The part of me that admires the Stoics tells me this is what I should do.
I should just give up the worry and let the rest of the world take care of itself. If things work out, well. If they don't, I have done my part. But, not worrying leads to an even deeper dread. A greater anxiety. I probably admire the Stoics because they preach something I cannot achieve.
What purpose does the anxiety serve? Why worry? I think the worry is an attempt to control—in some way—what cannot be controlled. To admit that it is all out of my control is too much; it's to admit to a helplessness that I cannot abide, or that I know is there but I have to ignore. But to worry about it and to worry about it constantly, though it too is a kind of dread, is to hold it all together in my mind. And, if I can hold it together in thought, then that is almost, almost, like willing it together.  To let it slip my thought is to let it be the chaos I really know it is. Of course, my worrying doesn't have this effect. The Secret doesn't work. But, a kind of mental order substitutes for the order that is missing in the messy, the chaotic, world.
The dread of constant worry is horrible, but it is less horrible than the dread of powerlessness and insignificance even to those things that matter most to my own life and my subjective enjoyment of it.
I have more to say, in another context, about the attempt to put order on a world that lacks it, but I'll save that for later. 

Why I'm not an (a)theist

There is an assumption in some circles that all rational people should be atheists. That all who profess philosophy should be is even more widely held. But I can't bring myself to that anti-credo.

To deny the existence of a thing (or a being), I have to be able to understand what that thing is, to have some fairly clear idea of what it would be for it to exist. I have a fairly good idea of what it would be for unicorns to exist. I understand what they are supposed to be like, what their biology looks like, their strange predilection for virgins, and all the rest. Similarly, I have a good idea what it would be for Zeus to exist. I know what his story is supposed to be, I know how he is supposed to have originated, I know his strengths and weaknesses, I know of his marital strife, his lusts.

So, I know what I am saying in denying the existence of unicorns or Zeus. And, I know what I would be saying in denying that Jesus existed--I think he did--or in denying that Muhammad received revelations from Gabriel or that Joseph Smith translated any golden plates.

But, I don't know what I would be denying the existence of God, full stop. I don't think atheism is, after all, just denying one more god in addition to all the others I freely deny.

I'm not just being precious here. I don't know what it means to say there is a Being who is the ground of all being. I don't know what it means to say that there is a Being that is outside of and utterly different to the universe, yet is the cause of the universe. I don't know what it is to say that God is both good and tolerant of all the suffering in the world--after all, His ways are mysterious.

There is a long tradition in the monotheistic religions of saying that what we say of God is said by analogy or metaphorically or, at least, predicated of God in a different sense to the secondary sense in which we predicate goodness or knowledge or anything else of beings in the world--here is the realm of the via negativa, the mystics, even Aquinas. This is just to say that we cannot understand God.

But saying that is tantamount to saying the claims of theism, taken literally, are a kind of nonsense--Unsinn. I don't mean that in a necessarily pejorative sense. Nonsense can be good, nonsense can be useful, nonsense can be evocative. We may need nonsense. Perhaps art is, in some ways, nonsense. But nonsense can't be true.

And, it can't be false, either. A negation sign doesn't make nonsense into sense.

Can you have the bells without the believers?

Richard Dawkins and I have something in common (almost). He considers himself a cultural Anglican and I consider myself a cultural Catholic. For both of us, a world in which there were no churches would be a world in which there were something important missing. At the very least, there would be an aesthetic loss, but there would also be a loss of a sense—he seems to be saying, and I would agree—of what the Western identity has been. 

I imagine I am a little more invested in my cultural Catholicism than Dawkins is in his Anglicanism. More than considering going into a church, I regularly go to the chapel near my office after classes and I engage in other practices rooted in my tradition. But that's not the point I want to make.

Rather, it is that being a cultural Catholic or Anglican or member of another tradition requires that there be committed members of the same tradition. Of course, Dawkins is in a slightly different situation, since his aesthetic comfort is state-supported. But, even in that case, and even if he is right that many Anglicans don't actually believe anymore, when there are no more believers, the churches will be just museums and the sepulchers—as Nietzsche's madman had it—of the dead God. That is not quite the same thing as a functioning church to which you have a cultural affinity, any more than an altarpiece in a museum is the same thing as an altarpiece in a church. Having been divorced from its purpose, it loses some of its meaning. There's no contradiction in being a non-believing, though culturally-entwined, member of a tradition. There might be something elitist about it, maybe it causes a tension, maybe it might even be bittersweet.

But my point is that being a cultural Anglican or Catholic does place a kind of restriction on one. Since what you love relies on committed others, they deserve respect. You can't run around with and cross-promote the work of people who claim that religion poisons everything, a la Hitchens; or, that those who pray are no more stable than those who believe God can be contacted by talking into a hair dryer, a la Harris; or, that all religion is a delusion, a la Dennett (and Freud); and, you can't claim that people ought to lose their jobs because they take their religion seriously, as Dawkins himself has—though that was with a person who believes a religion for which Dawkins has no affinity. 

That is, contrary to the program of many New Atheists, if you value what religion has given your society and even want to see it stick around, you can't deride the people who actually believe it—and create what you like.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10303223/Richard-Dawkins-admits-he-is-a-cultural-Anglican.html)

Thoughts on guilt and the divine ledger-keeper

One of the things about having drunk deeply of the font of Catholicism and being obsessive-compulsive—and not the fun, party conversation sort—is that you get to feel guilty a lot, even when you know you shouldn't. The old moral theologians called it scrupulosity.

A religious sense of guilt assumes a god, a god who keeps track of our transgressions, and is at least disappointed in us if we fail to match his expectations. (The fact that this sense of guilt can survive the death of the religious metaphysics that underpins it is fascinating, but a topic for another day.)

Of course, the god of the Abrahamic religions—God—is just such a being. God, unlike the God-of-the-Philosophers, is a person who enters into relationships with humans, a person who cares about humans. Only such a god could give believers the solace they derive from religion; only such a god could inspire devotion in worshipers.

But it is worth considering what kind of person this god is portrayed as being. God is supposed to be a being who not only concerns Himself with every human in creation, but who keeps track of everything each of them does. We are told that God keeps a book in which are listed all the deeds, both good and bad, of all people. God remembers all transgressions and forgives them only when forgiveness is requested, repentance is genuine, and penance is done. Even worse, in Christianity, we are told that God has given to humanity—the humanity that He set up to fail in the Garden—a set of rules and requirements that they can never fulfill because of their own depravity. (Judaism and Islam at least—if it is better—take humanity to be perfectible and perfectly capable of following God's law; of course, failing to do so then is entirely one's own responsibility.) God looks like a super-Santa Claus, though somewhat more sinister, since His punishments and rewards are eternal even as His ways are inscrutable.
There are so many questions that can be lodged here. But, I only want to ask one type. What would we say of a friend or a relative who kept a detailed list of every transgression? Who never forgave one unless it was specifically mentioned in an apology and was then paid for? Who, in fact, used her mental energies to keep such a catalog? Who, even better, intentionally set goals that she knew we could not meet, all in order to show how much we rely on her? This would not be a good person. It would not be a person you would want to know. It would be a petty person. And, I don't think we would take such a person to be one who was concerned with us in any laudable way. If I remember how my partner upset me ten years ago, that is not praiseworthy, it does not demonstrate the strength of my love or my concern. It shows me to be a pretty horrible sort of person.
Now, I know that the ways of God are mysterious, but what reason—other than fear of punishment or hope of reward, i.e., egoism—would make one praise a being who was portrayed as so petty?

Secularists have to do better

There's a pernicious style of argumentation among many secularists. You see it in the works of the New Atheists, you see it in this piece by David Brooks justifying the coup in Egypt—and, if you do the right substitutions justifying every possible coup; Pinochet or the return of the Shah, anyone?—and, in a recent series of tweets from Joyce Carol Oates. These are only examples. I hear it from students. I hear it from people who take themselves to be educated and enlightened. It is very much in vogue among a certain set.

The argument—I guess it is really a claim substituting for an argument—is that religious believers are mentally defective, delusional, incapable of rational thought; or, that they are immoral, necessarily misogynistic, barbaric. And, because of this, one cannot trust them to teach or govern or take any other important roles. 

Sometimes this strategy is aimed at all religious believers indiscriminately. Sometimes only at those one particularly disdains. Usually, these days that means Muslims.

I have an interest in the survival of secular government. And, Islamists scare the hell out of me; I know what happens to me in their ideal state. Pace some particularly strident thinkers—Sam Harris and Niall Ferguson come to mind—I think that there is a difference between Islam and Islamism. But as an accused member of the Homosexual International, and as a philosopher, I have no doubt that Islamism and its parallels in Christianity and Hinduism and even in Buddhism some places must be opposed and defeated, not least because I get killed in many of those views.

But you can't do this practically or while maintaining intellectual honesty, by claiming that all serious religious believers are defective in someway. Secularism needs defending, but it needs defending on its merits, not through ad hominem or through a baseless assertion that secularists and atheists really just are better. 

The Father of Lies: Evil, the Devil, and Us

There’s a line you hear from traditional Christians quite often. They will tell you the Devil is real. And, that when you say he isn’t that’s exactly what he wants, because he wants you not to fear him, not to be on guard against the lion that walks about waiting to devour the believer. And, when you aren’t on guard, that is when evil can triumph.

To deny the real existence of the Devil as a being is still a heresy for most Christians. His existence is affirmed in the catechisms of the Catholic and many other Churches.

There’s something a little brilliant about the notion of the Devil. To see a being like the Devil is to affirm that there is real evil in the world. This is not something that every tradition has seen. Many religions have some shady gods or demigods or spirits—Loki or Hades or Coyote or the Tempter or Opposer (haShatan) or many others—but they aren’t purely evil. And, often they exist in worlds where there’s not much notion of evil.

It can be hard to see from our point of view, but the notion of evil has not been and isn’t universal. When you read Homer, you see enemies, but they are no more evil than the gods are good. Hector is Achilles’ enemy, and he hates him for killing Patroclus, but he isn’t evil. There is no moral judgment of the sort that could make that distinction. Even when we come to a figure like Socrates, he cannot conceive that someone could see something as bad and yet choose it.

The discovery of real evil is an advance in thinking about humanity. Whatever Nietzsche may say about how we should feel about birds of prey, it is good to recognize we live in a world—yes, of mostly grays—but in which the full negation of good has a place. In this sense, then, the Devil is an advance in understanding the world.

But that advance comes at a cost in terms of our own self-understanding. The Devil is both a recognition that there is evil and a placing of that evil outside ourselves. It isn’t humans that are evil; they are led astray, tempted, suggested to, by an outside evil force. 

There is a danger in giving up the Devil—maybe a greater danger than that of giving up God. The danger is that we lose sight of evil. And, this happens in some of the more shallow presentations and lazy acceptances of relativism. 

“What they do over there, or what we used to do here or [less often] what we currently do isn’t evil,” we are tempted to say. “It’s just the way we do things.”

That is a mistake.

But, there’s an equal danger in hypostasizing or reifying that evil into an external being, a Devil. If we are seriously self-reflective and, sometimes I am too seriously self-reflective, we all recognize that there are dark places in us, spots of evil. Some of us have more and some of us have less; some of us can control them better, some of us worse; some of us barely see them, some of us are aware of them all of the time. But, they are there. Inside us. 

Denying the wisdom the idea of the Devil represents may well lead us to forget the real evil that is around us, but believing in the Devil is as likely to make us oblivious to the evil within.

The world would be easier if there were no evil, and life would be easier if the source of evil were outside us. But neither the world nor life are easy.

Some thoughts about Dawkins' latest insertion of his mouth into his foot

Richard Dawkins has gotten caught suggesting that religious believers have such absurd beliefs that they oughtn't have respectable jobs. Of course, he has replied that it was all a misunderstanding, here.

Some thoughts;

1. He clearly did say that the journalist should not have a job because of his theological beliefs. That is the worst sort of witch-hunt thinking. As in, gays can't be hired because they will recruit or atheists can't because they will undermine morality. But when Dawkins does it, it's in the service of truth.
2. When he was called out for this, he claims that he must have been misunderstood. That is the classic non-apology.
3. He claims to be fascinated by the fact that people can hold irrational beliefs in one area and not in others. Perhaps, then, he should read some of the vast psychological and cognitive science literature on this very topic, or think about the way logicians adopt non-standard logics because of this phenomenon. Except that might be too much like the science he claims to like but can't be bothered to do.
4. He consistently confuses truth and rationality. Whether beliefs are rational or not is a different question to whether they are true. A belief set can be mostly false, but rational. Similarly, a belief set could be mostly true and irrational. He could learn about that, but it might be too difficult.
5. If he really wants to call into question the contributions of religious believers, he might want to give up on the Big Bang, too, since it is the result of the work of a Belgian priest.
6. He seems to believe that his belief set is both fully true and fully rational. Such self-congratulation is the very mark of the dogmatist, not the intellectual and certainly not the scientist.
7. His foundation is called the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He has put what he cares most about front and center.

But why would you want to know that? or, why do my religious beliefs matter to you?

Several times a month, in a conversation that has nothing to do with religion, I get asked whether I believe in God or not. I get asked this by people who are theists and people who are atheists. Maybe this happens to a lot of people, but I suspect that I am asked for three—interrelated—reasons. 

First, you don't have to know me very well or even in person to know that I am curmudgeonly and contrary. I am critical. I criticize religious believers—something agnostics and atheists pick up on—and I criticize atheists and agnostics—something religious believers pick up on. So, people see criticism and think that means we are on the same team. 

But, as I was telling students just this week, I am as likely to criticize you because I agree with you but I think your arguments are bad, as I am to criticize you because I think your conclusions are wrong. I would rather disagree with someone but respect her reasons than agree when the reasons are bad. (At least, I aim for that.)

I wouldn't want to follow him in every way, but the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, as committed a Christian as there may ever have been, joined an atheists' group precisely because he thought they took their beliefs more seriously and with more thought than his coreligionists.

Second, I teach philosophy. (I strive to be a philosopher, but like happiness for Aristotle, that is an accomplishment of a whole life.) Many people make assumptions about what it means to care about philosophy. Surely, if I care about philosophy, they think, I must be an atheist. There is something silly in that assumption, since the long history of philosophy is filled with believers of some sort, even if only in the God of the philosophers. Of course, they also assume I must be a liberal or progressive. And, that isn't quite right either, at least not in the full political senses.

Third—and I think this is what is usually going on—this question works as a proxy. 

People who tend toward the non-theistic side are sometimes using this question to guarantee that another person is rational or logical or believes in science. Of course, we all know or should know that religion and rationality or logic or belief in science are not inconsistent. If you think they are, you have to explain people like Georges Lemaître, just to give one example. And, if you think that belief in science makes one rational, to stick with examples from cosmology, you will have to explain Sir Fred Hoyle.

People who tend toward the theistic side are often using this question to gauge their interlocutor's morality. "Do you believe in God?" functions like "Do you believe in right and wrong?", "Do you think morality is objective?", etc. Of course, we don't have to work too hard to find a slew of examples of immoral theists. (For those atheists, who might want to jump in here, there is plenty of evil on the godless side, too.) And, much of the greatest parts of the Western and Eastern intellectual traditions have worked—both in theistic and atheistic strains—to demonstrate that a morality derived wholly from the existence or commands of a God is something less than morality.

Whatever the real meaning of the question, the rolling of the eyes that begins if I actually try to explain what I believe shows that my interlocutor rarely wants to know.

Intellectual vices: certainty

Occasionally, I try to explain why it is that I didn't go through with seminary. The reasons are legion, but the kicker was that I didn't any longer have the sort of faith that would be required for one to climb into a pulpit. When I say this I usually get a look that says that I'm weird or I'm just being self-deprecating. I am weird and, when I'm not being pedantic, I tend to put myself down. That's not all that's going on in this case.

What I mean is that I lacked the certainty required for a job teaching that faith or any other. This is in spite of my real affection for the faith in which I was raised.

It might be that I am just, as Nietzsche said, making a necessity out of virtue as all ascetics do; but, certainty seems to me to be almost always an intellectual vice. And, to be clear, it is as rampant in those who claim no faith, as in those who do.

I suppose certainty—like the vices of passion—might be well-suited for practical concerns, but the certain mind is a closed mind. Having certainty there is no more need for questioning. And, no more need for discussion. (And, as Mill might have said, no more need to remind ourselves why we believe as we do, in the first place. For this reason, though there are some moral precepts that I am almost certain of, even these need constant defense and justification.) Only proselytizing and judging those who differ are called for.

This might be why an avowal of certainty kills my interest in conversation. Maybe, I'm actually being virtuous.

Or maybe I'm just unable to see the certain truths.

God, the deceiver

One of the brighter students in one of my classes was hanging around after class the other day and we began to talk about various kinds of idealism. I began to describe the views of Bishop Berkeley, who believed that there are only minds and ideas. That is, he denied that the physical world existed as a physical entity or collection of entities. She was really understanding the view and some of the intricacies of his theory.

So, I wanted to introduce some of the problems beyond the obvious counterintuitiveness of the view. So, I mentioned that Berkeley, as a Christian was committed to the goodness of God. But, I explained, Berkeleyan idealism committed one to viewing God as having endowed our minds with apparent sensory faculties that would naturally lead us to believing that a physical world existed, even though it doesn't on the view. This, I said, would make God into a deceiver.

She responded, "That's sort of like the problem with astrology."

Confusedly, I asked, "What do you mean?"

"You know, like the way that science tells us that the Universe is really old and about the Big Bang, but"

" Oh, you mean, astronomy," I cut in. "So, you mean that the Universe is really much younger, in spite of what science says?"

"Yeah."

Then, I realized that she is a young earth creationist. Now, I have respect for this young woman's intellect and for her hard work and for her ambition to make something of her life.

But, even as I tried to explain to her that, at least as far back as St Augustine, serious Christians have thought that the creation accounts in Genesis cannot possibly taken literally, I was wondering whether it was pointless. I wanted to get her to see that if her religious beliefs require her to believe things that are clearly empirically false, she needs to consider the way in which she holds those beliefs.

But I also realized that when I tried to get them to see the value in seeking the truth, in being reflective, in examining our beliefs and lives, most of my students either don't pay any attention or have so sequestered their lives that some beliefs are not at all revisable.

And, I was sad.

More about teaching

So, it's the end of the semester and this means that I am thinking way too much about my classes and wishing, no matter how much I may like some of my students, that the semester would finally end. So this will be another post about class and, alas, about God.

Thus, I will delay for at least a post any discussion of the California State Supreme Court's ruling regarding gay marriage. I think I am supposed to have a public opinion as a gay intellectual (?). My dream, of course, is to be a public intellectual, but there aren't enough openings right now.

Today, in one of my classes, we were doing a bit of review. And the topic turned to God and the difference between revealed and natural religion. I was explaining the distinction and how it is possible to get from natural arguments for God's existence—assuming they work—to a position of choosing which purported revelation might be best as a student interrupted to ask me whether I personally believe in God. I noted that this was irrelevant—in any case, as I was telling my friend and colleague Kevin (I hope I can call him a friend and I'm at least an adjunct colleague) yesterday, my views on God and what "belief" means when applied to the supernatural are a little much to explain to an introductory student, i.e., more than anyone would want to know—and that we were talking about other people's arguments and not my views.

He interrupted me again, to point out that I ought to believe in God, that he was the Son of God and that he was here to love us all. I herded him out; he was dressed all in white flowing robes and I was scared witless. There are great days in the college classroom and then there are days where I wonder if I shouldn't be armed. They killed Socrates, after all.

End of the semester frustration

While giving an exam today, I powered through the grading of just over twenty short papers on the existence or non-existence of God. I was in a zone and I want the semester to be over. It was the second set of papers about the same topic I had read this semester, and I was reminded of two things: 1) it is unwise of me to teach two versions of more-or-less the same class with totally different structures—granted they are taught at different institutions, but...; and, 2) I ought not to assign God as a paper topic, as it always depresses me.

The one that hit me the hardest today, was the one that informed me that the author's life was eternally happy because of her belief in God and that I, too, could be happy if I were to believe in God. So, I learned from this that my student believes that theism is a guarantee of happiness—apparently not all Bibles still contain Job and not all Christians were raised in the same tradition of 2000 of thinking over problems like suffering as I was—that she believes that the self-deprecating manner I affect in class is truly a reflection of a deep and abiding unhappiness and she assumes that she knows that I am an atheist or at least an agnostic. I take it that they teach youngsters in certain types of churches to evangelize all people at all time, but I wasn't in need of it—and it won't make me happier.

Hate at the funeral

Albert Snyder lost his marine son in Iraq, but today he gained almost $11 million in compensatory and punitive damages from Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas. (According to the claims of the defendants, there is no money to pay any of these damages, though that's hardly the point.)

Phelps and his churchmembers, especially his two daughters and other relations, are well known for the protests they stage around the country at events of all stripes. Whatever the event, their protest always has the same theme: God hates fags! Their signs are always some variation on that message and their website is even godhatesfags.com. Phelps and his kith and kin spend more time and energy thinking about homosexuality and gay sex than a whole circuit party and RSVP cruise of gay men combined. Among their more spectacular protests was their performance at Matthew Shepard's funeral, where their signs read, among other things, "Matthew is in Hell".

The reason they have been ordered to pay Snyder $2.9 million in compensatory damages, $6 million in punitive damages and $2 million more for causing emotional distress, is their protest of Snyder's son's funeral. Snyder wasn't gay, nor does the Phelps crowd care. Instead, they have decided that the reason that things like 9/11 and the debacle in Iraq have occurred is because of the tolerance of gays and lesbians in the US. In this, they share a line of reasoning with the unjustly mourned Jerry Falwell and that master of the legpress Pat Robertson. But the Phelps put their signs where their fellow-God-is-zapping-us theorists' mouths are. They protest at the funerals of fallen soldiers in order to point out what they take the iniquity of the US to be. In doing so, they villify the dead who have fallen for the country they take to be evil and they cause a great deal of pain to the families.

They are horrible and dastardly people. And, I imagine, if there is a Hell, they will be quite welcome in it. (It seems to me that Jesus said something about mistreating orphans and widows.)

But the issue that is important legally is whether they have a right to their very distasteful protests. Snyder's argument was that his privacy was invaded. But of course, they didn't enter his home; they didn't trespass, or at least that's not the claim. The attorney for the Snyder's rightly called the Phelpses bullies who attack the weak, and asked for a high judgment from the jury "that says don't do this in Maryland again. Do not bring your circus of hate to Maryland again." That seems designed to chill speech, hateful speech to be sure, but speech, indeed.

As much as I hate their message, it seems to part of me, that it is the really hateful messages that test our commitment to the ideas expressed in the Bill of Rights.