Reprint: Yo, Secular Leftists — Arguing with Religious People (an Introduction)

From Richard D. Erlich, Views from a Jagged Orbit (before 2014)

De Gustibus & Intelligent Argument

A fair number of people are familiar with the idea that you really can't have a useful argument over tastes ("De gustibus non est disputandum"), and a quick check of what people think neat to put up on YouTube — or a quicker check of YouTube's pornographic spawn — will point to the truth of that assertion.

Less well known in the injunction from the Hebrew Fathers to, not surprisingly, "Be diligent in the study of Torah, and," relevant here, "know how to answer an Epicurean." That is, at least for my purposes, the old rabbis enjoined knowing one's own tradition and premises and being able to argue with someone with very different ideas. A religious follower of Scriptures, the rabbis taught, should know how to argue with — the rabbis would want you to defeat — a materialist philosopher.

In arguing with an "Epicurean," a religious person could not use the final formulation of more recent rabbis and their more authoritarian followers: "Er steht!" — "It's written"; "It's a commandment!" The obvious Epicurean response to that would be, "So what?" To answer effectively a materialist, a secularist — then and now — one would have to argue from premises you can both agree on.

And, more important in our time, vice versa — for a secularist arguing with a religious person.

For a secularist to argue effectively with a religious person, the secular person must know "Torah": i.e., what the religious person at least claims to hold authoritative. It's nice that Protestants and Catholics are no longer burning one another at the stake nor taking turns burning Baptists and flogging Quakers. And it's nice that atheists are coming out of the closet and arguing for their position.

The danger to my beliefs, though, is an alliance of Believers against not just strident atheists but secularists in general, and against those of us who want to follow a religious tradition in a society that welcomes us and (aiding that welcome) runs a thoroughly secular state. The danger to my political positions, and that of many, is a Left that becomes increasingly militant in its secularism and (therefore) increasingly politically marginalized among an American public composed largely of various kinds of cooperating Believers.

So, my atheist friends: a bit of advice. Recall the great principle of Occam's Razor and the story of the mathematician-astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace and Napoleon. When Napoleon asked Laplace how he, Laplace, could write a substantial book "on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator," Laplace replied that he "had no need of that hypothesis." Even so, American atheists, when an argument comes up about God, just say, "I have no need of that hypothesis" — and let it go at that. More generally on the Left: gals and guys, "Know how to work with religious people" — including at times with religious people with whom you have profound disagreements.

If some apocalyptically-minded Christians are right, it's important to get Jews in control of all of what was ancient Israel and Judea and (even) Samaria to bring on the End of Days, at which time those Jews will either submit to Jesus or burn forever in the Lake of Fire. No Jews like that idea, but if they're Likudnik Jews or even further to the Right, they can ally with Right-wing Christians on Zionist issues. And they have allied, and not just regarding Israel.

So it shouldn't be so goddamn difficult for today's secular Leftists to learn the history of effective political movements in the USA, bone up on the more radical teachings of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, and renew the old alliances for peace, social justice, and the equitable distribution of the world's resources and wealth.

"The Earth is the Lord's / and the fullness thereof, / The sea and all that in them is" saith the 24th Psalm, and the psalmist goes on to justify God's ownership by a labor theory of property: "for he founded [the world] upon the seas / And established it upon the waters." If you're trying to get people to make the U.S. economy more fair, that's a good place to start — and you can omit arguing that the true story of creation is Big-Bang Cosmology.

Et bloody cetera for the divinity of Jesus if you want allies against militarism and against coddling the rich. You, my Liberal-Leftist-Peacenik friend, want a more humble U.S. foreign policy; Jesus enjoined downright pacifism. Use that!

And if anyone accuses you, correctly, of "cherry-picking" teachings, point out that there are not ten commandments in Torah but, by traditional count, 613. Moses was just the beginning. Selecting, emphasizing, de-emphasizing, rationalizing, modifying, allegorizing, and sensibly gentling (and sometimes just ignoring) religious doctrines has been the name of the game since the old rabbis decided that "an eye for an eye" meant equitable compensation, Jesus healed chronic medical problems on the Sabbath, and St. Paul said a guy could be a saved follower of Messiah without circumcision and that nobody needed to follow all those finicky Jewish food regulations.

So, devout religious folk, "Know how to answer" us materialists — or at least talk with us politely. My fellow Leftist-pinko-peacenik sorts (including small "b" believers): If you want to effect change, learn how to talk to and with religious people. Effective politics are coalition politics, and as of now the Right is kicking our asses at it.

Meditation on a T-Shirt (Standing Up for Science, in Good Faith)

A really neat T-shirt on sale on the web says on its front,

            Earth Is Not Flat

         Vaccines Work

         We've Been To The Moon

         Chemtrails Aren't A Thing

         Climate Change Is Real

         Stand Up For Science

But if I were making a shirt for myself, I'd want on on the back,

         Teaching Flat-Earth v. Round-Earth Hypotheses Is a Fine Way to Introduce Kids to Scientific Method and the History and Philosophy of Science

         The Human Species Evolved Like the Other Species, and Is Contingent, Not Special

         In a Universe of "Billions and Billions of Stars," the Human Species Is Trivial

         If There's a Multiverse of Universes, the Human Species Is Really Trivial

         If the Human Species Is Trivial, You Certainly Are Nothing Special

         If You Eat Carrots, Let Alone Hamburgers, You Deny that Life Is Sacred

         Like the Carrot or Steer You Eat, When You're Dead You're Dead

         Belief that "in the Big Picture" Humans Have Value Over, Say, Sheep or Cockroaches Is Necessary But Absurd

         Stand Up For Science and Its Implications

Herman Melville's Ishmael (or just the Narrator of much of Moby Dick) tells us that "[…] the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. 'All is vanity.' ALL" (ch. xcvi, "The Try-Works"). In a bit more detail, and more modern language — "vanity" means "emptiness": "All is emptiness" and "a striving after wind" — Koheleth tells us that he looked deeply into the truth of things and "decided as regards men, to dissociate them [from] the divine beings," gods and angels, "and to face that fact that they are beasts. For in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing" (Tanakh Ecclesiastes, 3.18-19).

Since the Renaissance and increasingly since the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, scientific research has expanded the human-eye view of the universe in space and time and displaced us from the center of things. This is good for human humility — a virtue we generally lack — but it has its dangers.

Robert Ardrey tells is in his African Genesis about a theory that circulated for a bit in the mid-20^th century, on "The Illusion of Central Position" as the birthright of every human child. I look around, and I see that the universe revolves around me. "With maturity, however, the illusion is undercut and the child and then the man comes to a truer perception of his place in the scheme of things." 

Nonetheless the theory grants that should a man ever attain a state of total maturity — ever come to see himself, in other words, in perfect mathematical relationship to the tide of tumultuous life which has risen upon the earth and in which we represent but a single swell; and furthermore come to see our earth as but one opportunity for life among uncounted millions in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy as but one statistical improbability, nothing more, in the silent mathematics of all things—should a man, in sum, ever achieve the final, total, truthful Disillusionment of Central Position, then in all likelihood he would no longer keep going but would simply lie down, wherever he happened to be, and with a long-drawn sigh return to the oblivion from which he came. (145; ch. 6)

So let us Stand Up for Science and Truth — but count its costs and face the pain of the human position and condition in the real reality of such materialist truth.

Quick Catechism for Why Bernie Sanders Is Headed to Hell (and You Probably Are Too)

"'And Bernie Sanders, who doesn't believe in God ... how in the world are we gonna let Bernie [...]?' asked Mark Burns, co-founder and CEO of the Now Network [...]" opening for Donald Trump. "'Listen, Bernie got to get saved, he's got to meet Jesus. I don't know, he's got to have a coming-to-Jesus meeting,' Burns added [...] ahead of a Trump event in Hickory, N.C."

I sometimes joked to my students that we were living an old joke about the University of Chicago as "Jewish professors teaching Catholicism to classrooms of atheists" — except I needed to explain Protestantism as well, and my students were almost all believing Christians, even if they weren't always very sure of what they believed. .

Anyhow, this much for a "Rich's Notes" cheat-sheet oversimplifying a couple millennia of Christian theology but giving context for what the sort-of Reverend Mr. Mark Banks said about a secular Jew like Bernie Sanders, which would also apply to a religious Jew like Joe Lieberman and maybe to most Roman Catholics and lukewarm Protestants.

First off, there is no salvation unless you make it to the Father. No matter how well you live your life, if you're not with God you're going to Hell to burn forever in the Lake of Fire (or more interesting and baroque torments if Dante got it right). After that,
      No one comes to the Father but through the Son. But how do you come to and through the Son?
             No one comes to the Son but through Holy Church: By Baptism and the other Sacraments of the Church one is washed free from Original Sin and kept in line for salvation.
              Alternatively and simultaneously, "By Faith and Faith alone shall you be saved." And how does one have capital "F" Faith (i.e., the true one)? Well, one experiences Christ and accepts Jesus as one's personal savior (capital "s" optional). Now, does one do that by striving on one's own? How can sinful, fallen, degenerate, innately depraved Man come to Faith?
                    Not on your own: God saves whom He will save and damns the rest — the great majority. So, By Grace and Grace alone will you be saved, except you probably won't be.
                           However ... "A tree is known by its fruits," and there are signs of Grace, including one's living a godly, productive, prosperous life in a godly community and gets accepted by a Church that is a gathering of the saved and live by its rules — like in the good old days of Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts among the Separatists and Puritans who left their stamp big time on what became the US of A.

Got it? That's some basics out of your old-time, hard-assed Christianity in the tradition of St. Paul in a bad mood, plus St. Augustine and Luther and Calvin and our own colonial-era Jonathan Edwards and the Mather boys Cotton and Increase. 

So of course Bernie Sanders doesn't believe in God in any way that counts, and there's a fair chance you don't either. Or at least that's the mainstream, or at least a central major stream, of Christian belief, with more liberal ideas always around but often losing out. The ideas of St. Augustine became "Catholic"; his competitors got anathematized and excommunicated. The Medieval Church loosened up a bit — for political reasons Dante has a Roman emperor in Heaven — but Martin Luther and the Reformation brought back tougher doctrine (including, with Luther, on Jews).

Personally, I have no problem with such doctrines, except when combined with unCalvinist ideas on free will and choice and the idea that it is the duty of Christians to save the heathen: in which case devout Christians can become annoying. And demanding a US that is a Christian nation where only those who've come to Jesus can hold office — well, that violates the prohibition of religious tests in our Constitution and undermines the USA as a secular Republic that guarantees freedom of religion. 

Biblical Dissent: Job and Ecclesiastes, Part I: Koheleth (26 July 2013)

"[…] the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes 

is the fine hammered steel of woe." — Herman Melville, 

Moby Dick, ch. 96, "The Try-Works"

            I wrote a while back on my favorite Biblical anti-hero, Jonah, and now I'd like to turn to more upbeat subjects, in a sense, starting with "the fine hammered steel of woe" of the Book of Ecclesiastes and, later, dealing with the more explicit heroism of dissent in the Book of Job.

            In "The Try-Works" chapter of Moby Dick, Melville follows the quotation above with "'All is vanity.' ALL" and "This wilful [sic] world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet."

            And now I have to do the first of a whole series of clarifications.

            The Book of Ecclesiastes is by Koheleth, which is more of a description than a name: "the Preacher" in some translations, or "the Assembler" (of an audience and/or of sayings), and Koheleth in the opening of the book takes on the persona of King Solomon. It's a useful persona; if King Solomon tells you that wealth and power and pleasure and sex are "vanity" (ch. 2) — "emptiness and a striving after wind" — then the words carry more weight than if spoken by your average poor, powerless, and laid-a-whole-lot-less-than-Solomon human being, or even a major philosopher, who, compared to Solomon, is still pretty poor, powerless, unentertained, and horny.

            "[U]nchristian Solomon's wisdom" is important for believers as a challenge to faith, especially, I think, if we put Koheleth in dialog with the (probably earlier) Book of Job. Indeed, when I taught Ecclesiastes to the college students in BASIC ("Brothers and Sisters in Christ"), their minister lost patience with them for their complacence. They had a one-word answer to Koheleth —"Christ" — and their minister chided them for not sympathizing with the plight of someone who didn't have that/the Word, and not appreciating just what their salvation had saved them from. The minister felt that some dark-night-of-the-souling was necessary for faith.

            Koheleth is also important for secularists, leading the way (if you have the courage to follow) to the most direct human implications of a cold-eyed view of a materialist universe.

            "I have seen the business that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with," Koheleth says. God "has put eternity into man's mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done […]. I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same lifebreath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity.  All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.  Who knows whether the lifebreath of man goes upward and that of the beast goes down to the earth?" (3.10-21, combining translations [RSV/NJPS]).

            Koheleth does believe in Sheol as a possibility for an afterlife (Sheol is either the grave or something like Greek Hades, with fewer visitors); still, basically, as an individual conscious being, when you're dead you're dead.

            Popular at funerals is Koheleth's great poem, "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven," either read or, maybe more often for my generation, sung as "Turn, Turn, Turn" by Pete Seeger, by way of The Byrds. Less popular are Koheleth's lines on mortality. Even if you believe in a "lifebreath" (spiritus, anima), there's no reason to believe the human is any better than those of other animated creatures.

            And secularists ought not to believe in a lifebreath, nor, by one definition of "secularist," believe in a God who lays down rules for life, which would have true significance. Think of it this way: Is it any big deal if I throw that old lady under a bus?

            Diana Vriend, a friend of a friend of mine, passed on a song from kid-culture responding to the enforced joy of being made to sing "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands"; it nicely summarizes part of the world view of Koheleth and a famous retort by John Maynard Keynes to boot: "A hundred years from now we'll all be dead! / A hundred years from now we'll all be dead! / No matter what is done and no matter what is said, A hundred years from now we'll all be dead!" Much shorter than a hundred years from now, the old lady will be dead. And, eventually — maybe soon if you live in Texas — you who threw her under the bus will be dead, and your whole generation will be dead: "One generation goes, another comes, / But the earth remains the same forever" (1.1), or, in the modern-view, capital "E" Earth evolves, but in ways that don't concern humans, except insofar as we evolve with it.

            Or we go extinct.

            In any event, in a way pre-figured in Koheleth but way beyond anything he could imagine, species come and species go; indeed, genera come and genera go and almost whole biospheres, but it seems only the Archaea and bacteria and such go on "forever."

            Except they won't either. Koheleth's recycling universe is pretty depressing: "What has been is what will be, / and what has been done is what will be done; / and there is nothing new under the sun" (1.9). Still, secular linear cosmology has all the optimism of frozen Norsefolk telling tales of Ragnarok and the twilight of the gods: depending on the latest measures of the mass of the universe, the fashionable theory has it that we'll either peter out through entropy —  "the heat-death of the universe," an end, figuratively, in ice — or there's the big crunch and the universe goes, if not in fire, something much more spectacular, except there will be no one to watch.

            Looking at things objectively, really getting The Big Picture — realistically, don't sweat killing off the old lady, or, for that matter, the entire human species.

            If God exists and has said "You shall not murder" (perhaps not even kill, or not without special permission [Exodus 20.13]) — if God exists and forbids murder, then murdering old ladies is significant: you're giving the finger to God. No God, or a God who really doesn't give a trilobite's tit, then it would be hard to find it a big deal about anything human.

            Hell, in terms of seventeen billion years or so of cosmic history and the vastness of just this universe — there may be others, simultaneously and/or serially — then it's not so big a deal if you wiped out our galaxy.

            Thinking more positively — this essay is ultimately upbeat — thinking more positively, there's also no big deal if you save the old lady, or the human species, or the galaxy. If you're fulfilling a divine injunction, there's significance in a good deed. Otherwise, "'All is vanity.' ALL."

            Koheleth is near the beginning of the tradition of "Virtue is its own reward" (as Cicero puts it), way down on the human scale of things. Virtue is its own reward 'cause in this life that's frequently all it gets, and there are no rewards or punishments in the life to come — and that's if there is a life to come that counts for much (see above): "since one fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice.  As is the good man, so is the sinner […]  (7.24; 8.14-9.2)."

            Indeed, not only does virtue often go unrewarded, so also, at least occasionally, does mere competence: "[…] the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all" (9.11). Nice guys sometimes do finish first, but sometimes last, and now and then not at all; even the fastest runner on the planet can slip on a slick spot, or get hit by a truck.

            So, what is to be done?

            Whatever.

            Or at least that is part of the answer: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going" (9.9).

            It's, like, Existentialist, man! Except Koheleth is a bit more positive than Albert Camus retelling "The Myth of Sisyphus," with Sisyphus endlessly pushing a rock to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll back down. (In my vision of the story, the rock rolls back down over Sisyphus, but, then, as a child I watched violent cartoons.) Anyway — hey, Sisyphus; make the rock your thing, man! Koheleth's imagery isn't of dead rocks in a kind of hell but of at least the potential for growing things, fertility: "In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand; for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good" (11.4-6).

         And Koheleth, even as a protoExistentialist, can balance advice for absurd striving for things people see as good with advice to find relationships that we feel are good, and significant: "Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which God has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. (9.9) * * * Behold, what I have seen to be good and to be fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life which God has given him, for this is his lot" (5.18).

         Carpe diem, baby! Sisyphus's bouncing up and running after that rock is a good thing, but "two are better than one" (4.9), and there are more enjoyable acts of emptiness than rock pushing. Or at least there are things and acts most people think — or feel or imagine — are better, and Koheleth would have us pursue them with some enthusiasm.

         "The end of the matter; all has been heard," as the pious editor of Ecclesiastes starts a brief summation of the lessons here (as translated in the RSV): "Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment […]" (12.13-14).

         And that's okay as a summary and not merely a neutering into Biblical orthodoxy: iff we see a duty as duty, period, and judgment as judgment, period, without talk of rewards and punishments. "Virtue is its own reward," and duty is duty, and it's maybe more than we can ask for to have objective judgment of whether or not we're doing that duty and our deeds are, objectively — from a cosmic, God's-eye-view good or bad.

         Koheleth's own last words are, in the Tanakh translation (5746/1985), "Utter futility — said Koheleth — / All is futile!" (12.8): courageous words, courageously praised by Melville. But in the full context of The Book of Ecclesiastes, and Moby Dick as well, we should add: "To Life! — What the f*ck?! Life's what we've got for our few days under the sun."

         However we analyze them, though, we should note that Koheleth's teachings are gutsy stuff. Even today, he speaks his truth to power, or at least to piety.


         Which will bring us to Job, who confronts Power even more directly.

SCOTUS on Christian Prayer at Town Meetings (6 May 2014)

This much on the early May 2014 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States allowing specifically Christian prayers to open town meetings:

     First, I'd like to be the 215^th Bible-educated liberal to quote at the Supreme Court Jesus's injunction to pray in private, to wit: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. [...] But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. [...] And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words" (Matthew 6.5-7).

     As an occasional and selectively-observant Reform Jew of Leftist and religion/State-separatist inclinations, I'll note this much positive in the decision: It should remind politically conservative Jews (and some non-SCOTUS Catholics) that their allies-of-convenience who talk of the USA as "a Christian nation" mean exactly what they say. In this theory — or doctrine — the USA is a nation and that nation is Christian; to be outside the true Church is to be outside of the nation and just a guest on that Christian nation's territory. (And as a nice young student once said to me in [mostly] innocence, "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm a Christian."). A bad possibility that's been brewing for a generation or so is that doctrinal tolerance among the various faithfuls will allow them to work together to impose a vague "nondenominational" religiosity on us all. This Supreme Court decision may help put that off.

     Meanwhile, I suggest that readers suggest to the City Parents of the Town of Greece and similar pious places this highly appropriate, and now perfectly legal, opening for their meetings: "Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Ha-Olam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav, v'tzivanu la-asok b'tsorchei ha-tzibur." Or, for those of us who don't do Hebrew, "Blessed are You, Eternal our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who has sanctified us with Your mitzvot and enjoined us to occupy ourselves with the needs of the community."

     The next week they might open with this poetic prayer of beginnings:

                     In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
                     Praise be to God, the Lord of the Worlds,                     The Merciful One, the Compassionate One,                     Master of the Day of Doom.
                     Thee alone we serve, to Thee alone we cry for help.                     Guide us in the straight path                     The path of them Thou hast blessed.                     Not of those with whom Thou art angry                     Nor of those who go astray. 

    If your town council aren't much into subtlety, use "Allah," the Arabic for "God."

    I'm dead serious here, people: If we're gonna play, let's play, and — to repeat an obvious suggestion — that means you, too, Scientologists and Satanists, laconic neo-Pagans (though Jesus may've been prejudiced there), and Awaiters of the AI Singularity. Let us make members of that Christian nation welcome as we begin some meetings our way (many of our various Ways).