Re: News-WSJ: Man vs. God pt. 1- Karen Armstrong

On 2009-09-14, Don Cates <caHORMELtes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Garamond Lethe wrote:
On 2009-09-14, Steven L. <sdlitvin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Garamond Lethe wrote:
On 2009-09-13, Steven L. <sdlitvin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
macaddicted wrote:

In the past, many of the most influential
Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers
How many?

Does she believe that the average Jew praying in his temple has read
Maimonides?
Do you believe that the average computer science student praying in
Algorithms class has read Knuth?

If they haven't (and they haven't), what would you conclude about
Knuth's influence on algorithms?

(I'm not couting those of us who were praying /to/ Knuth, of course.)

understood that what we call "God"
is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable
transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by
means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable
us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the
symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into
hard fact.
Is she serious???
If you would like a serious discussion about this and can manage to drop
the scarcasm and incredulity, I'm willing.

I find you post indicative of several non-theists who haven't read widely
in theology. As I see it, here's what happened:

1) Biblical literalism catches on in the US. Traditional theologians
see it as goofy, and it has made no headway in traditional denominations.
2) Biblical literalists are very good at getting media coverage, though.
3) Biblical literalists make many, many silly claims, including that
they represent actual Christianity.
4) Otherwise sensible atheists who know better than to believe anything
else literalists say fall for this one hook, line and sinker.
5) Non-literalists Christians look on in bemusement as this subset
of atheists take vicotry lap after victory lap each time they prove
that literalism is goofy. They do get a mite bit annoyed, though,
when literalism is mistaken for Christianity.
Karen Armstrong wasn't limiting her discussion to what happened in the
U.S. So I don't want to get off topic with American fundamentalism
here. It's been beaten to death in other discussion threads.

My point (which looks to have been made poorly) was that your criticism
of Armstrong was limited to American literalists.

She made a point about how thinking about God had been almost Deistic
till the late 17th century (which before the U.S. existed), which is
both incorrect and self-serving.

Why is it incorrect?

To 99% of His followers, God was never Deistic. God was a supernatural
*being* who intervened repeatedly on Earth to help His peoples and for
general purposes of justice.

And 87% percent of biology graduate students taking a required course
in evolution were not able to give an adaquate defintion of the term
on the first day of class. (My statistic comes from personal observation,
where does yours come from?) You can use my statistic to impeach
undergraduate education in biology, but I don't think you'd agree that
you could use that statistic to impeach evolution. Likewise, the fact
that some arbitrarily large population of believers are incorrect about
a theological point of doctrine certainly says something about the
effectiveness of communicating that doctrine, but it does not inform
whether or not the underlying doctrine is correct.



But let me begin by asking: how do you determine the contents of a
belief system?
Religion is what its adherents do.


Didn't Wilkins say something about this? Ah, here it is:

<q>
Kuhn's friend Paul Feyerabend [1970a, 1970b, 1975] stirred things
even more by arguing that there was no such thing as the Scientific
Method, either, something Kuhn held to exist in a more philosophical
sense. Feyerabend argued that method was restricted to small
subdisciplines, and that at any point any scientists could bring in
anything from astrology to numerology if it helped. He even cheered
on early recent creationism. This was the extreme end of the 'science
is what scientists do' approach. Feyerabend wanted scientists to do
anything they wanted, and call it science.
</q>
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/falsify.html

It's an interesting position to argue from, but as a practical matter
scientists can do (and attempt to publish) things that aren't science,
and the peer-review process is usually adequate for identifying these
attemps.

So let me ask you: do you believe (with Feyerabend) that "science
is what scientists do"? If so, debating this would be much more
interesting --- I think you're wrong, but at least your position that
"religion is what its adherents do" is consistent. On the other
hand, if you disagree with Feyerabend on science, could you expalin
why you think his approach is appropriate for religion?


And every week, there are hundreds of millions of people, all over the
world, who go to temple or church or mosque to pray and to participate
in religious services. They don't do that because God is an ineffable
transcendance who has no connection with them personally. They're
praying for *favors* from that God: Heal my illness, find me a job,
find me companionship, end injustice, bring about peace on earth, etc.

Religion belongs to THEM, not to a few intellectual theologians who are
constantly coming up with all these new rhetorical contortions.

Hundreds of millions of people also use chemistry, physics and math to
get through their day.

But they are not called (nor do they call themselves) chemists,
physicists, and mathematicians. This is very unlike their religious
affiliations.

Sure. We don't call someone who "believes in" chemistry a chemist;
that label is reserved for those people who have advanced experitse.
I think Steven L. is making the argument that where theological
matters are concerned, "believes in" is equivalent to expertise.
Thus, his (paraphrased) remark "Religion is what its adherants do."

This isn't true for any other human endevor I can think of, and I
can't think why it would be true for religion.

If "chemist" is too concrete, let's make the example more
philosophical. I'm a physicalist. I don't think you can go
from that point to defining physicalism as "what its adherants do".
Nor should you trust my understanding of physicalism to be
equivalent to the accepted definition. If you wanted to learn
about physicalism (as distinct from my ideas about physicalism),
you'd ask a philosopher. The same analysis would be appropriate
if I had said "I'm a dualist". Yet if I'm reading Steven L.
correctly, a completely different analysis is called for if
I say "I'm a Quaker."

I don't understand why that should be the case.


Their understanding of these topics is almost
always wrong in the details, and sometimes this ignorance can be
disasterous, but most of the time their understanding works well
enough to cook the food, do the laundry, and make sure their paycheck
hasn't been shorted.

I'd be interested in hearing an argument that chemistry, etc. belongs
to THEM.



That didn't wait till the end of the 17th century. That was what real
Jews, real Christians, and real Muslims believed for many centuries prior.

In fact, the God of the Bible had originally been just the God of the
Hebrews (just as the Canaanites had Baal). Only later did the Hebrews
"promote" their God to be the God of the Universe.

It's real nice that Karen Armstrong and a few other theologians have
attempted to "save" God by morphing Him into some "transcendance." But
that has never matched what 95% of ordinary people think of as "God":

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/God2-Sistine_Chapel.png

What do 95% of ordinary people think of calculus? And why does it matter?
Bad analogy.

Ordinary people don't do calculus.

Ordinary engineers then.

They do religion.
It sure matters what 95% of any subject's adherents are thinking about it.


And it sure matters what 95% of engineers think about calculus, at least
for the narrow range of problems they deal with. This does not mean that
engineers define calculus, even though they outnumber mathematicians.

Yes, Maimonides and Giberson and Rabbi Harold Kushner all have developed
radical, even Deistic, conceptions of God. Who cares.

People who want to understand religion, mostly.



which Michelangelo painted early in the 16th century, but which
reflected beliefs commonly held for centuries prior.

The audience for which Michelangelo was painting was able to understand
metaphor.
PROVE IT.
What did Pope Julius II think about God?

You really think all those peasants who went to church every Sunday were
told by their priests that all those Biblical stories were metaphors???

As they weren't allowed into the Sistine chapel, I'm not sure why that's
relevant.

Using your example:

<q>
While much of the symbolism of the ceiling dates from the early church,
the ceiling also has elements that express the specifically Renaissance
thinking which sought to reconcile Christian theology with the philosophy
of Humanism.[20] During the 15th century in Italy, and in Florence in
particular, there was a strong interest in Classical literature and the
philosophies of Plato, Socrates and other Classical writers. Michelangelo,
as a young man, had spent time at the Humanist academy established by the
Medici family in Florence. He was familiar with early Humanist-inspired
sculptural works such as Donatello's bronze David, and had himself
responded by carving the enormous nude marble David which was placed in
the piazza near the Palazzo Vecchio, the home of Florence's council.[21]
The Humanist vision of humanity was one in which people responded to
other people, to social responsibility and to God in a direct way, not
through intermediaries, such as the Church.[22] This conflicted with the
Church's emphasis. While the Church emphasized humanity as essentially
sinful and flawed, Humanism emphasized humanity as potentially noble
and beautiful.[nb 3] These two views were not necessarily irreconcilable
to the Church, but only through a recognition that the unique way to
achieve this "elevation of spirit, mind and body" was through the Church
as the agent of God. To be outside the Church was to be beyond Salvation.
In the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo presented both Catholic
and Humanist elements in a way that does not appear visually conflicting.
The inclusion of "non-biblical" figures such as the Sibyls or Ignudi is
consistent with the rationalising of Humanist and Christian thought of
the Renaissance.
</q>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel_ceiling#Content

Now let me take up your modified question: what did "those peasants"
believe? As written records from that class are pretty spare, let's
as a first approximation assume they believed what they were told.
And what they are told, going back to Augustine and reiterated by
Aquinas, is that "The scripture which is called 'The Old Testament'
has a fourfold meaning, namely history, etiology, analogy and allegory."
(Aquinas, Question 1, Article 10, SUMMA THEOLOGIAE).

If you think they believed something else, I'd be interested in seeing
your evidence.




.

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