As Flies to Wanton Boys

The belief in a loving deity, one that created the universe and we humans, one that is good, one that responds to prayers, intervenes in the universe and our lives, has always posed a certain difficulty to any thinking person.  The difficulty arises from the fact that a thinking person cannot help but feel that the universe is in some respects, perhaps in many respects, not good at all.  Bad things happen.

Most importantly as far as we're concerned, bad things happen to us.  Those bad things are not necessarily caused by other people, and so it can't be said that some person or persons are to blame.  The blame for natural disasters, if it's appropriate to speak of blame in connection with them, clearly must lie with something more than human, or at least other than human.

The "Problem of Evil" as it has been called necessarily arises in regard to this belief.  Why would such a God allow evil things to exist, to happen?  There have been several responses to this problem.  One has been to respond as does Shakespeare's Duke of Gloucester in King Lear, and to maintain that there is no such God, and there is instead a God or gods for which we are nothing more than flies are to wanton boys, and who kill us for their sport.

Another response is to ascribe the evil of the world to a supernatural being such as the devil.  This doesn't do much to address the issue, though, if that being is subject to God; a lesser being.  Then the question simply becomes why does God let the devil cause evil?  If such a being is claimed to be an equal--a kind of rival--to a loving God, God isn't necessarily responsible for evil directly or indirectly.  However, in that case God isn't all-powerful, either, and God's omnipotence is something most believers revel in; so, this Manichean approach isn't favored by most.

Then there is the option which posits that we are the cause of evil.  Perhaps we brought it into the world, or Adam and Eve did, and we are tainted by their Original Sin.  This approach isn't entirely satisfactory, though, as it doesn't account for the evil (suffering) which results from natural disasters.  But there are some, of course, who think we cause those as well, usually by being bad in some fashion.  Sexual misconduct seems preferred as a cause for hurricanes and fire from the sky, but in any event we act wrongly in some sense and God punishes us through manipulation of natural forces, and such punishment is just.

A kind of catch-all or what perhaps may be called a default response is that what we perceive as evil isn't evil in fact.  It is actually good for some reason we're too dense or limited to comprehend, but is manifest to God.  Thus there is no "Problem of Evil" as there is no evil.  There is merely the working of God which will eventually, perhaps in a time so far distant as to be beyond the insight of humanity, result in good.

There is a problem even with this latter response, though, and that is probably a consequence of the fact that what we tend to think of as "good" is what would be good for us humans, i.e. what we perceive to be good.  What good, so to speak, would what God may have determined is a good result for the universe do us if it is millennia or millions of years in the future, when we may not even be around as a species?

Perhaps we can get around that problem by believing the universe was made just for us or with us being utmost in God's mind.  In that case, what is ultimately good must be good as far as we are concerned.  Or perhaps we can claim that once dead, we become immortal, and will experience and benefit from the ultimately good outcome of the universe.

Clearly, the belief in a personal God possessing human characteristics or concerns regarding fate, good and evil, results in complications of this kind.  The more speculations and arguments are required to explain or justify what happens in life from such a perspective, the less justifiable such a belief becomes, it would seem.  Or the more mysterious life and the deity become.

Perhaps the recent popularity of Stoicism as a quasi-religious view is in reaction to the manifold machinations required to make sense of the universe given belief in a personal, human though superhuman God.  A God immanent in the universe wouldn't necessarily create the universe for a particular purpose or end.  Being immanent in a universe of unimaginable size, such a God wouldn't have peculiarly human concerns or desires and wouldn't be concerned in any particular sense with humanity.  But as a part of the universe ourselves, we participate in God and by exercising our reason, our peculiar ability, we act in accord with our nature and that of the universe.

Such a belief at least prohibits us from thinking ourselves flies to wanton boys, and other things.

Thou Shalt Not Issue Certain Marriage Licenses

The recalcitrant Ms. Davis, arbiter of who may or may not be married in Rowan County, Kentucky, has this date been jailed, appropriately enough I think, for contempt of court.

As all know, she claims God Himself decrees that she refuse to follow the law.  This is, presumably, the same God who decreed she should be divorced from three previous husbands, leaving one to wonder why God, who apparently takes marriage so seriously that He will suffer it to take place only in certain cases, has no problem with it being entered into and then dissolved so frequently.  Serial marriage is it seems perfectly fine with the Deity, provided it is between a man or a woman.  This particular county clerk evidently has no problem with it either.

Now as far as I am concerned, Ms. Davis may divorce her current husband and his successors, if any, and this won't necessarily mean she is a bad person or even a sinner.  I don't mean to castigate her or others who claim that they may ignore or break the law whenever they think God wants them to as immoral.  But I do mean to say that she and they are seriously misguided and thoughtless, and that such a belief is potentially dangerous.

It's difficult to know where to begin in addressing this kind of belief.  It seems almost self-evident that if people are allowed to refuse to follow the law as it impacts others and the rights of others because of their religious beliefs, the rule of law doesn't exist.  I don't address laws which apply only to the rights of believers.  In that case, there may be some basis for asserting a First Amendment right.  But I don't think the First Amendment contemplates the religious limiting the rights of other persons by virtue of claimed religious beliefs.  Thus, I doubt any court will hold that someone whose religion mandates that, e.g., someone of a certain race, or disabled people, cannot marry need not issue marriage licenses.  Happily, we haven't reached that point (yet?).

I  think a religion the free exercise of which requires that legal rights be denied to others is a curious religion indeed.  I suspect that if this woman was Muslim, and maintained that she could not comply with her legal duties because of some Islamic belief, neither Mr. Huckabee nor Mr. Cruz nor anyone else would be claiming her rights were being violated.

But at this time I wish to focus on what I think is an issue which must be addressed before others when such claims as those made by Ms. Davis are made.  For such as me, an initial question is...why would God care who gets married according to the law?  Assuming it's God's law that certain people shouldn't get married, and God's law is superior to that of the law of humans, why does it matter if the law of the United States or any other nation allows them to marry?  The marriage would be valid only as far as the secular authority is concerned; it wouldn't be truly valid; what's valid is what God decides is valid.  So, the marriage licenses issued by the state would be bogus in the eyes of God, and God's eyes are the only eyes that matter.

Why would God decree that clerks shall not issue licenses which are clearly bogus?  None of those prohibited by God from being married would really be married in any case.  Even if God is the highly officious being contemplated by the Abrahamic religions, God isn't likely to be concerned regarding anything which is not the case.

It would seem that God, or those who believe that they stand in the shoes of God, as it were, should be concerned with marriage licenses only if they result in marriages God has prohibited.  If they don't, there should be no concern.

As there plainly is a concern, however, it would seem that God and those who claim to serve him in this respect believe that the marriage licenses in fact create a forbidden marriage.  That is problematic for the religious though, as that is to impute some kind of validity to secular marriage even if it is contrary to God's will.  In other words, the refusal to issue marriage licenses would arise from the belief that the licenses are valid regardless of the will of God.  I doubt that's a position anyone who would claim that gay marriage is forbidden by God would want to take.

Ms. Davis and others in similar governmental positions don't cause people to be married, they don't bless the marriages of people.  They merely issue licenses.  They process certain paperwork when certain fees are paid and certain requirements set by the law (not by them) are met.

So is it God's directive is we cannot issue marriage licenses to gays, regardless of the fact those licenses are not valid...are in fact invalid?  That would be to claim the processing of certain paperwork is in itself sinful, against one's religion.  God becomes in that case a kind of Divine Bureaucrat.

It's astonishing the extent to which certain of those who claim to believe in God and follow his laws manage to demean God when they do so.

"I Will Destroy the Wisdom of the Wise"

St. Paul quotes these words in a letter to "the Corinthians"; those Christians residing in Corinth.  It appears the Corinthians were being unduly quarrelsome, or at least too quarrelsome for Paul, who modestly described himself as "called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God."  But I wonder just what was going on, in addition to quarrels, as in this letter Paul indulges in something of a tirade against wisdom, something not normally the subject of anger or disdain.

The words used by Paul which make up the title of this post are borrowed from the cheerful works of the prophet Isaiah, and are attributed to God.  God, it seems, wants to destroy the wisdom of the wise.  It's unclear why he would.  Paul adds to this, stating that God made foolish the wisdom of the world, apparently because the wise failed to understand Jesus was God before Jesus was born and that failure continues as Paul writes.

According to Paul, the wise did not come to God through wisdom, and God choose instead to save those who believe through the "foolishness" of his message.  Greeks, says Paul, seek wisdom, and think the preaching of "Christ crucified" is foolishness.  But the foolishness of God, writes Paul, is greater than the wisdom of the wise.

It's possible I suppose that Paul was being ironic in his use of "foolishness" here, though the Christians of that time and for centuries later were (and are now) not notably ironic in their proselytizing of, or apologies for, Christianity.  They were generally in grim earnest.  So, it's at least possible that Paul thought God's message, and Christ crucified, as establishing the existence of the true God or as signs of it, were ostensibly foolish.  This is a remarkable claim for a believer to make, or at least for a thinker to make.  Wisdom is inadequate to bring us to God--it's foolishness that does the trick, or at least that which is to all appearances foolish.

Given this curious use of language on Paul's part, I'm given to suspect that his supposed encounters or debates with pagan philosophers may not have gone as well for him as we've heard.  Perhaps he was unable to rebut claims that Christian beliefs were foolish, and so was compelled to take the position that if they are in fact foolish, that's the way God wants it.  Being God, the fact that he choose foolish means to bring the truth to fools, rather than the wise, has the result that fools and foolishness are greater than the wise and wisdom.

Regardless, though, such language and such claims regarding the wisdom of the world and the wise, when taken to be the words of God or God's agents, doing his bidding, can have serious consequences.  I think they did have serious consequences indeed when the religion which adopted such claims came to dominate the Roman Empire, as it became part of the doctrine of the state as well as the prevailing religion that the wisdom of the world and of the wise was nothing, the "foolishness" of God everything.

Perhaps it began with the repression of paganism and persecution of pagans during the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius I.  It's said that Justinian closed the last surviving pagan schools of philosophy some 200 years later.  Perhaps the "triumph" of Christianity wasn't entirely at fault, and that the view that the world is insignificant and truth to be found outside the world which we find in Plato prompted the Western world to turn away from life and the first efforts towards science we see among the ancient Greeks.

It's been maintained that what are called the Dark Ages weren't nearly as dark as they've been claimed to be, and I'm willing to believe that is the case.  But it seems beyond dispute that little in the way of new knowledge was acquired in Europe during those times, and that what passed as knowledge was primarily if not exclusively what was found in the Bible or in the works of the Church Fathers.  The standard of living fell far below that of the Roman Empire, even as to the great of the time.  And why not, the world in which we live being without value?   In a way, the Church if not God did indeed destroy the wisdom of the wise, if that wisdom related to how to live well and flourish in the world, and to the value of learning of the world and its wonders.

For a time, at least.  It's true that Europe gradually became aware of the wisdom of the ancient wise, and even valued it after a fashion.  The Church, which was at the time the only institution having any interest in books and writing, is to be thanked for the dissemination of the old knowledge it has so ruthlessly suppressed.  That began to take place, though, roughly 600 years after Justinian.  And the Church was grudging, even miserly, in its disclosure of what was lost.  It was another 200 years or so before the Renaissance was possible.

It's fun to speculate what would have happened had wisdom not been destroyed.  But we seem to live in a time when the pursuit of knowledge of the world is once more mistrusted and even under attack in some parts of the world.  Religion is once again involved in this, or at least religious fanaticism.  Let's hope historians of the future won't refer to a "New Dark Ages."

Why Monotheism?

I'm not a polytheist.  For what seems most of my life, however, I've heard and read that monotheism is in some sense superior to polytheism.  This is not unusual given my Catholic upbringing, I suppose (or perhaps not--more on that later).

Polytheism has been equated with paganism and idolatry.  It has been characterized as a religious belief system of a primitive and superstitious nature, replete with magic.  Well and good, perhaps, for the unsophisticated of ancient times and even in modern times in savage lands, until assorted missionaries brought with them the truth and began inviting the savages ever so gently to accept it.  Monotheism, though, is considered a sophisticated and far more profound system of religious belief.

Why is this the case, though?  Let us acknowledge as we must that Christianity, and especially Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, has certain problems in claiming to be monotheistic.  The first problem is the Trinity.  It may be a great and unfathomable mystery, but on its face, at least, it requires one to maintain that a single God consists of three persons, each of them God but all of them God, as well, and necessarily so.   It should surprise no one that such a conception of God is not easily accepted as monotheism.

Then there is the related problem of God having a son (or indeed being the Son, as well as the Father and the Holy Spirit).  The pagan gods had sons; plenty of them, in fact.  Those sons, however, were distinguishable from their divine parents, and so it may be claimed that Christ as Son is not similar to pagan sons of gods; but again it must be acknowledged that this distinction that is not a clear distinction (Son of God but also God) leaves one feeling rather uneasy.  Monotheism?  Well, so we have been taught.

Also, Christianity's assimilation of pagan gods in the form of saints, and the prevalence of statutes and icons in Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity, at least, makes one wonder about the extent to which Christianity represents monotheism.   Ancient Greco-Roman paganism accepted that there were minor gods subservient to Zeus or Jupiter, and the saints hold similar subservient status and have been said to perform miracles which duplicate or are similar to the works of minor gods worshipped in antiquity.  It almost seems Christianity is polytheistic in a sense.

The same cannot necessarily be said of the other Western monotheisms such as Islam and Judaism.  However, those religions seem to recognize angels as subservient powers sometimes involved in the interrelations between God and humanity.  And we have not even considered the devil and his host of demons who seem to figure in each of the major Western monotheistic beliefs.  Monotheism, it seems, still contemplates a rather crowded universe filled with supernatural powers, some good and some bad.  As understood in the major Western religions, it seems monotheism may not be as different from polytheism as we have believed.

There is a least one clear difference between ancient polytheism and institutionalized monotheism, though.  The major Western monotheistic religions each claim that the god they worship is the only true god, and that the worship of that only god is the only way to truth and salvation.  Ancient polytheism by its nature didn't require a belief in one god to the exclusion of any other. 

The monotheism we know has been exclusive and intolerant to varying degrees throughout its history, sometimes violently so.  The violence continues, and it's likely it always will as long as monotheists insist there is only one god, one truth.  The superiority of monotheism over polytheism is not clear at all in this respect, to me at least.  Worship of a god which requires intolerance of other religious view doesn't strike me as a religious belief, or a god, which can be called superior to much of anything.

But there have been kinds of monotheism which have not been exclusive and intolerant.  Those monotheisms relate to gods who are generally less personal and less lawgivers than those of the institutional religions.  Deists, pantheists may posit the existence of a single god, but not one who is so insistent on certain conduct and ceremony; a god that is less human, shall we say.

Is monotheism of this kind superior to polytheism?  Well, the gods of ancient polytheism were notoriously human in nature, and as it seems that such very human gods would not be expected to hold sway throughout the universe, an impersonal single god would appear to be a more reasonable hypothesis.  May their be an impersonal polytheism?  An interesting question.  I can't see how this would be an impossibility, though.  If it's not, why would monotheism of that kind be superior to polytheism of that kind?

Would Occam's Razor make the single god preferable in that case?  Perhaps.  But it's not clear to me that preferable in this sense is superior.  I doubt an atheist would be impressed by either monotheism of polytheism.

The Unknown God

According to the book known as "The Acts of the Apostles" St. Paul famously noted that the Athenians had an altar dedicated to "the unknown god" and expounded on it to their edification, using it as an example of pagan superstition or pagan piety, depending on just what translation is being read.  I personally find the notion more Roman than Greek.  The thorough, prudent Romans it seems to me would be more likely to see to it that an unknown, that is to say un-named, god be worshipped--just in case that worship should be appropriate or required for one reason or another.

The Roman religion as we know it, before it became Greek, was most practical, though the gods or spirits they were devoted to were often ill-defined.  This has sometimes been claimed to indicate that they lacked imagination, unlike the Greeks, whose gods they would assimilate.  The gods of the popular religion of ancient Greece certainly were fanciful, but if they're considered indicative of imagination I think that imagination is not particularly imaginative, as it consisted of extrapolation from human characteristics well known to any of us.

Though the gods were undefined in ancient Roman religion the means by which they were to be worshipped were detailed, even rigorous, and the rituals were to be carefully performed, without error.  This precision was owed to the divine.  If there was error, then they had no effect and were to be repeated.  The Emperor Julian is said to have repeated a particular rite when interrupted, and it is doubtful that at the time he did so the rite in question involved one of the ancient Roman divinities, as it would have taken place in the 4th century CE.  So the need to perform the rite properly seems to have survived if not the god or spirit itself. 

It seems that the more a conception of God is such that the characteristics ascribed to God are unknown, the more reasonable that conception becomes.  To the extent that God's characteristics are well known, it seems those characteristics are necessarily shared by humans.  For those of us who find it difficult to be impressed by a human-god, or feel that a human-god doesn't quite rise to the level of a God of a vast universe, this is unsatisfying.  This I think is why we find that what is called the "God of the philosophers" and the God most referred to by theologians, even Christian theologians, is quite abstract, and may even be said to be unknown, or unknowable, as a result.  In any event, a human-god is clearly a god of a kind which is limited, as it is one which is the special concern if not creation of our race on our tiny little planet in our tiny little solar system.

It's interesting that the more abstract our conception of God, the less likely it is that God will be a "jealous" god, or angry god, or demanding god.  It's difficult to ascribe to the God of the universe a keen interest in our sex lives, or in the manner in which we dress, or whether we act or do not act in certain ways on certain days.  Intolerant gods are little gods.  They're not great in any sense.

But little gods may be what we humans need until we have rid ourselves of our overwhelming selfishness.  As long as we look upon the universe as ours alone, as long as we think of ourselves as determining the universe, the divine will always be human.

The Etiology of the Christian Persecutions

Reading about the remarkable reign of the Emperor Diocletian prompts some speculation regarding the causes of the persecutions of the Christians during his principate and at other times during the Roman Empire.

The empire was normally fairly tolerant when it came to religious worship.  However, it disliked certain forms of worship.  Prior to the advent of Christianity, Rome banned some cults it considered weird and outlandish and so, of course, un-Roman.  For example, the thought of being, literally, washed in the blood of the bull (so to speak) was initially frowned on, and the tendency of certain male worshipers of the Great Mother to castrate themselves created some not unnatural distress.  Most of the banned religions managed to sneak back into the Roman world, however, and even came to be accepted in the sense that no effort was made by the emperors to stamp them out.

Christianity, though, was subject to persecution more than once.  It was certainly considered weird, at one point.  There were all sorts of stories regarding orgies and cannibalism being part of Christian worship, also incest (orgies themselves being, perhaps, not necessarily objectionable to the Roman mind).  But, there had to be more involved for certain of the emperors to react as they did.

And there was, of course.  Christians, or at least some of them, refused to pay homage to the emperor in the religious sense, generally by sacrifice.  It's thought that this in particular made them the subject of persecution.  This makes some sense, as Christians therefore would be considered to be against, if not a threat to, the emperor and thus the empire.

What I find interesting is why Christians would refuse to engage in this act, which probably required nothing in the nature of sincere belief or intent, and was simply a ritual gesture.  The answer that they refused because they were good, or wise, or honest, and the empire and/or emperor bad, and the emperor not divine, is generally given.  But I think there was more involved.

The Christians worshiped a God who became human.  The possibility that a human could be divine, therefore, would presumably not be objectionable to them.  However, their religion provided that only a particular human could be divine, and no other.  In this sense, the Christian view of a divine human differed from the Greek and Roman view which had been prevalent for some time.  The Olympian gods obviously had various human offspring.  The emperors had been granted divine status on their death for some time (some, like Caligula, claiming it during their lifetimes).  The divine status of the emperor was not objectionable to most pagans; they were not unused to the thought of humans having or asserting divinity in some sense.  Christians, however, at least those who were not Arians, believed that the one God had become human only once, in the form of Jesus.  And, as the Arians cam to learn, the orthodox Christians strongly objected to the idea of Jesus having a limited divinity--he was the same in substance with the Father, not merely similar.  The thought of someone being divine but not God was foreign to Christianity.

When Diocletian as part of his efforts to reform the empire sought to protect the emperor from assassination and deposition by formally taking on divine status, he struck at the heart of the Christian doctrine.  If only one human could be divine, the emperor could not be.  In this and in other things Christianity was (is) an exclusive religion.  There was only one God, all others therefore were false, and evil.  There could be only one human who was divine, and all other claimants therefore were false, and evil.  The idea of someone who was not Jesus claiming to be divine was inherently inconsistent with Christian doctrine.  It does not justify the persecutions, but it seems to be true that Christianity's own intolerance of other gods, and other religions, played a role in its persecution under the empire.  Certainly it explains its persecution of pagans, and Jews, and heretical Christians, after it subsumed the empire itself