Rage, God and the Other Hitchens

The "Other Hitchens" as some may have guessed is Peter Hitchens, the brother of the late and more notorious Christopher Hitchens.  Peter is, or was, a journalist by trade, and although I hesitate to say it having brothers of my own, is probably known to most of us as Christopher's brother.  This may be unjust; frankly, I don't know.

I recently read Peter Hitchens' book The Rage Against God subtitled, I think, "How atheism led me to faith" (I'm not sure, as no helpful if irritating colon appears between the "God" and the "How" on the cover of the book; which indeed wouldn't make much sense).

Peter like his brother writes quite well.  Unlike his brother, he believes in God.  He believes in Christianity in fact, which means to me--necessarily though in many cases without acknowledgement and even in denial--that he believes in a certain God, said to be the only one in being, though Father, Son and Holy Spirit).

The painting, or more properly altarpiece, shown above is The Last Judgment by Rogier van der Weyden, a work of the 15th century.  The book is a kind of account of Peter's youth, his lapse into atheism, and his return to the faith of his fathers, combined with as assault upon atheism and its adherents, including his brother, and the arguments they make against religion and particularly their attitude toward it and the religious.  If I understand him correctly, this painting made such a profound impression upon him that it was essential to his rejection of atheism and embracing of Christianity.

I should say first that I think that Christopher Hitchens, whose writings I mostly admire, Richard Dawkins and others of the "new atheists" are excessive and extreme in their criticism of religion and the religious.  So to a certain extent I sympathize with complaints made by Peter Hitchens in this book.  But for various reasons I think it fails in its effort to persuade (as I think he tries to do) that Christianity is necessary to civilization, morality, and most everything we fallen creatures do, think or say.

I think it's clear that Christianity, not religion in general or belief in a deity, is what is being defended and propounded.  This is because Christianity is the only religion he mentions except to the extent he refers to other religions (primarily Islam and Judaism) as examples of the the efforts made by atheist countries or societies such as the USSR and (Christian support of it notwithstanding) Nazi Germany.  This is part of his claim that such societies purposefully persecute religions because of a hatred of God and because religion is based on the belief that what is good and right exists outside of humanity and indeed outside of the universe.  Totalitarian governments do not want anyone to believe such things, according to him, because they persuade people to think there is something greater than the State, something by which the State is to be judged.

Also, Christianity in its Anglican form in the 1950s is what he looks back upon most fondly.  Its current version is not at all to his taste.  The first portion of the book is an indulgence in nostalgia, in fact.   The author longs for the days when England ruled the waves, and the sun never set on it empire.  It's unclear to me whether he believes that the acceptance of Christianity by England assured her success and dominion and its rejection caused its decline, but one does get that impression.

Those halcyon days having passed, and with them all glory, grandeur, poetry, courtesy, gallantry, honesty, the author perforce became an atheist.  There were a number of reasons for this decline, and Christianity played its part in it, by buying into liberal views on sex, on multiculturalism, on relativism, on egalitarianism, etc. 

Then came the day he saw the work of art pictured above.  He saw in the naked figures at the bottom of the work people who he says looked just like people he knew.  Their nakedness apparently helped foster this impression.  This was not because they were naked, but because they weren't wearing any of the peculiar clothes worn by people of that time.  As a result they could not be dismissed as different.  Most effective, though, was the fact that they were in terror of the Last Judgment, some even shown as vomiting in fear.  

It seems fear was a motivating factor in Peter Hitchens return to the faith.  Fear of judgment, presumably, and eternal damnation due to conduct contrary to the laws of God.  Fear certainly can motivate intensely.  However, being told to believe in God or else doesn't seem to persuade unless one is already in extremis as it were.  Also, it hardly seems to be a particularly Christian method of persuasion.  "Believe or burn in hell forever" isn't something one can picture Jesus saying, though some of his followers were apt to make this threat on his behalf.

If fear played a part in making him believe, I honor his honesty in admitting as much.  But he argues also that in the absence of belief in God, horrible things are done.  Witness the USSR and Nazi Germany.  This also seems one of his arguments in favor of having a religion.

It is at least something he thinks atheists like his late brother should acknowledge if they were fair, and gave religion its due.  Even cynics and likely non-believers like Napoleon (not his example, but mine) recognized it was necessary for the "common people" to believe in religion for the sake of order.  Thus his deal with the Catholic Church.

This may be an argument to the effect that religion has its uses, but again is not one which inspires belief in Christianity or any other institutional religion.  What is it that he believes inspired him, or should inspire others, to believe?

Here I confess I begin to lose him.  The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were horrible.  Were they horrible because they persecuted religion and sought to eliminate it, or for other reasons?  Maybe there was more than one cause.  If there was, can we claim as he seems to that it was their eradication of religion--Christianity in particular--that made them become evil?  Does it makes sense to contend that if they had tolerated religions--Christianity in particular--they wouldn't have been evil?  Or only evil sometimes, as Tsarist Russian was, as he seems to admit?

Whether he does so intentionally or unintentionally, he seems to maintain that Christianity alone can give us what we need to be moral and to have a just and true civilization.  A part of this is his assertion that it is necessary to have a standard of what is good and true beyond what humans can conceive in order for us to know what is good or true.  A part is his claim that only Christianity, with its injunction that we love one another, that can bring us close to God, to do his will.  The Christian demand that we love one another is superior to, for example, the Golden Rule.

He chides his brother for saying it is unrealistic to demand that we love one another as we love ourselves or are children.  He claims we show this love in dying to save others as in war, or to save a child in danger.  Well, certainly such selfless acts have been done, but despite the rhetoric employed these days not everyone is or can be heroic.  We are not heroes everyday.  Typically, we favor our children for example over those of our neighbors or total strangers.  It is unclear to me that we always love each other, and clear that we do not, and not having done so for ages suggests we aren't likely to  do so no matter how many gods command us to.

But in the end, and finally, I am again astonished by the arrogance of the Christian apologist.  For all the good points and respectable arguments he makes, other religions are hardly mentioned as guides to living life morally.  And no consideration is given to the fact that humansurvived, somehow, for ages before Jesus lived and even for a longer period before Christianity became what it is today, and in that time developed laws and theories of ethics and the good state, and good life, without belief in Christianity and even without belief in a personal, transcendent deity, that Christianity borrowed from assiduously.

I don't understand the rage against God or the religious felt by some atheists, but neither do I understand how such people as Peter Hitchens contend that the only choice to be made is to be atheist or to be Christian.

Invincible Irrationality

I'm not much of a fan of Nietzsche.  I've come to refer to him, perhaps unkindly, as Frantic Freddie.  I quote him nonetheless, and in doing so include thereby a picture of him wearing a mustache not quite as foreboding as the one we see him with in other photographs, and in caricatures, looking somewhat demented.

He has something of a point in this particular quote, at least.  I ask myself how the irrationality of a thing would be an argument against its existence, I confess, but it can be maintained easily enough that it is a condition of ours, at least.  Not necessarily what we lawyers like to call a condition precedent, perhaps, but a condition at least to the extent a characteristic can be one.

It was Aristotle I believe who wrote that we humans are rational animals, meaning that we are capable of reason.  The Stoics thought that capacity was what made us, in small part at least,  participants in the divine intelligence of the universe.  Reason was long honored with the highest place in the history of human thought, and then replaced (or supplanted) by faith when reason was thought to be inadequate, only to reappear during the Renaissance and then explode during the Enlightenment.  Since then it has been dying a slow death; slow, because the achievements of the methods of science cannot be denied entirely, but dying nonetheless because it seems not to satisfy what we want, because what we want now is to be irrational.

That seems obvious enough given the fact that apparently thousands if not millions of people not merely accept that the world is flat (according to CNN) but wish others to do so as well.  This belief requires that a good deal of what seems obvious be ignored or explained away, and this is done with fascinating ease by the conviction that the government or someone or other having great power and influence wants us to believe otherwise and so fake a landing on the moon, the apparent curvature of the Earth, and much, much more.  Thus do we cycle back into ignorance.

There is currently an obsession with conspiracy.  To an extent this is understandable, as there can be little question that our politics is corrupt as are our politicians.  We've grown accustomed to deceit and combinations entered into to benefit the interests of a small and perhaps shrinking group of people who care about nothing but themselves, ultimately.  We see this every day.  We see it most clearly in the impeachment hearings, courtesy of someone who is intent on self-gratification and his minions.  But we see the appeal of the irrational in the response to the hearings as well.  It is assumed that others share the same proclivity for self-gratification and so do what they do to advance their own interests by thwarting efforts by others to do so.  There is a presumption of selfishness that must be overcome, but, curiously, it cannot be rebutted because selfishness is the rule, the standard by which all is judged.

It isn't rational for Republicans, for example, to not merely protect but encourage an executive who seeks merely to satisfy his own concerns.  A Democrat may soon be in the same place, and do the same things, and Republicans will then be faced with the same arguments supporting such conduct they used to support it when it benefited them.  It's hard to believe any rational person would be so short sighted.

But it isn't just in our politics that we see this invocation of the irrational, but everywhere.  The more that science, or statistics, or reason, or the learned recommend certain actions or support certain conclusions, the more those actions and conclusions are thought to be fake, or deceitful, or to result from some wrongful motive.  Thus the return of the flat earth theory.

When the inclination is to disbelieve what is credible and supported by the best available evidence, there is a serious problem.  It's a problem which will become increasingly significant as the attitude is encouraged and fostered, as is being done now.  Soon enough the irrational will become invincible, impervious to reason, impervious to argument, impervious perhaps to fate itself.  We'll slide into chaos and self-destruct, unthinking.

Stoicism and Religion II

In the last post, I concluded that Stoicism isn't a religion, but could be religious, at least in a sense.  But is that truly the case?

I think that strictly speaking it can be if we use "religious" according to its dictionary definition as set forth in Merriam-Webster online.  A Stoic certainly can be devoted to a deity or underlying reality (the vague "Divine Fire" or "Divine Reason").  We can and do say that someone who believes in God is religious.  But the "God" commonly referred to when we say that word isn't an immanent "God" of the kind we find referred to by the ancient Stoics or other pantheists, nor is it the "god of the philosophers" we see referred to often enough even by those ostensibly devoted to institutional religions.

Who and why the reference is made is interesting, however, and indicates that the meaning of "God" is dependent on that who and that why.  Christian apologists, theologians and philosophers throughout history have managed to maintain that the "god of the philosophers" or something very much like that "god" is, in fact, the Christian God.  When they do that I think they necessarily must disregard Jesus as he is depicted in the Gospels, though (despite the Gospel of John's use of the word "logos" which must then, perforce, be made flesh and walk among us--something it's rather hard to imagine logos doing).  Nor is it possible to claim that the Christian God as he is actually worshiped in Christian churches is the god of the philosophers, if the ceremony of worship is considered.

And so I wonder whether it is entirely honest, if it is disingenuous in other words, to claim that Jesus is the god of the philosophers as is attempted from time to time.   Maybe those who do that are like some of the ancient philosophers who claimed that people should engage in the traditional worship of the gods despite the fact that the myths pertaining to them were silly at best.

If worship as ceremony, or ritual, is required for one to be religious, however, it would seem that a Stoic would not be religious.  Western history would seem to establish that worship is communal, something that groups of believers participated in generally at regular times and in a particular manner.  That was the case as far as I'm aware in pre-Christian and Christian times.  The ancient mysteries involved ceremony and invocation in group settings; sometimes large groups as in the case of the Eleusinian mysteries, sometimes in very small groups (the temples or caves in which devotees of Mithras would meet suggest 20 to 50 men would participate in worship).  Pagan worship involved parades and feasting and rituals of various kinds.  Christian worship certainly is communal, though one hears of hermits and folk who lived on pillars and other ascetic extremes, but these are rarities, and meant to be.

I find it hard to picture Stoics gathering for any similar purpose.  For that matter, I find it hard to imagine what they would do.  I personally am adverse to religious gatherings and ceremonies of any kind, though I've noted before my sentimental fondness for the old Catholic ritual.  This is one of the reasons I avoid not only Catholic but other Christian, and even Unitarian gatherings (from what I hear, Unitarians are similar to Christian church gatherings, with singing and reading from I'm not sure who--perhaps the New England Transcendentalists).  The only current non-pagan form of worship I can think of that might be tolerable would be Quaker, where it seems nothing is required beyond silent contemplation unless someone gets the urge to testify--which I like to think would be infrequent.  As for the so-called modern pagans, I suspect that Wiccans, Druids etc. do whatever they do in groups and that some sort of ceremony and liturgy is involved.

Are there any forms of worship engaged in by Stoics, or pantheists, or panentheists?  If so I don't know.  And this makes me wonder whether worship of such a kind can be, and also wonder whether it is possible for them to be considered religious.

Stoicism and Religion

I find myself wondering, now and then, whether Stoicism can be considered a religion, and for that matter whether it should be considered religious.  The answers I encounter when I read those who have addressed the question--those I've become aware of, I should say--are generally to the effect that it can be religious, but is not a religion.

This makes sense if "religion" is defined as a an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies and worship of a superhuman being or beings, i.e. something in the nature of the institutionalized religions with which we're familiar, and "religious" as relating to a devotion to an ultimate reality or deity (I take these definitions, roughly, from Merriam-Webster online).  Despite its growing popularity, Stoicism as far as I know has not become institutionalized or organized to such an extent, and certainly ancient Stoicism, at least, accepted and was devoted to an ultimate reality or deity, that being the Divine Reason.  That deity may even have been worshiped in a sense.  I think of the Hymn of Cleanthes.

In fact, some ancient Stoics seem even to have thought of the deity as personal, as having certain human characteristics and being concerned with humans as individuals.  One sees this tendency sometimes in Epictetus and Seneca.  The early Christian Fathers were fond of Seneca, and could only be so if they saw in his writings some reference to a personal God--though one must be careful in coming to such a conclusion, as the early Christians, like later Christians, would assimilate pagan philosophy in various ways when it suited their purpose to do so.

It seems clear enough that Stoicism need not be a religion, nor need it be religious.  Indeed, it may not even be a philosophy, in the ancient sense of wisdom and choosing the way in which to live.  We know that the wisdom of Stoicism is fundamental to modern psychological therapy such as CBT.

Well and good.  But I confess to feeling a bit disturbed when I see Stoicism used by, and associated with, the worlds of business and the military.  I've no doubt that Stoic techniques can have their uses in those worlds, but the great Stoics of the past were not interested in Stoicism as a path by which success in business could be obtained, or as useful in the development of good soldiers.  I think it's quite clear that the Stoics would consider success in business and in war as being the result of an undue concern with matters and things outside our control, regarding which we should be indifferent at most.

Whether it is or is not necessarily a religion or religious, should it be one or the other?  I think we humans have had and have now more than enough in the way of organized religions.  It isn't clear to me that they've done us much good, overall, and it is clear to me that they've been responsible for a great deal of harm.  Once organized as a religion, I think even Stoicism would lose much of what makes it wise and beneficial.

I do think it should be religious, though, for reasons I hope to explain.  This may be nothing more than an indication of personal preference or desire.

Let me say, first, that I use "religious" here much as it is defined by Merriam-Webster as noted above.  If Stoicism posits the existence of a Divine Reason that is the intelligence or generative influence infusing the universe, and if this spirit is immanent in nature, then I think a "religious" feeling results.  How is it possible to contemplate the vastness of the universe and all it consists of with anything but a sense of awe, and with reverence?  And if acting in accordance with Nature consists of being in accord with the universe, it would seem that by devoting ourselves to Nature is a devotion to the divine that's immanent in the universe.

It may be that in thinking or feeling this way I'm in a minority, because I haven't been able to find any author who sees this as essential to Stoicism, or deals with the religious aspects of Stoicism to any significant extent.  I understand Ricardo Salles addresses this somewhat in his work, but his book on it is so expensive I've haven't had much of an inclination to buy it.

One sees the Stoics referred to as pantheists, or the Stoic view of the universe as panentheistic, but these reference are made in passing, and left unexplored, as if there is nothing more to be said.  For that matter, one sees "modern paganism" called pantheistic, even by its adherents, but those who think of themselves as Wiccan, or Druids or Heathens seem ignorant of Stoicism and ancient philosophy generally.

Surely there's a religious kind of Stoicism in evidence somewhere?  Prepare ye the way of the Divine Reason!

O Tempora, O Mores! Redux--Politics.

Well, there it is.  Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution of God's favorite country, the United States of America. And, mirabile dictu, this not altogether clear, but succinct, language of that remarkable document comes to the fore once again in relation to someone holding the office of president of this divinely favored land.

I say it is a wonder that it has done so given the especially degraded nature of our politics and the craven nature of our politicians.  Even for an "impeachment inquiry" to commence is remarkable at this stage.  I suppose nobody could have expected someone even as self-regarding as the president would so blatantly, and stupidly, ignore the implications of the Mueller report and seek the support of a foreign government in an election in such a blithe manner.  But ignore it he did and so he has given heart to those who think his presence in the oval office a calamity, and caused alarm among his venal and submissive supporters.

And so begins a new phase of the farce.  Not even Aristophanes could have imagined this administration, and the advent of a diva president.  Still, narcissism, ignorance and other attributes so spectacularly on display likely are not treason, bribery, or "high crimes and misdemeanors" and so it would be unreasonable to expect that the president will be impeached merely for being himself.  What, then do they mean?

Treason and bribery are somewhat known; at least enough for most to dimly perceive when they seem to be taking place (although our Supreme Court has managed to conclude that bribery, at least when politicians and those who seek to influence them are involved,must be especially blatant).  But what in God's name are "high crimes and misdemeanors?"  Very few presidents have been impeached, but it seems that perjury is one of those things where they are concerned.  But other civil officers of the U.S. have been impeached (mostly federal judges) and what record there is suggests that high crimes and misdemeanors need not be crimes or misdemeanors, technically speaking, and may include abuse of office or malfeasance which do not necessarily amount to criminal conduct.

So it won't be necessary that the president be found by the House of Representatives to have committed a crime, presumably.  Yet it seems that not only the president's lackies--there is no other word which may be used as he cannot tolerate anyone around him who isn't servile--but also his enemies think that a serious crime must be established.  How else explain the view that an American  president seeking the assistance of foreign governments to harm Americans does nothing wrong?

It will be in any case be necessary that there be a trial by the Senate, and the Senators, or at least a majority of them, can be counted on to do only what is useful to them. As it seems that a majority of Senators are content to let the president do anything at all, short (perhaps) of murder or stealing money from them or their supporters, it's likely that if he is impeached by the House he will be acquitted, if that's the word, by the Senate.

Still, it promises to be quite a show, even though the actors are mostly dull, ponderous, sanctimonious, self-righteous, posturing blowhards incapable of wit.  We would be better served if members of the British Parliament were involved--they at least know how to speak and would not falter when called upon to utter long, complicated words as may be expected in such proceedings, and even to think on their feet.  Absent a teleprompter and a team of writers, it's anybody's guess what our politicians will blurt out at any given moment.

That it has come to this at last may, just may, indicate that there remains some self-respect and dignity in our politics and politicians, and some few, at least, who will when prompted behave as if they have principles and are unwilling to sanction the grosser efforts of the president and his supporters to feather their own nests.

There are disturbing times, when there is no honor even among thieves, and even less among those who purport to govern us.