Religion and Criticism

[Ecurb]

Algernon Swinburne once wrote (from memory), “I cannot imagine what should tempt a man to criticism except the pleasure of praising.” Why bother trashing bad art, if not for the hope that the art will be good?

Swinburne did trash George Eliot’s characters as “rag dolls”, but more memorable is his ecstatic plea to Walt Whitman:

“Send but over a song to us,
Heart of all hearts that are free.”

Why (my readers, if there are any, may wonder) do I mention this in a thread about religion? In the Christian ethos, praise is noble, even sacred. The angels (with a few exceptions) delight in praising God.

Praise is not easy. The God of the Bible (or Jesus Himself) sometimes seem unworthy of praise, as the quote-mining of some atheists on these very pages suggest. Yet the very essence of Christianity is that God is not only worthy of praise and adulation, but that anyone with proper sensibilities will delight in praising God, as a hungry man delights in honey.

In the Old Testament, the responsibility of us humans to worship God sometimes seems based on His power. We worship Him because He is the King.

This doesn’t seem particularly honorable. The Norse, for example, worship and admire the Gods despite the fact that they are not the Kings – they are doomed to lose to the Giants in the end. This seems a manly creed.

Nonetheless, any sophisticated reading of the Bible cannot simply despise God for tormenting Job, or killing Firstborn Egyptians, or cursing a fig tree. Such an approach looks at the details of the story, and ignores the essence of it. The reader is (it seems to me, whether or not the reader is Christian) required to try to reconcile these seemingly contradictory things – the essential Goodness of God, and the seeming evil (as judged by human standards) He commits.

Christian apologists recognize this, and have written ream after ream of explanations. Some atheists (however) simply look at (or seek out) seemingly wicked behavior on the part of God, and suggest this invalidates the whole story. I suppose that’s reasonable, or would be if the story weren’t so widely accepted as one of the greatest and most influential ever told. Such an approach constitutes throwing out the baby with the bath water. Religion INVOLVES contradictions – death equals birth; humility leads to glory; unjustified belief leads to truth, the last shall be first. The story is a difficult one: God is omnibenevolent, but he floods the world. What’s that all about? Answering that question by saying, “God can’t be benevolent and flood the world” is to ignore the text.

One principle of criticism is that a book should not be criticized for failing to be a different book. The reader of the Noah story is required by the text to seek to reconcile the seeming contradictions. Ignoring one part of the text (the Goodness of God) while honing in on another (the flooding of the world) is an abrogation of responsibility on the part of the reader.

[HCabret]

Yes, but it only takes one bad to ruin a million goods. Hitler built the autobahn, introduced the world to Volkswagen, lead Germany out of its worst economic crisis ever, oversaw a cultural apogee for German arts and athletics, and reunified a Balkanized German-speaking nation which had been broken by losses in WW1, ect.

Yes, god is good, but the mass murder will always be there regardless.

[Ecurb]

Yes, but it only takes one bad to ruin a million goods. Hitler built the autobahn, introduced the world to Volkswagen, lead Germany out of its worst economic crisis ever, oversaw a cultural apogee for German arts and athletics, and reunified a Balkanized German-speaking nation which had been broken by losses in WW1, ect.

Yes, god is good, but the mass murder will always be there regardless.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China (or anything I wrote in my post)?

[Frostball]

I actually don't think you have to quote mine, or purposely ignore good while focusing on the negative, in order to see god as a bizarre and evil character. God consistently does bizarre and evil things throughout the bible, starting right from the beginning.

The Adam and Eve story is problematic for a lot of reasons. First, there's the idea of punishing all mankind for the sins of the two progenitors. Then, there's the problem of punishing adam and eve for eating the tree of knowledge of good and evil, before they would have had knowledge of good and evil in the first place. There's the fact that god, being omniscient or at least much smarter and knowledgeable than the average human, must have known they would eat the tree from the beginning. Punishing them for something he knew would happen? There is also the fact that the serpent actually tells the truth, while god lies about the tree. Adam and Eve didn't die, they just became a little bit more like god, that is, they knew good and evil.

Then soon after we have cain killing abel. Another thing god must have seen coming. Then on to Noah's arc, where god decides he didn't do a good enough job the first time, so he'll just flush it all away and kill everybody but one family and a bunch of animals to start over again. Soon after that the tower of babel makes god feel threatened, apparently, so he messes that up. After that is Abram, where we have the Abram and Isaac episode. Not only that, the two Abraham Wife-sister narratives. The first one in which, abraham says his wife is his sister because she's so beautiful and he fears they will kill him to take her, and Pharaoh ends up nabbing her anyway and putting her in his harem. God sends a plague to punish him, because that's the best god could come up with apparently. He must have thought about it a bit more, because the same story happens again basically except between Abraham, Sarah, and Abimelech, but this time god just sends him a dream explaining.

It doesn't end here. Later there's the whole episode of Moses and the plagues, including the killing of first born children. Still later you have Joshua storming across the land with their army, killing every man woman and child and taking all the gold and silver and putting it into the Lord's treasury.

Basically, again, I disagree that it requires one to purposely try to see the bible as evil, or to quote mine, in order to see god as a pretty evil fellow. In fact, I think the reason people don't see god this way is because they go into it with the assumption that whatever god does must be good, so when they read these things they just think that although they can't understand why god would do something, he must be doing the right thing, in the end. I actually think that anybody who goes into reading the bible without any presuppositions like this, but analyzes god as any other character like Voldemort or Heathcliff, one will come out seeing god as a bizarre, evil, capricious, juvenile, etc., character.

As far as sophisticated readings of the bible, I don't think that would really concern itself with a value judgement like good and evil with the god character. I think sophisticated readings of the bible see it as many documents that are the product of many different peoples, cultures, times, and even different religions within the same religious tradition. It's no wonder god seems barbaric to us in these modern times, they were created by people with a very different and ancient point of view. It's also no wonder that god appears completely different in different texts, from an anthropomorphic god who walks in a garden, to the all powerful, all knowing, all present god without physical form. These different god ideas came from vastly different contexts and religions within the same religious tradition.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this matter.

[HCabret]

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China (or anything I wrote in my post)?

What?

[YesNo]

One principle of criticism is that a book should not be criticized for failing to be a different book. The reader of the Noah story is required by the text to seek to reconcile the seeming contradictions. Ignoring one part of the text (the Goodness of God) while honing in on another (the flooding of the world) is an abrogation of responsibility on the part of the reader.

One can look at all these stories as myths of consciousness. I agree that the stories don't always make sense, but they assume the existence of forms of consciousness that we are able to relate to in some way.

Atheists, in rejecting all these forms of consciousness, have constructed complementary myths of non-consciousness. These myths are justified through beliefs that we are determined by wholly non-conscious forces.

Which myths hold up better today?

In the early 20th century the myths of non-consciousness in physics were undermined by quantum physics. Today in the 21st century the myths of non-consciousness in biology are being undermined by challenges to neo-Darwinism's reliance exclusively on the non-conscious, though inconsistently selfish, gene.

I agree with Thomas Nagel that there isn't any way out of these atheistic myths of non-consciousness without modifying them to include something like panpsychism, but that would introduce consciousness back into atheist mythology. You could consider that the complementary problem that theists have with Noah.

So, which myths hold up better today? Which myths are we going to bet our lives on?

[Frostball]

One can look at all these stories as myths of consciousness. I agree that the stories don't always make sense, but they assume the existence of forms of consciousness that we are able to relate to in some way.

Atheists, in rejecting all these forms of consciousness, have constructed complementary myths of non-consciousness. These myths are justified through beliefs that we are determined by wholly non-conscious forces.

Which myths hold up better today?

In the early 20th century the myths of non-consciousness in physics were undermined by quantum physics. Today in the 21st century the myths of non-consciousness in biology are being undermined by challenges to neo-Darwinism's reliance exclusively on the non-conscious, though inconsistently selfish, gene.

I agree with Thomas Nagel that there isn't any way out of these atheistic myths of non-consciousness without modifying them to include something like panpsychism, but that would introduce consciousness back into atheist mythology. You could consider that the complementary problem that theists have with Noah.

So, which myths hold up better today? Which myths are we going to bet our lives on?

Can you explain what you mean by myths of consciousness and myths of non-consciousness?

[YesNo]

Can you explain what you mean by myths of consciousness and myths of non-consciousness?

The myths of consciousness are those that claim reality is fundamentally conscious. The myths provide stories of various deities or other conscious realities relating to us and to some extent determining our fate.

The myths of non-consciousness would claim that we are determined by non-conscious reality. Those myths involve belief in billiard-ball-like-particle or selfish-gene determinism.

[Ecurb]

A couple of points: first, part of my point in my initial post was to suggest that some atheists seem unable to appreciate Bible stories because they are unable to suspend disbelief. I suppose this makes sense for former Fundamentalists, who have converted to atheism, but it seems silly for sophisticated atheists who enjoy other forms of literature which regularly require the suspension of disbelief. If we ARE to suspend disbelief, we can see the seeming contradictions in the Bible as intriguing paradoxes for which strange (and possibly enlightening) answers can be discovered. Since paradox is the essence of myth (acc. to Levi-
Strauss, for example) this inability to suspend disblief limits such atheists' ability to read and appreciate the stories.

Look at Mal4mac's take on "The Goodly Fere", Ezra Pound's brilliant ballad I posted in the other thread: "The poem by Pound scans well but there are problems with it!" The problem is, evidently, historical. Mal can't enjoy Pound's poem because it differs slightly from the gospel versions of the crucifixion. Huh? I can see a Fundamentalist objecting on those grounds. But why would an atheist object? (Maybe I'm wrong and Mal was simply pointing out the differences, rather than allowing them to ruin the poem for him. But the tenor of all of his posts -- and he is well-read and normally has good literary taste -- makes me think otherwise.)

Regarding YesNo's theory about myths of consciousness vs. myths of non-consciousness I have my own, anthropologically oriented approach. I'm no expert on quantum physics. However, human consciousness clearly does not arise solely from non-conscious causes. Man makes himself. Our conscious lives are inextricably intertwined with culture, which we have created ourselves. Our conscious lives are shaped by language, man-made non-linguistic symbols, and by ways of looking at the world and at ourselves that are culturally constituted. So to think that human consciousness is shaped ONLY by non-conscious chemical and physical reactions is clearly naive, or, at least, reductionist to the point of having little explanatory value. We humans have created our own consciousness, to a large extent.

IN another sense, God is a metaphor for both consciousness and culture.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light."

Without consciousness, the earth is (for all practical human purposes) "without form and void". It is our consciousness that casts light upon the void, and our consciousness is shaped by BOTH genetics and culture. If God is a metaphor for culture, He has indeed shed light upon the darkness.

[YesNo]

However, human consciousness clearly does not arise solely from non-conscious causes. Man makes himself. Our conscious lives are inextricably intertwined with culture, which we have created ourselves. Our conscious lives are shaped by language, man-made non-linguistic symbols, and by ways of looking at the world and at ourselves that are culturally constituted. So to think that human consciousness is shaped ONLY by non-conscious chemical and physical reactions is clearly naive, or, at least, reductionist to the point of having little explanatory value. We humans have created our own consciousness, to a large extent.

IN another sense, God is a metaphor for both consciousness and culture.

Without consciousness, the earth is (for all practical human purposes) "without form and void". It is our consciousness that casts light upon the void, and our consciousness is shaped by BOTH genetics and culture. If God is a metaphor for culture, He has indeed shed light upon the darkness.

I agree that human consciousness does not arise solely from non-conscious causes. But that would mean there are conscious causes. It may also mean that physics is not "causally closed".

I also agree that reductionism has little explanatory value. It doesn't explain consciousness and I don't think it even explains the different forms things take. I'm getting this idea from Rupert Seldrake's Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation.

Nagel's panpsychism would put consciousness of some sort throughout the entire universe. It would all be part of nature. I think his motivation is to preserve reductionism by adding a psyche to all of reality. With something like that one would not need the term "supernatural" any more. He thinks atheism can work with this, but I don't know.

[Iain Sparrow]

IN another sense, God is a metaphor for both consciousness and culture.

Without consciousness, the earth is (for all practical human purposes) "without form and void". It is our consciousness that casts light upon the void, and our consciousness is shaped by BOTH genetics and culture. If God is a metaphor for culture, He has indeed shed light upon the darkness.

That is without a doubt, poetic nonsense.
Human consciousness is no more than a subjective perspective of a single reality in time, a product of evolution. There's nothing magical or supernatural about it. Our consciousness lives within a narrow bandwidth of our senses, that is all. And by my reckoning, pretty damn amazing without mucking it up with God metaphors.:)

[YesNo]

I see consciousness as too amazing to not muck it up with God, or some transcendent form of consciousness. It seems to be more fundamental than matter especially with quantum physics not finding any material substance underlying matter other than probability waves.

[Ecurb]

That is without a doubt, poetic nonsense.
Human consciousness is no more than a subjective perspective of a single reality in time, a product of evolution. There's nothing magical or supernatural about it. Our consciousness lives within a narrow bandwidth of our senses, that is all. And by my reckoning, pretty damn amazing without mucking it up with God metaphors.:)

Consciousness may be a product of evolution, but there is a sense in which evolution is "supernatural" (or meta-biological at any rate). Darwinian evolution is based on genetics, reproduction and the descendent-leaving success. Cultural evolution is also based on descendent-leaving success (since culture is generally passed from parent to child), but other factors are also involved. Like biological evolution, it has a dramatic impact on consciousness. Most obviously, our conscious thoughts are governed (partially, at least) by language -- we think in terms of words. Despite Chomsky, language is a cultural creation, not a biological one. So our culture (which is super-biological, if not supernatural) influences the nature of our consciousness.

I"m sorry if my interest in God's metaphoric value violates some atheist orthodoxy, or represents mere "poetic nonsense". However, this is a board on which we sometimes try to discuss literature, and discussing the symbolic and metaphoric significance of God seems a reasonable endeavor, however poorly (or well) I have done it.

There is, by the way, a sense in which metaphors are "supernatural", describing something in an unnatural (but strangely meaningful) manner, by comparing it to a different thing. There is also a sense in which poetry is "magical". It hardly seems like I should have to explain this on a discussion board devoted to literature.