Update: Since writing this blog entry, I have determined that the comment writer, “404,” was posting from Slovakia. Obviously this explains the broken English. So I retract those portions of the following where I make fun of his language errors. But I stand by the rest of it.
I got this comment yesterday on the Vultures for Jesus post, by someone calling himself 404:
Have you ever heard about the fact to respect the way the people think? That doesn’t mean that you’ve to agree. I’m christian, and to be honest you don’t know too much about it. If you haven ‘t got faith, doesn’t mean that who believe in something is a moron. Do not judge someone if you don’t want to be judged. If I’m a salesman or worse, what sort of people are you? I could be rude now as all of you have been. That is too easy for me… next time you start to comment on something count till 10, then start to think about if what you’re going to write is not going to be offensive… As someone once said, sometimes ignorance is bless!
Oh man, where do I start with this clown?
Let’s start at the end: “Sometimes ignorance is bless!” 404, you are righter than you know. “Bless” and “ignorance” frequently appear together, as in your comment.
Now let’s move to the beginning. “Have you ever heard about the fact to respect the way the people think?” Well, no, I haven’t heard about that fact, probably because I can’t quite be sure what that question even means. I stretch it and pull it and push it, but I can’t quite twist it into anything coherent. I’m guessing – and this is just taking a flyer – that what 404 means here is that all opinions are entitled to respect. Which is complete bullshit, of course, but not at all uncommon coming from the religious. Religion is accustomed to demanding (and receiving) immunity from criticism; “respect all faiths” is code for tacitly agreeing to give religion in general a pass on explaining or justifying itself. This results in people who don’t even know how to form a coherent sentence, let alone a convincing argument, but nonetheless are sure their opinions have just as much validity as those who have actually thought their positions through. Exhibit A is our new friend 404, who is perfectly willing to parade his muddled ideas and tortured syntax here and demand it be considered equal to actual thinking.
“I’m christian, and to be honest you don’t know too much about it.” Friend, I know a great deal about it, probably more than you. Would you care to try me? It’s one of the great ironies of living in America that atheists are usually more aware of christianity than christians are. Why? Because it’s a christian culture, and christians can live their whole lives in it without their beliefs being seriously challenged; whereas an atheist is always acutely conscious of the christian culture all around and is regularly challenged to explain himself.
“If you haven’t got faith, doesn’t mean that who believe in something is a moron.” No, you’re right; my lack of faith doesn’t mean you’re a moron. I think you’re a moron for other, much more visible reasons, ranging from “you believe in silly superstitions that five minutes’ hard thinking should dispel” to “you can’t even write a clear sentence.”
“Do not judge someone if you don’t want to be judged.” Well, at least this one’s an actual sentence. But it also sums up the problem with 404’s mindset. He assumes that because he does not want to be judged (and for good reason, it appears), no one else wants to be judged either. But I do want to be judged. Specifically, I want people to read what I write and judge its value. If I am full of shit, I want people to point that out and show where I have gone wrong. I want my ideas to stand on their merits, not ride on some bullshit unearned “respect.” I wouldn’t post on the internet if I were afraid of being judged.
404’s point here, such as it is, seems to be that I – well, we – shouldn’t criticize religion because it offends people. Well, tough. I don’t respect your religion, I don’t think much of your argument, and I don’t care if you’re offended. In fact, I’m glad you’re offended, because if you recognize yourself in some category I mocked, then the criticism was aimed directly at you – and I know it’s hit its target.
While the occasional pope has been known to string together two or three cogent sentences, and the Protestant scholars of the Reformation could also write now and again, most Christian defenders are utterly hopelessly incoherent. Between psychobabble, poor diction, failure to grasp grammar, and no comprehension whatever of the principles of logic, even the best-prepared religious advocate is entering the field of apologetics unarmed. So it’s no wonder that 404 puts forth such a pathetic showing.
Sadly, your rebuttal will not set him straight. As dimwitted as he must be, he won’t be able to recognize himself in your counter-arguments, and he won’t understand the futility of his position.
By the way, isn’t the irony of the moniker ’404′ just delicious?
It surely is. Page not found; nothing there. Error.
You’re being most unfair, Mr. Fnortner. Through the ages there have been many fine writers and subtle thinkers among Christian apologists. Was Augustine a hack writer? Luther? Please. Among more contemporary theologians you might read Hans Urs Von Balthasar or Reinholdt Niebuhr. Holding 404 as typical is a lame straw man argument which can only convince the ignorant. You could draw the same conclusions about atheists by reading some of the incoherent and unintelligible posts in online atheist forums where smug, unreflective stupidity is common coin.
The thing that most amuses me (or dismays me) about 404′s comment is that he thinks “ignorance is bliss” is intended as an endorsement of ignorance.
Urban: I think you and Fnortner both have points. 404 may not be typical of scholarly religious writing, but he certainly is typical of the worst kind of lay apologetic – incoherent, proudly ignorant, radiating the unearned arrogance of the “default christian” who has never tested his beliefs because in America you don’t have to. It’s christian theology reduced to the TV “debate” level, where people shout their unsupported opinions and unconnected sound bites at each other for 90 seconds and the “winner” is whoever was most telegenic while doing it. 404 clearly doesn’t have much experience at making persuasive arguments in the old school sense, but what he posted was very much in line with how “debate” is conducted now.
I think Fnortner is exaggerating for effect (and he will surely correct me if I’m wrong). I took him to mean that coherent arguments for religion have always been rare, and are getting rarer, compared to the endless waves of drivel offered in support of it.
Yes, dwasifar is correct about the hyperbole. And the dead need no defending.
I divide religious writing into two categories: theories in defense or support of the existence of a god, and morality and philosophy of life. The former always collapses on some point of insanity, no matter how eloquent, while the latter is often quite compelling, especially when well thought out. I like the teachings of Jesus, whoever he is, and like to worry my son-in-law whenever he and his church seem to be walking a path significantly different from that marked out by his savior. It annoys him no end when, for example, I ask him to explain again how his prince of peace actually supports the wars and killing in the Middle East.
I’m in general agreement with both you and Fnortner, as you know Dwasifar, but I also think that far too much atheist invective relies on straw men. If you want a fight don’t pick on the skinny kid with no friends. Take on the big boys. Go after Hans Kung. It might not be as easy as you think to take guys like that down a notch. You might even find yourself agreeing with the author about more than you are comfortable with.
I know of no easy and accurate way of assaying whether or not coherent theology is getting rarer, but I’m suspicious of your assertion that it is. Popular theology is to theology as popular music is to music. I’d be amazed if it is representative. It would be uniquely so if it were. We live in a shallow age. Most of the interesting things are happening at the margins and most people are blissfully unaware of them. I’ll bet that’s true of theology too.
I don’t follow such things very closely, but I have occasionally read or heard some impressive grapplings with post structuralist reality, (turtles all the way down), from religious people. Logical Scientismists, if I may, might do well to follow that example instead of wallowing in denial, its own version of “ignorance is bless”.
“I like the teachings of Jesus, whoever he is, and like to worry my son-in-law whenever he and his church seem to be walking a path significantly different from that marked out by his savior.”
Good for you, Mr. Fnortner. I’ve been known to use that move too, but it only works by cherry picking your citations every bit as much as the pastor of your interlocutor does. I’m not at all sure I like this Jesus fellow. I’m much more at ease with The Buddha or Epictetus as practical ethical philosophers.
As he often did, Gandhi nailed it. If Christianity were more about the Sermon on the Mount and less about Armageddon he could have been a Christian, but he had read the whole book without someone telling him what it meant, and he had been observing Christianity in motion his whole life.
Coherent anything is getting rarer, and it’s largely because of blogs and forums, like this one. It used to be that the price of entry to publishing was prohibitively high, having the effect of locking out all but the most determined cranks. Remember the adage that freedom of the press is available to anyone who owns one? Now anyone can. Blog comments and forum posts are like old-school letters to the editor of a newspaper, except that there’s no editor deciding what gets published; almost all of it does. In the old world, letters like 404′s would not have made it into print, either because they’d bring down the image of the paper, or just to compassionately protect the writer from embarrassing himself. In the new world, I leave dissenting posts up out of a sense of fairness even when I’m not mocking them.
Surely you’ve heard the widespread complaints about the flood of nonsense from the blogosphere; it parallels the flood of nonsense from the mainstream media, which are always under pressure to produce more and more “content” that has less and less actual, well, content. There has always been a lot of crap, but I know you’re old enough to remember when there wasn’t this much. And religious crap has waxed along with the rest of it, and probably outstripped it.
I can’t say whether this means the actual amount of coherent theological writing has decreased or remained constant; but there’s no reason to think there is more scholarly writing than there was in decades past, which means that the proportion of thoughtful writing to crap has almost certainly decreased. Hence, it is getting rarer – a needle in a haybarn rather than a haystack.
Plus, this really takes into account only the USA. If you expand it to include the western world in general, the declining religiosity of Europe must certainly result in less theological writing coming from the western world as a whole (muslim invaders excepted, of course, because they’re not really part of the western theological tradition, and their marching orders come from the Arab world anyway).
It’s almost impossible to make any scripturally supported point without cherry-picking citations, because if you were to include all relevant citations, you’d wind up with them contradicting each other almost every time. About the only fully scripturally supported moral precept I can think of off the cuff is “owning slaves is nifty.”
I’m sure there are others, but that’s the one that stands out.
Okay, a poll for the commentors:
I looked up 404′s IP using a geolocation service, and he’s posting from Slovakia. This probably explains the broken English. Do I owe him a retraction? I’m not sure. There is some sniping at the language, but mostly it’s mocking the ideas.
What do you guys think?
(muslim invaders excepted, of course, because they’re not really part of the western theological tradition, and their marching orders come from the Arab world anyway).
I’m not sure about that. There is a lot of Muslim theology being done in the European immigrant communities, mostly of the liberal and progressive variety, and the just-deceased Gus Dur was an important ‘alim, but no more an Arab than you are.
I was almost sure that 404 was a non-native speaker, but was distracted by stuff going down in the Real World(tm), so never got around to making the observation. I post in my second language in my local newspaper’s online edition; but you won’t be surprised to hear that some of the natives write it much worse than I do, with no sense of shame in posting.
“but there’s no reason to think there is more scholarly writing than there was in decades past”
Oh I wouldn’t expect the more interesting stuff to come out of divinity schools, so I didn’t really mean scholarship. I mean thoughtful, informed, coherent writing about religion from religious people. I’d be surprised if there isn’t a lot of such stuff going on at the margins.
Just to offer one pop culture example of the kind of religious writing that runs quite counter to the ignorant crap that offends both you and I, Dwasifar, I find Karen Armstrong’s writing to be brimming with insights and adept at drawing fascinating connections that wouldn’t have occurred to me. She’s not trying to construct a god centered unified theory of everything to impose on everybody. She’s only asking thorny questions and following her instincts with broad erudition. She’s trying to honestly find a path through the crisis within religion brought about by the circumstances of our hyper-connected, pluralistic world. And she’s writing for non-scholars. I approve. And there are others on that and similar paths who just don’t sell as many books as she does.
Since religion isn’t going to go away anytime soon, I’d like to encourage and support those who want to wrestle control of the conversation away from willfully ignorant kooks on power trips. They may not seem to have a chance against fire and brimstone, but historically, religion based mass psychosis has come and gone in cycles. I’m more than ready for the wheel to turn again.
I strongly suspect that almost everything has always been crap. Real excellence is always rare. There’s just more of everything now. And it’s everywhere at once. By removing the traditional barriers our culture has released the so-called hive mind and the results often aren’t very impressive or encouraging. There’s so much of everything competing for our attention that only something that jumps up and down screaming, or tap dances down the bar wearing a g-string, or throws money around, is likely to even get noticed by more than a handful. It sure looks like a race to the bottomless. But that doesn’t mean more subtle, nuanced things aren’t out there. We’ll just never find out about most of them.
Karen Armstrong? You’re serious? This is the same Karen Armstrong who’s getting into it with Sam Harris right now and taking the position that religion doesn’t actually cause divisions and start wars?
I can’t go with you on that at all. Her position in that particular debate is that we should just accept that we will always have religion because we will always search for meaning. That’s like arguing that we will always have slaves because there will always be manual labor that needs doing. That argument didn’t hold forever, thankfully, because people eventually realized that to be more civilized we would have to find some other way to get our manual labor done, and I would hope that we can also become civilized enough to realize there are better ways to search for meaning than to make up fairy tales and kill each other over them. The search for meaning need not default to the supernatural, and Armstrong makes a grave mistake in believing that it must always be so because so far it has usually been so.
I’m unimpressed by arguments that religion is the cause of war. All societies have religion and all societies engage in warfare. Therefore religion causes war. Are Karen Armstrong and I the only ones who see a problem with this logic? No wars have been waged by humans who didn’t breathe. Therefore breathing causes war? Correlation does not demonstrate causality. If war can be nailed down to one cause, a big if, it would have to be competition for resources. That societies use religion to manipulate the pawns to willingly fight and die for someone else’s interests remains a fact, but that hardly bolsters Harris’ (and Dawkins’) absurd point.
Sorry, Urban, but did someone post a comment in this thread claiming that religion is the cause of war? I haven’t seen it. Dawkins and Harris similarly do not claim that all wars are caused by religion; that’s a straw man put up by people who want to discredit them, like Armstrong.
It is fair to say “religion causes war” in the same way as “smoking causes cancer,” and it would be foolish to retort that the latter statement is wrong because smoking demonstrably does not cause all cancer. No one said it did.
That religion stands so ready to provide cover and support for evil men who would war with others makes it a magnificent and terrible weapon. That religion is also an avenue for peace, harmony, justice, and good for so many does not redeem it. This is rather like putting flowers, pretty music, pink paint and a sharp blade on a guillotine.
I would not even put it as strongly as religion causing war in the sense that smoking causes (lung) cancer. It’s a mobilisation technique for getting other people to take resources away from yet another people and giving them to you instead. Which isn’t as favourable a judgment on religion as Armstrong would like, either.
Because there is no god, all god beliefs are delusions. Therefore religions are massive communal delusional exercises. There can be no good to come of such. Someone close to me protested that people need religion because people need hope. Such insanity as this concept should not be allowed in the mind of a rational person. People who hold ideas like this are running the world, functioning at the highest levels of government and business, operating heavy machinery, making decisions that affect all of us, and having children. If they believe that magical things happen to make difficult moments in life just mysteriously work out, (a) that explains a lot about how f*cked up things are, and (b) things will just get worse.
Hope has its place. I hope the Vikings win the game this weekend. I don’t hope that if I send enough properly coded thought messages to the invisible space alien running the universe that he will alter the laws of the universe for me causing the Vikings to win. I actually hope the team is prepared, that they have a decent game plan, and that they don’t “mail it in” this time.
If I can say “shit” in the posts, you can go ahead and say “fuck” in the comments.
I don’t know that I can go the whole way with you on that. Certainly you could make the case that the Bush administration “played” religion in the mobilization sense that you describe. But Bush himself believed Jesus wants the US to have those resources, and in the process christianize the region, giving him divine justification to wage war.
So did religion “cause” the resulting war? I think you’d have to say it was at least a contributing cause – the same way that smoking “causes” cancer only in those people who are vulnerable to getting cancer from smoking. You can blame the smoke, AND you can blame the genes, but it would be dissembling to say that the smoke had nothing to do with it because the genes were there. Similarly, if religion tends to set off the rationalization process that leads to wars, then those wars are religiously motivated, q.e.d.
Put another way, if the Bush war was about a divine mission and the acquisition of resources, those two things add up to Prosperity Gospel on a national scale – Jesus wants us to be rich and own the oil. Classifying acquisitiveness as “the cause” by default, and automatically relegating religion to “the cover story,” is unwarranted at best, and leads you away from a more complete understanding of the causes. Those classifications could easily be reversed. Perhaps Bush used acquisition as the rationalization for a Crusade to convert the heathens. (Certainly that is what they believe.) More likely, they were both causes, and without one or the other it would not have happened, or at least gone down differently. And you can certainly place the bizarre conduct of the war at the feet of Bush’s “Jesus is guiding my gut” beliefs.
This same argument could be made from the other side, substituting Bin Laden or Hussein for Bush, and muslim beliefs about the divine mission to bring the whole world to islam substituted for the christian military crusade examples. Certainly the koran is at least as explicit as the bible (and probably a whole lot more) that its followers should enjoy dominion over nonbelievers, and extract spoils and tribute. But I used our side as the example instead, for reasons that have probably already become obvious to you.
“But Bush himself believed Jesus wants the US to have those resources.”
- And the resources are of no use in and by themselves, other than as something Jesus wanted you to have? I don’t think so.
Maybe we should compare & contrast with Raskolnikov, who dreamed up his repulsive justification for murdering the old lady pawnbroker. But he didn’t do this in order to murder someone who had no money that he could “appropriate for a higher cause”, did he?
Having said that, I would not claim that all resources are economic. On my own site I am in the progress of describing religion as economic, political, social-status and emotional technology. If you think that “acquisition of emotional resources” is watering down the concept of resources, fair enough, but I think we could agree that a lot of religion is about the acquisition of unjustified self-esteem, and here we come back to Bush, who in his heart may know that he is a schmuck, but can feel much, much better about himself by being born-again and bringing Jesus to the heathen. If we agree on this mechanism, then I would say that we are looking at prior needs, just like the prior need for oil. But what about the Prince of Darkness? Cheney wasn’t interested in Jesus.
I also like to picture religion as malware, exploiting security holes in the human operating system.
Didn’t say they were. But please refer back to the smoking and cancer and genes metaphor. I map it out:
Susceptible genetics + Smoke = cancer, where neither in themselves might have resulted in cancer: we blame the smoke and the genes. Thus we say that smoking can cause cancer, at least for people who have the genes for it; or we say that genes can cause cancer, if you bring it on by smoking. Both are causes of the cancer.
Acquisitiveness + Religious belief in divine right = war, where neither in themselves might have resulted in war: we blame… just the acquisitiveness? Why? Wouldn’t it be fairer to say that religion can cause war in the acquisitive, or acquisitiveness can cause war in the religious? Either way, religion is a causative factor.
I don’t know why you insist that it must be one or the other; either religion is the sole cause, and the resources are meaningless, or resources are the sole cause, and religion is irrelevant. When have you known any complex event to happen for only one reason? And if both factors combine to produce the outcome, why insist that one is the cause and the other isn’t? It’s like saying salt is made from sodium, and the chlorine is irrelevant.