The Secular Right and Knowledge

I've always been perplexed by the ignorance otherwise intelligent atheists show with respect to Christianity, given the time they spend bashing it. Here is the latest post by Heather MacDonald, a writer I don't miss at National Review or City Journal. In those contexts, she displays an obvious intelligence, attention to detail, and dedication to getting her facts straight. You get a different MacDonald on the Secular Right, however; here she seems intent on hitting Christianity with any stick she can find, and doesn't let history or elementary logic get in the way. Spot the black hole in this passage:

That the Catholic hierarchy could be embarrassed by relic veneration, when nearly every Catholic Church in Europe proudly displays its lavish, silver and gold jewel-encrusted reliquaries allegedly housing this bit of Jesus’ femur or that bit of a saint’s bladder, shows how the religious practices that once filled out a world still untamed and unexplained by science grow ineluctably more remote.

As Mark in Spokane gently points out in the comments, it doesn't make much sense for an orthodox Christian to venerate a relic of Jesus' femur, given that the central event of Christianity is the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. In fact, Christianity is to that extent empirically falsifiable: The discovery of Jesus's bones would decisively refute orthodox Christianity and put the Catholic Church out of business for good. This was understood even at the time of the Crucifixion (Matthew 27:64).

The perplexing part of this is that conservatives generally understand that it is necessary to understand one's enemy to defeat him. This is why conservatives often understand Marxism and socialism better than many socialists do. Yet when it comes to religion, the Secular Right seems to hold on to religious ignorance almost as a badge of honor. I wonder who should be more embarrassed: The third world peasant with a second grade education who venerates the relics of a saint (but who understands the meaning of the Resurrection), or the North American, college-educated, cosmopolitan atheist who, despite decades of higher education, hasn't yet gained an elementary understanding of the religion she bashes?

The Secular Right

The relationship of conservatism to religion has been on my mind lately, sparked by posts such as this over at the SecularRight blog. Heather MacDonald typifies one sort of modern atheist, the kind that sees religious belief as obviously absurd. For her, the difference between Harold Camping (the force behind the recently unfulfilled prophecy of the apocalypse) and mainstream believers is trivial: It is only because Camping has made an empirically falsifiable prediction that he is distinguishable from mainstream believers at all.

What interests me is the conclusion that seems to clearly follow if we accept that the mass of men are in the grip of irrationality. If belief in God is patently irrational, and most men believe in God, then most men are irrational. How then, can they be trusted with political authority in the form of the vote or, even, authority over their own lives? Is it not reasonable to place an authority over them for their own benefit? The individual freedom involved in limited government only works if men are capable of governing themselves. It doesn't seem an accident that the New Atheists tend to be of a left-wing political persuasion (e.g. Christopher Hitchens or Daniel Dennett).  What is unusual and, perhaps, ultimately incoherent, is the notion of right-wing atheism.

True Grit

Wonderful post on the film True Grit over at The Whirlpools' Rim.

I would like to comment on this quote from Stanley Fish:

What this means is that there are two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously.

For a Christian, isn't it Jesus Christ who unites the two registers of existence? Christ is the perfectly just man who nonetheless suffers an unjust death at the hands of men. But Christ is not only a man; he is also God Incarnate, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. And He teaches us that His unjust death has the paradoxical effect of redeeming the universe. Furthermore, when we unite our suffering with His, our suffering also has the effect of redeeming the universe. Christ has lifted the veil on the transcendent meaning of existence; we live in a fallen, sinful world in which the just suffer as well as the unjust. Damnation and salvation are not capricious. Damnation happens when we refuse to unite ourselves with Christ's redemptive act. Salvation happens when we accept the suffering the world visits on us; we do not accept the injustice of the world, but we accept that justice can truly only be found in the way of Christ. Christ provides the answer to the question Fish poses in this paragraph:

Mattie gives a fine (if terrible) example early in the novel when she imagines someone asking why her father went out of his way to help the man who promptly turned around and shot him. “He was his brother’s keeper. Does that answer your question?” Yes it does, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the reward for behaving in accord with God’s command is violent death at the hands of your brother, a question posed by the Bible’s first and defining event, and unanswered to this day.

Christ gives the answer in Matthew 5:43-48. If you love only those who love you, what reward is there in that? Loving those who are unjust to you is to act as God acts; it is to be perfect as God is perfect, and in doing so the world is redeemed. That is the reward.

I wonder if Mattie Ross is a Christ figure. Like Christ, she is relentless and incorruptible in her pursuit of justice; yet, also like Christ, she does not pursue justice through power but paradoxically through weakness and vulnerability. Through this pursuit, and her own suffering, she achieves justice and redeems the world. Justice is achieved because Tom Chaney is finally called to account for the murder of her father.  LeBeouf and Rooster Cogburn are redeemed. Initially at odds with each other, because both put their egos before the larger mission, they both eventually decide to abandon the mission (which is the pursuit of justice.) But just when it seems things are hopeless, Mattie, in her vulnerability, stumbles on Chaney and Ned Pepper. LeBeouf and Cogburn rise to the occasion and justice is finally achieved. Mattie is nearly killed and, like Christ, carries visible wounds as a sign of her redemptive sacrifice.

Douthat on Abortion

Excellent article here.

Harry Potter and the Exorcist

Via the Drudgereport:

Harry Potter

(No) Miracle on 34th Street

Santa Claus doesn't make the cut for Edward Feser, as he explains in this post.

His post includes a type of argument I've always found perplexing, which we might call the argument from artificial distance:

I would urge them to stop. A child is completely dependent on his parents’ word for his knowledge of the world, of right and wrong, and of God and religious matters generally. He looks up to them as the closest thing he knows to an infallible authority. What must it do to a child’s spirit when he finds out that something his parents insisted was true – something not only important to him but integrally tied to his religion insofar as it is related to Christmas and his observance of it – was a lie? Especially if the parents repeated the lie over the course of several years, took pains to make it convincing (eating the cookies left out for “Santa” etc.), and (as some parents do) reassured the child of its truth after he first expressed doubts? How important, how comforting, it is for a child to be able to believe: Whatever other people do, Mom and Dad will never lie to me. How heartbreaking for him to find out he was wrong!

All of us, or virtually all of us, grew up believing in Santa Claus as small children. Yet Feser writes as though the experience of discovering the truth about Santa Claus is something about which we can only speculate - what must it do to a child's spirit? The artificial distance allows him to imply that all sorts of horrible things must happen, which aren't specifically spelled out, but are darkly hinted at. But if we remember that we ourselves believed in Santa Claus, and if we remember that time with fondness, and with gratitude to our parents for making the experience possible, then perhaps we will be forgiven for thinking that Feser's diabolical Santa Claus legend is more mythical than anything we believed as children.

There is a reason that the Santa Claus tradition has carried on and grown over the generations. It isn't because, despite being traumatized with it themselves as children, parents felt duty bound to inflict it on their children. It's because parents remember the whimsy and joy of their early years, of which Santa Claus was an integral part, and wish their children to share in a similar experience. Early childhood is a world of magic, innocence, whimsy and wonder; a time when cows jump over moons, boys climb beanstalks into the clouds, and fairy Godmothers turn pumpkins into carriages. The fairies even occasionally drop in on an ordinary child's life, as when they substitute a quarter for a tooth under your pillow.

In what sense is Santa Claus "false"? The practicalities involved with Santa Claus are so preposterous that any child, as soon as he approaches the age of reason, cannot but see the impossibilities. But then Santa Claus is not a creature of the age of reason; he is a creature of the age of imagination and wonder. When a child starts to leave the world of early childhood and reason begins to dawn in him, he will say goodbye to Santa Claus as an old friend whom he has outgrown; but one who will be remembered for communicating truths that can be learned in no other way. We love films like Miracle on 34th Street because they reintroduce us to our old friend, and to ourselves when we were innocent enough to believe in such things.

In one sense there certainly is a Santa Claus. Somebody is putting all those presents under a tree. It turns out that Santa Claus doesn't live on the North Pole, but in the room just down the hall. I don't remember being shocked or heartbroken when the truth about Santa Claus began to dawn on me; what I remember is it beginning to occur to me how unselfish my parents were. They had given me lavish gifts for years, but had gone out of their way to make sure they got no credit for it. Mom and Dad weren't lying; it was more like they were telling a long, wonderful practical joke, one they knew I would figure out eventually... and be forever grateful they played it.

Feser On Kant

Excellent post by Edward Feser on the influence of Kant.

The following statements by Feser:

 Idolatry is in fact the defining sin of modernity, and it is all the worse for being directed at man. The ancient pagan at least knew enough to worship something higher than himself

allow me to publish one of my favorite quotes from Chesterton:

 Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. - GKC, Orthodoxy, Ch. V. 

Kant is absolutely critical to understanding oneself in the modern world. We are all Kantians by default; it is in the air we breathe. Only by a conscious effort at self-education is it possible to see our Kantian assumptions for what they are and, possibly, overcome them.