Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Lutheri a Caietano ad Papam, 1518 WS 2, 27-33, 33:5, ‘melius informati’; WB 1, 104, 18 Oct. 1518, 223:20; and see letter to Spalatin, where he uses the same phrase, LW Letters, I, 90-3; WB 1, 105, 31 Oct. 1518, 224:3-4. Froben published it along with Luther’s chief publications and Prierias’s reply, so that intellectuals had a handy volume that allowed them to make up their minds about the ‘Luther matter’: ‘Ad Leonem X. Pontif. Maxim. Resolutiones disputationum de virtute indulgentiarum . . .’ [Basle] [1518] [VD 16 L 3407]. WB I, 100, 14 Oct. 1518, which is similar to the one addressed to Spalatin of the same date. Many of the letters to Karlstadt have been lost: this one survives in German translation only, and since a letter to Melanch- thon a few days earlier tells him that Karlstadt has the details of the discussions so far, there must have been at least one earlier letter as well. WB 1, 99, 14 Oct. 1518; 102, shortly after 14 Oct. 1518; 104, 18 Oct. 1518. There is an undercurrent of anti-Italian feeling which Luther uses to reinforce a sense of common cause with the Elector. He remarked of Serralonga, Cajetan’s intermediary, that ‘He is an Italian and an Italian he will remain’, making fun of his beautiful prose that hid little of substance. WB 1, 110, 25 Oct. 1518, Cajetan to the Elector, which reached him on 19 Noy. 1518; 110, 21 Nov. 1518, Luther’s reply, is written in Latin although he usually wrote to the Elector in German, so that the Elector could simply send it on to Cajetan. WS 2, 5 (introduction); 6-26; 25 for the blacked-out text; Brecht, Luther, I, 208-9; on the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, WB 1, 67, second half of March 1518: even a supporter of Luther like Capito thought this sermon went a bit far, so Spalatin’s caution was not exaggerated. Acta Augustana, LW 31, 259-292; WS 2, 6-26. WB I, 124, 20 Dec. 1518 to Spalatin: Luther explains that he had intended the copies of the Appel- lation to be distributed when the ban arrived. However, he had not actually paid the printer. This would have been more persuasive if the 460 49. 50. 5I. 52. 53- 54- 55: 56. 57: MARTIN LUTHER same letter had not also included his explanation for his failure to follow Spalatin’s advice not to print the Acta, which he says reached him too late, a slightly different story from what he had told Langenmantel the previous month: WB 1, 113, 25 Nov. 1518 to Christoph Langenmantel. LW Letters, I, 72; WB 1, 85, 8 Aug. 1518, 188:12-13; LW Letters, I, 75; WB 1, 87, 28 Aug. 1518, 190:30-1. Harle, Schilling and Wartenberg (eds), Martin Luther, II, 17-23; this was not the only time that Luther mentioned his weakened body to Staupitz, who for his part worried about Luther’s health; and he referred repeat- edly and vividly to the likelihood of his martyrdom too.

• From Shunned (2018)

  “Months ago I started taking a second look at everything I believe, not taking anything for granted. I’m unclear and unsettled about many things, but what I do know is that I’m tired of the way The Truth condemns people—good people. People I know. It separates me from them in a way that doesn’t feel good.” “Doesn’t feel good? ” she echoed. “Part of being a true Christian means we often won’t feel good. You know that.” She shook her head. “This highfalutin job of yours has put you in way too much contact with worldly people.” She turned away from me and spoke to Dad. “This is what happens when you let your guard down.” “No, Mom.” I collected myself as she turned back to me. “It’s much deeper than that. I’ve noticed a deep spiritual questioning of everything I’ve been taught and a yearning for something more in life. I want some room to move around, the space to explore other beliefs.” “What does that mean? I don’t even know what you’re saying.” She looked baffled. Dad was focusing his gaze on the center of the table. “Yesterday I told the elders I was taking a break.” “A break?” “Yes, Mom, a break. From everything—meetings, service, study. Everything.” Dad closed his eyes and shook his head. Mom’s brown eyes darted across my face and eyes, searching in wonder. Then she turned to Ross. “What do you think of all this, Ross?” she asked. He frowned and shook his head. “I think it’s terrible. A great tragedy. Things haven’t been great between us for a while, but I never expected this. And she’s got it all figured out: an attorney, an apartment, all the answers.” Mom nodded. “That’s Lindy. Ever since she was little, she’s always been way ahead of us.” “And,” Dad added, “when she gets her mind made up about something, you’d best get out of her way.” Mom turned back to me. “This is a good man you have here, and you’re going to let him go?” I didn’t answer. It made no sense to stay in a marriage that tethered me to a religion I doubted, a religion that demanded allegiance to another person even after I’d outgrown both. “Lindy, honey, this makes you both so vulnerable to trouble.” I knew she was saying this because she cared, but the more she talked, the more I ratcheted down. “Before you take such extreme measures, perhaps you can let the elders help you.” “It’s past that, Mom,” I said. “Is there someone else?” she asked. “No,” I said. “When will this community realize that boredom and unhappiness can be enough of a reason to end a marriage?” They could also be worthy signals to leave a religion. The furnace clicked off. We all sat there. Mom looked at Dad. “Do you have anything you want to ask her?” she said to him. “I’m sorry you’ve been so unhappy,” he said.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Melanchthon, Luther’s representative in the town during his prolonged absence, was thrown into a flurry of indecision. He was unsure what to make of the prophets’ claims that God spoke to them directly, and defended them against the students. At the same time he tried to persuade Spalatin and Friedrich to permit Luther to return: Only Luther, he urged, could judge these spirits. He sent the request to the Elector via Spalatin, leaving the letter unsealed so that Spalatin could read it.35 Luther for his part was breezily unworried about the prophets, writing to Spalatin: “I do not come to Wittenberg, nor do I change my quarters, because of the ‘Zwickau prophets,’ for they don’t disturb me.”36 It was easy for Luther to discern spirits, far away in the Wartburg; however, those involved in the frenetic pace of politics and religious reform in Wittenberg found it much more difficult to work out what path to take. —LUTHER always regarded political authority as resting in the hands of the ruler, a perception strengthened by his stay in the Wartburg, where his main contact was the Elector’s right-hand man, Spalatin. Karlstadt, by contrast, seems to have believed that the town council should be empowered to introduce the Reformation, and placed his faith in “the Christian city of Wittenberg,” as he termed it in his pamphlets. This was a line he had been taking since the disputation on the Mass in October 1521, when he advocated that the whole community should decide what evangelical reforms to introduce. Karlstadt’s marriage, the departure of Zwilling—who had been a leading figure advocating change, and who now left the Augustinian order altogether to preach in Eilenburg—and the arrival of the charismatic Zwickau prophets may all have played their part in radicalizing Karlstadt.37 Or perhaps it was just that, although it always took a long time to persuade Karlstadt of anything, once he was convinced he became a zealot.

• From Shunned (2018)

  “I don’t know,” she said, squinting as she scanned my face. “I haven’t figured that out yet.” We were at an impasse. When I was little, I once asked Lory how she knew we had The Truth. I was a dreamy six-year-old who enjoyed childlike musings. Even then, I enjoyed mulling over big questions and wanted the opinion of someone older who had it all together. She replied at the time, “I just do. It makes so much sense.” Lory was a True Believer, and she wasn’t able to grasp the possibility I had doubts. She couldn’t hear it. It was easier for her to project her own experience onto me and trust I’d eventually come out on the right side, as she had. We both sat there, looking off into space. My whiskey was gone. She had barely touched hers. “Can I have a glass of water?” I asked. “Yeah, sure,” she said, and left the room. I wasn’t sure what we’d accomplished, and pondered how to make a graceful exit. I was glad I’d come, believing that just by showing up I’d fulfilled some kind of family expectation among all the others I was failing. Lory returned to the room, handed me the water, and sat back down on the couch, this time pulling her feet up and crossing her legs. I sensed the interrogation was over. “Where is your new apartment?” she asked, and I described my place and plans to move. “Have you and Ross finalized how you’ll split everything up?” I told her how easy that had been for us. “Just be careful you don’t concede things because of guilt,” she said. “Just because you’re the one leaving doesn’t mean you should let go of things you feel strong and sentimental about.” Then she told me about an oil painting she’d relinquished in her divorce and always regretted. My sister is giving me divorce advice. How strange. “Will you be talking to Randy soon?” she asked. “Soon,” I said. That would be my next hurdle: facing my big brother. “Good,” she said, grabbing a tea biscuit. “We’re all really worried about you, Lindy.” “I know,” I said. “But I’m actually feeling very strong. Last night I slept like a baby. I haven’t done that in weeks.” “You can’t fool me,” she said. “You’re going to look back on this as one of the hardest times in your life. One day I predict you will wake up and realize how stupid you’re being. When that sorry day arrives, your family will be here for you, just like they were for me. I never would have made it without your help. And we’ll all be here when you come to your senses, too.” I took a sip of water and avoided replying, thinking it would be better to conserve my strength and use my energy to walk the road ahead of me. [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] It was a warm spring Saturday afternoon.

• From Shunned (2018)

  I just wanted to get it over with. And yet I loved my brother and felt it was only fair that he get a chance to speak his mind. He was the one who’d requested the meeting, so I thought he’d be the one to start the conversation. And so I sat there, saying nothing, looking at him look out the window. His bent knees were even with the dashboard. The muscles rippled under his cheeks with each clench of his jaw. “I’ve been rehearsing what I was going to say to you,” he began, still looking out the window. “I had all these sensible things to say, but then I realized”—he turned to look me in the eye—“I doubt you’d hear any of it. You were always so level-headed, but nothing about what you’re doing makes any sense to me.” Good. Then this will be a short conversation. “I can see why you’d think that,” I said. “Can you?” he asked. “Because from what I hear, you’re being very irrational these days.” “Well, it doesn’t feel irrational to me,” I said. I could feel my whole body tighten up, my own jaw clenching. Intimate conversations between Randy and me were rare. He wasn’t someone I’d ever consulted before making a big decision. It wasn’t that his opinions didn’t matter, but I never felt that he added an original voice to the insights already available. He’d always lived by the book and had recently been appointed to serve as an elder in his congregation. He possessed an innate and quiet goodness, and I’d be hard-pressed to find a soul with a bad word to say about him. Except for playing basketball and going steady with a worldly girl in junior high school, he’d never done a single contrary thing in his life. Five years my senior, Randy had always felt a bit distant. Growing up, I envied his ability to escape to a room of his own, filled at one time with the model airplanes he assembled, and later with canvas and brushes, stained color palettes, squeezed tubes of paints curled inward like toothpaste, turpentine—all the tools of an oil painter. Randy never took much to book learning, but he was good with his hands. He was an artist at heart. In particular, he was influenced by the Western art of Charles Russell, which captured his own experience in the wide-open spaces of central and eastern Oregon, where he went backpacking with friends or flyfishing and deer hunting with my father. When we were little, he would quietly pass me Lifesavers during long-winded sermons at the Kingdom Hall, and I would never forget his assistance on my very first talk in the Theocratic Ministry School. It was Randy who taught me how to ride a bike. (“You’re thinking too hard,” he said in my ear, bracing me in a vertical position as I sat looking straight down our driveway. “Feel your way, and the balance will come naturally.

• From Shunned (2018)

  I didn’t tell anyone at the Kingdom Hall that night about my promotion because I didn’t know how to bring it up without sounding like a braggart. Truer still, I didn’t want to spark worry among the friends who had already expressed concerns when I traveled on business and missed meetings. The next day, Nick Marshall made a point of stopping by my office to congratulate me. “Well deserved,” he said. He had never mentioned our doorstep conversation. I’d found myself in the occasional meeting with him and his staff and continued to feel an appreciation for who he was as a person, how he handled complex matters with fairness and integrity. It was impossible to think of him as doomed, which made me a complacent Witness—but I preferred this new, compassionate acceptance I was developing for so-called worldly people, and the growing sense of belonging I felt among my coworkers. In spite of my new resolve, as the months slipped by, the headiness and new demands of my job made it hard to focus on the Watchtower and Awake! magazines I slipped into my briefcase each week. On a flight to Chicago, I tried to muster interest in an article titled “Is There Only One True Church?” then cast a glance across the airplane aisle, failing to see the harm in these people of varying beliefs. The flight attendants began the cabin service. Most of the passengers were quiet or engrossed in their own reading. It was difficult to imagine the faceless hooded riders on black-winged stallions coming to take them out. I struggled to reconcile those images with the compassionate Jehovah I’d grown up with. Life no longer seemed so black and white. Perhaps our differences could teach us something besides condemnation. I put The Watchtower away and reached for my two more compelling options—The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved by You? —which had begged to be purchased from the airport bookstore. I chose the latter. The extra earnings from my promotion had not diminished the arguments Ross and I had over our finances. I knew something bigger than money issues was playing out between us, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Ross had watched as I’d packed my suitcase for this trip, and had asked if I wanted to spend our summer vacation volunteering for the Watchtower Society, either by preaching in an area where smaller congregations needed help or by supporting the construction of a new Kingdom Hall downstate. It was something we’d discussed many times. Perhaps this was finally the year to do it. But the desire now felt foreign, antiquated. I had no interest in going but expressed that as concern about our ability to afford it. Ross rolled his eyes at my rebuffs and left for work without saying goodbye.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Several incidents like this occurred throughout my school years, and I continued to feel the isolation of being different from my classmates. But even stronger than that powerful discomfort was the deeper satisfaction of knowing in my heart that Jehovah was pleased with my faith. A momentary good time wasn’t worth my everlasting life. Over time, this separation from the rest of the world became a badge of honor as I refrained from participating in all sorts of activities, like birthday parties, my high school prom, and dating. It wasn’t that I didn’t prefer to fit in; it was that I never questioned I was doing The Right Thing, avoiding worldly celebrations that had roots in ancient pagan rituals and traditions that could lead to unwholesome alliances with the world. By adulthood, I had squelched all fears of standing out at work. My siblings and friends all shared the same experience: we found understanding and our sense of belonging in the safe embrace of our family and the Witness community. [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] Ross nudged me with his elbow. Another Scripture had been cited. I found it and followed along, more by rote than by awareness. Nick’s words kept reverberating like a catchy radio jingle: “Do you think you have the answer?” they echoed now. “Yes,” I had said. The audacity made me cringe. For the very first time in my life, I wondered. I was watching a relentless slow-motion replay of the scene, with cymbals crashing the instant I used that gritty “d”-word: “destroy.” If you stripped away all the pleasantries of that conversation, I had looked this man in the eye and said definitively that he would be destroyed if he didn’t believe a certain way and join the right team—our team . I squirmed in my seat. Why hadn’t I ever heard it this way before? Was Jehovah really that ruthless? That severe? Of course not. Jehovah was the epitome of love. Everything He did was grounded in higher wisdom and righteous principle. And yet. Nick seemed like one of the good guys. No. Scratch that. Nick was one of the good guys. And yet. If he didn’t embrace The Truth, was he worthy of salvation? And yet. Nick was a man of great integrity. Everyone in the office knew of his penchant for honesty. And yet. The Bible was filled with stories of people with good intentions who still failed to meet Jehovah’s high standards. And yet. I remembered the way Nick’s eyes crinkled upward whenever he spoke about his daughter, his hopes for her future. And yet. The Bible was clear about the requirements for God’s approval. This newfound skepticism seemed to emerge from someone else, another, small, distant version of me. “Do not be misled. Bad associations spoil useful habits.” Vince was quoting First Corinthians as he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the long bridge of his nose. He had a good point.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He expressed what has been described as the “agonized schizophrenia” of the Western-educated Iranians, who felt pulled in two directions, 39 and though he could articulate the problem memorably, he had no solution to propose—though it appears that, toward the end of his life, he was beginning to see Shiism as an authentically Iranian institution that could provide a basis for a genuine national identity and become a healing alternative to the Westernizing disease. 40 The Iranian ulema were quite unlike the Egyptian clergy. Many were aware that they would have to modernize themselves and their institutions if they were to support the people. They were increasingly distressed by the shah’s autocratic rule, which offended fundamental Shii principles, and his obvious indifference to religion. In 1960, even Ayatollah Borujerdi, the supreme Marja, who had forbidden the clergy to take any part in politics, was moved to condemn the shah’s Land Reform Bill. It was a pity that he chose this issue, because it made the ulema, many of whom were landowners, seem selfish and reactionary. In fact, Borujerdi’s intervention probably sprang from an instinctive feeling that this could be the thin end of the wedge. 41 The Land Reform contravened Shariah laws of ownership, and Borujerdi may have feared that to deprive the people of rights guaranteed by Islamic Law in one sphere could lead to worse abuses in other areas. When Borujerdi died in March the following year, the post of Marja was not filled. A group of ulema argued that Shiism should become more democratic, and that it was not realistic to expect one man to be the Supreme Guide in this complex new world. Perhaps the new leadership should consist of several maraji, each with his own specialty. This was clearly a modernizing move, and this group of reformist ulema included several clerics who would later play a key role in the Islamic Revolution: Ayatollah Seyyed Muhammad Bihishti; the learned theologian Morteza Motahhari; Allameh Muhammad-Husain Tabatabai; and the most politically radical Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani. In the autumn of 1960, they held a series of lectures, and the following year published a volume of essays that discussed ways of bringing the Shiah up to date. The reformers were convinced that, because Islam is a total way of life, the ulema should not be so wary of intervening in politics. They did not envisage clerical rule, but believed that when they felt that the state was becoming tyrannical or indifferent to the needs of the people, the ulema should stand up to the shahs, as they had done at the time of the Tobacco Crisis and the Constitutional Revolution. They argued that the curriculum of the madrasahs should be revised, to dilute the heavy concentration on fiqh.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  His astounding hypothesis was so radical that in his own day very few people could take it in. He suggested that instead of being located in the center of the universe, the earth and the other planets were actually in rapid motion around the sun. When we looked up at the heavens and thought that we saw the celestial bodies moving, this was simply a projection of the earth’s rotation in the opposite direction. Copernicus’s theory remained incomplete, but the German physicist Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was able to provide mathematical evidence in its support, while the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) tested the Copernican hypothesis empirically by observing the planets through the telescope, which he had himself perfected. When Galileo published his findings in 1612, he created a sensation. All over Europe, people made their own telescopes and scanned the heavens for themselves. Galileo was silenced by the Inquisition and forced to recant, but his own somewhat belligerent temperament had also played a part in his condemnation. Religious people did not instinctively reject science in the early modern period. When Copernicus first presented his hypothesis in the Vatican, the Pope approved it, and Calvin had no problem with the theory. The scientists themselves saw their investigations as essentially religious. Kepler felt himself possessed by “divine frenzy” as he revealed secrets that no human being had ever been privileged to learn before, and Galileo was convinced that his research had been inspired by divine grace. 11 They could still see their scientific rationalism as compatible with religious vision, logos as complementary to mythos. Nevertheless, Copernicus had initiated a revolution, and human beings would never be able to see themselves or trust their perceptions in the same way again. Hitherto, people had felt able to rely on the evidence of their senses. They had looked through the outward aspects of the world to find the Unseen, but had been confident that these external appearances corresponded to a reality. The myths they had evolved to express their vision of the fundamental laws of life had been of a piece with what they had experienced as fact. The Greek worshippers at Eleusis had been able to fuse the story of Persephone with the rhythms of the harvest that they could observe for themselves; the Arabs who jogged around the Kabah symbolically aligned themselves with the planetary motions around the earth and hence felt in tune with the basic principles of existence. But after Copernicus a seed of doubt had been sown. It had been proved that the earth, which seemed static, was actually moving very fast indeed; that the planets only appeared to be in motion because people were projecting their own vision onto them: what had been assumed to be objective was in fact entirely subjective. Reason and myth were no longer in harmony; indeed, the intensive logos produced by the scientists seemed to devalue the perceptions of ordinary human beings and make them increasingly dependent upon learned experts.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Roman authorities would not have held a census in a client kingdom of the empire such as Herod’s, and in any case there is no record elsewhere of such an empire-wide census, which would certainly have left traces around the Mediterranean. The story seems to embody a confusion with a well-attested Roman imperial census which certainly did happen, but in 6 CE, far too late for the birth of Jesus, and long remembered as a traumatic event because it was the first real taste of what direct Roman rule meant for Judaea.5 The suspicion therefore arises that someone writing a good deal later, rather hazy about the chronology of decades before, has been fairly cavalier with the story of Jesus’s birth, for reasons other than retrieving events as they actually happened. This suspicion grows when one observes how little the birth and infancy narratives have to do with the later story of Jesus’s public ministry, death and resurrection, which occupies all four Gospels; nowhere do these Gospels refer back to the tales of birth and infancy, which suggests that the bulk of their texts were written before these particular stories. We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem. Why, then, were the stories created? One motive for locating the birth in Bethlehem might be precisely to settle the argument noted in John’s Gospel about Jesus’s status as Messiah of his people Israel: it answered the sceptics who pointed out the problem with Micah’s prophecy. But there is much else to these stories, all reflecting the deepening conviction among followers of Christ that this particular birth had profound cosmic importance. Matthew’s and Luke’s preoccupations diverge – one would not realize from listening to the harmonization of fragments of them in Christian Christmas celebrations that the Gospels agree in hardly any detail about Jesus’s infancy. The narrators intend to recall more ancient stories in the minds of the hearers by applying them to the coming of Jesus the Christ. So Matthew raises an echo of Moses by sending Jesus and his parents in flight to Egypt from the murderous King Herod: once more, a birth is imperilled, innocent children are killed by a worldly ruler, and yet the one child survives in Egypt to be a deliverer for Israel. Matthew and Luke provide two ancestor lists for Jesus which agree very little in the personnel involved and whose distinct patterns seem to have different preoccupations.6 Christians quickly felt uncomfortable about these divergent families, producing explanations which, as recorded by the early-third-century scholar Julius Africanus (‘the African’), are masterpieces of far-fetched genealogical speculation.7 Matthew’s list unconventionally includes descent through women, unlike Luke’s; a strange bunch those women are, all associated with eyebrow-raising sexual circumstances and also, Jesus’s mother, Mary, excepted, with non-Jews. The messages here seem to be that Jesus (and maybe

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet he continued his underground activities for another ten years. For him, “Judaism” seems to have meant fellowship, the close bonding he experienced in a tight-knit group which gave meaning to his life, because when he arrived in Amsterdam and fell afoul of the rabbis there, he still wanted to remain within the Jewish community. Like Da Costa, Prado had for years maintained his right to think and worship as he chose. He had his own idea of “Judaism” and was horrified when he encountered the real thing. Prado voiced his objections loudly. Why did Jews think that God had chosen them alone? What was this God? Was it not more logical to think of God as the First Cause, rather than as a personality who had dictated a set of barbarous, nonsensical laws? Prado became an embarrassment. The rabbis were trying to reeducate the New Jews from Iberia (many of whom shared Prado’s opinions) and could not tolerate his deism. On February 14, 1657, he was excommunicated. Yet he refused to leave the community. It was a clash between two wholly irreconcilable points of view. From their own perspectives, both Prado and the rabbis were correct. Prado could make no sense of traditional Judaism, had lost the mythical cast of mind, and had never had the opportunity to penetrate to the deeper meaning of the faith by means of cult and ritual. He had always had to rely on reason and his own insights, and could not abandon them now. But the rabbis were also right: Prado’s deism bore no relation to any form of Judaism that they knew. What Prado wanted to be was a “secular Jew,” but in the seventeenth century that category did not exist, and neither Prado nor the rabbis would have been able to formulate it clearly. It was the first of a series of clashes between a modern, wholly rational worldview on the one hand, and the religious mind-set, formed by cult and myth, on the other. As so often in these principled collisions, neither side behaved very well. Prado was an arrogant man, and he roundly abused the rabbis, threatening at one point to attack them in the synagogue with a drawn sword. The rabbis also acted less than honorably: they set a spy on Prado, who reported that his views had become still more radical. After his excommunication, he maintained that all religion was rubbish and that reason, not so-called “revelation,” must always be the sole arbiter of truth. Nobody knows how Prado ended his days.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Google story, but luck played a more important role in the actual event than it does in the telling of it. And the more luck was involved, the less there is to be learned. At work here is that powerful WYSIATI rule. You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. I have heard of too many people who “knew well before it happened that the 2008 financial crisis was inevitable.” This sentence contains a highly objectionable word, which should be removed from our vocabulary in discussions of major events. The word is, of course, knew. Some people thought well in advance that there would be a crisis, but they did not know it. They now say they knew it because the crisis did in fact happen. This is a misuse of an important concept. In everyday language, we apply the word know only when what was known is true and can be shown to be true. We can know something only if it is both true and knowable. But the people who thought there would be a crisis (and there are fewer of them than now remember thinking it) could not conclusively show it at the time. Many intelligent and well-informed people were keenly interested in the future of the economy and did not believe a catastrophe was imminent; I infer from this fact that the crisis was not knowable. What is perverse about the use of know in this context is not that some individuals get credit for prescience that they do not deserve. It is that the language implies that the world is more knowable than it is. It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion. The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. Know is not the only word that fosters this illusion. In common usage, the words intuition and premonition also are reserved for past thoughts that turned out to be true. The statement “I had a premonition that the marriage would not last, but I was wrong” sounds odd, as does any sentence about an intuition that turned out to be false. To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past. The Social Costs of Hindsight

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For at the same time as these theologians, philosophers, and historians proclaimed the supremacy of reason, the German rationalist Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) undercut the entire Enlightenment project. On the one hand, Kant issued yet another of the early modern declarations of independence. People must have the courage to throw off their dependence upon teachers, churches, and authorities and seek the truth for themselves. “Enlightenment is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage,” he wrote. “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his own understanding, without direction from another.”23 But on the other hand, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant argued that it was impossible to be certain that the order we think we discern in nature bore any relation at all to external reality. This “order” was simply the creation of our own minds; even the so-called scientific laws of Newton probably tell us more about human psychology than about the cosmos. When the mind receives information about the physical world outside itself through the senses, it has to reorganize this data according to its own internal structures in order to make any sense of it. Kant was wholly confident of the mind’s capacity to devise a viable rational vision for itself, but by showing that it was really impossible for human beings to escape from their own psychology, he also made it clear that there was no such thing as absolute truth. All our ideas were essentially subjective and interpretive. Where Descartes had seen the human mind as the sole, lonely denizen of a dead universe, Kant severed the link between humanity and the world altogether and shut us up within our own heads.24 At the same time as he had liberated humanity from tutelage, he had enclosed it in a new prison. As so often, modernity took with one hand what it gave with the other. Reason was enlightening and emancipating, but it could also estrange men and women from the world they were learning to control so effectively.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  3 5 An equally telling, if less poignant, case was that of Juan da Prado, who arrived in Amsterdam in 1655 and must often have meditated upon Da Costa’s fate. He had been a committed member of the Jewish underground in Portugal for twenty years, but it seems that as early as 1645 he had succumbed to a Marrano form of deism. Prado was neither a brilliant nor a systematic thinker, but his experience shows us that it is impossible to adhere to a confessional religion such as Judaism by relying solely on reason. Without a prayer life, a cult, and a mythical underpinning, Prado could only conclude that “God” was simply identical with the laws of nature. Yet he continued his underground activities for another ten years. For him, “Judaism” seems to have meant fellowship, the close bonding he experienced in a tight-knit group which gave meaning to his life, because when he arrived in Amsterdam and fell afoul of the rabbis there, he still wanted to remain within the Jewish community. Like Da Costa, Prado had for years maintained his right to think and worship as he chose. He had his own idea of “Judaism” and was horrified when he encountered the real thing. Prado voiced his objections loudly. Why did Jews think that God had chosen them alone? What was this God? Was it not more logical to think of God as the First Cause, rather than as a personality who had dictated a set of barbarous, nonsensical laws? Prado became an embarrassment. The rabbis were trying to reeducate the New Jews from Iberia (many of whom shared Prado’s opinions) and could not tolerate his deism. On February 14, 1657, he was excommunicated. Yet he refused to leave the community. It was a clash between two wholly irreconcilable points of view. From their own perspectives, both Prado and the rabbis were correct. Prado could make no sense of traditional Judaism, had lost the mythical cast of mind, and had never had the opportunity to penetrate to the deeper meaning of the faith by means of cult and ritual. He had always had to rely on reason and his own insights, and could not abandon them now. But the rabbis were also right: Prado’s deism bore no relation to any form of Judaism that they knew. What Prado wanted to be was a “secular Jew,” but in the seventeenth century that category did not exist, and neither Prado nor the rabbis would have been able to formulate it clearly. It was the first of a series of clashes between a modern, wholly rational worldview on the one hand, and the religious mind-set, formed by cult and myth, on the other. As so often in these principled collisions, neither side behaved very well.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  have been living in a tent in Bangs. The friend shrugged off my argument. “You better make sure you know exactly how much faith you have when you decide not to take your kid to the doctor.” I filed the deaths under “unknowable,” but that didn’t feel right either. If the child had received medical care, she would have lived. That much we knew. My prayer became, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” Brother Terrell’s notoriety turned to full-blown infamy. Newspapers ran photos of him arriving and leaving the tent in Bangs in his Mercedes or Lincoln. They showed him stuffing his pockets with love offerings and ran the photos alongside the squalid living conditions of some of his followers. They emphasized that no one really knew where or under what conditions he lived, something my mother gave thanks for daily. After the article was published, Brother Terrell said from the platform that the reporters were out to get him, and we all nodded and said amen, including those of us who knew that the newspaper articles were a fairy tale compared to what was really going on. He railed against the press. “These bunch of lying reporters better watch out. The Bible says, ‘Touch not my anointing.’ They come against God, and they’ll wish’t they hadn’t.” But the reporters kept on coming. A follower knocked one out of her chair during a tent service when he raced up behind her, grabbed her camera, and ran out of the tent with it. She ran after him and into a line of men with folded arms. Yes, they had a seen a man with a camera. No, they wouldn’t tell her which way he had gone. Brother Terrell responded to the media coverage with increasingly grandiose claims. “In the Bible Paul said, ‘Follow me as I follow Christ.’ All this fasting and praying has purified my body, my mind, and spirit.” He leaned toward the audience as he spoke and trembled. He danced in place, and then hopped on one leg across the platform. “I’m pure like Paul. I’m without sin like Jesus. You can follow me all the way to glory, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!” The preachers and supporters who sat on the platform stood and shook their fists in the air, yelling amen. Mama stood with them, clapping her hands, shouting, “Preach it, preach it.” My mind rebelled. How can he say he is without sin? Rowed up at the back of the tent, so that they could be the first ones out and escape unwanted attention, sat three little girls. My sisters lived with my mother, but none of the tent crowd in Bangs knew about their existence. When Mama

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Monarchian thinkers: homoousios, meaning ‘of one substance’, which could be applied to the intimate and direct relationship of Father and Son. Now it sits apparently innocently in the Nicene Creed recited by millions in every Eucharist, but once it rang alarm bells for many Christians, especially in the East. Its use seemed to endanger the separate identities of the three persons of the Trinity, since it had been used by Monarchians in the third century, in particular Paul of Samosata, a Syrian Christian who had been deposed as Bishop of Antioch on an enjoyably ripe variety of scandalous charges. For that reason, homoousios proved to be capable of tearing the Christian world apart in the fourth century, as we will see (see pp. 211–22). ALEXANDRIAN THEOLOGIANS: CLEMENT AND ORIGEN Among Alexandrian theologians there developed the closest relationship with Greek philosophy which early Christianity achieved without entirely losing contact with the developing mainstream of the Church. This was hardly surprising, since the Christian schools in which Clement of Alexandria and Origen taught were outcrops of the most famous centres of higher education in the ancient world. Jews, Greeks and Egyptians had lived side by side in Alexandria for centuries; it was natural that gnosticism should flourish here and that its boundary with Christianity should be very permeable. Clement was not at all shy of annexing the word gnōsis (‘knowledge’) from his rivals, and he was very ready to defend a proposition that ‘The man of understanding and perspicacity is … a Gnostic’, or to speak of Christians living ‘perfectly and gnostically’.81 In the eyes of many later unsympathetic writers, both he and Origen had stepped over the borders which could be considered orthodox for Christianity. It is no coincidence that many of Clement’s and Origen’s writings are lost to us. When one manuscript might be the only source of a particular work and might easily crumble to dust in obscurity if someone did not think it worth copying, quiet ecclesiastical censorship could make sure that many works of these dangerous and audacious masters remained uncopied and so disappeared from sight. About 190, Clement, a much-travelled scholarly Christian convert, succeeded a now obscure teacher called Pantaenus as the most prominent leader in the Christian schools of Alexandria. Twelve years later, he was caught up in a crisis of persecution far away from Alexandria in the Cappadocian city of Caesarea in Asia Minor; here he looked after the harassed Christian community and even brought new people into it.82 Yet even after he had proved his pastoral abilities

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  male form in the recopying of manuscripts, or simply regarded without any justification as a man’s name. Early biblical commentators, given a strong lead by the great fourth-century preaching Bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, were honourably prepared to acknowledge the surprising femininity of Junia, but then there was a sudden turn in the writings of Giles of Rome in the thirteenth century, which was only rectified during the twentieth century. Likewise, historians have tended to view Phoebe’s status as that of a ‘deaconess’; yet this is probably reading back from the third and fourth centuries, when female deacons were restricted to roles necessarily reserved for women, like looking after scantily clad female candidates in services of baptism. First- and second-century Christians may not have made such a distinction between male and female deacons or the part that either played in the life of the Church.18 While Paul thus provides evidence about the roles that women were playing in positions of authority in Christian communities, his list of witnesses to Resurrection appearances significantly contrasts with that of three Gospels, by not including any women at all. He also insists in his first letter to the Corinthians on a hierarchical scheme in which God is the head of Christ, Christ the head of men and a husband the head of his wife: quite a contrast to his proclamation of Christian equality for all. That leads to a passage notable for its confusion of argument, in which he tells women to cover their heads when prophesying, yet elsewhere when addressing the same community in Corinth, he forbids women to speak in worship at all.19 This was not a stable position and a second generation was bound to move to clarify it. Paul’s admirers evidently decided to place increasing emphasis on his hierarchical view of Christian relationships and on his awareness of the scrutiny of Christian communities by non-Christians. Perhaps this was not surprising as hopes of Christ’s imminent return began to fade in the later first century and Christians began to realize that they must create structures which might have to last for a generation or more amid a world of non-believers. The change is visible in a series of further epistles which, although they assume the name of Paul, display a distinctive vocabulary and a mechanically intensive reuse of phrases from his writings. They should be thought of as commentaries on or tributes to his impact and teaching. Two which are now given addresses to Churches in Colossae and Ephesus are very closely related: Ephesians contains a patchwork of words and phrases from Colossians and from authentic letters of Paul, to the extent that it seems to be a devout attempt to provide a digest of Paul’s message.20 Three other epistles, supposedly addressed to Paul’s close associates Timothy and Titus, seem to be circular

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  She didn’t tell Jake. It couldn’t have been that important.” “Maybe she was racked with guilt,” he said. “Jake said she seemed normal on the phone before she freaked out,” the Colonel said. “But it must have been that phone call. Something happened that we aren’t seeing.” The Colonel ran his hands through his thick hair, frustrated. “Christ, something. Something inside of her. And now we just have to figure out what that was.” “So we just have to read the mind of a dead person,” Takumi said. “Easy enough.” “Precisely. Want to get shitfaced?” the Colonel asked. “I don’t feel like drinking,” I said. The Colonel reached into the foam recesses of the couch and pulled out Takumi’s Gatorade bottle. Takumi didn’t want any either, but the Colonel just smirked and said, “More for me,” and chugged. thirty-seven days after THE NEXT WEDNESDAY, I ran into Lara after religion class—literally. I’d seen her, of course. I’d seen her almost every day—in English or sitting in the library whispering to her roommate, Katie. I saw her at lunch and dinner at the cafeteria, and I probably would have seen her at breakfast, if I’d ever gotten up for it. And surely, she saw me as well, but we hadn’t, until that morning, looked at each other simultaneously. By now, I assumed she’d forgotten me. After all, we only dated for about a day, albeit an eventful one. But when I plowed right into her left shoulder as I hustled toward precalc, she spun around and looked up at me. Angry, and not because of the bump. “I’m sorry,” I blurted out, and she just squinted at me like someone about to either fight or cry, and disappeared silently into a classroom. First two words I’d said to her in a month. I wanted to want to talk to her. I knew I’d been awful—Imagine, I kept telling myself, if you were Lara, with a dead friend and a silent ex-boyfriend— but I only had room for one true want, and she was dead, and I wanted to know the how and why of it, and Lara couldn’t tell me, and that was all that mattered. forty-five days after FOR WEEKS, the Colonel and I had relied on charity to support our cigarette habit —we’d gotten free or cheap packs from everyone from Molly Tan to the once- crew-cutted Longwell Chase. It was as if people wanted to help and couldn’t think of a better way. But by the end of February, we ran out of charity. Just as well, really. I never felt right taking people’s gifts, because they did not know that we’d loaded the bullets and put the gun in her hand.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  8 Lecture 1: Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem?  This account also has its implausibilities, especially a star that seems to travel and stop over a particular house. There are also inconsistencies between this account and the one in Luke. Anyone reading the two closely will notice the general differences: the annunciation to Mary versus the dream of Joseph, the trip to Bethlehem from Nazareth versus the fl ight to Egypt, the shepherds versus the wise men worshiping Jesus.  These differences could easily be accounted for simply by saying that Matthew recorded some of the stories that happened and Luke recorded others. But there are also contradictions between Matthew and Luke. o In Matthew’s story, it appears that the hometown of Joseph and Mary is Bethlehem. The wise men worship Jesus in a house, apparently one in which Joseph and Mary live. o Moreover, the wise men seem to come to Jesus many months, possibly up to two years, after he was born. We know this from Herod’s decision to have boys under two years old slaughtered by his troops, based on the information he received from the wise men. o Finally, when Joseph and his family fl ee to Egypt and return, they are unable to relocate to Bethlehem, presumably their hometown, because it is now under the rule of Archelaus; for this reason, they go to Nazareth. This is obviously at odds with Luke’s account, in which Joseph and Mary are from Nazareth.  The other inconsistency between the two accounts involves what happens to Jesus and his family after his birth. According to Luke’s account, 32 days after she gave birth, Mary had to perform a sacri fi ce in order to cleanse her ritual impurity; afterward, she and Joseph returned to Nazareth. But if that’s the case, how can Matthew be right that after Jesus’s birth, the mother, father, and child fl ed to Egypt? There is no time for the fl ight to Egypt that Matthew tells about if Luke is right that they returned immediately to Nazareth.

• From Action (2014)

  Another line from the Jam’s itinerant boy: Oh, I’m sitting watching rainbows, and watching the people go crazy. While aligning yourself with a specific sexual orientation can open you up to protection and love of all-new magnitudes, you can also move between homes when it comes to embodiments. I never designated myself “straight,” or “gay,” or “bisexual,” depending on whom I was dating/fucking, because to do so made each of those words feel like the bigots who call fluctuating sexualities “faddish” were being thrown sturdy proof, even though that’s bullshit and everyone has the right to claim whatever gender they like for themselves, even if they capitulate. But I did not know how to mean any of these things, and I felt bad for potentially skewing their definitions for the people who did. I wasn’t doing anyone any harm, and it was fine for me to slip on identities as I felt them, but I prefer a mode that draws mainly on the fact that I can hook up with anyone I want, and it doesn’t have to change what I am. I could call myself any one of those things, despite my dalliances outside of their normal confines, and be correct. I don’t want to. I have to say something. Otherwise, how would people know that they’ve got a shot with me, or that I had the wiring to scout them out? Here is as close as I can manage, as far as how a name for my gender identity and sexual orientation might sound: queer. I picture it as a spaceship, or, no—of course, a cruise ship. Picture one of the massive ocean liners in romantic comedies from the 1970s (coincidentally, my favorite aesthetic may be found among the streamers, muted pinks, and dinner gowns native to this decade’s cinematic boats): I am uneasy when people confine me to a specific word when my heart feels as roomy and compartmented as a sea vessel. I am open to whatever kinds of aliens might want to float along on holiday with me.