Contempt

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.

Page 191 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  activists in Britain or America. They placed their own construction on an approach to genetics that fitted neatly with their concern to promote Christian families with standards set by white Protestantism; in the USA the movement was suffused with the idea of America’s special place in a divine Providence of Protestant flavour. [22] The norms of the American heterosexual family entered the twentieth century further reinforced by work on genetics by an American enthusiast for racial segregation who, like Galton, came from a devout Quaker family: H. H. Goddard. His bestseller of 1912, The Kallikak Family, advocated preventing some families from breeding, to cut short their hereditary degeneracy and feeble-mindedness. The family tree of the ‘Kallikaks’ at the heart of the book was actually Goddard’s own invention. [23] Later, Goddard did adjust his findings to deal with criticism even from some enthusiasts for eugenics, but that gave little pause to those favouring selective sterilization on eugenic grounds for humans classed as ‘feeble-minded’. Early Christian proponents of scientific contraception did not distance themselves. Mrs Margaret Sanger (an Episcopalian convert from Roman Catholicism) was the founder in 1921 of what became Planned Parenthood, and she was also an advocate of ‘birth control’ targeting the American poor, among whom she discerned the socially ‘unfit’: ‘human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization’. British legislation on ‘Mental Deficiency’, enthusiastically sponsored by Winston Churchill from within the government in 1912, was in the end modified to avoid legalizing sterilization, concentrating instead on physically isolating in institutions those caught within its definitions. [24] By contrast, various programmes in states of the USA have, overall, resulted in around 80,000 sterilizations. The example of the United States inspired Nazi legislation in imitation during the 1930s, and although that tainted association might be considered to have thoroughly discredited the whole eugenics programme, officially sponsored sterilization programmes persisted in the USA and Canada into the twenty-first century. [25] The broad spectrum within the Protestant alliance that composed Social Purity did not map onto future Christian cultural divisions across the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, the female Social Purity movement in the USA and its expanding efforts to provide moral education for an entire society was dominated by the liberal or low-temperature Protestant mainstream of American religion: Presbyterian, Congregationalist or Unitarian, Methodist, Episcopalian. The rhetoric of Social Purity nevertheless still united it with the shaggier parts of the American Protestant ecclesiastical family such as the Southern Baptists, or the new manifestation of Protestant revivalist energy that emerged around 1900 in the form of Pentecostalism (below, Chapter 18). The rhetoric has subsequently survived much longer within conservative forms of Protestantism than among liberals.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Charting a course between an unhealthy repression of sexuality on the one hand, and the excesses of the sexual revolution on the other, the LaHayes offered a vision of sexuality securely confined within the structures of patriarchal authority. Men could have unrestrained libidos—they simply needed to satisfy themselves within marriage. Women needed to restrain themselves until marriage, at which point it was their duty to satisfy their husbands’ demands.7 For the LaHayes, women’s subordination was theological, social, and sexual: “The very nature of the act of marriage involves feminine surrender.” In language that would resurface in countless subsequent books on evangelical masculinity, the LaHayes assured men that women desired their heroic masculine leadership, in the bedroom and beyond: “Lurking in the heart of every girl (even when she is grown up) is the image of prince charming on his white horse coming to wake up the beautiful princess with her first kiss of love.”8 Beverly and Tim would each play strategic roles in the emerging Christian Right. The two had met as students at Bob Jones University in the 1940s, a school that would be at the center of debates over segregation and private Christian education throughout the 1970s and 1980s. (BJU did not admit African American students until 1971, and then only with strict rules against interracial dating and marriage that remained on the books until 2000.) Tim had served as a machine gunner on a bomber in the Second World War, and after college he earned a doctorate in literature from Liberty University. In the 1950s, the LaHayes joined in the evangelical migration to southern California, and there they would knit together the new set of issues that would come to define modern American evangelicalism. Deeply influenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly emerged as an influential leader in her own right. In 1976 she published The Spirit-Controlled Woman , a book that would sell over 800,000 copies, and in 1979 she founded Concerned Women for America (CWA), an evangelical organization devoted to carrying forward the pro-family, anti-feminist cause. Within only a few years, CWA surpassed Schlafly’s Eagle Forum in terms of membership and influence within American evangelicalism. Even more than Dobson, Beverly LaHaye motivated her followers to engage with politics; 98 percent of CWA members voted in the 1988 presidential election, 93 percent had signed or circulated a petition, 77 percent had boycotted a company or product, 74 percent had contacted a public official, and nearly half had written a letter to the editor.9 Tim LaHaye was a pastor and speaker (including for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 1970s), and the author of more than 85 books. A sampling of his nonfiction titles reveals the contours of his worldview: The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know about Homosexuality (1978), The Battle for the Mind (1980), The Battle for the Family (1981), The Battle for the Public Schools (1982), Faith in Our Founding Fathers (1987), and Raising Sexually Pure Kids (1993).

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Rumsfeld had two key deputies in this effort: Stephen Cambone, a neoconservative defense intellectual known for his dictatorial style, and Jerry Boykin.19 Cambone set out to circumvent both the CIA and the State Department, and with his special-ops experience, Boykin “was the action hero” at Cambone’s side. The partnership was, according to one military intelligence source, “a melding of ‘ignorance and recklessness.’” This sort of workaround wasn’t unprecedented. A secret counter-insurgency program called the Phoenix Program had been instituted during the Vietnam War, and in the 1980s a covert unit had been created after the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran; deployed against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, it helped lay the groundwork for the Iran-Contra connection. In the twenty-first century, under Rumsfeld’s leadership, the Pentagon was ready to fight fire with fire. “The only way we can win is to go unconventional,” explained an American advisor to the civilian authority in Baghdad. “We’re going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare the Iraqis into submission.” Another official concurred: “It’s not the way we usually play ball, but if you see a couple of your guys get blown away it changes things. We did the American things—and we’ve been the nice guy. Now we’re going to be the bad guy, and being the bad guy works.” Not everyone agreed. As one Pentagon advisor put it, “I’m as tough as anybody, but we’re also a democratic society, and we don’t fight terror with terror.” Rumsfeld, however, had been given the power to effectively establish “a global free-fire zone.”20 A devout evangelical, Boykin pursued his assignment zealously. And he wasn’t afraid to talk about it. He was a frequent speaker at conservative Christian events, especially at Baptist and Pentecostal churches, and he nearly always appeared in uniform. A “circuit rider for the religious right,” he worked in tandem with the Faith Force Multiplier, a group whose manifesto advocated applying military principles to evangelism. Boykin depicted the War on Terror as “an enduring battle against Satan” and assured fellow Christians that God had placed President Bush in power, “that radical Muslims hate America,” and that the military was “recruiting a spiritual army” to defeat its enemy. Part of Boykin’s mission involved evading the Geneva Conventions, and he appeared to be working to replace international law with his own notion of biblical law. He understood himself to be in God’s direct chain of command. President Bush, too, was “appointed by God” to root out evildoers. Clearly, they answered only to the highest power.21 When word of Boykin’s speeches came out, Arab and Muslim groups accused him of bigotry and demanded his removal. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee called for an inquiry and for Boykin to step down until cleared of wrongdoing, but Rumsfeld backed Boykin, and he retained his position.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Yet some insist that such a multidisciplinary approach is unnecessary and improper, in that the natural sciences can answer every significant question with a unique rational and cultural authority. This position is often known as ‘scientism’, which can be described as ‘a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions.’39 I used to think this myself, so I can easily understand its appeal to anyone longing for certainty. For the philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg, science offers ‘irrefutably correct answers’ (hence eliminating any need for belief or any anxiety about uncertainty) to ‘persistent questions’ such as ‘What is the nature of reality?’ (his answer: what physics says it is), or ‘What is the purpose of the universe?’ (his answer: there is none). Rosenberg graciously concedes that ‘knowing the truth makes it hard not to sound patronizing of the benighted souls still under religion’s spell.’ But if you have discovered what you believe to be ‘irrefutably correct answers’, I suppose it’s irritating when others suggest you may have got things wrong. In the light of his unassailable certainties about life, Rosenberg declares that it is pointless to try and find ‘a good reason to go on living, because there isn’t any.’ Happily, Rosenberg has a therapeutic solution for those who might be troubled by the absence of morality or meaning from their worlds: if this ‘makes it impossible to get out of bed in the morning,’ you should try Prozac (other neuro-pharmacological fixes are, of course, available). Rosenberg presents himself as a lofty, rational observer of other people’s madness. Yet I am unpersuaded by his line of argument. Let me invite you to join me in a mental experiment that might be helpful in exploring this question. During the COVID lockdown of 2020–21, I regularly used a thermometer to determine my temperature. A raised temperature would not necessarily mean that I had COVID, but it was certainly an indication that I needed to check things out. Suppose I were to argue like this. My thermometer proved to be a reliable tool for checking my temperature. Since it worked so well in that role, why not use it for everything? Like working out what is right or wrong? Or whether I have free will? Or determining the meaning of life? Now this will strike most of my readers as a ridiculous argument. I suspect (and hope) many will respond to my suggestion like this: a thermometer has been designed to check temperatures! It doesn’t do anything else! It’s not meant to be used for ethical or existential issues! But that’s my point. Intellectual disciplines devise their own research methods to engage specific aspects of reality. A research method that works for one domain will be useless or misleading if used in another. Rosenberg is simply universalising a tool that was designed with other specific (and limited) purposes in mind.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  115 more horri¿ c, because Melito considers Jesus to be God, he accuses Israel of deicide: they have murdered the creator of the universe, God himself. (Melito Easter Homily, chapters. 95–96). This is the ¿ rst of many charges that the Jewish people killed God. Such animosity, as it emerged in the 2 nd and 3rd centuries, did not have a huge impact on society at large. Most people were neither Jew nor Christian, so the squabbles were ultimately of little moment outside the small circles of Christianity. All that changed, of course, with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity in the 4 th century A.D. Thereafter, it become quite popular to be Christian, and Christianity, as a result, eventually had the power of the entire empire behind it. At that point, Christian animosity toward Judaism took on a fevered pitch and Christians had the wherewithal, at last, to act out their animosity. Synagogues were burned, property was con¿ scated, Jews were killed. This was the beginning of one of the most heinous chapters in the history of Christianity, from the anti-Semitism dominant among Christian countries throughout the Middle Ages to the climax in our own time with the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust. The Book of Hebrews, of course, does not urge acts of anti-Semitism. It stands only at the beginning of a trajectory of thought that leads to anti- Semitism. In fact, it’s clear from the book that it is the Christians at the time who have been experiencing persecution—possibly at the hands of Jews, who near the end of the 1 st century were far more numerous and powerful than the Christians, but more likely at the hands of local governmental authorities (cf., 10:32–34). This author is urging his hearers not to fall away from the faith in the midst of their suffering, not to turn away into a more protected religion, such as Judaism. Those who neglect the salvation provided by Christ, who return to the outside world after joining the Church, will receive a fearful and eternal punishment (2:1–4; 3:7–18; 10:27–29). Ŷ

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  4 Lecture 1: The Early Christians and Their Literature The Early Christians and Their Literature Lecture 1 There can be no question that the Christian church since the 4 th century has been the most signi¿ cant social, economic, political, and cultural force in Western civilization. And the foundation of the church was and is the New Testament. T he New Testament continues to be a ¿ eld of ongoing fascination, not just for Christian theologians, pastors, and believers, but also for professional historians and lay people interested in classics, history, and literature. Virtually all modern historians would agree that the New Testament has been the most signi¿ cant book, or group of books, in the history of Western civilization. It continues to be an object of reverence and inspiration for millions of Christians today, a book that governs peoples’ personal lives, shapes their religious views, and gives them a sense of hope. The New Testament also plays an enormous role in our political and social lives. The meaning of the book is not self-evident. The differenced interpretation are not just related to geography, culture, and history—they are also related to different understandings of the New Testament. There are a number of ways we could approach the New Testament in this course. We could approach it from the perspective of the faithful believer. This is how most people who read the New Testament approach the subject. There are other equally valid ways of approaching the New Testament that do not require either that we all should agree about religion or even that we should agree to believe or disbelieve in the New Testament itself. It is possible to study the book from this cultural perspective of one interested in the development of Western civilization. There can be little question that this book stands at the foundation of Western civilization as we know it. Whatever you happen to think about the New Testament, there can be no question that the Christian church has, since the 4 th century, been the most signi¿ cant social, economic, political, and cultural force in Western civilization. And the foundation of the Church was and is the New Testament. We could study how it has played such a huge role in Western art or English literature.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  It would be a war filled with “murder, rape, and mayhem,” and it wouldn’t be won “by parlor games in board rooms” or holy hugs or singing “Kum Ba Ya.” Jesus, the Warrior Leader, would lead the assault against “Satan’s terrorists.” Along with Jesus, Welch looked to figures like Robert E. Lee and KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest as models of warrior leadership.14 [image "image" file=Image00013.jpg] Air Force cadets walking past the Academy’s Chapel in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in August 2003. AP PHOTO / ED ANDRIESKI . It was precisely this evangelical warrior rhetoric that made Antoon’s skin crawl. He found this attitude “diametrically opposed” to the values instilled in him decades earlier. Then, fighting and killing had been spoken of “soberly and with humility”—killing was accepted as a fact of war, not exalted. But “somehow that had all been transformed into a kind of holy bloodlust.” Antoon identified a source of this infiltration. He’d seen cadets and families at the Cadet Chapel welcomed by “a phalanx of enthusiastic pastors” and recruited to Monday night Bible studies taught by members of New Life Church and Focus on the Family staff bused in for that purpose. The academy, Antoon realized, had become “a giant Trojan horse for evangelicals to get inside the military.”15 Efforts to address evangelical overreach were met with staunch resistance from evangelicals themselves, inside and outside the military. Under pressure from critics, the academy put together an interfaith team to promote religious diversity, but evangelicals up the chain of command rebuffed these efforts. When reviewing materials the team had compiled, Major General Charles Baldwin, air force chief of chaplains, repeatedly wanted to know why “Christians don’t ever win.” Baldwin, who had a master of divinity degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and had served at the academy’s Cadet Chapel before taking up duties in Washington, also objected to a clip from Schindler’s List “because it made ‘Christians look like Nazis.’” (The scene was replaced with one from Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers .) With support from Focus on the Family’s Alliance Defense Fund, evangelical chaplain James Glass brought a legal motion claiming that any effort to curb prayer or proselytizing was a violation of his freedom of speech. Focus on the Family denounced all criticism as unjustified, and “fervently hope[d] that this ridiculous bias of a few against the religion of a majority—Christianity—will now cease.”16 Increasingly, evangelicalism was the religion of the majority within the armed forces. In 2005, 40 percent of active duty personnel identified as evangelical, and 60 percent of military chaplains did. As in other branches of the military, the presence of evangelical chaplains in the air force had increased significantly from 1994 to 2005, and evangelical chaplains brought with them a commitment to evangelism; Brig. Gen.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  120 Lecture 22: First Peter and the Persecution of the Early Christians Christians were themselves persecuted and prosecuted—not because their religion was against some kind of Roman law—but because they were perceived as public nuisances. Authorities took care of problems on an ad hoc basis. From both Paul and the Book of Acts, we see that Christian missionary activity sometimes led to public disturbances. Christians would often abandon their own families to join the new community. These splits in the family were often painful to those who were left behind (cf ., Matt. 10:34–37). Because the Christians were known to be a closed community, they sometimes came under suspicion as a secret society. In particular, widely believed slanders were leveled against the Christians. Because they met at night, called one another brother and sister, engaged in “love feasts” (that is, communal meals), practiced a ritual kiss, and actually ate the body and drank the blood of the son of God, they were widely believed to engage in nocturnal orgies involving incest and cannibalism (cf., the words of Fronto, the teacher of the 2 nd-century emperor Marcus Aurelius). Altogether, the early Christians had a considerable “image problem.” Consider the two pagan authors who were the ¿ rst to mention Jesus, whom we discussed earlier. The Roman historian Tacitus labeled the Christians a “pernicious superstition” and says they were the “hatred of the human race.” This, he claims, is why Nero could easily make them scapegoats for the burning of Rome for which he was responsible ( Annals 15). Pliny the Younger, governor of part of the region that 1 Peter itself addresses, called them “obstinate” and “mad” adherents of a “depraved superstition.” He was responsible for their persecution when they refused to abandon their Christian ways. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Christians refused to participate in the public ceremonies honoring the state and local gods. Because the Christians believed there was only one true God, they couldn’t very well participate in the worship of others. This made no sense, though, to pagans. As polytheists, they found the idea that if you worshipped one god you couldn’t worship another to be nonsense (it would be the same as saying that you couldn’t like one friend if you happened to like another). In addition, it was widely believed that the only thing the gods required was that people perform occasional acts of reverence to them—for example, through public sacri¿ ces—and that any calamities that happened in life were the result of

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  23 Dogmatism, however, designates a different category of discourse, which can be framed as a tendency to regard the beliefs and principles of a specific individual or community as objectively and self-evidently correct, despite their deficient evidential foundations and the existence of viable alternatives. Whereas ‘good thinking’ leads to a confidence that is proportional to the evidence available, dogmatic beliefs are held and asserted with a confidence that masks their being grounded on inadequate or biased thinking. Although some suggest that dogmatism is characteristic of religious people or beliefs, the evidence clearly indicates that it is linked with a wide range of domains, situations, topics and issues – particularly politics. 24 While the Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century emphasised the importance of open-mindedness and the destructive nature of dogmatism, the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new authoritarianism, made tangible in the rise of Fascism and the cult of submission to strongmen such as Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin. 25 Our concern, however, is not so much with an ‘authoritarian personality’ (someone who prefers a social system with a strong ruler) 26 as with dogmatic beliefs or hardened belief systems – ideas that clearly cannot be shown to be true, but which are asserted and enforced as if they were absolute certainties. A dogma is a belief which commands acquiescence and assent as a matter of obedience to a charismatic individual or a controlling community – such as the Soviet Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s. Though having the epistemic status of a belief or opinion, a dogma is treated as a truth whose denial constituted irrationality or mental illness. It is worth recalling that Pravda (the Russian word for ‘truth’) was the official organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1991, which informed its readers what they ought to think. This was the ‘truth’ that Party members were required to acknowledge. The psychologist Judy K. Johnson argues that dogmatism is ‘the arrogant voice of certainty that closes the mind, damages relationships and threatens peaceful coexistence on this planet.’ 27 For the philosophers Richard C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, dogmatism represents a ‘disposition to respond irrationally to oppositions’ to certain tenets of their beliefs, 28 often leading to ridicule rather than engagement, evasion rather than discussion. Dogmatism can be seen as an epistemically unjustified certainty arising from the confluence of cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics that lead to prejudicial closed-minded belief systems. A ‘dogmatic’ person is likely to be intolerant of ambiguity, to encourage an in-group vilification of out-groups, and to develop a form of mental compartmentalisation which protectively encloses its own declarations in barbed wire, while sealing off contradictory beliefs in such a way that they do not pose a threat.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  77 there are “Pauline” books whose authorship is debated. Most scholars, for example, are convinced that Paul did not write the books of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (called the “Pastoral” epistles, because they deal with how these pastors should oversee their churches). Scholars continue to dispute whether Paul wrote three other books that claim him as an author: Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians. These books, therefore, are designated the Deutero-Pauline epistles; that is, epistles that have a secondary standing in the Pauline canon. The seven remaining letters—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon—are designated the “undisputed” Pauline epistles, because virtually everyone agrees that Paul wrote them. Any study of Paul is best served to restrict itself to the letters he is known to have produced. All of Paul’s letters were “occasional” in nature. These are not systematic treatises on set topics, but letters written to address actual concerns that arose in Paul’s churches. We should not expect these letters to cover every topic of importance to Paul. For example, Paul mentions the “Lord’s Supper” in only one passage, 1 Cor. 11, because the Corinthians were not observing it correctly; if they had been, we never would have known that Paul found its observance to be important. A careful study of Paul’s letters, with an eye to the Book of Acts for corroboration, reveals several important pieces of biographical information on Paul, which can serve as the backdrop for our study. Paul was born and raised a Jew, committed to the traditions of Pharisaism; he was steeped in and deeply attached to the Law of Moses as given by God (Gal. 1:13– 14; Phil. 3:4–6). In fact, Paul is the only surviving Pharisaic author from before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. He seems to have been raised outside of Palestine and evidently did not know Jesus. He spoke and wrote Greek and appears not to have understood the Semitic languages of the region. For some reason, when he learned about the early Christian movement as an adult, he found it blasphemous and dangerous (Gal. 1:13). He may have shared a traditional view that the messiah was to be a ¿ gure of grandeur and power and found that the proclamation that the messiah was a cruci¿ ed criminal—one who was, therefore, cursed by God (Deut. 27:26; cf., Gal.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  (his answer: what physics says it is), or ‘What is the purpose of the universe?’ (his answer: there is none). Rosenberg graciously concedes that ‘knowing the truth makes it hard not to sound patronizing of the benighted souls still under religion’s spell.’ But if you have discovered what you believe to be ‘irrefutably correct answers’, I suppose it’s irritating when others suggest you may have got things wrong. In the light of his unassailable certainties about life, Rosenberg declares that it is pointless to try and find ‘a good reason to go on living, because there isn’t any.’ Happily, Rosenberg has a therapeutic solution for those who might be troubled by the absence of morality or meaning from their worlds: if this ‘makes it impossible to get out of bed in the morning,’ you should try Prozac (other neuro-pharmacological fixes are, of course, available). Rosenberg presents himself as a lofty, rational observer of other people’s madness. Yet I am unpersuaded by his line of argument. Let me invite you to join me in a mental experiment that might be helpful in exploring this question. During the COVID lockdown of 2020–21, I regularly used a thermometer to determine my temperature. A raised temperature would not necessarily mean that I had COVID, but it was certainly an indication that I needed to check things out. Suppose I were to argue like this. My thermometer proved to be a reliable tool for checking my temperature. Since it worked so well in that role, why not use it for everything? Like working out what is right or wrong? Or whether I have free will? Or determining the meaning of life? Now this will strike most of my readers as a ridiculous argument. I suspect (and hope) many will respond to my suggestion like this: a thermometer has been designed to check temperatures! It doesn’t do anything else! It’s not meant to be used for ethical or existential issues! But that’s my point. Intellectual disciplines devise their own research methods to engage specific aspects of reality. A research method that works for one domain will be useless or misleading if used in another. Rosenberg is simply universalising a tool that was designed with other specific (and limited) purposes in mind. Mary Midgley makes this point in a highly critical assessment of those who, like Rosenberg, demand that every intellectual domain should be subordinated to the methods of physicists. ‘No one pattern of thought – not even in physics – is so “fundamental” that all others will eventually be reduced to it. Instead, for most important questions in human life, a number of different conceptual tool-boxes always have to be used together.’ 40 But I have a second problem with Rosenberg’s approach, which he himself recognises: his argument for the exclusive authority of science is viciously circular, presupposing (indeed, relying upon) its conclusions.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  One difficulty concerns the increasingly polarised nature of American political discourse since the 1970s. An ideological polarisation, resulting from divergent viewpoints, is increasingly being supplemented with an affective polarisation, expressing distaste and dislike for the people holding these views. 44 It is not simply that American culture has become more polarised; the nature of that polarisation has become more complex, involving often trenchant views about the morality, intelligence and integrity of those who hold alternative viewpoints. It remains unclear whether Rawls’ views regarding finding agreement about fair outcomes can be sustained when there is such personal distrust within and across the political spectrum. Beyond the difference that believing makes to individuals, we have begun to contemplate how these shape public life and debate. In the next chapter, we shall focus on the question of the relation of beliefs and communities, focusing particularly on how ‘communities of belief’ come into being, function, and are prone to losing their way. Chapter 3 The Case of Religious Belief It is fatally easy to believe that something that has been named is something that is understood . Everyone thinks they know what ‘religion’ is. Perhaps this is why it remains such a viable category in public discourse and everyday life. But cultural familiarity is not the same as intellectual stability. We are all familiar with the term ‘love’, but people profess and embody this notion in vastly different ways from one culture to another, across age groups and even within the same home. What is Religion? Religion, we are often told, is a universal human phenomenon. This may be true, but the popular conceptualisation of ‘religion’ is decidedly western, shaped by the social and intellectual history of modern western Europe and North America. Allegedly ‘global’ definitions of religion are generally based on the views of present-day WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) populations, overlooking the views of as much as eighty-eight per cent of humanity today, and reflecting a disturbing disregard for how the concept was understood in the past. So, what do we study when we study religion? After all, a psychologist of religion or a sociologist of religion needs to know what they are meant to be investigating. Yet to speak of ‘religion’ is to enter a definitional cloud of unknowing, a miasma of personal opinions, cultural prejudices and questionable inherited intellectual habits which shroud the landscape like a dense fog. For example, while Judaism can be described as a ‘religion’, and Jews understood as adherents of this religion, there is growing scholarly evidence that Jews are better understood as a ‘people group’ with ancestral practices and beliefs that have become normative over time. 1 Take Ancient Rome.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Perhaps more worryingly, belief is toxic. If you believe something that is unevidenced, you will end up believing anything that is unevidenced, falling victim to a kind of ‘blind faith’ which is socially and politically dangerous. Maybe it is faintly amusing that some less evolved human beings believe in a sky fairy. But what if this delusion leads them to fly airplanes into buildings? Surely something needs to be done to eliminate such backward and destructive ways of thinking? Richard Dawkins expressed the deep cultural anxieties of many about belief and faith which crystallised around the turn of the millennium: ‘I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.’ Inevitably, the tone of the discussion of belief shifted as a result of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Many political commentators saw this as the outcome of American foreign policy and military interventionism in the Middle East, which generated a demand for retribution in this region. One analysis suggests that western sanctions against Iraq in the period between the two Gulf Wars caused more deaths than ‘all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.’1 Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, however, reframed this event as a demonstration of the dangers of religion. Religion was denounced as the ‘opium of the people’, impairing proper mental functioning and thus inducing extremism and violence. They say that nothing can stop an idea whose time has come; for many, these were the prophets of a new worldview that had been waiting for its moment in the sun. New Atheism encouraged a discriminatory rhetoric which turned a longstanding academic discussion on the reasonableness of religious belief into a political lightning rod in which conventions of thoughtful debate and personal civility were set to one side. Bumper slogans appeared, unconstrained by any consideration of truth or morality. ‘I think, therefore I am an atheist.’ Or, ‘God doesn’t kill People. People who believe in God kill People.’ The target of these denunciations was no longer simply religious ideas, but religious people. These, it was argued, are deluded and dangerous and therefore should be socially marginalised, excluded from positions of influence. Perhaps it was inevitable that religion, as the writer Marilynne Robinson observed, has ‘dropped out of the cultural conversation’. It seems that religion has been shamed into the margins of our culture, embarrassed out of the public square. Not everyone greeted this development with equanimity. Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain to Harvard University, was one of many who protested against shaming people for their faith. While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in God and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.2

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Innocent was now free to convoke again the council which Frederick’s forcible measures had prevented from assembling in Rome. It is known as the First Council of Lyons, or the Thirteenth Oecumenical Council, and met in Lyons, 1245. The measures the papal letter mentioned as calling for action were the provision of relief for the Holy Land and of resistance to the Mongols whose ravages had extended to Hungary, and the settlement of matters in dispute between the Apostolic see and the emperor. One hundred and forty prelates were present. With the exception of a few representatives from England and one or two bishops from Germany, the attendance was confined to ecclesiastics from Southern Europe.256 Baldwin, emperor of Constantinople, was there to plead his dismal cause. Frederick was represented by his able counsellor, Thaddeus of Suessa. Thaddeus promised for his master to restore Greece to the Roman communion and proceed to the Holy Land in person. Innocent rejected the promises as intended to deceive and to break up the council. The axe, he said, was laid at the root, and the stroke was not to be delayed. When Thaddeus offered the kings of England and France as sureties that the emperor would keep his promise, the pope sagaciously replied that in that case he would be in danger of having three princes to antagonize. Innocent was plainly master of the situation. The council was in sympathy with him. Many of its members had a grudge against Frederick for having been subjected to the outrage of capture and imprisonment by him.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Mary Midgley makes this point in a highly critical assessment of those who, like Rosenberg, demand that every intellectual domain should be subordinated to the methods of physicists. ‘No one pattern of thought – not even in physics – is so “fundamental” that all others will eventually be reduced to it. Instead, for most important questions in human life, a number of different conceptual tool-boxes always have to be used together.’40 But I have a second problem with Rosenberg’s approach, which he himself recognises: his argument for the exclusive authority of science is viciously circular, presupposing (indeed, relying upon) its conclusions. Imagine someone who makes the following assertion: ‘science is the only reliable arbitrator of reliable knowledge, offering “irrefutably correct answers” to any meaningful questions.’ Here’s my point: if science is the only secure foundation and reliable arbitrator of human knowledge, it necessarily follows that we must use science to reliably evaluate every belief or proposal – including the belief that ‘science is the only reliable arbitrator of reliable knowledge’. What experiment might show that science is the sole source of reliable knowledge? How could Rosenberg’s claim be validated from outside a scientific perspective? Rosenberg’s whole process of validation is ultimately self-referential and self-validating, allowing us to affirm the internal consistency but not the truth of this belief – and it is a belief, in that it cannot be proved to be true. Furthermore, how can we know that there is no more to reality than the laws of nature that science discovers? Declaring that science is the ‘ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions’ is making a second-order philosophical claim about science, which cannot be verified empirically. As the philosopher Edward Feser points out, Rosenberg is trapped in a circular argument. To break out of this circle, he suggests, ‘requires “getting outside” science altogether’ and verifying from an ‘extra-scientific vantage point’ that science alone offers a reliable picture of reality. Yet making this entirely reasonable intellectual move simply pulls the rug out from Rosenberg’s argument. ‘The very existence of that extra-scientific vantage point would falsify the claim that science alone gives us a rational means of investigating objective reality.’41 Over the years, I have come to the view that there is a spectrum of human knowledge, which rests on the application of a range of different ‘conceptual tool-boxes’ (Midgley), each developed and adapted with specific research questions in mind. Some examples may help illustrate the rich diversity of questions that people consider significant, and which they hope may be answered. What is the universe expanding into? Why can’t I be the good person that I know I ought to be?

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  168) denies the identity of the Logos with Christ, and resolves the Logos into a divine principle, instead of a person. "Der Logos ist nicht die Person Christi ... sondern er ist das gottheitliche Princip dieser menschlichen Persönlichkeit." He assumes a gradual unfolding of the Logos principle in the human person of Christ. But the personality of the Logos is taught in John 1:1–3, and ejgevneto denotes a completed act. We must remember, however, that personality in the trinity and personality of the Logos are different from personality of man. Human speech is inadequate to express the distinction. § 73. Heretical Perversions of the Apostolic Teaching. (Comp. my Hist. of the Ap. Ch., pp. 649–674.) The three types of doctrine which we have briefly unfolded, exhibit Christianity in the whole fulness of its life; and they form the theme for the variations of the succeeding ages of the church. Christ is the key-note, harmonizing all the discords and resolving all the mysteries of the history of his kingdom. But this heavenly body of apostolic truth is confronted with the ghost of heresy; as were the divine miracles of Moses with the satanic juggleries of the Egyptians, and as Christ was with demoniacal possessions. The more mightily the spirit of truth rises, the more active becomes the spirit of falsehood. "Where God builds a church the devil builds, a chapel close by." But in the hands of Providence all errors must redound to the unfolding and the final victory of the truth. They stimulate inquiry and compel defence. Satan himself is that "power which constantly wills the bad, and works the good." Heresies in a disordered world are relatively necessary and negatively justifiable; though the teachers of them are, of course, not the less guilty. "It must needs be, that scandals come; but woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh."862 The heresies of the apostolic age are, respectively, the caricatures of the several types of the true doctrine. Accordingly we distinguish three fundamental forms of heresy, which reappear, with various modifications, in almost every subsequent period. In this respect, as in others, the apostolic period stands as the type of the whole future; and the exhortations and warnings of the New Testament against false doctrine have force for every age. 1. The Judaizing tendency is the heretical counterpart of Jewish Christianity. It so insists on the unity of Christianity with Judaism, as to sink the former to the level of the latter, and to make the gospel no more than an improvement or a perfected law. It regards Christ as a mere prophet, a second Moses; and denies, or at least wholly overlooks, his divine nature and his priestly and kingly offices. The Judaizers were Jews in fact, and Christians only in appearance and in name. They held circumcision and the whole moral and ceremonial law of Moses to be still binding, and the observance of them necessary to salvation.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  And you should not expect him or her to be. "You should expect it to be good," says Famous Chef. That's the bottom line. BOTTOMING OUT There is no one less sympathetic to the trials, tribulations, and humiliations of the addict than an ex-junkie. No emergency room triage is more immediate and unforgiving than the way an ex-junkie sizes up a still-in-the grip former colleague. I hear that familiar, whiny tone of voice, I see the pinned, cartoon eyes of the smack user, or the jumpy, twitchy, molar-grinding, gibberish- spewing face of the coke-fiend, and I see a dead man. I'm not listening anymore. If I pay attention at all, it's to make sure they're not rifling through my coat. Cold? Yes. But then, junkies are used to stone-cold logic. Life, for someone whose body, brain, nerves, and cell tissue require (rather than desire) their drug of choice in order to get out of bed in the morning, is actually a very simple matter. You have one job: To get drugs. There's only one thing you have to do each day: Get drugs. One's priorities are always straight. Simply put: Nothing else matters. Those of us who've been addicted to heroin and/or cocaine (and I've been addicted to both) understand that better than anybody. You know, without question, that your best friend in the world will, given the opportunity, steal your drugs or your money or snitch you off to the cops. You know, without question, exactly how low you would be willing to go to get what you need. Chances are, you've been there already. More than once. Stories about drugs and rehabilitation are boring, particularly when it's some Hollywood actor, grinning out from the cover of People magazine, yammering about Clean and Sober and their new project. We've heard it all before. Some people live. Others die. Who survives and who doesn't seems most often to have been determined long before the subject enters treatment—when the junkie in question looks in the mirror one morning and decides that he really, truly wants to live. If there's any question in your mind, before you even walk through the doors of the methadone clinic or rehab facility, about how badly you want to turn things around, and what you're willing to do to accomplish that, then lose my number. The memory of the bitter taste of heroin in the back of my throat, the smell of burning candles, the taste of paint chips mistaken for a pebble of dropped crack, a whiff of urine and stale air from long-ago tenement drug superstores on the Lower East Side all came back when I watched Robert Downey Jr. being hauled off again in handcuffs.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The philosopher Thomas Nagel once asked: what is it like to be a bat?25 The point he was making remains important. If you aren’t a bat, you can’t tell what it’s like to be a bat, as this demands a comprehension of the bat’s first-person subjective experience. We may understand something about bats (such as the way they locate objects through echolocation), but that is an external third-person perspective, which doesn’t clarify anything about what it feels like to be a bat. Thomas Metzinger made a similar point, emphasising the divergence of two completely different ways of thinking or experiencing: an ‘inner’ account (a ‘first-person perspective’) and an ‘outside’ account (a ‘third-person perspective’).26 I often feel that some atheist critiques of religion are based on uninterrogated external assumptions about what religion must be and how religion must feel, lacking any sense of intellectual curiosity or cultural empathy that might motivate them to understand what religious people think and mean by words such as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. Terry Eagleton is one of many cultural critics to make this point: ‘imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’27 Philip Pullman is much more alert to the complexities of faith than Dawkins, highlighting the importance of a ‘sense that there is a power bigger than us’ which is ‘deserving of attention and respect’, while at the same time rightly expressing concerns about the entanglements of organised religion with money and political influence.28 This tendency to misunderstand or misread religious terms may help us understand why atheist critics of religious faith often focus on purely propositional understandings of belief, or interpret God in terms of imagined teapots orbiting distant planets, or ‘sky fairies’ that do not match up with either the self-understanding or experience of religious believers. As has often been pointed out, ‘what the atheist rejects is seldom what the theologian or believer professes.’29 The outcome is inevitable: the dialogue partners misunderstand each other, shooting past each other rather than engaging in a meaningful conversation. Thinking of religious beliefs in terms of ‘cosmic teapots’ suggests that they are essentially a form of ‘knowledge through description’, along the same lines as scientific statements, making no personal claims on the person who holds these views. This view of religion as a misguided and outdated form of science, set out originally in James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), misses the point completely.30

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  How might this be done? One way of applying Wittgenstein’s critical method is to look at the world through a series of potential informing ‘pictures’ or ‘worldviews’. We cannot dispense with these pictures; we can, however, ask which is the most reliable and appropriate. For Wittgenstein, a ‘picture’ changes the ways in which we see things. We can look at reality through a range of such pictures, and ask which of them offers the best rendering of our world. As Gordon Baker points out, Wittgenstein sets out ‘a kind of homeopathy’ in which ‘pictures are to be treated with pictures’.26 His philosophical therapy involves a willingness on our part to explore comparisons, leading to a ‘conversion to a new way of seeing things’. How well does it make sense of what we observe? What does it tell us about ourselves, and other human beings? Does it promote fulfilment? Or does it trap us in a limited and limiting world, such as Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rationalism? The first step to securing freedom is to realise that alternative ways of seeing the world are available. Wittgenstein’s critical analysis is invaluable for those who find themselves shackled to a bad philosophical system or individual ‘bad beliefs’,27 and want to break free from their thrall. As with the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous, Wittgenstein’s first step is to force us to realise that we are ‘captive’ – that we have trapped ourselves within a limiting worldview, and need to break free from its constraints and distortions (Wittgenstein is particularly helpful to those recovering from the existential nihilism of scientism). Some worldviews offer us reassurance that the world is coherent and existentially inhabitable. Yet others are often constructed to justify the marginalisation, exclusion or even persecution of others. The most familiar example of this is the dehumanising racial ideology of National Socialism, which treated Jews, Roma, Poles and Serbs as Untermenschen (‘sub-humans’). However, similar racial ideologies became influential in the United States after the First World War. During the 1920s, William McDougall – chair of the Psychology Department at Harvard University – advocated disenfranchising blacks, restricting intermarriage between races and complete segregation of blacks from whites on ‘scientific’ grounds.28 A decade later, Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of the ‘Nation of Islam’ in the United States, set out a creation narrative which claimed that blacks were ‘God’s Original People’, and that ‘whites were grafted into existence by Yakub, an evil black scientist, around 6,000 years ago.’29 Sadly, there is no shortage of ideologies which cause one set of human beings to regard others as representing a lower form of life – and hence as not entitled to the respect and rights afforded to proper human beings. Belief systems can easily lead to the construction of a moral framework that privileges some and legitimises discrimination and violence against others or gives a dangerous amount of normative or interpretative authority to a particular institution. The author and journalist Arthur Koestler learned this lesson the hard way.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  By the late twentieth century, the dreadful Mrs Butler had gained a commemorative feast day in the Church of England’s liturgy. [18] Temperance and prostitution were the supernova causes in a galaxy of fights against such expressions of hyper-masculinity as duelling, gambling, tobacco-smoking or the eating of meat. They were all summed up in a phrase that on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1870s became a common shorthand for moral campaigning movements: ‘Social Purity’, really a euphemism for sexual purity. In this cause, the US Women’s Christian Temperance Union used its considerable political influence to diversify its concerns. At the end of the two-decade reign of its Methodist President Frances Willard in 1898, twenty-five of its fifty-nine departments had campaigning briefs other than temperance; naturally they included votes for women, in the cause of pushing for legislation on alcohol. [19] It is significant that the WCTU also sought to limit Catholic immigration, a clear threat to the purity of Protestant America. The tone of such campaigning organizations was white, female, Protestant, middle class. They did not spare either men or social elites in seeking to hold all Americans to a common standard of sexual behaviour, and were determined to educate the next generation in principles to reflect that standard; public censorship of literature and entertainment was high on their list of priorities, merging into temperance campaigns. Their Christian values became American family values. In all this, they were in uneasy alliance with the increasingly powerful and well-organized medical profession, the uneasiness in large part because doctors were almost exclusively male, and might not share their moral preoccupations. In one important respect doctors yielded to Social Purity activists, in leaving public sex education to Protestant organizations led by women. It was an aspect of women’s duties to their families, and male clergy were as generally inclined as doctors to make a grateful escape from the obligation. [20] The cautious alliance of the Social Purity movement with the new medical establishment reflected a respect for the remarkable advances in medical science from the mid-nineteenth century that made diagnosis, treatment and surgery less threatening to human life than they had ever been. Western humans simply knew more about the physical realities of reproduction than in any previous generation, but, as so often in rapid advances of knowledge, there was overconfidence about the implications. One considerable wrong turn was to take too seriously the intellectual respectability of the ‘science’ of eugenics: the proposition that it was possible to breed high achievement through bloodlines, which just happened to favour members of the white social elite. The arguments were fostered from within what appeared to be a textbook case to prove the point: the extended clan of British intellectuals that included Charles Darwin. Darwin’s polymathic cousin Francis Galton’s major publication in 1869, Hereditary Genius , set the standard for constructing what looked like scientific arguments, effectively inventing intelligence tests and allied statistical tools, which other scientists much expanded into the twentieth century.