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.

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• 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 Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  We do not engage in many dialogues like this today. The debates in our parliamentary institutions, the media, academia, and the law courts are essentially competitive. It is not enough for us to seek the truth; we also want to defeat and even humiliate our opponents. The malice and bullying tactics decried by Socrates are embraced with enthusiasm as part of the fun. A great deal of this type of discourse is a display of ego. There is no question of anybody admitting that she does not know the answer or has doubts about the validity of her case—even about complex issues for which there are no easy answers. Admitting that your opponents may have a valid point seems unthinkable. The last thing anybody intends is a change of mind. But while aggressive debate may be useful in politics, it is unlikely to transform hearts and minds—especially when an issue arouses passions that are already bitter and entrenched. In our highly contentious world, we need to develop a twenty-first-century form of Socrates’ compassionate discourse. For some years now, I have tried to counter the stereotypical view of Islam that has been current in the West for centuries but has become more prevalent since the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Like any received idea, it is based on what the Buddha called “hearsay” rather than accurate knowledge or understanding. So when politicians or pundits have insisted that Islam is an inherently violent, intolerant faith or inveigh furiously against the practice of veiling, for example, I have written articles, based on my study of Islamic history, to challenge this. But I have recently decided that this is counterproductive. All that happens is that my article is virulently attacked and my assailants rehearse the old ideas again with greater venom. As a result, the intellectual atmosphere becomes even more polluted and people remain entrenched in angry negativity. As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if these are criticized or corrected. Perhaps it would be better to take a leaf out of the Buddha’s book and start from where people actually are rather than where we think they ought to be. In such public debates, instead of trying to bludgeon other people into accepting our own point of view, we may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them yet again.

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

  As silly and as sad as all Rob's social climbing, star-fucking, and ass-crawling might be: the TV Boot Camp where Rob had assiduously studied the fine art of simultaneously cooking and being telegenically charming, the dermabrasion to remove the evidence of an adolescent bout with acne, the ever-changing hair styles, one day straight, one day spiky, and suspiciously fuller these days at the crown (Jesus! Was he getting plugs?), the voice coach, the elocution lessons, the personal trainer, the constant sucking up to those miserable fucking shakedown artists at the Institute for Fine Food. Where were they now? Paul winced, thinking of all the whoring they'd done together, all the times Rob had put on his smile and floated and sucked up to Mortimer Hitchcock, the egotistical reviewer-slash-professional extortionist who published the ubiquitous Hitchcock Guide to Restaurants. More free food. More command performances at ridiculous charity events designed to do nothing more charitable than pump more gaseous air into Hitchcock's already bloated ego. An eight-cylinder hoodlum in the guise of an erudite diner, his face absolutely wriggling with corruption—he could probably teach the Genovese crime family something about coercion. Taste of Tribeca. Taste of Times Square. Taste of Gramercy Park. The ludicrous and thankfully short-lived "Res-taurantgoer's Manifesto," an attempt by the loathsome author publisher to elevate his status to more Jeffersonian heights. And Food Week! More bite-size portions of free food, more freebies. Chefs all around the city had to dumb down their menus, discount chicken or salmon for a bunch of cheap, useless shut-ins in cat-hair-covered skirts and basketball sneakers who'd just as soon be sucking down the early-bird special. What was that line in Taxi Driver? "Someday a big red tide is gonna come and wash them all away"? Paul hoped so. Jesus it was hard. It was probably hard being Rob Holland, who'd had to figuratively (or literally) French kiss all of them. Paul, though he'd been working without a day off, sixteen or seventeen hours a day, for three months while Rob worked the room, took day trips to the Hamptons and Aspen and Paris, wouldn't have traded places with him for any amount of money or fame. He just couldn't summon any animosity. Because Rob could cook. Because even now there was something of a little boy in Rob, so desperate for affection and respect, a yearning, Paul thought, for the day when the kid from Revere could look at himself in the mirror and be happy and proud of what he saw there. He did, however, resent that it had been left to him to break the news about the bonus situation. It made him feel even more complicit in all the madness and stupidity. And Christmas. It had to be Christmas. He sat there, holding his head, feeling like a Vichy French shopkeeper—in bed with the enemy.

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

  And who would listen to anyone who can visit Thailand—a country with one of the most vibrant, varied, exciting culinary cultures on the planet (including a rich tradition of tasty vegetarian fare)—and refuse to sample its proudly served and absolutely incredible bounty? What kind of cramped, narrow, and arrogant worldview could excuse shutting oneself off totally from the greater part of an ancient and beautiful culture? To my mind, there's no difference between Woody, the New Age gourmet, ensuring a clean colon by eating the same thing every day, and the classic worst- case, xenophobic tourist—the one who whether in Singapore, Rome, Hanoi, or Mexico City insists on eating every meal in the hotel restaurant. One fears "dirty" water, "unsafe" vegetables, "ooky," "weird," and unrecognizable local specialties. The other fears "toxins" and "impurities." It's bad enough when you bump into a curmudgeonly fellow countryman while on vacation in a foreign land. But to bring his tao home with you is another thing. Especially when the curmudgeon's worldview has been shaped in that crossroads of enlightenment, Hollywood. In striking contrast, Trotter's curiosity is a saving grace. And Trotter and Klein's creativity with a self-imposed restrictive form is something to be celebrated—I guess. Raw struggles mightily to convince the reader that "cheese" made from cashew can be a satisfactory substitute, and that "lasagne" made from zucchini "noodles" wouldn't be a hell of a lot better with the inclusion of some real pasta, but even the book's full-color food porn photos seem painfully lacking in some vital aspect. (Pork, perhaps.) Raw is a quantum leap in the realm of what's possible with fruits and vegetables. But by offering comfort, sustenance, and encouragement to Woody Harrelson and would-be Woodys everywhere, Trotter and Klein have opened a Pandora's box of fissionable material. At a time in history when Americans, to an ever greater extent, have reasons to turn inward, away from this fabulously diverse and marvelous planet and the millions of proud cooks who live on it; at a time when people are afraid of just about everything, the authors have made willful avoidance and abstinence an ever-more attractive option. I admire their skills. I really do. But I fear for the planet. IS ANYBODY HOME? It was late at night in New Orleans. The liquor was flowing and the large and unruly group of chefs, managers, and cooks, freshly released from their restaurants, was in a truth-telling mode. Among them, a contingent of professionals from one of Emeril Lagasse's better restaurants was particularly disgruntled. Not with Chef Lagasse, about whom they had nothing but nice things to say; and not with the general state of affairs in their restaurant, of which they were quite proud. It was those damn customers again. "They come in in their ugly shorts, with their cameras. And they ask, 'Is Emeril in the kitchen? Can you get him to come out and say "Bam!"?'" moaned one of them. "Dude! We're a fine dining restaurant!"

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

  This alone is reason to flee. The waiter knows, better than anybody, how bad things are. At my meal, as soon as my journalist pal and I sat down and a photographer took a picture of us from outside, our waiter inquired of our affiliations—and the purpose of the photographer—then immediately made a covert, whispered phone call. (A guilty conscience, and a procedure in place for dealing with too much interest, can never be a good thing.) Accompanying the waiter were a busboy (who apparently doubles as bartender), a dishwasher, and one cook. Now, how can one cook make all the food on an absurdly, even dangerously, huge menu, one might well ask oneself. And how long has that Duck a l'Orange been kicking around that quiet kitchen, waiting for me to come along? 4) Signs of quiet scaling back and cost cutting. A forlorn dessert cart, half- filled with hardy, not-too-perishable fruit variations (nothing that will oxidize or get too ugly too quickly—probably because it will be used again tomorrow and the next day) sits right by the front door, subtly blocking access to what might once have been an upstairs dining room. What don't they want us to see? Clearly a sign saying "Section Closed" is not enough. It has been deemed necessary to seal off the stairs, preventing even the casual drunken tourist, hunting for the restroom, from stumbling upon whatever hidden horror lurks above. 5) The trick menu. Wow! It sure looks big! But, wait! There may be ten or twelve appetizers—but half of them seem to contain prawns! This strategy allows the lone cook to quickly whip up a variety of no-doubt once-frozen delights from a single box of thawed prawns. And there sure seem to be a lot of deep-fried nuggety, breaded thingies . . . I regard the chicken "Cordon Bleu" with the same suspicion I cast on the prawn nuggets; they very likely originated in the same far-away blast freezer. 6) The telltale "DING!" of the microwave. Is it a coincidence that I heard its woeful tolling just before my limp, watery, gray, and completely uncaramelized duck arrived? I think not. 7) The table tent display offering festive party drinks with umbrellas in them. I don't know about you, but when I sit down in an empty steakhouse—whether in London or anywhere else in the world—a pina colada, a grasshopper, or a Singapore sling are not the cocktails that leap immediately to mind. Their presence is evidence of a disturbed mind, as if some cargo cult of South Seas natives had found the menu of a fifties-era American diner and after hitting the lottery and moving to the UK, decided to re-create it from memory. "Oh yes! Americans love drinks that look like fabric softener—as long as they have cherries and umbrellas in them!" 8) The mixed metaphor.

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

  Right? The place of heat is where cooks and eaters congregate, will always congregate, to share food and stories. Thus it has always been. Thus it will always be. Maybe not. Trotter has served a vegetable tasting menu for some time. Noticing that most restaurants tended to cobble together a plate full of side dishes and odds and ends when confronted with vegetarian customers, he rose to the challenge and raised the bar significantly for others inclined to improve their own veggie offerings. Charlie Trotter likes vegetables. He understands them. Though he surely knew that many of his vegetable offerings would taste a lot better married to a fat lardon of bacon, or tossed in duck fat, like most great chefs through history he made the very best of limited options. In his introduction to Raw, he is careful to distinguish between the role of chef/seeker and that of advocate for some health-conscious agrarian future. He seems to be saying that raw food can be a cool thing—but it's not necessarily the only thing. One gets the impression he is attracted more to the challenge than any underlying philosophy. Commendably, Klein urges similar caution, saying, "I think it's presumptuous for anyone to tell others how they should live their lives." Nice words. Nice book. Without question, it's an answered prayer for anyone whom religion or personal circumstances has pushed into veganism. My prejudices against vegetarianism and veganism are well known and deeply held, but looking at the gorgeous pictures, I thought surely any exploration of ways to make food—any food—better is a positive thing. As intellectual exercise, as gastronomy, as "another path," this weird corner of the culinary spectrum might, I thought, be as worthy of respect as any other. Then I read the opening anecdote of Klein's introduction, an account of the inspiring moment that led to her immersion into the mysteries of raw food. She describes a fateful meeting in Thailand with former Cheers star and hemp activist Woody Harrelson. "Every evening, our group would sit down to a fantastic feast of Thai vegetarian curries, noodles, and rice dishes. Woody, however, would always order a bowl of fruit or a green papaya salad. We tried to get him to sample the wonderful cooked dishes we were eating, but he always declined [italics mine]. After more prodding, he explained the reasons why he maintained a diet of raw fruits and vegetables. Michael [Klein's husband] and I found the philosophy interesting and decided to delve more deeply into it." This story is horrifying on so many levels that my enzyme-starved, toxin- laden, mucus-clogged body shook when I read it. First of all, why would anyone listen to Woody Harrelson about anything more important than how to be a working Hollywood actor or how to make a bong out of a toilet-paper roll and tinfoil?

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "My cunt got terrible green juices." Iris is one of Benway's projects. "The human body can run on sugar alone, God damn it.... I am aware that certain of my learned colleagues, who are attempting to belittle my genius work, claim that I put vitamins and proteins into Iris's sugar clandestinely.... I challenge these nameless assholes to crawl up out of their latrines and run a spot analysis on Iris's sugar and her tea. Iris is a wholesome American cunt. I deny categorically that she nourishes herself on semen. And let me take this opportunity to state that I am a reputable scientist, not a charlatan, a lunatic, or a pretended worker of miracles.... I never claimed that Iris could subsist exclusive on photosynthesis.... I did not say she could breathe in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- I confess I have been tempted to experiment being of course restrained by my medical ethics.... In short, the vile slanders of my creeping opponents will inevitably fall back onto them and come to roost like a homing stool pigeon." ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN Luncheon of Nationalist Party on balcony overlooking the Market. Cigars, scotch, polite belches.... The Party Leader strides about in a jellaba smoking a cigar and drinking scotch. He wears expensive English shoes, loud socks, garters, muscular, hairy legs -- overall effect of successful gangster in drag. P.L. (pointing dramatically): "Look out there. What do you see?" LIEUTENANT: "Huh? Why, I see the Market." P.L.: "No you don't. You see men and women. Ordinary men and women going about their ordinary everyday tasks. Leading their ordinary lives. That's what we need...." A street boy climbs over the balcony rail. Lieutenant: "No, we do not want to buy any used condoms! Cut!" P.L.: "Wait!... Come in, my boy. Sit down.... Have a cigar.... Have a drink." He paces around the boy like an aroused tom cat. "What do you think about the French?" "Huh?" 'The French. The Colonial bastards who is sucking your live corpuscles." "Look mister. It cost two hundred francs to suck my corpuscle. Haven't lowered my rates since the year of the rindpest when all the tourists died, even the Scandinavians." P.L.: "You see? This is pure uncut boy in the street." "You sure can pick'em, boss." "M.I. never misses." P.L.: "Now look, kid, let's put it this way. The French have dispossessed you of your birthright." "You mean like Friendly Finance?... They got this toothless Egyptian eunuch does the job. They figure he arouse less antagonism, you dig, he always take down his pants to show you his condition. 'Now I'm just a poor old eunuch trying to keep up my habit. Lady, I'd like to give you an extension on that artificial kidney, I got a job to do is all....

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

  It's an inevitable effect of the celebrity chef phenomenon that people are as interested now in "who" is making their food as "what" they're eating. While on one hand, the advent of the celebrity chef has been good for America in that it has raised the level of pride and prestige in the profession and inspired people to eat better, cook better, and expect more of their restaurants, it has also created a cult of personality completely divorced from the realities of the business. There should be little expectation that Emeril himself will be hunched over the stove when you eat at NOLA or Emeril's in New Orleans. The man has an empire to run. He's got restaurants all over the country, a product line, television shows, endorsements to make, books to write. Do you really think he's cooking your chicken? He's put in his time. After all those years on the hot line, all that time building a "brand" and a business, doesn't he deserve to kick back in an office, have a cocktail, spend a little quality time with friends and family, and let others do the heavy lifting? Of course he does. And while it's completely understandable that some nitwits who know him only as loveable TV Emeril—and who have no understanding or appreciation of what it took for him to get there—might expect him to come by their table for a photo op in between dunking their squid into the fryer, it's inexcusable that professional food writers knowingly continue to perpetuate the myth that The Famous Chef Is In The Kitchen. They know it not to be true. Yet they continue. It makes, one can only assume, better copy. An Important Food Writer who knows better recently penned a column in which he snarkily suggested that if he were paying one hundred thirty dollars for a meal at a Famous Chef's restaurant, he had every right to expect the Famous Chef to be in attendance, at least to swing by the table (presumably to pay homage to The Important Writer). Ridiculous! Most times when you see a legitimate restaurant review in which sentences appear like "Chef Flay has a delicate hand with the chipotles . . ." or "Ducasse's feeling for the flavors of Provence inform every course . . . " and you find yourself conjuring an image of the Famous Chef leaning over each of the reviewer's plates, nervously correcting seasoning or adjusting the garnish, you are complicit in a myth. If the chef is famous enough for you to know his or her name, chances are, he or she is currently Not In. Important Food Writer, of course, knows full well that Chef Ducasse has reportedly barely touched a plate of food in nearly twenty years. Chef Ducasse is likely sitting in the first-class cabin of a flight to Hong Kong, or Paris, or Las Vegas.

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

  Jerome wrote to at least three widows in his circle of admirers pleading with (or hectoring) them not to remarry. In 394 he addressed the young widow Furia: inevitably hugely wealthy, and actually sister-in-law to his unfortunate protégée Blesilla. His scatological remarks to Furia on wedlock bear repetition in Jane Barr’s translation, brusquely improving on the delicacy of some standard versions: You’ve already learned the miseries of marriage…It’s like unwholesome food, and now that you have relieved your heaving stomach of its bile, why should you return to it again…‘like a dog to its vomit’?…Perhaps you are afraid that your noble race will die out, and your father will not have a brat to crawl about his shoulders and smear his neck with filth. The image of excrement dripping down Grandpa’s neck effortlessly outshines Cyril Connolly’s pram in the hallway as a symbol of marriage’s threat to the

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

  fifth centuries, the only places that continued to shelter scholarship – and thus equip Church leaders with some ability to discuss or assess theology – were monasteries. This was a far cry from those early days of monasticism in the second to fourth centuries when monasteries were not places for scholarship, and when monk and bishop might have seemed to be two dangerously opposed sources of authority in the Church. [52] * Beyond the old eastern frontiers of the Roman Empire there had flourished from the fifth century an increasingly widely dispersed and numerous non- Chalcedonian Church, primarily Syriac-speaking. It came to despise the Greek-speaking Church of Byzantium, whose theology it regarded as tainted by imperial interference, especially at Chalcedon in 451; it proudly adhered to the ‘Dyophysite’ theology of the displaced Patriarch of Constantinople Nestorios and his older theological inspiration Theodore of Mopsuestia (whom we have also met as the mentor of Julian of Aeclanum, gadfly against Augustine in the Pelagian Controversy). Courtesy, and indeed theological accuracy, demands that this Church should be called not ‘Nestorian’, as Chalcedonians in West and East have tended to do, but Dyophysite, or simply ‘the Church of the East’. It may seem surprising that both the Church of the East and the other non-Chalcedonian Eastern Churches of diametrically opposed ‘Miaphysite’ theology (as they would prefer, the ‘Oriental Orthodox’) seem eventually to have concurred with their imperial rivals on clerical marriage and celibacy, but their particular circumstances encouraged this. In the case of the Church of the East, the fundamental contrast with the imperial Churches of the Mediterranean is that it never enjoyed the alliance with power that led to ‘Christendom’ in Byzantine Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The eastern frontier of the Empire swayed over time, but, from the third century to the seventh, the great power was the Sasanian Shah (king) in Iran (Persia), self-consciously heir to Iranian monarchies that had fought Mediterranean empires all the way back to the time of Athenian democratic greatness. Their religion was Zoroastrian, a far older monotheistic faith than Judaism, and indeed an influence on it. The establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire encouraged Zoroastrian Sasanians in pogroms against what they saw as a Christian fifth column in their midst. Though these bouts of persecution in the fourth and fifth centuries were savage, they were intermittent, while the Church of the East’s own quarrel with the Byzantine Chalcedonian Church gave it every incentive to come to an understanding with the Iranian monarchy. The high level of scholarship in the Dyophysite Christian elite was an advantage for integration. A Christian school of higher education established in Gondeshapur in south-west Iran was a repository of Graeco-Roman learning which included medicine, and Christian physicians proved very useful to the Sasanian rulers. [53] Nevertheless, reconciliation with a Zoroastrian monarchy posed even greater problems for Christians than the Roman imperial system.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Now keep your distance, folks, you is subject to be irradiated by the sheer charge of this character.' "And I knew him when, dearie.... I recall we was doing an Impersonation Act -- very high class too -- in Sodom, and that is one cheap town.... Strictly from hunger... Well, this citizen, this fucking Philistine wandered in from Podunk Baal or some place, called me a fuckin fruit right on the floor. And I said to him: 'Three thousand years in show business and I always keep my nose clean. Besides I don't hafta take any shit off any uncircumcised cocksucker.'...Later he come to my dressing room and made an apology.... Turns out he is a big physician. And he was a lovely fellah, too.... " Buddha? A notorious metabolic junky... Makes his own you dig. In India, where they got no sense of time, The Man is often a month late.... 'Now let me see, is that the second or the third monsoon? I got like a meet in Ketchupore about more or less.' "And all them junkies sitting around in the lotus posture spitting on the ground and waiting on The Man. "So Buddha says: 'I don't hafta take this sound. I'll by God metabolize my own junk.' "'Man, you can't do that. The Revenooers will swarm all over you.' "'Over me they won't swarm. I gotta gimmick, see? I'm a fuckin Holy Man as of right now.' "'Jeez, boss, what an angle.' "'Now some citizens really wig when they make with the New Religion. These frantic individuals do not know how to come on. No class to them... Besides, they is subject to be lynched like who wants somebody hanging around being better'n other folks? "What you trying to do, Jack, give people a bad time?..." So we gotta play it cool, you dig, cool.... We got a take it or leave it proposition here, folks. We don't shove anything up your soul, unlike certain cheap characters who shall be nameless and are nowhere. Clear the cave for action. I'm gonna metabolize a speed ball and make with the Fire Sermon.' " Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce. An Egyptian ad man on the skids from the sauce write the continuity. " 'I'll have one more, Gus. Then, by Allah, I will go home and receive a Surah.... Wait'll the morning edition hits the souks. I am blasting Amalgamated Images wide open.' "The bartender looks up from his racing form. 'Yeah. And theirs will be a painful doom.' " 'Oh... uh... quite. Now, Gus, I'll write you a check.' "'You are only being the most notorious paper hanger in Greater Mecca. I am not a wall, Mr. Mohammed.' " 'Well, Gus, I got like two types publicity, favorable and otherwise. You want some otherwise already?

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

  Even the Gospel of Thomas, which among several surviving Gospel- pastiches beyond the New Testament most resembles the four ‘mainstream’ Gospels in its content and may share their late first-century date, records a cry of Jesus to his followers to ‘be passers-by!’ That reverses the moral message of Jesus in Luke’s presentation of his Parable of the Good Samaritan, who was good precisely because he did not pass by. [27] Given the gnostic theme that mortal flesh is despicable, gnostics might treat the flesh in two ways. They could mortify the body with austerities – or, on the contrary, regard their souls as so independent of the body that the most wild earthly excesses would not imperil its salvation. Hostile ‘mainstream’ Christian commentators probably took much more relish in contemplating the latter luridness than was justified by real evidence about gnostic believers. In the fourth century, Epiphanios, a busily unlikeable Cypriot bishop and heresy-hunter, described gnostic rites that parodied the Eucharist using semen and menstrual blood. [28] Accordingly, one of very few supposedly gnostic texts of such a nature, involving Jesus deliberately indulging in illicit sex, now only survives in a deeply unpleasant small fragment preserved by Epiphanios himself, supposedly from ‘The Greater Questions of Mary’. [29] In fact, there is far more evidence for the austere, ascetic strain in gnosticism than for any licentiousness. It is unwise to rebrand gnostic belief as hospitable to modern liberalism in sexual outlook; still less plausible is a view of gnostic belief as a form of proto-feminism. [30] Gnostic hatred of the physical body matches very uneasily with some modern emphases on the liberating power of sexuality, or feminism’s celebration of all that it is to be female. Gnostic writers were just as inclined as writers in contemporary mainstream Christianity to assert that females needed to become males in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, and they might turn to contemporary medical wisdom to assert that in procreation (human or cosmic), females only provide substance and males the form. [31] Given such themes, we should heed one modern commentator in contrasting much gnostic thought with the baptismal proclamation in Galatians (3.28), where ‘Paul wanted to eliminate the inequality between the sexes, while the gnostics wanted to eliminate the distinction between the sexes.’ [32] Nevertheless, a gnostic emphasis on individual revelation rather than on hierarchical teaching might provide continuing opportunities in communities of gnostic inclination for women to assert their opinions or their active role alongside men. By the beginning of the third century, Catholic Christians were sneering at gnostics precisely because of this programmatic gender-blindness. The North African polemical theologian Tertullian exclaimed with outrage at

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  At this point, it becomes clear that this realm of certainties that we have been exploring in our thought experiment might be rather small and emaciated, populated with pedestrian simplicities. A world that is free of beliefs excludes an alarming number of views about the nature of the good life and, crucially, respect for our fellow human beings. It’s like a tone-deaf person writing a treatise on the significance of music for humanity that limits itself to the physics of musical instruments. Human beings deserve better than this. What is ‘The Purpose of Philosophy’ (to borrow the title of Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay)? Berlin argued that human convictions can be placed in three kinds of ‘baskets’: those that can be established by empirical observation; those that can be established by logical deduction; and a third basket ‘in which all those questions live which cannot easily be fitted into the other two’.20 The third basket hence contains the moral, political, social and religious values and ideas that have shaped human culture and given human existence direction and purpose. Berlin writes: There is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favour of kindness and you prefer concentration camps’ – each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ.21 One of the reasons why Berlin was so respected as an intellectual historian and philosopher was his willingness to acknowledge ambiguity and uncertainty – notice his use of the term ‘believe’ in the last few lines of this statement, where lesser philosophers or ideological activists might present these views as truths – something we know. The intelligent application of reason leads people to a plurality of defensible – yet unprovable – ideals or moral values, not to a single universal concept of ‘the good’. Berlin rejected the monist view that ‘all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors’. This, he believed, simply gave a spurious intellectual legitimacy to some form of totalitarianism: ‘To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.’22 Berlin’s criticisms offer a powerful criticism of blind faith or obedience demanded by institutions, ideologies and charismatic individuals – including some that are clearly religious, but claim not to be. We have a further question to explore in conducting our mental experiment, which is perhaps the most important: are human beings capable of meaningful existence within this imagined world of certainties? Suppose we limit ourselves to such certainties: can they provide a basis for a good life?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Organ music starts in the sanctuary, and we drift into a barnlike structure with tall stained glass windows where saints I don’t know are doing saintly things I can’t figure out. We stand and sit and pray for over an hour. People take turns talking at the granite altar. Dev belts out hymns in his brassy alto while I flip pages. Afterward, people eat pastries in the foyer. Kids streak around. A few parents from Dev’s school say hey. Somebody brings me coffee like I like. This uninvited niceness seems like a trap. I keep waiting for them to ask me for money. In the car, I ask Dev whether God was there, expecting him to be as cynical as I am. Instead, he cocks his head and squints, as if saying, Where were you ? We stop going to the Episcopal church after a few weeks because I find it too cold—not emotionally but physically. To heat that vaulted space would cost a fortune, I guess. Still, the scalding baths I take to get blood back into my feet after service feel like penance. Dev nudges me to take him to various places of worship. It’s still a social exercise for me, another maternal duty I hadn’t foreseen. Most places get just one visit. The Hebrew that mesmerizes me at the conservative temple frustrates Dev, who likes the Reform service, though it sometimes sounds to me—with its talk of Middle East strife—more political than spiritual. While I adore the hand-clapping gospel music of the Baptists, the anti-gay diatribe is tough to swallow, ditto the long service. By summer, I figure my half-baked sense of a higher power might resonate with the super-liberal Protestant parishes that shun dogma, but they actually put me off. Church X has the sterile feel of an operating theater. Since the well-off parishioners send their kids to fancy camps, it’s almost totally child-free. The sermon—on justice to one’s fellows—has so squeezed out any mention of God or Jesus, maybe to sound modern, there’s no sense of history. The pastor asks for peace and gives thanks for plenty, but the homily might come from Reader’s Digest . Looking for something to say to the pastor, I ask him how he deals with the problem of evil, and he says, We don’t believe in it —a phrase so obviously untrue, I wonder how they sell it. It’s like a Rotary Club meeting where everybody’s agreed on the agenda in advance and is only waiting for the danish to come out. Lots of professors go to Church Y, so again, I think maybe they’ll rook me in. But where Church X avoids God altogether, Church Y sees gods everywhere, each more or less interchangeable. These gods sound no more potent than the rabbit’s foot Dev carries into the batter’s box on a belt loop. The zendo wants people to sit in silence then chant for five minutes, which Dev could never do.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  I am subject to receive a Surah concerning bartenders who extendeth not credit to those in a needy way.' " 'And theirs will be a painful doom. Sold Arabia.' He vaults over the bar. 'I'm not taking any more, Ahmed. Pick up thy Surahs and walk. In fact, I'll help you. And stay out .' "'I'll fix your wagon good, you unbelieving cock-sucker. I'll close you up tight and dry as a junky's ass- hole. I'll by Allah dry up the Peninsula.' " 'It's a continent already....' "Leave what Confucius say stand with Little Audrey and the shaggy dogs. Lao-Tze? They scratch him already...'. And enough of these gooey saints with a look of pathic dismay as if they getting fucked up the ass and try not to pay it any mind. And why should we let some old brokendown ham tell us what wisdom is? 'Three thousand years in show business and I always keep my nose clean....' "First, every Fact is incarcerate along with the male hustlers and those who desecrate the gods of commerce by playing ball in the streets, and some old white-haired fuck staggers out to give us the benefits of his ripe idiocy. Are we never to be free of this grey-beard loon lurking on every mountain top in Tibet, subject to drag himself out of a hut in the Amazon, waylay one in the Bowery? 'I've been expecting you, my son,' and he make with a silo full of corn. 'Life is a school where every pupil must learn a different lesson. And now I will unlock my Word Hoard....' " 'I do fear it much.' " 'Nay, nothing shall stem the rising tide.' " 'I can't stem him, boys. Sauve qui peut .' " 'I tell you when I leave the Wise Man I don't even feel like a human. He converting my live orgones into dead bullshit.' "So I got an exclusive why don't I make with the live word? The word cannot be expressed direct.... It can perhaps be indicated by mosaic of juxtaposition like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negatives and absence.... "Think I'll have my stomach tucked.... I may be old, but I'm still desirable." (The Stomach Tuck is surgical intervention to remove stomach fat at the same time making a tuck in the abdominal wall, thus creating a flesh corset, which is, however, subject to break and spurt your horrible old guts across the Boor.... The slim and shapely F.C. models are, of course, the most dangerous. In fact, some extreme models are known as O.N.S.-- One Night Stands -- in the industry. Doctor "Doodles" Rindfest states bluntly: "Bed is the most dangerous place for an F.C. man." The F.C. theme song is "Believe Me If All These Endearing Young Charms." An F.C. partner is indeed subject to "fleet from your arms like fairy gifts fading away.") In a white museum room full of sunlight pink nudes sixty feet high.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  8 If you want to believe something, you will find ways of rationalising that belief and persuading yourself that it is true. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1932), anticipates this form of thinking that has become so influential in a post-truth world: identify your preferred conclusion, persuade yourself this is a self-evident truth, cherry-pick the evidence, and declare this conclusion to be the only option for a thinking person. ‘I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.’ 9 Sigmund Freud saw this need-driven form of argument as typical of religion, which proposed God as a human ‘wish-fulfilment’ offering a false consolation in the face of a meaningless world. Yet Freud failed to be consistent here: we are all – whether religious or secular – prone to create an imagined world which corresponds to our desires, and retrospectively develop arguments for its validation. Some secular humanists, for example, assert the fundamental goodness of humanity. It is a noble aspiration, which is called into question by the formidable moral challenge posed by the brutality of human history. As John Gray points out, ‘genocide is as human as art or prayer’. The easiest way of coping with this is by denying the problem through a highly selective reading of our history. A more realistic approach recognises that we are indeed a flawed species with a remarkable capacity for self-deception. 10 At least this helps us to figure out how we might come to terms with this problem. Can we cope with human evil if we define humanity as fundamentally good? Happily, most humanists are fully aware of this problem, and are rightly cautious in asserting human goodness as a fundamental article of faith. Atheism can be argued to represent another example of the reification of a desire for total autonomy and unaccountability. The philosopher Thomas Nagel illustrates this point well. Nagel’s own account of the origins of and motivation for his atheism suggests that it is a post hoc rationalisation of something more fundamental – his desire for a godless universe. ‘I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’

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

  [27] Luther led the new bearded fashion in 1521 during his stay in Wartburg Castle while pretending to be a secular gentleman, ‘Junker Jörg’. Although he made a personal decision thereafter to restore his shaven chin even after he got married, others ignored his change of heart, and most Reformers were bearded by the 1540s, led by the impressively hirsute Heinrich Bullinger in Zürich. In England, Archbishop Cranmer similarly commemorated Henry VIII’s death in 1547, which gave him the opportunity to come out as a married man: he grew a full-length beard and thus contributed his own authority to the fashion. Catholics, furious at Protestant innuendo that the celibacy of clergy inclined them to sodomy, sneered at Cranmer and his Protestant colleagues who had got married as ‘bishops effeminate’; that adjective meant the opposite of what it means now. A thousand years before, John Chrysostom had sneered at clergy in chaste ‘syneisactic’ relationships with women as sacrificing their maleness to their partners’ feminine whims, thus these bishops of Edward VI were so in thrall to their women that it robbed them of their masculinity. [28] Trollope’s Mrs Proudie does indeed come to mind. * Thus, after shaky beginnings in the 1520s, the clergy family became a cornerstone of European Protestant society. The ideal was a companionate loving marriage, modestly productive of children within the limits of an income which must also provide for wider hospitality and for more books than neighbouring houses possessed: all under the generally respectful but appraising eyes of the whole community, like a miniature royal family. More important, the clergy marriage became a role model for every marriage, not a binary clerical opposite. Once Lutheranism settled into being the familiar traditional religion of much of northern Europe in the seventeenth century, with a strong sense of historic pride in its Reformation, the Luther family apartments in the former friary became something of a goal for pious Protestant tourism, or indeed pilgrimage. Engravings of the notoriously stout paterfamilias that was the later Luther, paired with his redoubtable wife, were more readily identifiable and realistic models for pious married couples than Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Such pictures for fixing or framing on the wall of a family home would have been an answer to prayer for the unimaginative Lutheran wondering what to give for a wedding present. In effect, the image of the pastor’s family supplanted that of the medieval Holy Family in Protestant Europe. Humanist Protestants were gleefully aware of the pious fictions that had gone into the Holy Family’s construction, not least Pope Gregory I’s portmanteau Mary Magdalen. Her disassembly into her various scriptural and extra-scriptural component parts was prompted by a humanist who, like Erasmus, never himself became a Protestant, the distinguished Paris polymath Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples; his work aroused righteous indignation in distinguished defenders of the old faith such as the English theologian Bishop John Fisher which in the end proved injudicious.

• 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. Lurking in the background in the USA was the defeat of the slave-holding Confederacy in the Civil War of 1861–5, which left many Southern Evangelicals unreconciled to the idea of equality for African Americans; that racist ethos had actually been the raison d’être for the Southern Baptist Convention separating from abolitionist Baptists in the North in 1845. [26] Protestant identity would in the end splinter into two contrasting directions for world Christianity, but in 1914 the present-day divisions between liberal and conservative theologies were not yet at all fixed, let alone the global political consequences that have flowed from them. An important stage in the process was a series of very widely distributed short British and American essays published in twelve volumes between 1910 and 1915, The Fundamentals . They articulated increasing unease among some Evangelicals about nineteenth-century Protestant explorations of the Bible, and set out a series of points to be defended. These five main principles were ‘verbal inerrancy’ (that is, no possibility of the Bible being mistaken in its literal meaning); the divinity of Jesus Christ; his Virgin Birth; the affirmation that Jesus died on the cross in the place of sinful humanity (a theory technically known as penal substitution); and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in the flesh. [27] In 1919 the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association was founded, expanding through its use of mass rallies from a mainly Baptist base, with Pentecostalism a growing component, to affect most Protestant Churches. It was then not at all obvious that within a century matters of sex and gender would be the chief battleground on which Fundamentalists would take their stand, in alliance with other varieties of conservative Christians. Yet already the expansion of anglophone Protestantism through formal and informal imperialism had turned its theological debate on sex into a global conversation. VICTORIAN

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "And what is More UNNECESSARY that junk if You Don’t Need it ?" Answer? "Junkies, if you are not ON JUNK." I tell you boys, I’ve heard some tired conversation but no other OCCUPATION GROUP can approximate that old thermodynamic junk Slow-DOWN. Now your heroin addict does not say hardly anything and that I can stand. But your Opium "Smoker" is more active since he still has a tent and a lamp... and maybe 7-9-10 lying up there like hibernating reptiles keep the temperature up to Talking Level : How Low the other junkies are "whereas We – WE have this tent and this lamp and this tent and this lamp and this tent and nice and OUTSIDE IT’S COLD... IT’S COLD OUTSIDE where the dross eaters and the needle boys won’t last two years not six months hardly won’t last stumble bum around and there is no class in them... But WE SIT HERE and never increase the DOSE... never – never increase the dose never except TONIGHT is a SPECIAL OCCASION with all the dross eaters and the needle boys out there in the cold... And we never eat it never never never never eat it... Excuse please while I take a trip to The Source of Living Drops they all have in pocket and opium pellets shoved up the ass in a finger stall with the Family Jewels and the other shit. Room for one more inside, Sir. Well when that record starts around for the billionth light year and never the tape shall change us non-junkies take drastic action and the men separate out from the Junk boys. Only way to protect yourself against this horrid peril is come over HERE and shack up with Charybdis... Treat you right kid... Candy and cigarettes. I am after fifteen years in that tent. In and out in and out in and OUT. Over and Out . So listen to Old Uncle Bill Burroughs who invented the Burroughs Adding Machine Regulator Gimmick on the Hydraulic Jack Principle no matter how you jerk the handle result is always the same for given coordinates. Got my training early... wouldn’t you? Paregoric Babes of the World Unite. We have nothing to lose but Our Pushers. And THEY are NOT NECESSARY. Lookd down LOOK DOWN along that junk road before you travel there and get in with the Wrong Mob... A word to the wise guy. -- William S. Burroughs AFTERTHOUGHTS ON A DEPOSITION When I say I have no memory of writing Naked Lunch , this is of course an exaggeration, and it is to be kept in mind that there are various areas of memory. Junk is a pain-killer, it also kills the pain and pleasure implicit in awareness. While the factual memory of an addict may be quite accurate and extensive, his emotional memory may be scanty and, in the case of heavy addiction, approaching affective zero.

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

  They witnessed that Mary had at least not remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus, and so she had a normal married life; thus, she honoured all married life as part of God’s creation. In opposing Helvidius and Jovinian, Jerome forged an increasingly extreme polemic against sex within marriage, let alone outside it. [3] From Jerome’s treatises and many letters, even in some measure in phrases of his supreme achievement, the ‘Vulgate’ version of the Latin Bible, there emerges a tangle of personal loathings coupled with fascinations: notably about the nauseating physicality of marital sex and the general physicality of women (who are also among his closest correspondents). One attentive modern reading of his Vulgate admires the care and accuracy of his translation of ancient Semitic texts, with one exception: irregularities and mistranslations cluster round passages relating to women. [4] Jerome’s tirades against women marshal previous misogynist rants right back to pre-Christian antiquity, notably those of Aristotle’s philosopher-colleague in Athens Theophrastus, who was mostly known thereafter because Jerome quoted him. Jerome’s literary war-chest for denigrating women echoed down the centuries; in fourteenth- century England the poet Geoffrey Chaucer made fun of it in his Canterbury Tales , ventriloquizing his satire via the splendid fiction of the Wife of Bath, a much-married lady whom Jerome would have detested. [5] Jerome was also one of the chief conduits to a later age of that unpleasant remark imported from the Pythagoreans into Christianity, that a man who loves his wife excessively is an adulterer. Jerome particularly hated the prospect of widows entering a second marriage, especially women in his intimate circle – second marriage had always been a controversial matter in Christianity (above, Chapter 6). Unsurprisingly his visceral reaction spawned some hilarious efforts at biblically based argument: for instance, his typological contention to Jovinian that since Jesus only attended one wedding (at Cana, in John’s Gospel) the Saviour had taught that people should only marry once. [6] Faced with an uncongenial contrary opinion from what he would have regarded as Paul’s first letter to Timothy (5.14), which strongly advises widows to remarry, Jerome countered it with an appeal to Genesis: just as Noah’s Ark had contained animals both clean and unclean, a remarried widow would have to make do with being an unclean person within the Christian ark. Besides – in a rapid improvisation on one of his favourite tropes – the Parable of the Sower only included in its grain harvest the three categories of virgins, widows and the married, so anyone twice-married would be left merely as an anomalous tare lurking in the wheat. [7] Naturally the Book of Ruth, that charming Old Testament story of a young widow who finds happiness in a second marriage, not to mention a son who was among the ancestors of David and Jesus, did not feature prominently in Jerome’s recommended reading on the subject.