A work you might find interesting in this regard is Lindbeck's Nature of Doctrine, which is an attempt to decipher exactly what kinds of truth-claims religion doctrines are attempting to make. I have not studied the work in detail, but his basic point is that doctrinal statements serve as a kind of "grammar" for the speech and practice of the religious community qua religious community -- for instance, what types of prayers and statements can be made in the liturgical context, how the community assembles for worship, extending to more practical moral concerns. The Nicene Creed would be one way of trying to make this "latent" grammar explicit, in response to certain "ungrammatical" statements that threatened the inner consistency of the community.
I suppose one could make an analogy with Jewish law. Mary Douglas makes a pretty convincing argument that the point of dietary laws (for example) is not that there is something inherent to pigs that make them evil, but rather that pigs violate the concept of what kind of animal you eat -- that is, animals with split hooves that chew the cud. On a certain level, it doesn't "make sense" to eat animals that do not have those properties. (Incidentally, rabbits are excluded only because they don't have split hooves -- the way the rabbit's nose is always moving must have made it seem as though they did in fact chew cud.) The Jewish law is also a valuable example in that it is a much more thorough-going attempt to lay out the latent "grammar" of the community and because it shows the ways in which obviously "religious" (to our eyes) practices blur into everyday concerns. (Christianity has forever been trying to draw that line so that they can say what is still "in force" from the Hebrew Bible for Christians and what isn't; in my opinion, that line is in principle impossible to draw.)
Anyway, I don't have a huge investment in Lindbeck's ideas, but he's really big into the later Wittgenstein, so he might give you a good "in."
I thought pigs were excluded because eating pork was part of the worship of Ishtar/Astarte/et al.. But this is Robert Graves' theory, and he wasn't, as I understand it, too too concerned with careful research.
Obviously there are a lot of theories, but Mary Douglas's seems to me to cohere better with Lindbeck's -- plus I always find those kind of quasi-structuralist arguments to be very satisfying.
Here's where amateur status helps, since I don't know any of the jargon. But one conception of Christianity says the central thing is the practice, the hourly, daily, yearly rhythms of thought and action, that lead to the good. The doctrine motivates the practice, but the practice is the content. So the empirical evidence that counts is, does the practice work? For that all you need is an idea of the good, and one a lot less rigorous than philosophers insist on. Is the doctrine "accurate"? Wrong question.
2: Yeah, I'm vaguely remembering a paper I wrote as an undergrad on the topic. Pigs certainly had a chthonic association so one could make an argument that that's why they were excluded, but I tend to favor the argument that the point of most of Leviticus is that the Israelites are commanded to be different for the sake of being different.
Kedoshim t'hiyu: You shall be holy/set apart/different.
I like 4: I'd add to it a question of training the mind in certain contemplative ways, and so on.
The thing I'm getting hung up on, and maybe it's just stupid and I'm totally missing something, is why can't religion be "true" in the same way fiction is? Do we dismiss fiction, or poetry, or drama, because it is just stories about people who never existed and never acted? Surely not. We don't *care* if stories are "real" in that sense; we care if they are realistic because they feel true in ways we can't explain, and in ways that somehow transcend our ability to explain/understand/make meaning of things we know literally are true.
I think the "difference as such" thing makes sense as a reason that the laws were collected and then practiced over time -- but it just doesn't give a very good account of how they arose in the first place (or at least it doesn't provide much explanatory power).
The explanation I find most convincing is that the elites from the Kingdom of Judah ("southern kingdom") were trying to maintain their distinct identity in the Babylonian exile and so assembled various law-codes from their culture previously -- together with a lot of legends, etc. Before the exile, or at least before the reign of King Josiah, the law doesn't seem to have been that big a deal -- David, for instance, shows no apparent knowledge of the law.
It's a matter of preserving a distinct identity, built from pre-existing materials that were not developed explicitly for the sake of creating a distinct identity (except to the extent that every culture is distinct from others). For instance, I'm sure there were plenty of cultures that refused to eat pork just because pigs are gross. Even better example: circumcision, the decisive identifying practice of Judaism, which people were willing to die for, was also practiced by the Egyptians. NOT to denigrate the practice of circumcision as such or its value to Judaism -- just to say that it's not contrary for the sake of being contrary.
I think most of the laws in Leviticus are actually based on (though not identical to) Egyptian practices, including the pork prohibition. But I forget where I read that.
Also, I like the rest of 13. I don't think I've heard that specific explanation before but it makes more sense than the others I have heard.
Maybe you're thinking of Freud's Moses and Monotheism -- which is a really fascinating book, no matter what you think of it on the level of its factual claims. Also perhaps the most strangely organized book ever.
For instance, I'm sure there were plenty of cultures that refused to eat pork just because pigs are gross. Even better example: circumcision, the decisive identifying practice of Judaism, which people were willing to die for, was also practiced by the Egyptians. NOT to denigrate the practice of circumcision as such or its value to Judaism -- just to say that it's not contrary for the sake of being contrary.
True, the Egyptians did circumcise, but I remember correctly, Israel's immediate Canaanite neighbors did not?
It's a matter of preserving a distinct identity, built from pre-existing materials that were not developed explicitly for the sake of creating a distinct identity (except to the extent that every culture is distinct from others).
In fact, I'd argue -- although I never got around to researching it in depth -- that the Judahite response to the Babylonion exile was the impetus for the development of monotheism as a serious religious idea. (Babylon's victory over Judah wasn't a victory by Babylon's God over Israel/Judah's God, rather it was the God of Israel punishing his people using Babylon as a tool. See, for instance, Jeremiah.)
True, the Egyptians did circumcise, but I remember correctly, Israel's immediate Canaanite neighbors did not?
Probably not. I'm pretty sure the Philistines didn't, less so about the Canaanites. Circumcision as a practice is generally associated with Africa.
One way to interpret the Hebrews is as an Egyptianized Canaanite group with certain customs that differed from their neighbors (which were then elaborated in the post-Exilic period for theological reasons etc.).
There's some evidence that not all of the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt -- those who participated in (something like) the Exodus would have brought their practices with them, and would have been the conquering elites. Naturally, they would have thought that uncircumcision, pork eating, etc., were simply uncouth and unacceptable practices.
I think you're right about the Babylon thing generally, though I tend to think it was the Israelite prophet class more generally where this idea took off -- for instance, in the first parts of Amos, where God claims a certain sense of ownership over other nations. The prophet class was definitely the milieu in which the shift from henotheism to monotheism was decisively made. (I would take the creation story in Genesis to be an after-effect of that -- a polemical rewriting of Babylonian myths.)
Interesting; I'd never thought of Genesis 1 as being polemical (as opposed to merely derivative). Your reading makes good sense, even simply chronologically; by the time the P authors were established in exile and, presumably, writing, they'd probably have absorbed the prophetic program.
Damn, it's too bad my NRSV is downstairs and I'm covered in cats.
There are a lot of parallels between Genesis and Babylonian myths -- in fact, for believers (even loose ones), it can be kind of disturbing to read the Enuma Elish and other similar documents for the first time. By rewriting them to make the God of Israel the protagonist, the Israelites were saying, to put it crassly, "Our God is better than yours -- in fact, your gods are just made up." This is kind of an outrageous thing to say to the people who just conquered your country and uprooted all your elites and sent them a thousand miles away.
I take early Christianity to be a kind of repetition of the same impulse: "Caesar isn't the imperator -- the real imperator is the one Rome crucified." (There's a lot of literature nowadays on how St. Paul was a "radical Jew" -- for a lot of really good reasons, his contemporaries were not willing to go down his road.)
Good thing the Babylonians weren't listening. Like MH, I had generally thought of the creation story as derivative of Enuma Elish etc., but it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a relation of direct opposition in its composition.
I'm not a theologian of any sort; as a journalist I am more of an amateur sociologist of religion. The one thing I do know is that religion is not the same as Christianity and there is no reason to suppose that religions grow more or less religious as they approximate to the forms of Christianity with which we are familiar. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to remember this, precisely because religions are sets of cultural practices, so their attraction can only be understood by participation. By analogy, you can only understand the meaning of a phrase like "Je t'aime" if you have said and meant the equivalent in English. Even then, it won'ty be the same unless you actually happen to be in love with a French person, or the right sort of Canadian.
With that said, and if you're seriously interested, FL, I suggest the works of John Bowker, in particular "The religious imagination and the sense of God". JB is a man who has absorbed both Wittgenstein and Darwin. Very interesting. Also one of the few (
oh -- i got eaten by the html parser. I had put less-than sign after the bracket. Clearly it thougth I was opening an impossible tag. There is a lesson there, sisters and brothers, about the context-dependent nature of symbolic meaning. When they came for my angle brackets, i did not protest for I was not an angle bracket. When they came for my God, I protested, but no one took any notice. "You're not god", they said. "I knew God ..."
I'm afraid I don't have time to read that other thread; nor am I a theologian, but it seems to me that a) no one is really addressing your question and b) y'all have a very Abrahamic view of the world. Which makes sense I suppose, but is certainly not the only way to look at things.
I'm very tired, and just came back from the hospital, so this is probably not the best frame of mind to leave an unfogged comment in. So I'm not really going to try, but I will say that two people can have exactly the same set-description of the world--the same list of what things are in it, what their histories are, and how they interact with each other--but have very different ways of sorting and organizing and prioritizing and relating to that set. None of us can hold all of objective scientific reality in our heads all the the time. We have to focus on it in some sense, just like a camera cannot capture all of reality and must prioritze it along some focal plane.
Religion can be one way of doing that. Not always a good way, but not always a bad way. And because of many of its built-in emphases on God as the bulk of the lens--and God's usual definition as the source and center of all goodnes and love---it can be a particularly powerful lens, and for some people uniquely positive.
Not according to the definition of "Canaanite" I'm familiar with; they came from elsewhere (Greece?), spoke a different language, and had a different material culture.
Saheli: some non-Abrahamic stuff came up in the other thread, but I'll grant that this has been a very Abrahamic conversation. I haven't answered Labs's question because I'm neither Christian nor a theologian (nor particularly religious, for that matter); I don't know what Kotsko's excuse is.
B, I left something on the other thread about this line of thought. Here's a sort-of restatement. You say:
The thing I'm getting hung up on, and maybe it's just stupid and I'm totally missing something, is why can't religion be "true" in the same way fiction is? Do we dismiss fiction, or poetry, or drama, because it is just stories about people who never existed and never acted? Surely not. We don't *care* if stories are "real" in that sense; we care if they are realistic because they feel true in ways we can't explain, and in ways that somehow transcend our ability to explain/understand/make meaning of things we know literally are true.
There's some kind of value to good fiction, we think; we think we learn something useful from it even though the events it depicts didn't really happen. To go back to my example in the other comment, consider Of Human Bondage. False claim not genuinely asserted by the work: there was this guy Phillip with a clubfoot, and he became a doctor. True claim asserted by the work: sometimes the real harms done by, say, a physical deformity are psychological; the personality is warped by the twisted limb.
A hokey application to Christianity: (a) "Christ was crucified & rose from the dead" is in the first category of claims that needn't be true; (b) "people are special and we should be nice to the poor" is in the second. Here are some problems:
(i) this way of thinking about religion suggests a sort of anthropological approach-- we should study the sacred texts to learn what valuable life lessons they might impart, but we shouldn't get caught up in evaluating their particular claims. Hence, we can endorse Christianity in the same way that we endorse a bunch of other religions that have the same "big lessons." But, at least traditionally, adhering to two very different religions was thought to be incoherent. Hence, this stance toward religion is not compatible with the way the religion understands itself.
(ii) if we can't get the big life lesson without assenting to "Christ was crucified & rose from the dead" then, as I've been saying, the big claims are subject to empirical critique, because they rest on claims about what really happened.
(iii) we're left with a reading of the Bible as a kind of didactic fiction. A lot of religious practice (confession, the sacraments, perhaps even organized services) seem to lose their point on this reading. Why do these things? Is it important to eat wafers to learn to be nice to poor people?
The underlying point to all this is that the "useful fiction" reading isn't, as I see it, true to the practice. Too much of what's done is rendered incoherent by that reading.
Can I ask a simple question? Is the hypothesis "Christ was crucified and rose from the dead" really falsifiable? Keep in mind that the event is supposed to be not just miraculous but eschatalogical. It would seem to be the canonical irreproducible result. And I don't mean falsifiable in principle, but rather given the evidence that exists and is likely to be collected at any point in the future.
Religions make exclusive and contradictory claims about the world. To choose something simple but fundamental, the Hindu creation myth (Rig Veda) and Genesis cannot both be true, whether we are talking about empirically observable, testable reality or some more metaphorical, "literature"-like truth. The God (or gods) they imagine as the source of creation are different in their number, nature and values. The Rig-Veda tells us, for example, that the caste system was divinely ordained, prescribing to the lowest caste the duty to serve meekly the other three castes. How do you square that with Genesis' view that people were made in god's image, all equal? You can't, not even as literature, and certainly not as something more concrete, testable or observable.
I often think that Christian religious belief depends on the cultural isolation of most westerners. There are billions of people who do not believe that Jesus was God. Billions. What does that tell you about the likelihood that he was? How can you and they reach any kind of common understanding about this question? By appealling to "grammar" or feelings about an underlying divinity. It's nonsense. And yet, when I was a boy, I had a Sunday School teacher who assured me that all the people who I knew that were not Greek Orthodox (into which I was born) were on their way to Hell.
One other point which others have often made, but bears repeating, is that Christians have to selectively screen out of their awareness large chunks of the book they claim is divine writ. They just pretend they aren't there. I'm not talking about the weird empirical claims (like the idea that the world was created in seven days). I'm talking about specific commandments that are said to come directly from God. Kosher law has come up in the posts above, which is usually the subject of jokes. But then there are the darker commands, like the duty to kill those who convert from Christianity, which appears in Leviticus.
There was a certain bitter irony in the recent trial in Afghanistan, in which a man was nearly executed as the proper punishment for conversion from Islam. People in the West were almost unanimous in their condemnation of this rigid theocratic view, and I'm glad they were. But Leviticus, of course, contains exactly the same instructions for the followers of Yahweh.
I'm glad we're long since over that, but it's clearly because the religious turn a blind eye to it. I doubt many religious people think about that rule or have any theory as to why they don't observe it. No doubt that kind of selective attention helps preserve religious belief, but it doesn't make for a principled or even coherent religious viewpoint.
I basically agree with the thrust of 37, but I have some quibbles. First, part of the very basic theology of Christianity (as in what Jesus himself apparently taught) is that the old law (i.e. the Old Testament, including Leviticus) no longer applies. It was later included in the Christian Bible for other reasons, but it's not really fair to complain about Christians not following all the commandments because it's a big part of the religion not to, even though they are in the canonical text. The behavior of actual Christians is of course not always in accordance with this (see homosexuality), but that just means they're wrong, not that all Christians have to follow all the rules.
Also, the "don't they know how many people don't believe in Jesus?" argument is a non-starter; of course Christians know that most people aren't Christian--that's what missionaries are for. That is, however many people believe in a given religion is not an argument, from the point of view of its adherents, for how likely it is that that religion is "true" (whatever that means). Especially for religions that actively proselytize, being small in numbers just means there are still a lot of souls to save.
One of the problems with TedL's point is suggested by mealworm's 36: different passages in the Bible are supposed to be read in different ways, as dictated by theology.
Most Christians, if I've got it right, are instructed to understand much of the Levitical code as having been totally superceded by Christ and Paul: that part of the Torah is to be read anthropologically or historically. Genesis and Exodus are to be read either literally or allegorically, but different traditions will emphasize one or the other depending on their doctrinal needs.
In the face of teh Science, a lot of Christians are able to maintain their interest in the Bible by reading allegorically and eschatologically--neither of which hermeneutical styles will yield much to empirical claims.
(Of course, if you've got a dude running around claiming to have an direct connection to God's intent, you have a hard time ignoring his writings and "retranslations" of the older writings. Thanks a lot for mucking up the theological balance, Uncle Joe!)
These doctrines of how to read what might be considered part of the practice of the particular religions, which, I think, would distinguish that sort of reading from the kind praticed in literature, where the most highly trained readers are supposed to be able to switch hermeneutical gears for external and hopefully more empirically based reasons.
FL -- you're nearly their. But literate religions are ficiton with fandoms, (which would make the Book of Mormon fanfic, so my theory must be true); and the social dynamics of religions are those of fandoms without the self-awareness.
This kind of thinking is related to the canonical distinciton between a religion and a cult, which has nothing to do with the strageness of the beliefs, nor even owith the necessarily authoritarian nature of a cult, and certainly nothing sto do with brainwashing. it is about the distnace between the beliefs of te cult and those of the society around them. Thus, a man who keep sacred cows outside London is a cult member. A man who does so outside Benares is perfectly well-adjusted and devout.
at least traditionally, adhering to two very different religions was thought to be incoherent. Hence, this stance toward religion is not compatible with the way the religion understands itself. I agree that this is a problem: then again, I was raised in a fairly liberal, tolerant, ecuminical kind of Catholicism, so it isn't a problem for me. I'd tend to wipe this issue away with a breezy wave of my hand and a restatement of the position that the truth of religions isn't necessarily literal: so that this "you can't be both Catholic and Buddhist" thing can be either simply factually untrue, or, if you want to keep with the metaphor thing, it can be true in the sense that adherence to any kind of serious practice requires committment and specialization, just as one can't be both a philosopher and a neurologist. A very few highly skilled and dedicated people can do both, but even then they'd have to switch between different modes of thought while practicing one or the other.
ii and iii: I don't think I'm quite saying something as simple as "religion teaches big life lessons," though that's certainly a big part of what it does. I'm okay with the resurrection myself; not in a literal sense, but in a metaphorical sense (which I realize makes me a bad Catholic) and I'm willing to accept it, like a good Catholic, as a mystery that I can't fully explain, though I can explain some parts of it--resurrection as a metaphor for an extraordinarily profound and unique effect on a set of believers after one's physical death, as an assertion of the idea that death isn't the end of one's direct influence, that the energy in one's body goes somewhere after the body dies, and so on. None of those are sufficient and even together they're insufficient, but there's something powerful about that particular story that really speaks to people, and I can accept that without believing that some guy died and then his body came back to life just as it was before.
The thing about wafers and stuff is, I'd say, important to the practice. The point of Christianity isn't *only* to teach one to be a good person; there are lots of things we express by religion (or any complicated set of beliefs) and some of them are contradictory. The practice of the mass is really beautiful, I find, and when I'm attending the meditativeness, the ritual, and so on are important parts of the rhythm of my week.
It's funny, at the conference I just went to, I had dinner a couple of times with a really nice guy who was a practicing Jew and also an athiest. He knew a lot more about theology and religious history than I did, and we talked about that. But we also talked about the paradox of practicing a faith that one doesn't, in a literal sense, believe in, and what one gets out of it, and why, and what it means to do so. I think the point is it isn't as simple as "be a good person"--in which case any kind of set of moral beliefs might do--but the importance of actively practicing something that one knows isn't literal, but that one embraces as an expression of something that speaks to another important part of oneself (alone, or as part of a historic community) in a way that one can't satisfactorily articulate.
A work you might find interesting in this regard is Lindbeck's Nature of Doctrine, which is an attempt to decipher exactly what kinds of truth-claims religion doctrines are attempting to make. I have not studied the work in detail, but his basic point is that doctrinal statements serve as a kind of "grammar" for the speech and practice of the religious community qua religious community -- for instance, what types of prayers and statements can be made in the liturgical context, how the community assembles for worship, extending to more practical moral concerns. The Nicene Creed would be one way of trying to make this "latent" grammar explicit, in response to certain "ungrammatical" statements that threatened the inner consistency of the community.
I suppose one could make an analogy with Jewish law. Mary Douglas makes a pretty convincing argument that the point of dietary laws (for example) is not that there is something inherent to pigs that make them evil, but rather that pigs violate the concept of what kind of animal you eat -- that is, animals with split hooves that chew the cud. On a certain level, it doesn't "make sense" to eat animals that do not have those properties. (Incidentally, rabbits are excluded only because they don't have split hooves -- the way the rabbit's nose is always moving must have made it seem as though they did in fact chew cud.) The Jewish law is also a valuable example in that it is a much more thorough-going attempt to lay out the latent "grammar" of the community and because it shows the ways in which obviously "religious" (to our eyes) practices blur into everyday concerns. (Christianity has forever been trying to draw that line so that they can say what is still "in force" from the Hebrew Bible for Christians and what isn't; in my opinion, that line is in principle impossible to draw.)
Anyway, I don't have a huge investment in Lindbeck's ideas, but he's really big into the later Wittgenstein, so he might give you a good "in."
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 3:08 PM
I thought pigs were excluded because eating pork was part of the worship of Ishtar/Astarte/et al.. But this is Robert Graves' theory, and he wasn't, as I understand it, too too concerned with careful research.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 3:16 PM
Obviously there are a lot of theories, but Mary Douglas's seems to me to cohere better with Lindbeck's -- plus I always find those kind of quasi-structuralist arguments to be very satisfying.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 3:27 PM
Here's where amateur status helps, since I don't know any of the jargon. But one conception of Christianity says the central thing is the practice, the hourly, daily, yearly rhythms of thought and action, that lead to the good. The doctrine motivates the practice, but the practice is the content. So the empirical evidence that counts is, does the practice work? For that all you need is an idea of the good, and one a lot less rigorous than philosophers insist on. Is the doctrine "accurate"? Wrong question.
Posted by mealworm | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 5:43 PM
So the empirical evidence that counts is, does the practice work?
Is that a hookup to Jon Mandle's post on Crooked Timber?
Posted by ogmb | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 6:16 PM
2: Yeah, I'm vaguely remembering a paper I wrote as an undergrad on the topic. Pigs certainly had a chthonic association so one could make an argument that that's why they were excluded, but I tend to favor the argument that the point of most of Leviticus is that the Israelites are commanded to be different for the sake of being different.
Kedoshim t'hiyu: You shall be holy/set apart/different.
Which is a shame, because bacon is delicious.
Posted by Matthew Harvey | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 6:38 PM
6: Thing is, every culture is "different."
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 6:38 PM
bacon is delicious
It seems a very cruel god that would forbid it.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 6:55 PM
7: Well, yeah, but some are more intentional about it than others.
Posted by Matthew Harvey | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 7:43 PM
8: Shver ist a yid tsu sein.
Posted by Matthew Harvey | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 7:45 PM
I like 4: I'd add to it a question of training the mind in certain contemplative ways, and so on.
The thing I'm getting hung up on, and maybe it's just stupid and I'm totally missing something, is why can't religion be "true" in the same way fiction is? Do we dismiss fiction, or poetry, or drama, because it is just stories about people who never existed and never acted? Surely not. We don't *care* if stories are "real" in that sense; we care if they are realistic because they feel true in ways we can't explain, and in ways that somehow transcend our ability to explain/understand/make meaning of things we know literally are true.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 7:51 PM
10 gets it exactly right.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 7:54 PM
I think the "difference as such" thing makes sense as a reason that the laws were collected and then practiced over time -- but it just doesn't give a very good account of how they arose in the first place (or at least it doesn't provide much explanatory power).
The explanation I find most convincing is that the elites from the Kingdom of Judah ("southern kingdom") were trying to maintain their distinct identity in the Babylonian exile and so assembled various law-codes from their culture previously -- together with a lot of legends, etc. Before the exile, or at least before the reign of King Josiah, the law doesn't seem to have been that big a deal -- David, for instance, shows no apparent knowledge of the law.
It's a matter of preserving a distinct identity, built from pre-existing materials that were not developed explicitly for the sake of creating a distinct identity (except to the extent that every culture is distinct from others). For instance, I'm sure there were plenty of cultures that refused to eat pork just because pigs are gross. Even better example: circumcision, the decisive identifying practice of Judaism, which people were willing to die for, was also practiced by the Egyptians. NOT to denigrate the practice of circumcision as such or its value to Judaism -- just to say that it's not contrary for the sake of being contrary.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:00 PM
I think most of the laws in Leviticus are actually based on (though not identical to) Egyptian practices, including the pork prohibition. But I forget where I read that.
Also, I like the rest of 13. I don't think I've heard that specific explanation before but it makes more sense than the others I have heard.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:05 PM
Maybe you're thinking of Freud's Moses and Monotheism -- which is a really fascinating book, no matter what you think of it on the level of its factual claims. Also perhaps the most strangely organized book ever.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:10 PM
I'm virtually certain I'm not thinking of Freud's Moses and Monotheism.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:12 PM
13: Yes, I agree with this wholeheartedly. In fact, your second paragraph is a neat summary of part of my undergraduate honors thesis.
(Every time I comment here, I find myself thinking, "Damn, I should have explained that better." In this instance, you've done it for me. Thanks!)
Posted by Matthew Harvey | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:20 PM
16: Pick it up sometime anyway. Of course, I have kind of a weakness for crackpot theories.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:24 PM
For instance, I'm sure there were plenty of cultures that refused to eat pork just because pigs are gross. Even better example: circumcision, the decisive identifying practice of Judaism, which people were willing to die for, was also practiced by the Egyptians. NOT to denigrate the practice of circumcision as such or its value to Judaism -- just to say that it's not contrary for the sake of being contrary.
True, the Egyptians did circumcise, but I remember correctly, Israel's immediate Canaanite neighbors did not?
It's a matter of preserving a distinct identity, built from pre-existing materials that were not developed explicitly for the sake of creating a distinct identity (except to the extent that every culture is distinct from others).
In fact, I'd argue -- although I never got around to researching it in depth -- that the Judahite response to the Babylonion exile was the impetus for the development of monotheism as a serious religious idea. (Babylon's victory over Judah wasn't a victory by Babylon's God over Israel/Judah's God, rather it was the God of Israel punishing his people using Babylon as a tool. See, for instance, Jeremiah.)
Posted by Matthew Harvey | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:28 PM
True, the Egyptians did circumcise, but I remember correctly, Israel's immediate Canaanite neighbors did not?
Probably not. I'm pretty sure the Philistines didn't, less so about the Canaanites. Circumcision as a practice is generally associated with Africa.
One way to interpret the Hebrews is as an Egyptianized Canaanite group with certain customs that differed from their neighbors (which were then elaborated in the post-Exilic period for theological reasons etc.).
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:36 PM
There's some evidence that not all of the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt -- those who participated in (something like) the Exodus would have brought their practices with them, and would have been the conquering elites. Naturally, they would have thought that uncircumcision, pork eating, etc., were simply uncouth and unacceptable practices.
I think you're right about the Babylon thing generally, though I tend to think it was the Israelite prophet class more generally where this idea took off -- for instance, in the first parts of Amos, where God claims a certain sense of ownership over other nations. The prophet class was definitely the milieu in which the shift from henotheism to monotheism was decisively made. (I would take the creation story in Genesis to be an after-effect of that -- a polemical rewriting of Babylonian myths.)
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:39 PM
(I would take the creation story in Genesis to be an after-effect of that -- a polemical rewriting of Babylonian myths.)
Interesting. Could you elaborate?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:43 PM
Interesting; I'd never thought of Genesis 1 as being polemical (as opposed to merely derivative). Your reading makes good sense, even simply chronologically; by the time the P authors were established in exile and, presumably, writing, they'd probably have absorbed the prophetic program.
Damn, it's too bad my NRSV is downstairs and I'm covered in cats.
Posted by Matthew Harvey | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:49 PM
There are a lot of parallels between Genesis and Babylonian myths -- in fact, for believers (even loose ones), it can be kind of disturbing to read the Enuma Elish and other similar documents for the first time. By rewriting them to make the God of Israel the protagonist, the Israelites were saying, to put it crassly, "Our God is better than yours -- in fact, your gods are just made up." This is kind of an outrageous thing to say to the people who just conquered your country and uprooted all your elites and sent them a thousand miles away.
I take early Christianity to be a kind of repetition of the same impulse: "Caesar isn't the imperator -- the real imperator is the one Rome crucified." (There's a lot of literature nowadays on how St. Paul was a "radical Jew" -- for a lot of really good reasons, his contemporaries were not willing to go down his road.)
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 8:54 PM
Good thing the Babylonians weren't listening. Like MH, I had generally thought of the creation story as derivative of Enuma Elish etc., but it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a relation of direct opposition in its composition.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 9:19 PM
This whole conversation makes me want to go back to school. So much to learn and know!
Posted by Matthew Harvey | Link to this comment | 03-31-06 9:30 PM
I'm not a theologian of any sort; as a journalist I am more of an amateur sociologist of religion. The one thing I do know is that religion is not the same as Christianity and there is no reason to suppose that religions grow more or less religious as they approximate to the forms of Christianity with which we are familiar. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to remember this, precisely because religions are sets of cultural practices, so their attraction can only be understood by participation. By analogy, you can only understand the meaning of a phrase like "Je t'aime" if you have said and meant the equivalent in English. Even then, it won'ty be the same unless you actually happen to be in love with a French person, or the right sort of Canadian.
With that said, and if you're seriously interested, FL, I suggest the works of John Bowker, in particular "The religious imagination and the sense of God". JB is a man who has absorbed both Wittgenstein and Darwin. Very interesting. Also one of the few (
Posted by Andrew Brown | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 12:53 AM
oh -- i got eaten by the html parser. I had put less-than sign after the bracket. Clearly it thougth I was opening an impossible tag. There is a lesson there, sisters and brothers, about the context-dependent nature of symbolic meaning. When they came for my angle brackets, i did not protest for I was not an angle bracket. When they came for my God, I protested, but no one took any notice. "You're not god", they said. "I knew God ..."
Posted by Andrew Brown | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 1:08 AM
I'm afraid I don't have time to read that other thread; nor am I a theologian, but it seems to me that a) no one is really addressing your question and b) y'all have a very Abrahamic view of the world. Which makes sense I suppose, but is certainly not the only way to look at things.
I'm very tired, and just came back from the hospital, so this is probably not the best frame of mind to leave an unfogged comment in. So I'm not really going to try, but I will say that two people can have exactly the same set-description of the world--the same list of what things are in it, what their histories are, and how they interact with each other--but have very different ways of sorting and organizing and prioritizing and relating to that set. None of us can hold all of objective scientific reality in our heads all the the time. We have to focus on it in some sense, just like a camera cannot capture all of reality and must prioritze it along some focal plane.
Religion can be one way of doing that. Not always a good way, but not always a bad way. And because of many of its built-in emphases on God as the bulk of the lens--and God's usual definition as the source and center of all goodnes and love---it can be a particularly powerful lens, and for some people uniquely positive.
Posted by Saheli | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 1:11 AM
20: well, the philistines were caananites.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 1:33 AM
just came back from the hospital
Is everything okay?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 6:52 AM
well, the philistines were caananites.
Not according to the definition of "Canaanite" I'm familiar with; they came from elsewhere (Greece?), spoke a different language, and had a different material culture.
Saheli: some non-Abrahamic stuff came up in the other thread, but I'll grant that this has been a very Abrahamic conversation. I haven't answered Labs's question because I'm neither Christian nor a theologian (nor particularly religious, for that matter); I don't know what Kotsko's excuse is.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 1:17 PM
Oh, thanks Apo--I'm okay, but a member of the family not so much, though hopefully getting better.
I'll try to read the other thread later teofilo. . .
Posted by Saheli | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 1:55 PM
It's probably worth it if you can find the time. There's some interesting stuff in there.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 2:00 PM
B, I left something on the other thread about this line of thought. Here's a sort-of restatement. You say:
There's some kind of value to good fiction, we think; we think we learn something useful from it even though the events it depicts didn't really happen. To go back to my example in the other comment, consider Of Human Bondage. False claim not genuinely asserted by the work: there was this guy Phillip with a clubfoot, and he became a doctor. True claim asserted by the work: sometimes the real harms done by, say, a physical deformity are psychological; the personality is warped by the twisted limb.
A hokey application to Christianity: (a) "Christ was crucified & rose from the dead" is in the first category of claims that needn't be true; (b) "people are special and we should be nice to the poor" is in the second. Here are some problems:
(i) this way of thinking about religion suggests a sort of anthropological approach-- we should study the sacred texts to learn what valuable life lessons they might impart, but we shouldn't get caught up in evaluating their particular claims. Hence, we can endorse Christianity in the same way that we endorse a bunch of other religions that have the same "big lessons." But, at least traditionally, adhering to two very different religions was thought to be incoherent. Hence, this stance toward religion is not compatible with the way the religion understands itself.
(ii) if we can't get the big life lesson without assenting to "Christ was crucified & rose from the dead" then, as I've been saying, the big claims are subject to empirical critique, because they rest on claims about what really happened.
(iii) we're left with a reading of the Bible as a kind of didactic fiction. A lot of religious practice (confession, the sacraments, perhaps even organized services) seem to lose their point on this reading. Why do these things? Is it important to eat wafers to learn to be nice to poor people?
The underlying point to all this is that the "useful fiction" reading isn't, as I see it, true to the practice. Too much of what's done is rendered incoherent by that reading.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 2:18 PM
Can I ask a simple question? Is the hypothesis "Christ was crucified and rose from the dead" really falsifiable? Keep in mind that the event is supposed to be not just miraculous but eschatalogical. It would seem to be the canonical irreproducible result. And I don't mean falsifiable in principle, but rather given the evidence that exists and is likely to be collected at any point in the future.
Posted by mealworm | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 4:11 PM
Re 35: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
Religions make exclusive and contradictory claims about the world. To choose something simple but fundamental, the Hindu creation myth (Rig Veda) and Genesis cannot both be true, whether we are talking about empirically observable, testable reality or some more metaphorical, "literature"-like truth. The God (or gods) they imagine as the source of creation are different in their number, nature and values. The Rig-Veda tells us, for example, that the caste system was divinely ordained, prescribing to the lowest caste the duty to serve meekly the other three castes. How do you square that with Genesis' view that people were made in god's image, all equal? You can't, not even as literature, and certainly not as something more concrete, testable or observable.
I often think that Christian religious belief depends on the cultural isolation of most westerners. There are billions of people who do not believe that Jesus was God. Billions. What does that tell you about the likelihood that he was? How can you and they reach any kind of common understanding about this question? By appealling to "grammar" or feelings about an underlying divinity. It's nonsense. And yet, when I was a boy, I had a Sunday School teacher who assured me that all the people who I knew that were not Greek Orthodox (into which I was born) were on their way to Hell.
One other point which others have often made, but bears repeating, is that Christians have to selectively screen out of their awareness large chunks of the book they claim is divine writ. They just pretend they aren't there. I'm not talking about the weird empirical claims (like the idea that the world was created in seven days). I'm talking about specific commandments that are said to come directly from God. Kosher law has come up in the posts above, which is usually the subject of jokes. But then there are the darker commands, like the duty to kill those who convert from Christianity, which appears in Leviticus.
There was a certain bitter irony in the recent trial in Afghanistan, in which a man was nearly executed as the proper punishment for conversion from Islam. People in the West were almost unanimous in their condemnation of this rigid theocratic view, and I'm glad they were. But Leviticus, of course, contains exactly the same instructions for the followers of Yahweh.
I'm glad we're long since over that, but it's clearly because the religious turn a blind eye to it. I doubt many religious people think about that rule or have any theory as to why they don't observe it. No doubt that kind of selective attention helps preserve religious belief, but it doesn't make for a principled or even coherent religious viewpoint.
Posted by TedL | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 5:08 PM
I basically agree with the thrust of 37, but I have some quibbles. First, part of the very basic theology of Christianity (as in what Jesus himself apparently taught) is that the old law (i.e. the Old Testament, including Leviticus) no longer applies. It was later included in the Christian Bible for other reasons, but it's not really fair to complain about Christians not following all the commandments because it's a big part of the religion not to, even though they are in the canonical text. The behavior of actual Christians is of course not always in accordance with this (see homosexuality), but that just means they're wrong, not that all Christians have to follow all the rules.
Also, the "don't they know how many people don't believe in Jesus?" argument is a non-starter; of course Christians know that most people aren't Christian--that's what missionaries are for. That is, however many people believe in a given religion is not an argument, from the point of view of its adherents, for how likely it is that that religion is "true" (whatever that means). Especially for religions that actively proselytize, being small in numbers just means there are still a lot of souls to save.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 5:21 PM
One of the problems with TedL's point is suggested by mealworm's 36: different passages in the Bible are supposed to be read in different ways, as dictated by theology.
Most Christians, if I've got it right, are instructed to understand much of the Levitical code as having been totally superceded by Christ and Paul: that part of the Torah is to be read anthropologically or historically. Genesis and Exodus are to be read either literally or allegorically, but different traditions will emphasize one or the other depending on their doctrinal needs.
In the face of teh Science, a lot of Christians are able to maintain their interest in the Bible by reading allegorically and eschatologically--neither of which hermeneutical styles will yield much to empirical claims.
(Of course, if you've got a dude running around claiming to have an direct connection to God's intent, you have a hard time ignoring his writings and "retranslations" of the older writings. Thanks a lot for mucking up the theological balance, Uncle Joe!)
These doctrines of how to read what might be considered part of the practice of the particular religions, which, I think, would distinguish that sort of reading from the kind praticed in literature, where the most highly trained readers are supposed to be able to switch hermeneutical gears for external and hopefully more empirically based reasons.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 04- 1-06 5:33 PM
FL -- you're nearly their. But literate religions are ficiton with fandoms, (which would make the Book of Mormon fanfic, so my theory must be true); and the social dynamics of religions are those of fandoms without the self-awareness.
This kind of thinking is related to the canonical distinciton between a religion and a cult, which has nothing to do with the strageness of the beliefs, nor even owith the necessarily authoritarian nature of a cult, and certainly nothing sto do with brainwashing. it is about the distnace between the beliefs of te cult and those of the society around them. Thus, a man who keep sacred cows outside London is a cult member. A man who does so outside Benares is perfectly well-adjusted and devout.
Posted by Andrew Brown | Link to this comment | 04- 3-06 10:33 AM
s/their/there/ sorry.
Posted by Andrew Brown | Link to this comment | 04- 3-06 10:34 AM
Of course, if you've got a dude running around claiming to have an direct connection to God's intent
... you banish him / her from the colony, so that they're either scalped or forced to found Rhode Island.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04- 3-06 10:49 AM
at least traditionally, adhering to two very different religions was thought to be incoherent. Hence, this stance toward religion is not compatible with the way the religion understands itself. I agree that this is a problem: then again, I was raised in a fairly liberal, tolerant, ecuminical kind of Catholicism, so it isn't a problem for me. I'd tend to wipe this issue away with a breezy wave of my hand and a restatement of the position that the truth of religions isn't necessarily literal: so that this "you can't be both Catholic and Buddhist" thing can be either simply factually untrue, or, if you want to keep with the metaphor thing, it can be true in the sense that adherence to any kind of serious practice requires committment and specialization, just as one can't be both a philosopher and a neurologist. A very few highly skilled and dedicated people can do both, but even then they'd have to switch between different modes of thought while practicing one or the other.
ii and iii: I don't think I'm quite saying something as simple as "religion teaches big life lessons," though that's certainly a big part of what it does. I'm okay with the resurrection myself; not in a literal sense, but in a metaphorical sense (which I realize makes me a bad Catholic) and I'm willing to accept it, like a good Catholic, as a mystery that I can't fully explain, though I can explain some parts of it--resurrection as a metaphor for an extraordinarily profound and unique effect on a set of believers after one's physical death, as an assertion of the idea that death isn't the end of one's direct influence, that the energy in one's body goes somewhere after the body dies, and so on. None of those are sufficient and even together they're insufficient, but there's something powerful about that particular story that really speaks to people, and I can accept that without believing that some guy died and then his body came back to life just as it was before.
The thing about wafers and stuff is, I'd say, important to the practice. The point of Christianity isn't *only* to teach one to be a good person; there are lots of things we express by religion (or any complicated set of beliefs) and some of them are contradictory. The practice of the mass is really beautiful, I find, and when I'm attending the meditativeness, the ritual, and so on are important parts of the rhythm of my week.
It's funny, at the conference I just went to, I had dinner a couple of times with a really nice guy who was a practicing Jew and also an athiest. He knew a lot more about theology and religious history than I did, and we talked about that. But we also talked about the paradox of practicing a faith that one doesn't, in a literal sense, believe in, and what one gets out of it, and why, and what it means to do so. I think the point is it isn't as simple as "be a good person"--in which case any kind of set of moral beliefs might do--but the importance of actively practicing something that one knows isn't literal, but that one embraces as an expression of something that speaks to another important part of oneself (alone, or as part of a historic community) in a way that one can't satisfactorily articulate.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 04- 3-06 10:50 AM