I watched Equus the other night and was thinking of exactly this problem. Farber-like, I mention now that I wrote a post about this today, in which I posit that while the objects of faith change throughout a life, there are just some people who don't feel it in any real sense, while others are totally overwhelmed by it and have to find ways to manage it. Those without faith are often jealous of those who have it, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that those whose faith is painfully real to them are often jealous of those with a bland, benevolent agnosticism.

This is going to be a fundamental disagreement, here, I think, but isn't there a real contempt in saying "I envy you your false beliefs?" (It's not clear to me that Rove's remark has to be read that way, but let's say we were talking about someone who unambiguously had said that.) Faith may be an emotional state as well as a set of truth claims, but if the truth claims it rests on are false, isn't it inherently bullshit? And isn't telling someone "You're deluded, but it looks like fun, I wish I was happily deluded too" insulting?

(Now, any atheist thinks 'people of faith' are mistaken in their beliefs, but it seems more respectful to me to treat them as importantly in error. The idea of envying their error seems to me to trivialize the importance of the subject.)

faith is something that you can put yourself in a position to receive, but the reception of which remains a gift

This might explain why a Christian might think an atheist should envy him his faith, but doesn't explain why an actual atheist would hold this position ("I envy the fact that the god I don't believe in has given you the gift of the faith to believe in him!").

A much more plausible explanation for Rovian religion-envy is that in an overwhelmingly religious culture, being religious is the norm, and atheists like Rove wish they were more "normal"; that is, they wish they could genuinely participate in an activity that makes them more acceptable to the general public. Saying "I wish I could believe" is akin to saying "I wish I could lose twenty pounds."

Interesting, AWB. I'm not sure (as in, genuinely not sure) whether you're also secularizing faith by psychologizing it--explaining it as a turn of mind rather than a gift from God.

Karl Rove = Søren Kierkegaard. Who'da thunk it?

Oh man, this isn't going to go well, is it?

Isn't Rove a fellow jack mormon? Wikipedia doesn't mention his religious upbringing, but the bio certainly suggests an LDS background.

But don't some atheists have some kind of "faith" in something? Some system or theory that rules the universe that isn't God? But then there are other atheists who don't feel the need to commit themselves to systems?

Oh man, this isn't going to go well, is it?

Make more sense next time, Shia.

What part of "I bear witness that there is no god but God" is non-assertoric, my honey mustard friend?

And yes, Ogged, I am secularizing faith by psychologizing it, to some degree. It is odd to me that, as an atheist, I have a lot of the same yearnings and feelings about the universe that I had when I was a Christian. They are just expressed with less fear and anger now.

This is often true for me, but I'm having troubling figuring out how I(as a person with faith)'m supposed to be insulted here.

8: I don't think I do. Possibly I have something lurking in my head that is what you mean by faith in a system or theory that rules the universe, but I don't have anything that I'd characterize that way.

but isn't there a real contempt in saying "I envy you your false beliefs?"

Is this the difference between an atheist and an agnostic? Isn't "false beliefs" begging the question at issue?

I've deputized Kotsko to deal with all of you, so I can enjoy my Saturday. Whether he's up to the task, only God knows.

Also: explaining faith as a gift of God, rather than as a turn of mind? Seriously begging the question.

I think the distinction between agnostics and atheists is pretty important here: an agnostic might plausibly envy a religious person their faith, whereas an atheist expressing that same sentiment raises the problem LB mentions in 2.

But I don't think it's so clear. I think even an atheist (let's say a weak atheist if we want to distinguish between weak and strong atheism) might envy a religious person their faith, because hey, let's face it, being religious can be fun (not if you're Catholic). You get to hang around with like-minded people, listen to other people trying to uplift you and make you feel good, feel like you've got a built-in way to teach your kids how to be goo, sing songs, have built-in quiet time (prayer, meditation), people dying is less horrifying, etc.

Pwned by SCMT.

"I wish I could believe"

More like "I wish I were a believer". I think that (some of) those who believe in God have a fulness of being that I do not see in myself, and that if I believed in God I would very likely be healthier of mind. And yet I do not "wish I could believe". Because the effort required to believe is not something I (as I exist) would exert, and exerting that effort would not have any kind of beneficial effect on me. So it's more like I wish I was different in some fundamental way that would cause me to make that effort and to benefit from it. Whereas I could totally picture making the effort to lose 20 pounds, and being better off for it even if I were not successful. And yet, and yet.

Leblanc's getting me to lose my grip on what's puzzling. Suppose I think that there is no God; I can also acknowledge that apparently rational people disagree and claim to have different evidence for their beliefs, evidence that is inaccessible to me since it rests on private experience or something like that. I might envy all the good stuff that comes with religious devotion while downgrading my assessment of my interlocutor's irrationality.

You get to hang around with like-minded people, listen to other people trying to uplift you and make you feel good, feel like you've got a built-in way to teach your kids how to be goo[d], sing songs, have built-in quiet time (prayer, meditation), people dying is less horrifying, etc.

Is this not true for atheists? I hang around with like-minded people, listen to other people uplift me and make me feel good, have a built-in (and frankly, much better, more comprehensible and less venomous) way to teach my future kids to be good, I sing songs whenever I want to and in general the ones I sing are a lot better than the shit they sing in church, meditate whenever I want, go through the same mourning, grieving and recovery process my religious family members do. So what's the big difference?

teach your kids how to be goo

Isn't it more a matter just of being infected by the Goo and transmogrifying, than an actual learning process?

21: You may have all those things, but many atheists tend to feel they don't, or at least they see what religious people have in those respects as superior to their own options.

22: Some religions teach you ways to make yourself more receptive to the Goo, that it may infect you more easily.

Real faith, as I experienced it, is not about getting uplifted and feeling good. In fact, I tend to assume people who go to churches that do that are specifically those who lack faith but like to pretend. Faith is often a feeling of keen suffering due to the problem of being separated from the real presence of the divine, and knowing that death may be far off. But I think when someone says they envy faith, it's not the clapping-hands-at-church they envy, it's that constant feeling that we live in a fallen state and that there's some other state out there that we'll be in one day.

23: Fuck, if they're really all that hard up, they can join the fucking Unitarians.

The key problem here is that "faith" is not equal to "a series of beliefs about God." The New Testament term pistis means something like faithfulness, trust, etc. -- not "assenting to propositions," though there obviously is a role for asseting to propositions in the Christian life. If you take the great heroes of faith -- like Augustine or Luther or Wesley -- their turn to real faith isn't something like "Wow, I suddenly realized that God has to be three in one and that one of the three has to come down to earth as a man to die for our sins...." but rather "Holy fuck, God has chosen me, God loves me, God has set me free." And faith becomes a way of trusting in God as you attempt to participate in what God does in the world.

Talking about it primarily in terms of belief is an impoverished notion that was primarily produced by the debate with the Enlightenment. But even in the most hardened fundamentalist churches (which are themselves an after-effect of modernism), the more authentic idea of faith remains -- though I would argue it is deeply perverted in such congregations.

Most critiques of "religion" only apply to the perverted forms of religion that arose after the modern secular state relegated religion to the private sphere. Then religion becomes a matter of goosebumps and weird speculative opinions. Those are, of course, the types of religions that we in the West primarily have to deal with, but I'd like to see a little more historical consciousness among secularists about such matters. As it stands, we only get the narrative of "religion is dangerous because it causes major wars about matters of opinion that cannot be adjudicated by reason" -- that was definitely true in the concrete circumstances of the aftermath of the Wars of Religion that prompted the secularizing settlement, but it's not the immutable essence.

I look forward to further comments that continue to work with the assumption that faith and religion are all about believing stupid things. If someone could go ahead and express a sense of woundedness that all religious people think that all atheists are living meaningless nihilistic lives, when in reality they just believe in the actual truth and why do religious people insist on denying it, that would be great. Psychologizing people's religious beliefs would help, too -- I see we've had some of that, but we can do more. (Maybe some pop psychoanalysis?)

That is, people who don't have faith lack access to the overwhelming experience of the divine, which, sure, can be elation, but usually in a completely self-immolating snuff-porn kind of way.

24 -- awesome. Where do I sign up?

I look forward to further comments that continue to work with the assumption that faith and religion are all about believing stupid things.

As do I.

God told me to ask you to stop stalking him, Kotsko, before he has to call the police.

I'm going to back out of this conversation now, as I actually have strong feelings about this topic.

and frankly, much better, more comprehensible and less venomous

Not everybody had your parents, stras.

29: Just walk into any church and ask (preferably loudly, during a service).

I actually don't have strong feelings, other than annoyance at other people's ignorance. At the end of the day, it's not as though I want to carry water for "religion" (understood either as some particular institution or some particular warm fuzzy I had one time).

Hey Kotsko -- is my understanding of Kierkegaard close to correct? It is based on reading mostly snippets here and there of his writings and of writings about his thought, rather than complete works in sequence; it suggests that he would have said something very close to "I am not fortunate enough to be a believer".

33: True; they could've been raised by Kotsko and ended up totally normal.

"'Scuse me, Teo told me this was where I come for the Goo."

Adam, that was good, but you could be snarkier in complaining about snark. I give it a B+

The key problem here is that "faith" is not equal to "a series of beliefs about God."

Is a series of beliefs a necessary condition for, or a proper part of, faith?

36: Yes, but I think Kierkegaard adds an element where you have to work as hard as you possibly can to become a believer, even though it can only come as a gift of God.

Speaking of the "question-begging" element in viewing faith as a "gift of God" rather than a "turn of mind" -- at least in the early church, I can see the sense of seeing it as something beyond human capacity to be able to face down the lions, to go off into the desert and live a radically different kind of life, etc. Nowadays, it loses some of its plausibility, because the point of religion is to belong to a club and have certain beliefs, while otherwise completely going along with capitalism (atheists are much better, in that they just cut straight to completely going along with capitalism). But there are Christians who are still out there doing courageous things, and even dying -- Western Christians, too, like peace activists killed by Israeli Defense Forces, etc.

because the point of religion is to belong to a club and have certain beliefs, while otherwise completely going along with capitalism (atheists are much better, in that they just cut straight to completely going along with capitalism).

You are sooo the Very Face of the Left, Kotsko.

But seriously -- other than being obnoxiously smug at being really right about stuff, what do self-described atheists usually do as a result of their non-beliefs? Not a whole fucking lot. At least Christians set up the stray soup kitchen.

42 -- Do as a result of non-beliefs? No, it's not do as a result on non-beliefs. Not behead, not burn at the stake, not go door to door lecturing, not have telethons announcing that we'll die if people don't donate $10 million, etc.

28 That is, people who don't have faith lack access to the overwhelming experience of the divine, which, sure, can be elation, but usually in a completely self-immolating snuff-porn kind of way.

Actually, without faith, you can still get this with LSD.

I think that it's Rove's way of getting out of sticky situations. He's close enough to enough Christians that he can't pretend to be a believer. So he says what he says, and they can remain friends while they pray for them. If he had said that their whole religion was a pack of silliness and lies, that wouldn't have been possible.

I say something like that myself occasionally: "I'm afraid that I'm not a believer".

Atheism, at least for those who bother to call themselves atheists, is usually accompanied by a certain degree of (totally understandable and justifiable!) hostility toward religion. So you'd think that, say, someone who thinks religion is a huge illusion might take that next step and say, "Hey, what matters is our human solidarity in this life" and working for the poor and downtrodden. Or something.

Am I successfully killing this thread?

43: What Charley said. And it's not as though you can't have atheists setting up soup kitchens.

The "not fortunate enough..." thinking seems awfully materialistic. It relies on an elementary assumption of current American religiosity: that faith is something to be acquired and maintained. Like the most desirable assets, it appreciates. One trades it at death for a preferred spot in the life to come.

There are other metaphors, though, even in Christianity (and if Christianity gives you the creeps, I apologize): for one, the leap thing from Soren the K. For another, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's description of Christ as the center of things, which we want to approach. These make faith seem more like an adventure than a high school graduation present: "A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting." But they lead one to suggest that the apologetic unfortunates are either lying, and don't really care (fair enough), or are too lazy to take the trouble.

44 -- part of my desire for faith has always been a conviction that I was missing out on the best of what hallucinogens have to offer.

Atheism, at least for those who bother to call themselves atheists, is usually accompanied by a certain degree of (totally understandable and justifiable!) hostility toward religion.

This is not the case for me. I am not sure it is true for most. To be sure, there is a species of athiest which is vocally hostile to religion, but maybe you mis-assess their predominace because of how vocal they are.

Me, I do not hold people in contempt because they do not believe the same thing I do. Others take a different view.

So you'd think that, say, someone who thinks religion is a huge illusion might take that next step and say, "Hey, what matters is our human solidarity in this life" and working for the poor and downtrodden. Or something.

What makes you think atheists don't do this? Among the atheists I know, one is a civil rights attorney, two work for Oxfam, one is an environmental advocate, and another works for Amnesty International. I don't see what point you're trying to make - that there aren't specifically atheist organizations out there for fighting poverty, advancing civil rights, etc.? What would be the point, given the relatively small number of atheists? Secular humanists concerned for the well-being of their fellow human beings tend to join existing organizations.

But don't some atheists have some kind of "faith" in something?

Um, causality?

what do self-described atheists usually do as a result of their non-beliefs? Not a whole fucking lot.

This is a pretty cheap shot.

Adam: Can we circle back to faith not being about truth claims? I mean, I get that it can't be reduced solely to truth claims, but don't there have to be some underlying beliefs as to matters of fact about god and the nature of the universe before you can get to higher level faith?

Has Clownae read Ezra lately?

My thought exactly. In high school, I helped found a chapter of Food Not Bombs. Had nothing to do with faith, and homeless people still got fed. Imagine that.

what do self-described atheists usually do as a result of their non-beliefs

The same things that self-described Christians do; I can point to plenty of examples of non-believers I know who are very active with the charitable works and giving. Atheists do have beliefs, after all, just a different set than church-goers.

Also, I've not noticed that they've got the market cornered on smug condescension.

As I keep saying: atheism very seldom has the importance in the lives of atheists that religion has in the lives of believers. Atheism is the belief that God doesn't exist, and that we should learn to live without faith in God. Whatever positive you live for is not atheism.

55 to ... some of those comments up there. (I'm missing some keys.)

Emerson's point in 57 is worth re-repeating:

Atheism very seldom has the importance in the lives of atheists that religion has in the lives of believers.

Atheism is the belief that God doesn't exist

Hmm, be careful here. Strong- and weak-atheist definitional phrasing can carry a buttload of subtext. I for one wouldn't agree with your statement; it's too active and, um, strong.

By the way, I just got home from NCProsecutor's wedding. He is, of course, bizarrely overchicked, but now it carries the official sanction of the Episcopal Church and the state of North Carolina. Yay, NCP!

(Definitely agree with the gist of 57, though.)

Seems to me that Karl Rove's comment offers evidence in favor of the proposition that people without religion tend to be amoral. Just saying.

I'm speaking primarily of "doctrinaire atheists" here as doing nothing but being smug -- Richard Dawkins is the most prominent example. Certainly there are secular people -- that is, people for whom the existence of God is not a major question -- doing good things. But people for whom a major part of their self-identity is atheism seem pretty worthless to me, I'll admit.

56: Yes, my behavior is exactly like that of the fundamentalists and the doctrinaire atheists I despise. I repent in sackcloth and ashes.

I repent in sackcloth and ashes.

That's hott.

Well, my own belief is that God is a shit. I don't call it atheism, though.

61: NCP clearly rules. Best to both.

60: Disagree. Emerson is right on this one. Strong- and weak-atheist definitional phrasing depends on the strength of your belief that god doesn't exist, belief being a plastic concept. But that belief, even if only at the level that I believe Manchester fucking United is going to win the English Premiership, is a sine qua non.

In fact, it would appear to be a form of theism.

In fact, it would appear to be a form of theism.

No, theism implies belief in the existence of god. Atheism and agnosticism (non-belief) ought to be indistiguishable in terms of their impact on the behaviour of the atheist/agnostic (unless the agnostic has gone with Pascal's wager).

53: No. Think of the motto "faith seeking understanding." One will, in some exceptional cases, have a personal experience with God that leads to faith; more normally, one will be inculcated into faith in God through loyalty to a particular community and its liturgical practices. Theological reflection on the metaphysical presuppositions, etc., always comes after the fact -- note that the classical proofs for the existence of God were developed in a period when there was no controversy about whether God exists, for instance. The broad metaphysical controversy among people who fundamentally agree that God did something in Christ that pertains to the salvation of the world should also show that the various presuppositions aren't required building blocks to get there.

You don't build your way up logically to faith -- virtually no one in the history of religion has ever done that. You start from a position of faith and (most of the time) of belonging to a particular faith community, and then sometimes you will also take the intellectual route. But obviously most religious believers don't go that route, though in the modern age more people are due to greater availability of education, etc.

I can't believe that my proposed nickname for Ross "IwoulddoanythingforlovebutIwont" Douthat hasn't caught on yet.

my own belief is that God is a shit

Genesis 1:26 supports your belief, John.

Let's clarify some terms here.

Agnosticism is not doubt. Weak atheism is (scientific) doubt. This is the atheism that is common in the discourse. Strong atheism of course the unscientific positive belief in the absence of god. Agnosticism proper is the belief that the answer is unknowable, a fairly subtle and rarely-held position.

With the first appearance of Richard Dawkins in this thread, I believe it's time for a break.

theism implies belief in the existence of god

69: Sorry, 68 to 66. Emerson's belief about the nature of God implies, blah blah.

An atheist wouldn't have to see Rove's statement as smug and condescending, if he also believed that a) faith in God could be a rational way to organize one's life and b) that having faith seemed to offer the believer some benefit.

Adam's right, I think, in saying that you'd have to move it away from talk of believing propositions X, Y, and Z to understand what's going on. I'd probably think of it as having a particular outlook on the world, rather than holding a set of propositions; Augustine and others seem to be pretty clear that the faith came first, and only then were they able to understand the claims of faith.

So when Rove says, "I'm not fortunate enough...", it can be charitably read as "I haven't had that life-changing experience yet", not "Man, wish I wished a bunch of false things." More seriously, though, it's just a nice hedge so he doesn't have to acknowledge his atheism.

it's just a nice hedge

Yep.

54 -- No -- has he switched emphases from health care to God and hallucinogens? I will go take a look.

70: Here I am going to sound like an obnoxious atheist, I think.

Don't you still need to have belief in the factual existence of God, or something similar, regardless of the evidentiary or intellectual justification for that belief, to have faith in that God? If 'faith', in the sense you're using it, is compatible with believing that there is no God, and that your 'faith' doesn't refer to anything outside your own head, then what value can it have?

64: I don't think that's fair to Dawkins, at least. He's not just smug, he's also convinced that religion is actively a problem in this world, and goes to considerable effort himself to promote atheism and tell people why he thinks that. Agree or not, it's pretty hard to make the case that people like him are just sitting back and saying `look at all those stupid gits'. More of an evangelical athiest, I guess. Personaly, I think he's going about things in a counterproductive way, but I wouldn't write him off as merely `smug'.

It's possible that, like Chuck Colson, Karl Rove will be converted to evangelicalism in prison. Let us all hope for at least part of that scenario to come true.

The key problem here is that "faith" is not equal to "a series of beliefs about God." The New Testament term pistis means something like faithfulness, trust, etc. -- not "assenting to propositions."

Without knowing the linguistics of the New Testament, I like this idea a lot. Faith as a virtue doesn't make any sense to me if you define it as "beliefs about God." But "beliefs in and about God" is the definition of "faith" we usually use today, and it's hard to get past this in conversation.

If you look at faith as faithfulness, trust, etc., a lot of religious believers don't have it. And a lot of atheists do, in fact, exhibit truly impressive levels of faithfulness, trust, etc. in other people--including total strangers. ("If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.") You could, if you wanted to, characterize this as being faithful to God by proxy.

But a definition of "faith" that says that James Dobson doesn't have it, and atheist human rights workers do, is so idiosyncratic that I think it just mainly confuses & annoys people if you try to use it conversation.

Don't you still need to have belief in the factual existence of God, or something similar, regardless of the evidentiary or intellectual justification for that belief, to have faith in that God?

I think, per counterfly, you have to not have the belief in the factual nonexistence of God, but nothing more. For most people, it's an open question, as I understand Adam.

81 is awesome and true.

78: Have you never had an experience that you would have thought was impossible before you actually experienced it?

Faith, divorced from the actual existence of God, might mean something like "loyalty to the cause of Christ," i.e., what Christ was trying to accomplish in his early life. There are a lot of progressive Christians whose faith is based in that and for whom metaphysical questions about whether "there is" a God out there are not very interesting -- in fact, the question of whether Jesus did, in detail, all the things he's portrayed as doing are less important to them than the general spirit of what they take the story of Jesus described in the gospels to be about.

This seems to me to be kind of what Bonhoeffer was getting at with "religionless Christianity" -- a Christian practice that would be loyal to Christ without requiring the metaphysical backdrop of a Big Guy in the Sky, the immortal soul, etc.

You just don't seem to be able to let go of this paradigm that faith is mainly about propositions, meaning affirmations about states of affairs. There are certain ways of saying, "The Gospel of Christ is the force that will transform the world" that have nothing to do with propositions -- in fact, such a statement would fly in the face of the known facts (as represented by the fact that Jesus was, you know, brutally executed).

I'm actually kind of impressed that Rove didn't fake it and say that he was saved in 1976 after an encounter with Jerry Falwell. I guess the RR influence with the Bush set has fallen enough that there's no political liability for this atheist coming-out party.

I'm a muddled Unitarian, and I thought Dawkins' coinage of "brights" as the new term for atheists was both smug and unspeakably terrible marketing.

If Brad DeLong comes into this thread and starts quoting Bill and Ted at us, I'm out -- just so everyone knows.

But people for whom a major part of their self-identity is atheism seem pretty worthless to me, I'll admit.

people for whom the major part of their self-identity is [numismatics | Linux | Republicanism | religion | their sexuality | body-building | scrapbooking | wine | The Grateful Dead | whatever] seem pretty worthless to me, too. but it's still entirely possible for an atheist (or even a numismatist) to be smart, funny, charming and good looking - the kind of person you wouldn't mind hanging out with. and it's possible for people to make too much out of Interest X; we call those people "boorish" and we try to avoid them at parties - not because of Interest X, but because they've made themselves all about Interest X, and they won't talk about anything else.

I'm speaking primarily of "doctrinaire atheists" here as doing nothing but being smug

i'm sure you're not implying that religious people are never smug.

88: Why on earth would a statement that doctrinaire atheists are smug be taken to imply that religious people are never smug? No rational person could hold the position that religious people are never smug. Let's break out of this dualistic thinking, people!

78: Think of it a bit like believing that Buck loves you and that you love him. You probably didn't come to fall in love by examining a series of propositions and deciding that "falling in love" was the best intellectual response. But now that you are in love, you can probably give me a list of beliefs you have about your love, and point to evidence that you think supports it. But none of that evidence would make a particularly convincing argument unless you were already in love, as that evidence isn't what drew you to him in the first place.

86 is right. I love, love Dawkins' writing except for the inevitable portion of each book that deals with the nonexistence of God. (In some books, e.g. the awesome Ancestor's Tale, this section is quite short; in others it predominates.

86: Completely agree. I wasn't arguing that Dawkins wasn't smug. He is. I was just reacting to the `doing nothing but being smug'. He's doing a lot besides being smug; much of it wrongheaded as you point out (in my opinion). But counterfly is probably right; Dawkins appearance isn't likely to lead useful places.

87 -- you mean the "Excellent Adventure" duo, or some other Bill and Ted?

If Brad DeLong comes into this thread and starts quoting Bill and Ted at us, I'm out -- just so everyone knows.

We've all sent our emails accordingly.

Have you never had an experience that you would have thought was impossible before you actually experienced it?

I mean this in the best possible way, but only as a very very small child, and, uh, in the early evening of July ?th, 200x.

I'm somewhat of a fan of Bonhoeffer's, and it's allowed me a manner of common ground with the ministers in my family. And something to talk about after dinner at Thanksgiving.

You just don't seem to be able to let go of this paradigm that faith is mainly about propositions

But isn't this a fairly advanced theological point that isn't shared or understood by the vast majority of the rank-and-file faithful, who either actively believe in a personal God, or don't care about the facts but like the lifestyle/community/ritual?

The trick is to deny one's own athiesm. Then you get to have it both ways.

Unfunny joke made, obviously, Adam, athiests aren't going to do Good Works *because* of their athiesm, since one of the functions of athiesm is that belief (or lack thereof) is a non-issue. Sort of. So one who is an athiest might do good works for some other reason, but not because of athiesm per se.

But it is true that smug athiesm is annoying as shit.

84, 90: Oh, I'm not saying that the belief in a series of factual propositions has to be the cause of or pre-exist, or intellectually justify, the higher-level faith -- it just seems as though it has to accompany it.

Faith, divorced from the actual existence of God, might mean something like "loyalty to the cause of Christ," i.e., what Christ was trying to accomplish in his early life.

Mmm. At this point I don't see what distinguishes it from "Abraham Lincoln is my personal hero."

I before E, except after C, or when sounded like A, as in neighbor and weigh. Also, in atheism.

...except after c, or when sounding like 'a' as in neighbor and weigh, and lots of other exceptions, actually.

DAMMIT

"Faith, divorced from the actual existence of God, might mean something like "loyalty to the cause of Christ," i.e., what Christ was trying to accomplish in his early life."

If you subtract the Christ part, I have the impression that this isn't so uncommon in liberal Judaism: whether there's a guy in a beard sitting in the sky, whether there's an afterlife, is not the point.

But again, depending on how you define "the cause of Christ" (and assuming you don't require a subjective belief that the cause you're showing loyalty to is Christ's) there are full fledged atheists who are very faithful to it. Including "people for whom a major part of their self-identity is atheism". (I'm not one of them; I just tend to develop intellectual crushes on them).

101: At least you got the Kobe.

One reason for the new aggressiveness of atheists is the realization that in the new age of faith we are the ones excluded. We rank below gay black women as Presidential candidates. (No offense to gay black women.)

85: Has Rove somewhere declared himself an atheist? He could be agnostic; in any case, per Cala's 75, there's nothing inherently condescending in the way he expressed his non-belief. Of course, Karl Rove is an amoral monster whose every pronouncement is carefully edited for political effect, so I'm not sure what can truly be said about the nature of his faith.

98: One thing that distinguishes it is that I don't really know what consequences would follow from Lincoln being your hero. Nor does Lincoln seem to call anyone to follow and imitate him. Jesus does call people to serve the poor, visit those in prison, challenge the authorities, etc. And he always encourages that to happen in a committed community.

But with the Lincoln example, at least we have a concept of faith that includes more than propositions -- something that includes a level of emotional response (finding Lincoln to be an attractive figure). The key is to add the element that faith presupposes an element of practice or else is considered "dead," and I think we're pretty much there.

One could make an argument, though, that Founder-worship (or Lincoln-worship) is one manifestation of American Civil Religion. In fact, I would say that nationalism/patriotism is more like pre-modern religion, in a lot of senses, than modern religions are. Also, in my opinion, much more destructive than even the most virulent fundamentalist sect could ever dream of being.

I think in Rove's case he's actually just 1) agnostic, not an atheist (or a weak atheist rather than a strong atheist); and/or 2) sucking up.

Why would you believe what Rove says about his faith or lack of it any more than you would believe anything else he says. I would look at a calendar if he said it was Saturday, and on the basis of this I'm inclined to suspect he's a Shintoist.

I'm going to go ahead and revoke my statements about atheists and just step down to the less controversial statement that "I hate Richard Dawkins' work on religion and I hate it when people cite him approvingly in debates about religion." Or "Richard Dawkins' anti-religious activism is really lame and useless."

(Obviously Marx, Derrida, Zizek, et al. are atheists and I have no particular problem with them.)

While I agree with Kotsko about the nature of faith, I think the linked comment is overly generous in describing "people who are, at the very least, sincere Christians." I have not for one second believed that Bush's professed belief is anything more than political calculation, and I think the same goes for many other supposed Christians in American political life.

Also, the question of "what points he was trying to earn by phrasing it in that way" to Hitchens seems obvious, in that he was talking to a journalist and therefore making a statement for public consumption.

Adam, that's big of you ("Why, that's bigamy." "Yes, and it's big of me too." - Marx). But uncontroversial.

AK, why is Zizek such a consistantly cited figure among humanities bloggers? I have a pretty well-rounded education, I think (I've read Derrida in translation, and I'm at least familiar with Lacan), but I'd never even heard of Zizek until I started reading Crooked Timber.

"I have not for one second believed that Bush's professed belief is anything more than political calculation, and I think the same goes for many other supposed Christians in American political life."

Really? To me Bush's defining characteristic is his capacity for believing his own bullshit, and that very much includes his professed Christianity.

Not to bright, one might say.

Compared to his early work, notably The Selfish Gene, Dawkins' writings on religion are incredibly sad and disappointing. Not unlike Hitchens.

Whoops, 114 to 86

Having grown up in Baptist churches, I'm quite well acquainted with false piety, and Bush gives off that impression in spades. I don't believe his religiosity for a second and I'm willing to wager that his knowledge of the Bible wouldn't fill an 8.5x11 sheet of paper.

98: What's wrong with pre-modern religion? You were just telling us about how the modern variety is perverted.

I don't doubt the sincerity of Bush's faith. In fact, that's one of the things that makes him scariest in my mind, because he has a pretty fucked-up kind of faith (the kind where you can jump immediately from being an alcoholic to being sober without any process, for instance).

112: I think it's because he's presently the most visible figure in the humanities generally -- the blog coverage is a reflection of the situation overall. He's continually travelling through the country lecturing, he does tons of articles (some not very good, as we know) in a lot of different venues, he writes a ton of books, etc. The guy is basically a force of nature and is very difficult to ignore, especially for those who are well-disposed toward so-called "Theory" (the kind imported from Germany and France).

Also, from the blog perspective, it helps that a lot of his stuff is easily available online, he writes about current events as defined by the American news cycle (obviously crucial for American bloggers), and he writes in English. Honestly, I think the guy needs to get his own blog.

why is Zizek such a consistantly cited figure among humanities bloggers?

He's not. It's just that a couple of the better known humanities blogs have a couple of people on 'em who happen to have read a lot of Zizek.

110: I have not for one second believed that Bush's professed belief is anything more than political calculation, and I think the same goes for many other supposed Christians in American political life.

I'll go a step farther and say that it goes for many other supposed Christians in all walks of American life. There are five lights.

the kind where you can jump immediately from being an alcoholic to being sober without any process

This strikes me less as a manifestation of faith than an indication that he didn't actually fit the clinical definition of alcoholism.

Evangelicals do tend to over-hastily equate "heavy drinker" with "alcoholic."

apo, just to be clear, I think Bush's faith is fake at some level, but I don't think he's consciously faking it.

Adam, when you say you "don't doubt the sincerity of Bush's faith," are you talking about the beliefs-in-propositions-about-God kind or the pistis kind?

I don't doubt the sincerity of Bush's faith

I hear this a lot, but in the absence of any behavior remotely resembling what I understand as Christianity, I just can't buy it.

Bush looks too afraid of everything, IMO, for me to believe that believes anything he says any more. He may have convinced himself here and there, temporarily, but I think he's ultimately incompetent even at self-brainwashing.

I said faith, I meant faith. Not this made-up "believing in propositions" nonsense. In Tillich's terms, I would say his faith is "demonic." But it's still faith.

122: I think he doesn't fit most people's definition of "sober", myself.

"Atheism, at least for those who bother to call themselves atheists, is usually accompanied by a certain degree of (totally understandable and justifiable!) hostility toward religion. So you'd think that, say, someone who thinks religion is a huge illusion might take that next step and say, "Hey, what matters is our human solidarity in this life" and working for the poor and downtrodden. Or something."

I don't see why a non-"bright" atheist would fewel offended by that, or feel the need to say "Hey, I'm not like that."

"usually accompanied by" is an empirical question. I suspect it's true for the US, where atheist is a drty word.

I don't think he's consciously faking it.

Well, my position on Bush's faith is drawn strictly ex recto of course, but my assessment of him may be significantly less charitable than yours. I don't think he has any real belief in conservatism either, beyond the "I don't like hippies" intro. Best I can tell, the only core beliefs he has are: 1) protect the big investor class, and 2) attain a position of power.

126 gets closer to the truth for me. Maybe his alleged faith isn't exactly calculated any longer after all these years, but neither does it seem grounded in anything genuine. He seems unmoored.

129. David, I think your point about hostility to atheists being more prevalent where atheism is a dirty word is important. People are understandably hostile to those that wish them harm, but can afford to be magnanimous about it if the chances of their doing harm are negligible. If I was American, I might even be frightened enough to give Dawkins house room. As it is, you and I can afford to regard aggresive theists much as we regard people who listen to techno, or whatever. We are privileged here, I suspect.

127: Is it his ultimate concern if he only risks and sacrifices other people for it?

Why on earth would a statement that doctrinaire atheists are smug be taken to imply that religious people are never smug?

you've made a long series of pointlessly smug and snarky remarks here about how smug and ignorant and annoying and hostile and etc. atheists are, without even a nod towards the fact that those are general human traits and not all all limited to atheists.

No rational person could hold the position that religious people are never smug.

beats me. hence my confusion. because, if you're not trying to paint atheists as extraordinarily smug (i.e. more smug than everyone else) you shouldn't write things like this:
other than being obnoxiously smug at being really right about stuff, what do self-described atheists usually do as a result of their non-beliefs?

in other words, if you're not trying to say "atheists are more smug than everyone else in the world", why keep trying to tell us all how smug they are - what's the point ? yes, some people are assholes. BFD. if atheists are no worse than anyone else, you ought not keep beating on them for things they share with everyone else.

What is the clinical definition of alcoholism? Is it generally agreed upon? In popular speech it's a pretty free-floating term meaning "anyone who drinks too much".

32: Absolutely I tend to be a little more understanding of US obnoxious anti-religious people for that reason. The one Swedish guy I know who's kind of anti-religious partly grew up in the US.

32: Absolutely. I tend to be a little more understanding of US obnoxious anti-religious people for that reason. The one Swedish guy I know who's kind of anti-religious partly grew up in the US.

"But seriously -- other than being obnoxiously smug at being really right about stuff, what do self-described atheists usually do as a result of their non-beliefs? Not a whole fucking lot. At least Christians set up the stray soup kitchen."

Am I the only one who finds this remark obnoxiously smug?

134: Not all human beings or all human groups are equally smug. I would put the smugness of the "doctrinaire atheist" at the same level as the "pushy evangelical Christian." Disapproval of the latter group is pretty widespread here at Unfogged, and most readers here know me and know that I hate the latter motherfuckers, so specifically emphasizing their smugness in this context seemed inappropriate.

118: Modern religion is pathetic. Pre-modern religion isn't automatically good, but it is normally pretty impressive and powerful in the culture in which it operates.

138: My personal hypocrisy has no bearing on the truth-value of my statement.

140: New mouseover text material.

And excellent mouseover text it is.

140: I think 90% of the time when we talk about the attitude of people with whom we disagree, we're really looking for an excuse to avoid talking about the substantive disagreement.

Look at the talk about Rove - about how his attitude may be "condescending" toward religious people. In fact, he holds a view that differs dramatically from the views of others. Being patronizing, or whatever, is one of the *nice* ways for him to be. Most of the other available options are not so nice.

And being seen as "smug" by someone you disagree with is pretty hard to avoid. The main way of avoiding it is silence.

Kotsko:

You just don't seem to be able to let go of this paradigm that faith is mainly about propositions, meaning affirmations about states of affairs. There are certain ways of saying, "The Gospel of Christ is the force that will transform the world" that have nothing to do with propositions -- in fact, such a statement would fly in the face of the known facts (as represented by the fact that Jesus was, you know, brutally executed).

I'll try to reply in a tone appropriate to this thread: wtf? It certainly seems to many members of the clergy and many people who, say, write articles about the philosophy of religion that (for example) if the resurrection of Jesus didn't happen, Christianity is bankrupt. One reason I might think that the Gospel of Christ might transform the world is because I think he was the Son and rose from the dead and performed miracles.

Another point in support of at least a proposition-heavy view of this and some other religions has to do with the requirement to evangelize. If you view religious practice as (just) a form of ritual or tradition, there's no basis for preferring one form of practice to another. It's not an accident, I'd suspect, that Judaism is the least-evangelizing and most truth-indifferent religion of the Abrahamic faiths, since it seems to be about the practice in a special way. (I might be mislead because the frequency of atheistic Jews in the academy.)

Labs, but Adam said "certain ways." Which I read as deliberately pointing out that while "many" believers think that the resurrection must be literally true for faith to have meaning, there are believers/theologians who don't. Not my field, but this seems quite reasonable to me.

Plus, part of why Adam gets so exercised about all this is because of the kind of thing you're saying in the second paragraph--"the requirement to evangelize" isn't universal, and an awful lot of secular folks act and talk as if evangelical fundamentalism = Christianity. Which clearly it doesn't. Presumably Adam's focus is on those aspects of Christianity that (1) aren't fundamentalist, and (2) don't require a literal resurrection in order to find Christianity meaningful.

At least, that's how I would read it. Come to think of it I might be wrong about Adam's attitude towards (2); maybe that's just my own attitude.

144: This effort to separate faith from propositions threw me also. I think that propositions underly any faith (i.e., "God exists), and if you disagree with those propositions, you're automatically going to have trouble with faith. The discussion of all of the *other* things that faith might involve seems to me to be an effort to change the subject.

propositions underly any faith (i.e., "God exists)

But right there you have a problem. What do you mean by god? What do you mean by exists?

Usually evangelism involves an attempt to get someone to come to church. You don't just drop by someone's house, hand them some syllogisms, then start filling up the bathtub to baptize them. Bitch is right that not all Christians evangelize, but I have no objection to a Christian sect with which I am sympathetic trying to attract new members -- nor an objection in principle to a shitty one seeking new members, though presumably the techniques involved would be different.

But evangelism is seeking new members, not just abstractly trying to convince someone of something! Join us, come do the things we do -- which include various ritual practices but often also include programs for the poor, etc.

I'm not denying that something like "belief in propositions" is a part of it -- I never have been, though everyone seems to read my de-emphasis on that aspect as though I'm trying to erase it -- but those propositions are things that, for whatever reason, a given community has found to be necessary for making sense of its practices and hopes. It simply does not function in the same way as a statement like "Grass is green."

I would also ask: What the fuck is "literal resurrection" even supposed to mean? It seems clear that in Christian theology, the event of the resurrection is not of the same order as other kinds of events -- it's not like Christ just "comes back to life" in the normal sense. Many of the early apologists -- who are wrongly thought to be in the business of persuading people to believe propositions -- say that the practice of the Christian community is the "proof" of the resurrection, the real miracle. That rings pretty hollow now, but that seems to me to be much more convincing than trying to establish whether or not the resurrection happens to be among the set of historical facts.

I might be mislead because the frequency of atheistic Jews in the academy.

Maybe a little, but probably not too much (as long as we're talking liberal, i.e., non-Orthodox, Judaism).

those propositions are things that, for whatever reason, a given community has found to be necessary for making sense of its practices and hopes. It simply does not function in the same way as a statement like "Grass is green."

Not for everyone; but surely for some. (Just to flip sides again.)

146: I'm saying that propositions are involved, but it's a subordinate aspect. Your statement, AGAIN, just like virtually everyone here, ASSUMES that faith must, at bottom, involved belief in propositions, that that's the essential characteristic. I am deemphasizing that for rhetorical/strategic reasons -- i.e., because in this context, people (falsely!) believe that the key aspect of faith is belief in propositions.

I really, honestly don't think that faith is about propositions. Yet you make this little remark about "changing the subject" as though I have some hidden agenda. I'm so fucking sick of dumbass insinuations like that in comment threads. I'm sure you've got some cookie-cutter that I fall into -- and that you'll somehow dredge up what you think counts as evidence from this thread that I think you do, too. I look forward to it.

I don't mean just to pick on evangelicals; I mean the general obligation to share the Good News. There's a muslim equivalent, but I can't remember the word.

but those propositions are things that, for whatever reason, a given community has found to be necessary for making sense of its practices and hopes.

Right, but wouldn't the belief be prior to the practices, on pain of believing for the wrong sorts of reasons?

It's not an accident, I'd suspect, that Judaism is the least-evangelizing and most truth-indifferent religion of the Abrahamic faiths, since it seems to be about the practice in a special way.

Not just the practice. There's also the fact that you are a Jew by being *born* a Jew; having religious identity tied up with ethnic/cultural identity that way means that you're not going to be out there trying to get other people to join up.

What do you mean by god?
What do you mean by exists?

But, don't the vast majority of Christians have definite answers to these questions? Very, very few people in the scheme of things are Unitarians and/or apologist theologians.

wouldn't the belief be prior to the practices, on pain of believing for the wrong sorts of reasons?

Isn't this just the faith vs. works question? By which I mean, aren't you rhetorically begging the question?

147: In the context of this conversation, I don't think those should be tough questions. I think it's hard to come up with any definitions of those two words that, for instance, render the atheistic view ambiguous.

All this defining of terms seems to me to detract from clarity, rather than enhance it. Anyway, what do you mean by "mean"?

(Skip that last question, I was just being mean.)

154: Definite answers? I seriously doubt it--otherwise there'd be no theological tradition to speak of.

150: What I'm saying is that people -- even believers -- who think that doctrinal propositions function in the same way as "Grass is green" are incorrect.

Specifically, I think that historically this idea of "faith as (factual) belief in propositions" comes from the Enlightenment polemic against religion, and unfortunately this impoverished idea of faith was then taken up by the fundamentalists -- the bastard sons of empiricism! -- and has influenced other Christian groups. It is not a specifically Christian concept of faith, but rather originates with people who were (for totally understandable and justifiable reasons) trying to discredit Christianity. And this idea of faith still functions in that way, which is why in debates with secular people, fundamentalist Christianity is always implicitly taken to be the most proper version of Christianity and other versions are taken to be equivocating or cowardly (if they are acknowledged to exist at all).

It's a strawman of religion and faith that has been tremendously successful, to the point where certain religious people finally even ended up taking it on as their own position!

What the fuck is "literal resurrection" even supposed to mean? It seems clear that in Christian theology, the event of the resurrection is not of the same order as other kinds of events -- it's not like Christ just "comes back to life" in the normal sense.

Not to be snarky, but what normal sense would that be?

This emphasis on propositions is hard to avoid from an outsider's point of view. I am not claiming sophisticated knowledge of Christianity, but from where I sit people calling themselves Christians seem often to tie that status to, among other things, belief in a set of propositions including the fact that Jesus, after having been seen to have died, was seen (heard, perceived by sensory means) behaving in the manner of a living person. This seems to me to be a factually coherent and meaningful claim.

I get really confused by discussions of Christianity that appear to me to imply that someone thinking the literal truth of the resurrection (defined simply as seeing Jesus, dead, walking around alive) was important to their religious belief structure is making some kind of basic error.

152: Logically, it appears that the beliefs are prior to the practices. Chronologically -- both historically and in the experience of particular believers -- the opposite is the case. Faith seeking understanding. It's not like theologians are envisioning some scenario where you start from zero, read the Summa Theologiae or something, then decide to go to church.

156: I think the problem here is that you're seeing this conversation as being about fairly simple things, whereas Adam, the resident theologian, is specifically saying that those things are not, in fact, that simple. I'm not a theologian, but I'm both religious and kind of an athiest (depending on how you define athiesm), and hell, *I* know that these things aren't that simple.

What the fuck is "literal resurrection" even supposed to mean?

Well, technically, it's not ambiguous at all. If you instead ask "how the fuck is it relevant to faith," well, that's more subtle.

It's a strawman of religion and faith that has been tremendously successful, to the point where certain religious people finally even ended up taking it on as their own position!

This is a really interesting point. I've never thought of the fundamentalists in these terms before.

Adam, your presentation of my view is at least as terrible as my presentation of your view. I agree with LB insofar as practice without belief, straightforwardly construed, seems both incoherent and not consistent with the actual practice.

157 was me, btw.

"Plus, part of why Adam gets so exercised about all this is because of the kind of thing you're saying in the second paragraph--"the requirement to evangelize" isn't universal, and an awful lot of secular folks act and talk as if evangelical fundamentalism = Christianity."

Making this distinction in the U.S. at this point in history seems a bit like philosophizing about whether the boot that is kicking you in the face is genuine leather. (yeah, yeah banned)

If the evangelicals and their allies weren't a) so whacky and b) wielding ginormous power, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

158: Hm. So your frustration is kind of akin to mine when people talk about how feminists hate men.

The problem for both of us, then, is at what point do you have to concede that "--ism" has irreversibly come to mean the "wrong" thing.

163: No, Adam's right. Intrinsic to, at least, the Catholicism I grew up with, is the idea that practice without faith is important because faith can grow through practice as well as vice-versa. I mean, shit, surely this is why everyone's Catholic grandmother tries to drag them to mass.

I don't see why it's such a hard concept to grasp. Basically it's saying "fake it until you make it." Which does work sometimes.

159, 162: My emphasis is on the "literal." The way you both are talking about it, it's like Jesus was just resuscitated. But the Gospel accounts clearly show him to have entered onto a different level of existence, which is not simply continuous with his previous bodily existence -- he can walk through walls, change his appearance, etc., etc. There is also disagreement across the gospels about the properties of the resurrection body. It seems as though "he raised from the dead" is a simple historical proposition, but the Christian understanding is that "he rose from the dead -- into a new kind of life." And part of the understanding of that new kind of life is that the members of the community are in some sense his "body," and that the meal they liturgically share is in some sense his "body."

The Gospels themselves were written long after the resurrection is supposed to have taken place -- so again, though we might say that the "historical resurrection" is logically prior, the new kind of life of Christ in the community and in the liturgical meal were chronologically prior. The latter is what people found convincing -- only afterward did they come up with specific narratives about the weird, slippery kind of new body Christ had.

165: If the evangelicals and their allies weren't a) so whacky and b) wielding ginormous power, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Right, so the smartest thing to do is to pretend that the Christians who don't agree with them don't exist.

"I would also ask: What the fuck is "literal resurrection" even supposed to mean?"

This, again, looks like an effort to obfuscate by demanding definitions. Everybody, including you, knows that the expression "literal resurrection" means that an individual was dead, and returned to life.

And I'm genuinely puzzled by this:

"I'm saying that propositions are involved, but it's a subordinate aspect."

When we are talking about "faith," I assumed that we were talking about "faith in the existence of God." This seems fundamentally dependent on the proposition that God exists, no?

"Yet you make this little remark about "changing the subject" as though I have some hidden agenda. I'm so fucking sick of dumbass insinuations like that in comment threads."

Dumbass it may be. Insinuation it was not. I said exactly what I meant.

What can I say? Your attempt to turn a discussion of faith away from the question "Does God exist" seems evasive to me. I don't understand it otherwise - which, of course, perhaps makes me a dumbass. But I am sincere.

165.2: See, this is the crux. No, it isn't. One of the things that the fundies have successfully done, which really pisses of liberal religious--and there are a lot of liberal religious folks, you know--is convince everyone that Christianity/evangelicalism/fundamentalism/right-wing Republicanism are all the same thing. They demonstrably aren't. See, e.g., Catholics for a Free Choice, liberation theology, "womenpriests.org," Liberalis, etc.

Your attempt to turn a discussion of faith away from the question "Does God exist" seems evasive to me.

I believe you're sincere, but I can also see why Adam is frustrated with this. It seems that you're not really trying to understand what he's saying because you're determined to hang onto the idea that "does god exist" is somehow a simple question in which "exist" has a simple, straightforward meaning, even when he's saying that, in fact, it doesn't, and that there is a great deal of history and thought demonstrating that.

Now, okay, maybe Adam should be explaining and linking to all that history and thought. But again I can understand being frustrated with this. First, it's obvious to me that there *is* a long history of theology; it's intuitively obvious, then, even without having read much of it, that questions about the existence of god are a complicated enough that people have been writing about them for hundreds of years.

Again invoking the feminist analogy, it's kind of like getting in an argument with someone who says "feminists hate men" and then refuses to believe me when I say that that's simply not true, and that any attempt on my part to talk about what people *do* mean by feminism is somehow an attempt to change the subject away from what feminists think about men. When a kind of central feminist issue is that we don't, in fact, think about men all the time.

167: And part of the understanding of that new kind of life is that the members of the community are in some sense his "body," and that the meal they liturgically share is in some sense his "body."

I've highlighted the controversial word, here. I'm impressed with your dissection of this issue, but I have to say, the extent to which this part of the understanding it's kosher to promulgate as the dominant part of the understanding is pretty small, ecumenically, no?

170: liberation theology

is dead, no? A better example might be the vast reservoir of mainstream non-Baptist Protestanism. The ELCA, the Methodists, the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, are by and large quite nice people who are on the liberal side of things. And when they're not, they're at least internally debating shit.

What does the predicate "exists" mean in relation to the subject "God"?

I'm being argumentative in this thread, but I'm really not (I don't think) stuck on the fundamentalist straw-religion that Adam thinks we all are. My only contact with theology was the background I got reading medieval English poetry as an undergrad -- the Christianity in my head is my garbled version of the UofC's English department's understanding of what underlay, e.g., the Pearl poet's thinking.

172.1: No, I don't think so.
172.2: No, I don't think so.

Have sympathy, B and AK; my sense that belief is important comes in part from reading this Bible lying around my apartment. Given how often Islam gets called "orthopraxic" I was surprised to see that the Quran seems pretty keen on belief as well.

175: we probably have different standards for 'dead' and 'on the liberal side of things.'

171: You know, it may be frustrating from your end, but it's frustrating from over here as well. If 'does God exist' is a bad question, how's 'do you believe that the universe is such that our perceptions of it can ever differ from the way it would have been if God did not exist'? To put it really crudely, someone whose religion doesn't involve believing in a God that does perceptible things doesn't seem to me to believe in anything that differs importantly from atheism.

I think I'm on Adam's side here, if only because I seem to remember being in his position the last time we had this argument.

175: Right, but saying belief *matters* isn't the same as saying it necessarily precedes everything else, one; and two, consider the possibility that your reading and understanding of the Bible/Koran is colored by your preexisting ideas about belief.

178: I don't think it's that "does god exist" is a bad question; I think it's that "does god exist" isn't the *only* question.

To put it really crudely, someone whose religion doesn't involve believing in a God that does perceptible things doesn't seem to me to believe in anything that differs importantly from atheism.

Right, which is why I say that to a lot of people, I am an athiest. However, *I* don't think that I am, because I don't think that the only meaningful meaning of "god" is "an intentional independent entity." In fact, I *personally* would agree with most athiests that that definition of god is kind of naive and ridiculous.

172: Liberation theology is dead because US-sponsored campaigns of domestic terrorism killed it. It's not as though it just withered away because the grassroots rejected it for being too radical. (I know that you're just saying that it's no longer a big force, but I once saw Christopher Hitchens say [smugly], "Well, look how liberation theology worked out!" and wanted to kill him, even more than usual.)

Also, most denominations that wish to dissociate themselves from fundamentalism do actually more strongly emphasize the communitarian aspects of the resurrection.

169: I am not interested in the speculative question about whether "God" exists. This is part of my hostility toward the figure of the "doctrinaire atheist" for whom the speculative question of God not existing is such an emphasis -- without having any practical consequences. For exactly parallel reasons, I have no use for the fundamentalists who try to "prove" creationism (what would it matter if they succeeded? I don't think it would at all) nor for the consumerist evangelicals for whom faith in God means nothing other than indulging in their own special brands of consumer goods.

I am more interested in the types of communities for which "believing that God exists" has actual real-world consequences -- for whom "God" represents first of all an ethical demand. (Such communities do exist, believe it or not.) If someone is saying, "God is on the side of the poor," it seems to be really missing the point to ask, "Prove to me that this God exists." I can't really offer an argument for why I think that way, and I understand it's not going to make sense to everyone, but that's really what I think.

To put it really crudely, someone whose religion doesn't involve believing in a God that does perceptible things doesn't seem to me to believe in anything that differs importantly from atheism.

Gee, this does not seem right at all. I am not going to embaras myself by naming religions that could be called someplace close to that and find out my theology is wrong, but one could certainly imagine a religion based on the notion: God wants you to do X if you want to be good, or God wants you to do X if you want to go to heaven, or there is a spirual realm beyond this existence, and if you live in a certain way, you will escape the bonds of this realm and live in the other, none of which involve a diety or spitrual plane that does not appear in burning bushes, turn water to wine or make the Red Sox win.

represents first of all an ethical demand

If I buy into your ethical views but never think about anything describable as God, do we disagree?

God wants you to do X

But there's a being with intentional attitudes, and by "'s" I mean exists.

183: Jesus tells his disciples, "Whoever is not against us is for us." But it would have to be on the level of ethical practice, not just ethical views.

182 sounds right. In many people's lives, God is invoked primarily to remind them of what things are moral and what things are not, with the implication that people will be judged after they die. It seems like the Western tradition is to have a community in which everyone is understood to believe this, but maybe only a few people are so devout as to point out instances during daily life when God decided to make his presence felt. ("miracles")

But there's a being with intentional attitudes

Sure. But I think something is no less a relgion even though this God with intentional attitudes does not do perceptible things.

167: But Jesus is supposed to have had a weird, slippery body before he died, too. He could walk on water, for example. I don't think it casts any special doubt on bodily resurrection that he does the same stuff after being crucified. Saying that the body of Christ and all that are symbolic also seems to be projecting a modern sensibility onto the early Christians.

Also: I haven't thought much about it, but it seems to me that you're talking theology only to the extent that you are dealing in explicitly articulated propositions. Otherwise it sounds more like a sort of hermeneutic, anthropological treatment of a religion. Now, I'm not saying that empirical matters like that don't enter into theology, but aren't they pretty distinct kinds of approach?

I am not interested in the speculative question about whether "God" exists.

See, this I find psychologically bizarre. I really do agree with you that there are ethically admirable religious communities, I've met religious people who I thought both were good people, and were good because of their religion. I'm not snarling "Christianity=Evil Fundamentalism=Bad!"

But if your beliefs are such that you think the existence of an all-powerful, all-benevolent being that takes a strong interest in us and our actions and makes serious ethical and practical demands on us is a substantial possibility, how can you not be interested? Disbelief and therefore disinterest makes sense to me, that's where I am, pretty much. Belief makes sense to me -- not that I see what would cause that belief, but I can comprehend the state of mind. Doubt or partial belief also makes sense, if you had some reason for belief but not enough to fully convince you. But a combination of genuine doubt and lack of interest in resolving that doubt is incredibly difficult for me to comprehend.

167: But Jesus is supposed to have had a weird, slippery body before he died, too. He could walk on water, for example.

I don't know if that's a reason to say his body was different from that of every other man. It was more like an example of him having a divine power to suspend the laws of physics (in this case, to get the water to become solid beneath where he walked). Like any of his other miracles.

God wants you to do X if you want to go to heaven, or there is a spirual realm beyond this existence, and if you live in a certain way, you will escape the bonds of this realm and live in the other

I was including things like this as 'perceptible' -- doesn't have to be here and now, but if I get hit by a bus and wake up in pit of sulfur for representing the tobacco companies, I will be perceiving a universe that differs from what it would be if there were no God.

You could get to a completely imperceptible God -- there is a God but he takes no perceptible actions that impinge on us now or ever -- but I can't see why you'd be interested in him.

180.2 - This catches my exact problem with Adam. He *appears* to be soft-pedaling the discussion of "does God exist" in a dicussion about theism.

Certainly there are many other interesting questions, but Adam seems to think he is disposing of this question when, in fact, he is merely ignoring it. I refer you again to his discussion of "propositions" being relatively unimportant in discussions of faith.

As for your feminism analogy, I don't think it captures my objection. If I say to you "Feminists are man-haters," and you said, "Well, feminism isn't really about the relationship of men and women" I'd accuse you of evading the subject (and making a false statement.)

(Hmm. I'm starting to think that there's a good reason analogies are banned.)

181: sing it.

This was more or less the theme of this year's seder, by the way. I have the best in-laws ever.

188: Actually, talking as though the early Christians were concerned with "empirical facts" is projecting a modern sensibility onto them. Depending on what you mean by "symbolic," it might be more likely that they thought it was symbolic. (LB's encounter with the medieval thought represented by the Pearl poet would fit with this, too.)

I disagree with you about walking on water being the same as the post-resurrection stories. Peter, by all accounts a normal human being, is also able to walk on water in the story, until he gets scared. If we understand Jesus to have something other than a normal human body before the resurrection, then nothing in Christian teaching makes sense.

Theology does deal with propositions, but it's a reflective discourse -- it's not like theology "creates" religious practice. Official ecclesiastical doctrine is not so much a series of propositions as a set of guidelines for what kinds of propositions may be asserted in preaching and theology. (Now people are going to say: "See! Propositions! I KNEW IT!")

191 OK. I see your point. I do not completely agree, though. If I believed that there are rules relating to how to act that are objectively right because there is a God and she wants us to do good, I would call that a religion even if there were no consequences to me of not doing good or any other manifestations--from God--relating to my conduct.

I'd say that 194.2 was pwn3d by 190, but there's an exception to this sort of thing when the pwn3r doesn't actually know what he's talking about. Thanks Adam.

Okay, maybe this will help. If not, then ignore it. Here's a snip from a chat Adam and I are having parallel to this thread:

me: i have a new analogy: the practice before faith thing is kind of like the way having kids used to be
people who insist they have to believe before practicing are like people who refuse to have children until everything else in their lives is "ready"
Adam: And in many cases actually ARE those people.

See, this is why Adam gets pissed about this convos just like I get pissed about feminism. It isn't because either of us is "taking it personally" or is humorless. It's because we both have a kind of social justice thing going on with why we *care* about this stuff. And we find other people's ability to (1) not get what we're saying and (2) find our sense of urgency more important than our content, well, kind of offensive.

That, plus I think the kids analogy is a good one b/c maybe it'll help clarify the problem with the faith before works assumption *and* the idea that "does god exist" is a boring question. It's kinda like, well, people *do* have kids. What their motives are, or whether or not doing so is innately human or not, are irrelevant to the fact that they do so and being interested in how they raise them, why children matter to society, etc.

Hi everybody!

See, this I find psychologically bizarre.

I get that this is an "I" statement, but surely you, LB, can see why it might be heard by Adam as an accusation instead?

Analogies are banned. Jesus, like this thread is going so well that we need to talk how religion is like having kids.

Or getting kicked in the balls.

192: So what if he's ignoring the question? I get that *to you* this is what theism is about; the point is, it *isn't* what theism is about.

If I say to you "Feminists are man-haters," and you said, "Well, feminism isn't really about the relationship of men and women" I'd accuse you of evading the subject (and making a false statement.)

Exactly. And then I would get angry at you for much the same reason Adam is doing so: it is factually true that feminism isn't about the relationship between men and women, just as it is factually true that theism isn't about the existence of god--although sure, you can talk about m/f relationships and god's existence w/in a feminist/theist discussion. And by saying that those statements are factually untrue, you're assuming an authority you don't have and basically grinding the discussion to a halt.

200: How are you supposed to try to explain things to people who don't understand your language without using analogies?

'Accusation' I don't see, really, although of course I can see that it's an irritating thing of me to have said; no one likes to be called bizarre. But I'm not imputing wrongdoing of any kind, just saying that if I understand the position he's taking on belief, it's one that I find absolutely alien.

You could get to a completely imperceptible God -- there is a God but he takes no perceptible actions that impinge on us now or ever -- but I can't see why you'd be interested in him.

Have we compared religion without God to a gun club or an Elks Lodge like we did last time this stuff came up? That was sweet.

Something which may clear up Adam's point concerning the priority of propositional truth within Christianity (or perhaps obfuscate it all to hell; let's find out):

In his first letter to the Corinthians (ch. 15, for those reading along at home), St. Paul pleads with the assembly over the importance of a historical resurrection because some of them had apparently begun ignoring it after he left. You might think "Aha! See belief in the proposition of Christ's resurrection was the most important thing for Paul." But that would be stupid, because the Corinthians were already practicing Christians participating in an authentic community of faith through baptism, the eucharist, feeding the poor, scripture readings, and song -- even the ones who weren't so sure about all this bodily resuscitation business.

Paul's actual point was that the the resurrection gives these sacraments (the rites) their eschatological meaning -- one function amongst many -- not that their "pistis" is worthless without it.

204: No, I know you're not; I'm just cautioning because it's the kind of thing that could be heard as the equivalent of "you're crazy."

Religion is like getting kicked in the balls because as a small child, one is forced to take the prospect of it seriously, although one is not capable of comprehending its significance. And later in life, when people's eyes are focused and just need to be pointed in the right direction, their memories of the dogmatic rituals of children make it hard for them to move into a mature understanding of the situation. Forcing children into an imitation of adulthood leads to adults with childlike impressions with what a sensation ought to be like.

Jesus, like this thread is going so well that we need to talk how religion is like having kids.

Good-natured whining about NPR donations gone awry doesn't seem so bad anymore, now does it?

205: Did I do that last time? I probably did, it sounds like the sort of thing I'd say.

LB, I don't believe in "God" in the classical theist sense. That God required a lot of metaphysical baggage that is no longer credible to modern people. (This is what Bonhoeffer meant by the idea of "religion" no longer being operative -- the idea of a Santa Claus God in the sky, the division of the person into body and soul, etc.) The task of modern theology is to figure out how Christian faith and practice can make sense within the framework of the modern world -- how to be a Christian while not just fucking lying all the time.

So I'll just say: the "God" who is the object of proofs (or disproofs) of the existence of God does not exist. This is obvious to virtually everyone in the elite intellectual class. (And that's the level at which this conversation is being carried out -- don't throw back at me that a lot of Christians still believe in a Santa Claus God in the sky; obviously they do, and they're naive.) Yet nonetheless I still believe that Jesus Christ was the most important person ever to live, that the movement he created was the most important thing ever to happen, and that there actually have been people who have been faithful to Christ in every period of history. In some sense, I believe that whatever "Christ" represents has been a continuous force in history and that while it is not necessary to refer that to Christ in every case, referring it to Christ can be helpfully clarifying.

And obviously I also find the intellectual heritage of Christianity to be endlessly fascinating. These are the kinds of things that draw one to do something dumb like get a PhD in theology.

Re: B's analogy: but people's motives are interesting. Reproduction and other things that are innately human are interesting to think about. Not studying them or thinking about them is kind of anti-intellectual, no?

And,

just as it is factually true that theism isn't about the existence of god

This looks very very strange to me, and I'm trying hard to understand here. Do you mean that religion is only a little bit about theism? Because that makes more sense.

205: Not yet, but there's a good point from the other end. The fact that, say, Elks lodge members not only don't intend to perpetuate patriarchy but actively deny that it exists doesn't mean that, in fact, they aren't doing so.

203: If someone doesn't understand your language, how are you ever going to draw an analogy in a way that will be comprehensible to them? (I am assuming you also do not understand their language, otherwise you could just speak in that language.)

#211 is immensely clarifying.

Elks lodge members not only don't intend to perpetuate patriarchy but actively deny that it exists

Fuck, I thought they were just playing bingo.

212: No. For example, see the New Criticism (and every approach to literary study since them): the "intentions" of the author are one aspect of studying literature, but far from the only or even the most interesting one. Realizing this made literary study more, not less intellectually interesting.

"I am not interested in the speculative question about whether "God" exists."

Oddly, the same phrase LB doesn't much like, I find satisfying and appropriate. My only real problem was that I thought Adam was addressing atheism in some fashion when he clearly wasn't. As long as he lacks interest in that question, we can move on to other things.

"This is part of my hostility toward the figure of the "doctrinaire atheist" for whom the speculative question of God not existing is such an emphasis -- without having any practical consequences."

If I read you correctly, you also don't seem to think much of the doctrinaire theist, so you're consistent.

But gosh, I sure think the question of the existence of God is a question that has to be dealt with if one is going to purport to answer the question: What does God want from us? And certainly, for all of us, the question of whether God exists has obvious consequences.

Agreed that 211 is a super-fine comment.

(And that's the level at which this conversation is being carried out -- don't throw back at me that a lot of Christians still believe in a Santa Claus God in the sky; obviously they do, and they're naive.)

Seriously, I didn't understand you at all until this last comment, and now I finally think I'm following. Something that may have been confusing the emotional tone of the conversation is your assumption that belief in a Santa Claus God in the sky is something to be thrown back at you -- while I don't believe in such a God, I don't think such belief is necessarily embarrassing or naive (I admit that I don't understand it, but I've met believers who didn't appear to be naive or irrational generally) and I had been assuming that you believed in God in roughly that sense throughout.

LB:

With the caveat that I'm not actually sure I think about these things at all similarly to Adam, and I'm probably not explaining this well at all....

I think the ethical demands are very real. I am agnostic as to whether they originate from a benevolent, conscious being who created the universe and numbers the stars and hairs on my head--what Christianity calls a "personal God"--a God who can be understood separately from creation. To the limited extent that I do believe in a personal God, it's a God that: (1) cannot do logically contradictory things, and (2) therefore has drastically, drastically curtailed the ways in which He or She intervenes in the world, to the point where: (1) I'm not sure it makes any sense to say that I believe in an omnipetent God; (2) I don't expect to ever experience a miracle or revelation or direct contact with or observation of the supernatural that would confirm my faith in the existence of a personal God. So it's not so much as I don't care as that I don't and can't know, and guessing seems less urgent than the ethical demands that I do have faith in.

Did I do that last time? I probably did, it sounds like the sort of thing I'd say.

I sure I made the gun club crack, and as I recall either you or Cala compared it to an Elks Lodge. Went over very well. I think Weiner ended up saying he wasn't going to keep discussing it until people apologized.

214: I think that I've done so in this very thread. And without changing the subject (which is the real problem with analogies).

the "God" who is the object of proofs (or disproofs) of the existence of God does not exist. This is obvious to virtually everyone in the elite intellectual class.

Ho ho ho.

When I get around to believing in God, he's going to have magical powers damnit.

202: Well, at least we can agree where we disagree. To say "theism isn't about the existence of God," is gibberish to me.

202: That's fine, as long as you're willing to defer to people who know more about it than you do when they say that it isn't actually gibberish, yes?

Along the lines of Adam's 211, I'll refer you to the third paragraph of this comment.

227: Thanks, Farber.

221: This makes perfect sense to me -- I know 'agnostic' means something else technical about God's existence being unknowable rather than unknown, but thinking of the existence of God as an open question which you aren't expecting to get the information to resolve makes sense. I think that's different from where Adam came down in 211, which was immensely helpful and clarifying.

"it is factually true that feminism isn't about the relationship between men and women"

This is an interesting proposition. Unlike the theism thing, I'm prepared to entertain this idea. Maybe some appropriate thread will become available. (Probably such a thread already has happened.)

226 sounds suspiciously like an appeal to authority.

197: While I'm on the subject of anachronisms, this sounds to me like another one. Or something like one. As far as I know the Church didn't come up with its rituals as an aid to belief. It's only much later, partly under the impress of the Reformation, that belief is considered as something distinct from, much less opposed to, practice.

194: Right, but I didn't have in mind empirical facts as we understand them. Sharply dividing stuff up in this way, between empirical facts and the symbols that merely allude to them, doesn't sound likely in late antiquity. Look how in Platonism, for example, an Idea is supposed to infuse both an object and the person apprehending it. A very different metaphysics.

B: just as it is factually true that theism isn't about the existence of god

Me: Huh?

B: For example, see the New Criticism (and every approach to literary study since them): the "intentions" of the author are one aspect of studying literature, but far from the only or even the most interesting one.

I'm aware of the death of the author, but I'm still confused at how theism is factually not about the existence of god. Unless you replace 'theism' with 'religion', which would make it merely controversial and interesting, like the rest of this conversation, it instead looks like 1=0.

I'll agree with everyone else that 211 provides a lot of clarity for me, too.

226: Ah, the good ol' appeal to authority. No, sorry, if you think you know more than me on this subject (a statement about which I am agnostic), you'll have to demonstrate it.

Bitch, I'm sorry, but "theism" basically does mean belief in God in the "traditional" sense -- the Thomist versions of Aristotle's proofs, the "omni-" attributes, etc.

234: must you be so dyspeptic? Now is not the time for inflammation.

235: Judas.

226 sounds suspiciously like an appeal to authority.

I'm not saying that authority is *necessarily* right; I'm saying that when someone who knows more about a subject than you do tells you your facts are wrong, you're gonna learn more by saying "oh" and listening than you will by pulling 234 out. No one likes a snotty student with a chip on their shoulder.

229: sort of, but it's not just that I don't & can't know the answer about whether there's a personal God. It's also the idea that: (1) The metaphysical answer about whether there's a personal God also really just does not matter as much as the transcedent ethical demand part; (2) Therefore, there is no supernatural experience or revelation or claim to divine authority that I ought to trust more than my conscience and my own knowledge of how my actions affect other people.

Dr. B, did you really consider 235 in light of your prior comments to me? It appears not, given your characterization of *me* as the "snotty student with a chip on their shoulder."

For what it's worth, though, you may still be right, and I may be wrong, about theism. I don't consider Adam the ultimate authority on this. But you're still going to have to offer an argument, if you want to convince me.

This thread is officially OVER.

Awesome, Counterfly is the man.

239: It wasn't a characterization of you personally. It was a characterization of the effect of the "you may know more about this than I do, but you have to prove it to me" line of argument.

(Er, ah, I guess he's the Chick.)

(And it appears I spoke too soon, anyways.)

243 "It wasn't a characterization of you personally. It was a characterization of the effect of the "you may know more about this than I do, but you have to prove it to me" line of argument."

Which was the exact argument I was making. I realize that this is a tedious thing for people with more knowledge than I have, but in my efforts to remedy my ignorance, what are my other options? Blind acceptance doesn't work for the obvious reason that there are many people with more knowledge than I have, who nonetheless disagree with each other.

I agree with 245.

Since widespread puzzlement hasn't led to an explanation, can somebody explain how "theism isn't about the existence of god"?

Is it something like how if you are a theist, you are working within a system in which everyone assumes that God exists, so the question of whether he exists or not is a nonsensical question.

...question.?

So I've been transcribing this evening! A bit of it is even tangientially relevant to this thread, plus it is a trope I was mentioning to some of you yesterday evening. And Mcmc, you might appreciate the penultimate paragraph of this one.

247, how does it make sense for the final sentence of 246 to end with a question mark?

tangientially

249: 246 Edited for clarity of pedantry: "Is it [...] a [...] question.?"

hmm. A Dominican friend of mine once said that the question Aquinas was trying to answer was whether God exists, not, so to say, whether God which fact he took as indisputable. The problem for such people is about what language is appropriate to describe something fundamental about the way things are. I mean, things indisputably are. But are they in the same was as things about them are?

Arrr, as we say in North Essex. That be the question.

fuck. "Not, so to say, whether God comma, which fact etc

252: I find it much easier to talk to Puerto Ricans about theology.

By the way, the particular point of theology you relate has veered amusingly close the language of object oriented programming.

168: "Right, so the smartest thing to do is to pretend that the Christians who don't agree with them don't exist."

This is way late and nobody cares, but I don't see how you could possibly get that from my comment.

The point is that when real people, today, argue "against" Christianity it's because the people who currently hold all the power are of the whacky sort.

The fact that there are normal Christians is lovely, and I'm sure there are interesting academic debates to be held about the content of their beliefs, but berating people like Dawkins for not sufficiently focusing on the non-crazies seems sort of silly. He, and other "smug" atheists, are currently more concerned about things like the fact that 70% of US citizens don't believe in evolution.

If you want to debate the finer points of "sane" Christianity, more power to you, but that's a fundamentally different issue than what those nasty atheists you reference above are currently interested in.

Hate to follow myself up, but I think I have a more concise presentation of my point.

Why is it okay for Adam et. al. to dispense with the loonies and say "Oh, I'm only talking about real non-crazy christianity" but it's not okay for smug atheists to dispense with real non-crazy christians and say "Oh, I'm only talking about the loony tunes (who happen to be in charge of the most powerful country on earth, ahem)?

Well, for one thing, if you want to be politically effective, demonizing not only your *actual* opponents but a lot of other people who superficially look like them is a really shitty technique.

For another, the idea that Christianity=right wing radicalism is a creation of the right wing radicals who have (effectively) used Christianity as a cover. If you want to buy into that, go ahead, but you should recognize whose tool you've picked up.

255-256: I don't think that people like Dawkins really are only talking about the loony tunes -- he acts as though the nutjobs really represent the core of what religion is. So he and his defenders will say that referring to "less bad" versions of religion is equivocation or pointless pedantry.

And as I've said a million times in this thread, for reasons that are not simply limited to the current existence of the religious right, educated secular people in general tend to view fundamentalism as the most "real" type of religion. The idea that critics of religion only want to talk about fundamentalism since the rise of the Christian Coalition is completely and obviously wrong. It's a deeply ingrained tradition. Even if Dawkins was motivated to do his big book by the existence of the religious right, he's still rehashing the same old arguments that have been going on for centuries at this point.

211: But the belief that Jesus Christ was the most important person ever to live, that the movement he created was the most important thing ever to happen, etc., that an interventionist "Santa Claus God" does not exist ... these still represent a set of beliefs. Just because they might not be the same set of beliefs held by James Dobson or Rowan Williams or Leonardo Boff doesn't mean they aren't beliefs at all. I understand your initial point that religious faith means more than just a belief in a set of propositions, but those beliefs are the core of one's faith - they're what you have faith in, and I still don't understand your deemphasis of them.

And as I've said a million times in this thread, for reasons that are not simply limited to the current existence of the religious right, educated secular people in general tend to view fundamentalism as the most "real" type of religion.

But look, this is because fundamentalism is far more prominent than liberal religious groups. I can rattle off the names of a bunch of right-wing Christian organizations off the top of my head (Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, Christian Coalition, Concerned Women of America, Discovery Institute, etc.) who regularly enter the political and media spheres to push a hard right agenda, and only one group headed by a liberal religious figure (Americans United for Separation of Church and State) pushing in the opposite direction. This could be a result of gross media distortion, and I could be missing the vast network of lefty Christian groups in the US at work to push a social democratic agenda, but my general impression is that religious progressives, not unlike their secular allies, are outgunned from the right and generally need to get their shit together.

re 248: There's a whole mass of molecules, and complexes, and, things bound together by terrifying physical improbabilities, and the truth is, she could fly apart at any moment. Like some terrible pent-up lock that's waiting to snap and spatter her psyche across the universe.

Don't push me.

260 - But if I can speak for Adam, that's true in the context of "politicized Christianity in the U.S.", not "Christianity"; surely the Catholic Church, to choose one institution, is every bit as prominent as the Dobsonoids (and more interesting to someone like Adam whose concerns lay with Christianity as such), and they're not fundamentalists. I think there are domain problems in the discussions people are trying to have.

260: Yes, the left-wing Christians are not as organized. But on the other hand, who is it who decides who gets on the air? Mostly secular people who are going to lean toward the more conservative or reactionary Christian as representing the "Christian position" on a given issue. This really is a "chicken or egg" problem -- the success of the religious right is due largely to organization, but it requires media complicity, which is founded in the general belief among secular people that fundamentalism is a more authentic type of religion.

259: Those propositions are not at the fucking core! How many times do I have to fucking SAY THIS?! It's like banging my head against the wall with you people -- you just cannot get at the idea that propositions aren't the rock-bottom essential level of faith.

And is believing that "Jesus is the most important person to live" a proposition in the same sense as "Grass is green"? I really don't think so. It's not a matter of fact that can be adjudicated in some objective way. Saying "he either is the most important or he isn't" does not seem to really get at what that statement is saying.

I believe that I've tried every possible means -- patient or otherwise -- to convince people that the essence of faith is not believing (dumb) propositions. I'm obviously going to become irritated if people now show up and say something like, "See, propositions are involved -- so they must be at the core!" I don't have time to get irritated like that.

So if you have any further questions, just refer to my previous comments.

Here's another explanation of the idea that belief in propositions is not at the core. Does this help?

261 -- If it weren't for ribcages, it would just be spleens à-go-go.

Talk about, talk about, talk about mooooovin'.

("ribcages" s/b "Boss Cat t-shirts")

268: Those only work if your spleen can read.

Okay, so Adam is screaming at this point that belief in propositions is "not at the fucking core" of "faith," and has also stated that the naivete of traditional theism is obvious to everyone in the "elite intellectual class."

I'm having trouble at this point figuring out exactly whose "faith" is supposed to be under discussion here. It seems to me to be very common for people, even in the so-called "elite inellectual class," to in fact regard belief in propositions as a pretty core part of faith -- particularly of Christian faith -- which is why, for example, the so-called Problem of Evil looms so large in the history of Western musings about (and in some cases rejection of) God. I can understand saying that belief in propositions isn't necessarily "at the core" in all cases, but I'm as puzzled as stras by Adam's apparent obsession with completely deemphasizing it, and I don't think I'm being needlessly obtuse.

And the question of whether a religious tradition is weakened when belief in its propositions ceases to be part of its core value -- which LB posed much earlier -- is perfectly valid and sensible. When the elite intellectual class of a society has come to regard the traditional version of its religion as naive, there would seem to me to be a fairly major shift or series of shifts in the structure of faith going on, one of them being toward a state of affairs whose core propositions are more acceptable to the intellect of the day. That's not the sole story of faith, but surely it's a significant enough part of it that it's not worth tearing one's hair out over the fact it's even being mentioned.

"And the question of whether a religious tradition is weakened when belief in its propositions ceases to be part of its core value -- which LB posed much earlier -- is perfectly valid and sensible. "

Well, it's a valid, sensible question, but a lot you guys aren't asking it so much as answering it, and you're giving the same answer as the Left Behind folks about what truly constitutes "real" faith.

One of the reasons I like reform Judaism better than Christianity is exactly the idea that what propositions you believe about God and the afterlife just doesn't matter that much.

Is this really all that complicated? Adam didn't say that propositions didn't matter, but that the propositions (eg, I believe there's something beyond human existence or I believe the universe is ultimately just) aren't of the same kind as "grass is green" and that they're also not the core of faith, in the sense that proving/disproving, affirming/denying them is not how people practice their faith--faith isn't an academic or debating society.

There are all sorts of doctrinal beliefs in the various religious sects, but those are articulations or manifestations of faith; the affirmation of any set of beliefs is not itself faith.

May God forgive me, I'm going to use an analogy: your love for and attachment to your parents is a primary fact, and not a state of mind that you've come to after deliberation. You can try, as an adult, to work out the nature of that love. You might even wonder whether it's justified, or whether you've fallen away from them. You'll be able to give reasons and cite facts and beliefs as you do this, but your attachment will be the starting point.

Finally, I'm no scholar of Christian history, but my understanding is that the Santa Claus god has always been regarded by the intellectual class as a naive conception; it's not a notable new development.

And now, once again, I leave you in the hands of an angry Adam.

271: you're giving the same answer as the Left Behind folks about what truly constitutes "real" faith.

What constitutes "real" faith is a less interesting question than what describes the spectrum of practices called "faith." Belief in propositions is a pretty important part of that spectrum, and for some people a core part of it*.

This would seem to me to be fairly true no matter which faith we're describing. Judaism provides the canonical example of ethnic identity as another grounds of "faith," but it's not as though the interpretation of propositions about belief has played a small role in its intellectual history.

(* And it's kind of insulting to conflate such people with "the Left Behind folks" IMO. I know a reasonable number of people who believe in some sense "naively" in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit without being anything close to "Left Behind folks.")

272: in the sense that proving/disproving, affirming/denying them is not how people practice their faith

No, that's what I'm having trouble with. In fact affirming/denying certain propositions of faith, and the conflicts over how or whetehr those propositions can or should be proved or disproved, are in fact a pretty core part of how a lot of people -- "naive" or not -- conceive their faith. I referred to the Problem of Evil precisely because its persistence illustrates how common this is.

Oh, I should have said: your attachment will be the starting point

If Adam's talking about obscure subconscious motives for faith, that's different and wasn't immediately obvious to me. I'm talking about the conscious and articulated reasons people have for holding, deliberating and changing faiths.

DS, I've seriously explained this like five times. At this point, I'm not prepared to blame myself for your continued failure to understand.

But a note: We shouldn't be surprised if people who are theologically uneducated are not very good at articulating the bases for their own faith, especially when they are subjected to the propaganda of the fundamentalists. We don't take an uneducated entrepreneur's word for it when he says that "old fashioned hard work" was the direct and sole cause of his wealth -- he's not an economist. We don't take people very seriously when they self-diagnose through reading a few web pages they found on Google. I could go on and on.

Yet theological experts are continually dismissed in favor of "the people in the pews." This produces a dynamic in which (normally) a highly educated and sophisticated secular person ends up picking on the half-formulated views of a relatively uneducated person. This is part of the straw-man technique -- just like Dawkins and his defenders saying that they don't have to argue against Aquinas, they can just argue against the country bumpkins. Well, of course the brilliant evolutionary biologist is going to win an argument against a country bumpkin! Pick on someone your own size!

People. Surely the phrase "faith vs. works" resonates somewhere even for the most secular. And surely you can see that the phrase implies that propositions--faith--aren't the only, or for many religious the most, important part of religion.

265 and 211 are helpful, but they don't convince me that positions like the Preacher's and Adam's are particularly coherent or attractive.

Adam says:

I don't believe in "God" in the classical theist sense. That God required a lot of metaphysical baggage that is no longer credible to modern people....The task of modern theology is to figure out how Christian faith and practice can make sense within the framework of the modern world -- how to be a Christian while not just fucking lying all the time.

I take this to mean that the task is to figure out how some sort of practice can coexist with the failure of classical, metaphysically loaded theism, and to figure out what the practice would be, or what it would "mean" in some sense.

So I'll just say: the "God" who is the object of proofs (or disproofs) of the existence of God does not exist. This is obvious to virtually everyone in the elite intellectual class....Yet nonetheless I still believe that Jesus Christ was the most important person ever to live, that the movement he created was the most important thing ever to happen, and that there actually have been people who have been faithful to Christ in every period of history....

Of course, if the classical theist view is false, Jesus the historical person doesn't have any exalted metaphysical status either. I suspect the following is wrong, but it would be helpful to know just how it's wrong. The view we're left with is like this: the traditional Christian viewpoint and moral teachings are good and valuable ways of seeing the world, worthy of approbation, worthy of use in shaping our lives, though the metaphysical claims some associate with this viewpoint are, in fact, false. A Christian in this sense participates in Christian practice in something like the way I participate in Thanksgiving dinner: I don't believe some grandiose claim about the value of the settlement of the New World and I don't believe in Divine Providence, but I think the values of community, tradition and family are worth upholding. Similarly, Christians-in-Adams-sense, as I understand them, are endorsing values and a lifestyle connected with the traditions of Christianity.

One thing that I find irksome about this is that it seems to assume that the value of the "form of life" is disconnected from the metaphysical claims in a way I think is seriously implausible. One thing that would make Christian ethical practice the way to go, for example, is if the metaphysical story were true. If the story isn't true, we're left with some questions about what grounds the practice. If the answer is "I simply find it a good way to live" the God part has more or less dropped out completely and we're at a historically, ethically, and aesthetically more impressive version of the Elks Club.

For example, I sometimes play at talking like an Aristotelian, though, in fact, I find the idea of a robust notion of eudaimonia pretty implausible. As a consequence, if I want to make claims about the rightness of acting from virtue, I need some other sort of view of why that's the thing to do; without it, I'm just expressing a form of life I happen to like.

Where have I misunderstood the metaphysically austere or quietistic position?

DS, I think the confusion may be that when you say "reasons," you're talking about justifications, and when Adam says "reasons," he's talking about reasons. Kotsko should, if he wants to, correct me.

278: Labs, I think that your use of the word "false" is oversimplified. I mean, like you say that you find Aristotle "pretty implausible"--but presumably it would annoy you if my response to that were "so you think Aristotle is wrong; therefore any claims you can make about virtue are only that you find them a good way to live." As you're saying yourself, you need another sort of view of what virtue is, okay; what Adam's saying is that, like philosophy, theology is a discipline with a long and broad tradition. Throwing out the simplest version ("if an ethics class doesn't make students better people, then it's false") really doesn't have much bearing on the discipline as a whole.

Yet theological experts are continually dismissed in favor of "the people in the pews." This produces a dynamic in which (normally) a highly educated and sophisticated secular person ends up picking on the half-formulated views of a relatively uneducated person.

This seems seriously unfair to me. Someone with a belief in what you called a Santa Claus god, and I tried, more respectfully, to call a perceptible god -- a personal god capable of affecting things in the universe, is not necessarily going to be a naive nitwit. And the difference between that faith and a faith like yours is not complex or difficult to understand -- someone with a belief in a personal god who has a faith like yours explained to them seems to me to be much more likely to disagree with you, than to recognize your faith as a more sophisticated and thoroughly understood version of theirs. (They may change their minds, and move from a faith in a personal god to a faith like yours as they become better theologically educated, but that seems to me to be a real change, not a development of what they had faith in all along but didn't know how to express.)

Plenty of people out there believe in a personal god -- throughout history probably most Christians have. Complaining about people setting up straw men when they're talking about a set of beliefs that characterize most Christians strikes me as mistaken.

"Judaism provides the canonical example of ethnic identity as another grounds of "faith," but it's not as though the interpretation of propositions about belief has played a small role in its intellectual history."

Right, but it's more: this text is important, and you're supposed to study, read and argue about how to interpret it. Believing in the truth of one interpretation, in the sense that you believe the grass is green, in the sense of believing in a creed, is not the point.

I realize that in everyday conversation, when people say "faith in God," they now mean "belief in the truth of certain propositions about God." It doesn't even bother me that much, because I don't have a particular stake in the word faith. If that's what most people think "faith" means, okay, fine, then I don't have faith in God and faith in God is not that important. Faith without works is dead; works without faith is pretty good.

But if I were a committed Christian, and thought "faith" was a central part of Christianity, I'd care a lot if I thought that the original, correct sense of the word was being lost.

And what Labs said; I was trying to formulate pretty much exactly the same comment, but I get embarrassed using words like metaphysical.

Shorter 278: Was es mit unserer Heiterkeit auf sich hat. - Das grösste neuere Ereigniss, - dass "Gott todt ist", dass der Glaube an den christlichen Gott unglaubwürdig geworden ist - beginnt bereits seine ersten Schatten über Europa zu werfen. Für die Wenigen wenigstens, deren Augen, deren Argwohn in den Augen stark und fein genug für dies Schauspiel ist, scheint eben irgend eine Sonne untergegangen, irgend ein altes tiefes Vertrauen in Zweifel umgedreht: ihnen muss unsre alte Welt täglich abendlicher, misstrauischer, fremder, "älter" scheinen. In der Hauptsache aber darf man sagen: das Ereigniss selbst ist viel zu gross, zu fern, zu abseits vom Fassungsvermögen Vieler, als dass auch nur seine Kunde schon angelangt heissen dürfte; geschweige denn, dass Viele bereits wüssten, was eigentlich sich damit begeben hat - und was Alles, nachdem dieser Glaube untergraben ist, nunmehr einfallen muss, weil es auf ihm gebaut, an ihn gelehnt, in ihn hineingewachsen war: zum Beispiel unsre ganze europäische Moral.

276: We shouldn't be surprised if people who are theologically uneducated are not very good at articulating the bases for their own faith. . .

You're starting from a premise -- that regarding belief in propositions as a core part of faith -- is necessarily "theologically uneducated" or "naive" or an appeal to "the people in the pews." You really haven't established this premise. Hence the continued failure of some other people to understand, and your continued frustration.

Yet theological experts are continually dismissed in favor of "the people in the pews."

There's no reason one should have to be dismissed in favour of the other, but if the former are going to talk about the latter, it sure helps if they take their stated reasons for doing or believing things seriously.

Look, I'm coming to this way late, and maybe it's just too involved a subject for a comments thread. I hereby propose a change of venue.

278: Part of the problem, pace Adam, is that within Christianity, the relationship between faith and reason isn't entirely a settled question. There's a twisty little maze of issues. What's the value of evidence in coming to faith? How do you deal with contradictory evidence once in faith? Is faith rational? Should it be rational? What parts of faith are accessible to reason?

It's not right to say that belief in God is just like the belief that the grass is green. But neither does it seem correct to say that because faith is a different kind of intellectual attitude, that there aren't propositions that are believed in part because of faith. It's just that whether the propositions are true or false aren't justifying the faith (in part because they can't be understood absent faith, on some readings.)

Most intellectual theists would agree that if you set out to disprove faith by doing (say) archaeology to disprove Genesis, you'd have brought the wrong toolbox; but that doesn't necessarily entail that faith is just a form of life and no propositions are believed literally.

286 gets it right.

"We don't take people very seriously when they self-diagnose through reading a few web pages they found on Google."

Equating theological experts with medical experts is a remarkable concept. The validity of that analogy is at the core of a lot of the disagreement here, I think.

285: You're starting from a premise -- that regarding belief in propositions as a core part of faith -- is necessarily "theologically uneducated" or "naive" or an appeal to "the people in the pews." You really haven't established this premise. Hence the continued failure of some other people to understand, and your continued frustration.

No, I'm arguing against the claim that propositions are the core of faith, such that faith would be undercut if the propositions turned out to be untrue. And as for "establishing" that "my" definition of faith is the true one -- how exactly do you want me to do that? What authority could I cite that wouldn't be subject to the reproach, "Well, that's not what most Christians think faith is"? You already think you know what faith is and that it is, at bottom, a matter of believing propositions, and I'm obviously never going to convince you no matter what I do. Your close-mindedness does not constitute a counter-argument to my claims.

With regard to Labs' statements, yes, coming up with ways to make sense of one's religious practice and loyalty to a particular community is an important part of faith. You can't just go without it, and I've never suggested that you can.

However, it is demonstrably true that the same practices and participation in the same community are compatible with different sets of propositions. The example of atheist Jews is the clearest, but you also get people who are pious Catholics but don't think the pope's infallible, etc. Moreover, different Christian groups do the same practices while grounding them in different propositions -- communion is the most obvious example. There are various theories of what goes on in communion, and different churches subscribe to different ones -- and some subscribe to none in particular. In addition, there might be people sitting in a Catholic Church who don't really buy transubstantiation, or who don't truly understand it or its implications, but nonetheless participate in the same ritual and are very loyal Catholics. Does their religious faith have less integrity than that of someone who totally buys into everything the church hierarchy officially teaches?

I don't know -- who am I to judge? And more to the point, who are you, a non-religious person, to judge, Labs? You might think it's like the Elks Club, but obviously the people practicing that religion would take it as an insult.

It's totally legitimate for you to believe that the only way for you to participate with integrity in religious communities would be if you totally bought into all the official doctrines (in the sense of believing them like they're propositions), and if that's the case, then it's obvious that you'll never become religious -- because it's simply not the case that one ever becomes religious just by becoming persuaded that certain propositions are true. That's fine. Your personal obstacle to embracing religious faith is not, however, the absolutely decisive factor in religious faith as a broader phenomenon.

Adam, I really don't mean to offend or attack you. I find the idea of a faith that's ungrounded in metaphysical claims hard to understand -- not that it's hard to understand that your faith is ungrounded in metaphysical claims, but that it's hard to understand why, without the metaphysical claims, faith such as yours has has a higher status than "My ethical beliefs and those of the people throughout history I admire and wish to emulate." (Which, as a weak atheist, is all I've got -- I'm not claiming any better foundation for my own beliefs.)

Now, I am perfectly willing to accept that there are sophisticated theological arguments for why faith such as yours is importantly different from the ethical beliefs of an atheist, and I'm also perfectly willing to accept that these arguments are not easily explained in blog comments to someone of my limited philosophical/theological education. But you've got to accept that it's a real question, with a non-obvious set of answers.

In the case of faith that, while it is not limited to belief in a set of propositions, or necessarily caused by belief in that set of propositions, is justified by them ("I believe that I have X set of ethical obligations and obligations to engage in religious practice, because I believe that there is a personal god who I am obliged to obey who wants me to act this way.") the answer to that question is clear. And there really are at least some sophisticated, intelligent people who have faith they justify in that manner -- it shouldn't be an insult to be confused with them.

LB, Read some novels with main characters who are religious -- John Irving, something like that (I can't believe I'm recommending John Irving....). The problem here is that you don't understand religion empathetically from the inside, and so you're bound to come up with rather abstract ideas of what it is or what it constitutes. Reading several novels along those lines seems to be the only option open to you other than simply joining a church and trying to become religious yourself.

282: Believing in the truth of one interpretation, in the sense that you believe the grass is green, in the sense of believing in a creed, is not the point.

This presumably would vary depending on the tradition. (I'm not sure the 'grass is green' standard for propositions is doing the work people want from it.)

289: No, I'm arguing against the claim that propositions are the core of faith, such that faith would be undercut if the propositions turned out to be untrue... You already think you know what faith is and that it is, at bottom, a matter of believing propositions...

Look, I haven't said anything about "the" core of faith or what faith is "at bottom." I do think it's reasonable to say that belief frequently plays a substantial (for some people "core") role in how faith works and why it shifts. I regard the fact that people are very commonly prompted by real-world events to reconsider propositions of belief and reshape their faith as a result -- cf. the Lisbon Earthquake and subsequent effects on attitudes to theodicy, for just one example -- to be pretty strong evidence for this, especially within the Christian tradition. This is a big part of the history of the modern secular state and the disestablishment of religion in the West, right? Am I taking crazy pills?

And as for "establishing" that "my" definition of faith is the true one -- how exactly do you want me to do that?

I'm not interested in whose "definition of faith" is "the true one." I'm interested in what's descriptive. If it's "closed-minded" of me to expect your account of what faith is to make sense in view of the actual history of faith, so be it.

Geez, Adam, you really are going out of your way to be a dick. LizardBreath was being awfully conciliatory. Telling her, in essence, that she just can't "get it" seems a bit much.

I was telling her she doesn't get it, which seems to be her own view of the matter, and instructing her as to how to go about "getting it." That is, I was doing virtually the opposite of telling her she can't get it.

Adam, respectfully, here's who I am to judge: I'm someone who spends a decent amount of time thinking about how evaluative and metaphysical commitments are related and about how rational pressures bear on making one or the other of these.

However, it is demonstrably true that the same practices and participation in the same community are compatible with different sets of propositions. The example of atheist Jews is the clearest, but you also get people who are pious Catholics but don't think the pope's infallible, etc.

The question is not whether this is psychologically possible but whether it's defensible, perhaps from the standpoint of rationality. The Catholic case is a bad example, because there the relevant propostion isn't analogous. Compare to:

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.

If someone rejected those claims, and claimed to be a Christian, I'd be interested in just what it was to be a Christian in this sense.

You might think it's like the Elks Club, but obviously the people practicing that religion would take it as an insult.

They might; again, what I'm asking is for the difference. Once you've abandoned the metaphysics, how is religious devotion different from participation in one ritual form of life among others? Suppose I ask a Kotsko-style Christian "Is Christianity the right way to live, and why?" What sort of answer would I get?

I'm trying not to be testy here, because this is a higher stakes argument for you than for me -- we're arguing about religion which is important to you and not to me. But of course I've read novels with religious main characters. I've read medieval theological poetry, I've read eighteenth century essays about religion, I've read nineteenth century novels from the point of view of clergymen, and I've read modern novels about religious people. You don't need to direct me to information about the religious -- there are plenty of you out there.

None of that reading has brought me to any conclusion other than that being raised in a religious community is likely either to engender belief in the metaphysical claims that can justify faith and religious practice, or to cause a sentimental (emotional? psychological?) attachment to the forms of religious practice and the ethical obligations that would be justified by the metaphysical claims if one believed in them.

Whatever it is that gives faith not resting on metaphysical claims a different and superior status to say, my attachment to the practice of observing holidays like Thanksgiving and generally trying to be a good person by my own lights remains obscure, even after a good deal of reading material written by and about religious people. You don't have any obligation to explain it to me, and you probably couldn't without enrolling me in a Masters program in theology. But it's a genuinely difficult question, and my incomprehension on this front is not a personal attack, nor is it, I think, indicative of unusual ignorance or poor character on my part.

I'm off to swim, and it's probably bad form to say that my 272 was meant to address the concerns that keep coming up, but, uh, my 272 was meant to address the concerns that keep coming up.

And so it was that Ogged came to learn that his intentions and the effects of his actions were distinct.

Christianity, and indeed religion, pre-existed the metaphysical scheme presupposed by traditional theism. It has, at this point, outlived the plausibility of that scheme. To say that religion "rests on" metaphysical claims is to continue begging the question that propositions are foundational -- beyond that, it's demonstrably, descriptively untrue. Theological reflection is just that -- reflection, a second-order activity. Doctrinal definitions serve primarily to regulate theologians and preachers. Various metaphysical schemes have been proposed by theologians in order to make sense of Christian faith. Doubtless some future metaphysical scheme will come to serve that function in a future age -- several alternatives are being developed.

I am no more anti-metaphysics than I am anti-proposition. If you want to have a metaphysics with your faith, be my guest. I may well end up developing my own -- in fact, I kind of plan on it. But once I develop it, I'm not going to pretend like it has somehow retroactively founded all of the preceding eras of Christianity. Nor does their now-implausible metaphysical scheme undercut the faith of generations of Christians before me.

If someone rejected those claims, and claimed to be a Christian, I'd be interested in just what it was to be a Christian in this sense.

Isn't this a question that's applicable to things other than religion? E.g., is Ogged really Iranian?

Ok, let me try one more thing before I go. Think of someone who is looking for a home for her faith, so to speak, and who attends services at various churches, maybe even samples services in various religions, and then chooses the one that she finds speaks to her most clearly. She joins that faith community and lives her life, more or less and as best as she can, in accord with the principles of that faith.

B: sure, it's applicable. It's not meant rhetorically: I really want to know what's involved in being a Christian in this sense, while understanding that the boundaries of the class will be vague.

AK:

To say that religion "rests on" metaphysical claims is to continue begging the question that propositions are foundational -- beyond that, it's demonstrably, descriptively untrue.

So our hypothetical Christian stops answering "why do you go to church, take communion, and the like" by saying "because I believe in the existence of God" and starts saying something else. What's the something else?

Something like 296 was my initial reaction, too: I immediately thought of the creed I stood up and recited for thirteen or fourteen years of my life -- from about the time I could recite anything to around the time I felt my belief the propositions expressed therein drain away.

I am sympathetic to the idea that participation in a community of religious practice is separate from explicit belief in this or that theological proposition. Noam Chomsky, of all people, has a nice discussion somewhere about being Jewish, and makes the point that for his grandfather being Jewish meant observing particular laws and performing certain practices the right way, and if you'd asked him "Does God Exist?" he wouldn't have known what you were talking about. A community sociologist I know used to remark that your typical Irish peasant was quite able to believe three different things about death at the same time: that when you died you were dead like a dead cow, that you could be away in the land of the fairies, and that you had passed on to Heaven.

But I take Adam as saying more than that practice-based elements of religiosity are inaccessible to non-religious people like FL et a. He seems also to be talking about aspects of religious experience, the noumenon and all that.

Instead of a point to this ramble, I will say a friend of mine is writing a book about the category of "experience" in American religious thought since the 19th century. I should ask her about this question.

To say that religion "rests on" metaphysical claims is to continue begging the question that propositions are foundational -- beyond that, it's demonstrably, descriptively untrue.

The thing is, I just don't believe this as a historical matter on your assertion. I'm not a theologian, but I've done a fair amount of miscellaneous reading, and Christian writers from the Gospels through the twentieth century have more often than not written as if they believed that their faith was justified by the literal existence of what I've called a perceptible God -- a God with effects upon the universe. It is possible that those two thousand years worth of texts were all written with the same esoteric meaning in mind, and anyone believing in a personal God has always been an ignorant rube, but I am unaware of your basis for claiming that this is obviously true.

The difference between a metaphysical scheme in which a personal God exists and in which one doesn't really isn't a sophisticated distinction or one that's difficult to understand.

292 comments and no one's used the word "mysteries?" Yet Kotsko blames others for the marginalization of non-Fundy Christianity. The issues of communion raised in 290 get at why the Catholic Church emphasizes the concept of mysteries. There are these points where the spiritual interacts with the corporeal, and people can "feel" it (for lack of a better expression), and what's going on is more a question for theologians than for laypersons, but they signify. So, bottom line, faith is a sense of the holy/supernatural/mystical, and religion provides a framework for understanding and enacting those feelings. I'm pretty sure that's 90% of what AK's been trying to say.

I guess the way I'd emphasize it for LB and some of the other irreligious is that most (all?) people feel religiously at some point in their lives. Those who take that feeling and attempt to comprehend it and build a life around it are faithful, regardless of any specific "beliefs." So what Karl said (granting, for a moment, that he meant it) was that he's either never had those feelings - which sure seem impressive to witness when you visit a Pentecostal service, or a Midnight Mass - or that he hasn't been able to resolve those feelings into Faith. Although it seems to me that, for any moderately thoughtful person, the latter is awfully close to "I can't buy all those propositions."

All that said, I was quite devout and earnestly religious up to about 20, but it was, largely, the loss of belief in propositions that caused me to lose my faith. I'm sure that Adam will tell me that this means I never had faith, but the surprising thing (to me) was that, once I stopped believing in the tenets of the Catholic Church, I stopped having religious feelings whatsoever - no temptations towards other faiths, or belief systems. Further, I've been about as happy under both lifestyles (except that my post-faith self resents all the sexual opportunity missed by my faithful self).

Sorry if that sounded smug.

I'm sure this made sense underwater, Ogged.

Think of someone who is looking for a home for her faith, so to speak, and who attends services at various churches, maybe even samples services in various religions, and then chooses the one that she finds speaks to her most clearly. She joins that faith community and lives her life, more or less and as best as she can, in accord with the principles of that faith.

So it's really closely analogous to someone saying "I will devote myself to such-and-such a cause" or "I choose this project around which to organize my life, knowing that it's not, from the standpoint of the universe, particularly special or unique." Is that right?

I don't mean this as an insult, but where is the difference between someone who does this and someone who stakes himself to these goals, bracketed proposition aside?

To inculcate the principles of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love and Fidelity; [to recognize a belief in God;] to promote the welfare and enhance the happiness of its Members; to quicken the spirit of American patriotism; to cultivate good fellowship; to perpetuate itself as a fraternal organization, and to provide for its government, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the United States of America will serve the people and communities through benevolent programs, demonstrating that Elks Care and Elks Share.

Speaking for myself, besides the propositional problem I also almost completely lack the devotional feeling. Between the two I'm not a believer.

303: Obviously if asked for a "reason," in the sense you want, they're going to offer that kind of reason. That doesn't mean that the reason caused them to be part of their faith community, nor that that reason has remained constant over time. You are focusing on a very narrow aspect of the religious life -- trying to come up with ways to make sense of it -- and abstracting it out from the whole, then seeking to make it somehow foundational, such that religious life stands or falls with the propositions.

It is hard to imagine that many religious groups would want to have their theologians and preachers saying that God doesn't exist -- but what does "God exists" mean? I can think of several possible interpretative schemes you could deploy to make sense of that statement. There's not some unequivocal meaning for "believing God exists." If the metaphysical scheme that was previously used to support the idea of God existing doesn't work (i.e., traditional theism), then you come up with another one.

You affirm that God exists or you affirm the Nicene Creed because you're a Christian, not the other way around. And every last theologian in the history of Christianity thinks this.

This reminds me of the current thing about Rove saying he wasn't fortunate enough to be a person of faith. The sentiment is almost exactly the same as that expressed by Max Weber when he said he was "religiously unmusical."

I'm not talking about religious experience, spirituality, mystery, or anything of the sort. Certainly not 90% talking about it. Everything I've said is based in practice and loyalty to a community -- I've talked about the possibility that some people might have a "personal religious experience," but I've also said that's not normative and that such experiences only have a real-world meaning if they are followed up by participation in religious practice and membership in community. I'm honestly trying to be as materialist as possible here.

309: By a reason I mean the sort of thing a Kotsko-style Christian would offer as a justification for doing various things. "Because it's who I am" seems to be the tone of the answer.

You affirm that God exists or you affirm the Nicene Creed because you're a Christian

Maybe this comes down to what's involved in the affirmation. To my ear, someone saying "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth" seems to be making a claim about what there is. And so on for the other assertions. Now maybe there's some special context in which reciting the Creed isn't assertoric (e.g. I'm not lying if I star in "Hamlet" and say I'm the Prince of Denmark) but it has the trappings of assertion, and what it asserts seems to be the sort of metaphysical view you deny.

What I'm saying is that there is no one unequivocal thing that the various creedal affirmations mean. Theologians and, to a somewhat lesser extent, preachers are free to explain those affirmations a million different ways as long as they don't say something that contradicts the core doctrines. A statement in isolation does not mean anything. The creed itself is much too spare to bring its own metaphysical system with it.

I'm not saying theologians won't or shouldn't come up with metaphysical systems to explain the creed -- I'm saying that the creedal affirmations are detachable from the metaphysics and that they are therefore not unequivocal propositions about the state of affairs, metaphysical or otherwise.

I'm not talking about religious experience, spirituality, mystery, or anything of the sort. ... Everything I've said is based in practice and loyalty to a community ... experiences only have a real-world meaning if they are followed up by participation in religious practice and membership in community. I'm honestly trying to be as materialist as possible here.

See, I have no problem at all with this because I am a sociologist and not a philosopher. From a sociological point of view the actual existence of God is of zero interest, and all that matters is, as you say, the world of religious practice, membership in community and the relationship of these to social life more generally. But while this might be why I'm a sociologist rather than a philosoper, it's also why I am not a theologian.

With that, seriously, I must step away. But I'll recommend to Fontana Labs, as I have before, the book The Nature of Doctrine by George Lindbeck. It's pretty short, and it draws on Wittgenstein. I am basically rehashing his arguments for "doctrine as guideline or rule" rather than "doctrine as proposition."

This moment has likely passed, but I do want to say one thing about why Fundies rule the airwaves:

Contra Adam's "It's a plot by secularists to make Xtians look stupid" theory, there are at least 4 much bigger reasons that Fundies have become the face of Xtianity in America:

1. The Fundies have a history with mass media much stronger than that of Mainline churches (pace Fr Coughlin). From Aimee Semple to Ted Haggard, they tend to be more media-friendly than their Catholic & Presbyterian brethren (and there's all sorts of reasons for that to be true, and please don't make me back up this statement, because I will, and it will be dull, but overwhelming).

2. Fundies speak with one voice. The media loves this. If Catholics, Orthodoxers, Anglicans, and Presbys maintained message discipline, I guarantee they could get themselves on TV.

3. Unlike other strains of modern American Xtianity, Fundies are willing to say, "We are True Christians." This gives them a huge rhetorical cudgel, and no one has the balls to call them on it. I would LOVE to see Cardinal Egan go on TV and tell James Dobson that he's a full-of-shit heretic. But he never will. Instead, you'll have Fundies happily go on TV and use phrases like "real Christian" to exclude anyone who doesn't sign opn to their agenda. And, when the Cardinal does go on TV, the Fundies will write in and say, Why don't you put Real Christians on TV? Bad religion drives out good. (Note: Santa Claus wouldn't allow this)

4. The one point that has been (grudgingly) conceded: Fundies are vastly more important to public life in this country right now. Their interaction with the media isn't handled well, but it is unavoidable. When Catholics were America's most powerful, unified religious group (50s & 60s), they had a bigger role as the public face of Xtianity. But as many Catholics as there still are, they don't have the clout, because they don't speak with a single voice.

Adam, I'll spot you that faith precedes understanding, and that you can't argue someone into faith, but if you take away (say) belief in the creed, however, that gets sorted out metaphysically, you really don't have the same faith any more. You affirm the Creed because you believe, but if you stop affirming it.....? Isn't that where a large part of the debate is?

Faith isn't just belief in propositions, but that doesn't entail that whether God exists (say) is wholly irrelevant, which is I think how you're being taken here, though I'm not sure that's what you mean.

(Shorter me: I am not spotting you one billion Catholics. I call shenanigans.)

What I'm stuck on is the idea that "God exists" or the rest of the creedal affirmations are inherently equivocal propositions. Affirming the existence of One God in Three Persons, or whatever, seems to me to be squarely inconsistent with a belief that the universe is indistinguishable from a universe in which there were no god. I'll accept that there are arguments that can be made reconciling the affirmation with a lack of belief in a personal god, but those arguments seem to me to be at the least obscure, and you seem to be saying that they're self-evident and foundational.

Sorry Adam - I had noted (and liked) your community emphasis. But, given your 311, I really don't see your objection to Xtians-as-Elks.

I offered my explanation partly because I think that it's much closer to how a lowly pew-person might explain your anti-proposition standpoint to someone like LB.

318 cross posted with 317, which I find much closer to something I can understand.

319 - me.

313: At this point I'm hopelessly confused and I'm not sure what we're arguing about.

Looking again at the creed, it looks pretty metaphysical. It's not exactly a baroque reading to think that it says
(i) there is one God the Father Almighty
(ii) this Being made heaven, earth, and so on
(iii) there's another Person, Jesus Christ, who has such-and-such features, including suffering under Pilate.

(i) and (ii) look more amenable to metaphoric reinterpretation, but (iii) is more troubling, because it says things about substance and about matters of clear fact, such as suffering under Pilate.

The reason I've been thinking that the metaphysics is not irrelevant is that (a) being a Christian involves a particular form of life, whirl of organism, or what have you; (b) that form of life includes saying the Creed, for example; (c) saying the Creed involves asserting that things are a certain way; and (d) doing this seems to commit someone to what you'd been characterizing as a metaphysical view, namely, that God (a Being answering to various descriptions) exists, that Jesus suffered under Pilate, and so on.

The creed's chock full of chewy metaphysical goodness. The whole thing reads like cliff's notes of a metaphysics discussion. Seen and unseen: hello, universals. Begotten, not made: there's a few hours of arguments at the Council. One in being with: now my head explodes.

"why, without the metaphysical claims, faith such as yours has has a higher status than "My ethical beliefs and those of the people throughout history I admire and wish to emulate.""

Again with the caveat that I actually don't think much like Adam on these issues at all (he's a Christian in some complicated way; I'm a non-Christian secular humanist wannabe reform Jew....):

(1) I don't think that religiously-grounded ethical beliefs have a higher status than secularly-grounded ethical beliefs. I don't think you figure out what's ethical by figuring out what God says commanded; I think you figure out what God commanded by figuring out what's ethical.

(2) I do think that you can use the word "faith" to mean more than "my ethical beliefs". But what gives it that "higher status" is not whether your ethical beliefs involve God, or your certainty of the metaphysical basis for them whatever you have faith in, but your level of commitment to it.

The human rights movement has been called a "secular religion" so let's use that.

What's the best way to demonstrate your faith in universal, inalienable human rights? Is it:

(1) Making a really, really, really strong philosphical argument for their existence and importance;
(2) Feeling really, really, really certain that they exist and that they're important ;
(3) Actively committing yourself to working for them (in the most extreme case: willingness to risk getting shot at or going to jail for them).

Outside the context of religion, it's quite common to use the word "faith" to mean something like "loyalty" or "trust" or "commitment" or "fidelity", rather than "psychological certainty of the truth of a proposition".

316: You forget that The Religious Right (TM) is led by people who aren't really religious, and who have deliberately spent twenty years, give or take, building up a kind of grassroots conservatism that combines secular goals, a sense of grievance, and religious language in order to achieve political, not spiritual, goals.

317: I'm not spotting you the however-many-hundreds-of-thousands of Catholics (including me and Adam) who aren't going to accept that not saying the creed--or not 'believing' it in a literal sense--means they don't have the same faith you do. I'll agree that it's a different take on Catholicism, but not that it isn't Catholicism.

324: Once you say 'no higher status than ethically grounded secular beliefs' I'm right with you. Certainly, someone who serves a series of ethical commitments at the cost of personal difficulty and risk demonstrates fidelity to them better than someone who can accurately explain them but doesn't do anything about them.

Even though I live down the block from the Grand Lodge itself, I would really recommend talking about Amnesty International instead of the Elks Club if we're looking for a secular analogy that's not going to needlessly antagonize people.

But on some level the Elks Lodge is a better analogy. Amnesty International doesn't have the ritualistic stuff hanging off it that religions do -- it's an organization limited to serving a practical end. (Oh, there are probably some organizational traditions and rituals, but they are clearly not fundamental to its nature.) The Elks Lodge has rituals that resemble religious practice.

If you can come up with a more respectful analogy that preserves that resemblance, that would work, but I don't think the Elks were invoked just to be funny -- there's a real connection. Is Masons better?

325: This isn't about me wanting to keep Catholicism for myself. I haven't believed a blessed thing in five ooh, maybe six years, maybe longer, but I'm not going to argue that it means I have the same faith as someone who has faith, and as a result, actually believes the whole creed, does. This is part of my general dislike of undefined concepts, but I'm not going to mistake, say, my belief in the acceptability of birth control for anything taught by Catholicism. "I'm a person of the Catholic faith but I don't actually believe any of that God nonsense or any of the ethical teachings" rings very hollow to me.

It just seems conceptually messy to say my faith is exactly the same as where it was even though I don't believe any of the metaphysics any more or hold onto any of the practices besides a residual belief in the doctrine of double effect, a vague sense of goodwill towards the world, and a deep dislike of megachurches.

"I'll agree that it's a different take on Catholicism, but not that it isn't Catholicism."

Indeed - the argument here seems to be that Catholics themselves are incompetent to define their own experience. In this sense, you and Kotsko are, quite literally, more Catholic than the Pope.

330: That's not fair. Bitch is claiming to be as Catholic as, not more Catholic than, the Pope, which is quite different.

Interested parties can find a useful article about Lindbeck here.

325: What makes you think I forgot that? It's more-or-less irrelevant to my 316, as near as I can tell. Of course the Religious Right is a cynical political movement that is piggybacked on Evangelical Christianity. But it's also symbiotic - there are features very dear to E.C. that aid the Religious Right, and that's how it has risen. And those features contribute to the media prominence of Fundamentalism, and the public equation of Fundamentalism with Xtianity.

If there's a publicly-available list of which Fundy public figures are charlatans and which are sincere, I'd love to see it. Until then, they get lumped together. Sincere fundies are welcome to undermine this if it bothers them (Fred Clark does wonderfully with this, but a Slacktivist can only do so much).

B, what minimally essential [beliefs?/characteristics?/features?] do you think someone needs to properly self-identify as "Catholic"? (Surely the answer's not "none" if the word is to have any meaning.)

330: This is circling back to the Mormon-Christian brouhaha from a month ago.

I think as along as you've been confirmed, you can probably properly self-identify as Catholic. Catholicism is sort of patient, and practically expects people to wander away and wander back. But that doesn't mean that anything a Catholic believes is part of the Catholic faith.

Evangelical, fundamentalist, and conservative Christianity are all categories that overlap significantly but are not actually coterminous with one another. Coughlin wasn't any kind of fundamentalist, for example (contra 316).

336: Right, true, my question was inarticulate. I was trying to press at the distinction between a lapsed Catholic and a, um, non-lapsed Catholic. (And of course a lapsed Catholic can meaningfully identify as Catholic, so my question in 334 was very poor.) But does B think there is no such thing as a lapsed Catholic? As in: "I was confirmed, but haven't been to mass or believed any of that religious bullshit in decades" --- no problem, still a commited Catholic! As Catholic as the Pope himself!

Shorter 338: add "committed" before "Catholic" in 334.

Similarly, I think that Fred Clark is himself Evangelical but not a fundamentalist.

336: there's a lot to be said for that stance - hence "lapsed Catholic" - but I don't think it's germane to any meaningful discussion of Faith - we're back to atheist Jews (I certainly have described myself as ethnically Catholic, although I come from a very non-ethnic family, if you recall that discussion; but my upbringing was centered more around the Church than anything else except sports).

If you're describing yourself as Catholic, without qualifiers, then that implies both faith and belief. After all, while AK may be right that faith precedes belief, I'm not sure that, for an unsophisticated thinker, it also outlasts it. IOW, if you spend decades in the Church, you either retain some kernel, and thus remain Catholic, or reject it all, and you're atheistic/agnostic. Presumably B can point to some aspect of Church that she still believes in beyond "Mass is stirring."

No, of course Coughlin wasn't Fundy - he was the exception to my generalization that Fundies rule the airwaves.

I'm pretty sure you're right about Fred; frankly, I've used fundamentalist mostly because it's easier to shorten than evangelical. And there's enormous overlap between the two, more so than with "conservative Christianity." For the purposes of this discussion - especially for the reasons Kotsko was bringing them up - I'm not sure there's an important distinction to preserve. But only for the purposes of this discussion.

Maybe I'd put the question as what makes the faith Catholic as opposed to just faith in something quasi-divine. The faith isn't founded on belief in propositions, but it is supposed to lead to understanding certain propositions, and if that isn't happening at all, one wonders what went wrong.

Sorry, my eyes glided right over your pace.

OK, phew - I thought I had been clear.

Isn't the difference between K-Christianity and the Elks, that the communion of the Elks does not rest on a foundation of faith?

306 is a very good comment.

I think the question being asked is, if it's not assent to a set of metaphysical propositions, what are the characteristics of 'faith' that distinguish K-Christianity from the Elks? Both organizations recognize a set of ethical obligations, both engage in ritual observance, both do good works -- what makes K-Christianity differ from the Elks?

I posted that before I read 311, which surprised me by suggesting that what I think of as "faith" -- which is about what JRoth was talking about in 306 -- is not an important feature of K-Christianity.

Being a Christian differs from membership in other groups insofar as Christianity is about the holy.

Thanks for clearing that up, ogged.

My pleasure.

What's missing from the Elks is a perception that anyone actually seriously stakes his life on their ethical goals. It calls up an image of funny hats & bingo night & it's going to piss people off even if you add on some disclaimers....come on. You know this.

Or maybe I'm just displaying my ignorance of the heroes of the Benevolent Fraternal Order, but I kind of doubt it. Anyway, it's starting to annoy me too, so I'm not discussing it anymore. Elks analogies are banned.

I agree that AI doesn't have religion's ritual/mystical/aesthetic element. If you want an organization with shared ritual observances AND ethical commitments that are thought to be more important than belief in metaphysical truths about God, we're back to the reform synagogue I used to go to in Boston. I think the rabbis & the majority of the congregation would have considered the acts of saying the mourner's Kaddish and going to the passover seder to be more important & fundamental to one's identity as a Jew than believing in the words of the prayer or the Haggaah.

And for a classical example of how the ethical commandment is more important than, and does not really depend on, its stated metaphysical basis...

Some variation of this commandment appears about three dozen times in the Hebrew bible:
"You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."
"You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you"
"You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today"

Sometimes they person you're not supposed to be oppressing are widows, orphans, converts, or servants as well as strangers....There are other variations too. You get the idea.

I suppose this injunction theoretically would have added force if you actually believe that God actually gave these words to Moses on Mount Sinai, after actually parting the Red Sea and actually liberating the Jews from slavery. But in practice, it's possible to believe all those proprositions and still go right on ahead and oppressing the stranger, widow, and orphan. It's also possible to not believe in the literal truth of the Exodus story, not believe the Torah is the word of God given to Moses at Sinai, not believe in God at all, and be utterly committed to not oppressing the stranger, widow and orphan. Who is showing more faith in the commandment?

It's trickier with Christianity because a lot of self-described Christians think that believing in the creed *is* the definition of faith, and *is* what gets you into heaven. But there's actually some debate among Christians about what you have to believe or practice for it to count as true religion/faith/Christianity/etc. I can see the argument that it makes no sense not to adopt majority of Christians' definitions of "faith," "God", and "Christianity." At the same time, by doing so you're at some level taking their side against more liberal sorts who have different working definitions.

Well, there's really no reason to prefer the "strong-faith" definition, because it's not actually a majority position (remember, folks, RCC makes up an absolute majority of all Xians). Furthermore, with the universally-accepted parts of the New Testament including lines like "faith without works is dead," only a tendentious (albeit not uncommon) reading gets you to "the creed [...] *is* what gets you into heaven."

That said, it's also unavoidable that the NT puts a lot of emphasis on faith qua faith. It's inevitable that regular people would want to define that faith as propositions, even though Jesus was pretty clear about how to recognize his fellows (which AK cited forever ago), by their actions. Bottom line is, A. it's easier to profess faith than to live it; B. it's really hard to gauge anyone else's faith; C. God does the judging, but none of us get to see the results. End result is an awful lot of religion being about external markers of faith, whether propositions or tithing.

Well, there's really no reason to prefer the "strong-faith" definition, because it's not actually a majority position (remember, folks, RCC makes up an absolute majority of all Xians). Furthermore, with the universally-accepted parts of the New Testament including lines like "faith without works is dead," only a tendentious (albeit not uncommon) reading gets you to "the creed [...] *is* what gets you into heaven."

That said, it's also unavoidable that the NT puts a lot of emphasis on faith qua faith. It's inevitable that regular people would want to define that faith as propositions, even though Jesus was pretty clear about how to recognize his fellows (which AK cited forever ago), by their actions. Bottom line is, A. it's easier to profess faith than to live it; B. it's really hard to gauge anyone else's faith; C. God does the judging, but none of us get to see the results. End result is an awful lot of religion being about external markers of faith, whether propositions or tithing.

You can have faith without believing in the, or any, creed. Then you'd be a person of faith who'd fallen away from the community, or hadn't found her community yet, or whatever. This is not uncommon, and the people in that situation find it very uncomfortable to be without a satisfactory way to express or manifest their faith. (This is different from the kind of explanation Adam's been giving, obviously.)

Also, while this conversation has certainly been... edifying, I think it's a bit rich to suppose that Rove's approach is analogous to Kotsko's. My explanation back in 306 at least offers a realistic way for Rove to say what he did without the dishonesty/hypocrisy suggested by Chait/MY. I don't really see how AK's communities-of-the-faithful-without-beliefs relates to anything that Karl Rove would be talking about.

B, what minimally essential [beliefs?/characteristics?/features?] do you think someone needs to properly self-identify as "Catholic"?

I don't think I'm in a position to say what someone else needs to "properly" self-identify as Catholic. I'm not saying that "anything a Catholic believes is part of the Catholic faith"--e.g., my belief that California is the best place to live on earth? Not part of Catholicism, though there are a hell of a lot of Catholics who agree with me. But my belief that birth control and abortion are not incompatible with Catholicism? I would argue that those beliefs damn well are *too* part of the Catholic faith--the very fact that the Vatican declares both sinful has placed issues of sex and sexuality within the purview of Catholicism, and there are established movements *within the church* in defense of b.c., abortion, gays, etc. Those arguments exist, and the conservative wing's attempt to silence the people making the arguments doesn't make them evaporate.

Presumably B can point to some aspect of Church that she still believes in beyond "Mass is stirring."

Sure, but everything I say is going to be easy to shoot down as "vague" because I lack the ability to be more specific. I do love a good mass (though not all masses are stirring, and sometimes they only stir me into clenched-teeth fury). I think that I think like a Catholic, though I couldn't say what I specifically mean by that. I care about the direction the Church takes. I feel comfortable within Catholicism, despite its misogyny. I find that Catholicism contains within it a concept of fallibility and forgiveness that, for example, allows Catholics to accept 'sins' like single motherhood, divorce, etc., as complicated parts of the world. I believe that the role of Mary and the Magdalen within the Church are a saving grace from the misogynist bullshit that the Vatican and the men in charge are addicted to. I think that the idea of the saints is a remarkable recognition of the divinity within individuals, again including women. I am proud that the church has a history of educating women and including them in religious communities, and I think that these actions put the lie to the Church leadership's hostility to the ordination of women.

It's all fairly vague, but I would say that central to me is the way that making confession a sacrament allows Catholics to be very tolerant of "failure," and to make failure *central to what it means to be a Catholic*. Which is one reason why I think that the church's increasing shrillness about shit like abortion is actually much more anti-Catholic than the fact that I don't think that the little bread wafer magically turns into meat when the altar boy rings the little bell.

Ogged, remind me of what you take faith to be?

Shut up, Labs.

Whatever faith is, it's bad. End of story. There's no need to quibble, if it's faith, faithy, or faith-like, it's no good. You don't need to make fine discriminations, because God will know his own.

There! No Presidential run for me!

358: Where I come from, the term of art/abuse in this context is "a la carte Catholic."

So, Emerson -- have you got a position on whether Catholic priests should marry?

357 is a good reminder, and serves to refocus the question: If Karl Rove was saying "I am not fortunate enough to be a charismatic Christian, a believer in the literal truth of the scripture", then is that patronizing to the group in question?

363 -- Oh, snap!

Leap Year!

"a la carte Catholic."

Also "cafeteria Catholic."

Yes. It would serve them right.

Here you go: some cafeteria Catholics on the front page of the NYT.