Am I a Christian? New York Times asks Tim Keller

From the New York Times

What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st century? Can one be a Christian and yet doubt the virgin birth or the Resurrection? I put these questions to the Rev. Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian pastor and best-selling author who is among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today. Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

KRISTOF Tim, I deeply admire Jesus and his message, but am also skeptical of themes that have been integral to Christianity — the virgin birth, the Resurrection, the miracles and so on. Since this is the Christmas season, let’s start with the virgin birth. Is that an essential belief, or can I mix and match?

KELLER If something is truly integral to a body of thought, you can’t remove it without destabilizing the whole thing. A religion can’t be whatever we desire it to be. If I’m a member of the board of Greenpeace and I come out and say climate change is a hoax, they will ask me to resign. I could call them narrow-minded, but they would rightly say that there have to be some boundaries for dissent or you couldn’t have a cohesive, integrated organization. And they’d be right. It’s the same with any religious faith.

But the earliest accounts of Jesus’ life, like the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s letter to the Galatians, don’t even mention the virgin birth. And the reference in Luke to the virgin birth was written in a different kind of Greek and was probably added later. So isn’t there room for skepticism?

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If it were simply a legend that could be dismissed, it would damage the fabric of the Christian message. Luc Ferry, looking at the Gospel of John’s account of Jesus’ birth into the world, said this taught that the power behind the whole universe was not just an impersonal cosmic principle but a real person who could be known and loved. That scandalized Greek and Roman philosophers but was revolutionary in the history of human thought. It led to a new emphasis on the importance of the individual person and on love as the supreme virtue, because Jesus was not just a great human being, but the pre-existing Creator God, miraculously come to earth as a human being.

And the Resurrection? Must it really be taken literally?

Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19).

But let me push back. As you know better than I, the Scriptures themselves indicate that the Resurrection wasn’t so clear cut. Mary Magdalene didn’t initially recognize the risen Jesus, nor did some disciples, and the gospels are fuzzy about Jesus’ literal presence — especially Mark, the first gospel to be written. So if you take these passages as meaning that Jesus literally rose from the dead, why the fuzziness?

I wouldn’t characterize the New Testament descriptions of the risen Jesus as fuzzy. They are very concrete in their details. Yes, Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus at first, but then she does. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) also don’t recognize Jesus at first. Their experience was analogous to meeting someone you last saw as a child 20 years ago. Many historians have argued that this has the ring of eyewitness authenticity. If you were making up a story about the Resurrection, would you have imagined that Jesus was altered enough to not be identified immediately but not so much that he couldn’t be recognized after a few moments? As for Mark’s gospel, yes, it ends very abruptly without getting to the Resurrection, but most scholars believe that the last part of the book or scroll was lost to us.

Skeptics should consider another surprising aspect of these accounts. Mary Magdalene is named as the first eyewitness of the risen Christ, and other women are mentioned as the earliest eyewitnesses in the other gospels, too. This was a time in which the testimony of women was not admissible evidence in courts because of their low social status. The early pagan critics of Christianity latched on to this and dismissed the Resurrection as the word of “hysterical females.” If the gospel writers were inventing these narratives, they would never have put women in them. So they didn’t invent them.

The Christian Church is pretty much inexplicable if we don’t believe in a physical resurrection. N.T. Wright has argued in “The Resurrection of the Son of God” that it is difficult to come up with any historically plausible alternate explanation for the birth of the Christian movement. It is hard to account for thousands of Jews virtually overnight worshiping a human being as divine when everything about their religion and culture conditioned them to believe that was not only impossible, but deeply heretical. The best explanation for the change was that many hundreds of them had actually seen Jesus with their own eyes.

So where does that leave people like me? Am I a Christian? A Jesus follower? A secular Christian? Can I be a Christian while doubting the Resurrection?

I wouldn’t draw any conclusion about an individual without talking to him or her at length. But, in general, if you don’t accept the Resurrection or other foundational beliefs as defined by the Apostles’ Creed, I’d say you are on the outside of the boundary.

Tim, people sometimes say that the answer is faith. But, as a journalist, I’ve found skepticism useful. If I hear something that sounds superstitious, I want eyewitnesses and evidence. That’s the attitude we take toward Islam and Hinduism and Taoism, so why suspend skepticism in our own faith tradition?

I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.

But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience. Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.

In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe. He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.

I’ll grudgingly concede your point: My belief in human rights and morality may be more about faith than logic. But is it really analogous to believe in things that seem consistent with science and modernity, like human rights, and those that seem inconsistent, like a virgin birth or resurrection?

I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.

Science must always assume that an effect has a repeatable, natural cause. That is its methodology. Imagine, then, for the sake of argument that a miracle actually occurred. Science would have no way to confirm a nonrepeatable, supernatural cause. Alvin Plantinga argued that to say that there must be a scientific cause for any apparently miraculous phenomenon is like insisting that your lost keys must be under the streetlight because that’s the only place you can see.

Can I ask: Do you ever have doubts? Do most people of faith struggle at times over these kinds of questions?

Yes and yes. In the Bible, the Book of Jude (Chapter 1, verse 22) tells Christians to “be merciful to those who doubt.” We should not encourage people to simply stifle all doubts. Doubts force us to think things out and re-examine our reasons, and that can, in the end, lead to stronger faith.

I’d also encourage doubters of religious teachings to doubt the faith assumptions that often drive their skepticism. While Christians should be open to questioning their faith assumptions, I would hope that secular skeptics would also question their own. Neither statement — “There is no supernatural reality beyond this world” and “There is a transcendent reality beyond this material world” — can be proven empirically, nor is either self-evident to most people. So they both entail faith. Secular people should be as open to questions and doubts about their positions as religious people.

What I admire most about Christianity is the amazing good work it inspires people to do around the world. But I’m troubled by the evangelical notion that people go to heaven only if they have a direct relationship with Jesus. Doesn’t that imply that billions of people — Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — are consigned to hell because they grew up in non-Christian families around the world? That Gandhi is in hell?

The Bible makes categorical statements that you can’t be saved except through faith in Jesus (John 14:6; Acts 4:11-12). I’m very sympathetic to your concerns, however, because this seems so exclusive and unfair. There are many views of this issue, so my thoughts on this cannot be considered the Christian response. But here they are:

You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.

Christians believe that it is those who admit their weakness and need for a savior who get salvation. If access to God is through the grace of Jesus, then anyone can receive eternal life instantly. This is why “born again” Christianity will always give hope and spread among the “wretched of the earth.”

I can imagine someone saying, “Well, why can’t God just accept everyone — universal salvation?” Then you create a different problem with fairness. It means God wouldn’t really care about injustice and evil.

There is still the question of fairness regarding people who have grown up away from any real exposure to Christianity. The Bible is clear about two things — that salvation must be through grace and faith in Christ, and that God is always fair and just in all his dealings. What it doesn’t directly tell us is exactly how both of those things can be true together. I don’t think it is insurmountable. Just because I can’t see a way doesn’t prove there cannot be any such way. If we have a God big enough to deserve being called God, then we have a God big enough to reconcile both justice and love.

Tim, thanks for a great conversation. And, whatever my doubts, this I believe in: Merry Christmas!

Charlie Brown Christmas

Linus explains what Christmas is all about to Charlie Brown

Merry Christmas!

Ernie Johnson's Thoughts on the Presidential Election

"I never know from one election or the next, who's going to be in the Oval Office, but I always know who's on the throne"

Why Sam Harris is Unlikely to Change his Mind - Jonathan Haidt

From Jonathan Haidt and the rest here from the Evolution Institute

The New Atheist Sam Harris recently offered to pay $10,000 to anyone who can disprove his arguments about morality. Jonathan Haidt analyzes the nature of reasoning, and the ease with which reason becomes a servant of the passions. He bets $10,000 that Harris will not change his mind. 

Reason has long been worshipped by philosophers and intellectuals. In Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, the gods created humankind with a soul of perfect rationality and inserted it into our spherical heads, which were “the most divine part of us and the lord of all that is in us.” (The Gods then realized that they had to create necks, to keep reason insulated from the seething passions of the rest of the body.) During the “age of reason,” the French revolutionaries pulled the Christs and crucifixes out of the cathedrals and replaced them with images of reason. And in our own time, the New Atheists have written books and started foundations urging people to fight religion with reason.

The New Atheist Sam Harris has even gone so far as to argue, in his book The Moral Landscape, that reason and science can tell us what is right and wrong. Morality is—in his definition—limited to questions about “the well-being of conscious creatures.” Well-being can be measured objectively, he says, by methods such as fMRI scans. Therefore, whatever practices, customs, and ways of living maximize those measurements are morally correct; others are morally wrong. He does not say that there is a single best society (hence the image of a landscape, with multiple peaks). But he claims that moral values are facts, no different from the kinds of facts discovered by chemists. Scientific methods give correct answer to questions in chemistry, and they can therefore do so for morality as well. Harris’s confidence in his reasoned argument is so strong that he has issued The Moral Landscape Challenge: He will personally pay $10,000 to anyone who submits an essay so logically compelling that it makes him change his mind and renounce his views. (The contest closes February 9.) 

Critics of religion are right that science has a long track record of undermining claims about God’s role in the material world. Miracles don’t seem to occur as frequently as they used to. But the funny thing is that in the last 40 years, science has also undermined claims about the role and reliability of reason in our daily lives. In the 1960s, psychologists began studying the mind as a kind of computer. But in the 1970s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky began documenting the many bugs, or intuitive biases, in the software. For example, people are more likely to choose a surgical procedure when the outcome is framed in terms of the odds of survival, rather than the (equivalent) odds of death...

...In the 2000s, in my own area of research—moral judgment—it became clear that people make judgments of right and wrong almost instantly, and then make up supporting reasons later. The intuitive dog wags its rational tail, which explains why it is so difficult to change anyone’s mind on a moral issue by refuting every reason they offer. To sum it all up, David Hume was right in 1739 when he wrote that reason was “the slave of the passions,” rather than the divine master, or charioteer, as Plato had believed. 

I’m not saying that we can’t reason quite well about many unemotional situations where we really want to know the right answer, such as whether it is better to drive or take the train to the airport, given current traffic conditions. But when we look at conscious verbal reasoning as an evolutionary adaptation, it begins to look more like a tool for helping people argue, persuade, and guard their reputations than a tool shaped by selection pressures for finding objective truth. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber synthesized the large bodies of research on reasoning in cognitive and social psychology like this: “The function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade…. Skilled arguers are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.” When self-interest, partisan identity, or strong emotions are involved, reasoning turns into a lawyer, using all its powers to reach the desired conclusion... 

...If reasoning is so easily swayed by passions, then what kind of reasoning should we expect from people who hate religion and love reason? Open-minded, scientific thinking that tries to weigh the evidence on all sides? Or standard lawyerly reasoning that strives to reach a pre-ordained conclusion? When I was doing the research for The Righteous Mind, I read the New Atheist books carefully, and I noticed that several of them sounded angry. I also noticed that they used rhetorical structures suggesting certainty far more often than I was used to in scientific writing – words such as “always” and “never,” as well as phrases such as “there is no doubt that…” and “clearly we must…” 

To check my hunch, I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind...

...Reason is indeed crucial for good public policy and a good society. But isn’t the most reasonable approach one that takes seriously the known flaws of human reasoning and tries to work around them? Individuals can’t be trusted to reason well when passions come into play, yet good reasoning can sometimes emerge from groups. This is why science works so well. Scientists suffer from the confirmation bias like everybody else, but the genius of science as an institution is that it incentivizes scientists to disconfirm each others’ ideas, and it creates a community within which a reasoned consensus eventually emerges. 

I agree with Harris that the historical shift away from revealed religion as the basis of society and toward democracy, individual rights, reason, and science as foundations of moral and political authority has been overwhelmingly good for people in Western societies. I am not anti-reason. I am also not anti-religion. I am opposed to dogmatism. I am skeptical of each person’s individual powers of reasoning, and I’m even more skeptical of the reasoning of groups of activists, hyper-partisans, and other righteous reformers who would remake society according to their own reasoned (or revealed) vision... 

...If we want to improve our politics and our society, let’s be reasonable about reason and its limitations. Of course, I have used my powers of reasoning (and intuition) to write this essay, and I have drawn on scientific studies to back up my claim that Harris is unlikely to change his mind and renounce his claims about morality. But people are complicated and it’s always hazardous to use scientific studies to predict the behavior of an individual. I could well be wrong.

Sam Harris's fair response can also be found here where he addresses the findings of "certainty" words and when he did change his mind.

Let's condemn religion...?

Condemn religion

"All major religions are equally valid and basically teach the same thing."	To assert that the doctrinal differences between religions are insignificant is itself a doctrine, and one that is indefensible.
"Each religion sees part of spiritual truth, but none can see the whole truth. "	From what absolute vantage point can you claim to relativize the absolute claims of the different scriptures?
"Religious belief is too culturally and historically conditioned to be 'truth'"	If you say "no belief can be held as universally true for everyone", then by your own rules you can't say that this statement is universally true.
"It is arrogant to insist your religion is right and to convert others to it."	If you say "all religious claims to have a better view of things are arrogant and wrong", then by your own rules that statement is arrogant and wrong.

H/T: This university website 

Peter Hitchens (the late Christopher Hitchens Brother) on why he wrote The Rage Against God

"I want to explain how I became convinced, by reason and experience, of the necessity and rightness of a form of Christianity that is modest, accommodating and thoughtful - but ultimately uncompromising about its vital truth. I hope very much that by doing so I can at least cause those who consider themselves to be atheists to hesitate over their choice. I also hope to provide Christian readers with insights they can use the better to understand their unbelieving friends, and so perhaps to sow some small seeds of doubt in the minds of those friends."

- Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God

Christopher Hitchens' statement with Pastor Douglas Wilson

Thoughts on the Thoughts and Prayer Issue, and on "foundational and tradition-dependent assumptions"

From and the rest at CNN

"...America is deeply divided along the transcendence line. Tens of millions of Americans profess belief in a transcendent God. They include Christians, Jews, Muslims and people of many other faiths. Yet these generic labels are also imprecise; many self-identifying Christians and Jews reject the idea that God intervenes in the world in miraculous and supernatural ways.  

They may participate in religious practices. They may even pray. But they do not believe that prayer "works." They do not have a category of "forgiveness" that appeals to transcendent justice and mercy.  

They do not anticipate a transcendent world to come. Each of them lives out a kind of faith, but the content and contours of that faith is focused on the present physical world and the people in it. 

The transcendence line is not the difference between "belief" and "unbelief." Each of us lives according to strongly held commitments and values-infused beliefs. The liberal atheist who stands up for "equality" and "dignity" relies on foundational and tradition-dependent assumptions in much the same way as the religious conservative who defends "morality" and "truth."

Annoying Fundamentalists

Is "Religion" Dead?

From the WSJ

"God is not dead. Despite the predictions of academics and liberal religious leaders, the world is becoming more faith-filled, not less. According to Rodney Stark, the co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, there has been no rise of the “nones”—no increase in the number of the world’s self-professed atheists and no triumph of reason over revelation...

...Mr. Stark argues that, in general, the government sponsorship of religion is a hindrance to the growth of a faith. Monopoly destroys competition, and competition, he says, causes growth—in religious affiliation as much as in the marketplace for goods and services. In many places around the globe, the competition among Muslims, evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and hundreds of smaller religious groups has resulted in an atmosphere of revival. A smug complacency has been replaced by a fervor to win souls.

Not in Europe, however, where the churches, once so important, are now empty. For the champions of the secularization thesis, such a development is nothing to complain about: Empty churches are a sign of reason’s progress. Mr. Stark offers some amusing evidence to the contrary. Drawing on the Gallup poll, he notes that Europeans hold all sorts of supernatural beliefs. In Austria, 28% of respondents say they believe in fortune tellers; 32% believe in astrology; and 33% believe in lucky charms. “More than 20 percent of Swedes believe in reincarnation,” Mr. Stark writes; “half believe in mental telepathy.” More than half of Icelanders believe in huldufolk, hidden people like elves and trolls. It seems as if the former colonial outposts for European missionaries are now becoming more religious, while Europe itself is becoming interested in primitive folk beliefs.

Huldufolk. Hul du have thought?

Mr. Stark may criticize the methods of Pew and other polling firms, but there is no doubt that fewer Americans than ever before claim an association with a particular sect or denomination. They may be religious by some definition, but they are “unchurched.” The folks at Pew are not atheist triumphalists. They do seem to be tracking what Mr. Stark acknowledges to be the “social consequences” of the changes in the way people identify..." 

Book Review: 'The Twilight of the American Enlightenment' by George M. Marsden

From the WSJ

Almost all of the 'big idea' books of the 1950s shared the premise that self-fulfillment was the highest moral good.

By 

BARTON SWAIM

April 6, 2014 4:56 p.m. ET

Google the phrase "take America back" and you'll find thousands of people who feel their nation has been commandeered and must be retaken—maybe by force, maybe in a metaphorical sense; you're never sure. True, today the sentiment may be popular on the political right, but during the presidency of George W. Bush it was the left that wanted to take America back from right-wing religious nut jobs. It seems extraordinary that so many people can speak of their country as if it has been overtaken by a hostile force with whom they share no premises or aims.

The historian George Marsden, whose book "Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism" (1991) is widely and correctly regarded as the best historical treatment of Christian fundamentalism, traces this way of thinking—commonly summed up with the word "polarization"—to the 1950s. The '50s,
Mr. Marsden argues in "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment," was a time of cultural and political consensus. The U.S. had beaten two deadly foes in World War II, and Americans were enjoying unprecedented levels of prosperity; the future seemed secure. 

In politics, the opening of the Cold War had a unifying effect, and in religion the Protestant mainline enjoyed a quasi-establishment status. A sense of unified national purpose permeated the public sphere, and questions of personal morality were more or less agreed on.

But the midcentury consensus turned out to be flimsy. The liberals who dominated political and intellectual life, Mr. Marsden writes, "were passionately committed to principles such as individual freedom, free speech, human decency, justice, civil rights," and so on. But "their justification for these principles was not that they were fixed in a higher law or derived from an ideology. Rather, it was that these principles had evolved historically in the give and take of human experience in free societies." So, if the intellectuals' ideals weren't based on anything outside the self, the only other place to look was inside.

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THE TWILIGHT OF THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT

By George Marsden
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Mr. Marsden scrutinizes the arguments of several of the decade's "big idea" books, among them David Riesman's "The Lonely Crowd" (1950) and Erich Fromm's "The Sane Society" (1955), and finds that all but one share a premise: that the highest moral good lay in personal self-fulfillment. The one exception—"Essays in the Public Philosophy" (1955) by the venerated liberal intellectual Walter Lippmann—advocated a rejuvenation of thinking on natural law. Whatever the book's problems, Mr. Marsden says, Lippmann saw that a free and prosperous society couldn't sustain itself on the brittle principle of being true to one's self. Lippmann's book received a cold reception.

The other governing principle in the decade's intellectual discourse held that the only unquestionable kind of knowledge was knowledge arrived at through scientific inquiry. That this second principle flatly contradicted the first, as Mr. Marsden notes, gives you some idea of how weak the era's philosophical foundations were. Even mainstream liberal theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, while resisting the more imperialistic claims of scientism, conceded the supremacy of scientific knowledge. As a result, Niebuhr wrote so that his many admirers could easily accept his conclusions but reject his God. Indeed for many educated people in the 1950s, Mr. Marsden observes, God was a kind of "useful ally" who confirmed their own opinions.

The midcentury consensus didn't allow much room for principles and opinions that were substantively informed by religious convictions. So it was not prepared when religion obstinately refused to decline as predicted and in fact grew in diversity and fervor. Liberal academics and intellectuals, still working with the old liberal-consensus model, tended increasingly to see religiously informed opinions on "public" topics as illegitimate; they insisted that religious conviction should be relegated to the sphere of "private" opinion.

Hence the "culture wars": disputes about politics and morality in which the disputants seem to operate from completely different sets of assumptions about life. While secularized liberals tried to rule the opinions of religious people somehow out of bounds, many Christians in fundamentalist and evangelical traditions responded by advocating a return to the allegedly Christian principles of the nation's founding—often sounding as if they would take us back to 17th-century New England. Brushing aside the rhetoric of both sides, Mr. Marsden astutely points out that fundamentalists and evangelicals on the political right are not theocrats; they value Enlightenment principles of individual rights and economic opportunity as much as their secularist adversaries.

Here Mr. Marsden moves from a tone of (mostly) detached historical analysis to one of measured exhortation. Instead of engaging in yet more culture warfare, he counsels, members of the "religious right" should consider the "principled pluralism" of Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). Kuyper, prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905 and a devout Christian believer, rejected the idea of a "neutral" public sphere. In his writings and policies he advocated openness about presuppositions—whether of the secular or religious kind—and insisted that even those who disagree on fundamental principles can work toward equitable compromise...

Mr. Swaim is writing a book on political language and public life.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest He returning chide;

“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best

Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,

And post o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher's "lectures"

...Just before taking on CBS’s Late Night, Colbert famously said “To be a fool for Christ is to love.” I’m not sure I fully understood what Colbert meant by this until his Maher interview. Colbert could have resolved the tension with Maher in a different way. He could’ve laughed off the question of faith and made an easy Trump joke, but that’s not what he did. He embraced the tension. He entered into the foolishness... 

Rest at here, Mereorthodoxy. 

G.K Chesterton on Humility

“It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

- G.K Chesterton 

David Foster Wallace on Empathy Part 2

Obtained from the Wall Street (David Foster Wallace's commencement address before he committed suicide)  

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"... 

...Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. 

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. 

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water." 

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

The Contemprary Liberals Mindset?

"...Contemporary liberals increasingly think and talk like a class of self-satisfied commissars enforcing a comprehensive, uniformly secular vision of the human good. The idea that someone, somewhere might devote her life to an alternative vision of the good — one that clashes in some respects with liberalism's moral creed — is increasingly intolerable. 

That is a betrayal of what's best in the liberal tradition. 

Liberals should be pleased and express gratitude when people do good deeds, whether or not those deeds are motivated by faith. They should also be content to give voluntary associations (like religious colleges) wide latitude to orient themselves to visions of the human good rooted in traditions and experiences that transcend liberal modernity — provided they don't clash in a fundamental way with liberal ideals and institutions.

In the end, what we're seeing is an effort to greatly expand the list of beliefs, traditions, and ways of life that fundamentally clash with liberalism. That is an effort that no genuine liberal should want to succeed. 

What happened to a liberalism of skepticism, modesty, humility, and openness to conflicting notions of the highest good? What happened to a liberalism of pluralism that recognizes that when people are allowed to search for truth in freedom, they are liable to seek and find it in a multitude of values, beliefs, and traditions? What happened to a liberalism that sees this diversity as one of the finest flowers of a free society rather than a threat to the liberal democratic order? 

I don't have answers to these questions — and frankly, not a lot hinges on figuring out how we got here. What matters is that we acknowledge that something in the liberal mind has changed, and that we act to recover what has been lost."

The rest at theweek.com 

The shameful hypocrisy of our double standards on religion - TheWeek.com

"...For an exquisite example of such reactions, take a look at this Times editorial, which declares that nothing can "justify" the Texas exhibit and other "blatantly Islamophobic provocations" because they inflict "deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims," "exacerbate tensions," and "give extremists more fuel." 

Maybe that's right. But then shouldn't the Times editorial board also denounce The Book of Mormon, the runaway hit musical playing just a few blocks up the street from the Times offices for the past several years? Strangely, I can recall no such denunciation, even though the play relentlessly and vulgarly (and brilliantly!) ridicules the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from start to finish. Why has the Times neglected to rise to the defense of the LDS against this blatantly Mormonphobic provocation? Is it only because Mormons don't resort to terrorism over ecclesiastical insults?...

..."It is easy to appreciate the dilemma Lynne Meadow, the Manhattan Theater Club's artistic director, found herself in, but it is impossible to approve her decision," wrote the Times in an editorial titled "Censoring Terrence McNally," explaining that artist freedom demanded she not capitulate to the critics. Instead, she should have opted for "standing firm and relying on the police for protection." 

That was 17 years ago. Is there any chance that standards have evolved since then — that the Times now simply cares less about freedom of expression than it once did, and that it would apply this changed standard equally to both Christians and Muslims today? Do we have reason to anticipate editorials denouncing the Christophobic prejudices of various cultural exhibitions and events taking place around New York City, along with calls to shut them down for fear of inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Christians? 

That certainly wouldn't make me happy. I'd prefer consistency in the other direction — in favor of a strong defense of free expression in nearly all cases..."

From Theweek.com

Parents Clinging To Lone Religious Element Of Daughter’s Wedding Ceremony - The Onion

ROCHESTER, NY—After sitting through an outdoor ceremony officiated by the groom’s best friend, local parents Scott and Linda McNeil were clinging to the lone religious element of their daughter’s wedding, sources confirmed Saturday. “The vows they wrote for each other were nice, but the passage from Corinthians they used on the back of the wedding program was just beautiful,” said Linda McNeil, adding that she and her husband were both deeply touched by the inclusion of the biblical quote “Love still stands when all else has fallen,” which appeared beneath a verse from a Sarah McLachlan song. “I’ve always loved that passage, and it’s a part of the Scripture that really captures who they are.” McNeil then added that she knew the small image of a dove above the quote would have made her late mother very happy.


A Portlandia Wedding too below (found from Mbird.com)

The Rational Ayatollah Hypothesis

From the Wall Street Journal - Opinion Piece

"...This was one of the lessons of the Holocaust, which the Nazis carried out even at the expense of the overall war effort. In 1944, with Russia advancing on a broad front and the Allies landing in Normandy, Adolf Eichmann pulled out all stops to deport more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in just two months. The Nazis didn’t even bother to make slaves of most of their prisoners to feed their war machine. Annihilation of the Jews was the higher goal. 

Modern Iran is not Nazi Germany, or so Iran’s apologists like to remind us. Then again, how different is the thinking of an Eichmann from that of a Khamenei, who in 2012 told a Friday prayer meeting that Israel was a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut”? 

Whether the Ayatollah Khamenei gets to act on his wishes, as Eichmann did, is another question. Mr. Obama thinks he won’t, because the ayatollah only pursues his Jew-hating hobby “at the margins,” as he told Mr. Goldberg, where it isn’t at the expense of his “self-interest.” Does it occur to Mr. Obama that Mr. Khamenei might operate according to a different set of principles than political or economic self-interest? What if Mr. Khamenei believes that some things in life are, in fact, worth fighting for, the elimination of Zionism above all? 

In November 2013 the president said at a fundraising event that he was “not a particularly ideological person.” Maybe Mr. Obama doesn’t understand the compelling power of ideology. Or maybe he doesn’t know himself. Either way, the tissue of assumptions on which his Iran diplomacy rests looks thinner all the time."

Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about - Salon.com

From the Salon "Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about: The debate raging in American culture boils down to an even simpler divide than you think" (quite the "motherlode", almost wanted to quote the whole very insightful article)

"Here’s a news flash: None of these heated public debates about atheism and religion, or about how Western “liberals” should think about Islam, ever reach a satisfactory conclusion. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that talk-show hosts and movie stars (just for instance) aren’t necessarily the best people to bring nuance or thoughtfulness or clarity to these conversations. An even bigger reason may be that religion in general, and fundamentalist religion in particular, is a major sore spot in Western culture, a source of tremendous vulnerability and anxiety... 

...On the other hand, Harris’ belief that reason and science can (or someday will) supply a transcendent, religion-like experience that satisfies the human yearning for spirituality, while relinquishing all claims to metaphysical truth, is almost charming. That’s an article of faith if I’ve ever heard one, and one that rests on what St. Augustine would have described as a theological heresy – a misguided faith in the perfectibility of man in this fallen world. There is something noble about Harris’ efforts to bridge the gap between science and philosophy, and also something severely naïve in his declaration that in the age of astrophysics we no longer need God. To phrase Augustine’s response in modern terms, what we know about human psychology to this point suggests that as a species we favor storytelling over facts, and that we do not draw much distinction between stories that are true, those that are metaphorically true and those that feel true but are entirely false. 

Indeed, I would argue that people who line up on opposing sides of the Harris-Aslan feud over religion and Islam represent fundamentally different worldviews, in ways they themselves may not recognize. I’m not talking about East vs. West or Muslim vs. Christian, and still less about lily-livered p.c. “progressives” vs. courageous contrarian truth-tellers, or however Bill Maher would like to phrase it. And I don’t precisely mean the difference between people of faith and the atheistic or irreligious. Those are facets of the dispute that are largely obvious. In a conversation between Richard Dawkins and Pope Francis (and I’d definitely pay to watch that), both would politely acknowledge that they hold divergent views about the fundamental nature of reality. What I really mean is the difference between humanities majors and science majors. 

That may sound like crude or facetious shorthand, but I believe it contains a genuine insight. Given that I clearly belong to one of these tribes (you get only one guess), it’s entirely likely that I will mischaracterize the other one. Such is the nature of the epistemological division. When I say that one side is primarily concerned with facts and the other with narrative, or that one side understands the world primarily in subjective, experiential and relativistic terms while the other focuses on objective and quantifiable phenomena and binary true-false questions, that may help us frame the profound mutual misunderstanding at work. Harris’ conception of religion as bad science, which seems like a ludicrous misreading to those who understand religion as a mythic force that shapes community and collective meaning, is a classic example. One side insists that the only important question is whether the truth-claims of religion are actually true; the other side says that question doesn’t even matter, and then wonders what “truth” is, anyway. It’s the overly literal-minded versus the hopelessly vague. 

What we see in discussions about religion in general and Islam in particular is a version of the same problem: People who barely speak the same language talking past each other, either making grand claims that refute themselves or raising legitimate questions that the other side ducks. I fall much closer to the Ben Affleck-Reza Aslan camp than to the tough-talkin’ pseudo-liberalism of Harris and Maher, as it slides toward a justification of permanent drone war and universal anti-Muslim profiling. But both sides engage in oversimplifications and ideological short cuts that seem like efforts to conceal what this debate is really about. Despite all its remarkable accomplishments, Western culture feels guilty and ill at ease. It traded in God for Snooki, swapped transcendent meaning and social cohesion for a vision of Enlightenment that started out bubbly and gradually went flat, like a can of week-old Mountain Dew. It’s not the kind of trade you can undo. 

At this point, Harris and Maher have become war trolls and fellow travelers of Dick Cheney, without even realizing it. It’s a sad fate for Maher, who was an acrid voice of resistance under the Bush administration. As for Harris, he has played an elaborate intellectual game of bait-and-switch since at least 9/11: He makes inflammatory comments about how we must wage war against Islam, or about the need to consider a nuclear first strike against a Muslim nation, and then backs away, protesting that he’s been taken out of context and actually thinks those things would be dreadful. He and Maher have provided covert aid and comfort to bigots who firebomb mosques or beat up “Muslim-looking” people at the mall, while officially being horrified by such hateful actions. They’re analogous to polite Southern whites of 1955, who did not personally use the N-word and found the Klan distasteful, but who never questioned the fundamental rightness of white supremacy. 

But Harris and Maher and other prominent anti-Muslim voices are right about one thing: Western leftists are often reluctant to criticize Islam, and it isn’t entirely healthy. This reluctance stems from many understandable causes: from sheer politeness, from a desire to promote harmony rather than discord, and from an eagerness not to come off as smug, xenophobic blowhards, the way Maher and Harris so often do. Of course the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world do not support terrorism; that hardly need to be said. Despite right-wing claims to the contrary, any number of imams and Islamic community leaders have spoken out against the likes of al-Qaida and ISIS and Boko Haram. As Aslan has repeatedly observed, Islam looks very different in different countries, and like any other major religion it has many competing and overlapping currents. A Muslim woman cannot drive a car or go outdoors unaccompanied in Saudi Arabia, but she can go to the beach in cutoffs in Istanbul or go dancing all night in Dubai. 

Ultimately it does not aid the cause of tolerance to deny that social practice in most majority-Muslim nations involves a lot of stuff that Western liberals rightly find appalling: the subordination of women, the suppression or persecution of LGBT people, extremely limited tolerance for those of other faiths (or none) and sharply restricted freedom of expression. One can discuss these troubling aspects of real-world Islam – as Reza Aslan and many other Western Muslims frequently do, in fairness – while also insisting that you can’t understand them independent of social and historical context. We don’t have to follow Maher and Harris down the rabbit hole of unjustified assumptions and disastrous conclusions: Illiberality and intolerance are intrinsic elements of Muslim doctrine, they argue, and Islam is a zone of monolithic groupthink unlike any other world religion (“the mother lode of bad ideas,” says Harris). Therefore Islam is a global cancer or disease, which must be killed or cut out. 

Sam Harris genuinely appears to view himself as a voice of science and reason, defending the Western intellectual tradition against its enemies. So it’s striking that he has surrendered to a seductive and paranoid narrative about Islam as a corrosive, contagious and essentially evil force, which seems so devoid of the critical thinking that represents the Western tradition at its finest. To take the most obvious example, Harris must be aware that Middle Eastern nations have repeatedly been subjected to humiliating wars of invasion, conquest and expropriation that have killed millions of people. They play no evident role in his thinking about the state of Islam, which he appears to view as an unchanging entity. 

As Aslan or any other religious scholar could tell him, fundamentalism is a historically recent invention that emerged in response to the erosion of traditional social mores by the forces of modernity. Christian fundamentalism did not become a significant force until the 20th century; although William Jennings Bryan is claimed as a grandfather by today’s Christian right, he would have found its theology baffling and retrograde. Within Islam, the Salafi and Wahhabi revivalist movements that inform the theology of al-Qaida, ISIS and other extremist groups were relatively minor currents within the faith before exploding in the 1970s and ‘80s. Many historical forces fueled that rapid growth, but as Harris should be well aware, the American-supported jihad that eventually drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan played a major role. 

In both major religions, the rise of ultra-orthodox revival movements – and within them a tendency toward apocalyptic violence – represents a rearguard action, an attempt to regain the ground lost to science, pop culture, consumerism and other irreligious influences. Viewed through the long lens of history, fundamentalism is almost certainly a sign of religion’s decline and weakness, rather than the opposite. That doesn’t mean that violent splinter groups like ISIS are not dangerous, or that Christian fundamentalism at home does not pose political problems. But the exaggerated fear response of many liberal Westerners reflects our own culture’s weakness and moral uncertainty, not the strength of its enemies."