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Ch. 10: The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline...

#64: Mar. - May 2009 (Non-Fiction)
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DWill

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Re: Do you believe in miracles?

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Robert Tulip wrote:[. I take the view that nothing can occur contrary to natural law, which under your definition would make miracles impossible. We should never postulate that God contravenes the laws of nature, but I hesitate to abandon the concept of the miraculous to its magical origins. Acts of love and grace can have a miraculous quality, transforming people while remaining completely explainable by science.
I wanted to avoid the bleed-over that occurs when we let common usages back in. So many things are declared miracluous. Many of them may be wonderful and necessary, as in your examples, but I would say they are not miraculous at all, and that there are plenty of other good words for these things. Of course, religion has no monopoly over or necessary connection to these experiences.
Hitchens displays a failure to understand the basis of religious thought with this comment. It speaks to the prominent modern American myth of The Wizard of Oz, which at a religious level is describing God as a human creation. America yearns for a sense of mastery and control, exemplified in its other great myth Superman. Oz reassures the sceptical doubter that the universe can be explained by science, and that all mysteries – failures of courage, brains and love – can be rectified through the power of positive thinking.
Well, God is a human creation, isn't he? Note that my statement only has meaning when God is the personal god that intervenes in our lives as portrayed in the Bible. Other notions of God, which are essentially non-theistic, don't apply here.
The problem with this ‘control’ version of religion, as noted by Bacevich, is that the dream of control is an illusion. The empirical rationality of western domination stretches from Wolfowitz, perhaps as far as Hitchens. A more humble view would acknowledge it does not see through the veil of Oz, rather than arrogantly asserting that God is bluffing.
Of course, Hitchens doesn't say God is bluffing...that would require belief in him! And might he not agree with you that God can be a proponent of this control model? Or are you implying that he is a backer of the God-driven Wolfowitz control model (and this would be truly ironic). Anyway, an interesting and imaginative point.
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Dissident Heart wrote:Authority can be legitimate or illegitimate....
Ultimately, no matter where we place our authority, or from whom or what we derive our directives, it is we who establish the rank and order of power...it is we who say "this is my bedrock, here is my foundation, here is my truth and law for living and for dying"....pushed hard enough, all we really have is "because I say so".
Although if it is "we" who establish the bedrock, we are then empowering an authority, which is the way it's supposed to work in a democracy. Ultimately, any argument from authority depends on the perceived legitimacy or power of that authority, sometimes on one alone, sometimes in combination. We all assess this quality when deciding whether to comply. Whether the authority is a god or or a government makes no difference; we will assess the authority's claim to legitimacy and its ability to wield power. Hitchens says that he has always respected the authority of history and culture, and that it is therefore not easy for him to assert that religion has rested on a false foundation. Look at all the brilliant people who had been involved that put him to shame intellectually and even morally. He makes his decision based on the legitimacy of the authority, which he has found wanting.
The veil of Oz is too easily projected onto them: the other team, the other guy, those people over there, those tribes, that other party, religion, nation, school of thought, etc....we, us and ours and the way we do things around here: our group and party and nation are free of that nonsense and delusion...unlike the rest of those uninitiated, uneducated, unenlightened, unclean and ordinary- we have braved the tearing of the veil, because (unlike them) we are better, brighter, stronger. True, religion is made up by ordinary mammals...but, we, we are far from ordinary.
The boast you describe so well, if made by Hitchens, would indeed as you imply be the height of solipsism. If Hitchens or anyone else claims that there is an automatic positive benefit stemming from non-belief, I will join you in deploring that. To the extent that he might say or believe that atheists are less likely to screw things up or to be screwed up, he would be wrong. But I don't get any strong sense of that from his wiriting here.
Perhaps no more in vain as those courageous souls who have stood up to tyranny and despotism, abuse and domination, saying no to social injustice and personal degradation...demanding respect and care and honor and rights to fully participate in the structures and systems of power in their world...risking their lives and the lives of their families...struggling for a better world of ecological sustainability and economic fairness...perhaps all of this, too, is in vain: foolish and naive and dangerously ignorant of how power actually works?
You're not saying this runs counter to Hitchens, though, I assume.
If Shakespeare was a closet Catholic...then perhaps there is something about the Catholic faith that permeated and breathed life into the 'greatest writer about love and tragedy and comedy and morals'? IF Shakespeare felt it necessary to practice and worship as a Catholic...it seems that would say more about his moral saliency than our ponderings of his value and importance. And why should we expect the Koran or Talmud to be understood or shared in the same fashion as Shakespeare?
Well, Shakespeare's religion is speculation. It's not a solid that we really can talk about, nor do we need to in order to appreciate his plays. Hitchens' comment about moral saliency needs to be understood against the common objection that without religion we would have no guidance as to what is right or wrong or how to know the good life. In Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Joyce and so many others we do have a treasury of moral literature that can serve as well as various scriptures.
What about the the understanding that comes from practicing and participating in a religion? In other words, simply scrutinizing religion will provide undoubtedly valuable and important wisdom...but at what point does the nurturing, tending, and cultivation of religion offer wisdom as well?
I think you are assuming that he has a fight to pick on this basis. From his title, you would think so, but look further.
Here, the value of religion is best in disclosing its own abuses: in other words, religion works best where it confronts its own ignorances and misunderstandings. Hitchens is identifying the best of religion, at least here, in its Prophetic pathos of confronting falsehood, injustice and violent imposition of dogma and doctrine.
A point for him? :smile:

CHitchens: However, a moment in history has now arrived when even a pygmy such as myself can claim to know more--through know merit of his own--and to see that the final ripping of the whole disguise is overdue. Between them, the sciences of textual criticism, archeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man-made and have also succeeded in evolving better and more enlightened explanations.
DH wrote:Found the light! Free at last!
He is not making the utopian declaration that you are mocking, is he? It seems quite al lot more limited than that to me.
CHithcens: The loss of faith can be compensated by the newer and finer wonders that we have before us, as well as by immersion in the near-miraculous work of Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Tolstoy and Proust, all of which was also "man-made (though one sometimes wonders in the case of Mozart). I can say this as one whose own secular faith has been shaken and discarded, not without pain."
DH wrote: I am perplexed as to what newer and finer wonders have done to help us deliver ever more destructive forms of explosives and poisons across the globe...pumping more and more toxins into our air and soil and water and food supplies...terrors of war and ecological devastation have not diminished, but only increased...why we should trust or find authority in the 'man-made' elements of existence requires a faith at least as extraordinary and miraculous as our less enlightened forebears.
I think that by "newer and finer wonders" he is referring to such basics as evolution and other discoveries of science, and is explicitly contrasting them with the the way that religion explained the natural world. These are not "man-made" elements, actually. I agree it's wise to be skeptical--or scornful-- of claims that we've reached a millenium through all of our progress. We still have a status quo that was no different when religion ruled and likely will not be different when it doesn't.
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DWill wrote:In Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Joyce and so many others we do have a treasury of moral literature that can serve as well as various scriptures.
Joyce?

The supposition that a literary education improves one's morals has no foundation that I know of. From personal experience I have found literary persons as a group to be less trustworthy than the uneducated.
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Re: Do you believe in miracles?

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DWill wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:[. I take the view that nothing can occur contrary to natural law, which under your definition would make miracles impossible. We should never postulate that God contravenes the laws of nature, but I hesitate to abandon the concept of the miraculous to its magical origins. Acts of love and grace can have a miraculous quality, transforming people while remaining completely explainable by science.
I wanted to avoid the bleed-over that occurs when we let common usages back in. So many things are declared miraculous. Many of them may be wonderful and necessary, as in your examples, but I would say they are not miraculous at all, and that there are plenty of other good words for these things. Of course, religion has no monopoly over or necessary connection to these experiences.
Fair enough, religion has so badly corrupted the concept of the miracle that it probably deserves a rest from polite use. Still, there is symbolic meaning in the miracles of Jesus which we don’t see if we just focus on the debate about whether they actually happened.
Hitchens displays a failure to understand the basis of religious thought with this comment. It speaks to the prominent modern American myth of The Wizard of Oz, which at a religious level is describing God as a human creation. America yearns for a sense of mastery and control, exemplified in its other great myth Superman. Oz reassures the sceptical doubter that the universe can be explained by science, and that all mysteries – failures of courage, brains and love – can be rectified through the power of positive thinking.
Well, God is a human creation, isn't he? Note that my statement only has meaning when God is the personal god that intervenes in our lives as portrayed in the Bible. Other notions of God, which are essentially non-theistic, don't apply here.
Hammering in the stake to the heart of the ‘human creation’ ignores the fact that it returns in another guise. A non-theistic Christianity, for example from Borg, Harpur and Spong, is becoming much more widespread. The idolatry of believing in one’s own creation is condemned in the ten commandments and the epistles of Paul, for setting up a control doctrine on the model of the tower of Babel.
The problem with this ‘control’ version of religion, as noted by Bacevich, is that the dream of control is an illusion. The empirical rationality of western domination stretches from Wolfowitz, perhaps as far as Hitchens. A more humble view would acknowledge it does not see through the veil of Oz, rather than arrogantly asserting that God is bluffing.
Of course, Hitchens doesn't say God is bluffing...that would require belief in him! And might he not agree with you that God can be a proponent of this control model? Or are you implying that he is a backer of the God-driven Wolfowitz control model (and this would be truly ironic). Anyway, an interesting and imaginative point.
In practice, Hitchens did align with Wolfowitz over the Iraq War, as part of his chameleon transformation from Trotskyite to neoconservative.

He does imply that “God” is a rather tawdry imaginative construction who can be seen through in the same way Dorothy saw through the wizard. However, framing God in this way removes the sense of absolute fate which has always been central to the doctrine of God. You can't just assume that the imaginative language is seen as the reality, when religious traditions are at pains to say that God is beyond description.
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ethics vs. morality

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Hello Thomas, and DWILL:

Christopher Hitchens wrote:
". . . ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythcal morality tales of the holy books" (God is Not Great, pg. 5).

Thomas, are you speaking of ethics or morality? I find merrit in the authors mentioned by DWILL, and will add my own, Thomas Pynchon.

True, a well read person does not gain great moral wisdom from the books that she chooses to read. However, how does a literary person become less trustworthy? It is impossible to debate, or exchange opinions, or discuss topics with a person uneducated on the proposed topic, a monologue would be the result. It has been my personal experience to find the one man show monologue untrustworthy.

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Re: ethics vs. morality

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Suz wrote: Thomas, are you speaking of ethics or morality?
In so far as ethics is the study of existing moral systems, both.
. . . a well read person does not gain great moral wisdom from the books that she chooses to read. However, how does a literary person become less trustworthy?
That is indeed a good question. Booktalk persons, I imagine, would have a bias toward the belief that a literary education is uplifting. However, I have a specific model in mind, an intellectual and literate classmate of mine whose life has been devoted to wine, women, and song, and who abandoned his wife with several small children and left the country in order to evade child support. Somehow, too much imagination seems to deprive a person of ordinary moral sensibilities.

The personal lives of literary persons are typically less than admirable -- Frost, Vachel Lindsey, Whitman, Melville -- for example. Their works would be unreadable were it not for the separation that is typically made between literature and morality. And as for Shakespeare, perhaps you are aware of the physical horror and revulsion that underlies the sonnets?
It is impossible to debate, or exchange opinions, or discuss topics with a person uneducated on the proposed topic, a monologue would be the result. It has been my personal experience to find the one man show monologue untrustworthy.
Supposing you are speaking of me by indirection and are accusing me of a "one man show monologue" -- do three sentences make a monologue? Think of me as the loyal opposition who wonders whether an author who supports a war begun on lies and carried through with corruption and torture has any morality to speak of.

Tom
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ethics vs. morality

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Hello Tom:

Gotcha, Hemmingway, and Slyvia Plath may meet your critieria as well, Mark Twain maybe? I see your point, and if I see it correctly, I agree. Many authors and playwrights are far from role models. The drunken author is a stereo type after all. Shakespeare, my opinion, he wrote for the appetites of the people of the time, simular to the Grimm brothers, or Jodi Piqualt. I do not appreciate shock value. You do support your point very well wtih Melville and Whitman.

I am not sure what author you are referring to about the war based on lies, I would like to refer to the author who wrote about a war fuled by missals due to a man's erection. War based on testasterone. Can't ellaborate on Pynchon, he won't take off the paper bag.

Please consider, Jane Austen, Philip Roth, Margaret Attwood, and Toni Morrison. Sad tale about your friend, I hope he makes it big, maybe send some royalty checks to his wife.

Your loyal opposition,
Suzanne

P.S.
I thought I was being direct.
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Thomas Hood wrote:
DWill wrote:In Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Joyce and so many others we do have a treasury of moral literature that can serve as well as various scriptures.
Joyce?

The supposition that a literary education improves one's morals has no foundation that I know of. From personal experience I have found literary persons as a group to be less trustworthy than the uneducated.
Yes, Joyce. Read his story "The Dead," (for instance) and tell me if that is not an example of moral literature. I'm not speaking in terms of explicit moral directives, which I think can be arguably less effective, for adults at least, than the complex renderings of human motivations and actions that we find most plentifully in great novelists and playwrights. I should have added Dickens, who is above all a moral novelist.
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Call me a pedantic old nitpicker......DWill, but although, I love Dickens and his characters. I think he was more of a social reformer than one to look to for moral guidance.

His women characters are awful, more often than not. Either prostitutes or madonnas.

I much prefer Arnold Bennet - Hilda Lessways was so good, I could hardly believe it was written by a man.

I suppose we are talking about the difference between books which tell a moral tale, (the good are rewarded and the wicked come to a sticky end) and books which explore 'why' people behave the way they do.

I think most of us are born with a propensity to do what is 'right' - ie a child doesn't share his sweets naturally but it is easy to persuade him/her why it is best to do so.

I like the kind of books which attempt to explain why people do bad things. And then go on to 'suggest' productive ways to deal with that behaviour. I liked 'A Clockwork Orange' for this reason. A very violent book, with a hateful hero, but by the end of the book, I didn't want him to be executed, or even brainwashed. I so desperately wanted him to 'choose' to do right. So, it changed me a little, and I think for the better.

Which is rather more than the words in the NT could do by just saying 'Love your Enemies', but it doesn't tell you how to even begin to do that.
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He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad....

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DWill wrote:[quote="Thomas Hood
Joyce?

Yes, Joyce. Read his story "The Dead," (for instance) and tell me if that is not an example of moral literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_(short_story)
summary and resources

http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/englis ... s/dead.htm
text of The Dead

I did read it, maybe thirty years ago, and the impression I remember is that Joyce was unfair to the husband. Could you please say in a sentence or two why you think The Dead is moral literature?

Tom
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