On Spirituality – A Dialogue (1 of 3)

The following is a dialogue that occurred in another forum quite by accident. The original topic petered out and the three of us, who have been exchanging thoughts for several months, decided to pursue our ideas until we reached a conclusion. Qingu is an avowed atheist who is deeply disillusioned with religion generally has a low opinion of it. Zuma is a deist who is not personally religious thinks that religion can be a necessary and constructive force in people's lives, provided it is in keeping with the times. And, LostInParadise is a rationalist and an agnostic (I think) who is spiritual but not religious. Despite our differences we come to a surprising amount of agreement on the points we pursue, and despite our critical view of religion, we tend to agree on the value of spirituality.

Qingu: Religion doesn't provide anything that isn't provided by secular alternatives. It's just better at marketing to poor, uneducated people and it's better at enforcement through authority cults. I think the word "spiritual" has no actual meaning. It's such a fuzzy word and it's typically wielded tautologically as a synonym for "religious."

Zuma:  Then perhaps, Qingu, "Humanity" has no meaning either. It's just a fuzzy tautological synonym for "society" with no spiritual dimension.

The word "spiritual" like the word "Humanity" points to the very essence of what it means to be a moral being in the human context. An "essence," in this respect, is an emergent and evolving phenomenon; it does not have a list of strict denotative criteria that define it completely, but that does not mean that it is without meaning. Terms like "human dignity" or "civilized," or "cruel and unusual" are similarly open-ended so that their meaning can evolve to fit the cultural circumstances.

They are part of a moral discourse, and as such, they derive their meaning from that discourse. There is a spiritual hunger in our society—there is a deep longing to belong to something greater than oneself, whether it is a social movement, or something more philosophically abstract.If you don't want to be part of that discourse because you have painted yourself into an intellectual corner, or because you find such things cheap and cultish, then fine. But don't go to the ridiculous length of denying the very existence of other people's spirituality. It smacks of bad faith, because it refuses to acknowledge other people's sense of humanity, and how they use religion (or whatever) to connect with it. In a sense it denies people's humanity by attacking the way they go about connecting with it.

Sure, that method is fallible and people sometimes come to a distorted sense of what is required of them as human beings, but that is something one addresses within the dialogue, not by denouncing the whole discourse.

Qingu: Zuma, you brought up some other "fuzzy" words like humanity, dignity, etc. In my experience talking to people, these words are significantly less fuzzy than "spiritual." When you say "humanity" or "dignity," everyone knows what you're talking about. It's fuzzy, but there is a more or less consensus view what is included in these definitions.Spiritual? Not so much. A sunset is "spiritual" for some people. For others it's a relationship with a fictional character from an ancient religious text. My problem with the word is that too often people tautologically define "spiritual" to mean "religious."

For example, I've heard the argument "atheists are bad/mean/whatever because they don't respect people's spiritualism." Okay… what does that word mean? I respect beauty, thinking that sunsets are beautiful; I respect love and human connection. What I don't respect is the content of religious scriptures and traditions and too often the person making this argument is using "spiritual" as a synonym for the very thing I'm criticizing to begin with, in order to shut down discussion and criticism. It's annoying.

LostInParadise: To put in my two cents worth, I see secular spirituality as an awareness of being part of something larger. The something larger can be humanity or the natural world. It also involves a sense of how the various components of the whole interact in a myriad of ways to reinforce one another. What is required is not a leap in faith, as with religious belief, but a change in perspective.

Qingu: Why not just call it "altruism" or "being part of something greater than yourself"?

Zuma:  Because "altruism" is too mono-dimensional and pale a concept for what people are experiencing.
I don't think that spirituality is all that difficult to understand. I agree with LostInParadise here, and I would add that in addition to seeing oneself as part of a whole, there is an attentiveness to the moral claims of one's fellow man that leads one into commitment to preserving the social whole.

If you listen to intelligent theists, the bottom line is that when they pray, or commune, or "talk" to God, there is a felt sense that there is someone there on the other end of the line. And, in a sense there is. It may not be what they think it is, but there is something there.

Ultimately, it does not matter whether it is "really" a supernatural being, or something more prosaic, such as our mirror neurons constructing a "generalized other" (a la Michele Foucault) we imbue a personality exemplifying certain moral values abstracted from our social experience, and given a "high quiet voice" in one's mind. It may not be an all-powerful supernatural being in the sense we normally contemplate God, nonetheless, it is an immaterial, transcendent personality that stands over and above the individual, insofar as it is a reification of the moral life of the collectivity. Some people may experience this as a "conscience," others as the voice of an "other," speaking to them through their minds. But, however one constructs it, it gives voice to the moral claims of one's fellow man, it eases the feeling that you are morally alone in the world, and it helps you navigate the moral dilemmas of your world.

If you listen carefully to people when they speak of their spirituality, it is clear that they have a definite "something" in mind, and that something defines their humanity. Some become most acutely aware of this "spirit-self" while watching a sunset or other thing of beauty; for others it is a beautiful feeling of ego-abandonment they get when they meditate, or take certain drugs, or lose themselves in a religious ritual or hymn. For others, it is a beautiful mathematical or scientific insight. Beauty evokes spirituality because it awakens a shared aesthetic, rooted in deep shared values.If the person's only experience with spirituality is in a religious context, then for them the two ideas are going to be irrevocably linked. That does not mean that the two concepts are irrevocably welded together everywhere and for all time. As I hope I have pointed out, while people experience their spirituality framed in ways that seem to defy crisp definition, there are important commonalities insofar as "spirituality" is a way of placing oneself in a moral universe (made up of the moral claims of one's fellow man, which may or may not be projected onto mythological constructs).

I agree with you that some religions are destructive and pernicious, but that should not poison the whole idea of spirituality. It is possible to define one's humanity—one's spirituality—in more self-actualizing terms, emphasizing things like reason, free choice, respect for others, dignity and acting in good faith, using a liberally interpreted religious template as a touchstone for collective deliberation. I personally define spirituality in terms of being committed to healing the world.

Qingu: I don't have any problems with spirituality in the various ways you've defined it. I just don't like words that tend to come with imprecise semantics. Another example being "God," which can mean anything from a particular character like Dionysus to the Force from Star Wars to an entirely atheistic universe.

Zuma: I share your quest for semantic precision and certitude, but I think it will come some day, when people move beyond their polarizing rhetoric and come to a consensus about these matters. The advantage of using the language of "spirituality" is that it allows you to enter into respectful dialogue in which it is possible to find common ground with people who would otherwise regard you as their enemy. Meeting people on their terms is not only a vital gesture of good faith, it allows you to stake out a position they can relate to and respect without losing sight of what is really important.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if the voice in your head that speaks to you of morality is "really" a god, or a social-psychological construct that personifies the core values of your group. What matters is whether you will help a stranger in need; whether you treat others with the same charity, dignity, and respect that you would wish to be treated; whether you will act in good faith to promote human solidarity by including everyone in your moral universe; and whether you will enlist others in repairing the human legacy of cruelty, exclusion and bad faith. What matters more than doctrine and creed (and even semantic clarity) is whether you can bridge the gap between your individual values and your group's values, and your group's values and the values necessary for humanity's survival.As I've said elsewhere, I view humanity as being in a race against time. As technologies become more powerful and interdependent, it takes fewer and fewer misguided people to precipitate an apocalypse. So, pulling together to repair humanity's legacies of exclusion and bad faith are absolutely vital to our survival as a species.

I understand your frustration with the concept of "God." One way to look at it that might make it more palatable is that even though "god" can mean anything from Dionysus, to the Force from Star Wars, to a vague "something" or a self-organizing intelligent Cosmos, the details of these constructs are always going to be different from person to person. But this god, however conceived, is a vital anchor point which the individual uses to place himself in a moral universe. When you disrespect that construct, you are, in a very real sense, shaking that person's moral world. What is important is not so much how "god" is constructed but what the person feels obligated to do. And that is always open for discussion while the person's conception of god is often not.

Qingu: My problem with your approach is that it feels somehow manipulative. You're clothing your essentially atheistic belief in the language of "spirituality" so you can better infiltrate these people's worldviews to change your mind. I don't mean to characterize you as pernicious—in fact, I think that's an admirable way about going about these kind of discussions and I'm glad there are "respectful" secularists like you who want to bridge the gap. My point is that, rather, certain religious people may interpret what you are doing as pernicious, based on my above characterization. Whereas, while I'm fairly antagonistic towards religious folks, at least they know what they're getting when they engage with me.Really, I feel like there's room for both approaches.

Zuma: No, I assure you, my spirituality is quite genuine (as you can see from the rest of this blog, and my other blog Zuma's Commentary on Mind, Spirit, and Religion. Now, while it is true I am a deist (and morally opposed to all things supernatural), I do have a naturalistic, scientifically informed conception of God that allows me to relate to religious people on their own terms.

This is not a subterfuge because I really don't care whether the other person is a theist or an atheist. I only care if they are interested in healing humanity's legacy of exclusion, cruelty, and bad faith. As I keep saying, it matters not one whit to me how the person constructs his god, or if he even has a god construct per se; what matters to me is whether the person is going to help a stranger in need, whether he is going to act in good faith in his dealings, and whether he is going make peace or war. If the person thinks that his God requires him to dehumanize and scapegoat others, I am not going to tell him that it is wrong for him to believe in God. His belief in God is not the problem. The problem is that his belief in God has been perverted to justify a pernicious morality.

For all our previous conversations, I think we are just now getting somewhere. You are concerned with what people believe, and whether it is intellectually consistent with the formal tenets of their religion. I am not at all concerned with these "mere rationalizations." I am concerned with what is in people's hearts, and whether people are loving, moral and constructive.

Qingu: I would dispute that your God is on the "same terms" as the various Gods of actually religious people. Certainly many religious people would dispute this (which is why I do—relatability needs to go both ways).I also think you underestimate how important it is to many religious people that their specific god is the one true God. I mean, obviously there are exceptions. Lots of exceptions. And in Europe. In America and in the Muslim world, though, religious people don't really go in for that Unitarian "they're all shades of the same truth" stuff. If you tell an average Muslim that Allah is the same as the Buddha or the dude who knocked up Mary and had a kid, they are going to think you're full of it.

Likewise for telling American Christians Christ's death, Godhood, and salvation is super-important to most of them, and if you say "no it's not because your God is the same as a God who doesn't have a son and you don't need salvation from," they're going to say that you're wrong.Also, as for "what's in their hearts"...

I've talked to a number of Christians who I'm assuming are basically good, decent people. And when I show them the verses in their scripture where God orders you to commit genocide, they're like "well… obviously those people deserved to be mass-murdered."Another person I talked to, a Baha'i—probably the most "progressive" religion—was incapable of disagreeing with a writing by his religion's prophet decrying homosexuality as unnatural. Because obviously Baha'lluah had his reasons for writing that and who is he to say his prophet is wrong?

The content of religious ideology is not entirely separate from what is in religious people's hearts. It is an authority structure, functions as the supposed bedrock of their faith, and it informs who they are and how they form moral beliefs. They are not "the same" as secular atheists—just as conservatives are not the same as liberals. To deny that, I think, is to deny the importance of their religion in their own lives.

Zuma: As for my deistic conception of God not being "on the same terms" with theistic conceptions of God, I think you should check out the dialogues that are actually going on between leading theologians and scientists. In that regard, I would refer you to the Closer to Truth website where you will find hundreds of interviews with leading scientists and theologians and a very respectful and constructive dialogue between the two.
I agree that there are "huge numbers" of people who think their beliefs are the unchanging bedrock truth revealed in antiquity and handed down unchanged. But, I submit, there are even larger numbers—in fact the vast majority—who aren't so sure. In fact, I would venture to say that the vast bulk of humanity, religious and non-religious alike, despite professing a faith, aren't really all that involved in it. Rather, they are mostly ordinary Joes just trying to muddle through life and be a "good person" as best they can.

 And then here you come along telling them that it's all rubbish and rot, because on p.203 of their sacred text it says that "thou shalt poke thy neighbor with a red hot poker" (or some such nonsense that hasn't been observed for centuries and isn't applicable in the modern world) and you present this as something they must believe, since their scripture says so, or they are a intellectually dishonest, hypocrites, or worse. The only choice you leave them is to abandon their religion cold turkey, or brazen it out by defending it. And you are shocked, just shocked, that they choose to defend the "indefensible."

Yes, it is true, that most of the world's religions contain the baggage of a coercive, violent past. But it is also true that religions evolve, and they are struggling mightily to put all this behind them. Look at anything by Karen Armstrong. Rabbi Michael Lerner makes a distinction between what he calls "The Right Hand of God," which is all the coercive, militant-fascistic, fundamentalist nonsense you disapprove of and The Left Hand of God, which is an attempt to leave all that behind. Telling people that they must embrace every retrograde aspect that their religion has accumulated over the centuries isn't intellectual honesty, it's intellectual bullying, and it is vicious.In this respect, you are the kind of atheist that religious people hate, and rightly so—not because you aren't just "denying God," you scoff at the very idea of spirituality and make them feel stupid for trying to eke out a sense of humanity from their religion. If my discussion of that above has any weight (and it was looking like I was making some headway), you should be able to see that when you insult people's spirituality, you insult their very humanity. And when you attack their religion, you are undermining their sense of human solidarity.

Instead of addressing people's spirituality—their generosity of spirit, their commitment to the greater good, their solidarity with the human race—you bring up divisive points of doctrine and scripture as if these things are really important in the ultimate scheme of things, rather than things they believe they must profess in order to maintain their identity as a "good" or "religious" person. Rather than let these things go, you inflame the very fanaticism you deplore, and then you deplore it. It is cynical and vicious game.

Qingu: I don't think there's anything "vicious" about asking people to examine the content of the religion they claim to profess faith in. Your argument can be turned on its head by saying that such people's "goodness" and "spirituality" are actually divorced from the content of their religious scriptures and traditions. Which I'd agree with. But if that's the case then why on earth do they need those things?

Zuma: It often is the way you do it. The reason people need religion is because that is the language and framework through which they understand their humanity. Perhaps in time people can evolve institutions that promote human solidarity in the way that religions do now, but until that time, an attack on religion is pretty much an attack on human solidarity.

Qingu: To a lesser extent, political ideologies function as a "language and framework" through which people understand their humanity, certainly their social roles. Would you say that attacking political ideologies is an "attack on human solidarity"? I have a big problem with the idea that certain ideologies are "off-limits" to criticism. That's the beginning of censorship. It's also patronizing to the ideologies in question.

Zuma:  Certainly political ideology and spirituality both provide a vocabulary and a conceptual framework, but there is an important difference: Spirituality is about the values which inform the person's humanity, particularly insofar as the exhort the individual to place the greater good ahead of his own, and to adopt personal values like generosity, kindness, and forgiveness in order to lay the foundations of cooperative relations with others. Spirituality places the individual in a moral universe in which such things as compassion, good faith, and the golden rule invite him to empathize with his fellow man. It is, in this respect, inclusive, cooperative, meliorist and constructive.Political ideology, on the other hand, places the individual in a competitive arena where he is encouraged to engage in zero-sum thinking. Political ideology provides the rationalizations necessary to support banding together to pursue the narrow, selfish interests of one's class or party, generally to the detriment of others.

I agree with you that no ideology should be "off-limits" to criticism—and, indeed, I would wholeheartedly join with you in criticizing instances where spirituality has been replaced by political ideology, such as we find in the theocratic machinations of groups like James Dobson's Focus on the Family, or Al Qaeda's jihadists. In these instances, the solidarity of the group is geared toward denying the humanity of others and destroying their solidarity.

Where I think we part company is that I do not see religion as all about control. Some of it is, of course, but much of it is liberating. People who experience awe in a sunset, or who feel a kind of "force" that suffuses all of life, or who feel "spiritual but not religious" have all managed to shed the authoritarian trappings of religion and have developed a truly constructive outlook on the world, even if they still cling to their old church. It seems almost churlish to deny it.

Why is it important for people to examine the content of their religious scriptures and traditions? Do people actually draw their spirituality from these doctrinal anachronisms? No. So, what is constructive about bringing them up and telling people that in order to be consistent they "can't pick and choose" and that if they are to be intellectually honest, that they must swallow stuff that they find morally repugnant? (Which is utter nonsense, since you not only can pick and choose, you have to pick and choose, since there are so many inconsistencies and contradictions in these works.)Now there are some religious doctrines that I do criticize when I get a chance, such as the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. But I do so on the grounds that it promotes an unhealthy spirituality; i.e., it distorts your perception of you fellow man that is unjust. This doctrine has motivated untold child abuse, and all its crippling sequelae. Instead of telling people they have to believe this or they have to reject everything they believe in is not only untrue, it is unfair, and very possibly an act of bad faith.

People always come before principle.

LostInParadise: One thing that distinguishes religion from both politics and secular spirituality is the unwavering nature of religious fanatics, convinced that their particular interpretation of some holy book is the only permissible doctrine.

This is unfortunate, because there are some important issues that need to be discussed and that do not have such clear answers. Consider the issue of gay marriage. There is an important philosophical argument here that does not get aired. How should we define marriage? What is its purpose? Are we to allow anyone to marry anyone else or are there reasonable restrictions?Alternatively, consider abortion. There are important issues here as well. If we abandon the notion that a soul is grafted onto a newly fertilized egg, then at what point does an embryo become human? What are the defining characteristics of being human? It would be nice if we could get away from religious and anti-religious dogmatism and openly discuss such issues so that we might reach some sort of consensus.

Zuma: At this point, I would like to recommend an excellent book that I consider the core reading that informs this blog: The Left Hand of God by Michael Lerner. And, for an analysis of the contemporary mixture of religion and right wing politics, Republican Gomorrah by Max Blumenthal is an essential touchstone. Blumenthal sets the stage for describing a politics of personal crisis in which people with deep personal conflicts "self-medicating" themselves with religious conversion, wherein by turning themselves over to God in a born-again experience, they trade all their little problems for one big one—i.e., believing what they are told in order to be "saved."
Blumenthal picks up a theme in Philip Greven's Spare the Child which describes the prevalence of child abuse in Protestant denominations, particularly in the aggressive bullying politics of James Dobson and his Focus on the Family. In particular, he discusses the psychological fallout as abuse tends to create a kind of sadomasochistic undertow in which true believers alternately become aggressive bullies, or ineffectual, impotent, martyred masochists, who seem to become uniquely susceptible to being dominated and controlled and given both to violent fantasies and paranoid delusions. So, a good part of the personal crisis that drives these folks toward born-again conversions is a product of having their wills broken while they were helpless children.
Lerner describes how this translates into abortion politics (and anti-gay politics as well):

"...people's longing for mutual recognition and connection to each other is frequently coupled with melancholy resignation to the idea that such longing is utopian and cannot be fulfilled in this world. Yet the desire for this connection remains a driving force in the unconscious lives of most Americans."

"Part of the energy of the antiabortion movement… comes from its ability to symbolically address this desire. The fetus is a symbol of an idealized, innocent being, actually the little child within us, who is not being adequately loved and accepted in our daily experience. The desire to be loved and accepted as human beings—a completely rational desire—is split off by these antiabortionists, in part because they themselves (like so many of the rest of us in this society) have been taught to view that part of themselves as scary, unobtainable, and narcissistic. Acknowledging it would require getting in touch with our anger at all the things that prevent us and have always prevented us from getting that love and recognition. So instead we project this desire onto the fetus, which is then conceptualized as the idealized and pure version of ourselves—an innocent and perfect unborn creature, and, because, unborn, not yet sullied by the world. Those who felt conflicted about standing up for themselves when, as children, they did not receive the love and recognition they badly needed, and deeply wounded because no one stood up for them when they were vulnerable as children, can now symbolically stand up for the beautiful part of themselves, which was underappreciated, by standing up for this fetus."

And here we get to how this spills over onto gays and others:

"But because this projection and process of idealization involves an evasion and denial of the actual pain in our lives, it is accompanied by another split from consciousness—a denial of the rage and hatred that people carry within themselves all their lives to the extent that they live lives in which their fundamental humanity is not fully confirmed or was not adequately confirmed when they were children. So what do they do with their rage? In the case of some right-wing antiabortion activists… tat rage is directed against a demonized Other whose humanity is ignored or denied, transformed by imagination into the "murderers" killing little babies—or, in other instances, against the evil criminals who must be executed, the drug addicts upon whom we must wage war, the Muslims or terrorists who are imagined to be posed to take over the world unless we forcibly stop them, the liberal judges who are willing to allow Schiavo to die, or whoever else pops up as a possible target for their anger and who appears in their minds as the slaughterers of the innocent."

"Both the unborn fetus and the evil 'other' are imaginary constructs that carry an unconscious meaning, reflecting repression of people's most fundamental social need."

These, of course, are not the only reasons for opposing abortion, but when abortion politics, and conservative politics generally, are viewed in light of this sullied innocence and the resulting free-floating rage harnessed in defense of the fetus, one gets a sense of what is behind the vehemence and violence emanating from the Christian Right. It also puts into perspective the complete lack of interest in promoting the policies that could be called pro-life when it comes to militarism, the death penalty, or adequate support for children once born. In short, it gives us an insight into the origins of the personal pain that hold this culture of personal crisis together.

On Religion – A Dialogue (2 of 3)

Qingu: I think we are all 99% on the same page. I think a lot of our disagreements have to do with our differing definitions of what "religion" is. I prefer to understand religion as an ideology that is rooted in some specific scripture or tradition. Otherwise, it's just too nebulous a concept to meaningfully interact with (my atheism could count as a "religion" in your view since I am "spiritual" in the way you use the word).

I also don't really buy the bright-line distinction between religion and politics. This gets lost on a lot of secularists, but both the Bible and the Quran are fundamentally political documents. Muslims, especially, do not distinguish between their religion's "spiritual" content and its "political" content. The Quran is the constitution of Saudi Arabia and most Muslims consider it a guidebook for how to live their lives and construct an ideal society. Christians, since the enlightenment, have moved away from this conception of the Bible… but for most of the Middle Ages, the Bible was considered the framework for constructing society. And "fundamentalist" Christians who continue to think this way aren't an aberration. They are, historically speaking, the norm.

Zuma: When I look at religion I don't see it as rooted in scripture, so much as a received worldview that is rooted in custom, habit, norms and, mores. As such, I see it as much more organic, fluid, and context-dependent than you do. When you look at the broad sweep of human history, you don't find any doctrine or creed in animism and paganism. In animism, you have a worldview in which nomadic peoples attempting to propitiate spirits which animate nature, its game and its bounty; you also have periodic totemic rituals to blow off sexual energy and allow the individual whose secret transgressions of some taboo set them at odds with the group to psychologically re-immerse himself in the spiritual life of the clan.

In Ur-paganism, you have agricultural people living in a relatively unchanging world, save for the cyclical rhythms of planting and harvesting. The day-to-day religious life of the people is absorbed in rituals and festivals, and the telling of stories—which, being mythical, were by no means consistent or "factual" in a modern sense. And, being an oral tradition, they borrowed and incorporated elements of stories of neighboring peoples that were constantly being embellished and reinterpreted for each new generation. Pagan religious life was not concerned with doctrine or creed but with auguries, divinations, purifications, temple prostitution, and bargaining with the gods through ritual and sacrifice under the auspices of a (mostly hereditary) priestly cult. Quite often these inherited rituals degenerated into priests reciting meaningless strings of nonsense syllables learned by rote, long past the point where their original meanings had been forgotten.

Even though you have writings like Hesiod's Theogony or the Epic of Gilgamesh, these are not doctrinal or particularly ideological writings. While the works contain a definite worldview they do not contain any particular political ideology per se. Even where you have the founding Gods in Greek and Roman city states (e.g., Athena in Athens, Venus and Jupiter in Rome) these were compulsory civil observances having very little in the way of doctrine and even less in terms of subjective spiritual religiosity that we associate with modern religion. Private religiosity was confined to the worship of one's ancestral household gods, and was more a matter of filial piety and an affirmation of the authority of the family patriarch than anything involving faith or belief or doctrine.

Between 800 BCE and 200 BCE, you have the emergence of the Axial religions which swept like through the pagan world like a prairie fire. Here you have the appearance of Confucianism, which was a self-conscious attempt at a doctrinal political ideology, and right beside it you have Taoism, which was its spiritual repudiation. You have Jainism and Buddhism, which were acetic and otherworldly, and you have Zoroastrianism, which became the unifying religion of Persia. You have Socrates, whose worldview was practically subversive to the established polytheism, and Platonism which influenced Christianity and continues to influence modern scientific deism, but is neither sacred nor doctrinal. You have rabbinical Judaism and Christianity arising in this period as well.

I have another writing that is too long to put here, but which I hope you will read, that describes, in broad brush terms, at least seven distinct stages of Christianity: The Jesus Movement, Communal Egalitarian Christianity, Hierarchical Christianity, Millenarian Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Modern Christianity, Postmodern Christianity, Fundamentalist Christianity, and what I call the Humanist Response.

Take Millenarian Christianity, for example, the period between the Fall of Rome and the invention of movable type and centering roughly on the year 1,000. This was period was a seething cauldron of end-of-the-world anxieties, superstition, panics, pogroms, pilgrimages, plagues, crusades, witch hunts, indulgences, mystic saints, relics, self-flagellating saints, processions, monastic orders, soldier priests, persecutions, inquisitions, troubadours, and heresies that were not only tolerated but actually encouraged by the Church (right up to the point that the heretics believed that they were more holy and therefore more deserving of Church property than the Church). Here you had the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Albigensians, the Lollards, the Templars, the Hussites—enough to fill a whole Umberto Eco novel.

Most of these folks were illiterate and didn't have anything like a specific scriptural writing, or a coherent ideology, political or otherwise. For the most part, these were people in the grip of a movement, a panic, or an idea—ideas that were often rapidly changing, syncretic, sometimes frankly pagan, and hardly ever completely thought through. A group of nobles would often simply assume that just because they were Christian, their enterprise was blessed by God and could not fail. So they would pick up and go without even the rudiments of a plan. And then, when reduced to starvation and banditry, if they happened on a flock of sheep or some traveling Jews, they would take it as a sign from God that this had been provided for them.Now, when you look at religion in broad historical and anthropological terms, the idea that you can boil it down to some specific content flowing from a particular scripture or tradition strikes me as a rather narrow conception of religion. And I think people would be right to resist being told that their religion is "thus and so" when their tradition does not place much stock in scripture, if it even has one.

And besides, a Reform Jew and an Orthodox Jew both share the same body of scripture, yet they differ in what they pay attention to and what they ignore. The idea that you can hold them to any particular content is to ignore what makes them different. And the idea that you tell what's in people's hearts by what scripture they nominally subscribe to is another tenuous assumption. In my experience, it's what is in people's hearts that informs what doctrine they subscribe to, and not visa versa. After all, look at us.

Qingu: I think you can define religion broadly, as you have. But when I talk about religion, I prefer to talk about aspects of it that I can pin down.

Ultimately, how we choose to define religion is a matter of semantics. When I criticize "religion," I am generally criticizing the content of religious scriptures and traditions. The extent to which those criticisms apply to a given person depends on the extent to which those scriptures and traditions inform this person's worldview. And this does certainly vary amongst "religious" people.

Zuma: Yes, but I think you often mistake the part of religion which you can pin down for the whole religion, or the aspect of a religion that the people actually experience, and when people refuse to fit into the box you put them in, you accuse them of being intellectually dishonest. For example, to what extent do the verses of Joshua inform the spirituality of the folks at Tikkun Daily? Rabbi Lerner is quite explicit that he and his followers in the Reform Judaism movement reject this vengeful violent God tradition.

You are correct that fundamentalism, in its generic sense, is essentially a "back to basics" movement, where the followers of a religion strip it down to its essentials in order to get back to a mythical golden age of faith when the religion was simpler and presumably conflict free. Certainly there were such movements within Catholicism; e.g., the counter-Reformation, and the Jewish zealots of Rome, etc. but Armstrong is not talking about fundamentalism in a generic sense.

She is talking about what people who currently call themselves "Christian fundamentalists" profess to believe—i.e., a rather radical theology characterized by a personal relationship with God gained through a Born-Again conversion experience (in which one surrenders one's will to Jesus Christ as one's personal savior); a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible (which effectively replaces one's conscience with rules based on "God's laws" as interpreted in "scripture"); and a belief in the inherent depravity of man (which requires an authoritarian religion enforced by authoritarian parents and an authoritarian state). And that is a modern invention.

Qingu: I mean… I don't know how to make my position any clearer. I understand that people who reject almost all of the Bible and almost all characteristics of the Biblical God, but for some reason call themselves "Jews" or "Christians," are generally a-okay.

I think the danger with your rhetoric, and the rhetoric of many liberals, is simply that you give short shrift to what you call "fundamentalism." It's a feature of religion, not a bug. And perhaps I am being uncharitable to Armstrong but from what I read on her Wiki page she seems to tread into this style. If she's arguing that fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon by defining "fundamentalism" narrowly as modern fundamentalism, that's a tautology.

Religion has always been fundamentalist and fundamentalism in the broad sense has historically dominated religious thought and practice. For example, every trait you list for "Christian fundamentalists," which you characterize as "radical theology," was mainstream for most of early Christian history and throughout the middle ages. It only seems "radical" now because many Christians have become very secular. Which is fine, I'm glad they're secular—just don't pretend that that's the norm for the religion, or for religion in general. It's no accident that many of those secularized Christians turn full-out "atheist/agnostic," especially in Europe.

Zuma: No, I've seen you accost such people and tell them that they are not "really" Christians because they don't embrace the violent, petty, vengeful "Biblical" God, you seem to regard as the "real" God of Scripture. You attempt to shame them for "cherry picking" scripture, in order to arrive at a more benign, compassionate reading of Christianity. I've seen you call such people "intellectually dishonest" and "hypocritical" because they choose to believe in a loving compassionate God instead of a violent and vengeful "Biblical" God.

Now, I agree with you that scripture often portrays God as a wrathful, violent, petty, vengeful and arbitrary. But, I think one can often find, side by side all this violence, another voice that speaks of peace, compassion and social justice. Unless you hold that scripture is inerrant and therefore must be swallowed whole, then you absolutely must read scripture selectively in order to separate the spiritual wheat from the proverbial chaff.

This is why Thomas Cahill speaks of the "Desire of the Everlasting Hills," why Michael Lerner speaks of the "Left Hand of God," and why Karen Armstrong entreats members of all religions to reject the violent God traditions that arise from a literal and uncritical reading of scripture to join her in the Charter for Compassion. Is one being intellectually dishonest when one dismisses violent threats attributed to God as a distortion introduced into scripture by self-serving manipulative priests? Or, as errors introduced into scripture by petty, violent, vengeful men, living in petty, violent, vengeful times? I think not.

In our many conversations, I don't know how many times I have referred you to Thomas Cahill's "The Desire of the Everlasting Hills") but a "Biblical" God was not a feature of early Christianity. See also here. The Bible wasn't even codified until the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD; it was written in Latin, so that only priests could read it, and it wasn't widely available as the bedrock of faith for at least a thousand years later, and, even then, vernacular versions were often illegal and forbidden until even later still.The idea that Christian fundamentalism, with its literal Biblical inerrancy, its Ultimate Fighting Jesus, its "prayer warriors" and their imprecatory prayer offensives, its speaking in tongues, its wholesale rejection of reason and compassion is somehow the "real," actual, mainstream of Christianity while the Christianity of a Loving Compassionate Christ is some sort of historical fluke, is just flat out wrong.

The idea that one must undergo a radical Born-Again conversion as a condition of salvation did not become widespread use until the 1960s; and the doctrine of the total depravity of man does not appear until Calvin c. 1545. You may be correct, about authoritarianism being a feature of Christianity up until modern times. But we are now live in post-modern times where every form authority is open to question. To assert that present day fundamentalism is anything but a rejection of modernity and postmodernity is to profoundly misunderstand the world we live in. Scripture is not the final arbiter of any given religion's content; it is the interpretation of that scripture, however selective that may be. But, more than that, it is one's spirituality—the values that inform how one lives in regard the moral claims of one's fellow man—that is the true content of any religion. In my view, Scripture is just a gloss.Thus, to dismiss the ecumenism and pluralism of postmodern Christianity because it is not "Biblical," and to locate Born-Again evangelical Christianity in the mainstream is to be profoundly out of touch with post-Enlightenment Christianity and its spirituality. Consequently, when you disparage people you regard as "secular" Christians, you break faith with and undermine the very people who would protect you, my dear atheist, from a turn at the stake.

Qingu: I stand by my statements that reading the barbaric or inaccurate parts of the Bible as "metaphors" is intellectually dishonest. The text says what it says. I believe I compared it to reading Aristotle—who was simply incorrect about his views of the four elements—as a "metaphor" for some truth today. It's not. Neither is the Bible.

If liberal Christians want to say "Okay, most of the Bible is bullshit," that's fine with me. It's clearly what they believe, and it's not intellectually dishonest. But if they want to say it's all true in some metaphorical way, or whatever nonsense you're defending—it's just nonsense, and I'm not going to say it's not just because such people happen to be liberals like me.

The Biblical God you speak of was clearly a feature of early Christianity. You are correct, the "Bible" as we know it wasn't codified until the 4th century—but the angry vengeful Biblical God features in all four gospels, in Paul's theology, and especially in the book of Revelation. Medieval monks based their theology around a God very similar to the one worshipped by modern-day fundamentalists; the rules of one sect claim that the basis of faith is "fear of God." Medieval popes justified the crusades by appealing to such a God. Perhaps "total depravity" of man was not formulated as such until Calvin, but it is readily apparent in Paul's theology. It is simply incorrect to state that the modern, secular liberal hippie Jesus ideal of Christianity is historically mainstream. It is not only a-Biblical, it is a-historical.

And I am not "dismissing" ecumenism; early Christianity was just as sectarian and fractured as modern Christianity. And as an atheist, I don't give a shit who is a "true" Christian, nor am I interested in attacking liberal Christians for being Christians in "name only" or whatever. My interest in the word is purely semantics.

LostInParadise: I think I have to go along with Qingu regarding the history of fundamentalist beliefs. The fear of the wrath of God made it possible for the church to increase its coffers by selling indulgences. Among early Jews, working on the Sabbath was a grave offense and they carried copies of the Talmud as a guide for conducting their lives.

Mythos and Scripture – A Dialogue (3 of 3)

Zuma: Qingu, when you say that "The text says what it says." you sound like a fundamentalist scriptural literalist, which is absolutely a modern take on things (see below). No wonder you see "fundamentalism" as constituting the mainstream of historical Christianity. I disagree that the compassionate and mild vision of Jesus modern, secular, liberal, "hippie," un-Biblical, and outside the historical mainstream.

That may be what they teach in Baptist bible colleges, or in some Dominionist theological hothouse, but that does not conform to any history of religion that you might find in a mainstream university. At the risk of repeating myself, I have been arguing above that the vast bulk of historical Christianity—i.e., Catholicism—was "a-Biblical," as you put it. After all, that was what the Protestants ended up ultimately protesting about. However, this idea that Christianity should be "biblical" (or that religions are defined by their "scripture") is a 19th and 20th Century idea, and a specifically Protestant one at that.

For someone who is so concerned for "pinning down" the meaning of words, you can be awfully casual and overly broad when it suits you. Insisting, as you do, on a generic meaning of "fundamentalism," a meaning that is so broad that it covers virtually all of Christendom makes it almost impossible to discuss modern fundamentalists with any specificity. Lumping them into the mainstream ignores both the distinctions that they make between themselves and other Christians, as well as the distinctions that their mainstream critics make to distinguish themselves from the fundamentalists.

 Now, as it so happens, Karen Armstrong is a religious historian, and she has written one of the definitive histories of modern fundamentalist movements, her critically acclaimed best seller, The Battle For God.
Here is how she frames the issue (pardon the length, but it is central to the discussion):

"One of the most startling developments of the late twentieth century has been the emergence within every major religious tradition of a militant piety popularly known as "fundamentalism." Its manifestations are sometimes shocking. Fundamentalists have gunned down worshippers in a mosque, have killed doctors and nurses who work in abortion clinics, have shot their presidents, and have even toppled a powerful government. It is only a small minority of fundamentalists who commit such acts of terror, but even the most peaceful and law-abiding are perplexing, because they seem so adamantly opposed to many of the most positive values of modern society. Fundamentalists have no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech, or the separation of church and state. Christian fundamentalists reject the discoveries of biology and physics about the origins of life and insist that the Book of Genesis is scientifically sound in every detail."

"At a time when many are throwing off the shackles of the past, Jewish fundamentalists observe their revealed Law more stringently than ever before, and Muslim women, repudiating the freedoms of Western women, shroud themselves in veils and chadors. Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists both interpret the Arab-Israeli conflict, which began as defiantly secularist, in an exclusively religious way. Fundamentalism, moreover, is not confined to the great monotheisms. There are Buddhist, Hindu, and even Confucian fundamentalisms, which also cast aside many of the painfully acquired insights of liberal culture, which fight and kill in the name of religion and strive to bring the sacred into the realm of politics and national struggle."

"This religious resurgence has taken many observers by surprise. In the middle years of the twentieth century, it was generally taken for granted that secularism was an irreversible trend and that faith would never again play a major part in world events. It was assumed that as human beings became more rational, they either would have no further need for religion or would be content to confine it to the immediately personal and private areas of their lives. But in the late 1970s, fundamentalists began to rebel against this secularist hegemony and started to wrest religion out of its marginal position and back to center stage. In this, at least, they have enjoyed remarkable success. Religion has once again become a force that no government can safely ignore. Fundamentalism has suffered defeats, but it is by no means quiescent. It is now an essential part of the modern scene and will certainly play an important role in the domestic and international affairs of the future. It is crucial, therefore, that we try to understand what this type of religiosity means, how and for what reasons it has developed, what it can tell us about our culture, and how best we should deal with it."

"But before we proceed, we must look briefly at the term "fundamentalism" itself, which has been much criticized. American Protestants were the first to use it. In the early decades of the twentieth century, some of them started to call themselves "fundamentalists" to distinguish themselves from the more "liberal" Protestants, who were, in their opinion, entirely distorting the Christian faith. The fundamentalists wanted to go back to basics and reemphasize the "fundamentals" of the Christian tradition, which they identified with a literal interpretation of Scripture and the acceptance of certain core doctrines. The term "fundamentalism" has since been applied to reforming movements in other world faiths in a way that is far from satisfactory. It seems to suggest that fundamentalism is monolithic in all its manifestations. This is not the case. Each "fundamentalism" is a law unto itself and has its own dynamic. The term also gives the impression that fundamentalists are inherently conservative and wedded to the past, whereas their ideas are essentially modern and highly innovative. The American Protestants may have intended to go back to the "fundamentals," but they did so in a peculiarly modern way. It has also been argued that this Christian term cannot be accurately applied to movements that have entirely different priorities. Muslim and Jewish fundamentalisms, for example, are not much concerned with doctrine, which is an essentially Christian preoccupation. A literal translation of "fundamentalism" into Arabic gives us usuliyyah, a word that refers to the study of the sources of the various rules and principles of Islamic law. Most of the activists who are dubbed "fundamentalists" in the West are not engaged in this Islamic science, but have quite different concerns. The use of the term "fundamentalism" is, therefore, misleading."

"Others, however, argue simply that, like it or not, the word "fundamentalism" is here to stay. And I have come to agree: the term is not perfect, but it is a useful label for movements that, despite their differences, bear a strong family resemblance. At the outset of their monumental six-volume Fundamentalist Project, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby argue that the "fundamentalisms" all follow a certain pattern. They are embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these "fundamentals" so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action. Eventually they fight back and attempt to resacralize an increasingly skeptical world."

"To explore the implications of this global response to modern culture, I want to concentrate on just a few of the fundamentalist movements that have surfaced in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three monotheistic faiths. Instead of studying them in isolation from one another, I intend to trace their development chronologically, side by side, so that we can see how deeply similar they are. By looking at selected fundamentalisms, I hope to examine the phenomenon in greater depth than would be possible in a more general, comprehensive survey. The movements I have chosen are American Protestant fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Muslim fundamentalism in Egypt, which is a Sunni country, and Iran, which is Shii. I do not claim that my discoveries necessarily apply to other forms of fundamentalism, but hope to show how these particular movements, which have been among the most prominent and influential, have all been motivated by common fears, anxieties, and desires that seem to be a not unusual response to some of the peculiar difficulties of life in the modern secular world."

"There have always been people, in every age and in each tradition, who have fought the modernity of their day. But the fundamentalism that we shall be considering is an essentially twentieth-century movement. It is a reaction against the scientific and secular culture that first appeared in the West, but which has since taken root in other parts of the world. The West has developed an entirely unprecedented and wholly different type of civilization, so the religious response to it has been unique. The fundamentalist movements that have evolved in our own day have a symbiotic relationship with modernity. They may reject the scientific rationalism of the West, but they cannot escape it. Western civilization has changed the world. Nothing — including religion — can ever be the same again. All over the globe, people have been struggling with these new conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for an entirely different type of society."

"There was a similar transitional period in the ancient world, lasting roughly from 700 to 200 BCE, which historians have called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. This age was itself the product and fruition of thousands of years of economic, and therefore social and cultural, evolution, beginning in Sumer in what is now Iraq, and in ancient Egypt. People in the fourth and third millennia BCE, instead of simply growing enough crops to satisfy their immediate needs, became capable of producing an agricultural surplus with which they could trade and thereby acquire additional income. This enabled them to build the first civilizations, develop the arts, and create increasingly powerful polities: cities, city-states, and, eventually, empires. In agrarian society, power no longer lay exclusively with the local king or priest; its locus shifted at least partly to the marketplace, the source of each culture's wealth. In these altered circumstances, people ultimately began to find that the old paganism, which had served their ancestors well, no longer spoke fully to their condition."

"In the cities and empires of the Axial Age, citizens were acquiring a wider perspective and broader horizons, which made the old local cults seem limited and parochial. Instead of seeing the divine as embodied in a number of different deities, people increasingly began to worship a single, universal transcendence and source of sacredness. They had more leisure and were thus able to develop a richer interior life; accordingly, they came to desire a spirituality which did not depend entirely upon external forms. The most sensitive were troubled by the social injustice that seemed built into this agrarian society, depending as it did on the labor of peasants who never had the chance to benefit from the high culture. Consequently, prophets and reformers arose who insisted that the virtue of compassion was crucial to the spiritual life: an ability to see sacredness in every single human being, and a willingness to take practical care of the more vulnerable members of society, became the test of authentic piety. In this way, during the Axial Age, the great confessional faiths that have continued to guide human beings sprang up in the civilized world: Buddhism and Hinduism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in the Far East; monotheism in the Middle East; and rationalism in Europe. Despite their major differences, these Axial Age religions had much in common: they all built on the old traditions to evolve the idea of a single, universal transcendence; they cultivated an internalized spirituality, and stressed the importance of practical compassion."

"Today, as noted, we are undergoing a similar period of transition. Its roots lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the modern era, when the people of Western Europe began to evolve a different type of society, one based not on an agricultural surplus but on a technology that enabled them to reproduce their resources indefinitely. The economic changes over the last four hundred years have been accompanied by immense social, political, and intellectual revolutions, with the development of an entirely different, scientific and rational, concept of the nature of truth; and, once again, a radical religious change has become necessary. All over the world, people are finding that in their dramatically transformed circumstances, the old forms of faith no longer work for them: they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to need. As a result, men and women are trying to find new ways of being religious; like the reformers and prophets of the Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights of the past in a way that will take human beings forward into the new world they have created for themselves. One of these modern experiments — however paradoxical it may superficially seem to say so — is fundamentalism."

"We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world."

"Myth could not be demonstrated by rational proof; its insights were more intuitive, similar to those of art, music, poetry, or sculpture. Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it. Myth was also associated with mysticism, the descent into the psyche by means of structured disciplines of focus and concentration which have been evolved in all cultures as a means of acquiring intuitive insight. Without a cult or mystical practice, the myths of religion would make no sense. They would remain abstract and seem incredible, in rather the same way as a musical score remains opaque to most of us and needs to be interpreted instrumentally before we can appreciate its beauty."

"In the premodern world, people had a different view of history. They were less interested than we are in what actually happened, but more concerned with the meaning of an event. Historical incidents were not seen as unique occurrences, set in a far-off time, but were thought to be external manifestations of constant, timeless realities. Hence history would tend to repeat itself, because there was nothing new under the sun. Historical narratives tried to bring out this eternal dimension. Thus, we do not know what really occurred when the ancient Israelites escaped from Egypt and passed through the Sea of Reeds. The story has been deliberately written as a myth, and linked with other stories about rites of passage, immersion in the deep, and gods splitting a sea in two to create a new reality. Jews experience this myth every year in the rituals of the Passover Seder, which brings this strange story into their own lives and helps them to make it their own. One could say that unless an historical event is mythologized in this way, and liberated from the past in an inspiring cult, it cannot be religious. To ask whether the Exodus from Egypt took place exactly as recounted in the Bible or to demand historical and scientific evidence to prove that it is factually true is to mistake the nature and purpose of this story. It is to confuse mythos with logos."

"Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel."

"In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. Each would be impoverished without the other. Yet the two were essentially distinct, and it was held to be dangerous to confuse mythical and rational discourse. They had separate jobs to do. Myth was not reasonable; its narratives were not supposed to be demonstrated empirically. It provided the context of meaning that made our practical activities worthwhile. You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you did so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world. When, for example, Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade in 1095, his plan belonged to the realm of logos. He wanted the knights of Europe to stop fighting one another and tearing the fabric of Western Christendom apart, and to expend their energies instead in a war in the Middle East and so extend the power of his church. But when this military expedition became entangled with folk mythology, biblical lore, and apocalyptic fantasies, the result was catastrophic, practically, militarily, and morally. Throughout the long crusading project, it remained true that whenever logos was ascendant, the Crusaders prospered. They performed well on the battlefield, created viable colonies in the Middle East, and learned to relate more positively with the local population. When, however, Crusaders started making a mythical or mystical vision the basis of their policies, they were usually defeated and committed terrible atrocities."

"Logos had its limitations too. It could not assuage human pain or sorrow. Rational arguments could make no sense of tragedy. Logos could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. A scientist could make things work more efficiently and discover wonderful new facts about the physical universe, but he could not explain the meaning of life.9 That was the preserve of myth and cult."

"By the eighteenth century, however, the people of Europe and America had achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they began to think that logos was the only means to truth and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious. It is also true that the new world they were creating contradicted the dynamic of the old mythical spirituality. Our religious experience in the modern world has changed, and because an increasing number of people regard scientific rationalism alone as true, they have often tried to turn the mythos of their faith into logos. Fundamentalists have also made this attempt. This confusion has led to more problems."

"We need to understand how our world has changed. The first part of this book will, therefore, go back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the people of Western Europe had begun to develop their new science. We will also examine the mythical piety of the premodern agrarian civilization, so that we can see how the old forms of faith worked. It is becoming very difficult to be conventionally religious in the brave new world. Modernization has always been a painful process. People feel alienated and lost when fundamental changes in their society make the world strange and unrecognizable. We will trace the impact of modernity upon the Christians of Europe and America, upon the Jewish people, and upon the Muslims of Egypt and Iran. We shall then be in a position to see what the fundamentalists were trying to do when they started to create this new form of faith toward the end of the nineteenth century."

"Fundamentalists feel that they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values. During a war it is very difficult for combatants to appreciate one another's position. We shall find that modernization has led to a polarization of society, but sometimes, to prevent an escalation of the conflict, we must try to understand the pain and perceptions of the other side. Those of us — myself included — who relish the freedoms and achievements of modernity find it hard to comprehend the distress these cause religious fundamentalists. Yet modernization is often experienced not as a liberation but as an aggressive assault. Few have suffered more in the modern world than the Jewish people, so it is fitting to begin with their bruising encounter with the modernizing society of Western Christendom in the late fifteenth century, which led some Jews to anticipate many of the stratagems, postures, and principles that would later become common in the new world."

Now when you get out of this fundamentalist mindset—when you begin dealing with people who are comfortable with modernity—you get into a spirituality that is based on the Compassionate Christ. And that is very much in the mainstream of Christianity, while fundamentalism is a countercultural movement, with its culture of personal crisis and its politics of paranoia, resentment and rage.

Qingu: No, reading Scripture in a matter-of-fact and honest way is not "modern." Your stance towards the text, however, is particularly post modern.I approach the Bible the exact same way that I approach any other ancient text or religious document I read. When, for example, Aristotle writes about how everything is made out of four elements + the Aether, I don't think he is using "aether" as a metaphor for outer space. I don't try to excuse what he was writing as "written for the audience he was speaking to." Aristotle, while wrong about what he wrote, clearly meant five elements.

The fact that what he writes is clearly wrong by scientific standards does not mean you can just say "I interpret it to be a metaphor. That's simply not an intellectually honest engagement with the text.

Similarly, when the Code of Hammurabi says that it is inspired by the Sun God Shamash and handed down directly to King Hamurabi by Ea, Lord of the Anunaki, that's not a metaphor. The text is saying that King Hamurabi is a prophet of the High Gods. You may think the text is wrong — I certainly do — but that's what it says. Similarly, when it says that the guilt of a woman accused of adultery can be found by tossing her in the river and seeing if she drowns, it's not a metaphor. People actually believed that shit back in the day—it means what it says. When the Code says that if you build a house that collapses and kills another man's daughter, your daughter must die—it means that. It's not a "metaphor."

I get very pissy about this subject because I actually like the Bible as an example of ancient Mesopotamian literature. I think it is best appreciated, as literature, as a part of human history, by taking what it says seriously.

You're basically saying that ANY reading that treats the text seriously, that takes what it says seriously, is equivalent to "fundamentalism" and is therefore idiotic.This is completely unfair and un-nuanced. First of all, even your "fundamentalists"—with a few exceptions—don't fully engage with the Bible's text in an honest way. Most creationists I've talked to will say "Oh but the part in Genesis 1 right after the part I take literally, where it says the sky is a solid dome, THAT's a metaphor for no reason." Most anti-gay-rights fundamentalists I talk to will say, "Oh, but the part 7 chapters after the part of Leviticus that I cite against gay marriage, where it explicitly allows slavery, is just for the ancient times" And secondly because the really idiotic part of fundamentalism isn't how they interpret what the text says, it's that they believe the text is divinely inspired. A fundamentalist isn't wrong because he reads Leviticus 18 to actually say "homosexuals must be killed"—because that's exactly what it says. He's wrong because he believes this law has any moral relevance to today's world whatsoever, or that it somehow comes from God.

And to respond to your assertion that because most of history was Catholic, it was a-Biblical—that is a vast oversimplification of Catholicism.

First, Catholics' views on the "final say" of Scripture are distinct from their views on how Scripture should be interpreted. They have historically seen the Bible as one source of many for figuring out the will of God—this doesn't mean that they don't take parts of it literally.Second, the idea that Protestants were "sola scriptura" vs. the Catholics "the Bible doesn't matter" is itself an oversimplification as Catholic views on the Bible have varied considerably over history, differing from era to era and from individual to individual within the same era and same parts of the Church's hierarchy. As you're fond of saying, Catholicism, like any other religion, "evolves." The early Christians thoughts are in the Bible—specifically, Paul's arguments and well-developed theology. We also have records of 2nd and 3rd century Christian theology. They all took most of the Old Testament quite seriously, and literally. For centuries Catholics—for however else they ignored or cherry-picked the Bible—unanimously thought that Genesis 1 described creation as it happened (with the exception of the overall shape of the earth—by then they'd moved on to the Greek sphere instead of Genesis' flat shape)—but with the sun revolving around the earth, with the flood reshaping everything, etc. This stuff was never interpreted the way modern Christians interpret it. The only reason they DO interpret it that way is because modern science has outright disproven the Bible. And that's not an honest reason to believe the text says something other than what it says.

Zuma: When you say, "I approach the Bible the exact same way that I approach any other ancient text or religious document," you are not drawing a distinction between mythos and logos, as defined above. If you are reading the Bible (which is mythos) the same way you read Aristotle (which is logos) you are not reading the text in a "serious, matter-of-fact, honest way," you are seriously misinterpreting it, and committing the fallacy of presentism in the process.

Reading the Bible as mythos does not mean that it is "all metaphor. Rather, it means that its truths are not factual propositions, but "resonant" psychological truths, in the sense that a poem or a work of fiction "rings true." Mythos is about accessing the inner recesses of one's psyche, such as the natural feeling of sympathy and compassion one feels toward someone who has fallen into a ditch. It is not about dogma or factual correctness, it is about symbolism and meaning and drawing intuitive insights and connections between things.

Second, it's not that the Bible "doesn't matter" in Catholicism, it just isn't central to the religion as it is in Protestant Christianity. In Catholicism, the priest may read a short passage from the Bible as a launching point for the sermon, but the sermon is a secondary and dispensable part of the mass. The focal point of Catholicism is not the Bible, but the mass and the Eucharist. It is the ritual, the liturgy, the sacraments, the rosaries, the stations of the cross, the saints, the mysteries, the incense, the vestments, the music, and, above all, the sense of an unbroken chain of ritual going all the way back to Christ at the Last Supper.

LostInParadise: With all due respect, Zuma, I think you are the one guilty of presentism. This idea of looking at religious documents as instructive fairy tales is definitely a modern idea and is not the interpretation of true believers past or present. The orthodox and fundamentalists see figures like Abraham and Moses as actual people. They accept the statement that the Earth is some five thousand years old as fact. Karen Armstrong is a good example of Mark Twain's definition of religion as " Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

Here's a review of Karen Armstrong's book, The Case for God.
 Zuma: I disagree. People did not view their sacred stories as "fairy tales." They regarded them as statements of timeless truth; and, in this sense, they viewed them as instructive. For example, when Jesus recounts the story of helping man whose ox cart had fallen into a ditch on the Sabbath, what is important in this story is not whether it "really" happened, but the psychologically resonant truth that it conveys; namely, that compassion and helping people in need takes precedence over keeping the Sabbath. When the Pharisees rush up to reproach Jesus, and Jesus explains that the "Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath," Jesus is not asserting some tenet of dogma, he is asserting a timeless moral truth: i.e., people come before "principle."I also agree with you can characterize all believers in the past as "true believers. The idea of a true believer is a very recent (c. 1951) idea.

Certainly, the Pharisees, were close to being true believers, in the sense that their religiosity consisted almost entirely of a kind of legalistic observance of scripture-based law, making their approach to religion almost entirely a matter of doctrine and dogma. But, this is exactly the sort of "empty husk" of religion that Jesus rejects when he calls the Pharisees "whited sepulchers." Indeed, it was exactly this kind of scripture-bound religion that the early Christians were rejecting when they abandoned circumcision and the 613 kosher laws.

It is exactly this "people first" ethos that motivates compassionate Christianity. To assert that religion is—and has always been—about God's violence and vengeance, is not only wrong, it denies the tradition of compassion and social justice arising out of the confessional religions of the Axial age. If all religion is a matter of true believers dogmatically believing their beliefs; if all religion is a matter of fundamentalism and orthodoxy; and if dogma is the only legitimate expression of faith, there can be nothing morally improving about religion because religion is all about subjugating the individual and enslaving his reason and conscience to serve some inhuman ideology.

If all believers are true believers, then all faith is bad faith.

Qingu: Mythos/logos is a fairly modern (and very secular) construction, Zuma. It's certainly not unanimously accepted as a proper "lens" to interpret ancient texts in academic circles.

Also, not all parts of the Bible even remotely qualify as mythos. The legal parts surely are not. The historical parts post-Deuteronomy, the ones that triumphantly detail genocide, are not.

You could argue that, for example, the poetry of Genesis 1 is "psychologically resonant" in that mythos-like way, and not a statement of physical fact. But then people in ancient Mesopotamian really did believe the sun revolved around the earth and that the sky was a solid dome. In the Bible, the earth is portrayed as flat, the sky as a solid dome, and the stars and sun as points of light set into the dome of the sky. These aren't merely "psychological truths," they aren't merely "symbolic," they are clear, physical statements that describe the world as it was almost everywhere understood at the time. As I've argued numerous times, this worldview actually makes a great deal of sense, even "scientific" sense, if you are a bronze-age nomad. It was surely "logos" to them. You're only claiming it's "mythos" because our logos has disproven the Bible's logos, and that is simply not an intellectually honest framework for engaging literature.

Zuma: First of all, the distinction between mythos and logos is not a dichotomy. They are different but not mutually exclusive modes of knowing, roughly akin to the distinction between literary truths and factual truths. So, dismissing the idea of mythos/logos distinction as "overly simplistic" (and interpreting everything from an exclusively logos point of view) is an unsupported opinion offered in place of an argument.

Likewise, your statement that mythos and logos are modern "secular" constructs is a bit of a non-sequitur. After all, literary criticism and modern textual analysis are also modern and "secular" intellectual developments. That does not mean that they are inapplicable or invalid. In essence, you have chosen to ignore the argument.As for your assertion that Genesis is not mythos but is, instead, a kind of Iron Age attempt at cosmology in the modern scientific sense is presentism in the extreme. The purpose of Genesis, is not to provide a factual account of the origin the universe, it is to define the relationship between Man and God. Most gods up until that point were gods of the tribe or polis, or gods of some force of nature. By placing their sky-god Yahweh at the dawn of creation, they were implicitly asserting the superiority of Yahweh over all others—in effect, claiming the right to subordinate and subjugate their neighbors. That is mythos. Sure, it may have also been logos to the extent that Iron Age Jews lacked anything better as an explanation for the universe—but they weren't trying to explain the universe in a scientific sense; they were trying to define their God as immensely powerful.

Likewise, Leviticus laid down a codified law and, in that sense, was logos. But, in a larger sense, it was also mythos, insofar as the 613 prescriptions and proscriptions of what was ritually unclean were not about what was intrinsically harmful in the sense of mallum in se laws (things that are wrong in themselves). Rather the laws drew distinctions that set the Jewish people apart from their neighbors. There was nothing inherently harmful about eating shellfish or pork; these practices were all about keeping faith with Yahweh (the timeless, psychologically resonant truth).The idea that an Iron Age nomad was concerned with "facts" about the origins of the universe is to attribute a modern day scientific sensibility that simply didn't exist in that time. But, once again, there is no dichotomy between mythos and logos. That is entirely your own invention.

LostInParadise: Zuma, the assumption is that, unless otherwise indicated, when someone says or writes something, that they believe what they are saying or writing is factually true. There is no reason to believe that the framers of the Old Testament did not literally believe in their story of creation, nor that early Christians did not accept as fact Jesus's resurrection. We have a need for explanations and since scientific methods were not available, people were satisfied in believing the stories they made up. The burden of proof is on you to show otherwise.The parables of Jesus are of a different nature. Their instructional nature is paramount and it is not required for them to be factually accurate.

The purpose of the Pentateuch is twofold. Firstly it sets out to create an origin story of the Jewish people and secondly it lays out laws that tell people how to conduct their lives.Jewish dietary laws did in fact have a practical purpose. Pork and shellfish, if not properly treated, can cause disease. The Jews conflated the ideas of physical and spiritual cleanliness, which is not surprising since they did not have a scientific understanding of disease.

Qingu: You've raised quite a number of points, Zuma, so I will address them seriatim:

"So, dismissing the idea of mythos/logos distinction as "overly simplistic" (and interpreting everything from an exclusively logos point of view) is an unsupported opinion offered in place of an argument".

I believe I did support my argument. I gave examples of how they overlap. But if you want to define the mythos/logos distinction as, well, not a distinction, then whatever—semantics.

"Likewise, your statement that mythos and logos are modern "secular" constructs is a bit of a non-sequitur."

What? I was under the impression that you are arguing that religious people throughout history have interpreted their holy books through the mythos/logos lens. But this can't be the case if the mythos/logos lens is a modern, secular construction.

"As for your assertion that Genesis is not mythos but is, instead, a kind of Iron Age attempt at cosmology in the modern scientific sense is presentism in the extreme. The purpose of Genesis, is not to provide a factual account of the origin the universe, it is to define the relationship between Man and God."

Give me a break! Every single Mesopotamian myth provides the same cosmology! Are you seriously arguing the ancient Hebrews, and Babylonians, and Egyptians, and pre-philosophy Greeks, and Hindus—all of whom wrote myths involving a flat geocentric earth with a solid sky holding up an ocean—did not literally believe the world was shaped this way?

That said, I agree with you about the theological purpose of the Genesis story (it's actually more complicated—many scholars see Genesis as a sort of "theological response" to the earlier Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish.). However, this is why I don't like the mythos/logos distinction. You don't need the word "mythos" here when what you mean is "theology." And you can wrap theology around a story that one believes is factually true. You even admit as much in your post:

"That is mythos. Sure, it may have also been logos to the extent that Iron Age Jews lacked anything better as an explanation for the universe—but they weren't trying to explain the universe in a scientific sense; they were trying to define their God as immensely powerful."

No, they really were trying to explain the universe. Again: imagine you are a bronze-age nomad. You look at the world around you. It looks flat. You look at the sky and notice that rain falls from it. And it's blue, like large bodies of water. Therefore, there must be an ocean up there. And obviously, you know that water doesn't just float, so the sky must be some sort of solid structure that holds up the ocean, perhaps made out of glass or metal (the Hebrew word for the structure, "raqia," means "that which is hammered out." You also know that if you dig down far enough, you'll find water. So you conclude, reasonably, that the earth is like this flat plate with a dome sky sandwiched between an above-sky ocean and an underworld ocean.

Let's take another example: the Bible's flood myth. Most of the details of the Bible's flood myth are identical to an earlier Akkadian myth, the Epic of Atrahasis. Both myths portray the world in the shape I described above. Both myths have a hero load up a submarine-like ark with animals that he later sacrifices to the God(s). Even the details involving a bird flying from the ark's window are the same. However, the theology is different. In Atrahasis, the problem that causes the Gods to flood the earth is overpopulation. In the Bible, the problem is murder and bloodletting. In Atrahasis, the Gods' solution to the problem, post-flood, is to limit humankind's lifespan. In the Bible, God's solution is to give humankind laws that limit bloodshed.

But look at how the theology, or the "mythos," interacts with the reality presented in the story. Does the fact that there is a strong theological undercurrent to both stories mean that the physical reality described by the stories is unimportant? No! The Bible takes an established "flood story" template and wraps its own theology around them. But it does not change the underlying, physical premises of the story—because everyone at the time really believed in that underlying physical premise. It really was accepted as "fact" that there was a giant flood that collapsed the above-sky ocean and the underworld ocean, because that was how they believed the world was shaped.

Whether or not this counts as "scientific" depends on how you define the word science. What is certainly true is that it was a reasonable, earnest, even evidence-based attempt by ancient people to explain the shape of the world around them. Like I said, it wasn't just the Hebrews who believed this—every culture in the area at the time have similar stories about the shape of the world. Interpreting such stories as merely "psychological truths," as if their authors and audiences didn't give a shit about the detailed physical descriptions in the stories, strikes me as a slap in the face of sorts. It's disrespectful to the text.

And it seems like you are on the cusp of agreeing with me here. You seemed to say that Genesis really was logos for the ancient Hebrews. What I want you to ask yourself is: what changed? How can a story that was written as "logos," interpreted originally as "logos," and clearly thinks of itself as "logos," as an earnest, physical description of reality—how does such a story suddenly become only "mythos"? If your only standard is "because the logos presented by the story is now disproven by science," that is simply not an honest standard for engaging with a text.

"Likewise, Leviticus laid down a codified law and, in that sense, was logos. But, in a larger sense, it was also mythos, insofar as the 613 prescriptions and proscriptions of what was ritually unclean were not about what was intrinsically harmful in the sense of mallum in se (wrong in themselves) laws. Rather the laws drew distinctions that set the Jewish people apart from their neighbors."

This is an incredibly selective reading of Leviticus. First of all, Leviticus doesn't just contain so-called "ritual" laws. It also has those wonderful laws commanding you to kill adulterers and homosexuals. The laws against adultery were not about distinguishing the Hebrews from their neighbors since the Code of Hammurabi also calls for executing adulterers (though, unlike the Bible, the Code contains no laws against homosexuality).

Secondly, there is nothing in the text to suggest that the Hebrews believed their "ritual" laws were about setting themselves apart from their neighbors. For example, take the laws involving menstruation. If a woman is menstruating, she is considered unclean, according to Leviticus. She has to go outside the camp. And if you touch anything she touched, you have to purify yourself. Now, why in the world would you conclude that this law is about "setting the Hebrews apart from their neighbors"? It has nothing to do with their neighboring cultures. Likewise for the many laws in Leviticus ordering you to sacrifice food to Yahweh for unintentional sins—laws which, hilariously, specify that Yahweh likes his sacrifices seasoned with salt and herbs (which, coincidentally, the priests got a cut of…)

Your interpretation of Leviticus is not an engagement with the text. It's not based on anything in the text, or in the cultural context of the ancient Hebrews who wrote it. It's simply an attempt at a panacea, at mitigating the now-obvious stupidity of the laws of the book.Again: I ask you what your criteria is for interpreting Leviticus this way. Because I suspect it's the same criteria you use to interpret Genesis: because the book no longer makes sense, its purpose must be mythos.

"The idea that an Iron Age nomad was concerned with "facts" about the origins of the universe is to attribute a modern day scientific sensibility that simply didn't exist in that time."

Iron (and bronze) age nomads were very concerned about the facts of the world they lived in. To say they weren't is simply incorrect. Their survival depended on their ability to understand and predict the world around them.

In fact, one of the reasons I dislike this mythos/logos business is that many myths really are earnest attempts by (prescientific) people to physically explain the world around them.

Zuma: This whole conversation turns on whether there is such a thing as mythos, and whether the sacred texts of the past were constructed with mythos in mind. If there is no such thing as mythos then we have to view the writers of sacred texts as primitive scientists who were attempting to be factually correct in all matters, and failed miserably. If there is no such thing as mythos, then religion is nothing more than failed science. It is contemptible rubbish, shot through with error, and utterly unworthy of belief.

And, of course, anyone who still believes in religion—anyone having supped at the banquet of our materialist science and who comes away feeling spiritually empty—can only be regarded as an obstinate, self-deceiving, weak-minded dupe, whose attempts to salvage some scrap of insight or wisdom from this trash-heap of human error, can only be regarded as deluded and intellectually dishonest.On the other hand, if there is such a thing as mythos, then perhaps religion isn't total rubbish, and then, perhaps, the people who find solace in it aren't quite the rubes and dupes they are made out to be. If the goals of sacred texts are not those of science but those of literature, then maybe there is an opening for mutual understanding and reconciliation, instead of mutual rejection and interminable cultural war.

First, let's clear up that the mythos/logos distinction is a modern tool of literary criticism and textual analysis, and as such, it is not a distinction that peoples of old used to make sense of their experience. Ancient peoples did not have modern vocabularies, but that does not mean that they didn't have sociological and psychological insights. They did. And it is these that create the enduring appeal of myth. The fact that ancient peoples did not make a conscious distinction between mythos and logos does not mean that they approached things exclusively from one modality or the other. And it certainly does not mean that they approached things exclusively from a rational, practical, factual logos point of view.

Second, let's clear up another thing: mythos and logos are not mutually exclusive. Both were regarded as essential and as complimentary ways of arriving at truth. Myth, however, was regarded as primary. It was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in a world where there was "nothing new under the sun." It looked back to the origins of life, the foundations of culture, and the the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with so much with practical matters, as with meaning. When heroes descended into the underworld to navigate labyrinths in order to slay the beast within, they weren't talking about an actual hero, or an actual labyrinth, or an actual beast; these were symbolic events speaking to timeless psychological truths in a language that predates modern psychology.

If people took the details of their creation myths to be fact, that does not mean that the whole purpose of the story was to provide a factual account of the origins of the universe. Sure, ancient peoples were rational, pragmatic and concerned with facts, but they were much more concerned with what these facts meant for them. They lived in a premodern world where historical events were not seen as unique occurrences set in a far off time, but were thought to be external manifestations of constant, timeless realities.

They weren't concerned so much with what happened, but what it meant for them—which, in the case of Genesis, was that they were to regard Yahweh as their creator and not merely as their patron. Likewise, in Exodus, when the Jews escaped from Egypt, the story is deliberately written as myth, because what is important is not the details of how they escaped, but how God splitting the Red Sea created a new reality for them by opening the way to a new spiritual world, which the Jews continue to commemorate and make new in the rituals of the Passover Seder.

So, is logos the only interpretive frame, the only mode of thinking? Well, that is what the fundamentalists think when they mistake mythos for logos and proclaim that the bible is to be taken literally as the inerrant Word of God—and that appears to be what certain spirituality-denying atheists think when they that all religion is essentially fundamentalist. But if logos were really the normal, natural and prevalent mode of human thinking, why is it that rationality doesn't really come into its own until the 18th Century? Why is it that antiquity is steeped in a mythological worldview and not rationalist from the get-go? Why is it, in our presumably rational age, that mysticism still has any appeal whatsoever?

In looking at the two creation myths that you compare, you note that the "facts" of the matter are an agreed upon template of how things are, and there are two different theologies overlaying these facts. Sure, the "template facts" as you describe them have to be plausible according to the standards of the time, but that doesn't mean that the primary import of these was to explain "how things are" in a scientific sense. So, just because these stories make a nod to logos does not mean that they were all about a physical explanation for things. You don't need to include the harrowing bit about humanity being destroyed unless you are setting down a new mythos, that is, a new social and psychological order. As you note, these physical facts are just a template for a new theology, which conveys a moral message to one group (don't overpopulate) and another message to another group (live righteously and don't be so warlike). It is these latter messages—not the physics—that is the "moral" of the story. Once again, mythos and logos are not dichotomous, but complimentary.

In re Leviticus: It would be a pretty crappy set of laws that were completely arbitrary and without practical benefits; but, on the other hand, it is an ineluctable axiom of religion that you can't have a totem without taboos (cf. Durkheim). So, naturally, if you are going write down 613 laws in an attempt to cover every contingency, you are going to come up with a mixed bag of practical measures, ritual prescriptions, and things that strike us as absolute nonsense. But, while you may quibble over what people may or may not have thought as they followed each law, there is no question that this Mosaic Law as a whole defined the Israelites, and distinguished the Chosen People from their neighbors, and served as a constant reminder of their differences.

The purpose of this law was not simply to define things that are bad in and of themselves (i.e., one of the purposes of any system of codified law); it was to create a sense of social solidarity—a fabric of daily ritual and custom through which the Jews reaffirmed their worthiness of being the Chosen People. It was through these observances that the Jews could come to see themselves as morally superior to their neighbors, and being more holy, also being more deserving of their neighbor's land than their "unholy," "un-Godly" neighbors.

The prohibition against pork had a certain practicality to it when the Jews were nomadic: pigs simply can't keep up with a nomadic people and so represent a constant temptation to settle down (and assimilate with the local people). When the Jews finally settled down, this law simply became a way of creating a kind of taboo against assimilation. Likewise, the prohibition against eating meat and cheese in the same meal (which was a favorite post sacrificial repast amongst their neighbors) also served set the Chosen People apart. Assimilation is a constant temptation for nomads living amidst civilized people; hence, they needed a taboo to deter people. Now, of course, people were not consciously saying to themselves "this law is what sets me apart from the Moabites (or whomever)"; a taboo works from within. It was a bit of social engineering well understood by the priests.

Once the people internalize the taboo, they feel physically revolted at the idea of the taboo practices; so you don't have to reason with each and every one of them when the temptation presents itself. Naturally, it would be foolish for the priests to spell out this bit of priest-craft in the text, because taboos are supposed to work on an unconscious, not a conscious, level.

As for homosexuality being "an abomination," an abomination, as you probably know, is an impediment to sacrifice. When the Romans desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem, they placed stones of abomination on the temple's altars so that no sacrifices could be made. Ritual and sacrifice was how the Jews kept faith with their God, and it was this solidarity that was the true source of their power. By desecrating the temple, the Romans sought to break the connection between the Jewish people and their war God Yahweh. Without sacrifices to honor Him, Yahweh would withdraw His protection of His Chosen people, it was reasoned, thereby depriving the Israelites of Yahweh's power rendering them politically impotent and militarily defenseless as a people. It certainly did demoralize them, and in that sense it "worked." Notice that, here again, mythos and logos work hand-in-glove, and are not mutually exclusive.

One may quibble over what practical the sequestration of menstruating women, but anyone who has lived in a one room apartment with a woman for any length of time can appreciate the wisdom of banishing menstruating women to the banja hut. Likewise, washing up after you ejaculate, is a good way to get some of the people to bathe some of the time. The point of making it a holy law is to obviate the necessity of having to explain why to people who are not able to figure this stuff out for themselves.

"one of the reasons I dislike this mythos/logos business is that many myths really are earnest attempts by (prescientific) people to physically explain the world around them."

When you look at mythos as primitive sociology and primitive psychology, it makes perfect sense. Not so much as primitive physics or cosmology. If explaining the physical world were really the primary goal, why is it that people accepted such wholly inadequate explanations until relatively recently? Why is it that these ideas have such political significance?Why, for example, was the Church so upset with Galileo? Did the Church (or the world) actually depend on whether people believed that the Earth "really" revolved around the Sun? No, as we have seen, these physical facts don't matter one whit, unless you are a modern scientist. The Church has survived just fine after conceding these facts. It was the social and psychological import of Galileo's observations that made them seem so upsetting. They displaced a mythos which held that Man was the center of all Creation, thereby calling into question eternal relationship between God and Man, Heaven and Earth. The Church has survived because it has ceded logos to science, rather than attempting to claim it for itself.

The Fundamentalists have made no such concession, and so they are perpetually drawn into conflict with the modern world. As a consequence they feel spiritually embattled; and their militant forays into politics are marching the society steadily toward fascism. And you are leaving them no way out—no way to win, and no way to honorably surrender without abject humiliation.Finally, saying something is mythos is not to say that it doesn't make sense, but rather that it makes a particular kind of "universal" social or psychological sense, however you state it. Simply because myths have structure or have been arrived at through some (mystical) method, or contain elements of logos does not mean that they are entirely logos. The purpose of theology is to define the moral universe we live in, not the physical universe, which is mostly mute about matters of purpose and meaning.

Qingu: I don't disagree with most of what you say. I will grudgingly use your mythos/logos terminology in my response, even though I still hate it.There are two general problems I have with your argument.

1. You acknowledged that Galileo's challenge to the Bible's "logos" of cosmology displaced the "mythos" surrounding that cosmology—that Man is the center of creation. But this seems to contradict the rest of your argument. While you acknowledge that mythos and logos can be tied together, you don't generally seem to appreciate the extent to which they are mutually dependent. Heliocentrism is a good example of science displacing the mythos via contradicting the logos. The exact same thing is happening with evolution today—the reason fundamentalists feel threatened by evolution isn't because they're clinging to the "logos," it's because their "mythos" of original sin, of special creation—all the theological and moral concepts that underpin the necessity of Jesus' salvation, the cornerstone of their religion—become "displaced" if we are just primates.And they should be afraid because, I would argue, it's not a coincidence that the emergence of heliocentrism correlates with the emergence of secular moral systems like Enlightenment philosophy. Heliocentrism, by challenging the logos of the creation story, also tore away at some of the mythos associated with that creation story. You can't simply "cede" the logos and retain all of the mythos; they are in many cases intertwined.

2. Nowhere did you acknowledge that the "mythos" of a text can also be wrong.Let's look at the flood myth. I think you agree with my conception of it. The flood myth is written with the standard Mesopotamian logos of cosmology. Layered onto this is a "mythos"—the moral point of the story.

But compare the mythos of the Epic of Atrahasis (the earlier flood story) with the Bible's. In Atrahasis, the problem the flood solves is overpopulation—and the "moral" of the story is that the divine powers want humans to control our population so we don't impinge on them. The Bible does a full reversal in its version—at the end of the story Yahweh commands us to "go forth and multiply." We're supposed to spread out and have dominion over the earth.

I think it's fairly obvious, in our overpopulated, mostly polluted and industrialized world, that the Bible's "mythos" here is flawed. It might have worked for nomads. But the city-dwelling Akkadians had a better mythos in their story—at least one more applicable to today's world.Another problem I have is how you interpret the "mythos" of legal texts. If I understand you—and I might not—you are saying that the mythos of Leviticus is something quite separate from the actual content of its laws, that the moral point is not spelled out in the moral behavior the laws proscribe but rather in some sociological sense of cultural identity. I really just think this is nonsense. Let's move from the silly Leviticus cleanliness laws to something like Deuteronomy 22:28:

"If a man meets a virgin who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are caught in the act, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman's father, and she shall become his wife. Because he violated her he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives."

This law says that a rape victim must marry her rapist. It is obviously barbaric—but what is, according to you, the underlying "mythos" or "universal/psychological truth" it is trying to convey? I don't think there's anything deeper than the face-value content of the law.Now, I do think that we can examine this law in its cultural context. In ancient Israel, women were considered the property of men. First, a woman belonged to her father, until she got married. Then she belongs to her husband. (The 10th commandment makes this explicit: do not covet your neighbor's house, wife, slave, or other property). Husbands essentially buy wives by paying their father a brideprice, usually a little more than the cost of a slave. Thus, adultery is perhaps best understood as a property crime.

Rape is punished nowhere in the Bible. It is a concept that did not exist in ancient Mesopotamia except to determine whether or not a woman is party to her own adultery if she has sex with another man other than her husband (and thus deserving death along with him).

The "moral point" of this law, then, is basically "you break it, you buy it." If you agree that this is the "mythos" of this law, then I hope you will also agree with me that this mythos—like much of the mythos of the Bible—is wrong.When people ask me why I don't believe in the Bible, I usually respond with something like "Mostly because it's not true, but also because it's pretty damn immoral." As you've defined them, both the logos and the mythos of the Bible deserve plenty of criticism.

Zuma: I think we are very close to a deal here. Up until now, I wasn't sure that you accepted that there was any such thing as mythos. Or if there was, it was a kind of special pleading to get out of sticky contradictions in a logos reading of scripture.If we can agree that there is a mode of thinking and knowing known as mythos and that this is the foundation of religious cult and ritual, then I do agree that mythos can be wrong—not always wrong, but that there are some insights that are no longer in keeping with the world we live in—such as the view of women as property and the "you break it, you bought it" ethos.

I agree with you that parts of the Bible are not to believed—not because they aren't true, or that you have to take all of it or none of it—but because parts of it strike me as immoral and out of keeping with the modern world. Indeed, I find the whole idea of the supernatural offensive, not because it is factually "untrue" (who knows what the true facts are), but because the whole point of the supernatural is to privilege one group of human beings over another—it offends my moral sensibility.Yes, I agree that both logos and mythos deserve plenty of criticism, and not just in the Bible—in contemporary life as well. I think we secular rationalists suffer from not having a living mythos to go with our liberal sensibility. I think that fundamentalists may have several problems:

Mistaking mythos for logos in the interpretation of scripture;
a mistaken mythos which amplifies the notion of original sin into a doctrine of "total depravity";
a mistaken mythos of being embattled in an apocalyptic war of Good against Evil;
a mistaken mythos of "cheap grace" whereby a simple declaration of one's Born Again faith ("faith alone" without works) is sufficient for "salvation";
a mistaken mythos that beating children is "Biblical" and therefore desirable;
a mistaken mythos in which devalues reality and encourages retreat into fantasy;
a mistaken mythos which discourages independence and critical thought in favor of unquestioning obedience and conformity.

LostInParadise: I don't think we are that far apart. What is most important to realize is that for ancient peoples there was no split between what you are calling mythos and logos. It was all one thing. There would be no talk among Jews trying to separate spiritual and physical cleanliness. It was all tied together. Science was an expression of the will of God, and God was a perceived as a regular presence in their lives. Each tribe had its personal gods, which the people believed would assure their superiority. When they were conquered, they concluded that their gods were inferior, so they adopted the gods of their conquerors. Judaism owes its longevity in part to the refusal of Jews to give up on their God even after the many times they were conquered.Modern fundamentalists are attempting to do the same thing, but they are at a disadvantage. We know too much. Scientific method has proven its effectiveness many times over. To maintain the same point of view, centered in a God dedicated to man, one has to stick one's head in the ground. This is the only thing that separates modern and ancient true believers.

There is still room for spirituality, but its expression must be knowingly based on personal choice rather than as being seen as imposed from the outside. It must be based not on a Universe created for our personal use based on a God in whose image we were created, but on an attempt to create something meaningful in an otherwise cold and indifferent Universe. Here, the meaning in life as I see it comes from our acceptance of ourselves as parts of larger entities, not as a master or servant but as a mutual agent.

Qingu: I think it might be more accurate to say that what Zuma calls "logos" functioned as a sort of structural support for the moral theology (mythos) of the religion. Or, to put it another way, it functioned as "evidence."

You see this a lot in the Bible, where the various, allegedly factual historical events that terrorize the Jews are seen as divine punishment for moral lapses—as evidence that God is angry with them and wants them to behave better.

Zuma: I agree with LostInParadise that there was no perceived split between mythos and logos, but I also that each provided a kind of support for the other. Mythos gives meaning and context to the facts that are produced by logos.The problem today is that the mythos is often backward looking, attempting to go back to the sacred beginnings, the primordial event, or the foundations of human life and recreate this Golden Age, where people lived in harmony because they had the right beliefs and all believed the same thing.

According to Armstrong, mythos often embraced what she calls the "conservative spirit" which was to foster acceptance of the inherent limitations of an agrarian culture. For example, education in traditional societies would tend to consist of rote learning in order to discourage originality, not because people are intellectually timid, but because an agrarian society could not accommodate constant innovation or radically new ideas. Too much innovation could be socially disruptive and could endanger the community; so social stability and order were considered more important than freedom of expression.Also, if societies were believed to have declined from a primordial perfection, civilization tended to be seen as inherently precarious and fragile, ready to collapse or lapse into barbarism, as Western Europe did after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

With the advent of capitalism and continually reinvestment in human and physical capital, the resource base of modern societies is constantly expanding. So, now the task of mythos is to support people and give them courage to face an uncertain future in a sustained way, without awakening eschatological anxieties that lead to an apocalyptic cosmic war of "good" against "evil."I sincerely hope we "know too much" to go backward, but I don't think reason (logos) is quite enough to inoculate us against the dangers of the future—like the potential of science being turned against us in the service of our exploitation. I think we need some sort of transcendent vision that affirms that Humanity is a moral community to which everyone belongs, and that this membership confers the right to dignity and respect, and both the right to be supported and the duty to support one's fellow man, and which places morality in the context of human evolution where the cumulative effect of our individual moral choices matter, etc.

Qingu: I agree that the "backwards-looking" mythos is both pervasive in religion and perverse for modern day society. The idea that we are a "fallen world," yearning for a time in the past when we were perfect obedient child-slaves in a garden (mythical or otherwise) forms one of the fundamental tenets of all three monotheistic faiths and, I think, is a dangerous sentiment.Secular society has done a 180 on this, from "progressive" liberals who think the future will be better than the past, to transhumanists who actually think the future is going to be a magical place.

LostInParadise: I am very much in agreement with what Zuma is saying. The mythos of the ancients was all bundled together: religion, politics and science were pretty much united in one package. We still have mythos, but it is not so easily tied together. Religion, politics, science and economics all have their own mythos, sometimes coming together and sometimes not. Part of this modern mythos is the belief in science and engineering as means for solving all our problems. This, as you point out, can have dangerous consequences. There is, as many people are sensing, a need for something new. So far, modern attempts to replace the old time religions have not been very fruitful. Scientology and New Age beliefs don't cut it. Let's hope that it is possible to form a new spirituality in which we take direct responsibility for our collective actions.