Noah

So, I haven't seen Noah, but I found this piece in the LA Times a bit much based on what I know of the film.  The tenor of the times article is summed up in this quote:

The same people who gripe that Hollywood never makes any faith-based movies are complaining because Hollywood has gone and made a religious movie, albeit one that might not be as literal-minded as they'd like.

Those wacky God types, there's just no pleasing them.  But from what I know Noah is not a "faith based" movie nor is it a religious movie.  Noah depicts God has bitter and vindictive inspiring Noah his prophet to murder his grandchildren lest they survive the flood the ostensible purpose of which is to destroy all of humanity without allowing any humans left to multiply and  replenish the earth.  This of course is totally nonsensical.  Why preserve Noah and his family if the intent was to leave the earth completely barren of human life?

But I quibble.  God and his followers are without love or compassion.  Belief in God results in massive destruction and what appears to be insanity.  It's hard to imagine how Noah could be considered to be a faith based movie when it's central message preaches that faith in God leads to destruction and madness. 

Presumably the presence of a loving God faith in whom leads one to all that is good in the world is the literal mindedness the Times believes is missing from this film.  The Times also notes that religious whiners are complaining just because the story was not interpreted in the way in which those believers have been taught.  Again the interpretation the Times refers to as having been taught to believers is one in which God is good rather than an evil all powerful tyrant as Noah's writers and directors interpretation would have it.

Imagine the temerity of the religious to expect a depiction of sacred text to be an affirmation of the principles espoused in the text rather than a two hour long argument that if you believe that stuff you're crazy.   The backlash against protests about Noah as exemplified in the LA Times demonstrates once again that a certain segment of society, prominently including many responsible for our "entertainment," is bent on undermining faith and religion in our society.

Retirement

Then there's this.  So, why did I retire?  I was in a meeting the other day with a well-known prominent attorney who is about eight years older than I am and certainly in a much better financial position than I.  He has not retired and does not apparently have plans to retire anytime soon.

Unlike this prominent attorney and many others, there was nothing unique about the services I offered (and in truth the same probably can be said of him).  If I was not doing anything that others couldn't do at least as well and probably better, then the only reason I was working was to earn money.  Once I had earned sufficient to fund a comfortable retirement, the only reason to keep working, unless I really enjoyed what I was doing, was to earn more money.  But, as Hugh Nibley pointed out in one of his essays, when you have enough what is more?  Too much.

I didn't particularly enjoy the practice of law and the thought of doing something I didn't particularly enjoy simply for the purpose of adding to a surplus did not appeal to me.

I confess to feeling a bit guilty when I read articles like this.  I try to remind myself that working for money is not the only valuable or important work that can be done.  Besides, how could I travel for seven weeks as I am going to do this year if I were still working?    

For Time and for All Eternity

The concept of eternal marriage as an explicitly instituted union is, as far as I know (which admittedly is not terribly far), an idea unique to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  Other churches or religions may think of a marriage covenant extending beyond this life or may not limit their marriage vows to this life only, but to my, again admittedly limited, knowledge only the LDS Church explicitly teaches that God intends that marriages performed in sacred temples last forever.

As a point of doctrine, eternal marriage has appealed to couples who have viewed their love for each other as so powerful and enduring that it was difficult to conceive of its ending with life on this earth.  As an expression of depth of feeling it  has found its way into popular culture with songs expressing everlasting love or proclamations of loving someone always and forever and the fairy tale ending of a couple living happily ever after. 

Those popular sentiments have endured even in our modern culture of cohabitation rather than marriage and common divorce among married couples.  But I have seen a small but growing number of discussions of "natural" limits to the term of a marriage. Most recently I was reading an article relating to Gwyenth Paltrow's impending divorce when I came across this passage:  

Paltrow helpfully followed up her initial announcement by posting a 2,000-word treatise on conscious uncoupling from Habib Sadeghi and Sherry Sami, a married couple living in Los Angeles.  (Dr. Sadeghi is an osteopathic doctor who runs an “integrative health center” called “Be Hive of Healing,” pun presumably intended, and whose book Within: A Spiritual Awakening to Love and Weight Loss contains a foreword written by Paltrow. His wife is a dentist.)

Sadeghi and Sami begin by explaining that given rapidly accelerating life expectancy, these days it’s unrealistic to expect that we’ll be able to stick it out until death do us part, which suggests we “ought to redefine the construct” of marriage.

“Our biology and psychology aren’t set up to be with one person for four, five, or six decades,” they write.

 This idea, that we as human beings are not designed for prolonged marriage to one person, is a relatively recent idea (at least to my knowledge).  Certainly forty or fifty years ago when the divorce rate was much lower and the marriage rate much higher, there was not much talk about humans' natural inability to be with one person for four five or six decades. 

This entire idea it seems to me is a case of pseudo science running to the aid of societal changes.  Expressions of our natural inability to be with one person for our entire lives are calculated to justify decisions to separate and divorce.  "Don't feel bad about splitting up regardless of the reason.  It's only natural and expected."  This is yet another example of how our popular culture is undermining the family unit by supporting people in following their momentary desires and urges regardless of the effect it might have on others. 

 

Saved by Grace

I have, for a long time, wondered along with a number of others why individuals and organizations on the left are granted immunity from behaviors roundly condemned by leftists.  Why is George Soros, billionaire currency speculator, allowed to be politically active without criticism while the Koch brothers are not?  Why are leftist comedians permitted to utter vile words without a murmur from the press while conservative radio hosts are called to task for much less objectionable language?  Why are people of color who express conservative views allowed to be referred to by highly objectionable racial epithets while the most indirect reference to race from a conservative is grounds for termination and blacklisting?  Why are liberal billionaires and millionaires not considered to be part of the "one percent" and permitted to rail against conservatives of similar, or lesser, wealth without being called on their hypocrisy? 

Victor Davis Hansen has pointed out that those on the left are immunized from criticism because they believe, or at least express belief, in all of the right things.  They toe the ideological line, their hearts are in the right place.  That is certainly true as an objective matter but I have always wondered what the ideological underpinning for such an approach might be.  After all if the left is interested in results, one's belief should not trump one's actions; form should not be exalted above substance. The left's actions made no logical sense which is quite extraordinary for a philosophy that prides itself on being rational above all else.  I think I found an explanation.

I read with interest yesterday a review of a book called An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America by Joseph Bottum.  According to the review (I haven't read the book yet, but it's now on my summer reading list) Bottum's thesis is that

post-Protestant secular religion...gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues. Precisely because the new secular religion permeates into the pores of everyday life, it sustains the certitude of salvation and a self-perpetuating spiritual aura. Secularism has succeeded on religious terms.

 Viewing the left's attitude as a religious stance it seems to me makes sense of its apparently contradictory attitude.  If one views the left as being part of a religion, particularly a religion in the protestant tradition with its emphasis of grace over works, it is possible to understand why simply ascribing to the correct beliefs insulates one from criticism.  If the purpose of the leftist program is secular salvation then a declaration that one has been saved by having accepted the leftist saving principles absolves one of the need for action.  The grace of the left's ideological program is sufficiently powerful to save the sinner; no other qualification or action is required.

In this view since the purpose of life is to be saved by adopting the required beliefs, actual worldly conditions are unimportant.  If the population believes in the leftist program the fact that the results of the program lead to less freedom, opportunity and prosperity and increased misery, death and destruction are completely irrelevant because such worldly concerns are much less important than the souls that are saved.   

That is why leftists can with complete internal consistency ignore the misery and death caused by communist and socialist governments: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"   The leftist program makes sense only in religious terms.  What the left really has to offer is salvation by grace.

Images

I just read an old article from ABC news.  The article referred to an advertisement Target Stores had produced advertising a swim suit.  Target apologized for photo shopping a picture of a swimsuit clad young lady in the ad which had been altered to create a "thigh gap."  The concern over the ad related to portraying an unrealistic "body image" the idea being that models with dimensions very difficult or impossible to achieve set an unrealistic standard for young women who go will go to distressing lengths to emulate the model's appearance.  Young women feel that they have to conform to the body types represented in these ads according to some.

I have no doubt that such concerns are real and that we would all be better off if models and popular personalities were of a more realistic experience.  But I couldn't help but think that we are straining at the gnat of body image while swallowing the camel of risky and immoral behavior.  What is more troubling that a young woman's self esteem might be reduced from her inability to mimic the body of a model or star or that her life might be changed by her desire and ability to mimic the immoral lifestyle of a model or star either modeled in reality or in the movies or TV shows. 

This phenomenon is one more demonstration that our culture has completely lost its moorings.

Atheistic Morality

Only one more observation about the Salon article discussed in the last several posts.  Part of what the new radical heroes of atheism attempt to accomplish according to the Salon article is to begin constructing a basis for morality without reference to God. 

You can, of course, see the problem confronting atheists.  If we are simply an aggregation of chemicals and consciousness is only an accidental by product of the way in which the chemicals are arranged, life has no purpose and no meaning.  If our lives are without purpose or meaning nothing that we do or say matters.  If nothing that we do or say matters no basis exists for preferring one set of actions over another.  If no such preference exists, the only constraint on our actions is our physical limitation: anything we are capable of doing we may do. No constraint on any activity exists unless that constraint is imposed by forces external to the individual.

If any advantage exists to the individual in taking an action, any rational individual will take that action unless he is physically constrained.  Evaluating whether an advantage exists will involve evaluating the consequences of the proposed action such as prison or effects on relationships etc.   Morality involves restrictions on actions based not on physical limitations (what can be done) but based on limitations concerned with value judgments (what should be done).  Because in the atheists' view we are simply aggregations of chemicals our being provides us no guidance about what should be done. 

The authors described in the Salon article disagree as summarized by the author of the article "our moral life is also a natural (evolved) phenomenon, not rooted in any divine realm or mind. In this sense, the details of evolution teach us how to live together without any reference to God. Nothing is put in his place, because nothing is needed."  So what exactly to the "details of evolution" teach us about living together?  Well, according to the author ("Rules to Live By" in his formulation) the answer may be that 1) behaviors that increase well-being for the greatest part of the population, 2) behaviors that increase cooperation,  and 3) behaviors that increase trust, as opposed to actions based on assertions of authority (as an aside the author of this particular theory advocates reducing "the power of the state and devolve our lives into parishes, computer networks, clubs and teams, self-help groups and small businesses—'everything small and local.'” which sounds an awful lot like what one might call a "conservative society" at least in the contemporary notion of conservatism.  But earlier in the article the author claimed that according to one of these heroes "some forms of social life are less moral than others; that conservative societies have higher rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy and pornography" thus at least implying that conservative societies are less moral than contrasting (presumably progressive) societies "whose members are allowed to maximize themselves and others."  This is all very confusing because none of the "heroes" are cited as positing that divorce, teenage pregnancy and pornography are either morally prohibited or the result of immoral behavior so why these outcomes would be indicators of a less moral society is a puzzle.)

These notions completely lack properties we traditionally look for in moral guidelines: guidance about how to act in circumstances where actions are not legally dictated or constrained.  What does it mean to say that moral actions are those that increase well-being for the greatest part of the population?   This leads only to a popularity contest.  Notions of what well-being is and what actions might increase well-being are notoriously difficult to identify and nigh impossible to implement.   Does total well-being increase when people are generally thinner for example?  If so, are we morally compelled to force people to lose weight even though such actions infringe on an individual's ability to choose? 

Morality then merely reflects popular attitudes of the day.  What is immoral today becomes moral overnight.  At the turn of the century it was generally thought that sex before marriage decreased the well-being of most people.  That moral judgment derived from the common (at the time) belief that God through the ten commandments and other scriptures had dictated the proper moral framework for sexual interaction.  Today under the new moral framework sex before marriage has lost any stigma of immorality. 

In the 1990's the majority of people in Ruwanda (Hutu's) decided that the well being of that majority would be increased by the slaughter of the Tutsi's.  Was that a moral or an immoral decision?  If it was immoral what made it so?  Was it immoral because of the number of Tutsi's?  So, for example if the Tutsi's had comprised only 1% of the population rather than a much larger percentage?  Was it immoral because the rest of the world did not agree with the Hutu's?  What if the rest of the world did agree?  Under the "increasing well-being" standard the Hutu's actions would be morally acceptable.

All of these proposed moral standards suffer from the same defect.  With a moral code based on majority rule no one and nothing is safe.  Is that really what we mean by a moral standard?

But is even worse than it appears because on what basis do we decide that "majority rule" is the proper basis for formulating morality in the first place.  Why isn't any other basis for deciding what is moral just as legitimate?  Without God, that is without a moral force separate and apart from humanity and the natural world, man is lost in the wilderness without compass or direction.  Morality becomes whatever a particular group says it is at the moment and losses all meaning.              

Of Hope and Dispair

I'm going to offer my take on couple more points raised in the Salon article I've mentioned in the last few posts.  I want first to tackle the issue of hope and the purpose of life. 

The author of the article begins by relating two incidents from Richard Dawkins.  It seems after the publication of The Selfish Gene. We are told that "an unnamed foreign publisher...told him that, after reading...The Selfish Gene..., he could not sleep for three nights, so troubled was he by its 'cold, bleak message.'"  We are also told that "a teacher 'from a distant country'...had written to him reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book 'because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends, for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism.'”

According to the author of the article, Dawkins was shocked!, shocked!, that his view of human life as a chance assembly of chemicals without purpose could  lead anyone who took his philosophy seriously into a pit of nihilistic despair.

Dawkins attempts to offer us a way out of the dilemma.  While he observes that all purpose in life is "'gone... all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe,” apparently quoting his colleague Peter Atkins’s book The Second Law (1984), he admonishes us that this dispassionate view of the purposelessness of the Universe, of which we are a part, "must not be confused with the loss of personal hope."

Well, that sounds good.  What then is it that we are supposed to hope for personally in this life that is completely without purpose?   Well, he says "there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane."  That sounds like progress.  So we don't look to the ultimate fate of the Universe for purpose in our individual lives.  We must look closer to home, to something that is on a more human scale.  Okay, then what are we to look to?

Well, he observes that "[o]ur lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions."  Okay that's nice.  Then what about those human ambitions and perceptions will provide us with a bulwark against the despair of a life without meaning?  It is Dawkins avows a "sense of awed wonder that science can give us and which makes it 'one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.'”

So, although our lives are completely devoid of meaning and purpose we must not despair because the "closer, warmer human ambition[]" of science will keep the darkness at bay and provide us with our "life's hope."   But we never really see what it is we are to hope for.  Are we to hope for a privileged view of the inner workings of the Universe through the medium of science?  Are we to hope to be able to achieve a "sense of awed wonder" at the world around us? 

Of course the author of the article never ascribes to Dawkins any reason for hope or any explanation of what we should hope for.  I suppose that because the article is merely a summary of some of Dawkins' work he could provide those answers in one of his books, but somehow I doubt it.  No, it is clear to me that for all of Dawkins protestations to the contrary, he doesn't really believe the philosophy he espouses.  His demonstrates his insincerity by his very continued existence.

If there is no purpose to anything in the Universe, no purpose in our individual or collective lives; if after all we dissolve into nothingness then whatever joy or pain we experience, whatever success achieve or failure we suffer is completely pointless.  Living or not living is exactly the same.  The fact that the purveyors of the reductionist deterministic view of the Universe continue to live, that they breath and eat and do all those things necessary to sustain life, means that they believe that life has some meaning or purpose.  Otherwise why continue?  All of their protestations about living so that they can experience the wonder and awe of the physical world only means that they believe there is some point to doing so.  If there is a reason for doing so then there must be a purpose. 

A Modest Observation

Apropos of yesterday's post relating to what an atheistic society might look like, we do have one example of how a governing philosophy that rules out belief in God as one of its basic premises: Communism.   The communistic governing philosophy is based entirely on the material (that which can be perceived by the senses or can be shown to exist by way of reasoning from that which can be perceived by the senses).   This response to a question about religion posted on a website devoted to Marxism is typical.  The author in discussion the relationship between Communism and religion quotes Trotsky "We are of opinion that Atheism, as an inseparable element of the materialist view of life, is a necessary condition for the theoretical education of the revolutionist."

So, what does a completely Godless governing philosophy produce?  Horror and death on an industrial scale.  Communism killed many tens of millions of people and destroyed the lives of many tens of millions more.  No one who has read the Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression can doubt that wholesale death and destruction are the necessary result of any implementation of this Godless governing philosophy.  Everywhere it has been tried regardless of a society's pre-communist cultural background the implementation of a Communist regime always and inevitably leads to massive death and horror. 


Why should this be so?  Possibly because the philosophy itself requires behavior that so contradicts human nature that the only way to produce such unnatural behavior is by coercion and punishment.  Possibly also because by banishing God from society the practitioners of this vile philosophy are left without any moral compass; all things are permitted and therefore no restraints exist on the measures that can be taken to enforce necessary behavior and discourage improper thoughts and actions.  

Perhaps the results of Communism are unique to the Communistic philosophy and have nothing to do with its banishment of God from society.  Perhaps it is possible to have a  completely atheistic Godless society without the Communistic slaughter.  Perhaps.  But who really wants to conduct that experiment?

Evangelizing Atheists

I read an interesting article at the Salon website the other day entitled: "Atheism's radical new heroes: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and an evolving new moral view."  The article referenced several books by the named authors together with several other books whose avowed purpose is to "mount[] a spirited attack on the basic dimensions of religion..." One of the books reviewed in the article was
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) authored by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University.  Relating to this book the author of the article informs us  

 In writing his book, he [Dennett] said, he had come across one widespread opinion, albeit expressed in a variety of ways: in essence, this was that “man” has a “deep need” for spirituality. “What fascinates me about this delightfully versatile craving for ‘spirituality’ is that people think they know what they are talking about, even though—or perhaps because—nobody bothers to explain what they mean.”

Dennett had three things to say about how we should live. The secret to spirituality had nothing to do with the soul, or anything supernatural—it was this: let your self go. “If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the great scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person [italics in original].”

It was a matter of urgency, he thought, that people understand and accept evolutionary theory. “I believe that their salvation may depend on it! How so? By opening their eyes to the dangers of pandemics, degradation of the environment, and loss of biodiversity, and by informing them about some of the foibles of human nature. So isn’t my belief that belief in evolution is the path to salvation a religion? No. . . . We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! … In our view there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. … I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion.  (emphasis mine)

 Hmmm.  While he says that evolution is not his religion I wonder if we can perhaps divine another religion from his comments.  So let's unpack what he has to say a bit.  Dennett 1) expresses a belief in a proposition the truth or falsity of which cannot be determined by rational means; 2) testifies that his belief provides him a way of living that allows him to live life to its fullest and guides him towards being a better person; 3) avers that he feels a moral imperative to "spread the word" of a central tenant of his belief because 4) in his view a person's "salvation" may depend on accepting this central tenant as a truth.

The belief I refer to in my first point is his belief that God does not exist.  Although he does not express his atheism in the quoted language, I think it safe to assume that in expressing belief in evolution he refers to evolution undirected by a larger intelligence and that his fundamental belief of which evolution is part is that God does not exist and the universe and everything in it is a result of random chance.

Dennett's atheism appears to me to be functionally indistinguishable from any other religion from the manner in which he describes his beliefs to the function his beliefs play in his life and the necessity of gathering others into the fold for their own good and the good of all humanity.  I am pretty sure atheism is his religion.  But some of his theology is less than well thought out.  

His explanation of the widely perceived need for spirituality and the way to fulfill that need without reference to God or any higher power, for example, seems completely garbled.  According to Dennett, spirituality has nothing to do with the soul or anything supernatural; the secret to spirituality is to let your self go.  I can agree with part of that statement.  I understand that most religions associate a belief in God with foregoing self in favor of others.  A belief in God encourages sacrifice of our own desires in favor of accomplishing the will of God which is to serve his children.  But the sacrifice of self in relation to God fulfills our need for spirituality because it allows us to participate in something greater than ourselves.  We are enlarged by our sacrifice because through our sacrifice we become part of larger whole with a divine purpose.

By contrast the letting go of self Dennett imagines has only the effect and purpose of leading us to understand that we are even smaller than we appear to be.  We will understand essentially that we are nothing compared to the world around us.  This letting go of self would it seems to me result in making "hard choices easier" because the result of such choices are completely unimportant in an unimaginably large uncaring cosmos.  Dennett avers that this is not true, that his view will lead people to be better.  I can't imagine that he is right.  We  have only been conducting this particular experiment in a godless society for a very short period of time and that preliminary results don't appear to be all that encouraging.

          

Evil

This  is just how evil I am. On the way home today I was followed by a big pickup truck.  I was in the right hand lane of a four lane road.  The driver of said truck moved into the right hand lane to overtake me.  Down the road in the right hand lane was another car.  So what did I do?  I slowly increased my speed so that the pickup truck could not get around me.  Then when I was parallel with the car in the right lane, I slowed down so that the pickup was boxed in.  Oh, the drive of the pickup truck was not happy with me.  When I turned into a store parking lot he stepped on the gas and roared away in a cloud of diesel fumes.  I was amused, however, and isn't that the only important thing?