Your essence is not my essence
In answering the last question in the debate with Hitchens, Blair tried to sum up his defense of religion. He said you have to find “the essence.” Yes there are bad parts, but you have to explain those away, and keep the essence, that is, what you take to be the essence.
I see how people look at certain parts of scripture and draw those conclusions from it, but it’s not what it means to me, it’s not the essence of it. The essence of it is through the life of Jesus Christ, a life of love, selflessness and sacrifice and that’s what it means to me.
Yes but. 1) That’s what it means to you but that’s not what it means to other people, and because it is not based on anything universalizable, there is no way to adjudicate between you. There is no way to say definitively that you are right and the woman-stoners are wrong. So saying “that’s what it means to me” is worthless, and worse than worthless, because it endorses religion instead of saying this inability to adjudicate between versions makes it dangerous. And 2) a life of love, selflessness and sacrifice is not inherently religious or unavailable to atheists.
The second point wouldn’t matter all that much, provided theists could stop assuming and saying that only theists are capable of demanding forms of goodness, if it weren’t for the first one. But the first one is a killer.
And where does he, or anyone, get any knowledge about the life of Jesus Christ? The same source that also attributes some pretty nasty sentiments to him. Blair presumably has knowledge from somewhere that enables him to dismiss some very selected bits of the only source of information about the person whose life is his inspiration. If there was such a person at all, how does anyone know that the only bits of the gospels that aren’t pure invention aren’t those nasty bits?
Yes but. 1) That’s what it means to you but that’s not what it means to other people, and because it is not based on anything universalizable, there is no way to adjudicate between you.
Yet, the religious listeners would likely incline their heads in solemn agreement, even if only for the emotional benefit of all clinging together in an act of emotionally satisfying solidarity. Then what their agreement is about doesn’t matter so much as the fact that they expressed some sort of unity.
And 2) a life of love, selflessness and sacrifice is not inherently religious or unavailable to atheists.
I think religious people believe their observation, that love, selflessness and sacrifice are only possible with religion, they view that as a free-standing objective claim. But that belief about the world comes from within their religious doctrine.
We’re back to meaning again. Harry Potter holds meaning to people, because it’s a fairly consistent story written by a single author.
I’m pretty sure the Jesus Christ story is meaningful, but you have to ignore the meaningless parts to build the meaningful story. Because the Jesus story does not really exist in a meaningful way, it is a construct from at least four different dubious ‘drafts’. And so, in order to make Christianity meaningful, you have to build it or follow someone else’s meaningful interpretation.
And so that is what Blair means by essence, taking all the bits and making a coherent story, although the story does not actually exist at all in the new testament, only fragments and versions, drafts, letters, and so on. Of course, a coherent story may be meaningful, it just doesn’t mean it is true.
If Blair is inventing his own wholly admirable Jesus as a role model, that in itself is not so terrible. But it’s not what he’s admitting to doing, is it? Maybe someone should ask him what his Jesus has in common with the one in the “Left Behind” books. (Am I alone in that title making me think about half of what I’m sitting on?)
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Your essence is not my essence http://dlvr.it/9YQv8 […]
I call bullshit on Blair. What the fuck has he ever had to sacrifice? Now compare that to what he asked many people to sacrifice in a stupid, fucked up war! Or how about what his damned religion says women should sacrifice? Or gays or lesbians? It’s easy to “sacrifice” when you’re the one that benefits from the dogma of “self-sacrifice”! What a fucking piece of shit!
Reading Steven Freeman on The Closing of the Western Mind (500BC to 500AD) it is clear that secular (Roman Empire) interests drove the selection of orthodoxy in at best a random manner. How one can build a moral code on random dictates to an emerging religion is beyond me.
So lets start over and do it rationally.
Reading Steven Freeman on The Closing of the Western Mind (500BC to 500AD)
Interestingly I’m reading a cracking book called The Closing of the Western Mind, but it’s by a Charles Freeman.
When I was still a hapless, helpless abused catholic kid, oh a very long time ago now, the deal was it was ALL the divinely inspired word of doG and you had to accept and believe ALL of it. Of course they discouraged actually reading it so you wouldn’t see how nasty and contradictory and bullshitty it really was; they just explained it all to you in very long boring sermons.
Nowadays the “laity” realize that a lot of it is arrant bullshit, yet more is thoroughly nasty and is really at odds with present-day morals and cultural norms (now where did they come from?) and is just plain indefensible. Result you just have to find the essence – the little bit of the arrant bullshit that you believe. Well it may be Blair’s way but it ain’t the real Rattenfaenger way and a lot of you cafeteria catholics will find out the error of your ways once the Papacy is restored to power (trailing clouds of glory) – after all, the papal states retained the inquisition right to the end and I bet they still have the torture manuals…..have a nice day!
Right. And that’s only to be found in the Catholic doctrine. Not in the Protestant church, or the Baptist, or the Lutheran, or the Orthodox, or the Anglican. So very persuasive.
Blair just picked some cherries. Anyone hungry?
Compared to some of the things I have been called by the Christian right, I am quite happy with being called Steven rather than Charles!
I did a lot of work on the historical Jesus for my New History of Christianity and there is really very little overlap between the gospel sources and the way that Jesus is presented by Blair and others. The crucial point, as elaborated in Closing , was the linking of Jesus to the needs of the empire- the ‘leader of the legions’ as bishop Ambrose of Milan put it – certainly the most imaginative reading of the gospels I have ever come across. In early modern Europe, Jesus was often portrayed as a warrior. In the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, the apostles and Christ are described as if he was the leader of a warrior band. One searches in vain for the link between Blair as a politician, and now as a preacher grabbing in the millions ( this is much more offensive in Britain than perhaps it is in the US), and his professed faith.
@Charles Freeman
Among the various perceptions mentioned, I miss one : the eschatological Jesus. At least to me, some of the obvious paradoxes of the mythical person Jesus (which may have been no, one or several historical persons) becomes more coherent when interpreting his behavious and “teachings” (of which many likely have been edited in later) as a person convinced of his role in God’s concrete and physical plot for the end of the world.
While not influential like the Phariseans or Sadduceeans whom he distested and competed with (And distinct from the later bellicose Maccabeans), I would think much of the thoughts attributed to him was “floating around” in “late judaism”?
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
The respect and trust of the British public ?
One of the paradoxes that interests me is that the church is the keeper of eternal truths, but the eternal truths change over time. There is an out of date interpretation of the passion in which it is seen as a sort of “big con” played against the devil to trick him into breaking a covenant with god. In this scenario christ turns up in the afterlife and pulls off the rubber mask revealing that he is actually an aspect of god, and the devil realises he has been had as jesus drives off to heaven in a plain brown van as the mission impossible theme plays..and it sort of makes more sense than some of the other interpretations.
Cassanders. Yes ,among the people like Geza Vermes and Paula Fredriksen who are straightforward historians, the eschatological Jesus, who really did think that the kingdom was about to appear then and there, is the favoured option. The world of the theologians is completely different. The gospel sources are much too late and confused to say what happened at the empty tomb, but, as I argue, in my History of Christianity, there is circumstantial evidence that Caiaphas removed the body and bribed the guards and then got rid of it (his main aim was to get the Galileans back home and not to let a cult grow up round the tomb as normally happened in the case of Jewish martyrs). I stressed that there was no way we could be sure of anything. I was amused to be told that my theory was totally unconvincing and that it was much more likely that the body came to life again.
Charles, is that your gloss on what you were told, or did they actually speak of the reanimation of a corpse? I ask this because, in most contemporary Christian theology, there’s a bit of a sleight of hand at this point, and whatever it was that “rose” was not really a body at all, but an eschatological figure. That’s why it’s perfectly appropriate to speak about this figure appearing in rooms even though the door is locked, or simply disappearing, as happened when some disciples invited the risen Jesus to lunch, and he simply disappears when he breaks bread with them. Also why the figure still retains the wounds, so that there is a gaping wound in its side into which Thomas could, had he not gone all gaga with awe, have thrust his hand.
The whole story of the resurrection, as such, must be made from whole cloth, because there are so many imponderables like this. What this does is to allow people to keep believing in the resurrection, because the word ‘resurrection’ is so indeterminate. The same kinds of indeterminancy infect all language about religion, as things tend to shade off towards apophaticism or the kinds of essentialism that Blair used with such effect in his debate with Hitchens.
It’s really too bad that Hitchens didn’t challenge this, because Blair kept repeating it so often that, at the end (and I watched the whole thing straight through last night), this was the point that was left standing. Some people do bad things in the name of religion, but true religion is about love and compassion. Given the actual history, this claim won’t bear the weight than people like Blair want to put on it — just as you can pretend that Mohammed was a good thing for women only so often before you are bound to point out that overall he was and continues to be simply a disaster for women. (Besides, it’s hard to think how Mohammed was good for women if women are treated in the Qu’ran simply as the spoils of war.) But if you allow someone to get away with repeating the old story about the essence of religion, in the way that Blair did, it seems as though you are granting the point. And if there was a weakness in the Blair-Hitchens debate, it was precisely here that it is to be found, as Ophelia points out. But this is merely the old hermeneutical auction at work, and does not touch the heart of religion, which is about strange beliefs enforced by authority and dominated by power.
It’s quite evident that Jesus was not primarily about love and compassion. Indeed, some of the most remembered sayings of Jesus reflect the kind of unfeeling adamantine certainty that came to characterise the most extreme right wing of Protestantism, espressed in Calvin’s Institutes, and has never been far from the centre of the Christianity promulgated by Blair’s own adopted church. There are two significant acts of compassion in the gospels, one where, after calling the Canaanite woman a dog, he actually deigns to help her, and the other, the interpolated story in John where he bids the baying crowd of men to let the sinless one amongst them cast the first stone. The Jesus of the other stories is so deeply implicated either in doing a work of wonder or trying to illustrate something about his significance that any supposed compassion is secondary.
The only reason that Blair can harp on about the essence of religion is that most people allow it. Religion is, like it or not, a permanent feature of human societies — this was another big mistake in Hitchen’s strategy — so we had better opt for the most anodyne version of religion that we can, the one that is all about love and compassion. Never mind that examples of compassionate religionists stand out from a crowd of adherents and power brokers as exceptions, somewhere on the way to the present this is the line of retreat that religions have been allowed to take. Instead of centring on beliefs which are ridiculous when inserted into a modern conversation, because, like the story told by Ken M — at one time quite a prominent theory about the atonement — they are ridiculous, religions have been allowed to swan around pretending to be all about humanity and its flourishing. But even there, when you look more closely, you’ll see that it’s about proselytising. Like Hamas, the Roman Catholic Church does not help people selflessly; it acts in ways that it hopes will garner the largest harvest in faithfulness to the church and its teachings.
Blair might pretend that religion is all about care and compassion, but he did make a choice to join a church that acts in immoderately high-handed ways with respect to people in other Christian confessions. Surely, it wasn’t only love and compassion that drove him to join the church that has the most rigorously enforced belief system in the world. He could have shown love and compassion in practically any other church. Indeed, arguably, Anglicans are much more about love and compassion and sit more lightly to dogma than the Roman Catholic Church, and yet it was the church that condemns in such outrageous terms the secularism that has brought peace to Europe and much of the world — it was to this church that Blair chose, in servility, to subordinate himself. Surely there is more here than merely love and compassion. And all the saccharine stories about “inter-faith” cooperation cannot hide this rather peculiar choice. Certainly, maundering on about love and compassion scarcely answers deeper questions about the nature of religious faith, and the harm that it has done by it almost always and everywhere and by all.
@Eric
Hitchens did keep making the distinction between “in the name of religion” and what the dogma and scriptures of religion actually say, pointing out that most religious interpret their dogma literally and that what Blair was claiming was done “in the name of religion” was actually what those religions are based on and not some extremist interpretation.
Like trying to nail jello to a wall, it’s pretty much impossible to stop the Blairs of the world from moving the goal posts around and get them to define their terms and stick to them.
I notice that Hitchens did not dignify the Nazism/Communism/Kmer Rouge were the result of atheism and Einstein was religious assertions by Blair with an answer,
Based on what Charles Freeman had to say about Blair, I think the Tony Blair Faith Foundation bears looking into.
Tony Blair Faith Foundation
Yes, Steve, I agree. It is like nailing jello to the wall. Religious langauge goes all limp and soggy, and it’s hard to pin it down, but this is something that needs to be pointed out again and again, and if it’s not done, it leaves the impression — and I think the vote at the end shows this — that an important point has been made. Somehow we have to cut through the soggyness to show that it is jello all the way down. This is not easy to do, because religion starts with an advantage, that people allow it all sorts of latitude that it denies to non-believers. Even non-believers, as the gnu atheist-true atheist division shows, seem to be quite prepared to cut religion slack at this point, and that’s why we need to shake the jello around to show that that’s all there is, something nebulous and unsatisfactorily vague which nevertheless allows the religious to talk about essences. But where the boundaries are so uncertain, in what way does talk about essences make any sense? The whole point about the language of essence (and its closely related cousin, substance) is that it distinguishes natural kinds, and that’s precisely what Blair and others so obviously fail to do. But, having failed, thing that they pick out as the essence of religion is allowed to spread itself over religion generally, and religions get to preen themselves on the false lustre that is really just the result of a rhetorical trick.
‘thing’ in the last sentence should be ‘things’
I think Blair is following in a timeless Christian tradition, that of taking the name of a small time preacher executed for treason, and turning him into a symbol for whatever he finds important at the time. I just got done reading Jesus Interrupted by Ehrman yesterday (and I’ve read Misquoting Jesus before hand), and he makes it pretty clear that the early Bible was written with particular goals in mind by various diverging sects of Christianity, each of which had their own Jesus. Blair’s own Christianity with its triune divine Christ who divides people between Heaven and Hell is not the same as what Jesus taught, and is even different from the Jesus in the Gospels. But these are changes made to be more user friendly, so that people don’t leave the faith because the Apocalypse hasn’t come even though Jesus said it would happen within the lifespan of the Apostles. That Blair is getting even more creative with it in turning his Christian religion into happy happy fun time, all about community and good works and a loving God is probably a better than more dogma, but he has no real justification for it. When push comes to shove, do we see him standing up for the rights of women in the RCC? Or for proper condom education in Africa by the RCC? Or for investigations in all the child rape?
That’s his biggest problem right there, he projects his rosy view of religion onto everyone else, and gives them a tremendous benefit of the doubt, rather than realizing that they are just doing what the Bible says to them, and thus have no intention of changing.
Also, this discussion reminds me of an old black and white movie I saw when I was in Sunday School, which had a 50s court room style trial to determine if Jesus was actually resurrected. The movie viewed it as absurd that the body of Jesus would have disappeared in any other way but through some sort of Angelic intervention, never mind the fact that if people put him in a tomb, it isn’t hard to imagine people could get him out again. Its not like they put him in one of those crazy Egyptian trap tombs (though that would have been a more fun movie).
One interesting theory I’ve heard was that Jesus was drugged when he was given bitter wine, and though he was stabbed, he didn’t have his legs broken in the traditional proof of death check. So they take him down, entomb him, and the disciples bust him out later. He lives on for a while afterward, and actually dies in at the time that became known as the transfiguration.
I think religious language is fundamentally language that is incoherent, nonsensical or meaningless.
This serves the purpose of religion fairly well because it: (1) requires interpretation or mediation between a priest and a lay person and (2) allows for a variety of reductionist coherent interpretations from the same canon of incoherent language, thus producing narrow meaning from broader meaninglessness.
The purpose of language is to make sense of the world. However, if you begin to divorce language from the real world for which it serves its purpose, such as within fiction or history, then it serves a somewhat secondary purpose, no longer aiding our understanding of the world, but aiding our understanding of who we are (or were) and our origins.
Religion goes even beyond this secondary purpose, into a third purpose: nonsensical language with multiple meanings that give rise to power relations, where understanding is limited to the chosen who must be followed by the unwashed masses.
For whatever social or biological reason, people have a very strong emotional pull toward the secondary purpose of language: fiction and history, so as to make sense of our origins and who we are. No wonder then, that religion is now taking refuge within historical revisionism and origins of consciousness and emotions, because that is the domain which its handle on the human mind is most powerful.
The natural sciences have done a great job of exorcising religious claims and superstitious irrationality from the real world. Where science is lagging behind is in the social sciences. Religion and religious thinking (including secular ideologies) have created their own esoteric and incoherent languages so as to divorce ordinary people from the knowledge of their origins and their historical development, allowing for power relations to dominate within this field and academia. This is especially true within Anglo-American philosophy, which seems to want to dominate how the social sciences are understood.
Some kind of revolution needs to take place within the social sciences towards a more popular understanding, finally sweeping away the grip of religious and irrational control.
“Certainly, maundering on about love and compassion scarcely answers deeper questions about the nature of religious faith, and the harm that it has done by it almost always and everywhere and by all.”
That’s the point – there is no religious faith involved here. No acceptance of the catholic “mysteries”, no abstruse theology, no believing six impossible things before breakfast. It is merely contemporary societal secular ideals with a light touch of new testament mythology added to give it a little more shine – or so Blair wants to think.
Blair, like so many moderate Christians, emphasizes that the core of the biblical message is found in the selfless love demonstrated by Christ. Yet, I have never met one who actually follows the message pertaining to this put into the mouth of Christ, namely to give away all of one’s wealth and live a day to day dependent life relying on the heavenly Father. Even those in orders are backed by wealthy organizations.
It’s really all about me – me, me, me. Daddy, I’m afraid. Daddy, all those people suffering is gross. Daddy, I don’t want to die. Daddy, I feel yucky about what I did. Daddy, there’s a devil in my closet. It’s really about the selfless love of Christ as My Special Helper.
It is not at all clear to me, why “love, selflessness, and sacrifice” must be so exalted. If it is not for “rivalry, selfishness, and survival”, we wouldn’t be here to discuss this stuff!
As for sacrifice as the essence of Christianity, I’d believe it when the Pope stops traveling behind bullet-proof glass.
Eagletonians will accuse me of ignoring countless inpenetrable tomes on Atonement, but actually the ‘sacrifice’ stuff is nonsense. If Jesus was YHWH in human form, then It knew all the time that It would be ‘resurrected’ (in whatever sense theologians currently find not too incredible), and would ascend to sit at YHWH’s right hand in glory (or something). Therefore, It made no sacrifice. Moreover, It should have known that Its death would be the direct cause of 2000 years of persecution of Jews, and made the real sacrifice of changing Its plans. I realise all that is elementary stuff, but I wish Hitchens had put it in his much better words and rammed it down that fraud Tony Blair’s throat.
So few Eagletonians comment here. I never have figured out why. :- )
The whole ‘sacrifice’ thing works in the context of Jewish Temple sacrifices, which are designed to please God. Jesus was the ultimate and final one of those, however with our more modern belief systems, asking for human sacrifice instead of just being magnanimous enough to forgive without it seems rather brutal.
I had a similar sense watching a documentary about the Hajj last night, since the story of Abraham and his near sacrifice figures high into it. The throwing stones at the Devil is modeled after Abraham throwing stones at the Devil who was telling him “Dude, don’t kill your son!”. I can’t think of anything more absurd than the ‘evil’ deity tempting man to do a good deed and ignore God’s hideous request.
For an example of someone who embraces catholic faith in its entirety, I give you not Tony Blair but Bill Donohue.
I wonder if some – perhaps many – people are hard-wired to believe in something, whether it is “there simply must be something more” apophatic, new-agey need, or “I need to be part of something larger than myself; I need someone to worship” desire. And the more biblical inconsistencies they are shown, the more fervently they believe.
Yes, a major factor is how they were raised as children – we call it indoctrination – but I wonder if the way their brain is wired predicts how easily – or not – they can break free once confronted with contrafactuals.
JC is power.
Being a “nice” religious (ie “spiritual”) person is a bid for power.
Being in charge of an organisation of “nice” religious (“spiritual”) people is more power.
B’s only problem is, the pope is even more powerful, and one day the latter will tell the former to Shut UP.
I reckon B thinks that as a Former (eg PM) he can say these things. He hasn’t yet realised that he has ceded power to the pope. So when the pope tells the faithful whatever (eg don’t listen to him, listen to me, ‘cos it’s me who’s Christ’s Vicar on Earth etc.) B will become a protestant. Then he will go mad. Or madder.
B wants to be seen as nice. He wants to be approved, and not by a piece of pie in the sky, sorry Pie in the sky, but by living warm breathing PEOPLE, and the most pie-ish – no, Pie-ish – person he can think of is His Holiness The Pope GBH (God Bless Him).
But he is still stupid enough to think that he can rewrite religion, just like all the other “nice” “spiritual” people whom the real Church despises.
Blair’s epitaph:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HE DID WHAT HE THOUGHT WAS RIGHT
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ GBH ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Locutus7, it may be true. There is also another problem. You start with little ignorant infants and tell them all about that nice man Bullikins who put the colours in the rainbow and made the grass nice and green and the bunny rabbits all warm and furry, and then a bit later you tell them that Bullikins is watching and feels very hurt if people are naughty, or girls, or whatever, and then a bit later still you start to teach them that Bullikins says your toes must be chopped off if you don’t wash your hair in a special way (Bullikins is just so nice) or that you will be crucified upside down if you look at a jellyfish on Wednesday (trust Bullikins to know just how you feel!) or that you will be roasted alive for ever and ever if you stop believing in Bullikins (you know, Bullikins really CARES). And there you are. Robots.
The Bible does this, of course, but the Koran does it so blatantly that I’m not surprised that the Muslims all think that their scriptures are the realio trulio sacred scribble. How dare they think anything else!?