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Here is a brief review of an old, out-of-print book by a scholar of long ago, just one of many, many great, old books I have acquired that do not deserve to be forgotten. I started these reviews because I am sure there are other bibliophiles out there who can enjoy learning from them as much as I have.
I believe that the inexpensive old books I have discovered in used book stores and library sales are, in both the subject matter itself and in how it is presented, superior to what scholars and intellectuals publish today. Old books offer a dirt cheap way to give oneself a great education. I have learned from old books so much important material that, if I read only newer books, I would hardly be aware of, if at all; material that is essential to a good education.
For instance, it was mainly not through my formal education, but through my self-education that I came to see how history is often distorted and misrepresented by people and groups who have certain social/cultural/political agendas, such as Christians responding to the new rise of atheism by claiming that atheism leads to totalitarianism and mass-slaughter as in Soviet Russia. Well, here is one book that thoroughly and comprehensively looks at Russia's path to communism - and it is a history that does not quite corroborate what the Christians like to assert about the matter.
Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, by Avrahm Yarmolinsky; Collier Books, 1971; 349 pp.
The road to Lenin’s communist Russia of 1917 actually began in 1790 when Alexander Radischev’s book, A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, was published. “While informed with the spirit of Western Enlightenment, the book [A Journey] is deeply rooted in the native soil. Never before had the seamy side of Russian life been so boldly exposed” including “that the gaudy façade of Catherine’s rule conceals a corrupt and cruelly oppressive regime” (13).
Radischev was an official in the Russian government. As a teenager he was sent to Germany to study and he eagerly absorbed the ideas of the Enlightenment‘s thinkers, especially the French philosophes. Radischev, though part of the nobility, was an egalitarian democrat who wanted the serfs emancipated and he saw industrialism as evil. He believed it was for the future generations to make his vision of Russia a reality.
It is not known why the official censor let the book slip by and be published but the consequences of his neglect were tremendous and far-reaching for his country. Radischev was sentenced to Siberia but the ideas of revolution were planted.
The explosive nature of Radischev’s book is evident by seeing the historical setting it was in, which was that of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In Russia, Catherine II “opened schools, encouraged book publishing, sponsored a periodical press, though only as long as the satire in which it indulged remained innocuous. A peasant uprising at home and the turn events were taking in France helped put an end to her flirtation with liberalism. The regime which started out as enlightened despotism ended as despotism tout court. But she could not wholly undo, what was, in part, the work of her own hands“ (18-19). After the French king was executed Catherine wanted everything French “exterminated.”
Western liberal ideas were penetrating Russia, especially in its army after the war with Napoleon. Yarmolinsky tells how in 1820 that “the French ambassador wrote that he could not think without horror of what would happen to Europe if forty million Russians, still half savage and brutalized by slavery, conceived a desire for freedom and proceeded to shake off their chains. True, the dangerous notion hadn’t yet entered the heads of the lower orders, but it was already inflaming the well-born” (31).
Secret societies began forming, mostly of military officers. These societies were born of disapproval with sundry political and military matters and were the forerunners of the later communist/anarchist terrorist and revolutionary groups.
A group of insurgent army officers who planned to overthrow the czar in December, 1825 (the “Decembrists“) composed a tract called The Orthodox Catechism. The text is vaguely reminiscent of America’s Declaration of Independence but is heavily religious and collectivist. In it all Russia’s misfortunes are attributed to its government so the authors call for the formation of a republic because that is the form of government consistent with divine law. They assert that Jesus Christ must reign on earth as he does in Heaven; and the death of the czar is a sign from God for the Russians to free themselves from their slavery. The establishing of a new government is the army’s responsibility.
At the same time, among the Russian intellectuals two schools of thought about Russia’s direction developed, the Westernists and the Slavophiles.
The Westernists thought that Russia would progress similarly as the Western Europeans had. They strongly favored institutional reform as a means of progress. Vissarion Belinsky was the most prominent of them. He called the Orthodox Church a “toady to despotism” that was “foreign to Christ, who was the first to teach mankind the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity” (72).
The Slavophiles “were romantic doctrinaires who found in German philosophy sanction for their distrust of the intellect, their religiosity, their traditionalism. They believed that Russia possessed a culture distinct from and superior to that of the West” (69). They were populists in claiming that the Russian peasantry embodied the Orthodox faith and its sense of equality and brotherhood. Slavophiles held the lofty conviction that Russia could achieve no less than her own and the world’s salvation.
Alexander Herzen, who was prominent among the revolutionaries’ thinkers, was in the Westernist camp, envisaged a secular Armageddon in Europe that would bring in a new socialist society consisting of a centralized state, order (instead of freedom), and collectivism.
Nikolay Chernyshevsky was also one of the most important thinkers among the revolutionaries. He advocated enlightened self-interest, which meant identifying one’s happiness with the happiness of all. Man is the plaything of circumstances so his society is morally responsible for what he becomes. He also loathed laissez-faire and wanted to see the people living in phalansteries similar to those dreamt of by Fourier. After the publication in 1863 of Chernyshevsky’s fictional story, What’s to be Done?, about the heroically selfless “new men” of the future communism, his influence on radicals and revolutionaries - including on Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the next century - became tremendous.
Of the many terrorist groups in Road to Revolution, one was especially fanatical: “Half a dozen of the more audacious spirits discussed at length a plan for forming a terrorist band. They called it Hell. Each member of this secrecy-shrouded body was to be a dedicated and doomed man. He had to give up his friends, his family, his personal life, his very name” (137).
Dmitry Karakozov was a youth who was considered for the group and was fascinated by the possibility of daring action and self-immolation. “The cause of the common people was his ruling passion” (138). He tried to assassinate the czar but his pistol shot missed. This episode ended in much delicious irony.
That the czar’s life was saved was taken as proof of divine favor falling on him and the Russian people believed Karakozov was an angry serf-owner seeking revenge. Even a joint resolution in the U.S. Congress congratulating the czar for surviving the assassination attempt condemned his would-be assassin as an “enemy of emancipation.” Karakozov’s comrades were arrested and while in jail he vainly wrote to the czar pleading for his life to be spared. “On 3 September, two days after the verdict had been pronounced, Karakozov was hanged by one of the peasant’s for whom he wished to lay down his life” (141).
Like many of the early groups of Russian terrorists and revolutionaries, the Karakozov episode shows how they were often amateurishly inept to the point of hilarity. Often they were more dangerous to themselves than to their intended targets, and their many attempts to “rouse the masses” to revolt simply fell flat.
Yarmolinsky’s history of Russian radicalism ends in the 1890’s with the emergence of the major Marxist political parties.
Of nearly all the Russian revolutionaries, from the intellectuals down to the terrorists, three characteristics of them are salient.
First is how they saw their revolution in religious terms.
A few brief but very interesting examples from the book are representative of the communist revolutionaries' religious mentalities. In the early 1830’s when they were university students, Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Ogarev were seduced by the ideas of French socialist thinkers Saint-Simon and Fourier (whose socialist ideas were inspired by and meant to replace Christianity). They swore on the Bible “to dedicate their lives to the people and the cause of liberty ‘upon the basis of socialism‘” by forming a secret society (67). There was Vera Figner with her “ideal of the prophets and martyrs of the socialist evangel” (180). Michael Bakunin’s followers held “a dream of freedom and equality on earth which was a substitute for a lost faith in heaven” (184). In the 1870’s were one group of revolutionary propagandists who pored over the New Testament and “dreamed of a new faith that would at once steel the intellectuals with fresh courage and enlist the religious sentiment of the masses on the side of revolution.” They believed “a revolutionary was most effective when he suffered for the cause“(187). Yarmolinsky quotes one terrorist after an assassination: “Let my blood, too, be the seed of Socialism, just as the blood of the early martyrs was the seed of the Christian Church” (257).
Secondly, just like contemporary terrorists they were fanatical nihilists who reveled in death, destruction, and martyrdom. For instance one revolutionary pamphlet stated, “We must devote ourselves wholly to destruction, constant, ceaseless, relentless, until there is nothing left of existing institutions.” And here is another especially evil quote from the terrorists’ literature: “We prize thought only in so far as it can serve the great cause of radical and ubiquitous destruction” (152). Then there is Sergey Nechayev’s infamous, The Catechism of the Revolutionary, which describes the revolutionary as a “doomed man” who has, literally, only one interest: revolution, so he can “destroy this vile order.” Some of this rhetoric, also like statements of terrorists since then, is undoubtedly hyperbolic bravado and propaganda - but it expresses some amount of profoundly held conviction, nonetheless.
Thirdly, they were second-handers, some of them abjectly so. Nechayev was a basket-case of second-handedness.
In order to be seen as a hero by his comrades he faked his imprisonment, faked his escape from his faked imprisonment, and even faked being killed by the police. “His ascetic habits - he lived on bread and milk, and slept on bare boards, at least while staying at the homes of his followers - could not but make an impression. Those he did not fascinate he ruled by fear…He arrogated to himself the right to destroy those who did not see eye to eye with him” (157).
One cell member was disobedient to Nechayev and doubted the existence of a mysterious, secret “Central Committee” Nechayev claimed he attended and would then give them orders from (he was, indeed, its only member). Nechayev and three other cell members murdered him. “For years the cry to kill the people’s enemies had repeatedly been raised by the handful of would-be liberators. The only victim turned out to be one of their own small number who had aroused the leader’s hostility” (159).
Nechayev was eventually arrested and was to be sentenced to Siberia, but his pseudo-heroics only made things worse for himself. During his sentencing he shouted, “Down with the Czar!” and “Long live the free Russian people!” and similar insults to the authorities. “As a result, the Emperor changed the court sentence to solitary incarceration for life in the Fortress of Peter and Paul” (165).
Road to Revolution is a very interesting, informative, and readable book on the Russian revolutionaries before Lenin, from their intellectual theories and religious inspirations to their bloody actions. For anyone wanting to learn about this subject, Yarmolinsky’s book is required reading. More important, considering how often Christians attempt to tie atheism, rationality, and secularism to the totalitarian bloodbath of communism, Yarmolinsky’s book is an effective (although unintended by him) debunking of that assertion. Russian communism and its horrors were, to a very large extent, clearly consequences of irrationalism and secularizing the Christian religion.
Old, Obscure, Great Books: Review No. 1
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Mar 25, 2009
Mar 11, 2009
"Jesus, Interrupted", Reviewed
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them), by Bart D. Ehrman; Harper One; 2009; 292 pp.
In any legitimate field of human study, be it physics of the material world or psychology of the mind’s world, there is something as a subject of study that can be pointed to, so to say, that is independent of the person studying it. Even if a physicist’s, or psychologist’s, or economist’s, or philosopher’s theory or idea is dead wrong there is at least something in reality we all (at least in principle, if not in actual practice) can experience, have access to, observe for ourselves, be aware of perceptually or conceptually, directly or indirectly. If so, we can see how his theory or idea is dead wrong and therefore, correct it. For example, anyone can, in principle, look to economic reality and see how the economics of Karl Marx were dead wrong. The subject matter is there to be seen and understood - or even misunderstood again, but it is there and independent of the mind. It is no profound observation to state that men will always find more to learn about the subject matter of physics, economics, psychology, etc.
There is one subject of a long and tremendous amount of “studying” to which, the above, however, does not apply. That is religion.
Go to the origins of any religion or religious concept and what one will find is the historical and cultural context of the person(s) who originated that particular religious idea. One can certainly see how it satisfied their specific religious, political, or cultural need, question, or concern of that time in that place - but of the actual religious (i.e., supernatural) being, entity, process, etc., one will find utterly and absolutely nothing in reality that the mind can be connected to or be aware of perceptually or conceptually, directly or indirectly. Nothing. One can see that it was an arbitrary assertion pulled out of thin air by the originator of some god, messiah, other-worldly realm, revelation, or whatever because it suited some need. That’s it; find an exception to this in religion’s long history. Instead of finding any subject matter that is external to the mind and in principle accessible by others there is in religion a pathetic and shabby substitute: those others who believe and act as if the religious concept is a proven fact. Their “authority” said so, so it is true. That does not place us any closer in reality to the actual subject matter of any religious idea. It only places us that many minds removed from the mind that religious idea originated in. The subject matter of religion is based solely on someone’s say-so, not anything in reality independent of his say-so.
I learned this based on much studying of religion. At first religion may be seen as having a formidable appearance to penetrate that maybe, at bottom, has something to it somehow. Afterall it has existed for so long with so many adherents and defenders. There is so much of religion all around us with so much built upon it including entire civilizations, and yet eventually I found how arbitrarily man-made it is. Religion, however dominant and far-reaching it may be, ultimately, rests on nothing in reality apart from beliefs in the minds of men. That is the nature of the subject matter of religious beliefs - they are beliefs that are not legitimately derived from reality but are applied to reality.
This taught me a principle that I have come to consider a universal “law,” which is that one will find, the more and more one studies religion, the less and less there is to religion. Perhaps we should call this “The First Law of Religion.”
The eminent biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, has an interesting and revealing new book, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) - and it substantially backs up the First Law of Religion.
Jesus, Interrupted is about Jesus, the New Testament, and the development of Christianity. What is in the book, Ehrman states, is actually nothing new - to scholars, or those who have attended a seminary, that is. There is, though, plenty in the book that would be new to the man “on the street and in the pew,” like that the Bible actually contains forgeries and most of the New Testament authors are really unknown, and that Jesus saw himself as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet, not as God’s offspring, and plenty more like that - facts that challenge the version of Christianity most people accept. Ehrman’s thesis is that the Bible is a very human book and the Christianity we have inherited is very human-made. Prof. Ehrman, who was an evangelical Christian who turned agnostic, does not, however, intend to attack the Christian faith as such. He does intend to “let the cat out of the bag” as he puts it, about what scholars, theologians, and pastors have known for two or three centuries about the Bible and early Christian history but have kept from the public for whatever reasons. What Ehrman does is show the layman how to look at the Bible from the “historic-critical” approach apart from the usual “devotional” approach and explain what scholars using the historic-critical approach have learned about the Bible.
The way to find the contradictions, discrepancies, and other problems in the Bible is to use “horizontal” reading, which Ehrman distinguishes from “vertical reading.” Vertical reading means to start reading the gospels with Matthew, reading it from beginning to end, then on to the next gospel from beginning to end, and so on. Read that way they pretty much seem alike. “In a horizontal reading you read a story in one of the gospels, and then read the same story as told by another gospel, as if they were written in columns next to each other. And you compare the stories carefully, in detail. Reading the Gospels horizontally reveals all sorts of differences and discrepancies” (21). Horizontal reading clearly shows the discrepancies between the four gospels on the matters of Jesus’ birth, his ministry, what he taught, his death, etc. that a vertical reading might overlook.
In the first third of the book Ehrman goes over the inconsistencies on the more important matters in the four gospels and Paul's writings. From this the overall lesson is that “each author of the bible needs to be allowed to have his own say, since in many instances what one author has to say on a subject is not what another says. Sometimes the differences are a matter of stress and emphasis; sometimes they are discrepancies in different narratives or between different writers’ thoughts; and sometimes these discrepancies are quite large, affecting not only the small details of the text but the very big issues that these authors were addressing” (99).The contradictions are much to an atheist’s delight and even amusement, so I shall not divulge the details here like a “spoiler.” The point is, the material is all pretty shocking and is great intellectual ammo to use against Christians - right out of their own book!
Ehrman draws three conclusions from the horizontal reading of the gospels and Paul’s letters. The first is the belief in biblical inerrancy is simply not true. Secondly, the reader should “let each author speak for himself and not pretend that he is saying the same thing as another”(60). Thirdly, that there are discrepancies means that we “can’t read these books as disinterested historical accounts. None of them is that”(60).
Ehrman moves on to biblical authorship, a subject that will be very surprising to many. “Though it is evidently not the sort of thing pastors normally tell their congregations, for over a century there has been a broad consensus among scholars that many of the books of the New Testament were not written by the people whose names are attached to them. So if that is the case, who did write them?” (102)
Most New Testament books fall into three groups. Misattributed writings is the first group, which includes the four gospels. They were actually written anonymously. Then there are homonymous writings. These have the same name on them as someone famous, but are not written by that famous person. The book of James was written by someone named James, but not James, the brother of Jesus, as the church fathers assumed. Lastly are the pseudepigraphic writings which are forgeries written under someone else’s name, like many of the letters attributed to Paul. They were written by later followers using his name and thus giving his authority to their writings.
After spending a fascinating chapter on who did and did not write the New Testament texts, Ehrman moves on to the center of it all, Jesus. This is even more fascinating and revealing. A careful analysis of what the biblical authors say about Jesus placed in the context of history at that time brings conclusions as convincing as they are startling; and that are quite different from how Christians now view Jesus. Again, this is so good that I do not want to spoil this chapter for any readers so I will only pull this quote from the chapter: “For over a century now… the majority of scholars in Europe and North America have understood Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet”(156). Based on the evidence they do not believe that Jesus saw himself as the son of God, but merely another prophet. Like Ehrman said, he’s letting the cat out of the bag - and it is one big cat.
The next cat to leap out of the bag is how the New Testament canon was formed. "The problem in the development in the canon of scripture was that each and every one of the competitive groups of Christians - each of them insisting they were right, each trying to win converts - had sacred books that authorized their points of view. And most of these books claimed to be written by apostles. Who was right? The canon that emerged from these debates represented the books favored by the group that ended up winning. It did not happen overnight. In fact, it took centuries”(191).
Ehrman surveys some of the major Christian sects and how they differed and argued with each other, and as the centuries went by the Christianity that finally won out was far removed from the original Christian beliefs. “The group that won out did not represent the teachings of Jesus or of his apostles. For example, none of the apostles claimed that Jesus was ‘fully God and fully man‘… as the fourth-century Nicene Creed maintained”(215).
Ehrman concludes the book by considering the question of how biblical scholarship may impact a believer’s faith. It is an interesting chapter and Ehrman explains the role it played in his loss of faith, which was important but not decisive. He does not see his book with its historic-critical approach as an attack on Christianity - nor he says, do many Christians. Instead, what biblical scholars have learned has given some Christians a better historical understanding of their religion. As impressed as I am with Ehrman’s knowledge and analysis of early Christianity I find that I cannot agree much with him philosophically. That Christians, be they biblical scholars (most are Christian) or their students, can retain their faith anyhow in light of what biblical criticism has revealed only demonstrates what faith really means: holding a belief despite lack of evidence and contrary to reason. Ehrman's book and others like it are, by their nature, regardless of their intent, overwhelming attacks on Christianity simply by virtue of reporting and explaining the facts and realities that Christian beliefs fly in the face of. If I were a Christian, learning what is in books like Jesus, Interrupted would end my faith. For me they would be painfully clear in explaining how man-made religion is.
Examining the Bible and early Christianity like any other area of study as done in Jesus, Interrupted shows us, as Ehrman intends to show us, they are very man-made. We have this holy book that has been of foremost importance in Western civilization, yet the original texts that comprise it are lost, the surviving texts are copies that are from centuries later and are all different; also there is the problem of forgeries and later additions and omissions to the biblical texts; much of the history in it is inaccurate; and beliefs about God, Jesus, heaven and hell, etc., are known to be very man-made. Ehrman does a great job of explaining all that and more. Jesus, Interrupted offers one a thorough look into the origins and history of the most significant Christian beliefs - and the bottom line is there is not much there, just the say-so of the religion’s originators. "The Bible is not a unity, it is a massive plurality. God did not write the Bible, people did“(279).
In any legitimate field of human study, be it physics of the material world or psychology of the mind’s world, there is something as a subject of study that can be pointed to, so to say, that is independent of the person studying it. Even if a physicist’s, or psychologist’s, or economist’s, or philosopher’s theory or idea is dead wrong there is at least something in reality we all (at least in principle, if not in actual practice) can experience, have access to, observe for ourselves, be aware of perceptually or conceptually, directly or indirectly. If so, we can see how his theory or idea is dead wrong and therefore, correct it. For example, anyone can, in principle, look to economic reality and see how the economics of Karl Marx were dead wrong. The subject matter is there to be seen and understood - or even misunderstood again, but it is there and independent of the mind. It is no profound observation to state that men will always find more to learn about the subject matter of physics, economics, psychology, etc.
There is one subject of a long and tremendous amount of “studying” to which, the above, however, does not apply. That is religion.
Go to the origins of any religion or religious concept and what one will find is the historical and cultural context of the person(s) who originated that particular religious idea. One can certainly see how it satisfied their specific religious, political, or cultural need, question, or concern of that time in that place - but of the actual religious (i.e., supernatural) being, entity, process, etc., one will find utterly and absolutely nothing in reality that the mind can be connected to or be aware of perceptually or conceptually, directly or indirectly. Nothing. One can see that it was an arbitrary assertion pulled out of thin air by the originator of some god, messiah, other-worldly realm, revelation, or whatever because it suited some need. That’s it; find an exception to this in religion’s long history. Instead of finding any subject matter that is external to the mind and in principle accessible by others there is in religion a pathetic and shabby substitute: those others who believe and act as if the religious concept is a proven fact. Their “authority” said so, so it is true. That does not place us any closer in reality to the actual subject matter of any religious idea. It only places us that many minds removed from the mind that religious idea originated in. The subject matter of religion is based solely on someone’s say-so, not anything in reality independent of his say-so.
I learned this based on much studying of religion. At first religion may be seen as having a formidable appearance to penetrate that maybe, at bottom, has something to it somehow. Afterall it has existed for so long with so many adherents and defenders. There is so much of religion all around us with so much built upon it including entire civilizations, and yet eventually I found how arbitrarily man-made it is. Religion, however dominant and far-reaching it may be, ultimately, rests on nothing in reality apart from beliefs in the minds of men. That is the nature of the subject matter of religious beliefs - they are beliefs that are not legitimately derived from reality but are applied to reality.
This taught me a principle that I have come to consider a universal “law,” which is that one will find, the more and more one studies religion, the less and less there is to religion. Perhaps we should call this “The First Law of Religion.”
The eminent biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, has an interesting and revealing new book, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) - and it substantially backs up the First Law of Religion.
Jesus, Interrupted is about Jesus, the New Testament, and the development of Christianity. What is in the book, Ehrman states, is actually nothing new - to scholars, or those who have attended a seminary, that is. There is, though, plenty in the book that would be new to the man “on the street and in the pew,” like that the Bible actually contains forgeries and most of the New Testament authors are really unknown, and that Jesus saw himself as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet, not as God’s offspring, and plenty more like that - facts that challenge the version of Christianity most people accept. Ehrman’s thesis is that the Bible is a very human book and the Christianity we have inherited is very human-made. Prof. Ehrman, who was an evangelical Christian who turned agnostic, does not, however, intend to attack the Christian faith as such. He does intend to “let the cat out of the bag” as he puts it, about what scholars, theologians, and pastors have known for two or three centuries about the Bible and early Christian history but have kept from the public for whatever reasons. What Ehrman does is show the layman how to look at the Bible from the “historic-critical” approach apart from the usual “devotional” approach and explain what scholars using the historic-critical approach have learned about the Bible.
The way to find the contradictions, discrepancies, and other problems in the Bible is to use “horizontal” reading, which Ehrman distinguishes from “vertical reading.” Vertical reading means to start reading the gospels with Matthew, reading it from beginning to end, then on to the next gospel from beginning to end, and so on. Read that way they pretty much seem alike. “In a horizontal reading you read a story in one of the gospels, and then read the same story as told by another gospel, as if they were written in columns next to each other. And you compare the stories carefully, in detail. Reading the Gospels horizontally reveals all sorts of differences and discrepancies” (21). Horizontal reading clearly shows the discrepancies between the four gospels on the matters of Jesus’ birth, his ministry, what he taught, his death, etc. that a vertical reading might overlook.
In the first third of the book Ehrman goes over the inconsistencies on the more important matters in the four gospels and Paul's writings. From this the overall lesson is that “each author of the bible needs to be allowed to have his own say, since in many instances what one author has to say on a subject is not what another says. Sometimes the differences are a matter of stress and emphasis; sometimes they are discrepancies in different narratives or between different writers’ thoughts; and sometimes these discrepancies are quite large, affecting not only the small details of the text but the very big issues that these authors were addressing” (99).The contradictions are much to an atheist’s delight and even amusement, so I shall not divulge the details here like a “spoiler.” The point is, the material is all pretty shocking and is great intellectual ammo to use against Christians - right out of their own book!
Ehrman draws three conclusions from the horizontal reading of the gospels and Paul’s letters. The first is the belief in biblical inerrancy is simply not true. Secondly, the reader should “let each author speak for himself and not pretend that he is saying the same thing as another”(60). Thirdly, that there are discrepancies means that we “can’t read these books as disinterested historical accounts. None of them is that”(60).
Ehrman moves on to biblical authorship, a subject that will be very surprising to many. “Though it is evidently not the sort of thing pastors normally tell their congregations, for over a century there has been a broad consensus among scholars that many of the books of the New Testament were not written by the people whose names are attached to them. So if that is the case, who did write them?” (102)
Most New Testament books fall into three groups. Misattributed writings is the first group, which includes the four gospels. They were actually written anonymously. Then there are homonymous writings. These have the same name on them as someone famous, but are not written by that famous person. The book of James was written by someone named James, but not James, the brother of Jesus, as the church fathers assumed. Lastly are the pseudepigraphic writings which are forgeries written under someone else’s name, like many of the letters attributed to Paul. They were written by later followers using his name and thus giving his authority to their writings.
After spending a fascinating chapter on who did and did not write the New Testament texts, Ehrman moves on to the center of it all, Jesus. This is even more fascinating and revealing. A careful analysis of what the biblical authors say about Jesus placed in the context of history at that time brings conclusions as convincing as they are startling; and that are quite different from how Christians now view Jesus. Again, this is so good that I do not want to spoil this chapter for any readers so I will only pull this quote from the chapter: “For over a century now… the majority of scholars in Europe and North America have understood Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet”(156). Based on the evidence they do not believe that Jesus saw himself as the son of God, but merely another prophet. Like Ehrman said, he’s letting the cat out of the bag - and it is one big cat.
The next cat to leap out of the bag is how the New Testament canon was formed. "The problem in the development in the canon of scripture was that each and every one of the competitive groups of Christians - each of them insisting they were right, each trying to win converts - had sacred books that authorized their points of view. And most of these books claimed to be written by apostles. Who was right? The canon that emerged from these debates represented the books favored by the group that ended up winning. It did not happen overnight. In fact, it took centuries”(191).
Ehrman surveys some of the major Christian sects and how they differed and argued with each other, and as the centuries went by the Christianity that finally won out was far removed from the original Christian beliefs. “The group that won out did not represent the teachings of Jesus or of his apostles. For example, none of the apostles claimed that Jesus was ‘fully God and fully man‘… as the fourth-century Nicene Creed maintained”(215).
Ehrman concludes the book by considering the question of how biblical scholarship may impact a believer’s faith. It is an interesting chapter and Ehrman explains the role it played in his loss of faith, which was important but not decisive. He does not see his book with its historic-critical approach as an attack on Christianity - nor he says, do many Christians. Instead, what biblical scholars have learned has given some Christians a better historical understanding of their religion. As impressed as I am with Ehrman’s knowledge and analysis of early Christianity I find that I cannot agree much with him philosophically. That Christians, be they biblical scholars (most are Christian) or their students, can retain their faith anyhow in light of what biblical criticism has revealed only demonstrates what faith really means: holding a belief despite lack of evidence and contrary to reason. Ehrman's book and others like it are, by their nature, regardless of their intent, overwhelming attacks on Christianity simply by virtue of reporting and explaining the facts and realities that Christian beliefs fly in the face of. If I were a Christian, learning what is in books like Jesus, Interrupted would end my faith. For me they would be painfully clear in explaining how man-made religion is.
Examining the Bible and early Christianity like any other area of study as done in Jesus, Interrupted shows us, as Ehrman intends to show us, they are very man-made. We have this holy book that has been of foremost importance in Western civilization, yet the original texts that comprise it are lost, the surviving texts are copies that are from centuries later and are all different; also there is the problem of forgeries and later additions and omissions to the biblical texts; much of the history in it is inaccurate; and beliefs about God, Jesus, heaven and hell, etc., are known to be very man-made. Ehrman does a great job of explaining all that and more. Jesus, Interrupted offers one a thorough look into the origins and history of the most significant Christian beliefs - and the bottom line is there is not much there, just the say-so of the religion’s originators. "The Bible is not a unity, it is a massive plurality. God did not write the Bible, people did“(279).
Jan 5, 2009
D'Souza's Absentee Answer
In the opening of Dinesh D'Souza's column, An Absentee God?, his admission of being baffled by a debating opponent caught my interest by making me admire his intellectual honesty and determination to find an answer eventually, even if I would disagree with him. As it turned out, however, D'Souza would have been better off not attempting to answer his opponent, whose position he probably helped.
In my debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens... he raised a point that I did not know how to answer... Hitchens' argument bothered me.
Here's what Hitchens said. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let's say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man's horrible condition. After all, cave-man's plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn't really care.
Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, "It's time to get involved." Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn't bother with China or Egypt or India. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere. It took another thousand years or more for this message to get to places like India and China.
Here is the thrust of Hitchens' point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?
Suddenly savage man gives way to historical man. Suddenly the naked ape gets his act together. We see civilizations sprouting in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and elsewhere. Suddenly there are wheels and agriculture and art and culture. Soon we have dramatic plays and philosophy and an explosion of inventions and novel forms of government and social organization.
So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this but no one has offered a persuasive account. If we compare man's trajectory on earth to an airplane, we see a long, long stretch of the airplane faltering on the ground, and then suddenly, a few thousand years ago, takeoff!
Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being or force reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.
So paradoxically Hitchens' argument becomes a boomerang. Hitchens has raised a problem that atheism cannot easily explain and one that seems better accounted for by biblical account of creation.
Excuse me? If atheism cannot easily explain something - man's recent progress - then the Bible easily explains it? That is a convincing answer? Perhaps for a Christian who reasons in circles, not for an atheist, though. The simplicity of "God caused it" is not a persuasive account, just an easy, imaginary answer.
Actually, D'Souza does not answer Hitchens question, but does answer a question that Hitchens did not ask.The question was not, why was there no progress for so long in mankind's span on earth? That, D'Souza answered. Nor was it, what happened when and after God finally intervened? D'Souza answered that also. The question, however, was why did God wait so long to intervene in man's life on earth and only in ancient Israel? That, D'Souza has not offered any answer to. One can say at its best D'Souza's answer is a lame excuse for God's intervention when it was - that only a small fraction of men missed out on it, but in the larger picture it was for the good of the greater amount of men - whatever the reason was for it not happening sooner.
What D'Souza thinks is an answer is flawed, anyhow.
Hitchens often asks this question and uses the 100,000 year figure of man's existence as a minimum that anybody has to accept, based on the science. This excludes the science-rejecting Biblical literalists who claim the earth itself is only 5,000 or so years old. Hitchens actually accepts the science that man has been around for much, much longer than 100,000 years. So what happens to D'Souza and Kreps' arithmetic based on science that man has been around for 500,000 years, say? Then how do they explain God's timing?
If they can say God's timing was nearly "perfect," with two percent of all men missing out on it, can D'Souza also claim with consistency that an intelligent designer made the universe? If He made a universe of fine-tuned, irreducible complexity, that same intelligent designer's intervention in man's existence failed by two percent. Two percent should fall well outside the quality specifications tolerance of such a supremely intelligent designer.
Furthermore, D'Souza does not answer Hitchens as to why God allowed 1,000 years to pass before His Word spread across the earth after Its arrival.
Man suddenly developing knowledge is a "historical miracle"? If a miracle is a violation of natural law, how does the correct use of the human mind qualify as one? "Because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software." (Never mind the dearth of knowledge in subsequent religious societies.) D'Souza offers that non-answer to Hitchens' question of "what kind of a bizarre God acts like this?" If anything, he elaborates on it! By D'Souza's admission, 98% of human existence passed by on a primitive level before God intervenes with the gift of knowledge. (Wait - isn't there a story about God and a forbidden tree?)
What D'Souza's "answer" consists of is merely recasting Hitchens' very question as a statement, albeit in Christian terms: "it is a miracle according to the biblical account of creation," and he is satisfied that he refuted Hitchens.
D'Souza and Kreps think they nailed Hitchens: "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population." Besides the fact that biblical scholarship has proved that the records of God's relationship with man are indeed unreliable despite God's intention, why would an omnipotent, omniscient, intelligent designer allow His intervention into man's existence and its timing be dependent on man's circumstances? If He is responsible for the sudden surge in man's knowledge at this specific point in time, He could have made that happen sooner, like at the beginning of man's existence. Is that expecting too much from a fine-tuning, intelligent designer? Why would He do otherwise - which is what Hitchens' was asking!
Hitchens is not the one who threw a boomerang at himself, D'Souza.
In my debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens... he raised a point that I did not know how to answer... Hitchens' argument bothered me.
Here's what Hitchens said. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let's say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man's horrible condition. After all, cave-man's plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn't really care.
Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, "It's time to get involved." Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn't bother with China or Egypt or India. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere. It took another thousand years or more for this message to get to places like India and China.
Here is the thrust of Hitchens' point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?
*********************
[Erik] Kreps noters [sic] that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born in the 100,000 years before Christ came to earth.
"So in a sense," Kreps notes, "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population, so even though 98 percent of humanity's timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption."
*********************Suddenly savage man gives way to historical man. Suddenly the naked ape gets his act together. We see civilizations sprouting in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and elsewhere. Suddenly there are wheels and agriculture and art and culture. Soon we have dramatic plays and philosophy and an explosion of inventions and novel forms of government and social organization.
So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this but no one has offered a persuasive account. If we compare man's trajectory on earth to an airplane, we see a long, long stretch of the airplane faltering on the ground, and then suddenly, a few thousand years ago, takeoff!
Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being or force reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.
So paradoxically Hitchens' argument becomes a boomerang. Hitchens has raised a problem that atheism cannot easily explain and one that seems better accounted for by biblical account of creation.
Excuse me? If atheism cannot easily explain something - man's recent progress - then the Bible easily explains it? That is a convincing answer? Perhaps for a Christian who reasons in circles, not for an atheist, though. The simplicity of "God caused it" is not a persuasive account, just an easy, imaginary answer.
Actually, D'Souza does not answer Hitchens question, but does answer a question that Hitchens did not ask.The question was not, why was there no progress for so long in mankind's span on earth? That, D'Souza answered. Nor was it, what happened when and after God finally intervened? D'Souza answered that also. The question, however, was why did God wait so long to intervene in man's life on earth and only in ancient Israel? That, D'Souza has not offered any answer to. One can say at its best D'Souza's answer is a lame excuse for God's intervention when it was - that only a small fraction of men missed out on it, but in the larger picture it was for the good of the greater amount of men - whatever the reason was for it not happening sooner.
What D'Souza thinks is an answer is flawed, anyhow.
Hitchens often asks this question and uses the 100,000 year figure of man's existence as a minimum that anybody has to accept, based on the science. This excludes the science-rejecting Biblical literalists who claim the earth itself is only 5,000 or so years old. Hitchens actually accepts the science that man has been around for much, much longer than 100,000 years. So what happens to D'Souza and Kreps' arithmetic based on science that man has been around for 500,000 years, say? Then how do they explain God's timing?
If they can say God's timing was nearly "perfect," with two percent of all men missing out on it, can D'Souza also claim with consistency that an intelligent designer made the universe? If He made a universe of fine-tuned, irreducible complexity, that same intelligent designer's intervention in man's existence failed by two percent. Two percent should fall well outside the quality specifications tolerance of such a supremely intelligent designer.
Furthermore, D'Souza does not answer Hitchens as to why God allowed 1,000 years to pass before His Word spread across the earth after Its arrival.
Man suddenly developing knowledge is a "historical miracle"? If a miracle is a violation of natural law, how does the correct use of the human mind qualify as one? "Because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software." (Never mind the dearth of knowledge in subsequent religious societies.) D'Souza offers that non-answer to Hitchens' question of "what kind of a bizarre God acts like this?" If anything, he elaborates on it! By D'Souza's admission, 98% of human existence passed by on a primitive level before God intervenes with the gift of knowledge. (Wait - isn't there a story about God and a forbidden tree?)
What D'Souza's "answer" consists of is merely recasting Hitchens' very question as a statement, albeit in Christian terms: "it is a miracle according to the biblical account of creation," and he is satisfied that he refuted Hitchens.
D'Souza and Kreps think they nailed Hitchens: "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population." Besides the fact that biblical scholarship has proved that the records of God's relationship with man are indeed unreliable despite God's intention, why would an omnipotent, omniscient, intelligent designer allow His intervention into man's existence and its timing be dependent on man's circumstances? If He is responsible for the sudden surge in man's knowledge at this specific point in time, He could have made that happen sooner, like at the beginning of man's existence. Is that expecting too much from a fine-tuning, intelligent designer? Why would He do otherwise - which is what Hitchens' was asking!
Hitchens is not the one who threw a boomerang at himself, D'Souza.
How Science Emerged In a World of Faith: Reviewing "The Scientists"
The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of its Greatest Inventors, by John Gribbin (Random House, NY, 2006)
How science began is fascinating and there is much to learn from it - much more than just the science, there is the struggle, conflict, drama, danger, failure, triumph, and heroism that are inherent in the scientific pursuit - especially so in its originating struggle in a deeply religious, ignorant, superstitious, dictatorial, medieval Christendom. A very interesting and enlightening account of this history is in John Gribbin's book, The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greates Inventors,
Gribbin begins his history of the scientists in the medieval period and goes up through to contemporary science. It is a book for the educated layman, but having a decent background in history and philosophy is a great asset to bring to one's reading of this book as that sheds more relevant light on this subject than what happens to be within the author’s scope.
When science began it was not merely new knowledge; it was a new way of thinking and observing the world, indeed, a revolutionary way of thinking and observing. We take it for granted. At one time it was so revolutionary that it was dangerous for the early scientists because this new thinking led to discoveries threatening to the Church's version of the universe. A salient point I learned from reading Gribbin's dramatic history is that science had to be established from scratch by itself in an intellectual climate of a contrary nature. Like a frail infant, early science could have perished through its own weaknesses and feeble health - or it could have easily been killed by its stronger, experienced enemies, namely tradition, theology, or the Papacy. Fortunately, it managed to not succumb to either. If the scientists somehow failed then, medieval Christendom could have lasted far longer than it did. There lies the exciting drama of the history of science: so much was at stake. The discovery and use of scientific thinking took much time and application for the sciences as we now recognize them to be first of all, defined, and secondly, to be so situated as to be able to progress. The ceaseless labor of some scientists pointed the way forward into new areas to be discovered by their successors - without any guarantee that they would venture in those directions.
Furthermore, as Gribbin takes his reader to the initial understandings of vast areas of the natural world newly opened by a then-different method of thinking, the questions force themselves upon the reader as they more intensely must have upon the scientists: how to proceed successfully?; to what will this lead?; can it even be done at all?
All that we now possess of science and technology and take for granted - this was not inevitably to be ours; it could have been otherwise.
What the medievals believed about the world and the universe was preposterous, to be blunt. The earth was centered and encased in a large invisible sphere with the stars suspended from its ceiling and the planets were pushed around by angels. They seriously believed it. Why? It made perfect theological sense based on The Bible, of course.
Some brief examples from astronomy's development especially illustrate the revolutionary and struggling nature of scientific thinking.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was an example of the mix between the dominant mysticism and the nascent science. He believed the heretical view that the earth revolved around the sun, but in a manner that was neat and tidy, or, "perfectly." Copernicus "wanted a model in which everything moved around a single centre at an unvarying rate, and he wanted this for aesthetic reasons (11)." Planetary rotations of perfect circles around the sun do not exist, but he wanted them to in conformity with theology, so he fit his data and their explanations into that model.
Martin Luther, his contemporary, was quite upset with this new thinking. He "objected to the Copernican model, thundering that the Bible tells us that it was the Sun, not the earth, that Joshua commanded to stand still (13)."
After Copernicus came Tycho Brahe. He took on the decades-long task of observing the planets to correct the tables of planetary motions. His discovery of a supernova was the beginning of the end of the theological dogma that the heavens are eternally perfect. Tycho was "the first astronomer to imagine the planets hanging unsupported in empty space (46)."
The first true scientist was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who wrote, "In disputes about natural phenomena one must not begin with the authority of scriptural passages, but with sensory experience and necessary demonstrations (92)." In the end, he was placed under house arrest by the Inquisition for his heretical teachings that the sun is the center of the solar system.
Besides the heavens being totally misunderstood so was man's body and the earth under his feet. Inquiry and understanding of the physical world was virtually nil, as shown by the examples of the birth of two other areas of science.
Until the Renaissance, the accepted authority on human anatomy was Galen (Claudius Galenus) from the 2nd century. "Galen's work was regarded as the last word in human anatomy until well into the sixteenth century," (p.21). Andraes Vesalius (1514-1564), was the scientist who concluded that Galen must have done little dissecting of humans, and was therefore very wrong about human anatomy, so Vesalius took the initiative and produced an accurate book on the human anatomy, the Fabrica. In it, Gribbin writes, Vesalius "stressed the importance of accepting the evidence of your own eyes, rather than believing implicitly the words handed down from past generations - the ancients were not infallible." (25)
A contemporary of Vesalius was William Gilbert. After concluding that alchemy was a fantasy, Gilbert began studying magnetism and electricity, and like the instance of Vesalius and anatomy, this was "a feature of the world which had remained essentially neglected since the investigations (or rather, speculations) of the Greek philosophers some 2000 years earlier. (69)"
Fourteen centuries passed before man seriously studied his own anatomy; and even longer until magnetism and electricity were studied. They were known to exist but were not understood - other than superficially and superstitiously; that was sufficient in Christendom.
Scientists were not immune to making the error of accepting assertions based on authority, be it theological, the ancients - or one of their own even. Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a mathematician, scientist and philosopher, could not bear the thought of a vacuum and argued against it. His influence was so strong that the further investigations into the nature of the vacuum ceased for about a century.
What Gribbin captures for his reader about the first few centuries of science's development is a two-fold joy and thrill. It is the joy and thrill of discovering something about nature for the very first time and realizing that right there is a valuable new path to travel upward. Secondly, it is also the joy and thrill of also discovering for the first time how the human mind can know reality, that its cognitive ability is metaphysically efficacious. The implication is that man need not tremble before an unknowable universe, nor be forever enslaved to the authority of other men; but that he is in a knowable universe that he can master and the proper use of his mind creates his independence, which is his proper, natural state.
The scientists in the course of their pursuits were to varying degrees burdened with unscientific thinking that retarded their scientific progress. The scientist’s mind, insofar as it was scientific, (it was also partly a product of the dominant non-scientific mentality) was dramatically different than the prevailing mentality and psychology. Pseudo-science, religious dogma, superstitious psychology and beliefs were everywhere. Developing, refining, and integrating the proper inductive, scientific methods had to be discovered in the face of various obstacles and even opposition - and it took centuries. It was a change of mind for an entire civilization that began with a few brave, independent, intensely curious individual minds.
The type of thinking the early scientists did, in its immaturity, that produced its first results was demonstrably far superior to the dominant alternative type of thinking based on mysticism, appeal to scripture, religious authority, and its false, groundless assertions about the nature of the world. The religious response against the scientists was all assertions, rationalizations, arrogant intimidation - and no substance. (Its essence has not changed, incidentally. Although what it claims as its special knowledge has been reduced proportionally to science's growth.) The religious way of "knowing" would be hysterically laughable were it not so destructive.
The most salient lesson from The Scientists that remains relevant is of the actual interplay of reason and faith, that they are fundamentally incompatible. They were so in science's beginnings and remain so today in the "intelligent design" and evolution controversies.
Another striking lesson to apply from Gribbin's book is how the Islamic world is still in the philosophical and psychological state that medieval Christendom was in. There are few indications that Islam will go through any Renaissance or Enlightenment soon, however. Muslims certainly want the products of the types of minds that made the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution - without changing to that type of mind, retaining their backwards, religious-type minds and ways.
Also, the West, especially America, is experiencing a resurgence of religion. How this will play out remains to be seen, but as long as science is at its best - without seriously flawed premises and methods - it will again soundly defeat religion.
All the technology we now have and take for granted springs ultimately from the efforts of the minds of a relatively small handful of men who, daring to think differently from their social environment of arrogant and ignorant Christian superstitions, desired to discover and know the nature of this universe mankind is in and put that knowledge to practical use, thereby elevating the quality of man’s life.
The least we could do for the scientists is understand their struggles and their triumphs - and give them a silent, solemn “thank you.”
How science began is fascinating and there is much to learn from it - much more than just the science, there is the struggle, conflict, drama, danger, failure, triumph, and heroism that are inherent in the scientific pursuit - especially so in its originating struggle in a deeply religious, ignorant, superstitious, dictatorial, medieval Christendom. A very interesting and enlightening account of this history is in John Gribbin's book, The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greates Inventors,
Gribbin begins his history of the scientists in the medieval period and goes up through to contemporary science. It is a book for the educated layman, but having a decent background in history and philosophy is a great asset to bring to one's reading of this book as that sheds more relevant light on this subject than what happens to be within the author’s scope.
When science began it was not merely new knowledge; it was a new way of thinking and observing the world, indeed, a revolutionary way of thinking and observing. We take it for granted. At one time it was so revolutionary that it was dangerous for the early scientists because this new thinking led to discoveries threatening to the Church's version of the universe. A salient point I learned from reading Gribbin's dramatic history is that science had to be established from scratch by itself in an intellectual climate of a contrary nature. Like a frail infant, early science could have perished through its own weaknesses and feeble health - or it could have easily been killed by its stronger, experienced enemies, namely tradition, theology, or the Papacy. Fortunately, it managed to not succumb to either. If the scientists somehow failed then, medieval Christendom could have lasted far longer than it did. There lies the exciting drama of the history of science: so much was at stake. The discovery and use of scientific thinking took much time and application for the sciences as we now recognize them to be first of all, defined, and secondly, to be so situated as to be able to progress. The ceaseless labor of some scientists pointed the way forward into new areas to be discovered by their successors - without any guarantee that they would venture in those directions.
Furthermore, as Gribbin takes his reader to the initial understandings of vast areas of the natural world newly opened by a then-different method of thinking, the questions force themselves upon the reader as they more intensely must have upon the scientists: how to proceed successfully?; to what will this lead?; can it even be done at all?
All that we now possess of science and technology and take for granted - this was not inevitably to be ours; it could have been otherwise.
What the medievals believed about the world and the universe was preposterous, to be blunt. The earth was centered and encased in a large invisible sphere with the stars suspended from its ceiling and the planets were pushed around by angels. They seriously believed it. Why? It made perfect theological sense based on The Bible, of course.
Some brief examples from astronomy's development especially illustrate the revolutionary and struggling nature of scientific thinking.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was an example of the mix between the dominant mysticism and the nascent science. He believed the heretical view that the earth revolved around the sun, but in a manner that was neat and tidy, or, "perfectly." Copernicus "wanted a model in which everything moved around a single centre at an unvarying rate, and he wanted this for aesthetic reasons (11)." Planetary rotations of perfect circles around the sun do not exist, but he wanted them to in conformity with theology, so he fit his data and their explanations into that model.
Martin Luther, his contemporary, was quite upset with this new thinking. He "objected to the Copernican model, thundering that the Bible tells us that it was the Sun, not the earth, that Joshua commanded to stand still (13)."
After Copernicus came Tycho Brahe. He took on the decades-long task of observing the planets to correct the tables of planetary motions. His discovery of a supernova was the beginning of the end of the theological dogma that the heavens are eternally perfect. Tycho was "the first astronomer to imagine the planets hanging unsupported in empty space (46)."
The first true scientist was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who wrote, "In disputes about natural phenomena one must not begin with the authority of scriptural passages, but with sensory experience and necessary demonstrations (92)." In the end, he was placed under house arrest by the Inquisition for his heretical teachings that the sun is the center of the solar system.
Besides the heavens being totally misunderstood so was man's body and the earth under his feet. Inquiry and understanding of the physical world was virtually nil, as shown by the examples of the birth of two other areas of science.
Until the Renaissance, the accepted authority on human anatomy was Galen (Claudius Galenus) from the 2nd century. "Galen's work was regarded as the last word in human anatomy until well into the sixteenth century," (p.21). Andraes Vesalius (1514-1564), was the scientist who concluded that Galen must have done little dissecting of humans, and was therefore very wrong about human anatomy, so Vesalius took the initiative and produced an accurate book on the human anatomy, the Fabrica. In it, Gribbin writes, Vesalius "stressed the importance of accepting the evidence of your own eyes, rather than believing implicitly the words handed down from past generations - the ancients were not infallible." (25)
A contemporary of Vesalius was William Gilbert. After concluding that alchemy was a fantasy, Gilbert began studying magnetism and electricity, and like the instance of Vesalius and anatomy, this was "a feature of the world which had remained essentially neglected since the investigations (or rather, speculations) of the Greek philosophers some 2000 years earlier. (69)"
Fourteen centuries passed before man seriously studied his own anatomy; and even longer until magnetism and electricity were studied. They were known to exist but were not understood - other than superficially and superstitiously; that was sufficient in Christendom.
Scientists were not immune to making the error of accepting assertions based on authority, be it theological, the ancients - or one of their own even. Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a mathematician, scientist and philosopher, could not bear the thought of a vacuum and argued against it. His influence was so strong that the further investigations into the nature of the vacuum ceased for about a century.
What Gribbin captures for his reader about the first few centuries of science's development is a two-fold joy and thrill. It is the joy and thrill of discovering something about nature for the very first time and realizing that right there is a valuable new path to travel upward. Secondly, it is also the joy and thrill of also discovering for the first time how the human mind can know reality, that its cognitive ability is metaphysically efficacious. The implication is that man need not tremble before an unknowable universe, nor be forever enslaved to the authority of other men; but that he is in a knowable universe that he can master and the proper use of his mind creates his independence, which is his proper, natural state.
The scientists in the course of their pursuits were to varying degrees burdened with unscientific thinking that retarded their scientific progress. The scientist’s mind, insofar as it was scientific, (it was also partly a product of the dominant non-scientific mentality) was dramatically different than the prevailing mentality and psychology. Pseudo-science, religious dogma, superstitious psychology and beliefs were everywhere. Developing, refining, and integrating the proper inductive, scientific methods had to be discovered in the face of various obstacles and even opposition - and it took centuries. It was a change of mind for an entire civilization that began with a few brave, independent, intensely curious individual minds.
The type of thinking the early scientists did, in its immaturity, that produced its first results was demonstrably far superior to the dominant alternative type of thinking based on mysticism, appeal to scripture, religious authority, and its false, groundless assertions about the nature of the world. The religious response against the scientists was all assertions, rationalizations, arrogant intimidation - and no substance. (Its essence has not changed, incidentally. Although what it claims as its special knowledge has been reduced proportionally to science's growth.) The religious way of "knowing" would be hysterically laughable were it not so destructive.
The most salient lesson from The Scientists that remains relevant is of the actual interplay of reason and faith, that they are fundamentally incompatible. They were so in science's beginnings and remain so today in the "intelligent design" and evolution controversies.
Another striking lesson to apply from Gribbin's book is how the Islamic world is still in the philosophical and psychological state that medieval Christendom was in. There are few indications that Islam will go through any Renaissance or Enlightenment soon, however. Muslims certainly want the products of the types of minds that made the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution - without changing to that type of mind, retaining their backwards, religious-type minds and ways.
Also, the West, especially America, is experiencing a resurgence of religion. How this will play out remains to be seen, but as long as science is at its best - without seriously flawed premises and methods - it will again soundly defeat religion.
All the technology we now have and take for granted springs ultimately from the efforts of the minds of a relatively small handful of men who, daring to think differently from their social environment of arrogant and ignorant Christian superstitions, desired to discover and know the nature of this universe mankind is in and put that knowledge to practical use, thereby elevating the quality of man’s life.
The least we could do for the scientists is understand their struggles and their triumphs - and give them a silent, solemn “thank you.”
An Atheist Challenge to Theists
Long ago, Dionysius of Halicarnassus said “history is philosophy teaching by examples.” So what are some important lessons for us to learn?
In the 21st century we can look back on man’s history and how he thought and lived; how he has used his mind and to what ends. We can study the history of man’s mind to find out what ways of thinking and what systems of ideas cause what kinds of effects for man’s life on this earth.
Historically, we can identify essential societal and political essentials for man’s flourishing, like individual political freedom, material and economic prosperity, growing scientific and general knowledge, peace, freedom, and progress. They are necessarily good for man. Can they be caused by any type of mentality with any type of world-view? - and not just some of those components, but all? For human life to be at its best those are its requirements.
Religion has had more than enough time and chances to prove how wonderful and good it claims itself to be for our lives. It has, instead, time and again proved how false and destructive it is - and we, today, have not learned that.
How come all the countless predominantly religious societies, cultures, civilizations lack individual political freedom, material and economic prosperity, growing scientific and general knowledge, peace, freedom, and progress? Predominantly religious civilizations are characterized by backwardness, poverty, ignorance, superstition, collectivism, dictatorship, war - the exact opposite of what the nature of man’s life on earth requires; or, exactly what destroys man's life. Religion is competent at perpetuating - for millennia - those destroyers of man’s life.
If theists have been, for millennia and the world over, living according to what God wants them to do and be, why were all their civilizations disasters unsuitable to man's existence?
The major historical periods that have brought those necessary essentials for man’s life and progress held in common one common characteristic: they were based on independent, reality-oriented, rational minds. These historical periods were of classical Greece, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Each period was brief in the overall course of history, lasting a few centuries at most, and yet these brief time frames brought about rapid growth in knowledge of the world and of man himself. Indeed, the concept "progress" as we understand it did not even exist until the height of the 18th century Enlightenment. Before then under all the centuries of rule by Christianity there was no way for man to form the concept of "progress."
Sudden, dramatic leaps forward in knowledge, of opening new areas of knowledge, and of making progress by applying that knowledge are the historical exception to man’s stagnating under religion (and its usual corollaries: tribalism or collectivism). To the extent he frees himself from religion and thinks for himself, these exceptional periods show how much potential man has.
Theists have a vision of their religious utopia on earth that, at least, does not much tolerate ideas and ways of infidels, secularists, and atheists to have any influence. Yet, with so much history behind us, based on what historical examples do theists think they can have their religious utopia on earth and simultaneously have the necessary essentials of a proper human civilization: individual political freedom, material and economic prosperity, growing scientific and general knowledge, peace, freedom, progress? Where and when has faith, theocracy, dogma, created a society that was not a disaster, but a wonderful place for humans to live in, a religious paradise?
Show us.
I say you cannot because the religious mentality and philosophy are destructive because they are contrary to what man’s life on earth requires. (Disaster likewise results even when your religious ideas are secularized as 20th century socialism and communism demonstrated. For elaboration see this post.) Historical examples are settled and done, detached from current controversies so I challenge theists to answer these questions:
1.When has religion proved science to be wrong?
2.When has science’s conformity to religious dogmas regarding nature and man caused science to be fruitful and forward-moving?
3.When has faith caused a growing body of knowledge?
4.When has a country’s consistent and total adherence to and enforcement of religious dogma caused peace domestically? Internationally?
5.When has obedience to religious commands, rules, and practices caused material and economic prosperity?
6.When has a totally religious society been moral?
7.When has theocracy been compatible with liberty?
8.When have - assuming they could be answered positively - nos.1-7 existed together at one time in one society/country/civilization?
If theism is true then the proof must be in its results - likewise if it is false. Considering theism’s millennia-long domination of societies and civilizations, assessing it for its truth or falsity is sensible because so much - indeed, everything - is at stake. If theism can make for a proper and successful life on earth for man, then so be it. Then theist arguments have at least that much merit and are to be seriously considered.
This atheist thinks it is time for theists to prove - a reasonable, minimal expectation in the 21st century - that their vision of a society dominated by God and religion is an objectively good option for us. If not, then it is time for them to quietly go away once and for all, letting the rest of us pursue learning how to make the best of living on earth and achieving it.
In the 21st century we can look back on man’s history and how he thought and lived; how he has used his mind and to what ends. We can study the history of man’s mind to find out what ways of thinking and what systems of ideas cause what kinds of effects for man’s life on this earth.
Historically, we can identify essential societal and political essentials for man’s flourishing, like individual political freedom, material and economic prosperity, growing scientific and general knowledge, peace, freedom, and progress. They are necessarily good for man. Can they be caused by any type of mentality with any type of world-view? - and not just some of those components, but all? For human life to be at its best those are its requirements.
Religion has had more than enough time and chances to prove how wonderful and good it claims itself to be for our lives. It has, instead, time and again proved how false and destructive it is - and we, today, have not learned that.
How come all the countless predominantly religious societies, cultures, civilizations lack individual political freedom, material and economic prosperity, growing scientific and general knowledge, peace, freedom, and progress? Predominantly religious civilizations are characterized by backwardness, poverty, ignorance, superstition, collectivism, dictatorship, war - the exact opposite of what the nature of man’s life on earth requires; or, exactly what destroys man's life. Religion is competent at perpetuating - for millennia - those destroyers of man’s life.
If theists have been, for millennia and the world over, living according to what God wants them to do and be, why were all their civilizations disasters unsuitable to man's existence?
The major historical periods that have brought those necessary essentials for man’s life and progress held in common one common characteristic: they were based on independent, reality-oriented, rational minds. These historical periods were of classical Greece, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Each period was brief in the overall course of history, lasting a few centuries at most, and yet these brief time frames brought about rapid growth in knowledge of the world and of man himself. Indeed, the concept "progress" as we understand it did not even exist until the height of the 18th century Enlightenment. Before then under all the centuries of rule by Christianity there was no way for man to form the concept of "progress."
Sudden, dramatic leaps forward in knowledge, of opening new areas of knowledge, and of making progress by applying that knowledge are the historical exception to man’s stagnating under religion (and its usual corollaries: tribalism or collectivism). To the extent he frees himself from religion and thinks for himself, these exceptional periods show how much potential man has.
Theists have a vision of their religious utopia on earth that, at least, does not much tolerate ideas and ways of infidels, secularists, and atheists to have any influence. Yet, with so much history behind us, based on what historical examples do theists think they can have their religious utopia on earth and simultaneously have the necessary essentials of a proper human civilization: individual political freedom, material and economic prosperity, growing scientific and general knowledge, peace, freedom, progress? Where and when has faith, theocracy, dogma, created a society that was not a disaster, but a wonderful place for humans to live in, a religious paradise?
Show us.
I say you cannot because the religious mentality and philosophy are destructive because they are contrary to what man’s life on earth requires. (Disaster likewise results even when your religious ideas are secularized as 20th century socialism and communism demonstrated. For elaboration see this post.) Historical examples are settled and done, detached from current controversies so I challenge theists to answer these questions:
1.When has religion proved science to be wrong?
2.When has science’s conformity to religious dogmas regarding nature and man caused science to be fruitful and forward-moving?
3.When has faith caused a growing body of knowledge?
4.When has a country’s consistent and total adherence to and enforcement of religious dogma caused peace domestically? Internationally?
5.When has obedience to religious commands, rules, and practices caused material and economic prosperity?
6.When has a totally religious society been moral?
7.When has theocracy been compatible with liberty?
8.When have - assuming they could be answered positively - nos.1-7 existed together at one time in one society/country/civilization?
If theism is true then the proof must be in its results - likewise if it is false. Considering theism’s millennia-long domination of societies and civilizations, assessing it for its truth or falsity is sensible because so much - indeed, everything - is at stake. If theism can make for a proper and successful life on earth for man, then so be it. Then theist arguments have at least that much merit and are to be seriously considered.
This atheist thinks it is time for theists to prove - a reasonable, minimal expectation in the 21st century - that their vision of a society dominated by God and religion is an objectively good option for us. If not, then it is time for them to quietly go away once and for all, letting the rest of us pursue learning how to make the best of living on earth and achieving it.
Communism Was Not Secularism
Secularism's future will likely consist of a long intellectual and cultural battle until it wins the day at last. One major intellectual battle waiting to be fought is for the real secularists to repair the bad reputation their cause has. We are told how the 20th century was one of secularism that inevitably led to totalitarianism, warfare, gulags, genocide, and pogroms. Much of the bad reputation derives therefrom. Blaming secularism for those horrors is misplacing the blame, though. Anti-secularists fail to see under the surface of allegedly “secular” totalitarianism. Beneath that surface is religion. From this review of "Comrades" by Robert Service:
"But Hitchens makes the excellent point that Stalin was able to, indeed set out to, exploit the massive reservoir of credulity created by centuries of tsarist rule and sullen acquiescence to the Russian Orthodox Church, when he says: "Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it."
British historian Robert Service, in Comrades: a world history of communism, goes further. For Service, communism is a religion, a "secular credo" complete with millenarian overtones (apocalypse followed by paradise), an emphasis on scriptural exegesis (each communist party "was a synod of hair-splitting political discussion") and a theory of historical inevitability that looks suspiciously like a doctrine of predestination. Marx and Engels, Service suggests, enthusiastically encouraged devotion, with the consequence that they were "treated as prophets whose every word had to be treasured".
They were "infallible progenitors of an omniscient world view" and "remained unconsciously influenced by religious ideas about the perfect future society and the salvation of humanity".
To suggest that communism is religious in character is not an original point but it is a hugely important one, for it gives the lie to the view that communism, for all its attendant evils and failures, was essentially a rational experiment that the human race was bound to make - that it grew out of the Enlightenment, as opposed to fascism and Nazism, both of which were deeply irrational."
Hitchens is correct as far as he goes about the Russians' credulity; credulity that is found in any backwards, predominantly religious country. Under the tsars and Orthodox Church, Moscow was asserted to be the "Third Rome" and "Holy Russia's" destiny was nothing less than redeeming mankind. That was the self-image of a country where most people lived under the harsh, impoverished, quasi-communistic system of serfdom until well into the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, Western Europe progressed quickly with its Renaissance, scientific revolution, and Enlightenment, none of which substantially penetrated Russia - Russian intellectuals were against Western thought.
Looking back at the big-picture, it is therefore bizarre that Karl Marx believed Russia would be among the last nations to become communist - there must be fully industrialized capitalism before there is communism, he believed. (Later on Russian communists got Marx to make an official doctrinal exception for their country.)
Communism took its deepest roots where religion was especially strong: countries like Russia (as well as other eastern European countries).
Some communist countries, especially Russia, went headlong toward massive-scale modernizing and industrializing; modernizing and industrializing they did not learn first-hand how to create but rather begged, copied, and stole from those who did learn them first-hand. These were countries that were historically dominated by religious and tribal beliefs of mysticism, millenariaism, self-sacrifice, collectivism, conformity, and authoritarianism. They were impoverished, backwards, and stagnant. They did not grow themselves into an intellectual and cultural period of reason and science, such as western Europe's scientific revolution and Enlightenment, which led to rational, scientific, independent-minds; increasing knowledge of man and the world; progress; and liberty. In comparison, and not so incidentally, those countries that originated and/or were most influenced by the secularism of scientific revolution and Enlightenment (e.g., Great Britian, France, Holland, America) were much less vulnerable to the influence and spread of communism.
The Russian people were living for centuries under religious-induced collectivism, mysticism, ignorance, authoritarianism, and millenarian expectations, and suddenly had their religion taken away and replaced with Marxist-Leninist communism. What was not taken away, however, were those ideas and mindsets that were integral to their religion. Only those ideas' contents and contexts were changed from religious to secular. No more was Holy Russia going to redeem mankind and messianically usher in the millennium of a reign of heaven on earth. Instead, the proletariat was the messianic force that would overthrow the existing order and usher in a workers' paradise. And more: with that substitution these people obtained possession of the products of reason and science without being rational and scientific. They kept their collective, messianic mission of transforming the world, a religious, pre-modern mission they can undertake armed with modern weapons produced by modern industry. That backwards people with a strong tradition of religious superstition would go about executing their "mission" by grabbing absolute power and committing wholesale bloodshed should not be surprising. As 20th century communism's history demonstrated, the Marxist methodology of "dialectical materialist" thinking and its alleged ability to create a "scientific" socialism were as delusional and as destructive as relying on religious mystical revelation or theology as a method for creating a society.
How is secularism to blame for the horrors of communism, and religion is not only off the hook, but touted as the antidote?
That is why secular offshoots of religion should be opposed and distinguished from real secularism. Understanding what is good for human life on this earth and what that requires necessarily means using reason as the means to that end; resorting to mysticism as a method of knowing precludes any characterization of that endeavor as "secular." It becomes religious. Likewise does introducing into secularism's inquiry a concept, or ideas that cannot be derived from rationally understanding the world, like the idea of, say, "messianism." It comes from religion. That idea, however, even if given secular content or context remains a religious idea.
Robert Service's analysis of Marxism is dead-on. Marxist communism was the offspring of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Communism was not essentially secularism. Communism was essentially secularized religion.
Atheism and secularism were part of Marxist communism as a means of applying to society and government what otherwise were religious ideas. Religious ideas divorced from their supernaturalism cannot be made to work in this world any more than if they retained their supernaturalism. That is the lesson to be learned from the bloody "experiment" of communism.
Secularism will make significant headway when it distinguishes itself from and successfully opposes secularized religious ideas. The religious have used their own secularized offshoots, like communism, to justify denouncing secularism as a failure. We should not be tolerating this.
HT to Daily Atheist for the above review.
"But Hitchens makes the excellent point that Stalin was able to, indeed set out to, exploit the massive reservoir of credulity created by centuries of tsarist rule and sullen acquiescence to the Russian Orthodox Church, when he says: "Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it."
British historian Robert Service, in Comrades: a world history of communism, goes further. For Service, communism is a religion, a "secular credo" complete with millenarian overtones (apocalypse followed by paradise), an emphasis on scriptural exegesis (each communist party "was a synod of hair-splitting political discussion") and a theory of historical inevitability that looks suspiciously like a doctrine of predestination. Marx and Engels, Service suggests, enthusiastically encouraged devotion, with the consequence that they were "treated as prophets whose every word had to be treasured".
They were "infallible progenitors of an omniscient world view" and "remained unconsciously influenced by religious ideas about the perfect future society and the salvation of humanity".
To suggest that communism is religious in character is not an original point but it is a hugely important one, for it gives the lie to the view that communism, for all its attendant evils and failures, was essentially a rational experiment that the human race was bound to make - that it grew out of the Enlightenment, as opposed to fascism and Nazism, both of which were deeply irrational."
Hitchens is correct as far as he goes about the Russians' credulity; credulity that is found in any backwards, predominantly religious country. Under the tsars and Orthodox Church, Moscow was asserted to be the "Third Rome" and "Holy Russia's" destiny was nothing less than redeeming mankind. That was the self-image of a country where most people lived under the harsh, impoverished, quasi-communistic system of serfdom until well into the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, Western Europe progressed quickly with its Renaissance, scientific revolution, and Enlightenment, none of which substantially penetrated Russia - Russian intellectuals were against Western thought.
Looking back at the big-picture, it is therefore bizarre that Karl Marx believed Russia would be among the last nations to become communist - there must be fully industrialized capitalism before there is communism, he believed. (Later on Russian communists got Marx to make an official doctrinal exception for their country.)
Communism took its deepest roots where religion was especially strong: countries like Russia (as well as other eastern European countries).
Some communist countries, especially Russia, went headlong toward massive-scale modernizing and industrializing; modernizing and industrializing they did not learn first-hand how to create but rather begged, copied, and stole from those who did learn them first-hand. These were countries that were historically dominated by religious and tribal beliefs of mysticism, millenariaism, self-sacrifice, collectivism, conformity, and authoritarianism. They were impoverished, backwards, and stagnant. They did not grow themselves into an intellectual and cultural period of reason and science, such as western Europe's scientific revolution and Enlightenment, which led to rational, scientific, independent-minds; increasing knowledge of man and the world; progress; and liberty. In comparison, and not so incidentally, those countries that originated and/or were most influenced by the secularism of scientific revolution and Enlightenment (e.g., Great Britian, France, Holland, America) were much less vulnerable to the influence and spread of communism.
The Russian people were living for centuries under religious-induced collectivism, mysticism, ignorance, authoritarianism, and millenarian expectations, and suddenly had their religion taken away and replaced with Marxist-Leninist communism. What was not taken away, however, were those ideas and mindsets that were integral to their religion. Only those ideas' contents and contexts were changed from religious to secular. No more was Holy Russia going to redeem mankind and messianically usher in the millennium of a reign of heaven on earth. Instead, the proletariat was the messianic force that would overthrow the existing order and usher in a workers' paradise. And more: with that substitution these people obtained possession of the products of reason and science without being rational and scientific. They kept their collective, messianic mission of transforming the world, a religious, pre-modern mission they can undertake armed with modern weapons produced by modern industry. That backwards people with a strong tradition of religious superstition would go about executing their "mission" by grabbing absolute power and committing wholesale bloodshed should not be surprising. As 20th century communism's history demonstrated, the Marxist methodology of "dialectical materialist" thinking and its alleged ability to create a "scientific" socialism were as delusional and as destructive as relying on religious mystical revelation or theology as a method for creating a society.
How is secularism to blame for the horrors of communism, and religion is not only off the hook, but touted as the antidote?
That is why secular offshoots of religion should be opposed and distinguished from real secularism. Understanding what is good for human life on this earth and what that requires necessarily means using reason as the means to that end; resorting to mysticism as a method of knowing precludes any characterization of that endeavor as "secular." It becomes religious. Likewise does introducing into secularism's inquiry a concept, or ideas that cannot be derived from rationally understanding the world, like the idea of, say, "messianism." It comes from religion. That idea, however, even if given secular content or context remains a religious idea.
Robert Service's analysis of Marxism is dead-on. Marxist communism was the offspring of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Communism was not essentially secularism. Communism was essentially secularized religion.
Atheism and secularism were part of Marxist communism as a means of applying to society and government what otherwise were religious ideas. Religious ideas divorced from their supernaturalism cannot be made to work in this world any more than if they retained their supernaturalism. That is the lesson to be learned from the bloody "experiment" of communism.
Secularism will make significant headway when it distinguishes itself from and successfully opposes secularized religious ideas. The religious have used their own secularized offshoots, like communism, to justify denouncing secularism as a failure. We should not be tolerating this.
HT to Daily Atheist for the above review.
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