The common wisdom in many circles (most located in certain cities on the East and Left Coasts) is that religion, in general, is a bad thing, and that in the hands of "fundamentalists," the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and ultra-super-radical-Islamic terrorists, it is inevitably evil. Eliminating religion, it is then suggested or even openly argued, is a sure way to rid the world of evil. The term "religion," it should be noted, almost always refers to Christianity (or a form of pseudo-Christianity) and then, in some cases, to Islam.

An example of such thinking is the story of a film that documents the abuse of religion and the deadly bigotry that can flow from racists who twist the Bible for evil purposes. The Detroit Free Press reports on a showing of the documentary at Rochester College in Michigan and the reaction to it:

In the often-emotional discussion after the film, Rubel Shelly, a Rochester College professor who teaches courses on religion, told the crowd, "This startles me, aggravates me and humbles me. It scares the life out of me."

He said the film made him wonder about everything from the abuse of Christianity by white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to the twisting of Islam by suicide bombers. "For me, the insight from this film is that religion can become downright evil," he said.

Based on these comments, one might conclude that the film is about "white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan" or "suicide bombers" or perhaps a crazed "fundamentalist" Christian who tried to bomb an abortion clinic. But the film (which aired on PBS in Michigan) is titled "Theologians Under Hitler: Could It Happen Again?":

The film focuses on several 1930s-era Protestant theologians in Germany who encouraged the rise of Nazism, publicly praising it as a gift from God to resurrect the impoverished German people. These men also added their moral weight to the attempted destruction of Judaism.
 
Among the most infamous was Gerhard Kittel, at the time a world-famous Protestant expert on the ancient history of the Bible. Far from a marginal figure or thug, like many of Hitler's early followers, Kittel taught at the centuries-old Tubingen University, the same school that later would have Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, on its faculty.

Reading this, a couple of questions come to mind. First, was Gerhard Kittel some sort of knuckle-dragging, half-witted "fundamentalist"? No, he wasn’t. On the contrary, he was a highly regarded and well-educated New Testament scholar who produced work – the ten-volume Theological Dictionary of the New Testament – that is still used today.

Secondly, if religion is proven bad because Kittel and some other Christians supported the Nazis, what was proven by the many Protestants and Catholics—including the much-maligned Pope Pius XII—who helped save hundreds of thousands of Jews? What about Hitler’s obsessive hatred of orthodox Christianity? Is religion itself really the problem? Specifically, when someone states that "religion can become downright evil," is he saying that religion inevitably leads to evil, or religious people commit the majority of evil acts, or that the religious impulse must be severely contained (or even destroyed)?

Sam Harris thinks so. The popular atheist author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the End of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2004) makes a passionate, if not convincing, case for the elimination of religion, namely (of course) Christianity and Islam. Lamenting that many people, including some public leaders, still take seriously Christian doctrine, Harris writes: "As we stride boldly into the Middle Ages, it does not seem out of place to wonder whether the myths that now saturate our discourse will wind up killing many of us, as the myths of others [terrorists] already have."

He then boldly insists that "faith" must go the way of the dodo bird: "We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. … It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs" (47, 48). It comes as no surprise that Harris’s polemic is praised by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, who advocates infanticide and euthanasia and all else in-between (yet, irrationally, Singer spent much moneykeeping alive his mother, who is stricken with Alzheimer's disease).

Professor Shelly apparently missed Harris’s book (which was well-received among those who read The New York Times Book Review—"This in an important book"—and sleep in on Sunday mornings). Still, when a professor of religion states, "For me, the insight from this film is that religion can become downright evil," one can be forgiven for wondering what they have studied and if they have ever contemplated human nature, both by considering the actions/thoughts of others and examining their own actions/thoughts. Sure, there is a sense in which "religion can become downright evil," which is because people can become downright evil. As G.K. Chesterton rightly noted somewhere (the exact location escapes me), if you think the world is in bad shape you might be shocked how much worse it would be if Christianity weren’t around. And before anyone argues that it’s a completely subjective point, do check out The Black Book of Communism.

The problem many people have today is not that they deny outright the existence of evil, but that they deny they could have anything to do with evil. Sure, evil is personal and is committed by persons—but not by me. Yes, Hitler was human—but I’m different from Hitler. Some folks aren’t even comfortable at that distance, so they create more space by conceiving of evil as something done to them or forced upon them (usually by an institution) rather than a specific attack on the good and on others that humans can freely choose to commit. Another comment by Professor Shelly from the Free Press article points toward this second option:

Without a stricter separation of church and state, Shelly argued, "we can still allow ourselves as Christians to be played by political power," just as in Germany in the 1930s. At that point, he turned to Martin and asked, "So where are the religious leaders who are strong enough to resist the stroking of political power today?"

The implication, it seems clear, is that evil comes in the form of large, faceless, and frightening institutions—usually political—that force themselves on us. Strangely enough, a common (and sometimes warranted) criticism of some "fundamentalists" is that they have a conspiratorial mindset and operate out of fear of the Big, Bad Bogeyman (the U.N., the European Union, Hollywood, etc.). But if one feature of "fundamentalism" is an irrational, conspiratorial, and highly emotional fear of beliefs and institutions that we do not understand (nor try to understand), then "fundamentalism" is hardly limited to the realms of traditional Christianity, conservative politics, or Middle America. Nor is evil the sole property of a certain religion, political party, or ideology, even if a particular religion or ideology carries fuel that feeds the thought and actions of a person bent on committing acts of evil.

Admittedly, it is often difficult to see where religious teaching ends and adherence to that teaching begins. It becomes even more difficult when the teaching appears to be ambivalent or open to different interpretations. But to say, for instance, that a priest who molests a boy does so because of his religion (or, as it is sometimes argued, the unrealistic or "unnatural" disciplines of his religion) is to ignore that Catholicism condemns such an act. In the case of Kittel, I don’t know all of the influences—either theological or political—that shaped his thinking. But I know that nearly a million Jews were saved by the actions of Pope Pius XII, who acted in accord with the religious belief that all men are created in the image of God and that murder is evil. (And yet, when many people think of Christianity and Nazism, they also think of "Hitler’s Pope," a sad testament to the reality of evil attacks on truth.)

We can see the effects of this skewed thinking when confronted with the "solution" so often promoted by educators such as Professor Shelly, which is a "stricter separation of church and state." If that is the answer, look no further than the former Soviet Union to see what happens when the ultimate separation of church and state takes place—that is, when the state essentially destroys the church (and I use "church" here to mean an authentic body of Christians who don't give lip service the state to save their skins). The result is not just the eradication of traditional religion but also the establishment of a grotesque and bloody new religion—or anti-religious religion.

In the words of Simone Weil: "Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people." Weil's remark is quoted in Raymond Aron's The Opium of the Intellectuals, a classic work of political reflection on radical politics, especially Marxism and Communism. In another work, The Dawn of Universal History,Aron (1905-1983)—a French intellectual who was once classmates with Sartre but chose a far different path from the famed existentialist—has a lengthy analysis of "The Secular Religions," which include Fascism, Nazism, Marxism, and Stalinism.

Aron writes that these secular religions "related everything—men and things, thoughts and deeds—to that ultimate end [the totalitarian goals of each respective political movement], and utility in terms of that end is the measure of all values, even spiritual ones. Partisans of such religions will without any qualms of conscience make use of any means, however horrible, because nothing can prevents the means from being sanctified by the end. In other words, if the job of religion is to set out the lofty values that give human existence its direction, how can we deny that the political doctrines of our own day are essentially religious in character?" He then points out how these secular religions provide an interpretation of the world, the meaning or source of suffering, salvation and the hope of a future utopia, and the demand of sacrifice by commitment to the "movement."

Oddly enough, Harris also recognizes the religious character of certain totalitarian ideologies, although his comments suggest that his reasoning is self-serving: "Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. … Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational" (79; emphasis added). Readers are apparently expected to take on good faith that Harris is not just paying lip service to rationality, but hates religion for perfectly rational, scientific reasons.

The point is that every "ism"—even atheism, materialism, and the "pragmatism" endorsed by Harris—plays riffs based on the same tunes since man moves to a religious beat; to further the metaphor, man has music within him and longs to know the composer. He is, in other words, a religious animal who thinks religious thoughts and has religious impulses. In the words of Chesterton:

Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence. This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern world. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. (Heretics, [Ignatius, 1986], p. 205).

So, one of dogmas (either conscious or otherwise) of avowed secularists is that religion is unreasonable and almost inevitably produces evil. Another is that some form of pure secularism (often described using terms such as "education," "progressive thinking," "enlightenment," "sophisticated," "scientific," and so forth) is the much-needed answer to the problems that plague humanity.

But Chesterton is correct in observing that there "are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice" (What’s Wrong With the World [Ignatius, 1987], p. 48), and that doctrine "is a definite point," while prejudice is "a direction." Religion, especially orthodox Christianity, is despised because it is a definite and specific faith. Instead of vague platitudes about love, the Christian Faith speaks of specific suffering and a definite Cross. Instead of hazy affirmations of the goodness of man, Catholicism teaches a specific doctrine of sin and makes definite moral demands.

And instead of a general appeal to "just get along," the Church insists on specific sacrifices and definite choices between good and evil—and bluntly says that all of us are capable of evil, regardless of how non-religious our religion might pretend to be.
 
 
(Image credit: The Day)

A recent Live Science press release, titled “Believers Leave Punishment to Powerful God,” opened with the memorable words:

"Believing in an involved, morally active God makes people less likely to punish others for rule-breaking, new research finds."

Which is equivalent to saying that non-believers are less forgiving, less compassionate, less merciful, and—oh, let’s just say it: they are worse people. Don’t get mad at me. This is research!

But then maybe this summary is too telegraphic. Because the very same research that proves atheists are more bloodthirsty than theists also proves “that religious belief in general makes people more likely to punish wrongdoers — probably because such punishment is a way to strengthen the community as a whole” (emphasis mine).

In other words, theists are less forgiving, less compassionate, less merciful, and just plain worse people than atheists. Except when they aren’t and when their roles are reversed.

The press release explains the conundrum thusly: “In other words, religion may introduce two conflicting impulses: Punish others for their transgressions, or leave it to the Lord.”

This is the power of statistics, a field of science which, given the routine ease with which two opposite conclusions are simultaneously proved, we may now officially dub Orwellian Analytics.

Research Shows...

 
The paper which this popular article was based on is titled “Outsourcing punishment to God: beliefs in divine control reduce earthly punishment” by Kristi Laurin and three others. It was published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

After a lengthy introduction arguing that all morality (except presumably the morals of the authors) can be reduced to urges induced by evolutionary “pressures,” and defining something called “altruistic punishment”, the authors describe how they gathered small pools of WEIRD young people (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic undergraduates) and had them play games. The results from these games told the authors all they needed to know about who enjoys punishment more. Incidentally, about the punishment, they said this:

"Prior to effective and reliable secular institutions for punishment, large-scale societies depended on individuals engaging in ‘altruistic punishment’—bearing the costs of punishment individually, for the benefit of society."

And did you know that “According to theory”—are you ready?—“Though administering punishment benefits society as a whole, it has immediate costs for punishers themselves.” Who knew?

Experiment one corralled “Twenty undergraduates” who “participated in exchange for course credit.” That’s one more than nineteen, friends. The supplementary data (which is mysteriously left out of the main article, but which is linked there) shows that these participants contained 8 whites and 9 Asians, with 1 black and 1 Arabic left over; 10 Christians, 1 Buddhist, 1 Hindu, 1 Muslim, 1 “Other”, and 6 Atheists. The authors claim to have “measured participants’ belief in powerful, intervening Gods, and their general religiosity.” Which makes you wonder how they classed the Buddhist and “Other.” No word on the breakdown of how participants answered the “religiosity” question.

But the next part is more fascinating: “We then employed the 3PPG–an economic game commonly used to measure altruistic punishment.” I'm struck by the words “commonly used.” It must be common, because there isn’t word one in the paper or supplementary material of what this creation is. But I can reveal to you it is the “Third-Party Punishment Game,” a frivolity invented by academics designed to flummox undergraduate participants in studies like this. More about that another day.

The “game” runs so (sorry for the length, but do read it):

"Player A receives 20 dollars, and must share that money between herself and player B in two-dollar increments, without input from player B. In the second stage, player C [who presumably knows what A did], who has received 10 dollars, can spend some or all of that money to reduce player A’s final payout: For every dollar that player C spends, player A loses three dollars. Player A’s behaviour does not affect player C, all players are anonymous and expect no further interactions, and punishing player A costs player C money. People treat sharing money evenly between players A and B as the (cooperative) norm; thus, player C’s willingness to punish player A for selfishly violating this norm can be taken as an index of altruistic punishment of non-cooperators."

In other words, Player C looks at how much A gave B. If C thinks this too low, C sacrifices some of his own money to reduce the amount A kept. But A and C got the money for free and since these are students we do not know if A actually knew B in real life, or if C knew either. For example, if I as A and Uncle Mike as B and Ye Olde Statistician as C were to play this game, I would split the money with Uncle Mike and Ye Olde Statistician would go along. This is because we were pals before the game commenced. But if we were enemies, something entirely different would occur. The authors never mention if they look for these kinds of effects in this or in any experiment. Leave finding flaws and contrary evidence for others.

But never mind, because C giving up some of his play money is scarcely the same thing as C desiring that a child rapist be tossed in jail to rot, even though C knows that the cost of the rapist’s cell will be taken from his wallet. But C in real life hardly knows even that. C knows that he pays taxes and that some of his taxes go to prison upkeep, but those taxes also go to pay for the fuel to ferry the president around on Air Force One from fund raiser to fund raiser. That is, most of us Cs don’t think that ponying up taxes is altogether altruistic.

The authors are mute on this objection, too.

Enter The P-value

"We regressed participants’ levels of altruistic punishment [amounts of money] on their God beliefs and their religiosity (both centered around 0) simultaneously…participants who believed more strongly in a powerful, intervening God reported less punishment of non-cooperators, β = -0.58, t(17) = 2.22, p = 0.04; whereas more religious participants showed a trend towards reporting greater punishment, β = 0.33, t(17) = 1.67, p = 0.11."

And there it is. Theists reported less punishment and more punishment. Except that the p-value for the “more punishment” isn’t small enough to excite. (And a linear regression is at best an approximation here.) The authors also discovered “more religious people tended to believe in powerful, controlling Gods.” The correlation wasn’t perfect, but neither should it be when you mix Buddhists and Christians. Let’s don’t forget that this regression model only included 6 atheists for its contrast.

The really good news is that “Given the strong correlation between religiosity and conservatism (r = 0.52), we conducted an additional analysis including conservatism in the regression. Results are reported in table 1; we found no evidence that conservatism explains the religion–punishment association.” Sorry, Chris Mooney.

The authors did four more studies, all similar to this one, but with increasingly complicated regression models (lots of interactions, strong hints of data snooping, etc.). The findings don’t change much. In their conclusion, however, they include these strange words: “In our research, we found it necessary to remind participants of their beliefs for these beliefs to influence their decisions.” This sounds like coaching, a way to induce results the authors expected.

So what's the real lesson here? That one of the largest science sites on the Internet has no problem squeezing a complex mass of data into a terse and misleading headline.
 
 
(Image credit: Steve Dease)

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

So says Richard Dawkins. Obviously, he doesn't want readers to think he's on the fence about God as presented in the Old Testament—or at least, how God seems to Dawkins. But if we clean ourselves up after this blast of rhetorical wind, how strong is Dawkins' case against God?

Dawkins lists a number of objectionable Old Testament scenes, ending with God's command to massacre the Midianites (Num 31:17-18), Joshua's putting all of the inhabitants of Jericho to the sword (Josh 6:21), and God's "rules" for waging holy war in Canaan (Dt 20:10-18). In regard to the last two, he remarks, "the Bible story of Joshua's destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein's massacres of Kurds and the Marsh Arabs," and "Do not think, by the way, that the God character in the story nursed any doubts or scruples about the massacres and genocides that accompanied the seizing of the Promised Land…. [T]he people who lived in the land…should be invited to surrender peacefully. If they refused, all the men were to be killed and the women carried off for breeding."

Let's try a little experiment, and assume Dawkins' skewed and unfair reading of the Bible. Suppose upon reading his devastating attack on the God of the Old Testament, we would reject the Bible and embrace Dawkins' atheism—exactly what Dawkins wishes to be the effect on readers. What then? Would we be any better off?

First of all, as he himself admits in his book River out of Eden, in coming over to Dawkins' side, we have thereby embraced a cosmos indifferent to good or evil. As a consequence, we immediately face a dilemma: we have no moral grounds for condemning the actions of God (He doesn't exist) or the characters in the Bible (good and evil don't exist). Since God doesn't exist, there is no reason to work up a froth of indignation against Him, anymore than against the lunkheaded Zeus in Homer's Iliad.

Yet now another, more amusing problem arises for Dawkins as the champion of Darwinism today. It would seem that a good many of the complaints made by Dawkins against the God of the Old Testament could with equal justice be made against natural selection itself. To say the least, that puts himself in a paradoxical position.

If we might put it in an arresting way, many sociologists of religion argue that primitive people tend to fashion their notions of the gods according to the way they experience nature, as nature deified (whether this is true or not, we won't decide here, but will take it on trust for the purposes of illustration). What would evolution look like if we tried to deify evolution's principles? Would the Evolution God (EG) be "unjust" in its callous indifference "to all suffering," and supremely so, for continually picking off the weak and sickly? Would EG be an "unforgiving control-freak," "megalomaniacal," and "petty" since (as Darwin stated), "It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relations to its organic and inorganic conditions of life"? Would EG be "sadomasochistic" in his use of suffering, destruction, and death as the means to create new forms of life? A "capriciously malevolent bully" in his "lacking all purpose" and being "callous"? A "bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser," "genocidal," and "racist" in his continually pitting one species population against another in severe struggle, the struggles among humans taking place between tribe and tribe, race and race? And what adjective would describe EG, who uses these deadly struggles as the very vehicle responsible for the upward climb of human evolution?

So we've rejected the God of the Old Testament for Dawkins' atheistic account of evolution, only to find out that many of the traits Dawkins marked as repugnant are ensconced in natural selection (except that now, as a new and even more unfortunate kind of Job, we have no one against whom to complain).

Perhaps Dawkins will fare better in his case against the people of the Old Testament? But now another paradox comes to the fore. On Dawkins' own grounds, it would be hard to imagine a people who more assiduously pursued a better set of evolutionary strategies for ensuring that its gene pool was carried forward, undiluted by rival tribes and races, than the ancient Jews. They were genetic geniuses!

Think over the above "reprehensible" examples Dawkins provided from the Bible, and then ruminate upon his account of how evolution, including human evolution, works. Dawkins maintains in his classic book The Selfish Gene that we may "treat the individual as a selfish machine, programmed to do whatever is best for its genes as a whole" (although, as he makes clear, the invisible level of the struggle between genes in a single individual is, for him, the real level of natural selection and the struggle to survive). The selfish machine works, literally, by gene-o-cide, the destruction and use of other selfish machines, treating them as fodder for its own survival.

What, then, is left of Dawkins' case against the God of the Old Testament? Nothing at all.
 
 
Originally posted at To the Source. Used with permission.
(Image credit: The Guardian)

One of the enduring myths of the secular state is that religion is so dangerous, so volatile, so likely to burst into conflagrations of violence, that the only protection we have from societal destruction is the erection of a wall that separates religion from the state.

We've all heard the story, and in fact, having also heard endless tales of horror about the great religious wars—especially the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years War—we might be strongly inclined to believe the myth.

Even my calling it a myth seems out of place. Isn't it true—in fact, a truism—that wherever religion and politics mix, it is like gasoline and a match? Isn't that what history teaches us?

No. History actually teaches us two things.

First, as William Cavanaugh so powerfully argues in his Myth of Religious Violence, when we take a closer look at the 16th and 17th century wars of religion we find that differences between Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants and other Protestants, were secondary to the aims of the emerging nation-states and various political and dynastic intrigues. Simply put, the main cause of these wars was political, not religious.

How can that be? If religious differences were the main cause of these bloody conflicts, Cavanaugh maintains, then we would expect to find that they were invariably fought along neat denominational lines. What we actually find is Catholic emperors attacking popes, Catholic French kings attacking Catholic emperors, Protestant kings and princes siding with Catholic kings against other Protestants, Lutheran and Catholic kings uniting against Catholic emperors, Protestant Huguenot nobles and Catholic nobles in France uniting against both Catholic and Protestant Huguenot commoners who likewise united against the nobles, Protestant and Catholic nobles in France uniting against their Catholic king, Protestants rejecting the Protestant Union (the coalition of German Protestant states) even while some Catholics were siding with it, Lutheran princes adamantly supporting the rights of a Catholic emperor, Catholic France supporting Protestant princes in Germany, the Dutch Calvinists helping the Catholic king to repress uprisings of French Calvinists, a Lutheran leading the Catholic imperial army, and mercenaries of every religious stripe selling themselves to the highest Catholic or Protestant bidder.

And that is only a very quick overview of the examples provided, at great length, by Cavanaugh. A careful, unbiased study of the so-called religious wars yields the rather surprising result that they were not religious wars. They were political wars that both ignored religious differences when the more important political aims demanded either cooperation with religious opponents or antagonism to those sharing the same religious beliefs, and used religious differences when they would serve political purposes.

That's the first history lesson. The second is equally important, and related to the first. As Cavanaugh makes equally clear, the secular state needed (and still needs) people to believe the story that religion is the cause of violence because this belief allows for the actual creation of the secular state. The secular state is what emerges when religion is forcibly removed from the public square through the powers of the state. The myth of religious violence justifies the removal of religion, and it is through that very removal that the state achieves secularization.

This can be seen, argues Cavanaugh, in the landmark Supreme Court case Everson v. Board of Education (1947) that interpreted the Establishment Clause as demanding (in Justice Hugo Black's words, borrowed in turn from Thomas Jefferson) the erection of "a wall of separation between church and State."

As other legal historians have shown, Jefferson's words had little or no legal effect prior to Everson. American jurisprudence was defined by the notion of cooperation between the church and state because there was general agreement that the state needed the moral and religious support provided by the church.

But by the mid-twentieth century, secularism had taken hold of the intelligentsia and, through university education, had formed the mindset of legal scholars and jurists. They were formed by the Enlightenment myth that religion was a negative presence that, for the sake of human progress, needed to be eliminated for the sake of peace. A sign of this (as everyone believed) was the horrible atrocities of the religious wars.

So it was that Justice Hugo Black, in his majority opinion, used that notion that religious violence in Europe was the defining reason why the American founders had written the First Amendment's Establishment Clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..."

As proof, Black invoked Jefferson's famous words from a letter of 1802 written to the Danbury Baptists, wherein Jefferson remarks, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." So, Black ended his opinion with the flourish: "The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable."

For Black, and especially for those secular-minded justices using the reasoning of Everson thereafter, the specter of religious violence demanded the secularization of politics. So it was that, since 1947, Everson has been used to stop Bible reading and prayer in public schools, deny Christian groups access to public school and public university buildings, justify the removal of nativity scenes from public squares and Ten Commandment plaques from judicial buildings, and (unsuccessfully) to remove "In God We Trust" from coins.

In short, Everson has become an instrument for state-sanctioned secularization. It has effected the emergence of a truly secular state precisely through the active separation of the church from the state and the erection of a wall of separation. Historically, this active separation, and wall, created the secular state where one did not exist before. And I think I need to add (to capture the full irony of its use of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause), this active separation establishes a secular state, using federal power to transform America from a Judeo-Christian culture to a secular culture.

Now you see the connection between the first history lesson and the second. If the notion that religion is the main cause of bloody conflict is a myth, and the so-called religious wars were actually fueled by political ambition, then the alleged pressing need to erect an impregnable wall of separation between church and state, collapses as well. What, then, is the justification for the secularized state?
 
 
Originally posted at To the Source. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Patheos)

This is the second in a series of posts on the “dark passages” of the Bible. These are texts which understandably raise the eyebrows of both nonbelievers and believers who encounter them and say, “How can that be in the Bible if it is God’s own word?” In my previous post I took up the problem of violent Old Testament passages in light of Pope Benedict XVI’s claim that violence is contrary to God’s nature. My book Dark Passages of the Bible likewise deals with this and various other areas of the Bible that seem to contradict what Christians believe today. Today I’d like to comment on Psalm 137, a short text which is at once one of the most profound as well as troubling imprecatory texts in the Bible.

In Psalm 137 we have before us a hymn whose context is clearly exilic, meaning that it was written after the Jewish people had been carted off into Babylon in 586 B.C. Before discussing, we should read the poem in its entirety:

"By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the LORD's song
in a foreign land?
 
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
 
Remember, O LORD, against the E'domites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Rase it, rase it!
Down to its foundations!”
 
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you
with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!"

The plain sense of the last pair of verses is a proclamation of blessing—in particular that a man will be blessed by God because he has killed his captors’ little children. This is a point at which atheists understandably say to believers, “Really, your God would bless that type of person? What a hateful, pathetic, bloodthirsty god—a god made in man’s image indeed! This doesn’t sound like a very ‘pro-life’ God.” Even C.S. Lewis, in his Reflections on the Psalms, describes Psalm 137’s concluding outburst as “devilish.” According to Lewis, the harboring of animosity is at once “profoundly natural” but also “profoundly wrong.” Does this mean it shouldn’t be in the Bible or that it constitutes an error on God’s part?

Though Psalm 137 does not have God directly making this troublesome curse, the problem cannot be skirted merely by pointing out that the human author is the one saying these hateful things rather than God. Why does this not help? For traditional orthodox Christianity, which includes Catholicism, the Bible is God’s word in human words, and we believe that lying, falsehood, and hatred are incompatible with the nature of God. As the Second Vatican Council authoritatively put it, whatever Scripture’s human authors assert is also asserted by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, if the human author of Psalm 137 asserts an error, we are saying that the Holy Spirit is also asserting an error.

For a Catholic, the question ultimately then revolves around the following question: what precisely was the human author of Psalm 137 asserting? In Catholic biblical exegesis, this assertion refers to the primary message an author wishes to teach or communicate. For a Catholic, the doctrines of biblical inspiration and inerrancy do not mean that every sentence in the Bible is a reflection of God’s mind on a given matter. Rather, the Bible is God’s word in human words. To use an expression from the Church Fathers, it was part of his divine pedagogy or teaching method to gradually reveal himself to his people. As part of this process, he accommodated himself to our human weaknesses and ennobled feeble humans in such a way that they have become bearers of his word. Naturally, these humans were not going to perceive God’s will perfectly from day one of his divine revelation but rather grow in this perception over time. This is why Pope Benedict states that Catholics should not simplistically treat any given Old Testament text as a definitive illustration of how we ought to act or believe without seeing it as part of a plan that is fully revealed only in the person of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, when Christians are challenged by non-believers to defend a particular Old Testament passage, they end up trying to defend the indefensible and, to borrow an expression from Thomas Aquinas, thereby make the faith look ridiculous.

What, then, is the assertion of Psalm 137? The Catholic must first be clear that it is not to teach that celebration is in order when the children of our enemies are killed. Now if you are an atheist, you are probably (and understandably) going to respond: “You’re pre-determining that this biblical text can’t be saying the crazy thing it seems to say since you’ve already begun with the assumption that it can’t be wrong.” Believe it or not, the Catholic would actually agree with the atheist here. Yes, our prior commitment to Jesus Christ and the truth of the Bible does a priori preclude the possibility that God’s revealed word asserts error.

But does this mean that the Catholic position is irrational and indefensible? As I said in my previous post, Catholics can’t expect a nonbeliever to accept our particular interpretation of a text like Psalm 137 if said person hasn’t first accepted the existence of God, the incarnation of Christ, and the Bible as his revealed word expressed in human words. What we can do is offer a reasoned explanation for the presence of thorny texts in such a way that one could see how it would be illuminating if faith in Christ is granted.

Up to this point I have merely been discussing what Psalm 137 does not intend to teach, but we also have to offer a positive statement of what the author intended to assert. In the present psalm as in any biblical text, an author might wish to make multiple points. In this case, there are two related purposes of the psalm when read in light of the whole. On the one hand, it is a hymn of hope for liberation and confidence in God’s covenant faithfulness. Thus the beautiful words in which the psalmist reminds the people of God’s promise: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!” God has bound himself to Israel in covenant. He cannot go back on his promise to remember his people.

Though expressive of hope, Psalm 137 is at the same time a national hymn of sorrow. As the text relates, Israelites cast into Babylonian captivity wept bitterly as they were mocked by their captors who asked them to sing songs of their native land which had just been destroyed. The psalm is thus an occasion for the nation to pour out its anguish to God over the loss of land, family, and cult. Its aim is not to assert a universal truth claim about children in relation to evil and revenge. One cannot simply isolate the last pair of verses from the context and message of the whole. Rather, the central thrust of Psalm 137 is its cry of longing for God and for God’s good gifts to be restored.

To be sure, the frightful side of human nature shines through in this psalm, but for the Christian this makes the text all the more real, more meaningful. In this way it becomes a prayer which we today (with proper caution and making due distinctions) can each take up in our own lives. Catholics call this the moral sense of the text, an application to our own life’s circumstances of what we have learned from the experience of God’s people in ages past. We today find in our own heart the same emotions of despair and hope, hatred and love, that God’s people of old experienced. The psalm teaches us that we should not try to hide our deepest and darkest thoughts from God. Rather the psalms teach us to get these out in the open so that God can help us live our sorrows in him and eventually heal our brokenness.

A final dimension of Psalm 137’s moral sense is something picked up on by Christianity already in its first centuries of reflection upon the text. I refer here to the beautiful and practical exegesis of Origen in his important treatise Against Celsus. Following the familiar lines of patristic-medieval thought, he comments:

"The just give up to destruction all their enemies, that is to say their vices, so that they do not spare even the children, that is, the early beginnings and promptings of evil. In this sense also we understand the language of Psalm 137...For, “the little ones of Babylon” (which signifies confusion) are those troublesome sinful thoughts that arise in the soul, and one who subdues them by striking, as it were, their heads against the firm and solid strength of reason and truth, is the person who “dashes the little ones against the stones”; and he is therefore truly blessed."

For Origen, there is no question as to the psalm’s meaning: the “little ones” who are to be slain are not human children but rather “the early beginnings and promptings of evil.” He justifies the psalmist’s words by appealing to the etymology of the word Babylon, which is related to the word “confusion.” According to Origen, these nascent vices are called “the little ones of Babylon” because they arise in the form of troubling thoughts that confuse one’s soul. The message of the psalm is that we should put an end to our evil behavior at its outset—when it is still in its infancy, so to speak—lest it eventually develop into an unbreakable vice.

In line with centuries of Catholic thought, I believe that Origen’s interpretation is spot on. However, I would also caution believers that it is not sufficient on its own. Catholics out there who think that jumping to this moral sense of Psalm 137 does justice to its violent outburst of vengeance need to ask themselves: Does Origen’s exegesis respect the text of Psalm 137? Yes, the Catholic should happily recognize the spiritual sense of the text, but was the psalmist really thinking about crushing his vices when he composed this psalm? While some Catholics refuse to admit that the psalmist actually entertained the hateful thoughts he appears to entertain, the principles I have offered above are an attempt to seek truth in the text while admitting the presence of troubling statements which atheists (rightly, I believe) take to be obviously at odds with the nature of God if such a being exists.

In any event, I think any Christian—and indeed any person who reflects upon his vices—can find great wisdom for life in Origen’s approach to Psalm 137. Regardless of whether my above attempt to determine the text’s literal sense is sound, I hope we would all be able to learn from Origen’s exhortation to blot out nascent defects in our lives before they grow up and develop into full-fledged vices. This is precisely the sort of exegesis that makes a difference in our lives, and for the Catholic it represents the most important purpose of the Bible. But he who wishes to truly appreciate Scripture must pay attention to both its spiritual and literal senses. As I put it in a recent interview with Brandon Vogt, Catholics must beware of whitewashing difficult biblical texts by jumping to their spiritual sense without seriously taking into account the challenges these texts present on the literal level.

To conclude, I’d like to acknowledge and reiterate that ascertaining a biblical text’s intention is not always an easy task. Catholics must respectfully disagree with some of our Protestant brethren who believe that the Bible’s meaning is perspicuous. Exegesis often requires a lot more patience and skill than many Christians possess. Above all, it requires us to recognize that the many troublesome passages of the Old Testament ultimately only make sense insofar as they are seen as part of a progressive revelation by which God gradually prepared his people for the coming of Christ. In the words of Pope Benedict, which I cited in my previous post, “It follows straightaway that neither the criterion of inspiration nor that of infallibility can be applied mechanically. It is quite impossible to pick out one single sentence [of the Bible] and say, right, you find this sentence in God’s great book, so it must simply be true in itself.” According to Pope Benedict, problematic passages in the Old Testament are “valid insofar as they are part of the history leading up to Christ.”

On the same token, biblical exegesis also requires a degree of intellectual humility that I find atheists and believers alike sometimes lack. Especially in today’s world where we get much of our information in short bursts of data via social media outlets, it is very common to find folks assuming that if they don’t understand a claim at first glance or if its meaning is not readily apparent to them, then it’s not true. When the Catholic asks for the chance to clarify or make further distinctions, atheists often accuse him of backpedaling, covering his tracks, or obfuscating the ostensible meaning of the text he is trying to defend.

When I engage in discussions like the present one—especially in an online context—I am always reminded of C.S. Lewis’ words in his book Miracles. Explaining Christianity to someone who thinks it is easy and simple is a lot like trying to explain quantum physics to someone who conceives of atoms as tiny little balls which comprise everything in the material universe. At every turn we have to multiply distinctions and rule out false analogies proffered by our interlocutors. It sounds a lot like backtracking, and sometimes it is in fact backtracking. But sometimes this is what it takes in order to make a reasonably adequate explanation for something immense and beautiful. If Christianity is true, then it is with good reason that Catholicism has long regarded theology as “queen of the sciences,” the study of that being who is most immense and beautiful.
 
 
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Today I’d like to consider an issue on which many atheists and Catholics may—perhaps to their surprise—find a point of common ground. “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God.” This line is not from an atheist but rather from Pope Benedict XVI. The context in which he penned it was his famous (in some circles infamous) Regensburg Address from 2006. In this particular case, he was endeavoring to foster a dialogue with Islam over a theology which “might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.”

As good Muslims and atheists whom I’ve known in the past have indicated, this warning applies to Christian theology and Scripture as well. Namely, what do we make of the many Old Testament texts in which God commands seemingly evil deeds such as the slaughter of men, women, and children? For just one example, read 1 Samuel 15. Within this chapter, God commands the extermination of an entire people and then proceeds to remove King Saul for office for not having fully carried it out!

Before I proceed any further, I want to make something clear. Within the constraints of a short blog post, I have no pretense of offering an exhaustive defense of the many passages in the Bible which seem to fly in the face of the words just cited from our previous pope. In fact, I have recently authored a 300-page book entitled Dark Passages of the Bible that itself only scratches the surface of this issue. What I hope to achieve here is simply to make an observation which I hope will better frame debate over the Bible’s so-called dark passages, as well as to offer a key principle for explaining their presence from a Catholic perspective—a perspective which, unfortunately, not many Catholics themselves grasp and hence are unable to convey to non-Christians.

To begin, the very notion of violence being contrary to God’s nature is something we Catholics debate amongst ourselves. Thomas Aquinas, for example, seeks to justify violent divine actions in the Old Testament on the basis of the fact that all people are sinners and in fact deserve the punishment of death on account of original sin. Hence Aquinas states, “[B]y the command of God, death can be inflicted on any man, guilty or innocent, without any injustice whatever.” For Augustine as for Aquinas, the problem of thinking God is being cruel when killing people is that we just don’t realize the gravity and pervasiveness of sin and thus the punishment it deserves. Now I love both of these Doctors of the Church, and this is a very brief paraphrase of their arguments, but here I have to join my atheist friends in saying that I simply don’t fully buy the explanation. To be sure, it’s not the only possible Christian answer, but other ones I have come across usually leave me just as unsatisfied. So my observation is this: if even I—a Catholic theologian who buys fully into the Catholic worldview and tradition—don’t find this approach satisfying, then I don’t think we are going to make progress in our dialogue with atheists by taking an approach wherein we seem to have no problem in saying that God directly wills the killing of men, women, and children. Perhaps God does do this. I am open to being convinced otherwise, but again I just don’t buy it.

That said, I am fairly certain that my response is not going to satisfy atheists, either. Yet I do think it makes a step in the right direction by at least admitting that they have a point in seeing the Old Testament’s dark passages as problematic from a certain point of view. So what does the Catholic have to offer the atheist by way of explanation, then?

First, for Pope Benedict with whom I agree, we have first have to admit that the Bible really says what it seems to be saying. It says God did some violent things.

Second, we may admit that what the Bible says does indeed seem to conflict with the nature of God such as we understand it through reason.

Third—and here is the key according to Pope Benedict—the Catholic has to interpret the entire Old Testament as a gradual progression towards Jesus Christ: “Anyone who wishes to understand the biblical belief in God must follow its historical development from its origins with the patriarchs of Israel right up to the last books of the New Testament.” Christians believe the fullness of truth is revealed in the person, teaching, and ministry of Jesus. We look at the entirety of Scripture in light of him. Indeed, according to Pope Benedict, problematic passages in the Old Testament are “valid insofar as they are part of the history leading up to Christ.” Now if he had commanded violence, then we’d be in trouble. (Perhaps you have an objection here, but that’s a topic for another post).

Benedict’s 2010 exhortation Verbum Domini is particularly significant because it has a section entitled “Dark Passages of the Bible” in which he states that instances of violence and immorality in the Bible can be adequately addressed only if Catholics take seriously the fact that “God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance.” Benedict admits that “revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times,” and for this reason the Bible narrates certain things without denouncing their immorality in the way that we would rightly do today. In an interview Benedict stated in the same vein: “It follows straightaway that neither the criterion of inspiration nor that of infallibility can be applied mechanically. It is quite impossible to pick out one single sentence [of the Bible] and say, right, you find this sentence in God’s great book, so it must simply be true in itself.”

Bottom line: the Old Testament does not give us a video-camera account or transcript of what God said and did in times of old. It is God’s word; it is inspired; it is inerrant (Due to space constraints I’m not addressing that issue here, although it definitely needs addressed). Neither I nor Pope Benedict nor anyone who takes such a position need deny these Catholic doctrines. But interpreting passages which seem to contradict the nature of God requires us to recognize that the people who penned the Old Testament were not privy to the fullness of divine revelation and the Catholic tradition whereby we now distinguish, for example, between God’s active will and his permissive will (whereby he allows evil to be done by humans).

Did the authors of the Old Testament think that God wanted them to execute entire peoples? To me it seems disingenuous to reply in the negative. Yet notwithstanding that these authors thought, for Catholicism and its doctrine of biblical inerrancy the question revolves around what they intended to assert or teach, as stated in Vatican II’s constitution Dei Verbum. But I digress. The simplest way to say it is that the Old Testament’s conception of God and God’s deeds was imperfect because God was working with an imperfect people to gradually lead them to Christ. Like any good teacher, God in his divine pedagogy had to work the pupils he had, not the 4.0-GPA honors students he wished he had! The imperfections we see in the Old Testament are therefore not God’s, but rather due to the fact that he deigned to “condescend” (to use a term from the Church Fathers) and patiently work with a truly human people to lead them into communion with himself. I suppose God could have “zapped” people’s minds and taught them the Trinity ten thousand years ago, but in the Catholic worldview this is not the way we understand God typically acts. He creates a human nature and works with it. As the scholastics aptly said, grace builds on nature. Problematic passages within Scripture are among the clearest of evidence that grace does not eliminate human nature.

Like I said above, I don’t expect an atheist to be convinced by this. First of all, it’s an incredibly abbreviated summary covering only one of several key distinctions needed to account for the Bible’s dark passages. Second, to accept the divine pedagogy is already to have accepted something prior to it: namely, the existence of God and faith in Jesus Christ. Seeing Old Testament passages in light of their progression towards Jesus is only going to satisfy someone who already believes that Jesus is God in the flesh. But it’s not my job in this post to prove that Jesus is God or even that God exists. What I’ve tried to do is the only thing a Christian can do in this situation, according to Thomas Aquinas. That job is to provide answers to objections from unbelievers so that they might see what a reasonable way to deal with dark biblical passages might look like if faith in Christ and his revealed word is granted.
 
 
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