Pop-Pantheist Blasphemy

One of the more prevalent modern blasphemies is that of a sort of pantheism or pandeism which holds that all religions partially and imperfectly apprehend the one true God. In the last few days I heard or overheard versions of this blasphemy at work and from Saul Williams on Twitter. Not long ago, I was in an argument with Immortal Technique on Twitter where he was ineptly defending the position (while not even really understanding that it was his position). And in the case of Saul Williams and Immortal Technique, they had legions of followers expressing general agreement with the stance.

Not many people necessarily consciously self-identify in this way, as those who hold to the position often believe that they have transcended the particularity of confession, doctrine, and -- certainly -- labels. Usually it's a disingenuous posture adopted by agnostics or nominal believers who want to affirm there is a space 'beyond' religion, where all religions are legitimate in their own general way, but where none of their specific confessional details or doctrinal content need be affirmed or denied. But this is obviously impossible: if God is a bland spiritual essence or power, beyond the particularities of religious confession, who is apprehended just as accurately by a Christian as he is by a Hindu, then this god is incompatible with the particular God of historical Christianity (for example), and the specifics of any religion must be denied in favor of this pantheist god who is the "true God".

Or, if God is somehow the immanent all-embracing 'One' of pantheism which all religions vaguely apprehend, then the holocaust, slavery, rape, intolerance, hatred et. al. all become necessary elements of "God's" being -- in fact become part of God him/itself. Once again making this god crucially incompatible with the gods of the Abrahamic religions, and many others besides.

While the incentive to adopt this stance is understandable -- desiring to overcome differences, to promote understanding, peace, and unity across religious divides, to see God as indiscriminately all-embracing etc. -- it is immediately self-defeating. Far from eliminating exclusivist religious claims, it merely introduces another exclusivist claim into the fray i.e. "none of your gods, as you understand them, is the true God, but in your errors of specific confession and practice you vaguely gesture in the true God's direction." Rather than subsuming all religions under the banner of the one true pantheist God, you introduce a new god who is just as in conflict with the historical faiths as any of the gods of those faiths is at odds with one another.

Perhaps this is the reason few people self-identify as pantheists of this sort. On close inspection, the position becomes untenable, evil, or pointless. But many people say and believe things without close inspection.

In the desire to affirm the legitimacy of all religions, you necessarily undermine and oppose them all. The God I believe in is not the god of Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism or Pop-Pantheism. This is not the resolution to the 'problem' of religious exclusivity that some naively believe it to be, rather it's proof of the inescapable, inherently exclusive nature of confessions of faith. 

On "Meta-Atheism" and Georges Rey

Our old friend Peter Boghossian recently posted a link to this short article from 2000, bearing the title Meta-Atheism, by Georges Rey who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. Why this old article is circulating I'm not sure, especially since it doesn't go much beyond Freud's standard account of religious belief as wishful thinking, only adding some particulars to the observation, but there it is.

The "meta-atheism" the title refers to is Rey's claim that "despite appearances, not many people -- particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science -- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived." This is a formulation of the de jure objection to religious belief which Alvin Plantinga deals with thoroughly in his Warranted Christian Belief (in which Plantinga rigorously demonstrates why none of the de jure objections, in their various formulations, actually work as objections).

Be that as it may, it certainly isn't controversial to suggest that if God is not real, or there is no supernatural reality, that therefore religious belief is a product of wishful thinking or self-deception. That's obviously true, operating on that conditional. Indeed, even if God does exist and one religion is True, it still may be true that other instances of religious belief in other gods are products of these mental processes (though Christians would claim that they are products of a natural desire for God, implanted by the creator, though this doesn't mean that desire can't be commingling with other, fallen mental processes). So that hypothesis (even though I don't accept it, at least as regards Christian faith) is at least understandable.

What doesn't make any sense at all is Rey's particular enumerated list of 'extensions' of wishful thinking in religious belief and practice. These seem to be specific examples of how self-deception and wishful thinking manifest themselves in things believers do and say. Rey thinks certain things believers do and say betray that they don't really believe what they claim they believe. Let's see if he has a point, and address them:

1) Detail Resistance
2) Comparability to Fiction

Though listed separately, this is actually a single objection, with #2 functioning as an addendum to #1. The problem here is that he mistakes a well established doctrine of creation ex nihilo for intellectual incuriosity to detail, when really it's acute attention to the conceptual details of that doctrine which reveals there simply can be no mechanistic 'details' of the kind he's asking for, nor is there any reason to expect they should exist. On the contrary, expecting them (as he does) shows a lack of understanding of the doctrine. The lay religious person may not articulate this to him in his interactions with them, but it's what they're intuiting when they recognize his questions as 'silly'. The one example he gives of 'detail resistance' is justified 'detail resistance'. Ignoring the specific example, and attempting to make sense of the objection itself, it still fails; given the Christian doctrine of Incarnation -- that God became flesh in a very particular, fleshly Jew, in whom all truth and hope resides -- 'detail', or the finite, or the-particular-as-such is entirely redeemed, as David Bentley Hart explains in The Beauty of The Infinite. The details of the form of Christ are everything, and we have no desire to shy from them.

However, it is sometimes, with regards to certain questions, entirely appropriate to point out that the "how" of some process is at best of secondary importance, or possibly of no functional significance at all.

3) Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of Absence

Here he attempts to flip a common theistic refrain on its head, though he fails to do so. Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, if the evidence that's missing is evidence we would otherwise expect to find were the claim true. Which is the case (to some extent) in the murder example he gives, but not the case as regards Christian belief, and so the supposed objection is really no objection at all. If Christian belief is true there is no reason to expect we should have more evidence that it's true than what we do in fact have.

4) Appeals to "Mystery"

Some believers appeal to 'mystery' or 'paradox' at times when they ought not to. When, for instance, an answer to something isn't actually a mystery, it's just something they don't know or understand. Believers ought to have more humility and acknowledge that just because they don't understand, or aren't aware of, something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a mystery. However, certain appeals to mystery (as it happens, the ones that are most commonly made) are absolutely justified, given that an infinite God can't be fully apprehended by finite creatures. We can -- through His Grace, the Incarnation, scripture, tradition and the intervention of the Holy Spirit -- come to know truths that He reveals to us about Him, but as finite beings we by definition will not be able to have a full knowledge of Him. This "appeal to mystery" is entirely appropriate given the infinite-finite distinction.

5) Merely Symbolic Status of the Stories

This objection is not very well articulated. First he objects to the internal coherence of the Christian doctrine of atonement (an objection which is predicated on a misunderstanding, which I will explain anon), and then says something about how if the Christian story is merely symbolism then the problems aren't relevant. Well yes, but so what? Is he saying that many believers do claim that such stories are symbolic? If so, how are they self-deceiving, according to him? I honestly can't make out what his point is here.

As for his objection to the doctrine of the atonement: One must first understand death as a consequence of sin -- rather than just something that happens for no ultimate reason, but just because of entropy or whatever -- and then one can begin to understand how the unjustified death of a sinless man can be an atoning death. I won't attempt to exegete the entire doctrine here, but he is missing the very fundamental first principles of it and then declaring it incoherent. Of course, if God doesn't exist, and death isn't a consequence of sin etc. then the atonement of Jesus doesn't make sense either, but what he's really objecting to here is the internal logic of the scheme of atonement, when that logic is absolutely pristine and he simply doesn't understand it.

6) Betrayals By Reactions and Behavior

The example he gives here may be somehow inconsistent for certain faiths, but not for Christian faith. And I suspect his confusion is a result of a confusion that is common among Christians too, which he just accepts but which is false; namely, that our eternal destiny is a disembodied heaven which we arrive at upon at the instance of our death, when actually our hope is in bodily resurrection and in New creation, a New Heavens and a New Earth. None of which has yet to come, and so mourning at death (which is a consequence of sin, and antithetical to God's plans for creation) is completely consistent and appropriate. Again, his confusion is somewhat understandable since even a wide swath of Christians share it, but it's his (and their) confusion that leads to seeing mourning as contradictory when it's perfectly consonant with orthodox Christian belief. "Blessed are the mourners, for they shall be [future tense] comforted". Jesus, significantly, didn't say "cursed are the mourners for there is nothing to mourn." Because there is something to mourn; death is inimical to God, God's enemy, and Christ defeats his enemy at the cross. Because of Christ's work death has no ultimate power over us, and therefore we don't sorrow like those without hope, but we do mourn a loss to the waste and destruction of death. For now.

7) Belief is Not a Matter of Choice

Again, his point here isn't all that clear. It seems to consist in nothing more than ponderous musings on the nature of 'faith' and how faith differs from simple 'belief'. Well, yes, quite. And? He does make the unsupported assertion that "I suspect you can have 'faith' only about what isn't really a serious contender for truth." Oh you suspect that, eh? Cool story, bro. I suspect differently. Glad that's all cleared up.

Somewhat more seriously, faith is mostly invoked with regard to propositions that are not matters of efficient, material causality, and so when he talks about "a serious contender for truth", he's pitting religious belief against scientific empiricism as a means for finding out truths about material causality -- something people of faith don't use faith for, at least not in the vast majority of cases, so the objection is just absurd and amounts to no more than "faith doesn't do what it isn't intended to do".

8) Projection

Here he merely asserts that humans have the capability to project meaning into things where it might not be there. Of course, he doesn't make an argument showing why this is what is occurring in all or most instances of religious belief, but merely asserts that it's something that can happen. Indeed it can, though I'm not sure how this supports his hypothesis. If the meaning he believes is being projected into things is actually there and he just isn't apprehending it, then it's his senses which are damaged, not the supposed 'projector'. And assuming said meaning isn't there presupposes atheism, rather than lends support to it as a conclusion.

In addition to each of these claims having problems within themselves, many of them don't even have any logical link to his central hypothesis about self-deception. His #3, for example, is just an attempt at a standard atheistic argument about God's non-existence. It's a de facto objection, not the de jure objection he was claiming that he was making. It's about the likely truth of religious belief, not whether religious persons are self-deceiving for holding to the belief. The objection, even if true, would not establish that religious people were self-deceiving when noting that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is true to varying degrees of a number of the listed objections.

Granted, this isn't a scholarly piece, and it comes with a disclaimer that he has developed the argument in more depth elsewhere, but with such carelessness of thought and with so many fundamental errors and misunderstandings, I can't imagine the argument gets anything but more convoluted and confused in its 'deeper' incarnation.

Christian Response to the "Hating Religion" Video

From my previous post you should be able to infer that I found the viral popularity of the "Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus" video to be discouraging and disheartening. It's one thing for one guy out there to write that poem, and make that video. That event in itself wouldn't bother me so much, because I could just write that person's thinking off as anomalous and not representative of any large swath of Christians. But when my first exposure to the video came via an explosion of praise and enthusiasm from Christians, that makes it more troublesome in two ways: 1) It means that many Christians already had similar thoughts and 2) The fact that it is being spread primarily as a positive thing may influence other Christians to adopt a similar attitude.

Of the four times it appeared on my facebook on the first day, each post only had positive feedback on it. It's possible that those who felt like I did about it just kept their dissent to themselves, perhaps not wanting to offend anyone. But, in any case, there are many, many Christians out there who either agree with the sentiments expressed in the video, or at least don't find them harmful.

To my relief, in the day or two following the appearance of the video, there has also been a substantial number of critical responses to the video from the Christian blogosphere. Many of which echo the criticisms from my post, others that took the video to task for different, but extremely important reasons, and still others that fall somewhere in the middle.

This one by my friend Ron focuses on the misunderstanding of the significance Christ's work displayed in the video, reducing that work to solely "dying for our sins", while failing to emphasize the utterly crucial regenerative aspect of Christ's resurrection. Resurrection which enables Christ's followers to change, not merely to be forgiven.

This post, by a friend of a friend, largely echoes my points regarding conflating one certain mode of religion for religion itself.

This post by my friend Scott wasn't written as a response to the video, but it was something he wrote previously that he thought was applicable in light of the video. It's about how -- despite the sometimes understandable desire to want to do so -- we can't separate Christ from His church, and say we love Him but not it. And if the Church of Christ is not "religion" then there's no such thing as "religion".

This post does an excellent job of highlighting the fact that using religion to erect a false facade to cover our brokenness is not the fault of "religion", but the fault of those of us who sinfully misuse "religion".

Finally, this post does a phenomenal point-by-point breakdown of the inaccuracies and fallacies of the video in a way that I wanted to do, but felt it would require too much effort. Even my post focusing on essentially one aspect of the video was fairly long. So, thank you for picking up my slack, sir.

I'm sure there are many other similar backlash responses out there, and thank God for that. I thought I'd just share a few of them that I found encouraging. While the "spiritual-Christ-follower-but-not-religious" attitude is still seemingly epidemic, it's good to know I'm not alone in opposing it.

Why I Love Jesus AND The Religion He Established

If you are a Christian and use the Internet you may have seen this video titled "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus":

It has recently gone viral on the Christian-social-media scene, if my facebook is any indication (4 Christians posted or re-posted it today, which is a big number for one day). Since I'm going to expend a rather large amount of time critiquing aspects of it, I felt I should -- in the name of fairness -- list some of the things I did like about it first:

- The affirmation of love for Jesus. This is always a good thing to see and hear, and he mentions multiple  reasons Christ is worthy of praise and Glory. Amen to all of that.
- His honesty about his own struggles being a "Sunday-only" Christian and such.
- His rightful disdain of certain hypocrisies of certain typically religious types of people, such as the erection of a religious facade to mask their brokenness and sin.

The main downfall of the video is its critique of "religion" and the false antagonism it introduces between Jesus and "religion", and this will take some significant unpacking.

Critique of religion is not the exclusive domain of the un-religious. Or at least not of unbelievers. The amount of people who use the phrase "spiritual-but-not-religious" (alternatively, "Christ-follower-but-not-religious") to describe their belief system is staggering. If "spiritual-but-not-religious" was itself an option for checking on religious affiliation surveys, I imagine it would be in strong competition for being one of the top 2 or 3 religions in America, at least.

Whence such disdain for (Christian) "religion"? In largely Protestant America, it can partially be traced back to the Reformation. After all, the Reformation was a rebellion against the established, legalistic, Christian order of the time that resulted in a more individualized, more "free", more enigmatic form of religion. Ultimately this was a movement away from those things we tend to most closely associate with "religion": authority, tradition, ritual, legalism etc. And, in America and within Protestantism, the majority regard this movement to be a desirable result.

Another reason for the hostility toward religion is the historical failings of "religion", or really -- more precisely -- the failings of religious people and institutions. Of which there are plenty. Some of these are common human failings that seem to be magnified in religious people; self-righteousness, pride, "intolerance". Whether this perception of religious people -- or of the Church -- is in fact accurate is debatable, but it's easy enough to admit that many religious people (Christians included) do many wicked things, and certain tendencies are more closely associated with religiosity than others.

But the two biggest reasons for the hostility toward Christian religion specifically are A) sin -- the sinful rejection of Christ and His bride -- and B) the fact that "religion" is so nebulous, multifarious, and imprecise as to make it a perfect scapegoat. It literally has no one to defend it. A Christian has no interest in defending "religion", he will defend Christ or Christianity. A Muslim has no stake in defending "religion", he only wants to defend Islam. And so on.

As for "A)", that problem doesn't appear to be the best explanation for this video. He verifies that he loves "the Church and the Bible." However, in most instances of the "spiritual-not-religious" or "Christ-follower-not-religious" voicing their opposition to religion, it is often motivated by a desire to affirm certain sinful (or at least inaccurate) critiques of (Christian) religion, while attempting to avoid throwing Christ out with the religion. The problem is that you can't separate Christ from his Church as the Church is Christ's Body, indwelt and empowered by the Holy Spirit. His representative on Earth. The move for the "spiritual-not-religious" person at this juncture is to claim that Christ's church is not about "religion", which he (the "spiritual-not-religious" person) implicitly narrowly defines as a certain form of self-righteous, legalistic, Pharisee-ism. The problem is that "religion" is a much more broad, protean phenomenon than that and you can't disassociate yourself from it by redefining it, simply because the word has some nefarious associations for you.

With regard to "B)", this fellow in the video isn't alone in this scapegoating effort. The most visible perpetrators of this scapegoating currently are the New Atheists, a group of scientists and authors who have made penning haughty diatribes against 'religion' their main source of income. One overarching difficulty for their arguments -- and for this video -- is that they fail to distinguish religion as such from religion as practiced by most, or the particular case from the general case. Either that, or they have trouble distinguishing between correlation and causation. While the subject is too large to tackle in this post, David Bentley Hart does a marvelous job of that here and here. Or, as Hart says elsewhere, most of the criticisms lodged against religion are "simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true."

This is evident in the video when when the poet asks "If religion is so great, why has it started so many wars?", making multiple mistakes at once. The actual number of wars started by "religion" or in the name of "religion" is zero. And this is not (solely) a flippancy; if you're going to make an argument you have to make these critical distinctions between "religion" and "things religious people have done in the name of their religion", for instance. They are not equivalent.

If we're to be charitable and assume he meant something like "many wars have been started by adherents of particular religions for religious reasons", then it becomes a bit of a historical caricature that is true only in a limited sense. Many of the wars traditionally attributed to religious causation were not "religious" wars. The European wars of the 1800s that are commonly referred to as the "wars of religion", for instance, were not religious wars at all but wars waged by the modern secular state. Many other wars throughout history had various political, cultural, and religious tensions which resulted in the eruption of violence, but which were not fundamentally "religious" wars, but sometimes get mislabeled as such (usually because there were religious men fighting in them).

Further, if we narrow it to Christian religion specifically -- since that's the crux of the disagreement as the video claims all religion as such is bad, while I claim all religion is false except Christianity -- then the caricature is even more historically inaccurate. Still, I would happily grant that there have been wars started by religious people for religious reasons throughout history. But this only gets us to the aforementioned "irrelevantly true". What does this tell us about "religion"? It tells us that humans are often wicked, sure, but if the world were purged of religion, would we have more or less war? Does the existence of political wars condemn politics as an illegitimate enterprise? The point of these rhetorical questions is to point out that the existence of religious wars tells us absolutely nothing about the validity or goodness of particular religions, or even religion as such.

The video also claims that "Jesus came to abolish religion." If we consult any dictionary on the matter, we can plainly see that this is factually incorrect. We must assume that by "religion" he means the narrow form of legalistic religion -- along with the sinful, sanctimonious attitudes it engendered -- of the Pharisees. Jesus was indeed opposed to this aspect of religion, and in the light of what He did and who He was, religion was transformed forever. But this is not the same as abolishing religion. Jesus was not a-religious, or anti-religious, He was perfectly religious. In every deed and every thought He never broke the Law of God's covenant with Israel, living the life of a sinless Jew. If Jesus was perfectly religious, and He is to be the example that we follow, how do we conclude that we should be a-religious or anti-religious? How is it even possible to be followers of Christ without being a "body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices"?

The man in the video goes on to point out the fact that religion is man-made, as if this were some strike against it. Art is man-made. Architecture is man-made. Science is man-made. Philosophy is man-made. Christ's work redeems all things -- except sin and death, which He defeats at the cross -- and religion is no exception. It's a logical fallacy to say that since Jesus opposed the religious order of his time, opposed hypocrisy and self-righteousness, or that since he atoned for sin, that therefore he was opposed religion as such. As with everything else, Christ redeems fallen religion and brings it under His righteous rule. He did not come to abolish it, contrary to what the video claims. And He told you as much: "I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." - Matt. 5:18.  He came to fulfill the Law and make the one true religion, the Kingdom of God, accessible to all people (rather than the one true religion being exclusive to God's chosen people, the Jews).

In addition to all this, when you look at the religion of Christ's followers on Earth, and the record of Christian religion -- all of it, pros and cons -- there is absolutely no cause for shame whatsoever, or any indication that Jesus will reject adherents of this religion in the way that he rebuked the Pharisees. Nay, He actually assured the followers of this religion that He would be with them visa vis the Holy Spirit, until his return (John 14). That doesn't mean Jesus co-signs every action of the Church, which is still made up of fallen men, but it does mean that this is the religion He established and that He has no intention of rejecting it.

This -- his hating religion while loving Jesus, his claiming Jesus and religion are on the opposite ends of some spectrum -- is my primary beef with the video. I have others -- Churches do feed the poor, for instance -- but it kind of feels like excessive piling on at this point, so I'll leave it at that.

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UPDATE: It looks as if a friend of mine, Ron, did some of my expounding on other issues for me. He even touched on things I hadn't considered. 

Sam Harris on Mutually Exclusive Religious Claims

In his recent debate with William Lane Craig Sam Harris trotted out one of my favorite arguments against religious belief. Harris pointed out that people of all religions claim to have certain similar types of experiences--moments where they feel they are in some way in the presence of God, moments of awe, moments of exhilaration at their apprehension of the divine. He then argued that since all religions report such experiences, since in some sense all these reports are qualitatively similar, and since all these religions have mutually exclusive truth claims then the claims of religion can not possibly be true.

Well, certainly these religions can't all simultaneously be true, but few believers claims that they are. The vast majority of believers hold that their religion is true and that others are false. Believers can account for other religious 'experiences' easily enough. Either the reports of those experiences are misconstrued by those who experience them as a divine encounter, but they are mistaken (just as Harris would contend), or the Christian, for example, might say that these experiences could indeed be legitimate encounters with God's divine presence in the natural world, though not necessarily an affirmation of the beliefs of the person who has the experience. In either case the existence of those experiences across religions is not difficult for a person of faith to account for.

The mutually exclusive truth claims of religion only precludes all religions from being true simultaneously, but they do nothing to preclude one of them from being true. Moreover, atheism--while not a religion per se--can be included in the fray. If atheism is true then no religion is true. If Christianity is true then no other religion or perspective on God (including atheism) is true. This observation, quite obviously, gets you absolutely no where. With only this information to go by, all we have established is that any religion (or atheism) could be true. Gosh, I think we all owe Sam Harris a debt of gratitude for clarifying that!

The frightening thing is that this vacuous observation of Harris' is probably interpreted by many to be a forceful objection against religious belief in general. And while I have no stock in religious belief in general, I do have stock in Christianity, and if someone writes off religious belief in general then it will be difficult for them to ever get to Christianity specifically. So while this is a silly objection it's still worth refuting.