Literal vs. Metaphorical

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

As I finish reading Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon I find that a prime aspect of religion that he seems blind to is the longstanding dispute between believers who understand their professions of faith in a literal way and those who understand them in a metaphorical, figurative way.

To take a quick example: In the Catholic Church at every Mass we recite the Nicene Creed, which begins, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen ... ." Leaving aside the other clauses, what does "Maker of heaven and earth" mean? Specifically, what does it means to say God "makes" this world, our earth?

If you are one of those who understand this idea literally, you may have a hard time with any explanation of the earth's origins that doesn't square with the most direct possible interpretation of the words in Genesis, chapter 1. Which tends to leave the theory of evolution out in the cold.

If on the other hand you understand this idea of God as the world's maker metaphorically, both Darwin and Genesis could be absolutely right.


In talking about the literal versus the metaphorical, I would like to sidestep any attempt at a rigorous definition of the two terms. I am perfectly willing to substitute terms like "simile" or "analogy" for the noun metaphor, "figurative" or "poetic" for the adjective metaphorical.

In fact, I am willing to stipulate that for me, the name of God is a metonymy — a term-substituting figure of speech, such as a "suit" for a business executive, or the "crown" for the king or queen. In this case, the word "God" stands in for the Great Big Truth we would otherwise have no chance of expressing.

What I am really trying to get at is not what a metaphor or a metonymy is, but rather the way in which the human mind works when it is in "figure-of-speech mode," as contrasted with when it is operating in "literal mode."

Moreover, what I am really trying to say is that some people (among whom I count myself) respond to religious language by automatically adopting a "figure-of-speech stance" towards it, while other people reflexively adopt a "literalist stance." Literalists and figuratives, we might call these two groups.


A figurative religionist such as myself is, I imagine, apt to be more of a "liberal" when it comes to his or her understanding of theology; a literalist will tend to be a religious "conservative." Thus do "liberal" and "literal" effectively become direct antonyms, when the discussion turns to religion.

I'm not just talking about how different people read the Bible, mind you. Bible reading is part of it, but in my Catholic tradition, Bible reading is amplified by how believers interpret all the wide-ranging pronouncements the Church has authored down through history, as summarized in, among other writings, The Catechism of the Catholic Church. How we "hear" the creeds we say in church, along with the homilies, the prayers, and all the other parts of the Order of the Mass, depends crucially on whether we are liberal figuratives or literalist conservatives.


Most of the complaints which Dennett makes about religion seem (at least to this liberal figurative) to convict the literalist conservatives.

It is the literalist conservatives who cannot reconcile Darwin's evolution theory with a belief in God. It is they who mock science's materialistic outlook: nothing not made of matter and its movements and modifications exists. It is they who conflate that philosophical definition of materialism with the everyday one: a bias toward gaining material possessions and away from living a life of the spirit.

Literalist conservatives seem to be increasing their share of Christians in this country, and they are certainly not shy about claiming that liberal figuratives like myself are missing the boat. But I would counter that it is they who have it wrong. Christianity has historically not been literal in its reading of scripture.


Accordingly, I think Dennett himself misses a very big boat by assuming that the "spell" of religion needs "breaking" simply because maximally strident, intransigently radical fundamentalism so menaces the common enterprise of all humanity. Yes, that is a spell that needs breaking, but, no, it is not the same intoxication with the Infinite that typifies Christianity in its "Great Tradition" and informs all the other grand and magnificent World Religions.

Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity

So says religion scholar Huston Smith in The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. Smith's 2005 book stands as the most eloquent possible riposte to Dennett's, though the latter would only be published the following year.

To Smith, the Great Tradition that was the Christian Church of the first millennium is the answer to all those — whether fundamentalist evangelicals or atheists like Dennett — who would polarize the world into two armed camps, one insistent that Holy Writ must be read literally, the other that it should be read as false.

Smith shows (see p. 17) that there are four levels of biblical exegesis that we must never fail to attend to. At the lowest level is the literal. Next up the line is the ethical: what should believers do or not do. Then comes the allegorical — as with ascribing meanings to Jesus's parables.

Most conservative literalists would not blanch at these three, but the fourth would raise many eyebrows. It is what Smith calls anagogic.

One online dictionary defines an anagogy as "a mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text, especially scriptural exegesis that detects allusions to heaven or the afterlife." In Smith's view the word encourages a mythical outlook, à la Joseph Campbell; per Reinhold Niebuhr, "Myth is not history, it is truer than history."

The problem for literalists is that anagogic, mythical, mystical modes of biblical exegesis put slavish literalism on the back burner. These modes recognize, first and foremost, that "languages are geared to the worldviews that monitor them" (p. 20).

Recognizing that fact, we moderns accordingly need to transpose the language of the Bible away from the ancient worldviews that informed it, as it was set down, it is quite true ... but over into a mode of understanding that assiduously factors out "the sea change from the traditional to the scientistic worldview that has profoundly affected the way our language works."

Today's biblical literalists — including those who, like Dennett and other vocal nonbelievers, read scripture literally and then dispute it on that basis — don't do that. They are blind to what I think of as metaphorical ways of interpreting religious truth.

In posts soon to come, I intend to expand on the remarks above as I detail my highly positive reactions to Smith's magnificent defense of Christianity in its Great Tradition.

Coherence of Belief (EOF5)

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

The End of Faith, Sam Harris' recent book proposing an end to religious faith as an antidote to religious hatreds, is in part an exercise in understanding how, for each of us, all the things we believe in need to cohere. I touched upon the idea in my last post in this series, Basins of Attraction for Human Beliefs, in which I indicated:

... it seems that the various basins of attraction we find ourselves in in different matters of opinion and belief interact. I am in the yes-there's-an-afterlife camp but also in the God-loves-us-all-equally camp ... so it's no wonder that I'm in the find-a-way-not-to-take-
Deuteronomy-literally camp. I can't imagine hating anybody's religion so much I expect not to see them in heaven, right beside my mother and father.

One of the chief differences between Harris' atheistic worldview and my religious one is that the way he finds not to take the biblical injunction "You must stone [the infidel] to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God" (Deut. 13:10) literally is not to take it at all. He favors junking all of scripture except perhaps certain portions which serve a legitimate — i.e., rational — spiritual purpose. Deuteronomy, read literally, doesn't do that; it asks us to do terrible things in the name of an arbitrary and bloodthirsty God whose existence cannot even be verified.

Though my worldview differs with Harris' about how we can find truth in the Bible if we read it in a non-literal way, I agree with him about the impossible dream we all share of "guaranteeing that our worldview is perfectly free of contradiction" (p. 57).

Harris is spot on when he shows that there are two forms of coherence that have to intertwine for us if we are to be persons at all — persons being seats of reliable, stable, non-contradictory, self-aware identity:

Beliefs are both logically and semantically related. Each [belief] constrains, and is in turn constrained by, many others. A belief like the Boeing 747 is the world's best airplane logically entails many other beliefs that are both more basic (e.g., airplanes exist) and more derivative (e.g., 747s are better than 757s). [Thus, logical coherence.] The belief that some men are husbands demands that the proposition some women are wives also be endorsed, because the very terms "husband" and "wife" mutually define one another. [Thus, semantic coherence.] In fact, logical and semantic constraints appear to be two sides of the same coin, because our need to understand what words mean in each new context requires that our beliefs be free from contradiction ... (p. 52).

If a person were to believe, for instance, two contradictory things about the place of his or her birth, Harris shows such a lack of coherence would eventually undermine the person's very identity:

Personal identity itself requires such consistency: unless a person's beliefs are highly coherent, he will have as many identities as there are mutually incompatible sets of beliefs careening around his brain (p. 54).

And yet, as Harris shows, there is no such thing as a perfectly consistent set of beliefs in any human brain:

If perfect coherence is to be had, each new belief must be checked against all others, and every combination thereof, for logical contradictions. But here we encounter a minor computational difficulty: the number of necessary comparisons grows exponentially as each new proposition is added to the list. How many beliefs could a perfect brain check for logical contradictions? The answer is surprising. Even if a computer were as large as the known universe, build of components no larger than protons, with switching speeds as fast as the speed of light, all laboring in parallel from the moment of the big bang up to the present, it would still be fighting to add a 300th belief to its list.

Along these lines, I worry about the internal consistency of Harris' own atheistic belief system. In discussing the need for the grammatical sentences which we use to tell ourselves what our beliefs are to cohere semantically and logically, he parses the inner logic of There is an apple and an orange in Jack's lunch box, saying thereupon:

It just so happens that we live in a universe in which, if you put an apple and an orange in Jack's lunch box, you will be able to pull out an apple, an orange, or both (p. 58).

What is this "it just so happens" business? That phrase is one we use when we want to elide any attempt to explain the fact that appears in the subordinate clause following "that." It just so happens that I'm in love, It just so happens that the coin I just tossed came up heads, It just so happens that the species Homo sapiens exists — all these are locutions that sidestep the need to deal with explanations.

But there are (possibly imponderable) reasons for each of these "that" clauses. I'm in love because I've finally found a lady friend who understands me. The coin came up heads because of a particular combination of physical forces acting upon it. Our species is present on Earth because of a historical process of biological evolution over billions of years.

It just so happens that we live in a universe in which, if you put an apple and an orange in Jack's lunch box, you will be able to pull out an apple, an orange, or both is tantamount to saying It just so happens that we live in a logically and semantically coherent universe. It's all well and good if we want to sidestep naming the cause of this (when you think about it) astounding fact in the name of brevity or ease of locution. But when the chips are down, we need to admit that this is exactly what we are doing.

Just as It just so happens that the coin I just tossed came up heads at some point has to be expanded to The coin came up heads because of a particular combination of physical forces acting upon it, It just so happens that we live in a logically and semantically coherent universe has to be expanded to We live in a logically and semantically coherent universe because ... .


Because what? is of course the next question that needs answering. But Harris-the-atheist doesn't follow through with an answer. Instead, he seems to think this is the one question concerning causality that need not be answered at all.

I worry that that's downright incoherent. After all, Harris presumably believes in science and rational inquiry, the tools we generally use to answer all causal questions. When we use these tools, we typically assume all things to have rational causes. We need only look hard enough for them, and we are bound to locate them. It is sort of a post-Enlightenment "Seek and ye shall find" mentality.

But in the Harris worldview, all bets are off when it comes to seeking and finding the cause of cosmic causal coherence per se. That alone can have "It just so happens ... " slapped on the front of it — so we can make semantically coherent statements about it, presumably — and it can be set all by itself on a shelf of inexplicability, never to have its cause determined or named.

Accordingly, it is here and only here that Harris allows semantic and logical coherence, which are generally joined at the hip, to come apart and separate. The causal coherence of the world has no logical explanation, an assertion which he papers over semantically with an "It just so happens ... " locution.


In my religious worldview, I answer the Because what? question this way. There are two classes of existents: caused things and uncaused causes. Often caused things do their own causing, yielding more caused things. In fact, just about everything is a caused thing. The class of uncaused causes contains just one member: the Prime Mover whom Judeo-Christians call the Lord God of Hosts.

Observe the imaginable alternatives. Suppose the class of all uncaused causes is an empty set, and there is no God. Then we are left with the incoherence I just exposed in Harris' atheistic worldview, in which the axiom that semantic coherence unfailingly goes with logical coherence, and vice versa, fails.

Or, suppose the class of all uncaused causes contains multiple, independent entities — say, the Greek or Roman pantheon of gods. If we ignore for the moment the fact that even Classical culture tried to trace the genealogy of its gods back to one single source, we are left with the possibility that the gods could fall out (as they often did) and impose their conflicting wills on the world we are assuming is fundamentally coherent. Multiple gods, conflicting wills, and unfailingly rational worldly coherence simply don't go together all that well, do they?


No, the only way you can successfully explain the twin coherences of the world, semantic and logical, is with reference to the single Unmoved Mover whom we call God.

Perhaps this is why the Christian Bible insists we think of Jesus Christ as the embodiment of the preexistent Logos, a.k.a. the Word of God. Logos suggests, of course, logical coherence, while Word implies semantic coherence. Q.E.D.

Basins of Attraction for Human Beliefs (EOF4)

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

I'm still considering The End of Faith, Sam Harris' recent book proposing an end to religion, all religion, as an antidote to hatreds and terrorist acts nominally grounded in religious faith. (See The End of Faith?, The Gandhi-and-Hitler Problem, and The Doubting of Harry for the first three installments in the series.)

As I said before, I dispute Harris on the grounds that he doesn't take into account the difference between true religion, which promotes life and love, and its demonic parody, which finds reasons to kill or torture "in the name of God."

I notice that Harris, an atheist, shares certain thought patterns with conservative-fundamentalist religious believers. One of these is the assumption that scripture, be it the Bible or the Qu'ran, ought to be interpreted literally in each and every passage, so when we Judeo-Christians read in Deuteronomy that God orders us to deal mercilessly with believers in other gods, that's it. There's no room for poetic re-interpretation.

That means that this and every other biblical passage are literally true, all in exactly the same way ... or (and this is what Harris actually thinks) they are balderdash. As such, some of the words of scripture may in a sort of by-the-bye way spark in us a glimmer of spiritual understanding, but the bulk of the Bible (or the Qu'ran) ought to go right on the trash heap.

Harris' outlook, frankly, gives me agita — heartburn. For all my ability to argue logically against it (see the earlier posts), I realize the dispute actually runs deeper than logic or reason. We disagree, I think, because our minds circulate in different basins of attraction.

Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe

A "basin of attraction" is an idea I borrow from the sciences of dynamical, state-changing systems. As I said in this post in another blog, one of the leading advocates of those sciences is Stuart A. Kauffman, whose book At Home in the Universe I consider to be a touchstone of understanding. Kauffman is a researcher into theoretical biology who finds that certain patterns of Darwinian evolution can be modeled on computers. The models reveal there is a built-in tendency for certain dynamical systems to produce "order for free," owing to their ability to "self-organize."

All dynamical systems move from state to state over the course of time. All are accordingly on some sort of "state cycle," such that eventually they will return to the state that they are observed in at any particular time. If the system is chaotic, it visits every other possible state that exists in its "state space" before it returns to where it began. Its state cycle, being arbitrarily long, seems to produce random results in any finite period of time.

If a system is tightly ordered, its state cycle is short, and it cycles forever among just a tiny handful of the possible states in state space. At the limit, the number of states in the state cycle is exactly one, and the system is frozen in place.

Neither a chaotic system nor a tightly ordered one can evolve gracefully. Chaotic systems cannot preserve new features they happen to stumble on which may be advantageous to their survival. Too orderly systems cannot easily generate new, adaptive characteristics to begin with. The only systems that can evolve gracefully are those that have state cycles that are fairly long, but not too long.


As such they are able to explore fairly large chunks of their state space in search of adaptive characteristics. The downside is that they pretty much are limited to that chunk of state space.

Such a system will often get "perturbed" by various events in its environment, such that it temporarily hops off its state cycle and enters a state that is not on the original cycle. Typically, though, that new, hopped-to state will be "near" the original state cycle. As the system proceeds to yet more new states following that initial perturbation-induced hop, it will tend to gravitate back to one of the states on the original cycle. After that, it will circulate around and around the original state cycle once again, pending another hop-inducing perturbation.

Kauffman calls the original state cycle an "attractor" within the state space of the system. It lies at what may be thought of as the bottom of a "basin of attraction" — in the bottomland of a drainage basin, as it were. As a raindrop falling on the Rocky Mountains, depending on exactly where it falls, will eventually find its way either to the Pacific Ocean or to the Gulf of Mexico, via the Mississippi River, a dynamical system will (following a perturbation) gravitate toward one attractor or another depending on what basin of attraction its current state is in.


Each basin of attraction has its attractor state-cycle. It is as if the attractor holds the system in a particular region of state space. To get the system into another region for wider exploration would require a huge perturbation. If such a perturbation occurred, the system might find itself forever in the grip of a different attractor. Now it would gravitate toward a new set of states which follow one another in a new cycle, never to know its original state cycle, ever again. Such radical changes in gracefully evolving systems are rare, needless to say.

It is speculative on my part, but I would wager a great deal of money that the human mind is like a gracefully evolving dynamical system, in terms of the beliefs it holds. At some level of its operation, a human person's belief system is a collection of state spaces, one for each matter of opinion or topic of belief.

For example, take my belief that the Bible (or at least parts of it) ought to be interpreted loosely, something like poetry. The passage from Deuteronomy which Harris cites as typical of religious scripture — the one that urges God's chosen people to show pagan worshipers no mercy — is, on this view, hyperbole. It is an extended figure of speech which is intended not to be followed literally but to let us know how very, very seriously we are to take our personal and communal commitments to God.

The question I am addressing here is not, however, whether mine is the right interpretation. It is, rather, why I seem to be able to entertain it at all, while people like Harris are not. My contention is that my belief system as it concerns biblical interpretation is simply in a different basin of attraction than Harris' is.

Every time I come across new information about the Bible and how people and churches have interpreted it, what generally happens is that the new information acts as a perturbation. It knocks me out of my comfortable groove for a bit.

This is exactly what happened when I read Harris' claim that the thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy — which contains the divine order, "You must stone [the infidel] to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God" (Deut. 13:10) — marks Judeo-Christian religion as irredeemably bloodthirsty.

But then my basic understanding of what the Bible "says," when taken as a whole, reasserts itself. As the state of my belief about biblical interpretation finds its original attractor once more, I am able to reason that such a command, which seems so counter to everything I hold sacred, cannot be read literally.


But that only begs the question, why do I hold so sacred the notion that Judeo-Christian religion is meant to unite us in life, love, and peace, not set us at one another with swords drawn and stones ready to be slung?

I could give many answers, but the simplest one is that I have always rejected the divisive aspects of religion, even before I believed in God.

When I was 13, I happened to be taken to Sunday School by a cousin I was staying with. I had not been raised by churchgoing parents, and had spent little time in church. This was a new experience for me. That day, the topic of discussion was whether, as young people about to start having dates, we ought to go out with those of other religions.

I was called on first, as the guest in the discussion circle. I had no doubt that I knew the right answer: yes, because it was a good way to get to know families of different faiths.

I was quickly disabused of my foolish assumptions by the Sunday School teacher and the rest of the class. No, going out with someone of another faith was an invitation to disaster. For what would happen if marriage and children ensued? Possibly the children would grow up confused and have no faith at all!


Even as (at that time) a budding agnostic, I simply knew that couldn't be right. Surely God didn't want his children to wall themselves off from one another over disputes of religion. Surely that wasn't the purpose of religion. The purpose of religion had to be to bring us all together in God's eyes, not tear us apart.

I couldn't have stated it in just this way then, but that last paragraph truly reflects my inchoate understanding of what it had to be like to believe in a God on High who made us and loves us, one and all.

Again, my intent here is not to argue the point, but to show that my barely formed understanding of who God is was already in a God-unites-not-divides basin of attraction. Much later in my life, my actual beliefs about God (once I had become religious) encountered the state-cycle attractor they circulate on today. But even then, it was that attractor which was their destiny.


Less directly, that God-unites-not-divides attractor is surely responsible, at least in part, for my belief in liberal, rather than literal, biblical interpretation.

Strictly speaking, my belief concerning universal human brotherhood, with no exceptions whatsoever, and my belief concerning liberal Bible interpretation are, though compatible, separate matters. To prove the point, I need only note that Harris, despite his atheism, agrees with me on the first matter and disagrees with me on the second. In fact, he believes that the only way to serve brotherhood and peace is to abandon religion.

I won't abandon religion so easily. One of the reasons (see An Ever-So-Desperate Need) is that I believe I'll be reunited with my departed parents in heaven someday. That's a belief that I cherish as the result of the earthquake in my soul that occurred at the time my mother died. It was so huge, it put me in an entirely different basin of attraction vis-à-vis the question of the afterlife!


So it seems that the various basins of attraction we find ourselves in in different matters of opinion and belief interact. I am in the yes-there's-an-afterlife camp but also in the God-loves-us-all-equally camp ... so it's no wonder that I'm in the find-a-way-not-to-take-
Deuteronomy-literally camp. I can't imagine hating anybody's religion so much I expect not to see them in heaven, right beside my mother and father.

The Doubting of Harry (EOF3)

In this week's TIME Magazine, Lev Grossman asks the question, "Who Dies in Harry Potter?". The answer: God.

"The Doubting Harry. Why we love a world where dragons are real and religion is the fantasy," reads the article's subhead, as printed in the magazine itself. In the text of the article, Grossman points out how different J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series is from C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" or J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." Both of those can be read as Christian in their basic outlook, while

Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn't. Rowling has more in common with celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens than she has with Tolkien and Lewis.

In the Potter books, there is no God, no heaven, no prayer. Says Grossman:

What does Harry have instead of God? Rowling's answer, at once glib and profound, is that Harry's power comes from love. This charming notion represents a cultural sea change. In the new millennium, magic comes not from God or nature or anything grander or more mystical than a mere human emotion. In choosing Rowling as the reigning dreamer of our era, we have chosen a writer who dreams of a secular, bureaucratized, all-too-human sorcery, in which psychology and technology have superseded the sacred.

I think that's pretty close to the truth about the Harry Potter worldview ... with the caveat that Rowling actually takes potshots at bureaucracy. She portrays it as the enemy of love, not its friend, because of its pettifogging blindness to the dangers posed by the dark and evil Lord Voldemort.

Actually, now that I think about it, there's one more caveat. I tend to doubt that Rowling would feel comfortable with calling love a "mere human emotion." When Harry does his heroic feats to thwart Voldemort, the emotions he typically feels are anger, fear, disgust, bafflement ... but not love. He's forced to battle He Who Must Not Be Named before he's gained his full maturity and become aware of the power of love. In fact, it is through being confronted with the challenges from hate that he grows in love.

All that notwithstanding, clearly love as a deep commitment to humanity and life and a radical opposition to powers of death and destruction — not a "mere human emotion" — is what Rowling's Potter series is all about.


Which means that Grossman is basically right. Rowling seems to be saying — all caveats aside — just what Grossman thinks she's saying: we ought to build a world in which love triumphs over death in our hearts and minds ... and do so in the absence of religion.

That seems to me to be a tall order.

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

In my estimation as a religious believer, I see religion's mission as exactly that: to build a world in which love triumphs over death in human hearts and minds. Yet, as I have documented in my previous two installments in this "The End of Faith?" series, this introductory post and The Gandhi-and-Hitler Problem, books are now cropping up right and left challenging that view. The one I am reading right now is Sam Harris' 2004 screed titled The End of Faith.

Harris opposes faith in both its guises, fundamentalist-conservative and moderate-liberal. He thinks religion is constitutionally unable to set aside those parts of Holy Writ that call for us to make war on infidels ... i.e., anyone with a different Holy Book. He despises modern, moderate theists for their "tolerance" of other religions because that toleration, he claims, effectively turns a blind eye to the seeds of hatred in every faith.


In the second of my previous posts in this series, I took Harris to task for failing to distinguish between religion and its various demonic parodies. In trying to lay out what I meant by "demonic parody," I ought to have likened the faith/demonic parody opposition to that between the Force and the Dark Side in "Star Wars." Anakin Skywalker can morph into Darth Vader, as George Lucas showed us in his motion picture double-trilogy, while still mouthing the selfsame idealistic formulas of his youth. No matter what the ideal, there is a level of commitment to it that can turn anyone into a death-dealing tyrant.

Or, as The Skeptic, Michael Shermer, points out in his most recent Scientific American column, "Bad Apples and Bad Barrels: Lessons in Evil from Stanford to Abu Ghraib":

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who knew a few things about the capacity for evil inside all of our hearts of darkness, explained it trenchantly in The Gulag Archipelago: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

I believe that implicitly: the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. In fact, it's exactly what my religion tells me is true, with its distinction between angels and humans. Angels (even if they are fallen) don't have a divided-heart problem. The angels in heaven are good through and through. Those in hell are thoroughgoing Darth Vaders.


So I wonder if the overt attempts by Harris and others to dethrone God, aided by the more indirect influence of Rowling et al., would even work. The fact that religion itself has dealt in death, both in the present and historically, could be taken (as Harris takes it) as evidence that faith per se is harmful to life and love. But it could also be taken as I take it: as testament to the depth of the divided-heart problem we all have to confront, with or without religion. Given that religion, when it is pure and not a demonic travesty, is specifically targeted at this very problem, wouldn't we be foolish to give it up?

The Gandhi-and-Hitler Problem (EOF2)

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

Sam Harris' recent screed The End of Faith has as its premise that the world can no longer afford religion — any religion.

As I said in The End of Faith?, "You must stone [the infidel] to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God" (Deuteronomy 13:10, in the Judeo-Christian Bible) stands for Harris as a sort of précis of what religion, at its very core, is. It is, to Harris, an irrational faith in words supposedly written by the Creator of the universe, and these words unfailingly exhort us to kill those who don't believe them.

There are a seemingly infinite number of possible rejoinders to such a gruesome caricature of religious faith. The one that impresses me as most apt is that which carefully distinguishes between true religion and its demonic parody.


Since I am a Christian, let me adopt a modicum of objectivity by claiming, as a paragon of true religion, someone from a different religious tradition entirely: Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was a Hindu. His Hindu title, Mahatma, means "great soul."

The life of this spiritual leader of India's independence movement from British rule in the late 1940s is portrayed in Richard Attenborough's marvelous 1982 biopic, Gandhi. The film shows Gandhi as insistent on Hinduism's philosophy, religious customs, and precepts ... including that of ahimsa, nonviolence.

Though a committed Hindu, Gandhi repeatedly and consistently attempted to bridge the differences between Hindus and India's many Muslims. Gandhi was vehemently opposed to any independence plan that partitioned India into two separate countries. After independence was gained, India and Muslim Pakistan underwent a bloody partition nonetheless, and Gandhi was assassinated by a radical Hindu who objected to Gandhi's ultimate acquiescence in the partition.

Those Hindus and Muslims who killed one another out of opposing religious convictions were of a mindset diametrically opposed to that of Gandhi. Where Gandhi's mindset was what I would choose to call "true religion," that of the sectarian killers in the former "Raj" of India was its "demonic parody."


Another example of demonic parody, from the recent history of religion, is that of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. Nazism in the Third Reich was fed by a selective mixture of faux-Christian theology along with the iconography of ancient Germanic and Roman paganism — see Wikipedia articles Nazism and Religion and Positive Christianity. Into the mix went also a widespread belief in mysticism and occultism, along with a perverted scientific viewpoint which claimed Germans were demonstrably the "master race." Taken together, these beliefs underwrote the Nazis' persecution of Jews and their attempt to conquer all of Europe.

True Christianity, in view of Jesus' admonition to "turn the other cheek" (see Matthew 5:38), has developed a rational doctrine of "just war" which sets out the necessary exceptions to a general rule of Christian pacifism. Among the constraints: "Force may be used only to correct a grave, public evil, i.e., aggression or massive violation of the basic human rights of whole populations," according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1993.

Accordingly, to the extent the Nazis' hodgepodge of Christianity alloyed with other influences is a religion at all, it is a demonic parody of true religion.

Northrop Frye's Words with Power

By "demonic parody" I mean any perversion of religion to glorify not life but death. I take the term from Northrop Frye's Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature, the late literary critic's second book on how the Christian Bible informs all of Western literature and culture. Frye associates demonic parodies, biblical or otherwise, with such things as the casting of God's creation into the category of an inert, manipulable "object," and also with themes of tyranny and sadomasochistic domination. But the main thrust of demonic parody of religion is to urge us toward what Sigmund Freud called thanatos: the death instinct or death drive.

I hasten to add that, as I admit ought to be quite apparent to all of us who believe in God, Western Judeo-Christian religion has historically come under the spell of thanatos from time to time. Like everything nasty that exists in the unconscious mind, the renunciation of the will to live — another way of referring to the death instinct — can all too easily be psychologically displaced outward onto other human beings, Freud showed. Thus, the burnings at the stake done by the Inquisition to "save the souls" of witches, heretics, and other unbelievers.

Of course, thanatos does not always get fully displaced onto others — thus, today's radical Islamist suicide bombings that claim the lives of countless innocents and make supposedly Paradise-bound martyrs of their perpetrators.


Harris wants to abolish religion because he himself seemingly cannot disentangle it from thanatos. He cannot distinguish what I am calling the demonic parody of religion from the real thing.

Historically, I admit, Harris is quite right to accuse numberless religionists of falling prey to the death instinct, whether displaced outward or not. When they have done so, they have turned God into a killer-by-proxy, and sometimes even a suicide-by-proxy.

I can offer two main reasons why Harris' solution to this historical reality — his prescription of religion-no-more — is a bad idea.

First, thanatos is a powerful instinct. It will never be abolished. It must be fought head on.

Second, fighting it head on requires true religion: religion which gives us a rational basis for rejecting the death drive in all its manifestations.

Yes, I said a "rational" basis. Harris gets religion quite wrong when he calls it fundamentally irrational. It is not fundamentally irrational to take certain things on faith and then use them to extend our understanding of the world. When we do arithmetic to compute a trajectory to the moon, for example, we place our faith in the unprovable axioms of number theory. That's not irrational. No more is it fundamentally irrational to adopt as an axiom that a God who truly exists and is himself rational made the world.

Faith only turns irrational when it glorifies thanatos. Extolling death is wholly incoherent for the living. Thanatos is crazy.

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

As I discussed in several earlier posts on Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, including among others The Self-Contradictions of Liberty, and in posts I made about the Pope's much-maligned Regensburg Lecture (see The Pope of Reason and The Pope and Islam), Christianity is first and foremost a reasonable religion.

By that I mean that it finds the coherence and reasonability of God's created world to be grounded in the fact that reason and logical coherence are core attributes of the divine nature. In his lecture, Benedict took Islam to task for (sometimes) thinking of God as capable of putting on and taking off reason like a mask. Translation: if God tells you to do the irrational, you do it willingly, for the orders come straight from the deity behind the mask.

Christianity says no to that. Christianity has (hopefully) purified itself of any tendency it has had in the past to do the irrational and logically incoherent: kill (or die) in the name of God.


Furthermore, I believe that all true religions are just like Christianity in this regard. They house foreign, impure elements of demonic parody that glorify not life but death. Islam is no exception. Neither is Hinduism.

As for the Nazis' amalgam of religion and racism, it was never a true religion at all. It was a demonic parody from day one.

The antidote to demonic parody is not to jettison religion entirely, as Harris wants. It is rather to use our God-given reason to purify the religions we have.

The End of Faith? (EOF1)

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

Sam Harris' 2004-2005 screed against religion, all religion, has finally popped into my bedside reading stack. Called The End of Faith, it was recently a New York Times bestseller. Its subtitle is "Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason." Its premise is that religion qua religion is fatally flawed by virtue of its hostility to reason, and can never, ever stop underwriting terrorist bloodbaths.

Harris is a scholar, an academic, a graduate in philosophy at Stanford University. He has delved deeply into Eastern and Western religious traditions. Spirituality, both within and external to these faith traditions, interests him deeply, as does the basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in our brain's functioning.

He quite apparently also is a committed — nay, militant — atheist.


The author directs much of his venom about religion at people like me, whom he would label a religious "moderate." (I would prefer to think of myself as a religious "liberal," but never mind.) To Harris, moderates are worse than fundamentalists because we moderates' watchword is "tolerance." We carefully avoid smiting those of other persuasions.

Harris can't stand that. Early on, he conspicuously cites language from chapter 13 of Deuteronomy, the fifth book in the Judeo-Christian Bible, in which God directs his chosen people to kill anyone trying to "secretly seduce you" over to the worship of rival gods. This sort of thing, he says, is what fundamentalists who spare not the sword get right about their religion ... and moderates who turn a blind eye to such divine adjurations get wrong.

In fact, "You must stone [the infidel] to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God" (Deut. 13:10) stands for Harris as a sort of précis of what religion, at its very core, is. It's not just Judeo-Christian religion that sparks our thirst for blood to be drawn in God's name. It's also Islam, another well-known form of monotheism ... in which the blood is shed in Allah's name. And, with other necessary changes to the holy name, it is likewise true of every other world religion that demands that we call things true on faith rather than by seeking and finding incontrovertible empirical evidence.

If religions are fundamentally calls to vanquish other religions, Harris thinks the future of our world depends on jettisoning them all in favor of science, empiricism, reason ... and, yes, even a sophisticated spirituality which does not depend on unverifiable portions of Scripture.


We wouldn't be eliminating all spirituality, in Harris' longed-for world in which the old religions have vanished into oblivion, because:

There are undoubtedly spiritual truths that we would want to relearn ... and these are truths that we have learned imperfectly in our present state. How is it possible, for instance, to overcome one's fear and inwardness and simply love other human beings? (p. 24)

When I read this, I wanted to shout at Harris, "That's what Christianity is. It's a time-tested method of learning to overcome one's own fear and selfishness and replacing them with love for others."

But Harris doesn't see it that way. He goes on:

Assume, for the moment, that such a process of personal transformation exists and that there is something worth knowing about it; there is, in other words, some skill, or discipline, or conceptual understanding, or dietary supplement that allows for the reliable transformation of fearful, hateful, or indifferent persons into loving ones. If so, we should be positively desperate to know about it. There may even be a few biblical passages that would be useful in this regard — but as for whole rafts of untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to take them up again.

In my next post in this "The End of Faith?" series, I'll take up the subject of why I totally disagree with Harris' understanding of what religion really is. As a foretaste of that, let me just say that I think ideologies which provoke hatred and bloodshed are a demonic parody of true religion ... never mind the extent to which they historically and currently have held millions in their grip.