The City of God

Bearing the Cross

David Van Biema's "The Turning Point" in the May 2, 2005, issue of TIME magazine gives much insight into the intellectual and spiritual formation of our new pope, Benedict XVI.

It also helps me understand why he and I — though I am a Roman Catholic — don't sing from the same hymn book.

At the root of our disagreement is a different attitude toward "ordo, God's all-inclusive order." Pope Benedict, as Joseph Ratzinger before he became a cardinal and then Holy Father, lionized saints Bonaventure and Augustine. Augustine postulated The City of God, the name of one of his two major books (the other being his Confessions). "A key concept" of that book, Van Biema writes, "is that the Christian church is superior and essentially alien to its earthly surroundings."

As such, the "eternal, divine truth" of the church seems to represent to His Holiness the only true foundation for worldly order: "the only bulwark against man-made 'truths' ranging from the mischievous to the murderous." Faith in the "city of man," by way of contrast, can be a recipe for chaos.

Not that "experimentation" with "free and liberal thoughts" within the church is always forbidden. During the mid-1960's Ratzinger was in fact a key architect of Vatican II reforms, including the earth-shaking 1965 document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), also called "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World." It has since been cited by liberals and reformers

... as a mandate for the church to come into synch with modern Western culture. That means loosening its hierarchical authority, encouraging internal debate and external outreach and honoring individual freedom of conscience ... .

But then in 1968, while Ratzinger was a teacher at the University of Tübingen in Germany, dialogue with the left turned to disruption. Student strikes, Ratzinger's former friend and now-antagonist Hans Küng reports, "triggered a huge fright. Ratzinger believed that he was in some way responsible, guilty of the chaos, and that the university and society and church were collapsing."

Since then, the less-liberal in the church have re-envisioned Gaudium et Spes as being "far less expansive than liberals imagine." Meanwhile, as a cardinal, Ratzinger became prefect of the Vatican's "heresy-hunting office," which had since been renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and which he had once been critical of as "an all too smoothly functioning [body] which prejudged every question almost before it had come up for discussion."

In that role during the 1980s — even if his various decisions and pronouncements on the subject of "liberation theology" were shaded and nuanced, and not necessarily simplistic — Cardinal Ratzinger "effectively crippled the philosophy's influence and wounded the prestige of sympathizers like the Jesuits." (Liberation theology was a movement, primarily in Latin America, in which Catholic priests sided with local Marxists on behalf of the poor and against their repression by entrenched rich oligarchies.)

When the man who would one day become pope was traumatized by the German academic upheavals of 1968, according to his former assistant and friend Wolfgang Beinart, "at that moment Ratzinger the reformer decided the necessary conditions for reform did not exist." Ratzinger apparently concluded that the City of God needed rigidity, not openness. That rigidity has been the story of his career for over three decades.

The fact that I resent this rigidity says as much about me as it does about objective truth. I was some 20 years younger than the forty-something Ratzinger when, also in 1968, "liberal" protest against the war in Vietnam turned ugly and "radical" here in this country. I never bought into the rationale for that change ... and as a result I have never felt particularly "mugged by reality" in the wake of that development. It was a tragic mistake to go "radical" ... but that was no reason for me to stop hoping for a "liberal" world of greater justice and freedom.

In those days, I was not a Catholic. As the child of lapsed Protestants, I was attending Jesuit-run Georgetown University despite my lack of religious affiliation. I accordingly imbibed the heady spirit of Gaudium et Spes and the rest of Vatican II at a slight distance, since I had known little of the heavy-handed ways of the earlier church.

But from what I heard, I knew that the Gaudium spirit spoke to me. Little surprise that when some three decades later I converted to Catholicism, I considered myself a "Vatican II Catholic." Never mind that the current pontiff, John Paul II, was a "conservative." For me, Catholicism is a faith of liberation.

In examining my own basic assumptions over the last decade or so, I have become ever more convinced that there are lawful, if hidden, sources of order in the world itself. This is why, for instance, I am so taken with the evolutionary theories of researcher Stuart Kauffman as discussed in his book At Home in the Universe (see Welcome to Beyond Darwin and the other posts in my Beyond Darwin blog).

Kauffman posits that "order for free" just nautrally emerges in systems poised at the "edge of chaos." Neither rigid order nor rank chaos is the natural state of such systems. Rather, they gravitate to that fecund boundary between the two, so to evolve with greater and greater complexity. "Self-organization" accounts for the evolution of life forms and of human cultures.

I would liken the Vatican II Gaudium et Spes church to the fertile edge of chaos, the rigid church of yore and today to the frozen order which harms evolvability, and the 1968 upheavals which traumatized Ratzinger to the chaos which likewise harms evolvability.

Still, I take the erstwhile Cardinal Ratzinger's point that there are times when rigidity is a necessary ploy to conquer chaos. I just don't agree with his underlying metaphysics: that the City of God and the city of man are essentially alien to one another. I think our faith, hope, and joy transform the city of man into the City of God. I think the spirit of Vatican II is just what the doctor ordered for such a transformation.

I admit, however, that I can't explain why that spirit curdled so rapidly into hateful radicalism in the late 1960s. Nor am I quite certain what, if anything, would keep that from happening again, should the Holy Spirit move the new pope to resume his mid-1960s openness.

But that is exactly what I pray for today. Am I being too rigid?

The Church as Gyroscope, or Counterweight?

St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, Rome

As I indicated in A New Pope, I am like other "liberal" American Catholics who are wary of the reign of the newly installed Benedict XVI. Columnist Jules Witcover of The Baltimore Sun, himself a liberal Catholic, has this article about the situation in this morning's edition.

Of the former Cardinal Ratzinger, Witcover writes of Catholic Americans' concerns with his ...

... rigid adherence to church orthodoxy in barring women from the priesthood and marriage for male priests, in categorical opposition to abortion and to the use of condoms in the fight against the AIDS epidemic.

Moreover, Cardinal Ratzinger, in a memorandum to a leading American cleric during the 2004 presidential campaign, sent at a time when certain American prelates and priests favored denying Holy Communion to Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, because he was pro-choice ...

... appeared to sanction the same denial to any Catholic who supported a pro-choice candidate for that reason.

"A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation with evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion," the German cardinal wrote, "if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia."

Such stands on specific issues fit in with a worldview then-Cardinal Ratzinger expressed as recently as his homily to the conclave of cardinals who would elevate him to pope in the coming days, in which ...

... he warned that the world was "moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires."

Elsewhere [Witcover continues], he equated this relativism with Marxism, liberalism and feminism to be shunned by all Catholics.

I take this ultra-orthodoxy, this aversion to "relativism," as a sign that the new pope, if he had his way, would have the church and the world march in lockstep to a single drummer. That, after all, is what relativism's opposite, absolutism, is all about: there is supposedly one absolute source of values and morals, and if the world doesn't march to its beat, it's on its way to hell in a proverbial handbasket.

But, as I suggest in Emergent Expectedness, Emergent Evolvability in my Beyond Darwin blog, when any "society" composed of semi-autonomous agents coupled loosely together in networks of mutual aid and support starts marching to a single drumbeat, uh oh. Though the uniform drumbeat seems the perfect antidote to rumors of incipient chaos, it too harms the evolvability and survivability of the society in adapting to inevitable change.

I think Pope Benedict imagines the Catholic Church as a counterweight to change. Better he should imagine it as a gyroscope, dynamically spinning out the sort of change society needs today, meanwhile keeping things steady and on course.

Today, the church and the society as a whole need the affirmation of women that would come if women could be priests. Also needed is a recognition that not all good priests need be celibate. And an admission that sheer concern for the lives of millions demands that the church stop opposing condoms as barriers to AIDS.

A New Pope

Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

We Roman Catholics have a new pope today, and wouldn't you know it, the man who was selected was the one man I most hoped would not be made pope. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, erstwhile chief enforcer of theological purity as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is now Pope Benedict XVI.

This is quite a blow for me, a "liberal" in my faith. Only three days ago I filed Mugged by Uncertainty, in which I pointed out TIME magazine's nominating Ratzinger as one the top 100 movers and shakers in the world. In this article, TIME said:

Ratzinger has been a tough theological enforcer in the church for more than two decades. Once an enthusiast for the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, he later wondered if they had gone too far. Call him one of the first theo-conservatives—a former liberal mugged by what he saw as the reality of religious laxity.

His response was, said TIME:

... to reassess the importance of the papacy as a means of asserting control over the church, to insist on the otherworldliness of religious faith and its imperviousness to changes in society.

The "theo-conservatism" of Ratzinger is admittedly anathema to me. So I consider it my duty to at least try to figure it out.

Some help comes from two paragraphs in a front-page profile of the new pope in today's The Baltimore Sun:

Ratzinger's experience in Nazi Germany is thought to have been a seminal moment in the formation of his theological convictions, convincing him that church teachings must be clear and absolute lest they be easily manipulated by outside forces.

"Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism," wrote John L. Allen Jr., in his book Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith. "In other words, he believes the Catholic church serves the cause of human freedom by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what it teaches and believes."

The best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism? That idea of serving freedom by restricting it is truly paradoxical to me, even oxymoronic. Moreover, I am a great believer not in absolutism but in relativism: I think most moral decisions must be taken in view of a larger context. What is wrong in one context may be right in another.

My gut tells me that John L. Allen's assessment of what lies at the core of Pope Benedict XVI's thinking is spot on — ecclesial totalitarianism as the supposed guarantor of human freedom, that is — even though it is usually a mistake to summarize complex thought with simple mantras.

It furthermore looks to me as if the late pope, John Paul II, bought more and more into this notion as he got older and older. Somewhere in the newspaper coverage of the papal election was mentioned the fact that Cardinal Ratzinger was one of the few men to have had regular private audiences with John Paul. Could there be a connection?

We must keep in mind that, just as Benedict XVI was traumatized by Nazism in the Germany of his youth, the former Karol Woytila was scarred by both Nazi and Soviet occupation of his native Poland. Both were, lest we forget, forms of totaliarianism.

I can't think of many things that I hate more than totalitarianism and tyranny.

So I'm going to have to cogitate on how it could possibly be true that ecclesial totalitariansim helps the cause of human freedom!

Mugged by Uncertainty

Michael Kinsley

"Evolution of the Neocons," a recent op-ed column be the Los Angeles Times' Michael Kinsley, shows how the neoconservative movement has done a 180-degree turn since the 1970's and '80's. Where the neocons who drive foreign policy in the Bush administration have

... a "messianic vision" of using American power to spread democracy, an indifference to the crucial distinction between what would be nice and what is essential to national security, and excessive optimism that we can arrange things according to our own values in strange and faraway lands ...

the founders of neoconservatism looked askance at trying to impose American values elsewhere. Jeane Kirkpatrick, neoconservative emeritus from the Reagan years, once published an article that

... was a ferocious attack on President Carter for trying to "impose liberalization and democratization" on other countries. She mocked "the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances." Democracy, she said, depends "on complex social, cultural and economic conditions." It "normally" takes "decades, if not centuries."

Part of the explanation for the about face, as Kinsley mentions, was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pre-collapse neocons were mainly wanted to make certain that the communists would not win the Cold War. Indeed, Kinsley writes:

The core group [of original neocons] had famously been Trotskyites at City College in the 1930s. By the 1950s and 1960s, they had become anti-Communist liberals and supporters of the Vietnam War. ... Finally [after taking offense at various liberal programs and at the counterculture] Irving Kristol, dubbed the neocon godfather, decided to take the name [which had been coined by neoconservatism's opponents as a slur] as a compliment. He defined a neoconservative as "a liberal mugged by reality."

However, I see an overarching continuity here, despite the appearance of an about face. Kinsley himself alludes to it in his final sentences:

The seemingly easy spread of democracy over the last couple of decades may have disproved Kirkpatrick's pessimism. But all these explanations require an admission of error, something the neocons are not very good at. They are selling certainty.

They are selling certainty because they are seeking certainty. When our chances in the Cold War seemed touch and go, these folks were hell-bent on guaranteeing our victory, even if we had to climb into bed with dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran to bring it about.

Now that we've won that war, the new generation of neocons see muscular projections of American power abroad as the best guarantee that we'll win the current war against terrorism.

Again, it's all about certainty. Whatever ideological posture underwrites American certitude is the right one for the times. The best way to be certain of the results is to be cocksure of the grounding philosophy.

The hunt for certainty is everywhere today. I (who am a "liberal" Catholic) believe it infects the "conservative" side of the Catholic Church. Take, for example, this article in TIME magazine nominating Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as one the top 100 movers and shakers in the world. TIME writer Andrew Sullivan says:

Ratzinger has been a tough theological enforcer in the church for more than two decades. Once an enthusiast for the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, he later wondered if they had gone too far. Call him one of the first theo-conservatives—a former liberal mugged by what he saw as the reality of religious laxity.

His response has been, says Sullivan:

... to reassess the importance of the papacy as a means of asserting control over the church, to insist on the otherworldliness of religious faith and its imperviousness to changes in society.

The "control" asserted by a strong pope, be it noted, is what brings that greatest certainty. We got that same message from the pulpit at Mass yesterday, from a visiting priest who began his homily by noting recent coverage in The Baltimore Sun about individuals whom the good father asserted were "not real Catholics."

The article, I knew, was In the church, on their own terms, from April 10. It profiled seven local Catholic women who had diverse ways of making sense of their faith in our times. One of them sent so far as to replace "Our Father" with "Our Holy Mother" in saying the Lord's Prayer.

One agreed largely with Church teachings, subject to the proviso that the Church may one day be moved to ordain women, and was especially strong for the teaching against birth control.

One resented so much emphasis on "sex, abortion, birth control" and wanted more on "the war in Iraq, executions, far more serious problems." "The primacy of [individual] conscience," that one also felt, "has always been the essence of the Catholic Church."

And so on. Not exactly a rogue's gallery of "not real Catholics." So when Father railed from the lectern at them as a lead-in to telling us how important a strong, controlling pope is, I blanched. Upon further reflection today, I realize he was basically saying what the writer of a recent letter to the editor had in mind. (See "Priest shortage result of decline in moral values" on this page.)

The writer blamed the priest shortage in the Catholic Church on our loss as a society of:

... such things as absolute truth and absolute standards of good and evil, of right and wrong. Those are radical concepts in this day and age.

The shortage of priests in these United States is not a commentary on the church's refusal to discard ancient traditions and doctrine for the sake of expedience. It is more a commentary on us, on America - a commentary on what we've lost.

That boils down, in my mind, to a fear of change. For change endangers certainty, and the thing which unites all of the conservative voices I've mentioned in this post is that they all act as if they have been mugged by uncertainty.

Is that any way for people of faith to act?

Divine Disobedience

As I mentioned in Whither the Church? and in Mass Movement, I have been reading Francine du Plessix Gray's 1970 book, Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (a book for which there is no online image available). The book assembles several articles Ms. Gray wrote for The New Yorker about radical Catholics in a radical time in America. Among them are "Catonsville Nine" leaders Daniel and Philip Berrigan, two priests for whom burning draft records in protest of the Vietnam War was as natural as breathing.

I delved into this book in hopes of stoking my own reviving commitment, in faith, to doing good works to better the world. But it's not really working.

The reason it's not really working makes itself known to me when I read, on page 79, "There is a moral fundamentalism in the Berrigans which follows this passage from the Book of Acts with total fidelity." "This passage" is one which du Plessix Gray has just quoted:

They [the early Christians] remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers ... the faithful all lived together and shared out the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed. (Acts 2:42, 2:46)

The Berrigans took this mandate, "the socialism of the Gospels" (Acts was originally the second part of Luke's Gospel), with "a disturbingly literal reading," a "simplism":

"Read the Gospel, get poor, get with it," Daniel [Berrigan] blithely told a student who had asked him how to live the Christian life. "It's just that simple." (p. 80)

I don't believe in literal, simplistic, fundamentalist readings of Scripture, whether by the Christian left or the right.

I read the early Christians' divesting themselves of material security as a metaphor for the throwing away of crutches in general, as it were ... for what a New Ager would call "claiming one's power."

In my view of faith (see "Throw Those Crutches Away ... " for more) it only really begins to be faith when it gives us the power, with God's help, to create our own reality. When we do what the proverbial faith healer is wont to tell us to do —"Throw away those crutches and walk!" — then and only then are we living a life of faith.

If material wealth is in fact a crutch we lean on, it blocks our spiritual growth. That's the kind of thing the Gospels are telling us in saying man does not live by bread alone.

But literally throwing bread away — becoming poor for its own sake — mistakes a metaphor about discarding whatever is blocking our spirituality for a universal commandment which may or may not be applicable, depending on the individual person and whatever it is that acts as a crutch in that particular life.

We all have different crutches. I suppose it is possible to use one's "social commitment" as a crutch, too.

Then again, I don't want to sound like I'm against efforts on behalf of social justice. All I'm really saying is that they are not for one and all the universal elixir Daniel Berrigan implied when he told his student how to live the Christian life.

"Throw Those Crutches Away ... "

William A. Dembski's Intelligent Design

In my Beyond Darwin blog yesterday I posted Grounding Faith in Reality?, part of my ongoing critique of William A. Dembski's book Intelligent Design. This book concerns how we can go about assuring ourselves that life's complexity is so extraordinary, the "finger of God" must be behind it.

By life, Dembski means the biosphere of this planet as it has evolved over the eons. For Dembski, though he is a theist, evolution is real. It's just that Darwin's heirs are incorrect: evolution is not rooted in pure randomness. Dembski says that that claim is demonstrably false. His book is in part a "scientific" demonstration of why.

But in part, it is an exercise in theology. Dembski tries to show that life's incredible complexity is a sign from God: an event or combination of events that is so very extraordinary, it must be "uniquely specific" to an alleged sign-giver. In this case, the alleged sign-giver is God.

If a sign can be so validated, it can activate a "test-conditional" of the form if-the-sign-occurs-then-decide-such-and-such. A concrete example Dembski gives: If the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is real, then we ought to believe in our own bodily resurrection ... and all that goes with it in Christian religion. We ought to have faith that the Son of God has, through his own death on a cross, conquered death.

My quarrel with Dembski is over his idea of what faith is and how it works. He disparages faith that is "not grounded in reality." Specifically, he finds fault with the Basque-Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) for saying, "To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as though He did exist."

That formulation is not good enough for Dembski (see p. 42). It leaves room for doubt about God's existence. Dembski hopes to construct an argument about the extraordinariness of life's evolutionary history which can eliminate that doubt.

But I say that where there is no room for doubt, there is no room for faith. Faith is not supposed to be the same thing as palpable certainty. Though the risen Jesus tolerated the "hands-on" confirmation sought by his "doubting" apostle Thomas, clearly the message for us is that faith in itself ought not require such materialistic confirmation.

I would go even farther. I would say that true faith is never to be "grounded in reality." It is the other way around. As I have tried to suggest in earlier posts — Genesis by Observership, Verum Factum, The Pearlescence Principle — we are supposed to ground our reality in faith!

Dembski's argument about Intelligent Design is at best a crutch to belief. For belief to become a reality-grounding and life-generating faith for us, we need to — as the faith healers are wont to say — "Throw those crutches away and walk!"

Whither the Church?

As I mentioned in Mass Movement, I have been reading Francine du Plessix Gray's Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism. This book, from 1970, is apprently out of print, and I can find no image of its cover on the Web.

That's too bad, since it captures a spirit that has been too long absent from most of Catholicism. It is the spirit of revolutionizing the world.

The brother priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan had it when as part of the Catonsville Nine they protested the war in Vietnam by seizing and burning draft files at a Selective Service office in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland.

Ms. Gray profiled the Berrigans in the New Yorker essays which formed her book. This was in a time before the title "Ms." was even yet known. The Church itself had recently been revolutionized by Vatican II. Ms. Gray wrote (pp. 67-68):

Docile seminarians though they were in their youth, Daniel and Philip were soon affected by the progressive theology that poured out of Europe after World War II. The French, Belgian, and Dutch churches had been radicalized by Catholics' participation in the Resistance Movement, by priest's and laymen's militant political involvements under the Nazi occupation. Even liturgy had been renewed by the improvised Masses which were often said, during wartime, in private homes, factories, or open fields. The Berrigans' vocations were deeply affected by the ideology of the French Resistance. In the late 1940's, when Daniel Berrigan was studying at Weston [a Jesuit seminary] and Philip was at Holy Cross College nearby, the French avant-garde was a favorite theme of their Sunday afternoon conversations. Their heroes were men like Cardinal Suhard, a guiding spirit of the Missions de France and of the worker-priest movement, whom Philip regards as the greatest single influence on his life; the Jesuit Father Henri Perrin, who became a factory worker after his return from German concentration camps; Abbé Pierre, the Resistance leader and MRP [Mouvement Républicain Populaire] deputy who ministered to thousands of homeless families in the Paris suburbs, and needled the French government into starting a new housing program for the poor. These men had preached, in Cardinal Suhard's words, "a fearless involvment in the temporal and social spheres." The classical missionary tactic of Saint Paul ("With the Jews I live like a Jew, to win the Jews") had been put into reverse gear by the worker-priests. The Berrigans had learned from them that their task was not to convert the world to the Church, but, rather, the Church to the world.

I interpret that as meaning that the struggle for human life, liberty, and dignity and against poverty, oppression, and degradation is at the heart of the Church's concern, just as the late Pope John Paul II said it was, and not a matter peripheral to the faith.

The conventional wisdom, however, is that JPII was a "conservative" and the Berrigans "radicals." I admit that I myself cannot resolve that dichotomy to my own satisfaction. I don't fully understand why the late Holy Father did not go "all the way" and make women the full equals of men in the Church, for instance. But never mind. My point here is that the Church today needs to reclaim the spirit of worker-priests in the French Resistance, Vatican II, the Berrigans, and John Paul II on his better days. It needs to allow itself to be
"converted to the world" once again, so that it might once more expend its energies in making the world a more hospitable place for all God's children.

Mass Movement

We Catholics are about to gain a new pope.

The death of Pope John Paul II came at at time when this particular blogger's personal zeal for his Catholic Christianity was at a low ebb. By some mysterious synchronicity, the evening before the pope's funeral, I "happened" to watch Casablanca on Turner Classic Movies. As I saw Humphrey Bogart join Paul Henreid yet again in the war against Nazi Fascism, I recognized that the struggle against oppression lies near the heart of my religious soul. Without an emphasis on fighting tyranny and widening the scope of liberty, religion goes dead for me.

Then came the funeral of the Holy Father who Lech Walesa said was at least 50% responsible, all by himself, for freeing Poland from Communist dictatorship.

By this time I was on a personal spiritual roll. I unearthed my copy of Francine du Plessix Gray's 1970 book Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (no online image available), and I rediscovered the spirit, so large in the 1960s, of clerics like Ivan Illich, the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and the priests who founded Emmaus House in East Harlem.

I also popped the DVD of the 1982 movie Gandhi in the player and began drinking in the tale of how one man's refusal to compromise his personal dignity blossomed into a mass movement and freed India. (Wouldn't you know it — it had that famous Catholic activist Martin Sheen in it, in a minor role. Round up the usual suspects!)

The brothers Berrigan and seven other priests, religious, and lay people were the Catonsville Nine. To protest the Vietnam War, they burnt draft records a Selective Service office in the suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, where I now happen to live. The church at which I regularly attend Mass is a stone's throw from the Knights of Columbus hall whose second floor housed the office they targeted. Daniel Berrigan considered their illegal act, for which they went to jail, "an act beyond politics: a religious act, a liturgical act, and act of witness" (Divine Disobedience, p. 57).

But in my ten years at St. Mark, the nearby parish church, I've heard basically nothing from the pulpit about such activism, such committment to social justice and peace. So yesterday, a beautiful April Sunday, I decided to join my friend Bob and his family at St. Ignatius, an old Jesuit church in downtown Baltimore, where Bob tells me you do indeed hear the call to speak up for justice and against oppression.

Now, Bob is just about my oldest friend. We met in our freshman year at Georgetown University, when I was not even yet a Christian or a Catholic. It was 1965. Bob had it all over me in terms of being aware of what came to be called the Movement. He was, on his mother's side, the heir to a liberal brand of Catholic witness of the sort to be found in her native Netherlands ... and on his father's, a liberal sort of Midwestern Protestantism.

Bob was struggling with the fact that he depended on a stipend from Army ROTC to help meet his tuition bill, and was it kosher to take their money but then, after graduation, refuse to fight in Vietnam? (He soon decided he had to quit ROTC and give up the money.)

"Where?" asked I. I had scarcely heard of Vietnam in September 1965. For I simply hadn't been paying attention to much printed in the newspaper beyond the sports scores.

Bob began filling me in and gave me a copy of The Vietnam Reader to complete the job. That book — I'm talking about the 1967 tome by that name, edited by Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, for which I can find no image on the Web — was a compilation of writings indicting the "military action" in South Vietnam (not officially a war) as ill-conceived, ill-motivated, and downright immoral. (It was also Bob who, a few years later, gave me Divine Disobedience. Or was it just a loan? I'd better ask.)

1965 came in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of Catholic clergy which had been convened in Rome by the recently deceased Pope John XXIII to provide aggiornimento, or updating, to Catholic belief and practice. At that juncture, I could barely spell "Vatican." But the ferment which "Vatican II" unleashed was obvious to me in classes such as Philosophy of Man, taught by a Jesuit scholastic (priest-in-training) named John Cunningham who later left the order, as so many priests, nuns, etc., did in that era.

During the late '60's and the '70's I got "liberalized" but not quite "radicalized." Before entering Georgetown, my attitude toward the civil rights movement had been one of apathy, even hostility, but by 1968 when Martin Luther King was slain, I was able to march with Bob and other students from Georgetown to a park across the street from the White House to mourn his assassination publicly ... and then, on the way back to the Hilltop, to look back over my shoulder and see the inner city of D.C. start to go up in smoke.

Though I mourned King, I would be many years before I allowed myself to recognize him as an American Gandhi. First, of course, I would have to learn something about mind, heart, and soul of the real Gandhi ... a process which has yet to come to completion. I would also have to come to see that mass movements for liberty and justice are inextricably linked to Christian faith. That's precisely what I'm focusing on as I write this.

(In between Georgetown and now, by the way, I went from agnostic to believing Christian. That eventually led me to the Catholic Church, some ten years ago. Had Father McSorley planted something in my brain, back at Georgetown, when he used me as a willing, nay, eager guinea pig in his hypnosis demonstrations on campus?)

As a Christian, though, I've tended to resist the link between social concern, mass movement, and religiosity. One reason may well be that I have the temperament of a staunch maverick, an obdurate outsider: not a team player, not able to surrender my independence of thought and behavior to leadership (except possibly through hypnotism).

But I have recently come to see that faith requires submission — if not to a leader, to a creed. You have to decide what you most deeply believe in and act upon that belief. For it is only in acting upon your belief that you make your faith real (see my earlier post Verum Factum).

It is only by choosing what universe you expect to live in that you make that universe actual (see Genesis by Observership).

I know that sounds crazy, but it's what I'm coming to see as the essence of faith: in a sense, you have the power, through faith, to "hypnotize" the world into doing your bidding. Gandhi did it. King did it. Popes John XXIII and John Paul II did it. And to one extent or another, every person of faith does it.

Faith is at the heart, of course, of every mass movement. And faith without mass movement is dead. The torn, scandal-weakened Catholic Church needs another mass movement today, which is why I pray that the next pope can call one forth. And I hope the movement he ignites will be intensely focused on extending human liberty and dignity and opposing oppression in all its forms.

Evolutionary Latency

Earlier, in At Home in the Universe, I suggested that theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman is right in his so-named book: there were, from the very start, "profoundly robust" properties lurking in the evolving biosphere. Certain latent qualities of living organisms would have emerged, no matter what the other, chance details of evolution happened to be.

Thus did the "deep and beautiful laws" of emergent, self-organized complexity make creatures like us: "we the expected," Kauffman calls us. We could have turned out like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or the aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in terms of our looks and bodily configuration, but our kind was nonetheless ever in the offing.

By "our kind" I mean, principally, creatures that are self-aware — not just conscious, but alive to their own consciousness. I believe (see my earlier post Abortion and Personhood) that our personhood and our self-awareness are one and the same thing. So what I have just said is tantamout to saying that we as persons could have been, and were, expected to evolve in our universe all along.

Straight-up Darwinists don't tend to believe that. They tend to emphasize the haphazardness and unpredictability of evolution's pathways, owing to the fact that most or all hereditary variation stems from genetic mutation, and mutations are gene "copying errors" that happen at random. That makes for a panoply of variants, as well as the usual more mouths to feed than there are places at the table (which scientists call "superfecundity"). So that blind force of nature, Darwin's "natural selection," simply sifts the variants that are less fit — less well adapted to current living conditions — out of the mix, and voilà, over incredibly long amounts of time you get ... whatever you get.

But Kauffman says the Darwinist's troika of mutational variation, superfecundity, and natural selection have a "handmaiden": self-organization, the process by which a lovely "order for free" has managed to emerge and continues to emerge spontaneously in the natural world. Another term for the phenomenon would accordingly be emergence, as when Kauffman calls his professional endeavors "a search for a theory of emergence." And I would call it evolutionary latency: from day one there was, within the workings of our cosmos, a quiescent, dormant, irresistable "urge" to produce not only life but conscious, self-aware, personal life.

The Sexual Revolution

Make Love, Not War by David Allyn

Make Love, Not War is David Allyn's "unfettered" history of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s. It was a time which this blogger lived through, though when Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl appeared in 1962, he was not quite old enough to know what all the fuss was about.

Looking back, I see it was a truly nutty, schizophrenic time. There were weird people such as the founders of the League for Sexual Freedom running around New York City proselytizing for an agenda that included things like "the legitimacy of public masturbation" (p. 46). One, the possessor of one of the great names of all time, Tuli Kupferberg, was a member of a folk-rock band called the Fugs. Their songs included such all-time favorites as "Group Grope," "Boobs a Lot," "Kill for Peace," "What Are You Doing After the Orgy?" and "Dirty Old Man" (p. 45).

Another Sexual Freedom League founder, Jeff Poland, was "one of the first hippies" (p. 42). He, Kupferberg, and others who included the soon-to-be-famous poet Allen Ginsburg took up the cause of Professor Leo Koch, fired by the University of Illinois for a 1960 letter he wrote to the Daily Illini, a student newspaper, advocating (gasp!) premarital sex (p. 43).

As advanced as Koch's views seemed to be at the time, today he could very easily be deemed a galloping sexist, a male-chauvinist pig, and worse. A footnote Allyn includes (p. 43) notes that Koch's letter was in rebuttal to

... an article written by two male students condemning premarital petting. The students argued that the average college man treated every college woman as "a simple female sex unit" rather than as "a living individual — as an organic complexity of personality and character, emotion and intellect, and passion and reason." (This was some eight years before radical feminists would make the very same claims about the "objectification" and sexual exploitation of women.)

In retrospect, in fact, I realize the entire launching pad for the sexual revolution was basically sexist, if sexist means not coming to terms with the realities of women, their bodies, their needs, and their wills. We had Hugh Hefner airbrushing the pubic hair out of his Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month photos. We had the Pill — the first oral contraceptive, appearing in 1960 and gaining phenomenal acceptance by 1965 — making it for the first time

... possible to prevent pregnancy without ever touching one's vagina or penis. It was ultimately a technological accommodation to the deepest dualism of American culture: the belief that the mind was pure and noble while the body is dirty and base. Ironically, the single most revolutionary invention of the 1960s was a tiny, timid little pill ... secreted away in a purse or a pocketbook without anyone ever knowing about it. No wonder the pill did little to erase Americans' ambivalence about sex. (p. 40)

As I read these early pages of Allyn's book, I find I can't wait for radical feminism to assert itself. How odd that is ... at the time, I thought "women's lib" was much ado about nothing!

Genesis by Observership

"Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?" asks this provocative article in the June 2002 issue of the science magazine Discover. Quantum physicist emeritus John Archibald Wheeler, coiner of the term "black hole," thinks perhaps not. Experiments both real and hypothetical suggest that the act of observing — or at least of recording — the outcome of any one of the quantum processes which underlie all of cosmic reality is what actually fixes it and determines its nature. Which single outcome actually occurs, of many equiprobable outcome possibilities, depends on how the quantum event is observed.

This is true even when the ambiguous quantum event in question happened in the past — even though the observation of the event is taking place in the present! Observations now determine events then.

Imagine a photon, a unit of light energy, emitted by a far off quasar. It has two possible paths between there and here on Planet Earth, each path bent towards us by the gravity of a conveniently positioned galaxy. Which of the two paths the photon actually takes, or took, depends on which way we have pointed our observational telescope!

If we point the telescope toward Path #1, the photon proves to have taken Path #1. But if we point the telescope toward Path #2, the photon proves to have taken Path #2. Yet the photon in question had to "choose" which path to take billions of years ago, before there was even life on Earth.

It gets screwier. The phenomena I just reported are consistent with there having been two photons, not one ... but when the light from the distant quasar is so weak that only one photon arrives here at a time, the same thing happens. "The measurements made now, says Wheeler, determine the [single] photon's past."

And if we don't pin the photon's path down telescopically — if we don't observe it at all — guess what? The photon acts not like a particle at all, but like a wave. Or, rather, like a pair of waves, each of which took one of the two different paths, arrived here concurrently, and set up an interference pattern consistent with ordinary multiple-wave behavior.

This thought experment can't actually be done ... but it can be transformed into a slightly different kind of experiment, also done with photons. That transformed experiment was indeed performed at the University of Maryland in 1984. The Maryland experiment confirmed that an act of observation (or complete lack thereof) in the present determines — selects among — equiprobable quantum events that happened in the past.

This mind-bending phenomenon is what Wheeler calls "genesis by observership." In a "participatory universe" like ours, there are "many possible quantum histories." "Clouds of uncertainty" turn into actualities only after the fact. "The mystery of creation may lie not in the distant past but in the living present."

Per Wheeler himself, a cloud of uncertainty can (probably) be turned into an actuality by virtue of its associated quantum event being somehow recorded by an inanimate mechanism. It doesn't have to be observed by a conscious observer. But Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde goes Wheeler one further and claims that conscious observers are indeed necessary. They cannot be replaced by inanimate objects.

"The universe and the observer exist as a pair," Linde says. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here — for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead."

If Linde is right, then Wheeler's own conjecture that "we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself — and building itself" is true in spades.

I find this interesting because of the parallels between it and my Pearlescence Principle, which says that whatever pearl of wisdom we have utmost faith in shines its "pearlescence" forth from within us, as it were, and colors the external world as we experience it, making it conform to whatever it was we believed it capable of and anticipated it to be. We make the type of world we inhabit, based on our inmost belief.

It's as if our unshakable verities of faith choose which "telescope" we observe the external cosmos through, thereby crystallizing a firm actuality — a Verum Factum — out of what would otherwise be a cloud of uncertainty.

Accommodation vs. Separatism

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism has been a recurring preoccupation of this blogger in the last few weeks. I have finally finished reading it, and I must say that at the end of the day I seem to have stumbled over a fundamental disagreement I have with Jacoby.

The book is about "freethought" in American history: atheism, agnosticism, secularism, humanism, rationalism, naturalism, and other words of that ilk. The opposed mindset is that of conservative, orthodox, fundamentalist, evangelical religion — not at all the same, mind you, to "liberal" or "mainstream" religion.

Freethinkers is both a history and a polemic. The closer the historical record gets to the present day, the more the book turns into pure polemic. The entire last chapter, "Reason Embattled," is little more than opinionated editorializing. I must say I found that disappointing.

As a polemical argument, the book's contention is more or less this: the Framers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were super-wise to have left all mention of God out of their secular creation, insisting on no religious tests for public office and no "establishment" of religion whatever. Then, despite some noteworthy exceptions, American freethinkers pretty much had the best of things for the first 100 or 150 years of our country's existence. Yet beginning at about the time of the Scopes "monkey" trial in 1925 — if not a couple of decades earlier — fundamentalists began staging a huge comeback. The 1973 leagalization of abortion by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade energized religious conservatives even more. Today, freethinkers (though they are no longer called that) are afraid to open their mouths, and it looks as if the secular intent of the Framers has all but bitten the dust.

Notice the close parallel of Jacoby's contention to arguments often heard from religious conservatives. They make an almost mirror-image claim: our country's Founding Fathers were generally pious Christians who wanted America to be a Christian nation. Over the past century or so, however, secular humanists and atheists have stolen the country away from God's rule. Nowadays religion has been all but excluded from the "public square," and the country and the world are headed for hell in a handbasket.

Can it be a coincidence that each argument is identical to the other, except that all the terms have been reversed?

Meanwhile, despite whichever of the two putative declines you care to harp on, America has continued to grow in terms of prosperity, strength, liberty, and democracy. We now have more people of more categories — race, gender, religion, age, sexual preference, ideology, etc. — living the good life than ever before.

What's wrong with this picture?

The better off we get, the more certain many of us become that some deep-seated negative trend is going to end it all.

Why can't we just relax and enjoy the ride?

Jacoby notes throughout the book that there are, among freethinkers, two schools of thought about that vital secularist desideratum, the separation of church and state. On is full-blown separatism, which insists on a maximally high "wall" separating the two. The other is accommodationism, which is content to let the wall be breached under certain circumstances.

Jacoby agitates for high-wall church-state separatism. For example, when in the aftermath of Sept. 11 President Bush denied "the existence of any connection between [those events] and 'real' Islam" (p. 355), she interpreted it as a reflex of the "religious correctness" which she claims has permeated our politics. I interpreted it, on the other hand, as a gesture of tolerance for all religions that do not turn into excuses for terror and tyranny — a profoundly American idea which I'm sure Jacoby would agree the Founders wished to instill.

In other words, I think Jacoby is paranoid in her unwillingness to accommodate fundamentalists, an attitude which so clearly mirrors fundamentalists' own unwillingness to accommodate freethought. This freethinker says, "A plague o' both their houses!" America needs its accommodationists and reconcilers! That, Rodney King (remember him?), is how we all get along.

Abortion and Personhood

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism has a section that makes as cogent an argument as I have ever heard in favor of legal abortion.

To my mind, the argument hinges on the question of what is a "person"?

In writing the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun, says Jacoby

... went on to state unequivocally that 'the word "person," as used in the the Fourteenth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution], does not include the unborn. (p. 345)

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees "the equal protection of the laws" to "any person." No "person" may have "life, liberty, or property" taken from him or her "without due process of law."

So is an embryo/fetus a person? If it is, its life cannot legally be taken from it by an intentional abortion.

But if it is not a person, then state anti-abortion laws violate the mother's "privacy" in making her own reproductive decisions.

(Though "privacy" is not a word that expressly appears in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has a history of interpreting the Due Process clause that does appear there as a "privacy" guarantee. For example, the implicit "privacy" guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment was cited by the Court in striking down state laws against interracial marriage.)

So the question of the "personhood" of a fetus or embryo is paramount to the abortion debate. At least while a fetus cannot survive outside its mother's body, I would say (as would Jacoby — see pp. 344-5) that it is not a person.

And that is exactly what Justice Blackmun found: persons, at least in a legal or constitutional sense, do not include the unborn.

In a previous post, The Pearlescence Principle, I indicated that "personhood" is absolutely central to my (evolving) worldview. It is the human "person" who is capable of making his or her own reality, bridging the divide between pure, unfiltered objectivity and ordinary, unreliable subjectivity. I tried to indicate in that post, and also in another, Verum Factum, what Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan philosopher, seems to have discovered some three centuries ago: the idea that we make our own truth or reality — for that is what verum factum means.

As a person, each of us is capable of making what he or she deeply believes in, or takes to be an axiom of faith, absolutely real, for ourselves and perhaps for others as well. This is true of Christians and other religious believers, and it is true of freethinkers like Jacoby also. "God-fearing" Christians make God real in their lives. And I have no doubt that Jacoby's naturalistic belief system, just as if it were a religious one, feeds back into her very experience of the world, coloring it, molding it, making it conform to that worldview per se. Atheism, secularism, and rationalism work for her, just as religious belief works for others.

We each have certain "pearls" of faith, belief, and wisdom buried deep within our "souls." Once activated, they cast a "pearlescence" or "opalescence" originating from within out upon the world, changing that world at least as we personally experience it. In Jacoby's case, the "pearls" of her insight are different ones that in the case of, say, an evangelical Christian. But the Pearlescence Principle works just the same. Jacoby, like everyone else, uses the light of her "inner pearlescence" to personalize her private world.

That we can do this amazing, pearlescent thing at all has to do with our being self-aware creatures, I think. Personhood and self-awareness go hand in hand. They may even be the same thing.

A fetus has yet to develop self-awareness. I say this because it is standard psychological opinion, I believe, to maintain that even a newborn baby (much less a fetus in the womb) is not yet self-aware. Only when, after birth, it learns that it is separate from its mother, and also from the world at large, does an awareness of its personal selfhood dawn upon it. Only then is it a person.

Yes, a fetus feels pain. So do my beloved pet cats, Xander (a.k.a. Mr. Pooh) and Willow (Ms. Mouse) — but they are not self-aware (or so say most experts on animal psychology; my kittycats may wish to disagree). I believe that a fetus can be no more self-aware than my Xander or Willow.

Accordingly, believing as I do in the Pearlescence Principle, and believing that it doesn't yet apply to an unborn fetus, I would have a hard time insisting that a fetus is a "person" entitled to constitutional protections.

And so I thank Susan Jacoby for laying out in a mere page or two what the crucial questions are concerning abortion's continued legality: personhood, privacy ... and moral relativism. Yes, moral relativism, which Jacoby says is not at all the bête noire cultural conservatives take it to be.

Some things are moral absolutes, she says — the proscription on murder, for example, which is the unlawful taking of a person's life.

But morality applies to other things in a relative way. What is or is not moral depends on its context ... and who better to determine the contextual morality of a contemplated abortion than the pregnant woman herself?

So, I would say, abortion must remain legal ... and if Roe happens to be struck down by a future Supreme Court, as now appears likely, then state legislatures ought to refrain from passing blanket proscriptions on it in the aftermath of the reversal.

Verum Factum

Giambattista Vico (1688-1744)

Giovanni Battista (or Giambattista) Vico, according to this Wikipedia article, was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist who lived in the early days of the European Enlightenment. In 1725 he wrote in the book New Science of his major idea: that truth is an act. So history, in that it is made by us, is understandable to us. We truly know only that which we make or do.

Although I am frankly somewhat over my head when it comes to interpreting the nuances of such a philosophy, still it seems to pattern with what I posted before, in The Pearlescence Principle. There I tried to suggest that "we somehow manage to make our own reality." We all have certain "pearls" of incipient belief and faith within us, but only when we begin act them out do they actually become real for us. Then and only then do we find that they cast their "pearlescence" upon our supposedly objective outer world.

Strangely enough, "that pearlescence, that opalescence, actually becomes a part of the reality we survey." Our worldview or "belief per se feeds — somehow — back into our experience of the world, coloring it, molding it, making it conform to that worldview itself."

How odd. Our faith, suitably turned into action, makes itself true.

Words with Power

Literary critic Northrop Frye says something about this in his study of the Bible, Words with Power (p. 82):

The discoverer of the the principle that all verbal structures descend from mythological origins was Vico, and Vico's axiom was verum factum: what is true for us is what we have made. ... What is true for us is a creation in which we have participated, whether we have been in on the making of it or on the responding to it. We are accustomed to think, rather helplessly, of whatever presents itself to us objectively as reality. But if we wake up in the morning in a bedroom, everything we see around us that is real, in contrast to our dreams, is a human creation, and whatever human beings have made human beings can remake. I take it that this is something of what [the poet] Wallace Stevens means by his "supreme fiction," the reality which is real because it is a created fiction, and recognized to be such.

We create our world, in other words; if not literally, then simply by means of how we respond to "objective" reality.

Put another way, our response is itself a world-creative act, a personal participation in the very act of creation which in our more simpleminded moments, if we are religious, we attribute only to God. In another passage keyed to Vico's verum factum axiom (p. 135), Frye says the Incarnation of God in the man Jesus of Nazareth "presents God and man as indissolubly locked together in a common enterprise." That enterprise concerns "the reality of God," which at the end of the Bible

... is manifested in a new creation in which man is a participant [by virtue of his] being redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from his origin in nature.

The advice Jesus gives to turn the other cheek in Matthew 5:39 impresses me as a good example of what this means: "But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."

I interpret "resist not evil" from a Tai Chi standpoint. This ancient "moving meditation" is actually a martial art. When two masters do Tai Chi together, it becomes a sort of dance, but the inner logic of this dance is that each is performing movements that will ward off or redirect the force of the other's "attack." The "blows" hurt neither party; they are merely channeled elsewhere.

So neither "combatant" achieves superiority over the other.

How does this relate to Jesus's pronouncement? A blow on the right cheek, assuming the striker is right-handed, entails striking with the back of the hand. In Jesus's day, that would have been not just a physical assault but also a demeaning, belittling gesture, since an equal would have been struck with the palm of the hand. Therefore, "turn to him the other also" — the left cheek, that is — is to, in effect, say, "I insist that you not demean or belittle me as your inferior. I'm not going to hurt you in retaliation, but I'm going to insist on being taken as your equal."

Again, neither "combatant" achieves superiority over the other.

The one being assaulted or struck (the "strikee") is, in the Bible story, (re)creating his world, his truth, his reality. He does this in such a way as to "claim his power" — without stooping to the abuse of power manifested by his assailant.

This is a specific case in which "the reality of God" can be "manifested in a new creation in which man is a participant [by virtue of his] being redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from his origin in nature."

The strikee is liberated from the worldview of the striker. Instead, his own "pearlescence" shines forth and molds his very reality "in God's image." Verum factum, indeed.

How Can We Believe in Both God and Darwin?

It would be hard to think of a question that, at a deep level, more troubles our age than that of how — or even whether — we can believe in both God and the theory of biological evolution, principally by means of "blind" natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin.

The question has confronted us ever since Darwin published The Origin of Species almost 150 years ago. But, today, how it is answered — "conservatively" or not — helps stoke the "culutre wars" that so sorely divide America.

Firefly: The Complete Series

To sneak up on one possible answer to the question, consider a scene from a recent television series. Firefly was a short-lived show which, though quite good in this blogger’s humble opinion, got canceled partway through its first season. It was a quirky “space western” set nearly five centuries in the future. Those who are interested can buy the entire truncated series on DVD.

Imagine an oddball band of humans, smugglers running stolen cattle and the like across the vastness of the 25th-century universe. Their home is Serenity, a Firefly-class spaceship. Our heroes, when they’re not taking on booty, generally get in the hair of the tyrannical Alliance which runs the cosmos’s affairs 500 years hence. The Alliance is not only repressive of human liberty, it’s also stupid and cruel in the way that British colonials were, in film, depicted as stupid and cruel. That’s precisely why it’s OK for our heroes to be lawbreakers … though they prefer to call themselves “independents.”

Two of our unlikely band of independents are River, a girl in her late teens who has escaped from an Alliance torture prison. She’s now post-traumatic and schizoid. Yet her condition has given her preternatural insight as well, to add to her stratospheric I.Q.

Second, there’s the priestly Shepherd Book, a man of faith who acts as the conscience of Serenity. He is the only crew member old enough to have gray hair and great wisdom.

In the episode called “Jaynestown,” Book is left on Serenity in charge of River while the rest of the crew are off taking care of business elsewhere. In one scene, Book comes upon River editing his Bible: revising passages with a marking pen and ripping pages out. She says it’s full of “contradictions, false logistics — doesn’t make sense.” She intends to revise Holy Writ to eliminate the impossibilities.

From there the scene progresses:

Book: No, no. Y-You can’t.

River (ignoring him): So we’ll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God’s creation of Eden … Eleven inherent meta-phoric parallels already there. (She mumbles something about prime numbers, then looks up at Book.) Noah’s ark is a problem.

Book (incredulous): Really?

River: We’ll have to call it “early quantum state phenomenon.” … Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammal on the same boat.

Book (angry, snatching Bible): Give me that. River, you don’t … fix the Bible.

River (as if Book were a simpleton): It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense.

Book (recovering his aplomb): It’s not about … making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. (Gaining confidence in his own words now.) You don’t fix faith, River. It fixes you.

The Bible does not have to pan out scientifically, in other words, and if it does not pan out, it does not need to be fixed. Holy Writ is fine as it is, a symbol system about a faith which can “fix” us. And we are all in some way or ways in desperate need of fixing.

This scene suggests how we can continue to believe in the God of the Bible and in what River calls “non-progressional evolution theory,” by which she presumably means a biohistory in which the driving force, natural selection, has no idea what “making progress” is. If the result of that evolutionary process looks like “progress” to us – because it has led to us – it wasn’t because evolution’s driving force “knew what it was doing.” Natural selection has only one “goal”: to weed out the least fit varieties in favor of the most fit.

That doesn’t mean there’s no God, or that the Bible is bunk. It just means we have to take God and the Bible for what they are: receptacles in which we may place our faith, if we need to be “fixed.”

More on Freethinkers

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism impresses me more and more, the further I get into it. It is testimony to the fact that the "culture wars" of today have deep roots.

Today we see religious conservatives — fundamentalists, evangelicals, traditionalist Christians, the super-orthodox, whatever you want to call them — battling liberals, some of whom are religious liberals, and some of whom are religionless atheists, agnostics, and so on.

When we look back at the founding of the United States of America, Jacoby shows, we see the same basic thing. Only the labels have changed ... especially the ones applied to those on the left. While Jacoby uses similar terms to those we use today for the religious right of 1776 and 1789, or the first decade of the 1800s — words like "evangelical," "orthodox," "conservative," etc. — early Americans on the left were referred to as "freethinkers" (by themselves) and "infidels" (by their enemies).

Then as now, and in every period in between, some of these so-called "infidels" were actually quite religious. They were not religious, though, on the same terms as those on the religious right.

For example, during the decades of the 19th century leading up to the Civil War, religious lefties were solidly abolitionist. They hated slavery as much as most of the atheists, agnostics, deists, and other non-religious exercisers of freethought in their day. But, even outside the Old South, the much larger religious right found justification for slavery in passages they read in the Bible and did not oppose the ownership of humans as chattel in America.

The same right/left split occurred in the early days of feminism. During that same 19th century, the thrust of the anti-patriarchal movement was primarly to secure the vote for women. But the fight for women's suffrage saw agnostics like Susan B. Anthony break (to a degree) with fellow agnostics like Elizabeth Cady Stanton to join forces tactically with the likes of the religiously conservative Women's Christian Temperance Union. That alliance would one day bear fruit in female enfranchisement, via a Constitutional amendment (a good thing), and in Prohibition, also via amending the Constitution (a historical mistake).

Even though there were such occasional tactical bridges built between religious conservatives à la the WCTU and freethinkers like Anthony, for the most part the two sides were ever at war ... with, according to Jacoby, liberal Protestants and non-orthodox Jews most often aligned with agnostics, atheists, and deists against the worldview of stricter, more traditional Christians and orthodox Jews. (There were few liberal Catholics, she says, until the 20th century.)

Jacoby claims Abraham Lincoln for the freethinking side, even if he was able to fudge the distinction in his soaring rhetoric, perhaps out of political expediency, perhaps because he was such a doubter that he was unable to commit himself to any particular religious view.

And she rhapsodizes over out-and-out freethinkers like Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary pamphleteer, and Robert Ingersoll, the "Great Agnostic," who was a mover and shaker in late-19th-century, Gilded-Age America, but who has largely been forgotten. Why? Because, Jacoby says, his ideological enemies got to work after he died and pretty much expunged his memory from history books.

Emma Goldman on the cover of one of her books

Also in Jacoby's Pre-1900 Freethought Hall of Fame are leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; feminists Lucretia Mott, Ernestine Rose, and Emma Goldman; all who supported Charles Darwin's theory of evolution when it was put forth in and after 1859; and such literary luminaries as Walt Whitman, whose collection Leaves of Grass was the first book "banned in Boston" because it contained poems frankly celebrating sex as well as the full equality of women.

Walt Whitman

Whitman's "To a Common Prostitute" was a particular sore spot. In it, Whitman (who was actually homosexual) calls himself "liberal and lusty as nature" and tells his hypothetical inamorata, "Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you."

It was upon learning of Whitman as the focus of freethinkers' oppostion to government censorship in the late 19th century that I got the point: Jacoby's book is not just a good one, it is (as one of the back-cover blurbs proclaims) a "necessary" one. It seems to me essential. "Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you" sounds like a mantra for my own freethinking religious liberalism, echoing the episode in which Jesus wouldn't let the religious conservatives of his day of his day stone a harlot to death.

So I can't wait to see how the constant thread of battle between fundamentalists (a term which wasn't even invented until 1910) and freethinkers (a term which was becoming an anachronism by then) is stretched forward into the 100 years or so leading up to now.

* * *

It occurred to me, after writing the above, that there may be a way to explain the rightward swing of American politics over the last 25 years in terms of freethinkers.

The "neoconservatism" we know today got its intellectual start about 50 years back with thinkers like Irving Kristol; Norman Podhoretz; the former's wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb; and the latter's wife, Midge Decter. They had at one time been communistic in their beliefs — specifically, Trotskyist. Though all were Jewish, I believe I am correct in saying they were nonobservant, secular Jews. But then, in the phrase coined by Kristol, they were "mugged by reality." Their ultra-left illusions could not stand up to the light of 1950s and '60s events. It was then that they switched to a new brand of conservatism that had many things in common with religious (and nonreligious) paleoconservatism, but that nonetheless remained predominantly secular.

It seems they also had much in common with, per Jacoby (p. 230), "the minority of freethinkers" of the early 20th century who "were social conservatives strongly influenced by Spencerian social Darwinism. Their antireligious views were coupled with a strong element of contempt for the poor and uneducated."

Social Darwinism was an application by Herbert Spencer of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" to, not nature, but society. In this view, the "unfit" deserved to be left to their fate because to coddle them with government programs would weaken the society as a whole.

It seems to me that the neoconservative tax cuts of the George W. Bush administration, in which the wealthy have gotten the biggest breaks, can trace their ideological lineage back to socially conservative, anti-Progressive freethinkers of a century ago. Then these freethinkers were in the minority among secularists. Today, at least when they form judicious electoral coalitions with members of the religious right, they seem to be running things.

In other words, the neoconservative movement was started by people who, in their former communist stance, had been oriented to economic and social justice. After being "mugged by reality," however, they seem to have adopted a slightly-mutated form of Spencerian social Darwinism. I think it is this formulation of secularist freethought which, though allied practically and politically with religious conservatives, dominates our politics today.

Or could I be wrong?

The Pearlescence Principle

What I am about to suggest sounds more than a bit mystical. Could it be the case that the worldview we uphold and the specific belief system it supports are inevitably going to be "true," for each upholder personally, because of the ways in which belief per se feeds — somehow — back into our experience of the world, coloring it, molding it, making it conform to that worldview itself?

Let me give a personal example. I recently, for whatever reason, became enamored of the idea that I'd be well-advised to take up the ancient Chinese physical art, Tai Chi. Somewhere in my repository of unconscious beliefs was one which said that Tai Chi — along with the Taoist religion or philosophy with which it is associated — is an ideal road to physical and spiritual well-being. And guess what? Within days after taking up Tai Chi, I began to experience a physical and spiritual boost from it. It's been two months now, and the boost continues — as does the belief, now quite conscious, that this is exactly what Tai Chi is supposed to do for a person.

Of course, one interpretation is to posit that there are objectively powerful capabilities for the promotion of personal health hidden within the mind-body unit — the Chinese concept of the subtle body energy or Chi being one of them — which Western medicine is blind to. Tai Chi simply unlocks them.

Another possible interpretation is to go to the opposite extreme and say, in effect, that the benefits I'm getting are "all in the mind," basically meaning phony or not real. I'm deluding myself, in other words. My spiritual/physical health isn't really any better than before.

My interpretation lies somewhere in between. I say my predisposition to believe in Tai Chi has become a "self-fulfilling worldview" that has actually borne fruit for me. I'm really better off: healthier, happier. On the other hand, if I were to take someone whose wellness is in the same limbo state as mine used to be in and somehow coerce them into doing Tai Chi, despite having no predisposition to believe in it, I'll bet he or she would report few benefits.

Take a parallel case: Christian prayer. Though I am a practicing Christian — go to church regularly, pray the Lord's Prayer often — I have never developed a strong belief in the power of prayer. (Go figure.) Nor in the value of what I consider pious devotion. As I told someone just yesterday, I consider myself a very worldly Christian.

But I know lots of people who are truly devout, who pray a lot and feel their prayers are answered, and who believe they are in direct touch with God at every moment in their lives. And by the principle I outlined above, I assume that they are. God does touch them and lead them and answer their prayers constantly, in ways that I can only long for from afar.

In other words, we somehow manage to make our own reality. I make a reality for myself in which Tai Chi, seeking the Tao, and various other pearls of personal belief radiate out from whoever I actually am and give their opalescence to my world. My devoutly religious friends do the same, except that the pearls of their worldview are different from my personal pearls.

And here's the strange thing: that pearlescence, that opalescence, actually becomes a part of the reality we survey. In my reality, Tai Chi works. In the actuality of really, really devout Christians, prayer works.

It's magic! Belief is powerful. Worldviews are self-fulfilling.

The only problem comes when we, as is our wont, become convinced that our belief, our worldview, is right for everyone — because the fact that it works for us must make it objectively so.

Then we start pushing our belief system on others. Sometimes gently. Sometimes coercively. But pushing all the same. But that doesn't work.

Oh, it works for some other people, true enough ... because they have the same pearl of positive wisdom lying dormant somewhere within their personhood. Once it begins to imbue their reality with the same opalescence it donates to ours, one and all become even more convinced of the objective truth of their vision. They work even harder to push it on the rest of the disbelieving world.

But, again, that doesn't work. Not universally.

It only works for people that have the same pearls ripe for the unveiling.

The world would be a happier place if we could just get these things through our heads. Belief is powerful. Worldviews are self-fulfilling. But only for those who are ready to invest themselves in them.


By dint of what some have labelled "synchronicity," just after I wrote the above laying out my (shall I call it) "pearlescence principle," I came across a perfect example of it. In "Hail, Mary," TIME magazine's story about how Protestant Christians are taking a fresh look at the mother of Jesus, long revered by Catholics, we hear of Mary's being called First Disciple by latter-day Protestant "reformers." To wit:

Traditional commentary saw Mary's "Let it be" primarily as a statement of obedience. But [Princeton Theological Seminary's Beverly] Gaventa, and many who followed, heard in it a thought-through acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah made long before any other believer's. In a Christianity Today article, Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., paraphrases some of the original reformers, saying, "If she had not believed, she would not have conceived."

To underscore the key concept: "If she had not believed, she would not have conceived." That's it! That's my "pearlescence principle" in action. We can conclude that Mary nurtured within her personhood, albeit unbeknownst to her, a "positive pearl of belief" in the coming Messiah-to-be. Activating it by uttering her words, "Let it be," she empowered herself to conceive and give birth to that very Messiah. Accordingly, the pearlescence of Mary's idiosyncratic belief in her Son shone out and lit what was to become all of Christendom.

In view of which, I feel I ought to amend and extend how I define the "doubt" in my world of doubt. After all, I seem here to be enshrining belief, not doubt. But what I doubt, I am beginning to see, is the notion that any personal belief system or worldview — however many others share it — is objectively true.

Nor is it simply subjectively so. It's better than both of those: it's personally true.

Which means it feeds back somehow into objective reality and colors it from that person's perspective. In a sense, we make up — or simply make — our own world. The pearlescent light we ourselves cast, based on what we truly and deeply believe, is the light we see by.

It's something like Schrödinger's Cat, a thought experiment in quantum physics. In it, a live cat is put in a closed box with a mechanism that may (or may not) indirectly cause the cat's death by at any moment releasing (or not releasing) a radioactive particle as a trigger. We let the experiment run on its own for a period of time. After a while, we open the box and see whether the cat is alive or dead.

It is only at the moment we do so, Schrödinger proved mathematically, that the outcome is decided ... even though the release of the fateful particle and the death of the cat happened (if at all) earlier in time! Inconceivable as it seems, no other understanding is consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics.

Our observation of the outcome alone makes it real. Is that any screwier than Mary's belief in the Messiahship of her Son making itself come true?

So our mental activity — our observation, our belief — fabricates the very reality we exist in. It does so neither objectively nor subjectively, but personally.

As Alice said, "Curiouser and curiouser."

Belief Systems and Worldviews

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code

A friend of mine, knowing of my interest (like that of millions of people) in Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, sent me a booklet by RBC (Radio Bible Class) Ministries, "The Da Vinci Code: Separating Fact from Fiction."

The general thrust of the booklet is that Dan Brown's novel is a great big hoax. Not historical at all.

For those who have been living in Outer Slobovia, the novel concerns a supposed nearly 2,000-year-long conspiracy on the part of the historical Christian (mainly, Catholic) Church to suppress evidence that Jesus wed Mary Magdalene (MM) and fathered a child, born on French soil after Mary fled the post-Crucifixion Holy Land.

Putatively, certain important personages down through history — Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, and many others — knew or guessed the truth. They even formed a secret society, the Priory of Sion, to preserve the hidden documentary evidence of MM's being designated by Jesus to be, disciple-wise, first among equals. Leonardo, the novel claims, put veiled references to MM's special status in his famous painting, "The Last Supper."

The evidence concerning Jesus's marriage to Mary Magdalene had to be kept hidden, saith the novel, because it was too hot to handle. Imagine: a Church which has historically derogated bodily desires, sex, the fertility of women, and the "sacred feminine" being confronted with proof that Jesus himself, in terms of his own life on this earth, did not!

Before disclosing who has actually been committing brutal murders to get his hands on this suppositious evidence, the novel suggests it may be a (again, supposedly) fanatical bunch of Catholic zealots called Opus Dei. The implication is made that the Vatican itself may be secretly complicit in keeping proof of Jesus's connubial life buried by killing those who might reveal it.

Enter the RBC booklet with the stated mission of "separating fact from fiction." It's far from the only recent publication to aim to do so.

Dan Brown's Angels & Demons

Why, I feel entitled to wonder, all the fuss? After all, the author's previous book, Angels & Demons, was a page turner, too. But its "conspiracy theory" was about the Illuminati, pretty much a dead letter today. So no one is writing a lot of books debunking it.

Why, that is, do so many people care whether Jesus was a husband and father?

Why do they care whether a woman named Mary of Magdala was not only his wife but his favored disciple?

One answer might be that Jesus can't have had conjugal relations — sex — because (as the booklet, which I'll henceforth call SFF, puts it on p. 17) he "lived a single life of devotion to His mission."

As if being in the married state robs one of one's mission-orientedness, one's "devotion." Tell that to all the Protestant ministers who are happily married today.

Well, but ... but how could God (for Jesus presumably was God) have sexual desires and potency, and be fertile for fathering children?

Well, why not? Jesus was like us in all ways but sin, was he not?

Well, but ... why don't the Gospels in the Bible's New Testament say Jesus married Mary of Magdala, or anyone else for that matter?

Well, they don't say he didn't. The best SFF can do is point out the "indirect evidence" in the Bible that Jesus remained a celibate bachelor (see pp. 16-17). For example, Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (chapter 9) takes up the topic of Christian missionaries "taking along a believing wife." Paul lists "the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas" as having done so — but not the Lord Jesus himself. Says SFF, "If Jesus had married, Paul would have included him in the list."

But maybe not.

Maybe Jesus simply did not "take along" his wife during his ministry.

Or maybe the books of the New Testament were set down in an atmosphere, during the first few centuries following Christ, in which it had already become a faux pas to suggest a married, sexually active Lord and Savior. Maybe that's why "Mary is never tied to any male when she was named" in any of the four Gospels, and why "Jesus showed no special concern for Mary Magdalene at the cross" in John's Gospel.

Yes, that's all speculation on my part. But to me it's enough of an objection to the "indirect evidence" of the Bible to insist that Jesus's bachelorhood cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

Which brings me to my real point: this argument is about belief systems and worldviews, not facts.

Traditionally, Christians have had a belief system, a worldview, in which women have taken a backseat to men, and sexuality to celibacy, virginity, and chastity.

The SFF booklet has to do some fancy footwork to hold that the Church has not historically devalued women except to the extent that "followers of Christ have missed the spirit of their own Scriptures and Leader" (p. 14). It may have been "Paul's teaching that men should love their wives as Christ loved his Church" (p. 15), but Paul also taught that wives should defer to their husbands, and women should keep their heads covered and their mouths closed in church.

The Catholic Church won't allow either female priests (with no exceptions) or married male priests (with certain exceptions).

As for sexuality and religion, don't get me started. Suffice it to say that the Church has always placed tight strictures on sex. It has also historically looked mightily askance on — as Dan Brown put it on p. 125 of The Da Vinci Code — "female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, herb gatherers, and any women 'suspiciously attuned to the natural world'," potential witches all.

Whatever the rationale for it, there has been a devaluation of the very idea that there could even be a "sacred feminine." It's as if honoring lusty female fertility may pose an obstacle to heaven.

And, yes, it may ... depending on your worldview. It would be foolish of me to maintain that the patriarchal, paternalistic worldview hasn't made sense to millions, including millions of women, down through the centuries.

It would be equally foolish of me to imagine that the record sales of The Da Vinci Code don't betoken millions of modern women and men who now question that worldview and any belief system that goes along with it.

(I'm one of them. Though I'm a practicing Catholic, I don't agree with my Church on many matters having to do with sex: homosexuality, birth control, and the legality of abortion among them.)

And — however many liberties Dan Brown takes with the actual facts — it's thrilling to suppose that maybe, just maybe, Jesus would have rejected that sexually repressive, patriarchal view himself.