[Buddha-l] Re: Anyone up for another year?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 13:40 -0500, Curt Steinmetz wrote:

> I am looking over this book at amazon right now, as well as checking out 
> Harris' very interesting website at http://www.samharris.org/. It looks 
> to me like Harris makes the mistake of failing to distinguish adequately 
> between Christianity in particular and Religion in general. 

This is not the impression I get from reading The End of Faith. The
religions that Harris finds especially onerous are those that put trust
in beliefs for which there is no evidence outside of texts believed
(without any evidence at all) to be divinely inspired. Judaism,
Christianity and Islam all come in for pretty strong condemnation, as do
Hinduism and Sikhism, but Buddhism does rather well. (It could be argued
that Buddhism comes out a little TOO well in Harris's treatment.)

> In her recent book "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas", Elaine 
> Pagels makes a small step in the direction of pinpointing when and how 
> Christianity became a "faith based" Religion - more or less the year 435 
> at the First Council of Nicaea.

Another book that is worth a look is Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer's "Jesus
against Christianity: reclaiming the missing Jesus." Nelson-Pallmeyer
makes the claim that by far the most dominant depiction of God in almost
all the Bible is a god of violence and vengeance. This violent and
vindictive deity is found again and again in the Torah, the history
books, the prophets and even the wisdom books of the Jewish bible, and
he makes a comeback in the writings of Paul and in the book of
revelations. Nelson-Pallmeyer argues that Jesus, while decidedly Jewish
and not at all the persona that one finds in the Pauline corpus,
strongly repudiated most of the classical Hebrew portrayals of God. 

Nelson-Pallmeyer's agenda is very clear from the outset. He is
interested in salvaging a forgiving and compassionate Jesus and
distinguishing him from the imperialistic, triumphalist and occasionally
genocidal ranting that makes up most of the old covenant. Nelson-
Pallmeyer reminds me somewhat of Thomas Campbell, who strongly
emphasized the claim that the new covenant completely replaces the old
covenant. Some Campbellites were content with a bible consisting only of
a new covenant, although none went as far as Thomas Jefferson in
jettisoning everything except expurgated versions of the three synoptic
gospels. Jefferson, Campbell and Nelson-Pallmeyer all have in common a
view that it is nigh unto impossible to get much of anything of moral,
aesthetic or scientific value out of Hebrew scriptures. 

Nelson-Pallmeyer's position is that God is real but beyond all human
reckoning, and so people project their own psychological shortcomings
onto the deity. So fearful and vindictive people tend to project those
qualities onto God, and those interested in territorial conquest (as
Americans have often been) love to read all those biblical accounts of
God looking with favor on the Hebrews as they took land away from other
people, desecrated their shrines, killed their priests, raped their
women and bludgeoned their children to death. As Israel did to the
Canaanites, so European Americans can do to the native Americans.

The weakness in Nelson-Pallmeyer's position, I think, is that he fails
to notice that kind and gentle people also project their own mentalities
onto the deity. More satisfying to me would be the position that God is
a purely human construct, a fantasy, a fiction for which there is no
evidence whatsoever, and that everyone who claims to be speaking for or
guided by God is suffering from a psychotic delusion.

Incidentally, another interesting read that is at least tangentially
related to this topic is Paul Bloom's article in The Atlantic entitled
"Is God an accident?" (It can be found on line at
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200512/god-accident .) Bloom's
thesis is that human beings evolved with an accidental genetic quirk
that predisposes them to believe things for which there is no evidence.
His argument undercuts a lot more than God, of course. It could also be
applied to the essentially irrational beliefs that some Buddhists have
in rebirth, nirvana, enlightenment, karma and pure lands.

Steinmetz's critique of Harris is interesting but much too superficial.
I think the critique rests on just the kind of flaw that it falsely
accuses Harris of making. Steinmetz sees Harris as falsely assuming that
all religions are like Christianity in placing an emphasis on beliefs.
He then claims that Christianity is preoccupied with creeds (a claim
that is, by the way, false for most kinds of German and American
Protestantism) and that other religions are not. But this shows a much
too limited appreciation of the roles that religious beliefs play in
stirring up mischief and danger. A belief need not be expressed in a
creed to be dangerous. 

For example, it may be true that Judaism does not have creeds like the
Nicene Creed, but there are plenty of orthodox Jews who will assure you
that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews and that Jews have a duty
to fight to protect that divinely bestowed gift. 

Hinduism has no creeds as such, but there are plenty of Hindus willing
to kill to purge Ayodhya of Muslims, all because they believe (without
evidence) that Ayodhya was the home city of Rama. (And not a few Hindus
seem prepared to purge Harvard of competent Sanskritists, too.) 

Islam may not have formal creeds as such, but there seems to be an
endless supply of people who believe that killing enemies of Islam will
send the enemies to hell and their killers to heaven.  

-- 
Richard Hayes

"Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human
soul."
  -- Mark Twain