Is it true that you have to learn life’s lessons the hard way? I don’t believe that. In fact that maxim sounds to me like an excuse, a cheap rationalization that comes in handy for folks who know they shouldn’t take some destructive course of action but plan to anyway. The single note of wisdom detectable in this sentiment is applicable only in retrospect, not in prospect. If you have passed through a rough patch that wasn’t your fault (or even if it was), you will be well advised to take stock, to learn what you can about life and especially about yourself, from your experience.

But if you blunder on into the path of what you already know will be a mistake, you won’t even learn anything from the ensuing mess. This is because you will have made it a policy. Like the guy in the joke who thinks it unmanly to submit to the legal speed limit and looks at the sign and thinks “A hundred dollar fine? I can afford that!” You will be like the Sunday Catholic who, abusing the penance system, goes out carousing Saturday night, planning on confessing it all the next morning. It’s pure charade. And giving yourself the go-ahead to do something stupid is the same charade. And you’re the one who’s going to pay for it.

So what’s the alternative? Childish naiveté is no good. You do need to learn wisdom. But I think there are ways to learn that wisdom vicariously. Think of it as almost a good kind of cheating, copying from the paper of someone else who has learned life’s lessons the hard way. One way is simply to listen to advice from people older than you. Of course, there is an initial possible roadblock: you may be such a thick-skulled adolescent that you can’t see the value of someone else’s experiences. You may have to learn that the hard way, smart guy. As for me, I’d prefer to ask directions from someone who has already been down the road I’m embarking on.

And then there’s reading. Over the ages, many people have bequeathed us their hard-won wisdom in the distilled form of proverbs and aphorisms. The Book of Proverbs in the Bible is a prime example. If you read it sometime, even in a cursory manner, you may be surprised how little its advice depends on any religious belief at all. It does not contrast believers with unbelievers as other portions of scripture do. Nor does it contrast Jews with Gentiles or pagans. In fact, some of the material comes from Arab and Egyptian sources. That’s because the sayings concern themselves with life in this world. I guess you could sum up the gist of Proverbs in the words Jesus tells his disciples in the gospel: “Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.” And that’s part of the wisdom: one can be shrewd in the way of righteousness. You have to learn the rules of the game. You don’t have to cheat at the game. The Epistle of James contrasts “the wisdom from above” with “diabolical wisdom.” I should nominate Machiavelli and, especially, Saul Alinsky as masters of wicked wisdom: the hardball tactics of winning at any cost. They’re experts in diabolical wisdom; Alinsky even dedicated one of his how-to manuals to Lucifer, after all. Of course, I’m not saying there is a real devil—except for Alinsky and certain prominent followers of his in our government.

One need not get one’s ration of proverbs from the Bible if you cringe from all things religious like Dracula from the cross. Abe Lincoln or Yogi Berra will do. It doesn’t matter who said it. The only authority a proverb possesses is that of the ring of truth. You hear or read it, and immediately it crystallizes what you have learned but not yet correlated. You suddenly say to yourself, “That’s right! I should have thought of that!” “That makes sense! Of course!” And you go forward, forewarned and forearmed. You learned it the easy way from someone, it doesn’t matter whom, who learned it the hard way. Call it vicarious wisdom.

Nor does it have to be wise sayings. Traditionally, gaining wisdom was supposed to be the goal of reading novels. Granted, sourpusses have long condemned readers of frivolous novels as wasting their time on “worldly amusements.” Excuse me if I take a friendlier view of popular genres. I have for decades understood the moral value of superhero comics and seen the value of science fiction and heroic fantasy for expanding my imagination. But let me focus on “great literature.” Apologetic school marms have always tried to convince bored students who’d rather be out playing ball (or, today, taking drugs) that it was worth slogging uphill through Shakespeare or Dickens or The Old Man and the Sea because of what one can learn from them about life. And they were right, though one can hardly blame the kids for hating that stuff. They’re not ready for it yet. (I only know that reading Shakespeare is, for me, like reading a foreign language, whereas, when I see it performed on film, it is lucid.) 

Great novels, those I as a nerdish fantasy fan regard as “mundane,” are libraries of other people’s lives. You as their reader are like a vampire devouring their lives and experiences. Or how about this? You will be just like God as some theologians view him: God experiences worldly loves, hates, ideals, losses and lessons, none of which come properly to him as an eternal, omnipotent Entity, through us, via his omniscience. You see, you’re like the deity floating above the mortal world. The novels and their striving characters are like earth’s ephemeral inhabitants, experiencing things precisely because of their temporality and finitude.  Like God, you may never know the fear of the battlefield or the anguish of betrayal, or the satisfaction of achievement or the thrill of reciprocated love. Not firsthand. But others have, and you can siphon it off! You can experience it secondhand, vicariously. What a bargain!

Until Northrup Frye, literary criticism was pretty much secular homiletics (sermonizing), the job of literature instructors to edify their students as if the latter were a congregation. I love the Twilight Zone episode, “The Changing of the Guard,” starring Donald Pleasance as an elderly Literature professor in a prep school, forced to retire. On the verge of suicide, he is dissuaded by the ghostly visitation of several old students who perished in World War Two, taking to their graves noble ideals learned from the old man’s lectures in their youth.

Frye realized that literary criticism should be a study of how literature works, a grammar of narrative, figures of speech, symbolism, structure, etc. This is the approach I mostly take. Other critics examine literature for what it tells us about socio-sexual-political-colonialist assumptions which the texts embody. Some of that stuff seems to be political polemic, not really concerned with the text for its own sake. But I appreciate the approach. It is impossible for me to read Pride and Prejudice as its original readers did precisely because the cultural codes jump out at me in a way impossible for the intended audience who swam in that same sea like oblivious fish. And yet this enriches the text for me instead of impoverishing it.

So I appreciate the various modern approaches to literature. But I want to stick up for the school marms and the old-time Lit professors. Why not cash in on the life experiences of characters in literature (not to mention biographies and autobiographies)? Why reinvent the wheel? It’s not a question of shying away from the adventurous living of your own life. No, it’s simply a matter of getting a healthy head start.

So says Zarathustra.  

To be frank, Diana Butler Bass’s book Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (NY: HarperOne, 2012) made my skin crawl. I see in it a hybrid of the worst of evangelical pietism and politically correct liberalism (“progressivism”). Not that it is unique in that. I have cringed at the same trend among seminarians and clergy for many years now. Her larger goal is to chronicle the steep decline of institutional “Churchianity,” whether evangelical, liberal Protestant, or Roman Catholic, and to herald a tectonic shift toward a people’s Christianity that is better described (and often self-described) as spiritual rather than religious. She offers oodles of sociological data, but it immediately becomes clear her aim is more prescriptive than descriptive. Her description is correct, I think, but, unlike Professor Bass, I do not see in these trends a Hegelian-like movement of the Absolute Spirit. The mere fact that it is happening doesn’t mean it is the ineluctable will of God, which fanatics and ideologues think they know.

Christianity for the Tender-Minded

Professor Bass’s program seems to me to mirror the foolish policies of the current administration: it owes a great and massive theological debt and has long since run out of any intellectual capital with which to pay it. She affirms the increasing unwillingness of Christians young and old to swallow the catechism they have long been spoon-fed. So far, I’m with her. She then appeals to the great Wilfred Cantwell Smith (The Meaning and End of Religion, 1964).and others to suggest that belief was never really the point anyway. I even agree with that: as Tillich said, “ultimate concern” would seem to be the core of the thing. But then again no one ever valued pat, glib belief without a depth of commitment behind it. Isn’t it more of a distinction between “necessary” and “sufficient conditions”? I mean, you can have worthless faith that is merely skin-deep, and you can have heart-felt faith that makes a difference. What remains to be seen, however, is whether you can have the concern without the belief. Remember Hebrews 11:6b: “Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” It is not some kind of a qualification without which you are not entitled to seek God, like claiming a man has to be circumcised to be saved (Acts 15:1). It is a simple matter of a logical premise: why would you seek what you don’t believe exists?

Well, Professor Bass urges us to replace the what with the how, content with style or technique. The old German Pietists (Spener, Tersteegen, Count Zinzindorf) knew that hollow orthodoxy was useless and that true belief had to be grounded in the “heart-warming” experience of faith. But Dr. Bass cannot mean only this, since she is prescribing the “how” as the remedy for doubt, implying that the cognitive assent to theological propositions is just not where it’s at. Yet all her gushy talk of seeking and finding Jesus in a soup kitchen or a prayer session or a quilting bee obviously implies some sort of “Jesus is God” Christology, doesn’t it? Unless she is just using the name “Jesus” as a catch-all term for the divine presence that she (thinks she) feels. In that case, she has, as Francis Schaeffer used to say, reduced theology to “connotation words.”

Similarly, Bass appeals to scriptural texts as some kind of norm again and again. Does not this how presuppose a very definite what? And the belief in a coming Kingdom of God that will spread justice and peace over all the earth—that doesn’t presuppose a definite belief that something’s going to happen? If not, then what on earth is the point? The urgency that Christians try to behave like Jesus—does this not simply take for granted that the gospel portrait of Jesus represents the real Jesus? And that Jesus is for some (theological) reason the norm? Otherwise, why not Frodo? Or is there much of a difference in Bass’s self-described “romantic” Christianity?

Certainly her use of scripture, stories of Abraham as well as Jesus, is as ahistorical and as touchy-feely as Rich Warren’s. She psychologizes and historicizes the biblical characters and makes them into pop-psychological object lessons. The depiction of Jesus as a first-century Leo Buscaglia overseeing the self-realization of his disciples (cf., Peter’s Caesarea Philippi confession, according to Bass: “You are the One for whom my heart has waited!”) is comical. Bass’s Christianity is not only “romantic,” i.e., artsy and emotion-colored; it is the stuff of women’s talk shows. Bass represents only the latest stage of the subjective sentimentalizing of religion described by Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture (1978).

In all this, Bass means to cater to Christians who can no longer suppress their doubts. But plainly what she proceeds to do is simply to take God, Jesus, the whole thing, for granted. Her implicit message is not: “Here, friend, let me remove your burden of having to believe the unbelievable.” That was the approach, e.g., of John A.T. Robinson. Honest to God, 1963). It is rather “Let’s just forget about critical thinking, and then your doubts will not bother you.” This is to make a methodology, even a fetish, of intellectual flimsiness.

I say she owes a great theological debt because her approach is parasitic upon a version of belief, namely evangelical Christianity, that she is rejecting. It certainly appears that the atonement upon the cross has as little role in her thinking as it does in Process Theology or New Thought. Yet she wants people to “encounter Jesus” as if he were the same old imaginary friend that is so central to traditional fundamentalism. You supposedly don’t have to believe in the resurrection, but she wants you to experience the power of the resurrection as she did in a chat with an ecumenical council of local bank tellers one morning. Schaeffer was right: all she has left is connotation words.

The Relevance of an Implausible Ideal

But maybe that’s not quite all. Bass is very confident that Christians must pursue the agenda of Political Correctness, especially the code-slogan of “social justice” which amounts, finally, despite the cosmetic denials, to Socialism: forced income redistribution and a shut-down of Capitalism. These strategies, the policy of the current administration, are wrecking the economy. Political liberalism is already a sheer-faith position, forged in the mind-game laboratories of academia where paper ideology is king. Like-minded politicians legislate these ideologies, demanding that the stubborn facts of economic reality shall obey them. They “call things that are not as though they were” and expect creation ex nihilo. It is like an old science fiction parody by L. Sprague de Camp in which Congress got together to rescind the Law of Gravity, and everything began to float off into space! The joke, of course, is that one cannot regulate the “laws” of nature, try as one might. But this is what Socialist ideologues seek to do. And when their economies, for instance, of Eastern Europe, are ruined by this strategy, they have their rationalizations at the ready—just like Harold Camping and the Jehovah’s Witnesses when their predictions of the Second Coming fall through—again and again. Jim Wallis used to say that the criterion for Christian action was not success but obedience. One might paraphrase that maxim this way: what counts is not results but rationalizations.

Liberalism is, I say, already a religious faith, though secular liberals do not seem to realize it. Bass’s type of “progressive Christianity” makes the religious character of it explicit, though insofar as they are eroding the theology that might justify it, her social justice Christians are becoming just as arbitrary. But they have not yet made the connection that if one cannot count on a miracle-working deity to pull a miraculous harvest out of a hat in the Millennium, there is no pay-off. But maybe they are planning for that, judging from their pious talk of “living simply.” They are blithely embracing a strategy that must grind the economy to a halt, since makers of consumer goods would be left idle and poor. But this is okay with Bass and her fellows, since they (like all liberals) are deep down ascetics anyway and want everyone else to join the fun.

Let me pause to mention Bass’s “romantic” approach to realizing the kingdom through token efforts, conscience-salving efforts I should say, to “make a difference” re world hunger by shopping at Whole Foods, etc. Here we are witnessing magical thinking akin to that of the Melanesian Cargo Cults, whose confused adherents knew that Westerners were doing something right, judging from their manifest prosperity and military power, so they marched and drilled in the public square with broom-handle rifles and chattered into orange-crate radios, hoping these childish mimicries would cause the European god Jesus to bring them a boatload of Western goods. The gestures of the PC righteous are just as futile. I remember seeing those STOP APARTHEID NOW bumper stickers and thinking, “I’ll be sure to take care of that the very next chance I get.” I recall seeing a sign posted on a Society of Friends meeting hall that read PEACE SITE. My thought: “That’s a relief—no first strike from the Quakers!”

The Velvet-Covered Brick of Liberalism

But the strategies of Bass’s progressive Christians do not stop at that. They are plainly disciples of the current administration and its prevaricating messiah. They identify Democratic victories at the polls with the Fourth (or Fourth and a Half) Great Awakening and the indefatigable march of its Kingdom of God agenda. Are they naïve or just duplicitous in decrying Religious Right theocracy schemes, while advocating for their own zero-tolerance Leftist theocracy? From Harvey Cox to Jim Wallis to Diana Bass, they are surer than mortals have a right to be that they know what God is up to in the world, and thus they feel no qualms about legislating that. Would that they would heed the wisdom of the Apostle Paul: “Now we see in a glass darkly.” Or even the wisdom of Paul Simon: “God only knows. God makes his plans. The information’s not available to the mortal man.”

Not to open Pandora’s Box yet farther, but I just cannot fathom how self-proclaimed Christians of any stripe can have the slightest sympathy with the pro-abortion ideology when their own Lord and Savior narrowly escaped King Herod’s abortion clinic. But Bass blithely lumps Operation Rescue activists in with the Tea Party, whom, in accord with the Obama media line, she caricatures as “nativists.” The glib identification of the liberal agenda with the onward-marching will of God is just staggering. Here the smug arrogance of secular progressivism is reinforced by the pious zealotry of evangelical triumphalism. The worst of both worlds.

At one juncture in Christianity after Religion, author Bass shrugs off the anticipated reader suspicion that she is just stuck in nostalgia for her radical-chic evangelical college days. Forgive me if I think that is precisely what has happened. She has resolved to keep her Sunday School piety, come hell or high water, even as she saws off the epistemological limb it is hanging from. She imbibed sophomoric “social justice” slogans, mixing them with the seeming sophistication of C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, hence her “romanticism.” It is a stance that disdains reality for a comfortable, self-congratulatory fantasy world of Prius-drivers and Obama voters. She and her fans are mired in the “Young Evangelicalism” set forth by my old pal Richard Quebedeaux in his 1974 manifesto. Those were heady days. I was thrilled to embrace the dream. But it is long since time to put away childish things.

The future’s so bright I have to wear shades — or is it just dark?

What would maturity mean? It would mean a “great awakening” from the pleasant dreams of both evangelicalism and progressivism. It would amount to the “great noon” of Nietzsche, when religious crutches are cast away with the vigor of someone who thinks he has been healed by Ernest Angley or Peter Popov.

Dr. Bass is right on target when she highlights the onrushing of religious and inter-religious pluralism in America. As classmates, roommates, office mates, team mates, and marriage mates drop the old religious barriers that traditionally divided them (and personal acquaintance is an irresistible battering ram to those tottering walls), I believe that Americans will of necessity cease to make their inherited religions their primary (or even secondary) identifiers. Since, as Rousseau said, “It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned,”  people will allow their religious identities to recede into the background, right next to their ethnicities. It will be something to appreciate, even to cherish, but no longer the main thing, just as the Law of Moses, which is the very Word of God in the Old Testament, has become merely “the customs of the Jews” in the Book of Acts.

Pluralism next begets secularism, as it already has in our pluralistic republic, where the “sacred canopy” (Peter Berger) of our laws is not the Bible or the Koran, but rather a purely pragmatic social compact that keeps us off each others’ toes. And then there is modernity with its scientific worldview. Technology with the access to once-forbidden heresies that it provides has already eroded traditional religiosities in various parts of the world. It was such influences from the secular West that spawned Islamo-Fascism as one of Anthony Wallace’s Revitalization Movements. Usually such reactions are doomed at the outset, since, if the horse hadn’t already escaped the barn, the frantic rancher wouldn’t be wishing he had locked it and resolving to keep it locked from now on. Until recently I expected that Islamo-Fascism would pass like a destructive hurricane and be gone, clearing the way for world peace to arrive through the eventual adoption of democratic Capitalism and the free market. When people have abundance, a condition made possible for the first time in human history by the very same Capitalism now deemed Politically Incorrect, there will be no need for war.

But now I see that bright prospect endangered. It appears that America is haplessly following “progressive” Europe into the financially suicidal path of the socialistic welfare state. It is like the character in Stephen King’s horror story “Survivor Type” who survived as long as he could amputate and consume his own flesh. Progressives are following the wrong biblical precedent, that of the primitive church in Jerusalem, which pooled and redistributed its members’ resources, bringing collective bankruptcy in its wake and causing them to hit Paul’s churches up for hand-outs.

The moral decadence of our society is manifested in our abortion mills and the increasing toleration of infanticide as well as the judicial system’s indifference to child rape and murder. But moral decadence can take the form of inflated morality as much as a deflation of it, as witness the courts’ compassionate preference for the murderer over his victim. Liberalism erases distinctions between the predator and his prey when it opposes the execution of the former, as his life is imagined to have equal value with that of the latter. Consider the tragic moral confusion in Bass’s anecdote about the Amish community who embraced the murdering dog who killed their own children. Nietzsche could have asked for no truer example of the slave morality of sniveling Christianity. Once we declare universal forgiveness we lower the standard of responsibility for ourselves and others. If I don’t hold you responsible, you won’t hold me responsible. “We’re all sinners, after all.”

Environmentalists consider humans the enemy of “the planet” and unapologetically advocate policies that will make us pesky humans suffer. Add to that the ludicrous attempt to dress animals up in the suits and cravats of “rights” when they certainly accord none to each other in the nature of the case. (We must be humane to animals, but it is an obligation of our own character, not of their imagined rights.) Think of the myopic madness of pacifism which only facilitates the victory of an aggressor. Morality has gotten way out of hand here, becoming dangerously counterproductive.

All this denotes a rot that is hollowing out our resolve to survive. We face a virulent foe in worldwide Islamo-Fascism, and we are too cowardly even to admit the threat exists. We call it “Islamophobia” when anyone dares decry the dangers of Islamo-Fascism. We are too lazy and faithless to prevent Jihadist states from gaining nuclear weapons. We have made ourselves weak and spineless, hoping that international problems will just go away, that our enemies will be as slow to act as we are. If there is a second Shoah, a nuclear one this time, well, that will be too bad. We will put on our required mourning clothes and say, “Never again! And this time we’re not kidding!”

There is a chance that the Islamist hurricane will destroy Western Civilization because we will have proven ourselves unworthy of surviving it. To use Garrett Hardin’s once-controversial analogy, the one person in the lifeboat whose tender conscience bids him jump overboard to make room for another will only have succeeded in ensuring that there is no longer any conscience in the lifeboat. If medieval barbarism against women, homosexuals, and freethinkers should one day prevail, the effete and naïve “romantics” and “progressives” will have abetted the process. But that will be all right with them. It will give them a chance to play the martyr, an essential role in the aesthetic of victimhood.

There is a 1970s Adam Warlock comic series in which the world falls under the dominion of a fascistic religious cult. The hero contrives to go back in time to prevent its rise. He succeeds, but when he returns to his own time he finds the insignia of a nearly identical new cult festooned everywhere. In fact, that is just what happened in the twentieth century when Communism displaced and replaced Christianity in Russia. Just goes to show everybody but certain of my fellow atheists that religion is not the problem; zealotry is. And iron-fisted zealotry can be and has been secular as easily as religious. Certain prominent atheists contend that the problem with secular totalitarianism is that it is “acting religious.” That is so stupid that it must be disingenuous.

My disagreement with religion and religious people is, I hope, a gentleman’s disagreement. As a humanist, I cannot despise the cultural fruits of religion, including the art, literature, music, and even the fascinating theology it has given rise to. That doesn’t mean I can’t condemn the atrocities it has also spawned. But I cannot share, and dare not share, the loathing that many of my atheist compatriots harbor toward religion and religious folks. One reason is that, insofar as atheists adopt such disdain and hostility, they are mirroring and mimicking the very things they so hate about religion. As a humanist I have to approach all things human as an anthropologist does, as a sympathetic observer seeking to understand human nature and motivation, and to appreciate the products thereof. In fact, “anthropologist” is almost a synonym for “humanist” in my lexicon.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed for Ahmadiyya Muslim Television. My gracious hosts were, of course, members of the sect. Do you think I should have taken the opportunity to “witness” to them about atheism? To try to disabuse them of their beliefs? The notion is grotesque. I just wanted to learn about these friendly emissaries from a different “cognitive universe.” And that’s the way I feel about Mormons, Moonies, Satanists, Communists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals and others who cherish beliefs different from mine. I don’t especially want them all to be like me. Sure, I think I’m right and they’re wrong, and I am happy to engage in friendly debate in the right forum. But I don’t want to be an atheist evangelist, an atheist imperialist. Are you over religion? Then be over religion.

This is why I cringe every time I hear about the latest attempts of the Freedom from Religion Foundation to scour every expression of faith from the public square. Just today I dropped by Town Hall to pay my utility bill, under the wire, I might add, and I was disappointed to find the place closed in observance of Good Friday. But my instinct was not to get on the phone with the ACLU and to start legal proceedings. I believe that the FFRF and like-minded zealots are operating from a basic confusion. They see as a church-state issue what I believe is better understood as a culture-state issue. For local government to allow a manger scene on public property or to allow crosses to adorn veterans’ graves is in no way tantamount to a legal establishment of religion, though making churches tax-exempt probably is. Posting “Thou shalt have no other gods besides me” in public schools is.

But not everything is. To forbid Easter egg hunts or Christmas carols in public schools for fear the Buddhist or Manichean kiddies would be “offended” is like canceling “Italian day” in the cafeteria for fear that Poles and Jews would feel discriminated against. (And why not have latkes or knishes some other day of the week?) We want to affirm cultural diversity, not suppress it, don’t we? Atheists of all people ought to see that religion is no more than someone’s culture. But the atheists I am talking about seem to share the belief of the religious that religion is something metaphysically more than that. Only for them it is demonic, not divine. Are not these atheists then being superstitious, like the fundamentalist Christian who believes in the devil?

Don’t you see what’s really going on here? To contend that so much as a mention of one faith amounts to discrimination against members of other faiths is a formula for the suppression of all faiths, and that is the goal. Who is “offended” at the expression of, even the friggin’ mention of, religion? Why, of course, only thin-skinned religion haters. And this is all done in the name of “sensitivity”?

Which brings me to the recent reports of some idiot professor at a Florida university who commanded his students to write the name of Jesus on a sheet of paper, put it on the floor, and stomp on it. The fool reportedly was trying to show the kids that there is no power in a “mere” name or word. There isn’t? You mean like “African-American”? Like “Progressive”? Like “Pro-Choice”? Of course all these words are full of meaning and radiate meaning. Not inherently; there’s nothing magical in the shape of the letters. But what is the whole point of words? We fill them with meaning, and all communication presupposes a common fund of agreed-upon meanings. Obviously, this professor wanted his students to grind the name of Jesus into the linoleum precisely because it has a commonly acknowledged meaning and power.

And lawsuits over the coins? Personally, I don’t care what is stamped on the coins. They could put “What, Me Worry?” on ‘em for all I care. To get upset over “In God We Trust” seems obsessive, neurotic, like Dracula cringing from the cross. “God” on the coins does not constitute a theocracy. It is not even a first step toward a theocracy. It is ludicrous fanaticism to get worked up about it. Do you as an atheist ridicule the scruples of first-century Jews who would not allow Roman coinage to be used in the temple? Well, you’re just as picky. Look, if you don’t want all those theophoric coins and bills, I’ll be happy to take them off your too-pure hands.

Stunts like this remind me of what neo-evangelical E.J. Carnell wrote about fundamentalism as “orthodoxy gone cultic.” When a fundamentalist makes a nuisance of himself trying to convert his neighbors or classmates, he is essentially just accumulating status points in the eyes of his fellow cultists who will praise him as a “soul-winner.” I can’t help thinking that the “victories” in the nuisance suits brought by the ACLU and the FFRF function the same way. They are much celebrated at atheist conventions and clubs (“Score one for our side!”), but they just irritate everyone else. This is atheism gone cultic.

I am not only an atheist; in my role as a New Testament scholar I do not even believe there was a historical Jesus. I certainly do not mind causing a bit of discomfort among those too comfortable with their assumptions. Accordingly, I applaud the various billboards posted by American Atheists, FFRF and other secularist groups proclaiming “You know it’s all a myth” or “There’s probably no God,” etc. I’m all in favor of the Zen slap to wake people up. An unexamined faith is not worth believing. You’re doing the pew potatoes a favor. But, though I hate to say it, I think conservative Catholic TV host Eric Bolling is right to compare the litigious atheists with the Westboro Baptists. They are making themselves appear as horrific, bullying nuisances.

The part of this whole mess that upsets me, given the sort of stuff I write, is that the kind of scorched-earth “sensitivity” censorship which these secularists practice will sooner or later be turned against them (and me!) when, for sensitivity’s sake, the public criticism of religion will be banned and/or bullied as “hate speech.” In fact, we are inviting it insofar as we make ourselves look like hate-spewers, “Westboro Atheists.”

So says Zarathustra.

There are actual arguments, i.e., reasonings, against the moral acceptability of homosexuality. I do not find them convincing, but that does not mean I dismiss them as mere rationalizations for bigotry. Even if they were first framed to justify a bias after the fact, that would entitle no one to leapfrog careful analysis. Such dismissal would itself constitute a logical fallacy. It would be the genetic fallacy, as if the motive for the argument counted either for or against the validity of the argument.

One might observe that, even according to evolution and socio-biology, sex and sexual pleasure “caught on” because of their obvious survival value. If everyone had felt sexual attraction only to members of their own sex, well, the human race would have been over before it started!  So is homosexuality wrong?  Not on these grounds, at least, since same-sex attraction is obviously not widespread enough to endanger the replenishment of the human race. Aquinas had to defend sacerdotal celibacy on the same basis. “What if everybody were to embrace celibacy? What would happen to the future of the species?” Tom’s reply? “Don’t worry, pal, it’s not going to happen!” There’s no celibacy fad. Nor is there the remotest likelihood that everybody’s going to switch from straight to gay.

This anti-homosexuality argument smacks of the division fallacy. Yes, collectively America is a wealthy nation, and I am an American, but that doesn’t mean I can start writing big checks. Sure, the human race has to reproduce their own kind, but not every single member is obliged to reproduce. I can think of plenty whom we should pay not to! (Maybe we could start with politicians, union bosses, and school administrators.)

That was a version of the claim that “Homosexuality is unnatural.” Another focuses on medical, physical harm sometimes caused by homosexual acts, especially anal sex. But there are “safe sex” precautions, whether or not one wishes to take them. And besides, here I think we are dealing with a merely prudential matter, not a properly moral one. In Kant’s terms, we are talking about a hypothetical imperative rather than a categorical imperative. Is it immoral to spend yourself (or your country) into insolvency? It is pretty stupid and pretty dangerous, and if it means you are callously causing harm and deprivation to others, then yes, it is also immoral. But that is a special case, as when the plague demon who first spread the AIDS virus would tell his hapless partners the next morning, “I’ve got gay cancer, and now you have it, too.” That behavior cannot be simply identified with homosexuality, any more than rape can be equated with heterosexuality. What is foolish is not automatically immoral.

Mountain climbing, bungee jumping, race car driving, and other “extreme sports” are risky business, but that doesn’t mean they are immoral. The late Dale Earnhardt was no martyr, as some seem to esteem him, but the needless risks he took do not make him a sinner, even though they led to his spine skewering his brain.

The religious version of the unnaturalness argument boils down to saying that homosexual activity was not part of God’s plan and he doesn’t want you to do it. And if you do, and don’t repent of it, you will be heading sooner or later to hell. Ultimately, this opinion depends upon a handful of Bible texts. The Sodom and Gomorrah story of Genesis 19 has nothing to do with homosexuality, so let’s get that one off the table. The pair of verses in Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13) are technically dealing with ritual or ceremonial infractions, on the same level with eating shrimp or bacon. One cannot simply assume these prohibitions survive into New Testament ethics, where many such restrictions are dropped. So for Christians the issue shifts over to the Pauline Epistles.

1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 are traditionally read as condemning homosexuality, but the Greek words used there occur so rarely in extant ancient literature that scholars are not sure exactly what they are supposed to mean. They may be references to specific varieties of homosexual prostitution. Again, that is irrelevant. To condemn heterosexual prostitution is not to condemn all heterosexuality.

In Romans 1:27 we seem to have a clear condemnation of male homosexuality (though I think the adjacent mention of the perversions of women, verse 26, refers not to lesbianism but to bestiality, a la Leviticus 18:23). I think this negative view of homosexuality is based on an inaccurate ancient assumption, namely that all men are naturally heterosexual, so that homosexuality would have to be a perversion, like bestiality. But who knows? Anyway Romans 1:27 certainly does condemn male homosexuality. And this is the big reason Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants think it is immoral.

And this is why many see a Christian parallel at this point with the Taliban: why should evangelicals think anybody should accept their condemnation of homosexuality based on what some ancient book says? In fact, when conservative Christians try to convince gays that they must turn straight, aren’t they really telling them they must embrace the doctrine of biblical inerrancy? Not to do so is the real “sin.”

I am trying to tread carefully here. In attempting to understand the condemnation of homosexual activity as immoral, I suppose I am substituting one accusation of prejudice for another. I think it is slander to allege that all who think homosexuality is immoral are “homophobic.” That seems to imply some hysterical and irrational freak-out once people learn what gays are doing with one another. And there are no doubt such people out there. But I am no mind-reader and cannot simply assume that opposition to homosexuality has no other basis. I grant that opponents of the morality of homosexuality have reasons for their stance. I just do not accept them, for the reasons I have already given. But I do believe, based on the explicit arguments they offer, that Christian conservatives are in this case demanding that others accept their doctrine of scripture as the basis for ethics, and this means the morality of homosexuality is finally beside the point. The larger issue is whether one ought to sign on to biblical infallibilism and literalism.

It may help to remind the reader that this suggested parallel with the Taliban is only very partial. There is a radical fringe of fundamentalists (the Dominionists and Christian Reconstructionists) who do want to impose all the archaic laws of ancient Israel on modern America, but these constitute a tiny minority.

I do, however, believe that no one segment of American society has the right to legislate its theology when it comes to women’s or gay rights, or the teaching of biology. We have to stand vigilant against that, because it is no longer merely a difference of opinion. It is real intolerance.

     So says Zarathustra.

I watched the very first Superbowl with my family, at least some of it. I thought it might be interesting. But it wasn’t. Not to me, anyway. And it still isn’t. Today is Superbowl Sunday, and I’m watching a rerun of Iron Man 2, let’s see, for the third time. I’m aware that most of America is gathered around the video altar rejoicing in good-fellowship and a huge feast of munchies. Sounds fun, except that I just can’t be in the same room with football. I think I know what Jews feel like when everyone else is celebrating Christmas. Just as Jews observe Hanukah instead, which never seems to be as big a deal as Christmas, my family and I had home-made pizza as we watched the movie Groundhog Day last night, as we have for the last… what? Fifteen, sixteen years at least. (In fact, there seems to be some sort of parallel between the movie’s premise, in which a man lived the eponymous holiday over and over again for at least twenty years.)

I do not exactly disdain football, or sports in general, though I admit that is my first reaction. I can’t dismiss an interest in sports as the province of dullards. My brother isn’t close to being one, nor is S.T. Joshi, nor was Paul Kurtz. But I am, as I have always been, utterly and completely baffled. Dr. Kurtz used to say how maybe secular humanists are just tone deaf to religion and its appeal. That is how I would have to describe my indifference (to put it mildly) to sports.

Keep in mind that I admire athletes. I envy their ability and discipline. I readily admit they are superior to me! And I can certainly understand devotion to a team when one’s relative is a member, or when the team is representing one’s school or town, though I have never been able to share it. (Maybe it has something to do with forced attendance at a high school pep rally, which had all the marks of a Nurnberg rally.) But why do people enthusiastically follow sports teams with which they possess no natural connection? Some years ago, when I walked into my classroom at Mount Olive College, a student asked which I rooted for: NC State or UNC. This stumped me: why on earth would I give a fig about either one of them? Why did these Mount Olive students? I still don’t get it. Do you?

I have sometimes heard it said that sports gives men something to talk about, while women spend their time discussing matters of emotional and personal importance. Going back to those halcyon days at Mount Olive again, once a couple of the (male) faculty invited me to drop in at lunchtime at the Southern Belle, a local café and hang-out. There was a surprisingly large group of young professional men and faculty sitting around a few shoved-together Formica tables—talking about sports. Honestly, I felt as if I had somehow blundered into a group of foreigners chattering in some alien language. I can tell you, it wasn’t long before I made some excuse and got the hell out of there. I had not one thing to say. I’d have been more conspicuous had I stayed and said nothing than by getting up and leaving quickly. Nice guys, but totally mundane.

I, on the other hand, am an incurable nerd, just this side (I think) of Asperger’s Syndrome. I love comic books, science fiction movies, Sword-& Sorcery fiction (which I also write), Lovecraft and Tolkien. These interests are my spectator sports, demanding no participation outside the imagination. But then football games are spectator sports for everybody but the guys on the field. What is the difference? I’m not sure I know, but let me give it a try.

I couldn’t care less about any sports team, but there are teams I follow. They’re called the Avengers, the Justice League, the Justice Society, the Legion of Superheroes. What is the difference? Both interests involve vicarious combat. Sports are often thought to channel and dissipate violent urges. And that’s a real service to society. (And you know by now, don’t you, that the business about Superbowl Sunday being the worst day of the year for wife-beating is malicious misinformation.)

What I get from superhero fiction is not that. Partly, I think, I like it because it is a fantasy compensating for the lack of justice in the decaying society we live in, wherein the innocent suffer at the hands of violent felons and then from a legal system that adds insult to injury by taking the side of criminals. And there’s no real chance that will ever change. I can only relish the complete fantasy that the bad guys might get theirs, and that is why I so appreciate the Punisher, the Eradicator, Rorschach (“Used to mollycoddle criminals, let them live.”). Wouldn’t it be great? But it’s like imagining a man can fly. Justice? Yeah, right–when pigs, or men, can fly. That’ll be the day.

But there’s also the mythology angle. The superheroes of text (Conan, Doc Savage, John Carter) and image (Superman, Spider-Man, Iron Man) are like Hercules, Achilles, Theseus, even Apollo and Zeus. There is an element of transcendence and the igniting of the imagination. It gives what religion gives to believers, but without requiring belief. Does it “save” you? Well, it saves you from the crushing, numbing grind of the mundane. It does me.

H.P. Lovecraft once referred to a fellow-writer as a “self-blinded earth-gazer.” Forgive me, but that’s what I think of the sports fan—if that’s all he is. Of course, you can be both, and more. Like my brother Byron. Like Joshi, the world’s leading authority on Lovecraft.

And what about the nerd, the geek, the dweeb? I believe the stereotype (not necessarily an exaggeration!) is of a one-sided personality: everything crammed into one side of the brain with little to no wiring on the other. Aren’t these brainy folks active in the real world, too, by virtue of their tech-savvy? Yeah, sure, but my guess is their scientific genius just happens to prove useful in the real world. For them, it’s just more computer games! Which is the way it ought to be!

If I am not a dweeb, my saving grace is that I do have another aspect to me, not that it puts me in touch with the real world, mind you, and that is my religious scholarship. I have something else going on. And I readily admit that most football fans are about more than the pigskin. Or they may be. I guess I know as little about them as I do the Hottentots. But let’s agree to disagree: you take the Superbowl, I’ll take Superman.

So says Zarathustra,

Dreaming of the Superman

These Sunday morning meetings were much less structured than ordinary church services. Baptist churches have very rudimentary liturgies anyway, but the Grail had none. Not that I dislike liturgy; I always enjoyed that of the Episcopal Church. But we weren’t set up for it. With the group we had, it would have been out of place. We were there to discuss ideas and issues. Existential issues, moral issues, issues of speculative spirituality. We thrived on what I liked to call a spirituality of inquiry. I believe that dogmas function as sleeping pills for the soul and that open questions cause the stretching and nourishing of the soul. (How to define “soul”? You tell me.) I bought a lectern from a local antique shop and would stand at one end of our small living room and speak from a prepared text, just as I had done at First Baptist, for about a half-hour. Sometimes I had to speak with a co-star, as our clever cat Helix would hop up onto the lectern, then onto my shoulder, before I was finished.

I sought to explore reflective questions and to challenge my hearers to introspection and authenticity. I had never beat the drum for any doctrine even in the liberal Baptist days, so this was little different. The edge of my critique of religion did become sharper, though. Eventually, in fact, the increasingly negative, critical character of the whole enterprise was one of the major factors in my calling it quits. But while it lasted, it was great. After I was done speaking and woke everybody up (just kidding—there was only one guy who regularly started to snooze), I would sit down and we’d go around the circle discussing the morning’s topic. Anybody could say whatever he or she wanted. And there was no budget, no church property to keep up, nothing mundane to keep us dragging along the ground. And the discussion was genuinely personal and profound. I still thought of these good folks as my parishioners, my flock, and I loved them.

But finally I decided I had said all I had to say. In fact, I came to feel I was done with living in New Jersey, a state I loved and still love, though I love North Carolina, too. In fact, as you know, Carol and I decided to move back here. And as soon as we did, I returned to St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in nearby Goldsboro. This was the church I had come to love in the mid-eighties and had always missed even when I was pastoring First Baptist. I came to sense (and still feel) that there was no place for me in New Jersey anymore. All the exciting avenues I had been pursuing for some years seemed to be going nowhere. So I was glad to leave.

But what made me decide to leave the Grail? As I’ve said, I eventually realized my increasingly anti-theological “preaching” stank of the same fatal irony one often observes in the Unitarian Universalist Association: having a religion that was all about being non- religious. As a religion, it was like Sanka, or as the Mormons used to call it, “Coffee-Near.” It had become obvious that what we were doing (at least for me) was essentially a therapeutic transition from religion into irreligion. Later still I came to realize that organized atheism and humanism were also substitutes for religion. As Marjoe Gortner once quipped, “Can God deliver a religion addict? Yes he can!” But organized atheism seems to be the methadone to religion’s heroin. At least that’s how it looks to me. I could be missing something, as I often do.

But there was a deeper dimension to my discontent. I realized that in conducting what I viewed as a tiny conventicle of the intellectual elite, I was not much different from the fundamentalist or Pentecostal minister presiding over a “righteous remnant” of “true believers,” only I guess we were “true unbelievers.” Wasn’t it time to leave the club house and grow up? It’s not that I no longer wanted anything to do with the intellectual discussion of issues religious, moral, and philosophical. Carol and I tried to start up a new branch of our Heretics Anonymous discussion group once we got back to North Carolina, and we did, though it has been more difficult to get it on track than we expected.

But we didn’t start up a new Grail. We didn’t even try. For one thing, I wanted to go to St. Stephens Sunday mornings. But I haven’t been to church for over a year now. I just lost interest in it, though I may well return–who knows? So I do have Sunday mornings free. So why no North Carolina Grail?

I guess it’s this: I am uncomfortable with the role of an ostensible spiritual leader, as if I had any right to stand behind the lectern and tell anybody anything. Christian clergy of all stripes seem to feel they have a hot-line to heaven, but I know I do not. Even the very liberal ones think they can speak with moral authority. But do they have that right? It all seems to boil down to that business about the pastoral role. I want to be a compassionate friend, sure. But a “spiritual leader”? Personally, the more someone does come across as a “spiritual leader,” whether Christian, New Thought, New Age, whatever, the more suspicious I become. If they maintain a front, a persona, it is inevitably in some measure an act, a schtick. I prefer the unpretentious. I prefer to be unpretentious. And that seems to be incompatible with the “Moses down from the mountain” persona of a spiritual leader. It is not mine to be a role model. I possess no authority and want none.

No, the only role I will accept, besides straight scholarly teaching (and at First Baptist they complained that I did too much of that, and they were right), is the Socratic one, to stimulate and to facilitate the thinking of others. And I believe this column is the proper forum for that. Why? Because it is a hit-and-run venue. It has the same advantage as the Internet generally: authorial suicide. Roland Barthes wrote of “the death of the author.” As soon as his work is launched into the public sphere, it must stand alone. The text speaks for itself, albeit in partnership with its readers who help co-write it by virtue of the way they interpret it. And the writer cannot intervene to correct them. After all, his reading of “his” text will only amount to one more interpretation of it. The author has no privileged priority of interpretation. His word will not return to him. This column is like an arrow. It may bring you a message. You may dodge it. Or it may find its mark. Or it may miss. But the arrow is all you need be concerned with. It simply does not matter who fired it. This is why I seldom add a comment to those contributed by readers (though I enjoy reading them all). The issue is not whether “the Price is right,” as if I needed to defend “my views,” as if they constituted some sort of party platform. It is enough that my remarks get you thinking and sharing your thoughts with fellow readers. Have at it!

As for me, I am Zarathustra, and there is no Zarathustra.

So says Zarathustra.

Through a Glass Darkly

What is a prophet, and what is the gift of prophecy? The ancients had it that prophecy was information, news of the future that had not yet happened, but which must happen. Perhaps the Fates or the Norns had decreed it, woven it into their tapestry, like the tapestry of Nephren-Ka that “precorded” every day of the future, rolled back by the priests of Nyarlathotep each new morning.. Or perhaps it was determined by the resolution of Jehovah who knew the future no more than we do but could decree and create it with ineluctable power that no lesser agency might resist. But either way, a divine entity had vouchsafed such knowledge to a mortal, and he reported on it. In principle it was no different than a teacher informing her students of what had happened in the past.

By contrast, I have much more respect for the powers of the futurologist, he who cannot see the future except as its unfolding seems to him implied in contemporary events. He can discern the signs of the times and infer where events are heading. What is a curtain to others, concealing the future’s great and secret show, is for the analyst a window through which he can see a shifting illusion of change. And if that mirage becomes real with the passage of time, we acknowledge that he had truly seen, that is, extrapolated, the future.

A prime example would be Russian political scientist Andrei Amalric. In 1970 he wrote a book called Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1985? (The American publisher got him to change the date to the apocalyptic 1984.) In it he took a long look at the Union of very disparate Soviet Socialist Republics and ventured that the union could not resist the centripetal force of competing and incompatible ethnicities, languages, politics, and traditions. It would unravel in a mere 15 years. Well, he was five years premature, but otherwise he was exactly right: little Estonia, followed by the other Baltic States, Then the rest, seceded, and nobody could do anything about it. I couldn’t believe it! How did Amalric know? Did some god or angel inform him, like Jehovah telling Abraham of his plan to destroy Sodom? No. Amalric had the wits to assess the relative weight of major factors and to discern the signs of the times. Precisely like Isaac Asimov’s character Hari Seldon in Foundation.

And, I may add, just like H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s racist and nativist views are well known, though at his best he was no more of a racist than Jimmy Carter with his talk of neighborhoods preserving their “ethnic purity.” He disdained “race mixing,” “miscegenation,” as illustrated in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where the text speaks of  hybrid Deep Ones but the subtext intends Polynesian Islanders, equally repulsive to Lovecraft. We are children of the 1960s and of its legacy. We categorically reject racism and embrace the wonderful, glittering diversity of the human race in all its variations. I know I do. I always have.

But we are cheating ourselves if we fail to hear some important news from Lovecraft, a warning, much like Andrei Amalric’s, of what HPL could see coming. What he saw impending on the historical horizon was the overthrow of Eurocentric, logocentric, that is to say rationalistic cultural hegemony. The battlements of the historic West, he said, would be assaulted by non-Westerners with creeds based on emotion and superstition, with reason their first casualty. Chaos should ensue. He saw a revolution not like the American, French, or even Russian Revolutions where the have-nots toppled the castles of the haves, but rather a Copernican Revolution, where the dominant worldview would crash and burn. In Nietzsche’s terms, it was not like the earth snapping the chains that bound it to the sun to soar freely through the universe. That metaphor stood for the death of God and of objective truth and the resultant freedom of Nihilism. Rather, what Lovecraft foresaw requires a different Nietzschianism: that of the danger of the Superman allowing himself to be stung and bitten to death by a horde of insects, taken down by a thousand threats and judgments one does not feel at liberty to defy. But the Superman must defy! He cannot be defeated unless he forgets who he is and lets his sword fall from sleepy, nerveless fingers. Yes, admittedly Lovecraft portrayed the carriers of this plague as Mediterraneans, Africans, Asians, and Arabs, mestizos and half-castes. That is the shrill voice of Lovecraft the racist. Let us turn a deaf ear to that. But not to the warning itself.

And, as Nietzsche’s Mad Prophet said, that warning has been a long time arriving at its destination. And the time is now. We now live in the time of the teetering of reason and Western Civilization that Lovecraft predicted. We do not see aberrant cultists committing ritual murder and human sacrifice. We do not hear of Yog-Sothoth or of the Necronomicon of  the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred. These, too, were fictional idioms in which the warning was conveyed. What we do hear and see, however, is religious zealots massacring thousands with airplanes, subway explosions, and suicide bombs. We hear of honor killings, people killed over hair styles, fanatical hatred of Jews and infidels. Instead of the Necronomicon, these poison winds flow forth from the Koran. It seems that Abdul Alhazred was the father of a multitude of mad Arabs. And, as the worshippers of the Old Ones sought to clear the earth of human life and prepare for the reign of their depraved gods, today’s “Islamism” is determined to raise up the worldwide caliphate, a regime of holy terror, scripture-quoting tyranny. Freedom is a vice to such madmen. And they are dedicated to extinguishing it in a rain of blood. It is for all the world like the dreams of the Cthulhu cultists who sought to hasten the day when they should reign and impose upon all unbelievers a jihad of bloody terror.

Bin Laden as Alhazred

Lovecraft describes Alhazred as only an indifferent Muslim, a closet worshipper of Yog-Sothoth. Thus he does not indict Islam as his civilization-threatening cult. And that is correct: it is only a minority of Muslims who are sympathetic to Jihad. A mere 10%. Of course that works out to a “mere” one hundred million! As for the remainder, they are singularly unwilling to take a stand against the fanaticism of their Jihadi brethren. They may constitute inert dead weight, but you can see which side of the scale they weigh on. In this case, I’m afraid Sam Harris is correct: the moderate majority serves to camouflage the deadly minority. You see this when oblivious Politically Correct liberals reject all criticism of Islamist terrorists as “Islamophobia.” They commit the Sweeping Generalization fallacy. Most Muslims are fine folks, so the same must be true, they imagine, of all Muslims. Thus for me to denounce Islamo-fascists is somehow supposed to be a vilification of all Muslims, so these PC fools bemoan timely warnings as hate speech. It is all quite sad.

If the amphibian Deep Ones stood for Polynesian Islanders, frightening to the paranoid Lovecraft, the Cthulhu cultists correspond in our day to Islamism, Jihadism. What makes Lovecraft’s fiction prophetic is that it is coming true as fact. And, as HPL intimated, we do not possess the decisive courage to turn back that assault. Whining Islamists demand and gain special treatment, for instance Shania law courts in the UK and USA and special exemptions from airport security measures made necessary by their co-religionists and no one else. Major publishers are already censoring themselves in order to avoid riling up Muslims. British schools are skipping teaching the Holocaust because it offends Muslim extremists who like to pretend it never happened, meanwhile planning to drive Israel into the sea—as they themselves constantly remind us.

Don’t you see the pattern here? Western civilization, the one that invented democracy, rationalism, religious toleration, equal rights for the races, the sexes, and for homosexuals, is being bullied into appeasement, “Finlandization.” What blithering, dithering fools we have become! How decadent and sententious, inviting our conquerors with an open door!

I am a New Testament scholar, and as such I cannot ignore the perilous parallel with the insidious logic of 1 Corinthians 8:9-13, whose author bids those Christians who enjoy freedom of faith, action, and thought, to forego these freedoms so as not to “offend” the “weaker brethren” who are bound by neurotic legalism. Well, he could never have imagined the neurotic legalism of those who declare fatwahs on infidel cartoonists or who want yodeling banned as an offense (somehow!) against Islam! Paul, or whoever may have written it, did not seem to realize that these “weaker brothers,” self-styled victims of offense, offended at the freedom of others, turn out to be the stronger brothers, before whose petulant whining all others must yield. Today, out of spineless politeness to the tender feelings of terrorists, we mute criticism of them. For fear of being called “Islamophobic,” we stifle criticism of Islamo-fascism.

Let no one accuse me of stirring up hatred for the sublime faith of Islam. I have studied it and appreciated it for decades. I love it now. I love it when Muslims proudly share the treasures of their culture with the rest of us. I have read the Koran four times in various translations and intend to read it again and yet again.

What shall we do? We must understand when we are being played for fools, our freedoms turned into tricks and traps against us. It is possible to turn swords into ploughshares and to have them be all the deadlier. We must stop tying ourselves in knots, disrupting our free travel and speech and commerce, allowing the mere possibility of Islamist threats to sacrifice our freedoms, bringing about precisely the result the terrorists seek. We must stop pretending that terror may as easily come from the stooped Italian grandmother in line for the airplane because we are afraid of being accused of “profiling.” We will perish from the same obtuseness exhibited by Wilmarth (in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”) who just could not recognize his danger.

We face terror and murder and the slow erosion of freedom from people who proudly proclaim their love for death and martyrdom. Death is no deterrence to them.

What would be? What might count as a weapon against them? I have heard of two ideas, so loathsome to our enlightened sensibilities that we will not allow ourselves to consider them, though we must. First, we ought to alert every terrorist, every Islamist combatant, that if they are caught they will be executed with bits of pork stuffed into every orifice. According to their barbaric superstition, this should bar their entrance to the Playboy Club in the sky. That might make them think twice (or once).

Second, we ought to let it be known that if there is another terror strike against the West, or if the fanatics should, say, try to level the “idolatrous” Pyramids and Sphinx, as the Egyptian Salafist sect urges, we will not hesitate to unleash upon holy Mecca that monstrous nuclear chaos which Alhazred mercifully cloaked under the name Azathoth.

So says Zarathustra.

So says Zarathustra.

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Recently I read about Jesus’ wife, not in the gossip column, and not for some extravagant vacation trip to Spain. You probably heard about it, too. Karen King, an erudite pal of mine from the Jesus Seminar days, presented a paper to some scholarly confab in Rome in which she unveiled a ripped-up Coptic text fragment she says some collector loaned to her. There isn’t much left of it, but what you can read clearly has Jesus referring to Mary (Magdalene) as “my wife.” It would have been a bit funnier had he said “the wife” (don’t you hate that expression?). Is the text authentic? That’s two questions in one. Is the scrap actually an ancient piece of writing, as opposed to a modern hoax written on genuine ancient papyrus? And, if it is ancient, does it actually report historical data on Jesus (assuming he existed in the first place)?

The age of the papyrus can be fixed somewhere in the fourth century, just like the manuscripts of the Gnostic Nag Hammadi library and, er, come to think of it, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, our earliest complete New Testament manuscripts. But when was the text composed? That’s anybody’s guess, just like with the New Testament writings. Professor King thinks the document is very likely a copy of a genuinely ancient work. Most of the relevant experts she ran it by said so, though one sneered at it as a definite modern forgery. The paper was up for publication in the prestigious Harvard Theological Review (a journal I have about as much chance of appearing in as I do in Penthouse). But veteran Harvard Professor Helmut Koester (a disciple of Rudolf Bultmann and, I am grateful to report, co-instructor, along with Harvey Cox, of a “Heresies Ancient and Modern” course I took at HDS back in the glory days of 1977), nixed the publication when other scholars weighed in, pointing out various problems with the paleography and content. A fake after all, or at least so likely a fake that no one wanted to make the Review and its editors look like fools should the hoax one day be exposed (if it hasn’t already).

I had my own doubts as soon as I read the translation, such as it is. I know as much about paleography and about the Coptic language as I do refrigerator repair, so I’ll stick to the content. From the few letters remaining on what was left of the text, one can tell the document ran parallel with one of the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas (the best known of the Nag Hammadi texts): “My natural mother gave me death, but my true mother gave me life” (saying 101). The lines in which Jesus is shown defending Mary as worthy of discipleship is another version of Thomas 114, “Simon Peter says, ‘Tell Mary to leave us, because women are unworthy of the Life.’ Jesus says, ‘Behold, I shall lead her to make her male, so that she, too, may become a living spirit, like you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’” There is also an echo of the saying in another Nag Hammadi text, the Gospel of Phillip, in which Jesus again defends Mary from the male disciples’ criticisms, and the set-up to the saying says “The Savior loved Mary and used to kiss her on the lips.” The new text seems to make the relationship between Jesus and the Magdalene more explicitly marital.

Okay, in so tiny a fragment, ostensibly of a longer gospel text, what are the chances that virtually the whole thing would “happen” to parallel portions of other already-known gospels and nothing else? And the only part you can read clearly is the business about ”my wife”? I smell a rat. I smell a modern attempt to stir up the Da Vinci Code tempest in a teapot over whether Jesus was married.

Karen King argued that it would have taken greater expertise than some casual troublemaker can be pictured possessing for someone to fake this gospel text. True, but that only narrows down the pool of possible suspects, right? In the National Geographic special about the “newly discovered Gospel according to Judas” a few years ago, a reporter asked one of the “dream team” of scholars who had shepherded the Judas Gospel to press: who might theoretically have had  the skills to forge such a thing? The scholar said, “Nobody outside of this room.” But I agree with Richard J. Arthur that it was one of those men gathered in that room! I think I know which one, too. (That one also cheated by reusing a chunk of a Nag Hammadi gospel, the Apocryphon of John, even copying the exact same spelling error present in one of our three Nag Hammadi copies!)

Bible hoaxes are nothing new. Look at Bart Ehrman’s fine book Forged. He shows how quite a number of biblical writings are pious frauds. But if you want to read about modern Bible frauds, take a look at Edgar J. Goodspeed’s classic volume Famous Biblical Hoaxes (also published as Strange New Gospels and as Modern Apocrypha) or Per Beskow’s excellent Strange Tales about Jesus. Nicholas Notovich’s The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ and William Mahan’s The Archko Volume still make the rounds in reprint editions, and there are many others, less well known today.

Debate still rages over the Secret Gospel of Mark, allegedly discovered (but very likely fabricated) by Morton Smith. Again, no slob, rather an astronomically highly educated specialist who had every skill necessary to pull off such a hoax and seems to have done so. (Actually, I hope somebody eventually manages to vindicate this text fragment, since it would fit so well into some of my hare-brained theories, but so far it looks bad for Smith.)

The trade in fake archaeological relics has of late been brisk, what with the Ossuary of James and some sculpted pomegranate detail from a Davidic building proving to have been produced in a professional relic-forger’s back room workshop. But the cranking out of fake early Christian documents is even more disturbing to me. It shows a poisonous cynicism not only without the scholarly community but within it as well. Have we so completely wrung the juice out of the genuine evidence that we feel forced to fabricate new “ancient data” to supplement our theorizing? In that case, the scholarly game is just not worth playing anymore.

So says Zarathustra.

The mass fears ability and always seeks to co-opt it and to dilute it. Did you see the movie Captain America: The First Avenger? Remember how the Army shoots scrawny Private Steve Rogers full of the experimental Super Soldier Serum, whereupon he turns into a powerful Adonis, a one-man army? And then what happens to him? The government assigns him to go on stage to promote War Bonds. That’s it. Until he strikes out on his own to rescue troops trapped behind enemy lines. He is a hero, and serves others, only once he breaks free of the clinging restraints of the Collective.

Have you ever been forced to work with a committee, whether of stupid classmates or of dim-witted fellow employees or of idiot church deacons? You have knowledge and ideas. They don’t. You notice two things happening simultaneously. First, you wind up doing all the work, though the whole committee gets the credit. But you don’t mind it, because that way at least the job gets done better than it would have if you had let the dead wood actually participate. You’d rather have them share your A than you sharing their C. Second, the dead wood will whittle away at the excellence of your best ideas. What do you expect? They have only mediocrity, and that’s what they contribute.

The Collective always and necessarily dilutes the talents of the gifted. They don’t want to be shown up as mediocre, so they will always try to drive down any excellence they see arising. Somebody else doing a good job makes them look bad. Poor workers always resent good workers. This is why Teachers Unions oppose competency testing or ranking. The herd huddles together, as if adding so many zeroes could total more than one big zero.

I remember my contempt and disgust when I heard a Unitarian minister at a conference say that the theologian must seek to articulate the beliefs of his “faith” community rather than develop his or her own ideas. If he did the latter, he might be considered a philosopher of religion, but a real theologian exalts the mass and eschews individualism. Ugh…

Lucky for me, when I was a teenager I watched Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner and learned its lessons well. And yet I cannot deny Uncle Ben’s lesson either. If one does have great powers, to whom is one in debt? I think I know: one owes a debt to oneself.

The way I look at it, which I happily learned reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, is that one possesses an individual path (what some call a dharma) constituted by the law of one’s own being. One has a built-in drive and goal, planted by one’s genes and watered by one’s environment, which will eventually blossom forth into a life and a destiny. Only so can one find fulfillment. You “must” fulfill your potential or you will find yourself frustrated. And this is only and precisely because your potential is you. To cultivate it and to express it and to apply it is autonomy, obedience to the command of your own nature, not heteronomy, which would be the command of another. A good teacher tries to get you to do your best not as an assignment, like Pharaoh commanding the Israelites to make bricks without straw, but rather in order to encourage your own self-development. You owe it to yourself.

This is why, as Rand said, selfishness is a virtue. Who has a better claim on your abilities and your freedom? Not the mass, the mob, the Collective. It doesn’t “take a village” to determine what you ought to do with your life. I prefer Billy Joel to Hillary Goddam Clinton: “I don’t care what you say anymore. This is my life.”

But isn’t there some larger social dimension? As the quotable George Costanza bellowed when no one passing him on the street would answer a simple question, “We’re living in a society here!” How does that work? Here I think of the “egoism” (but not egotism) of Epicurus, who (in effect) compared society with an orchestra. It works only when each musician concentrates on his own sheet music and plays his own instrument. Imagine the chaotic cacophony if everybody butted in on his neighbor’s performance. Dropping his or her own trumpet and grabbing the other guy’s violin, “Here, let my take care of that for you!” You owe something to the rest of the orchestra, all right: to do a good job with your own performance!

I am responsible not to you, but to me. You are responsible not to me, but to yourself, and that’s the way to get a resulting society that will work best for us both, for us all. I don’t want to succeed at your expense; I want you to succeed, too!

But what about poor souls who are disadvantaged, who cannot excel in such a way as to secure their own weal? Philanthropy is better than forced government collectivism. The superman will naturally look with compassion upon the unfortunate. He will not render assistance in obedience to a government which demands the right to confiscate and redistribute his resources or to commandeer his talents. He will instead act with holy condescension. He does not pretend that no “descent” is involved, because he recognizes that the delusion that all are equal and equally “entitled” is part and parcel of the Collectivist ideology of the slave herd, and he will not be party to that.

So says Nietzsche.

So says Rand.

So says Zarathustra.