Am I my schismatic’s keeper?

November 11, 2012 By Leah Libresco

This post is part of a series discussing Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

By the end of Breaking the Spell, Dennett has shown the reader that religions may have memetic staying power independent of their truth. And, even if a religious reader isn’t convinced that their own religion is explained away by evolutionary processes, he hopes his book will awaken the religious to their unique duty to short-circuit dangerous religious memes. He writes:

“There is more work to be done, and it is the unpleasant and even dangerous work of desanctifying the excesses in each tradition from the inside. Any religious person who is not actively and publicly involved in that effort is shirking a duty–and the fact that you don’t belong to a congregation or denomination that is offending doesn’t excuse you: it is Christianity and Islam and Judaism and Hinduism (for example) that are attractive nuisances, not just their offshoot sects.”

I love duties and I love arguments, so a duty to pick fights is awfully tempting. But I think Dennett’s exhortation is misguided. I’m not a adept in every style of fight or theology. I might know enough to not subscribe to a philosophy without being fluent enough to persuade its adherents to give it up. There’s a lot of distance between points, even if you limit yourself to Christian conceptspace.

If I can’t speak to my opponents, speaking about them to condemn them is of limited use.

There needs to be enough public disapproval for people stuck within a bad institution to understand its precepts aren’t universally acclaimed and to have a sense of why. But every Christian doesn’t need to speak about each bad sect to accomplish this.

Condemning outside of conversation with your enemy can be counterproductive. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. I like to try and keep my interlocutors face before me in a fight, so I have to remember I’m fighting a person and that all my work has to be for their good, not an excuse to feel superior that I didn’t fall into that error.

But why shouldn’t I spend more time training up to fight the people I can’t reach now? Why not spend more of my blogging time rebuking bad theology and less time gushing over Stephen Sondheim. Accepting the duty Dennett proposes gives the people in error too much power over us. I’m reminded of the story of the Tragedian in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce:

“That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it… The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”

That’s why my comment policy makes it clear that I don’t take on the responsibility of responding to or deleting every aggressive comment. Where we can intervene to protect others from harm, we should, but rebuking other people’s beliefs shouldn’t be able to preempt explaining and living our own.

Who Can Blaspheme?

September 30, 2012 By Leah Libresco

Today is International Blasphemy Rights Day, spearheaded by the Center for Inquiry. It’s pretty much Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, but with a broader focus. I fully back CFI’s fight against blasphemy laws (remember, just in the past few months, Alexander Aan and that girl in Pakistan). I’m a little more dubious about the practical use of having people in the U.S. and other relatively free nations blaspheme as a way of drawing attention/funds to the fight against blasphemy laws. But neither of those two issues is the topic I want to discuss today.

Blasphemy is one of the sins I’m a little confused about. It seems like it’s about the betrayal of a relationship, and I don’t really understand how that can happen if you’re unaware of the relationship. Let’s contrast blasphemy with the crime of insulting the Thai monarchy. Although these laws might be enforceable in Thailand, they aren’t binding in the rest of the world. Whether or not the Thai king actually has rightful authority over Thailand, he definitely doesn’t have it over the whole world. I have no fealty to him, so the only responsibility I have to betray is the same kind of responsibility I have to all human beings (which is rather a lot to be going on with).

Christianity makes a more audacious claim. Christ the King does have rightful authority over everyone, but this claim is as unobvious to many people as the Thai king’s claim to the whole world would be. So maybe the better analogy would be being raised by a single mother, unaware of the identity of your father, and then failing to meet him and take care of him in his old age. This lapse would be tragic, for you and for him, but it wouldn’t be a chosen slight. And a mortal sin must be committed with full knowledge and consent.

So, are people participating in Blasphemy day actually blaspheming? I’m not sure. Intuitively, this seems more like the kind of sin that only religious people can commit against their own religions; to choose to profane something, you must first acknowledge it as holy.

Further reading: While still an atheist, I wrote a series of posts opposing PZ Myers’s desecration of a consecrated Host, since it seemed only intended to upset people, not to defend his own freedom.

Further further reading: Atheist Kenan Malick has posted the transcript of a talk he gave on the history of blasphemy laws. It includes this interesting excerpt:

Despite the concern with God and Christianity, the outlawing of blasphemy was less about defending the dignity of the divine than of protecting the sanctity of the state. In 1676 John Taylor was convicted of blasphemy for saying that Jesus Christ was a ‘bastard’ and a ‘whoremaker’ and that religion was a ‘cheat’. ‘That such kind of wicked and blasphemous words were not only an offence against God and religion’, observed the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Matthew Hale, in front of whom Taylor was tried, ‘but a crime against the laws, States and Government; and therefore punishable in this court; that to say religion is a cheat, is to dissolve all those obligations whereby civil societies are preserved; and Christianity being parcel of the laws of England, therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law.’

…Four hundred years after Taylor’s conviction, Lord Denning, perhaps Britain’s most important judge of the twentieth century, made, in 1949, much the same point about the relationship between blasphemy and social disorder, though he drew the opposite conclusion about the necessity of the law. Historically, he observed, ‘The reason for this law was because it was thought that a denial of Christianity was liable to shake the fabric of society, which was itself founded on Christian religion.’ But, Denning added, ‘There is no such danger in society now and the offence of blasphemy is a dead letter.’

Back then, there was more agreement that Christian natural law undergirded social law. Now, post-Christian thinking has managed to pull in a lot of the results of Christian metaphysics, but hasn’t always bothered to derive them from a new metaphysics. So Denning is probably right that all the scaffolding exists to sustain the necessary ideas without belief in God. But it makes me wonder what the new unthinkable thought is. (Possibly relativism).

If you can’t take the heat, turn into a tardigrade!

September 6, 2012 By Leah Libresco

tardigrade — “I am a rock. I am an island”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” is a quote that is frequently attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt (without sourcing). I found it for the first time while I was in middle school in a Dear Abby column and adopted it as a mantra until some point in college. This can be a helpful coping strategy, especially in middle school, but I was definitely too enthused about it.

I flashed back to my younger self when I read Ted Seeber’s comment on my post about the campaign against Jen McCreight.

My point is that when you enter the world of online communications and flame wars (and I can’t believe I have to tell you this, let alone a supposedly “experienced blogger” like Jen) you need to check emotionalism at the door. Text is an autistic media- there is no subtext, there is no body language, any emotion you think is being transmitted is all imaginary and in your own head.

First of all, the possibly-Eleanor Roosevelt quote is not “No one can come to your house and physically harm you or sabotage your professional career without your consent.” Jen was getting threats, and you can’t stoic your way out of those. (Well, you can, insofar as you cultivate an indifference to bodily harm, but I don’t think that’s what Ted or anyone else is recommending).

But let’s leave sticks and stones out for the sake of argument and just ask whether you can reconfigure yourself so that words can never hurt you. Yeah, probably. I’m pretty good at it, and it’s a skill I’ve leveled up over time I just don’t think that’s a very good goal.

How do you get better at not minding vitriolic abuse? Well, you can nurture contempt for your commenters. Every stupid, nasty comment is a public testimonial to the suckiness of your enemies. Your ability to endure it is bolstering your side, since the hate is self-delegitimizing! You can cackle to yourself as your watch your enemies behave worse and worse.

Or you can cultivate indifference. You just put writing out there, and people will do with it what they can, but their reactions are irrelevant to you. The whooshing of the wind could never offend you, so why should you let these people’s insults have any more power over you that that? Imagine their jibes are just the output of infinite monkeys. Text is text, it doesn’t matter who produced it.

I’ve practised both these reactions, and they can get me over a hump, and they feel great. I don’t feel hurt, I feel stronger than the person abusing me. Not only did I not let them bully me, but I’ve got a chance to realize just how much better than them I am. It feels like stepping out of the way of a punch and getting to laugh as your assailant overextends, loses his balance, and falls. I feel light and quick and strong. And exhilarated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNWNOGXZ7hA

And all of that is pretty bad for me.

I don’t want to enjoy someone else degrading themself, and I don’t want to practise thinking of humans as not-human. My peace and pride is bought by callousing my empathy. I’m a pretty bad compartmentalizer, so it’s hard for me to practise this contempt and indifference online and not have it spill over into my day to day life.

If you’re better at emotional code-switching than me, maybe you can pull it off, but, if not, then following Ted’s advice means wounding the part of you that can be hurt by people because you’re open to and interested in them. It’s bad for you as a person, and bad for you as a writer, since your pieces will be more persuasive if you can model your enemies as human and write to them. And what shall it profit a woman if she should keep her blog, but lose her love for her readers?

Can Lethal Resistance be Loving?

July 6, 2012 By Leah Libresco

I quite enjoyed reading Logan Mehl-Laituri’s Reborn on the 4th of July for the Patheos Book Club this month. Mehl-Laituri was weakly religious, but, while serving in the US Army, he became more deeply engaged with Christianity and ultimately decided that his newfound faith was incompatible with his job shooting people.

It’s obviously an emotional as well as an intellectual journey for Mehl-Laituri, but since I tend to be an unfeeling reader, wishing for a little less personality and a bit more theology in these kinds of books, I was delighted that Mehl-Laituri has helpfully included several appendices on his religious beliefs, military law, a concordance of biblical citations about soldiers, etc, so the reader is free to wonk out.

It turns out there are two types of contientious objectors under US law. The first is exactly what you think of: someone whose religious and/or philosophical beliefs mean they cannot serve in the military in good conscience. But it turns out there’s a second classification: someone who won’t carry a weapon or do any harm to the enemy, but is willing to serve in other capacities. It turns out that Mehl-Laituri sought the second, extremely uncommon classification. He wanted to be redeployed with his unit to Iraq, but could not consent to harming Iraqis.

The army did not allow him to return with his unit, and I was left wondering how and whom Mehl-Laituri intended to serve as a non-combatant. Would he be complicit with killing? Or at least, any more complicit than he is as a tax-payer? Did he intend to ship out as his comrades’ keeper, and try and protect them from the wounds they were inflicting on their souls, however unknowingly? As a Christian, how much hold do national loyalties have on him? He didn’t go into detail on this point, but my impression was that he wanted to return to Iraq because he felt a powerful communion with the individuals he had served with.

I don’t particularly want to talk about the justice of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, or whether a bad war creates an obligation to see it through to a good peace. The question I found most interesting is: What kind of resistance should Christians offer to injustice? Violence only seems useful if we’re using it against other people the way we would against a rabid dog. There’s an immediate danger, and, regretfully, we don’t have a way to heal or reason with the aggressor. And then we get to the question of martyrdom.

Ultimately, Mehl-Laituri has a duty to everyone on the field of battle, but no clear way to serve. His conflict feels a lot higher stakes than the way we deal with quotidian enemies, but there are a lot of kinds of non-lethal resistance and opposition that run the risk of being unloving. I’ve got a lot of questions and a couple interesting source texts to riff on here, so stay tuned over the next few days and browse through the posts tagged “radical forgiveness” and “sin eaters/dirty hands” for some background.

Bonus points if you can guess which Shakespearean soliloquy has been running through my head since I read Mehl-Laituri’s book and will be the topic of tomorrow’s post.

Update: There are two follow-ups on this theme, both inspired by plays: “That his heels may kick at heaven” and “A Martyr for All Seasons.”

Go Ahead, Tell Me What’s Wrong with Homosexuality

May 22, 2012 By Leah Libresco

One of the reasons I found the “gay brownshirts” argument so frustrating is that it’s a distraction from the fight I really want to have with Mark Shea and other orthodox Catholics. I want to know why they think gay people are required to be chaste, why homosexual relationships are ‘intrinsically disordered.’ Mark put out a call to his commenters on my behalf for reading recommendations.

My questions are a little unusual, as I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to limit the behavior (sexual or otherwise) of two consenting adults. As I wrote to Mark:

I don’t think it’s intrinsically unreasonable to tell a person (or a class of people) that sex is out of the picture for them. No one is guaranteed or entitled to a sexual relationship, and there are plenty of other impediments that can mean you can’t have sex with someone you love. (Having to break up with the Catholic boyfriend I loved is a case in point). So, in theory, I don’t object, but I don’t understand why having the beloved be of the same gender means you wind up on the impediments list. That’s what I’d like to read a defense/explication of.

It’s not just a question of differing religious premises; I can’t wrap my head around how some of these arguments work within a Catholic framework. The explanation I usually get comes down to natural law: the male and female bodies fit together like a lock and key, which tells us something about the privileged status of that kind of sexual congress. Now, there are some objections that people raise (some heterosexual couples are infertile! gay people can adopt or be impregnated! etc), but I’m willing to grant that the qualitative difference exists: only male-female sex has procreation as a possibility by default.

But I don’t think this fact has many necessary logical implications. Ok, so gay people won’t ever have the same kind of relationships as straights. I didn’t need to go to a priest to learn that; plenty of queer theorists would have told me the same thing. Arguing that eros in same-sex relationships is different from what you find among straights isn’t the same as arguing that it is proscribed.

In fact, if I want to reason from nature, there aren’t really enough queer people in the world to threaten the reproductive project, even if all the bi people ended up with same-sex partners. There’s room for a parallel structure of relationships. And we’ve got some models to draw on.

Friendships (whatever the gender pairing) can be emotionally intense, but non-sexual. Some relationships can have an erotic frisson without being sexual (I’m thinking here of Sherlock and Irene Adler in the BBC’s Sherlock, where they’re both infatuated, but only by the other’s intellect). So why are romantic same-sex relationships not ok in the same way as these are? Here are a couple reasons I’ve heard and don’t find convincing:

Same sex relationships are narcissistic (version one) – If you’re dating someone of the same sex, aren’t you basically dating yourself?

I’m not really going to waste time expanding this objection, my response to it is here: “What about other Others?”

Same sex relationships are narcissistic (version two) – If it’s just the two of you and your relationship isn’t directed toward children, aren’t you isolating yourself with a kind of selfish love?

Aside from the what about older/infertile couples objection, I think this genre of objection sells short friendship. The ways that a marriage changes you will spill over into all your relationships; parenting isn’t the only way to be of service to someone. You can see more about what I think marriage is for here: “Whaddya Wanna Get Married For?“

So, if Catholics want to convince me that active homosexuality is incompatible with the faith, I’d like to hear about why my objections to the above don’t cut it or hear some new arguments about why different means disordered.

7 Quick Takes (4/20/12)

April 20, 2012 By Leah Libresco

— 1 —

The anti-gnostic cooking project continues on apace. This week I made cheddar-chive scones (the second thing I’ve ever cooked!).

Some friends came over and nommed them up with me while we watched Of Gods and Men which is (a) stellar and (b) also helpfully anti-gnostic in its own way.

I’d appreciate any easy recipes I could attempt in the future (but be patient, I’m travelling the next two weekends). And keep in mind that I’m picky eater and I hate most food (but especially meat, tomato sauce, and many colloids).

— 2 —

While I’m trying to cultivate an appreciation for the concrete and physical, maybe some of you want to spend more time getting into the abstract. It’s your last chance to sign up for Udacity’s new set of seven week computer science classes. I just did the p-set for my Web Application Engineering class and I’m pretty excited. The intro class has no prerequisites and by the end of the term, you’ll have build a bare-bones search engine. Woo!

— 3 —

What does it say about me that I’ve never (to my knowledge) heard a Tupac song, but I have heard of the Pepper’s Ghost setup that was used to set up a faux-holograph for his performance? The trick is pretty cool (and Ars Technica has a good explanation) and it’s the kind of thing you can try at home for Halloween depending on the layout of your house.

— 4 —

The Tupac hologram turned out to be an illusory illusion instead of true hologram, but you have my word of honor that the picture below is not any kind of trick:

An Italian art museum, frustrated by a lack of funding, has started burning paintings. Like a supervillian, they’ve pledged to burn three paintings a week until their demands are met. So far, all the artists have consented to their works being torched, but that could change at any time.

— 5 —

The last Quick Take featured a questionable use of fire, but I’m sure we can all agree that the below video (via Win!) is objectively awesome:

— 6 —

To continue the theme of objective awesomeness, here’s Jim Henson’s original pitch for the Muppet Show:

— 7 —

And to close it off, the only thing cooler than pennyfarthings:

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Is Civil Marriage a Right?

March 31, 2012 By Leah Libresco

Last week the European Court of Human Rights ruled that same-sex marriage is not a human right guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition, according to The Daily Mail’s write-up of the case, the court ruled that if gay couples are allowed to marry, any church that offers weddings will be guilty of discrimination if it declines to marry same-sex couples.

Before I get to the main point, I have to say that last part struck me as bizarre. There’s not a Catholic church in the country that would consent to marry me to another atheist, whatever the gender. There are a number of prerequisites for sacramental marriages, and I have no idea why civil same-sex marriage would obligate the Church to officiate anymore than civil marriage for divorcees would obligate the Church to marry people in the absence of an annulment. Either there’s something missing from the Mail’s analysis, or the court just created a huge and under-reported constraint on religious liberty.

That worry aside, when I read the article, I realized I wasn’t certain whether I thought civil marriage (for any gender pairing) really ought to be considered a human right. I guess a big part of the question comes down to whether you think marriage comes out of our right to freely contract with others and have the State enforce those contracts. In that case, the State has an obligation to recognize and enforce the bond we create between ourselves and individuals, but it has no duty to single out a particular kind of contract as ‘marriage.’

This wouldn’t mean the State couldn’t acknowledge marriage in law, in the tax code, etc, or that it wouldn’t be prudent to do so. It only means that it doesn’t have to and that, in the absence of the State’s involvement or blessing, people can conduct themselves as they wish. People can get recognition of their commitment to a spouse from a church, from their family, or from their community at large.

The ‘officialness’ of the marriage would be enforced by whatever constraints the couple chose to be subject to at the beginning of the marriage. Essentially, everyone would be picking from a menu of covenant marriages, where the restrictions were enforced either by contract or by social opprobrium.

I don’t know that I have any major objections to this libertarian model of marriage. I’d like for people to have more freedom to specify who gets to visit them in the hospital, who gets to inherit, and who has joint custody of their children irrespective of whether that person is a romantic partner.

That’s obviously not the system we have, and I think most of the litigation about gay marriage has nothing to do with inalienable human rights. The government can have an interest in marriage regardless of human rights, insofar as the regulation and recognition of marriage is an opportunity for soft paternalism, so the question isn’t whether government should be involved. The legal question (at least in the US) is, once the govenment is involved, is it allowed to make a category that deliberately excludes a protected class.

What I’d like to know is whether you all think the government’s involvement in marriage is a matter of prudent social engineering or of moral obligation.