The Questioning Christian

Karen Armstrong: Itinerant prophet of the Golden Rule

My wife and I enjoyed hearing renowned religious historian Karen Armstrong last night at Houston’s Wortham Center, as part of a Progressive Forum of Houston lecture series. Some observations:

• Armstrong is delightful.  Her lecture style is passable; to me, though, the most enjoyable part was her living-room conversation afterwards, in the style of Inside the Actor's Studio, with Progressive Forum founder Randall Morton, who posed questions previously submitted via the Web.
• Armstrong emphasized the commonality of the Golden Rule in world religions. That resonated with me, of course (see my various postings here on the fundamental importance of the Summary of the Law in human cultural evolution).
• She claimed that it’s only been in the last few hundred years that people took the Bible’s creation accounts lit­erally. She said that those accounts used to be re­garded — correctly, in her view — as mythos, a story setting out a program for action, as opposed to logos, a description of the way things really are. (Doubtless this one-sentence summary fails to do her justice.)
• Armstrong pitched the Charter for Compassion movement that it sounds like she’s spearheading.
• She pronounces her first name CAR-rin.
• The event looked to be sold out – I saw only a handful of empty seats here and there in the Cullen Theater, probably from no-shows. We ended up sitting in the mezzanine, which I think was our first time ever in that section. The seating there is pitched incredibly steeply, more so than any stadium I’ve ever been in.
• It was announced that Armstrong would do a book-signing for her latest, The Case for God, being sold on-site by co-sponsor Brazos Bookstore. I wanted a signed book, but the line was at least 30 minutes long, so we headed home.  I’ll check with the Brazos to see if they have any signed books there.
• I’ve never seen so many Toyota Priuses in one place as there were in the parking garage afterwards; draw your own conclusions about the audience ....
• Armstrong is not without her critics – see that section of her Wikipedia entry.

Shiites in Iraq have recently been refraining from retaliation against Sunni extremists' provocations

See this NY Times article. Of course, turn-the-other-cheek works only for those who have sufficient staying power to hold on until their attackers have a change of heart — which might be a long time coming.

Would God think less of orthodox Christians for praying with others who didn't share their beliefs?

I seem to be getting some post ideas from an ongoing discussion at TitusOneNine. Here's a thought experiment I posed there in response to a comment from one of that blog's more rigorously-orthodox participants.

THE SETTING: Imagine that:

• A group of Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and doctrinally-orthodox Christians, meet regularly for prayers.
• All are devout, all their beliefs and prayers are sincere.
• When a specifically-Christian prayer is said aloud, the non-Christians mentally ‘translate’ the prayer into their own respective religious idioms. The same is true when a specifically-Hindu prayer is said, etc.

QUESTION 1: In general, does God take a lesser view of, say, Hindus than he does of Christians? How about orthodox Christians versus heretical ones?

QUESTION 2: Does God take a lesser view of Christians when they pray in a theologically-heterogeneous congregation?

QUESTION 3: Do Christians' prayers lose some portion of their effectiveness if they're prayed in a congregation that happens to include non-Christians?

If your answer to any of these is “yes,” then please explain.

Redefining church

Here’s a proposition for debate, inspired by a discussion at TitusOneNine and a posting last week by Nick Knisely:

Resolved, that the members of ‘the church’ are those people — reasserter, reappraiser, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. — who are willing:

1) to pray ‘next to’ one another, even if the prayer of the person next to you is no more than a grudging acknowledgement that maybe a Creator of some sort might indeed exist;

2) to treat each other's prayers with equal dignity, even when there’s grave disagreement over underlying suppositions; and

3) to collaborate in seeking the best for others as for themselves, even if for no other reason than that this seems to give a species a survival advantage over the long term.

Under this definition of ‘church,’ a given individual’s theological beliefs would be of no particular relevance, except of course to the extent those beliefs influenced the individual’s actions.

I know some would object to such a definition of ‘church’; I’m curious how you’d articulate that objection.

Muslim extremists’ narrative of grievance may be an evolutionary side effect of altruistic punishment

Islamic extremism is just one of countless movements that “create[] a collective identity by appealing to a set of common grievances and create[] a master narrative of suffering and oppression.” [1]   It’s possible that this tendency to frame the world in terms of a narrative of grievance is something of an evolutionary side effect of an otherwise-useful trait.

The trait:  Natural selection appears to have hard-wired us to seek to punish unfairness, even at a cost to ourselves, because doing so tends to promote group fitness.  This is often called altruistic punishment. 

The side-effect:  Consciously or not, movements that cast their sales pitches in terms of ‘the unfairness of it all’ are making a smart move, because it so often works.

(It’s not unlike sugary cereal manufacturers who discovered that they could increase sales by positioning their wares on the lower shelves, that is, at eye level for kids riding in their parents’ shopping carts.)

Our willingness to punish unfairness may partially explain why we can be so quick to buy into narratives in which —

1. the members of our group (whatever that might be) are entitled to certain things;
2. when we don’t get those supposed entitlements, it’s not merely the luck of the draw, a poor choice of parents, a consequence of past decisions, etc.  No — it’s unfair, a distortion of the cosmic fabric, a case of Life Not Being The Way It’s Supposed To Be;
3. our hard-wired response to any perceived unfairness is to identify those at fault and punish them.

Putting it another way: if a hammer is one of your primary tools, an awful lot of things can start to look like nails. 

This might also help to explain why anger at Those At Fault often seems more emotionally satisfying than the hard work of facing the facts about the things we don’t like and trying to do something constructive about them.

Related post:

• Good News, Bad News: Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect?

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[1] Reza Aslan in an interview in the Houston Chronicle (emphasis added).  Aslan is author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005) and the just-published How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.  It’s not hard to think of other examples of group identities that are built on, or reinforced by, a narrative of grievance; think of extremists in, for example, North Korea; Serbia; the political parties of various countries; the Episcopal Church; etc., etc.  (And I’m not even going to mention some other obvious examples from history.)

Evolution in action: In crowded Gaza, the West-subsidized high birth rate helps select for aggression

Today's WSJ (Europe) contains a thought-provoking piece by Gunnar Heinsohn about the ongoing 'youth bulge' in Gaza, fed by a six-babies-per-woman average birth rate that is subsidized by the West. We can conjecture that this results in at least a modest selection bias in favor of aggressive males, who — assuming they survive to sire children — seem likely to sire more children on the whole than passive or timid ones. (This is a questionable assumption, of course; some women may have a stronger preference for men who are likely to be around to help raise the kids than for those who are likely to get themselves killed.)

Excerpt:

In such "youth bulge" countries, young men tend to eliminate each other or get killed in aggressive wars until a balance is reached between their ambitions and the number of acceptable positions available in their society.

The reason for Gaza's endless youth bulge is that a large majority of its population does not have to provide for its offspring. Most babies are fed, clothed, vaccinated and educated by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. ... [@para;]

The Hamas-Fatah truce of June 2007 allowed the Islamists again to direct all their energy on attacking Israel. The West pays for food, schools, medicine and housing, while Muslim nations help out with the military hardware. Unrestrained by such necessities as having to earn a living, the young have plenty of time on their hands for digging tunnels, smuggling, assembling missiles and firing 4,500 of them at Israel since 2006. ... [¶]

... By generously supporting UNRWA's budget, the West assists a rate of population increase that is 10 times higher than in their own countries. Much is being said about Iran waging a proxy war against Israel by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. One may argue that by fueling Gaza's untenable population explosion, the West unintentionally finances a war by proxy against the Jews of Israel.

If we seriously want to avoid another generation of war in Gaza, we must have the courage to tell the Gazans that they will have to start looking after their children themselves, without UNRWA's help. This would force Palestinians to focus on building an economy instead of freeing them up to wage war. Of course, every baby lured into the world by our money up to now would still have our assistance.

(Bold-faced emphasis added.)

Heinsohn's diagnosis seems very plausible, but his prescription is more than a bit lacking.  He does not explain how exactly we are suppose to induce Gazans to reduce their birth rate, while simultaneously continuing to provide assistance for "every baby lured into the world by our money up to now[.]" (Tom Evslin has a couple of observations on that score.)

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Related post:

• Evolution in action: Did Muslim four-wives rule select for aggressive males?

Evolution in action: Did Muslim four-wives rule select for aggressive males?

Yesterday's news prominently featured an Israeli air strike in Gaza that killed leading Hamas militant Nizar Rayan, all four of his wives, and 9 or 10 of his 12 children. I wonder if the Muslim approval of polygyny, allowing men to have up to four wives if necessary for humanitarian reasons, may help explain why Islamic militants seem to be some of the most aggressive on the planet. I would think that, other things being equal:

• The men most prone to seek multiple wives would tend to be the assertive and even aggressive ones. (This premise intuitively makes sense, but that's all the more reason to give it careful scrutiny before making any significant bets on my reasoning here.)

• Every time a polygynist takes an additional wife, his action has a double-whammy effect on the makeup of the next generation's population:  It reduces the number of women available to bear the children of more-passive men, and it increases the number of women who will bear the children of assertive ones.

• Thus, in a society that allowed multiple wives, over time we would expect more descendants of assertive men, and fewer descendants of passive ones, than we would expect in a monogamous culture.

Assuming intuitively that assertiveness is at least partially determined by heredity (another assumption requiring critical scrutiny), this gives us a clue about how a society might eventually look after X generations of polygyny. 

The above analysis is pretty simplistic, of course. It doesn't take into account other factors that doubtless contribute to the hyper-aggressiveness of Islamic militants, such as overcrowding in Palestinian 'refugee camps' and the inability of many Islamic societies to generate the kind of widespread economic progress that is comparatively common in the West.  (The latter may itself be due in part to a population prone to aggressiveness.) Nor does it take into account the increased likelihood that aggressive males might die violently before fathering as many children as they might have in a normal lifespan.

 But I do suspect it there may be something to it.

Muslim graveyard refuses to bury Mumbai terrorists

Good:

A Muslim graveyard in Mumbai said Monday it would not bury the dead gunmen, with an official saying they are not true followers of the Islamic faith.

"People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim," said Hanif Nalkhande, a trustee of the influential Jama Masjid Trust, which runs the 7.5-acre (three-hectare) Badakabrastan graveyard in downtown Mumbai. "Islam does not permit this sort of barbaric crime."

While some Muslim scholars disagreed with the decision — saying Islam requires a proper burial for every Muslim — the city's other Muslim graveyards are likely to go along because of the authority of the Jama Masjid trust.

In a West Wing episode just after 9/11, Aaron Sorkin pointed out that Islamic extremism is to Islam as the KKK is to Christianity.  Shamefully, the U.S. stepped up and dealt with the KKK only after their barbarous deeds had brought about worldwide pressure.  Nominally-Muslim terrorists have no shortage of barbarous deeds of their own to their name. It's past time for the rest of the Islamic world to start dealing with the problem, because it's likely they're the only ones who can.

Muslim scholars reach out to Christians

I'm late to the party on this one, but if you haven't done so already, you need to read the exchange of letters between Muslim and Christian clergy and scholars:

• A Common Word Between Us and You, by the Muslim scholars, emphasized that the three Abrahamic faiths share a common ground in (what Christians call) the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law: Love God above all, and love your neighbor as yourself.

The Muslims take note of Jesus' remark that "he who is not against us is on our side" (Mark 9.40; Luke 9.50); they ask that Christians consider Muslims to be with them, not against them.

(With reference to Jesus' apparently-contrary saying in Matthew, the Muslims quote an 11th century Greek Orthodox scholar as arguing that in context, Jesus was referring to Beelzebub and other demons when he said that "He who is not [Greek: The one not being] with me is against me, and he who does not gather [Greek: the one not gathering] with me scatters abroad" (see Matt. 12.26-30).)

• Loving God and Neighbor Together: A Christian Response to 'A Common Word Between Us and You "receive[s] the open letter as a Muslim hand of conviviality and cooperation extended to Christians world-wide. In this response we extend our own Christian hand in return, so that together with all other human beings we may live in peace and justice as we seek to love God and our neighbors." 

The Episcopal Cafe has more about A Common Word, as well as about A Christian Response and about the positive responses by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the president of the Lutheran World Federation.

Sure, Jews and Muslims Can Celebrate Christmas

Jews and Muslims wouldn't have the same theological basis as Christians for celebrating the birth of Jesus.  But is that really so important? 

Whatever else Jesus was or was not, he certainly was one of Israel's greatest prophets.   Surely the Abrahamic faiths (and perhaps others as well) can agree that, in some sense, God was at work in Jesus' birth.

We should focus on that common ground we share, instead of on the theological speculations that we allow to divide us. 

Christmas should be an occasion for all theists to celebrate God's work, in fellowship with each other.

So, Cindy Chupack, don't feel one bit guilty about putting up a Christmas tree in your Jewish home, in praise of the Creator.