September 26, 2009 at 1:13 P.M. I am in receipt of a notice indicating that my Yahoo settings have changed. My e-mail cannot be accessed at Yahoo. As a result, I will not return to that site. My Amazon account was similarly hacked into. I went through the usual war to get to this site. I will go to public computers at new locations later today, then I will return to this computer. I surmise that this is part of the licensed "frustration inducement" effort from New Jersey. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "North Bergen, New Jersey is the Home of La Cosa Nostra.")
New arrests are expected soon in New Jersey. Good luck with the IRS and FBI, fellas! Don't forget to dress warmly, cool weather is coming.
August 30, 2009 at 9:39 A.M. Several "errors" were inserted by New Jersey's hackers overnight. Images are blocked at this site, access to MSN is obstructed, no web sites can be safely visited by me on this computer. Several corrections of this text have been made on more than one occasion. Cybercrime and harassment continues on a daily basis. ("Is Paul Bergrin, Esq. an Ethical New Jersey Lawyer?" and "Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey.")
Hide your children from politicians and judges in New Jersey.
August 27, 2009 at 12:00 Noon -- Written under adverse and noisy conditions. "Errors" will be inserted in this essay on a regular basis, cyberattacks have intensified lately. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Is Senator Menendez a Suspect in Mafia-Political Murder in New Jersey?")
James Wood, "God in the Quad," in The New Yorker, August 31, 2009, at p. 75.
Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), $25.00. (More like $27.00 at Barnes & Noble. Eagleton has to pay for that summer home in Ibiza.)
C.S. Lewis, The Seeing Eye: Selected Essays From Christian Reflections (New York: Ballantine, 1967), pp. 99-112.
Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain (New York & London: Harcourt Brace, 1946), pp. 166-225.
A recent New Yorker "blesses" us with the wisdom of Harvard "don" James Wood concerning the subject of God, God's critics, and the new atheism by way of what purports to be a review of Terry Eagleton's recent book. Has Mr. Wood read that book? I doubt that he has read it.
Eagleton's book is a compilation based on his Gifford Lectures delivered at Yale University. Eagleton was delighted (to the point of experiencing sexual and non-sexual orgasms) at being invited to provide these talks to eager students in a nation Eagleton has dismissed as "greedy and cruel" -- except, of course, when it offers large sums of money to British academics to lecture on the new atheism.
"I love Americans!" Mr. Eagleton was quoted as saying when informed of the fee that he would receive for these talks. ("Why Terry Eagleton Hates Americans.")
Mr. Wood looks on with envy. Professor Wood shares his philosophical meditations with readers of this prestigious publication who know even less philosophy than does Mr. Wood. Perhaps Mr. Wood will give next year's Gifford Lectures. You scratch my back, and I'll vote for your tenure application. This article is a disappointment to the extent that it has much to say on the subject of God's "existence," as it is couched with qualifications in the passive voice and third as well as first person: "I am inclined to think that Gould had a point." (p. 75.)
What does that mean, Jim? Are religious persons "idiots" (like Debbie Poritz and Stuart Rabner of New Jersey) as you suggested in your first article on the same subject for this magazine? ("Is this atheism's moment?") Or have the new atheists gone too far? I suspect that Jimbo's view of the matter is best captured in a sentence that escaped his pen exactly as the British acquired their empire -- "in a fit of absent-mindedness":
"Since belief in God is clearly MADNESS, the new atheists must scrabble around for quasi-biological explanations of this stubborn malady." (p. 75.) (emphasis added)
Among those mentally-ill or insane persons burdened with this so-called "malady," we must include "scrabblers" like Simone Weil, Malcolm Muggeridge, C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and about 90% of the population of the planet who remain unenlightened, as do I, by the new atheists. We sufferers from this "malady" (if we are religious) will persevere in our life's journeys. To his credit, Mr. Wood grudgingly admits:
"The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism, and who aren't inclined to submit to the mad mullahs and the fanatical ministers. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers (the philosopher Daniel Dennett has advocated that non-believers call themselves 'brights' -- the better, I suppose, to contrast with dullard philosophers like Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, or the late Leszek Kolakowski), and that any working scientist who professes to believe in God is probably lying ..." (p. 75.) (emphasis added!)
As one of the semi-intelligent agnostics and "pseudo-intellectuals" who is much more respectful of religious believers than either the new atheists or Mr. Wood "appear to be" (as Mr. Wood would express it), I am dismayed at discovering James Wood's curious reasoning prominently displayed in The New Yorker. "Oddly, despite God's general discrediting," Mr. Wood tells us, "theology is thriving." (p. 76.) It sure is, kid.
These paragraphs by Mr. Wood shine with the earnest wrongheadedness and dull lack of comprehension associated with the wooden prose of Mathew Alper. For example, I direct readers with strong stomachs to Mathew Alper, The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God (New York: Rogue Press, 2001).
Would Mr. Alper participate in or condone censorship? I wonder whether Mr. Alper has visited my sites in order to criticize my writings under a pseudonym?
Here's a little theology for you, James. Do you think that a person is using the concept of God properly if he or she is under the impression that God has been "discredited"? I have my doubts on that subject. ("Is it rational to believe in God?") How does Mr. Wood's statement concerning the "madness" of believers jive with this little chestnut:
"What is most repellent about the new atheism is its intolerant certainty; it is always noon in Dawkins's world, and the sun of science and liberal positivism is shining brassily, casting no shadows." (p. 76.)
Eagleton's intelligent comments on religion and profound criticisms of the new atheists (I have only glanced at his book in the bookstore) is a whole lot better than the "drek" in the new atheist category (Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins are all best known and admired, appropriately, for their non-religious writings).
In an important recent book, theologian and philosopher Mark Johnson refers to these popular writers as the "undergraduate atheists." As a former undergraduate atheist, I concur. Mr. Alper is a high school atheist.
What pisses me off about many of the lobotomized morons who have debated me on these issues is not their "disagreement" with my expressed opinions nor their dismissals of the entire history of philosophy because "it's not science, duh!" I don't give a shit whether you agree with me about anything. I am "O.K." with your choice to be a moron. I object to people censoring my writings or suppressing books that they are incapable of understanding. Am I being "over sensitive"? I don't think so. I am not overly sensitive, only rational and well-informed on this issue. Any more inserted "errors," gentlemen? Ladies of all genders are invited to disagree with my views, but not to alter my writings. Sam Harris is not a writer to emulate for his philosophical acumen, even if we admire his knowledge of science.
Eagleton has understood the meanings of religious writings and their necessary connection to our aesthetic and moral lives. Christ speaks to us today (metaphor) of politics and revolution as well as poverty and wealth. Eagleton is "shining brassily" in this book and in his earlier works on aesthetics, which are not unrelated to the new theology. Eagleton is a theologian of liberation. Eagleton's book-length essay on Marxism and Marxist aesthetics is highly recommended. I have only read 6 of Eagleton's books. Hence, I may not know Eagleton's work as well as Mr. Wood does in his profound English-studies kind of a way.
The offensive and patronizing accusation by Mr. Wood that Eagleton's "religiousness, like a limp, has become more pronounced," (p. 76.) is not overly bothersome, I am sure, to a man who recognizes what Mr. Wood does not. ("Pieta" and "God is Texting Me!")
I wonder whether Mr. Wood has read my short stories? Was this comment intended as an insult? ("David Denby is Not Amused.")
Eagleton recognizes the lesson and instruction in the scriptures of the great religions that we must stand with the poor and afflicted masses of humanity, choosing to share in the suffering and anger at injustices that torture our fellow human beings, many of whom are far less fortunate than Mr. Wood and less inclined to indulge in Harvard (or is it Yale?) easy chair ironies about plague or famine. Do you agree, Mr. Alper? Do you really have a Ph.D., Mr. Alper? Diploma mill?
I am happy for anyone who has been fortunate enough to attend one of the world's great universities. It takes a whole lot of effort from many family members to get young people to those schools, usually that effort is exerted when the young graduate is a child, and some luck does not hurt. Many brilliant people will not get to any university because they are too busy trying to survive. I am thrilled that I attended graduate school at a fine Catholic university and was admitted to a Ph.D. program at NYU. I was lucky to go anywhere. However, my discipline in reading about a book every two days, my four languages, my intense studies are a matter of personal choice. No school is responsible for my mind, such as it is. Also, I am not intimidated by anyone in discussions of these issues at (what I am assured) is my advanced old age of 50. Got it? Mr. Alper, you have the choice of weapons. I can only hope that further censorship and cybercrime will not be one of those weapons.
Billions of us are hungry, sick, tormented by separation from loved-ones, exploited, violated, raped and denied our due recognition in this world, whereas mediocre talents (like Mr. Wood or myself, perhaps, you decide) are absurdly privileged. Eagleton recognizes himself as among the ridiculously fortunate; Mr. Wood does not. Eagleton feels himself called to share in the misery and pain of his neighbors; Mr. Wood will be spending the summer on the beach at Long Island or some place like it. Whether you call yourself "Wood," "Halper," or "Alper" -- the lack of reading shows.
I prefer the company of Terry Eagleton to that of Mr. Wood (based on this article) -- even if Eagleton purchases that house in Ibiza -- because Eagleton cannot help standing with his less fortunate neighbors by feeling their anger, pain at cruelty, insults, sleights along with non-recognition and articulating that anger for them or all of us. Eagleton knows, as I do, that many of the world's simplest people have more interesting things to say about religion, politics, revolution than we are likely to read in Mr. Wood's forthcoming essays in The New Yorker. No doubt it is because some of us who are not members of New York's "media club" have interesting things to say that we are censored and our writings are suppressed. ("Why Terry Eagleton Does Not Like Americans" and "How Censorship Works in America.")
Mr. Wood, who has just received from me and Terry Eagleton (for no tuition cost!) the benefits of the sort of instruction that he provides to readers of The New Yorker magazine and Harvard students, complains that the anti-atheists, presumably, "accuse atheists of wanting to murder an overliteral God, while they themselves keep alive a rarefied God whom no one, other than them, actually believes in." (p. 78.) "Them"? Who them? This guy is an English professor? at Harvard?
Does Mr. Wood mean that "no one other than they" actually believes in this God? If so, then Mr. Wood is not only afflicted with a tin ear for the English language -- and poor syntax -- but mistaken concerning the merits of his claim. I suggest that Mr. Wood say three Our Fathers and sin no more.
The God highly intelligent and sane persons accept is a moral force -- or overwhelming love -- that allows for sharing with others and enduring heinous sufferings in Auschwitz and places like it. I regard such a God as anything but trivial or laughable. There is no belief in the supernatural required in my kind of religion or in faiths that I respect -- not in religious beliefs and practices that I admire -- only recognition is required of the love that we feel, if we are persons, for others, especially for the afflicted among us. Like truth, for Michel Foucault, religion and God are things of this world. If you wish to dispense with the word "God" and speak of love, that's fine by me.
A capacity for feeling is, indeed, crucial to an appreciation of religious sensibility and ecstasy. Feelings are disappearing from what appear to be human lives, along with any appreciation of why they are needed to cope with life's losses and pain as well as the confrontation with evil and death.
If the word "God" is what bothers you, as I say, then just speak of love as compassion. This is anything but vague or unclear as a belief or set of secular values. This empowering love is God. This is the dream, articulated by Dr. King as well as many others, for all human societies, the dream of which Senator Edward Kennedy spoke to a naive or foolish nineteen year-old college student that I was: " ... and the dream shall never die."
This is a summary of what religions amount to, as a life-lesson communicated in the archetypal language of poetry or symbolism, from which they are inseparable. For a professor of literature at Harvard University to imagine that God is a mythical Old Testament figure and nothing more or that a phenomenon like religious belief is "silly" or "outdated" (Richard Dawkins) is hard to take seriously. This is the sort of simplistic view of such matters attributed to fundamentalists -- at the other extreme of the spectrum -- such as Mullah Omar of the Taliban. Qualifications aside, this is what Mr. Wood "seems" to be saying. I find it difficult to believe that James Wood wrote every word in this essay. I say this as someone who read, enjoyed, and admired Mr. Wood's first novel which certainly was not mediocre. James Wood, The Book Against God (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), p. 171:
"What interests me is your certainty, ... It's one thing to say that the world is a horrid place -- if indeed it is -- but it's another to say, 'Ergo God doesn't exist.' I'm not sure you can make that leap. I mean, if you suddenly lived in a world without any pain at all, would you then say to yourself, 'This is such a happy world that I am convinced that God does exist'? I don't think so. Arguments from design are always a bad idea, whether practised by believers or atheists, and that's what you're doing."
Mr. Wood "appears" much more reasonable and profound (through his literary characters in a novel) than in these unfortunate articles in The New Yorker. Is there an editor to blame for this catastrophe? What happened to this once extraordinary magazine? (See the fothcoming essay: "Atheists in Disneyworld.") You can't shake off this kind of argument or criticism by inserting an "error" in my essays or altering the spelling of a name. This would be a good time to insert another "error," Mr. Alper or Mr. Wood, or Mr./Ms. X.
Mr. Wood must know better than the criticisms that he articulates from a suitable ironic distance so that his friends in Cambridge will not be shocked at his expression of anything but aloofness from the religious delusions of the unwashed masses. I am one of the unwashed masses. Hence, I will be blunt: Although I am not religious, I am deeply respectful of religion and certain that love is what life is about. Does that make me a "fool" to Mr. Wood? I am sure that it does. This does not greatly trouble me, as I have not attended Harvard University. I am not likely to do so. "Never say never." I've heard about a great hamburger place in Boston.
"Salvation is not so much about saving our souls as 'a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich.' ..." (p. 77.)
Is it possible that Mr. Wood does not realize that this has ALWAYS been how genuinely religious persons see themselves as "saving their souls"? Salvation is a moral concept that is and must be other-regarding, like love. You save your soul only when your concern is not about saving your soul, but at the suffering of the other. Those of us who have experienced torture, denigration, insulting condescension, censorship and suppressions of speech in America, humiliations and much worse from the likes of Mr. Wood and his ilk -- or whoever wrote these offending passages -- derive comfort from realizing all that such persons will never know because they cannot experience true powerlessness and utter misery or despair in this world. There may be a response to the existence of evil in this observation. Love is what remains when everything else is taken from you.
We simple folks (this is non-Harvard irony) are enriched by such knowledge, even when it is painful. We pity them, the James Woods of this world. Yes, there are many of them. As a deaf person cannot understand a symphony so Mr. Wood will never "get" religion. I am truly sorry for him. Let us pray for him, if we are religious persons, so that "God will fill his soul with understanding." Eventually, like all of us, Mr. Wood will certainly come to know suffering and death. Maybe religious ideas will seem more interesting at such a difficult hour:
"We are saved, [Eagleton writes,] 'not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.' ..." (p. 77.)
That is the "bottom-line" in religion, Jim, our non-supernatural relations with one another:
"Heaven is not really about a world to come but about the transformation of the world we have." (p. 77.)
Same thing. The transformation of the world we have is the world to come. Wood's mention of Wittgenstein is confused and pointless. The difficulties raised concerning the concept of God are dealt with, easily, by Thomas Merton in The Seven Story Mountain or C.S. Lewis in The Seeing Eye. Here is Merton drawing on the metaphysics of John Dun Scotus ("Erigena"):
" ... the word is aesitas. [Absolute] In this one word, which can be applied to God alone, and which expresses His most characteristic attribute, I discovered an entirely new concept of God -- a concept which showed me at once that the belief of Catholics was by no means the vague and rather superstitious hangover from an unscientific age that I had believed it to be. On the contrary, here was a notion of God that was at the same time deep, precise, simple and accurate and, what is more, charged with implications which I could not even appreciate, but which I could at least dimly estimate, even with my own lack of philosophical training." (p. 172.) ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review.")
"The monastery is a school -- a school in which we learn from God how to be happy. Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, [this is true love,] the perfection of His love." (p. 372.) ("The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "Beauty and the Beast.")
I will quote C.S. Lewis, who provides a warning for Dick Cheney and his "co-religionists" on the Right, as William F. Buckely, Jr. used to say:
" ... the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed [is] the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ideology as men choose their clothes. [Do we choose our science? Do we create the reality revealed by science?] Everyone is indignant when he hears the Germans define justice as that which is to the interest of the Third Reich. But it is not always remembered that this indignation is perfectly groundless if we ourselves regard morality as a subjective sentiment to be altered at will. Unless there is some objective standard of good, over-arching Germans, Japanese and OURSELVES alike whether any of us obey it or no, then of course the Germans are as competent to create their ideology as we are to create ours. If 'good' and 'better' are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology [power?] of each people, then of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than one another." (p. 101.)
Our moralities choose us. The moment we object that, say, 9/11 is an evil event (which it is) we have entered the moral domain and are engaged in theological speculation. I suggest that we cannot avoid doing so. The only issue is whether we will do so, engage in valuing, rationally or irrationally. This need to valorize exists not because we are all insane or suffering from a malady, as psychobabblers -- who are often insane and suffering from a malady -- would have it. Religion is needed to make sense of our inescapable moral lives. Valuing involves us, necessarily, with what we may call God. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")
I urge philosophically-minded readers to turn to Dieter Heinrich's elegant essays examining Kant's aesthetics and rights theory. We cannot remain persons if we are denied a spiritual and ethical as well as aesthetic component in our lives. What is meant by religion is highly elastic and can include art, eros, philosophy or social meliorism. Anything that is a giving of the self to others can be religious, including love-making. Copulation (not the same thing as love-making) and eating regularly, purchasing expensive things and driving large cars will not be enough for us, if we are persons. This may even be true at Harvard University's English Department.
James Wood gets a "C" for his efforts in this essay. Try harder next time, James. Any more cyberattacks and defacements from Trenton or its "employees"?
