God evolves

It's good news, I suppose, that more and more pastors and theologians are finding scriptural sanction for gay marriage, as  Evan McMorris-Santoro reports -- a nice illustration of Robert Wright's thesis that God grows kinder and better as human society evolves socially and ethically.

The process involves obvious self-delusion, as interpretation of texts invested with supreme authority always does. Here, for example, is Obama ally and megachurch pastor Delman Coates putting his "flexibility" on display:

Coates is a Biblical scholar and said his own views on marriage equality came from studying his faith's holy book....He said his understanding of Christian faith has always required flexibility and open-mindedness.

"We are evolving. Not just in our understanding of civil marriage, but we're also evolving in our understanding of what the scripture is affirming and what it is condemning," Coates said. "I think as more reasoned Christians take a look at scripture, it's pretty clear."

Courage, Peter Beinart

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about Peter Beinart's call for a boycott of products from Israeli settlements on the West Bank, but as he gets attacked from various factions of the Israel-right-or-wrong bloc I just want to express my support.  Beinart draws his own red line on the green line, rhetorically quarantining "nondemocratic Israel" (the colonial power on the West Bank) from a still-loved still-democratic Israel proper. Here's his call to action:

Bibi bearing gifts: it's the thought that counts

With moral clarity and finely controlled indignation, Robert Wright pierces the theocratic-tribal heart of Netanyahu's darkness -- and that of his American fellow travelers:

Yesterday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave President Obama a copy of the book of Esther, which will be read in synagogues this week in observance of Purim. Esther tells the story of a Persian government that tries and fails to wipe out all the Jews in the Persian Empire. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Netanyahu saw this as an occasion to generalize about Persians (or, as we call them today, Iranians). He told Obama, "Then, too, they wanted to wipe us out." Here's a thought experiment:

Suppose that an Arab or Iranian leader of Muslim faith met with President Obama and told him about some part of the Koran that alludes to conflict between Muhammad and Jewish tribes. For example, according to Muslim tradition, the Jewish tribe known as the Qurayzah, though living in Muhammad's town of Medina, secretly sided with Muhammad's enemies in Mecca. Suppose this Muslim said to Obama, "Then, too, the Jews were bent on destroying Muslims." What would our reaction be?

Better Angels yield new angles

I am very much looking forward to reading Steven Pinker's  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, after reading a precis by Pinker and a review by Peter Singer. As a collector of evidence that human life and human beings are getting better, I am receptive to the copious evidence that Pinker has gathered to demonstrate that violence has diminished dramatically over the course of human history -- in the family, in the state, between states, and, perhaps now finally, within states.

Pinker's demonstration that human beings have gradually taught themselves to be more in control of their violent instincts, more amenable to reason, and more empathic seems to me to sync up nicely with Robert Wright's theory that God has evolved with human society--that as society grows more humane, so do concepts of God (this too I'm familiar with through the writer's shorter representations of his recent book, The Evolution of God).

Personally, though, I would prefer not to drag the God of Ages along on our pilgrim's progress.  Notwithstanding frequent relapses such as the two world wars of the twentieth century, it looks to me as though Pinker shows moral advances in human history to be as verifiable as technological advance. For that reason, I am impatient with the concept of scripture, the investiture of any inherited text or law with authority that can't be superseded , after due process, by a text or law embodying the best wisdom of those living now. Less legalistically: if a thinker is groping toward new moral or ethical insight, why shackle that insight to an interpretation of God's law as embodied in ancient texts? Can we not acknowledge by now that gods are silent, except perhaps through our own intuition, and that that intuition is continually improving?

Myths are all very well, but dreams of purity are pernicious

Andrew Sullivan, pushing back against atheist literalism that attacks religious tenets on the ground of their obvious factual inaccuracy, writes:

The Christmas stories in the Bible - and they are multiple and contradictory - are obviously myths. They are obviously not to be taken literally. They are meant as signs to the deeper, profounder truth that Christians hold to: that the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins. This is so enormous and radical an idea that it is not suprising [sic] that early Christian writers told stories to bring it more firmly to life. But they were stories, telling of a deeper more ineffable truth. If only contemporary Christians could let go of the literalism in pursuit of the far more extraordinary fact of the Incarnation.

Nothing really can be said against this. If myths are not dependent on factual occurrence, and if the myths of a particular religious tradition speak to a given individual, who is to nay-say?  Specifically, if the core of Jesus's preaching as represented in the gospels really sings in your soul, there is nothing to argue about.

Or maybe there is, a little. You can argue about the psychological and social impact of particular myths -- for example, virgin birth, which is ubiquitous in diverse mythologies and sacred texts.  In Christianity, virgin birth is bookend to the doctrine of the fall, which I regard as a really pernicious myth that fundamentally miscasts the human condition.


The intensity of my dislike of the fall meme has taken form through my ongoing if increasingly pointless internal dialogue with C.S. Lewis, whose mythopoeic force made Christianity at least partially imaginatively available to me for a few years. In his novel Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis imagines three intelligent species on a planet, Mars, that has never experienced a fall. Hence the differing social lives of the three species are uncorrupted by violence, fraud, injustice, self-inflicted suffering. The achievements are of our own society -- law, medicine, commerce, technology -- are memorably lampooned as byproducts of human depravity.

The imaginative depth of Lewis' depiction of three distinct species with different talents and personalities, none of which exploits any of the others, is really remarkable. Utopias that actually make a just and peaceful society imaginable -- and desired by the reader -- are rare and to be treasured. (Another one, underpinned by an equally if oppositely misguided ideology, is Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed.)

Yet what's behind this dream of an effortlessly just, God-honoring society? An answer lies in a fictional footnote to the novel, added by the hero ("Ransom") in a letter responding to the narrative produced by his friend ("Lewis") who has written up his story.  Ransom notes, among other facts of life pertaining to the species he lived with, "that their droppings, like those of the horse, are not offensive to themselves, or to me, and are used for agriculture" (p. 169, Macmillan edition, 1946).


So. An unfallen species would presumably not be inhabited by bacteria -- or maybe only by good bacteria that smelled like roses.  The conditions of our evolution and the fundamental realities of our biological being are causes for guilt, because we deranged them in our collective past ("mythical" or not). (Pair with this an earlier detail: the hrossa are not only completely monogamous, but mate only for a relatively brief season.  That's presumably because, as CSL explains elsewhere, the fact that human beings don't attend gastronomic stripteases in which dishes are seductively uncovered proves that something is fundamentally wrong with our sexuality.)