Pope Benedict's mistake

The Boston Globe:By James Carroll

WHEN THE likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens, citing insights of science or the rise of sectarian violence, denounce the very idea of God, fundamentalists strike back by attacking pillars on which such modern criticism stands. In this mode, Pope Benedict XVI last week issued two unexpected decrees, restoring the atavistic Mass of the Council of Trent and resuscitating an outmoded Catholic exclusivism -- the notion of a pope-centered Catholicism as the only authentic way to God.

In these reactionary initiatives, Pope Benedict inadvertently shows that he shares a basic conviction with Dawkins et al. -- that religion is a primitive impulse, unable to withstand the challenge of contemporary thought.

Yet, instead of feeling intimidated by secular or "scientific" criticisms of religion, a believer can insist that faith in God is a fulfillment of all that fully modern people affirm when they assent to science -- or object to violence. At the same time, a believer can advance the Dawkins-Harris-Hitchens critique to say that most articulations of traditional religion of all stripes fall far short of doing "God" justice. ...

Such people regard the fact that God is unknowable as the most important thing to know about God. Traditional propositions of the creed, therefore, must be affirmed neither rigidly nor as if they are meaningless, but with thoughtful modesty about all religious language, allowing for doubt, as well as respect for different creeds -- and for no creed....

Once we realize that doctrines of orthodoxy evolved over time, we stop treating them as timeless. Indeed, once we understand ourselves as belonging to one religious tradition among many, we lose the innocent ability to regard it as absolute. Once our internal geography recognizes that, however much we are a center, we are not the only one, we have no choice but to affirm the positions of others not as "marginal to our centers," in a phrase of theologian David Tracy, "but as centers of their own."

Faced with such difficult recognitions, religious people can retreat into fundamentalism or throw out religious faith altogether. Or we can quite deliberately embrace what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a "second naiveté." This implies a movement through criticism to a renewed appetite for the sacred tradition out of which we come, even while implying that we are alive to its meaning in a radically different way. Pope Benedict is attempting to restore, by fiat, the first naiveté of "one true church." In an age of global pluralism, this is simply not tenable.

The tension that Carroll addresses in the Roman Catholic context is present in many traditional religions, including my own (although Judaism is, in my opinion, blessed to be without a papal figure, and to venerate instead a tradition of study, debate and dissent). I line up in parallel with Carroll: no "one true synagogue," respect for many "centers of their own", and recognition that each generation regards the tradition through new eyes, and in a changed context, engaged with the challenges of contemporary thought.

Stanley Fish is at it again

Is Religion Man-Made? New York Times Blog:

So there’s the triple-pronged case. Religions are humanly constructed traditions and at their center are corrupted texts that were cobbled together by provincial, ignorant men who knew less about the world than any high-school teenager alive today. Sounds devastating, but when you get right down to it, all it amounts to is the assertion that God didn’t write the books or establish the terms of worship, men did, and that the results are (to put it charitably) less than perfect.

But that is exactly what you would expect. It is God (if there is one) who is perfect and infinite; men are finite and confined within historical perspectives. And any effort to apprehend him – including the efforts of the compilers of the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran – will necessarily fall short of a transparency that will be achieved (if it is achieved) only at a future moment of beatific vision. Now – any now, whether it be 2007 or 6,000 years ago – we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians, 13:12); one day, it is hoped, we shall see face to face.

In short, it is the unfathomable and unbridgeable distance between deity and creature that assures the failure of the latter to comprehend or prove (in the sense of validating) the former. ...

[A commententator] identifies the “religion is man-made claim” as the “strongest foundation of atheism” because “it undermines the divinity of god.” No, it undermines the divinity of man, which is, after all, the entire point of religion: man is not divine, but mortal (capable of death), and he is dependent upon a creator who by definition cannot be contained within human categories of perception and description. ...

This does not mean that my arguments constitute a proof of the truth of religion; for if I were to claim that I would be making the atheists’ mistake from the other direction. Nor are they arguments in which I have a personal investment. Their purpose and function is simply to show how the atheists’ arguments miss their mark and, indeed, could not possibly hit it.

At various points Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens all testify to their admiration for Shakespeare, who, they seem to think, is more godly than God. They would do well to remember one of the bard’s most famous lines, uttered by Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Oh, very nice. The Wise Bard concurs.

I've never been much attracted to logical/empirical arguments for or against the existence of a divine being (or, for that matter, beings). It's always seemed to me a category mistake (at least since I've had that vocabulary), and an unpromising avenue for discussion or debate.

I've long accepted the notion that scriptures are human creations, efforts to put into imperfect human language apprehensions of "truths" and "perceptions" that are best approached in poetic and metaphorical, and not literal, terms.

For me that is the beginning of wisdom, and hardly the end of the discussion.

Scriptural traditions reflect a cumulative human effort to come to some set of terms with questions of ultimate meaning (including the possibilities of human solidarity and community) that are, essentially, forever beyond our grasp. Some traditions do better than others with different parts of this task. Many get stuck along the way. There are multiple paths. I am less sure whether they all approach the same "Truth" (or whether thinking there is one such Truth is the best way to think about things, although that is my inclination), but I am (very strongly) inclined to believe one can learn important things along many of the paths.

Mistaking myths, metaphors, and parables for scientific assertions about natural phenomena seems to me a major misapprehension of the spiritual quest at the heart of a religious calling. But my notion of religion is rather light (or lite) on dogmatic assertions, and perhaps on "belief" as that is conventionally understood.

More like an individual quest that takes place in the setting of community, against the background (and on the shoulders) of those who have come before, and tried to convey something of what they have experienced, thought, and learned of the mysteries of existence.

How does that compute?