Letters to the Editor
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Oops...
In my penultimate paragraph, I meant "...atheists may be considered..." not "...theists."
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Here's where you lost me
I didn't do it for that reason, but it had that effect.
What were Pagels' motives for joining the church and getting "born again" while growing up in a household with an atheist father? Sounds a lot like rebellion to me.
I realize that ad hominem arguments are fallacious, but honestly, how can I rely on the judgment of someone who says something like this? Scholars who say things like this seem to want to escape from the flesh-and-blood experience of being human into some ivory tower of intellect.
I am just not sure what to make of that particular statement. Was Pagel a serious theologian at 15? Was she in love with God or Jesus? If the former, she is some kind of prodigy (Maybe she is; I got no idea.). If the latter, then she was just another adolescent who (like myself) did all kinds of goofy shit and tried on all sorts of hats trying to find herself on the way to adulthood.
Too bad. It was a fascinating interview up to that point, but something about that passage just threw me for a loop.
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Historical matters, quantum mechanics.
A brief note on QM: Einstein's objection was to objective randomness in the universe. (There's nothing about "objectivity" or "knowability" involved - Bohr was a subjectivist, for sure, but to suggest that's necessary in QM is ridiculous, as an examination of the semantic properties of any equation of quantum mechanics will tell you.) It turns out Einstein's preference is likely to be unfulfilled.
As for the Judas stuff, well, there has been a lot of work investigating the historical Jesus, and even the Jesus seminar folks reduce most of it to myth. Mind you, in the 19th century, the mythicist case was propounded and a few courageous folks recently have adopted it. (Earl Doherty, for one.) There's even a passage in the bible that says Jesus was never on earth - even the KJV gets this right, at Hebrews 8:1-4 or so.
It was the experience with the non-canonical gospels that really sold the mythicist view to me.
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I was prepared not to care for this article
But really it is rather fine. That Judas was not the villain of the piece is not precisely news to educated Christians, but many of the other elements in the interview are thoughtful and well-stated.
My real objection, and perhaps it isn't one now, is that as a Christian one gets rather weary of anti-Christian, anti-fundamentalist overtones in articles that appear during the most sacred week of our liturgical year.
It doesn't seem likely to me that there will be articles questioning the tenets of Judaism today and tomorrow, or that one could even contemplate raising substantive arguments about Islam during the month of Ramadan.
I'm just saying.
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how to know the unknowable
I'm not religous in the conventional sense, in that I don't subscribe to any particular creed or dogma. I love science, and always have: science is exploring the natural world, and trying in a systematic way to understand how it works. The Bible, as well as all other religous works, share the same flaw: they were written by human beings. Even the most devoted scientist has to struggle to try and be objective from inside whichever cultural paradigm that's been instilled in him or her since birth. Imagine how much more tempting for the "inspired" scribe to incorporate (mostly) his personal pets and peeves into the scripture, even unconsciously.
What it boils down to, for me, is this: wierd shit has happened to me I can't explain. I've never seen any visions, angels or dead people (I wish I had...I miss my dead people) but I have wandered through a much-loved forest, now a tiny beleagured island in a sea of sprawl, mourning my various losses, and thinking "Gee, I'd feel better if there were still box turtles in this poor forest" and bingo...two steps later, there's a perfectly healthy female box turtle. I know, I know, just a coincidence, and my head tells me that. But my heart (figuratively speaking) asks: was Something sending a message just then?
Does a caterpillar understand butterflies? Does a dragonfly larva have an inkling that it's going to exchange one watery plane of existance for another, airy one? Perhaps it is just our neural architecture that causes us to see significance in coincidence, but there doesn't seem to be any way to prove that the significance doesn't exist. Fundamentalists of any stripe range from the merely annoying to the truly dangerous, and I've read a lot of "christian" rant that doesn't seem to correspond to the "cast the beam out of your own eye" teacher, but even Richard Dawkins can't logically prove a negative. I would love to believe that when I die, I'll either go for remedial education and be sent back, or be allowed to stay and help other students. I dunno. Maybe not. Eventually, we'll all find out.
I absolutely agree with other writers on the subject of civility. There are probably 6 billion different ideas about what spirituality is (or is not)all about, but we can at least explore the possibilities with consideration and good will.
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three pages of empty words
once again, nothing is revealed.
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the "village atheist"
You lost me with that. I hope Pagels didn't think that bit of ad hominem was going to be viewed as clever. And her rebuttal of Dawkins' teachings is weak. Pagels claims that "the God he's debunking is not one that most of the people I study would recognize". But Dawkins is debunking the God as it is understood in popular culture, not the God of the books Pagel is reading. In popular culture, the notion of God as a "great big person" is not only fairly widespread, but is indeed the dominant controlling metaphor. So please, don't insinuate that Dawkins is the village idiot for dealing with religion on the terms that religion defines for itself.
I mean, is there some great big person up there who made the universe out of dirt? Probably not.
Glad we got that out of the way. Now remind me again why Dawkins is foolish? I guess his sin if in being open about his atheism, and not hiding it the way Pagels does.