[MD] False Messiah

[david buchanan]

Marsha, Ant and all:

Marsha said to Ant:
Nothing wrong with 'just sitting', realizing that (what is the saying?) 
'thou art that', that you're already there.  The problem with the hero's 
journey, in the West, is that they are always accompanied by so much 
violence.

dmb says:
I think the macho violence problem is with the West in general rather than 
with the journey. But I certainly agree that its a problem. That's one of 
the reasons I like the hero as artist rather than as warrior. And the gender 
equality implied in this is only my second favorite reason. The first is 
that it provides a more balanced offering of masculine and feminine quality. 
I mean, the patriatchial bias distorts the whole culture and is bad for men 
and women.

But I don't want to beat a dead horse. Starting out on this thread, I was 
hoping discuss the present period of (neo-Victorian) moral decline in a 
larger context, and the comments about the hero's journey were only meant to 
get at the MOQ's code of art. You know, I was trying to get at the moral 
regeneration of the hippies, the artists, revolutionaries and other 
contrarians. And, in my paper, Orpheus is painted as one of these types of 
heros too.

I think its worth looking at Pirsig's metaphysical read on our time. The 
idea that bohemian types are the agents of moral change and that this 
conservative movement is a period of moral decline defies conventional 
wisdom and is, I think, quite correct.  I was hoping to discuss politics in 
terms of the MOQ's evolutionary morality, in terms of the conflict between 
social and intellectual values, etc.

Having said that, et me take this in a different direction. A while ago, Sam 
Norton turned me on the a rather courageous thinker by the name of Sam 
Harris. Maybe you've heard of his book; "THE END OF FAITH: Religion, Terror 
and the Future of Reason"? He studies Eastern and Western philosophy at 
Stanford. I found some of his posting, in which he replies to questions and 
criticisms, at Truthdig.com Let me put some of that on the table for the 
sake of discussion....

Responding to the assertion that "Religion is our only source of morality. 
Without it, we would be plunged into a secular moral chaos", Harris says...

"This concern is so widespread that I have responded to it at some length.  
A version of this response will soon be published in the magazine Free 
Inquiry (www.secularhumanism.org) as “The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos.”...

..If a book like the bible were the only reliable blueprint for human 
decency that we have, it would be impossible (both practically and 
logically) to criticize it in moral terms. But it is extraordinarily easy to 
criticize the morality one finds in bible, as most of it is simply odious 
and incompatible with a civil society.

The notion that the bible is a perfect guide to morality is really quite 
amazing, given the contents of the book. Human sacrifice, genocide, 
slaveholding, and misogyny are consistently celebrated.  Of course, God’s 
counsel to parents is refreshingly straightforward: whenever children get 
out of line, we should beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13: 24, 20:30, and 
23:13-14). If they are shameless enough to talk back to us, we should kill 
them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark.7:9-13 and 
Matthew 15:4-7).  We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, 
homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshipping graven images, practicing 
sorcery, and for a wide variety of other imaginary crimes.  Most Christians 
imagine that Jesus did away with all this barbarism and delivered a doctrine 
of pure love and toleration.  He didn’t (Matthew 5:18-19, Luke 16:17, 2 
Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 20-21, John 7:19). Anyone who believes that Jesus only 
taught the Golden Rule and love of one’s neighbor should go back and read 
the New Testament. And pay particular attention to the morality that will be 
on display if he ever returns to Earth trailing clouds of glory (e.g. 2 
Thessalonians 1:7-9, 2:8; Hebrews 10:28-29; 2 Peter 3:7; and all of 
Revelation). It is not an accident that St. Thomas Aquinas thought heretics 
should be killed and that St. Augustine thought they should be tortured.  
(Ask yourself, what are the chances that these good doctors of the Church 
hadn’t read the New Testament closely enough to discover the error of their 
ways?) As a source of objective morality, the bible is one of the worst 
books we have. It might have been the very worst, in fact, if we didn’t also 
happen to have the Koran....

..People of faith regularly allege that atheism is responsible for some of 
the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Are atheists really less 
moral than believers? While it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, 
Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not 
especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more 
than litanies of delusion--delusions about race, economics, national 
identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In 
many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the 
Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick 
was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, 
Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and 
attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the 
faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a 
predominately secular way, its roots were undoubtedly religious—and the 
explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout 
the period. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its 
newspapers as late as 1914.) Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are 
not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified 
beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not 
thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to 
say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the 
blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is 
none other than the problem of dogma itself--of which every religion has 
more than its fair share. I know of no society in recorded history that ever 
suffered because its people became too reasonable.

According the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005), the most 
atheistic societies--countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, 
Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United 
Kingdom—are actually the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life 
expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, 
gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 
nations now ranked lowest by the U.N. in terms of human development are 
unwaveringly religious. Of course, correlational data of this sort do not 
resolve questions of causality—belief in God may lead to societal 
dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor 
may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of 
mischief.  Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove 
that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil 
society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to 
ensure a society’s health."

Thanks for reading,
dmb

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