someone dared to disturb the dogma.
I hadn't paid much attention to the hype around the da vinci code, but the reaction to it is reminiscent of
how zealots of other monotheist superstitions react to ideas contrary to the existing canons.
Of course, muslims have had more difficulty to temper their dicontent than christians have
and resorted to more headline-grabbing ways to express it, but the intolerance is present across
the board.
Interesting how the less evidence there is to back the accuracy of one's convictions, the stronger
people feel about them.
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37 comments:
Yeah, yeah, yeah -- disagreeing with some invidious lefty bs is the same as chopping heads. The moral clarity is blinding.
Pepe: I'm just curious, but why are you so bothered if some Christian (whether nuts or not) is attempting to defend their own myth? (and I don't mean to use "myth" in a slanderous way, either)
Doesn't your allegience simply rest with different theories and ideas, maybe not Yahweh or Jesus F'ing Christ, but rather with individuals such as Comte and Simon?
Self-righteousness seems to be a recurring theme when it comes to Evangelicals and Socialists of all flavors. I sometimes wonder if they are merely afraid of trying to understand ideas that run contrary to their own — even full-on Reactionaries. Just a thought.
Pepe, you seem to be legitimizing the spreading of lies as long as the lies are about an opponent (in this case the Jesus-freaks).
Would it not be a better tack to simply defend truth like the Jesus-types are doing (in this case), against falsehood as in Dan Brown's work of fiction?
That would make your point of view coherent when you attack the Jesus-types for their ridiculous intelligent design stuff.
This way it looks suspiciously like you just hate the Jesus-types and so everything they say or stand for is bad.
Sounds childish.
>someone dared to disturb the dogma.
Some daring! Of course, this is the usual liberal conceit: "speaking truth to power", yada, yada, yada. As a matter of fact, it takes zero daring nowadays to attack the Church. What grates me the most is the cowardice masquerading as valor. O tempora, o mores!
Criticizing the Church probably isn't a bad thing, but as you said AI, it's nothing new and certainly trendy.
Those who rip on it (and there are Popes throughout history that need a good slamming) often fail to recognize what the Church has done for Western Civilization. To ignore, for example, what the Irish monks preserved; or what the North African monks preserved; or to even be incapable of looking at, for example, St. Augustine's City of God as a good historical primary source delegitimizes the efforts of the whiners.
In the business, I think we refer to that type of bleating as intellectual dishonesty. Or, at the very least (in Collingwood's Idea of History phrase), only thinking in the first degree.
mft/jj - there is no "spread of lies" - this is just a work of fiction with a different take on part of a story. Transpose this into the musical realm and you have jazz. But given that this story is itself probably very far from reality - biblical vs historical JC, I see no need to defend a myth: there is nothing to defend as long as it is a work of fiction, not an attempt at rewriting the new testament.
Finally jj, if there is any spread of lies, it is more immediately obvious in the contention of the existence of immaculate conception, divinity of JC, waling on h20, yadayadayada than on a twist on a small part of the storyline.
>This way it looks suspiciously like you just hate the Jesus-types and so everything they say or stand for is bad. Sounds childish.
You don't mean kinda like y'all with everything that has a liberal whiff, of related to Chirac & villepin, do you?
>this is the usual liberal conceit: "speaking truth to power"
huh? there is nothing political here, nor does it have anything to do with speaking truth to anyone. This is just another fucking story, people and I am tickled at how everyone gets so worked up over it.
>>often fail to recognize what the Church has done for Western Civilization.
In your effort at being intellectually honest, you should really include the crusades and the inquisition to the list of contributions of christianity to western civ.
These two perspectives may not give a conflicting representation of the contribution of religion to our culture though. I'll go out on (another) limb and submit that the church's contribution to the political process has pretty much always been disastrous and that where religion does best is in the private realm. any counter-examples ?
Transpose this into the musical realm and you have jazz. Pepe, you must be joking. Music is fun, but it's not history.
From what I read, the author brags about how well researched his book is. But then there grew a minor cottage industry of books by real scholars debunking his "scholarship," and pointing out scads of historical fallacies and inconsistencies.
Sure enough, Brown (and his liberal apologists, who of course view this book as another dagger in their endless campaign against what they call, following their own prophet (pbuh), the "opiate of the masses") now hide behind the "it's just fiction" fig leaf, and squeal like they were caught in the Georgia woods by rednecks.
jj - the bible isn't history either. this is a work of fiction, why hold it to a different standard?
Bible is fiction? So the Romans never had Judea? What's that big arch in Rome all about?
A chacun son gout. I'll take the Bible any day over Das Kapital. As the proverb says, the dogs bark, but the caravan rolls on.
das kapital ? i think you are drifting...
jj - are you stating that the story of JC as stated in the new testament is historically accurate ?
Are you saying that everything in the Bible is false and everything in Thucidides is true?
jj - no, and none of my posts suggests I do.
So if Dan Brown contradicts the historicall accurate content in the Bible is it not a distortion of historical truth?
what part of what is in the bible do you deem to be accurate ?
given that numerous parts of the bible are laughably inaccurate (waling on h20, multiplication of bread, immaculate conception, divinity of jc, etc...) and given that you are comfortable with these inaccuracies, why are you holding up what is a work of fiction to a higher standard of accuracy ?
What part of Dan Brown's book contradicting established historical fact do you deem acceptable?
Sorry to seem pedantic here, but the burden seems to be on you. You are the one that posted that Christian extremists are protesting the falsehoods in Brown's book as if they were the bloody Taliban and seem to be cool with falsifying the historical record in works of fiction.
Is the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" a laudable work of historical fiction, Pepe, or does it propagate lies?
BTW, WTF does "waling on h20" mean?
walking on water.
i still don't see your argument: christian orthodoxy is holding a work of parabol/fiction (the new testament) as having force of historical accuracy and that is where the problem lies.
Aren't there some similar efforts in non-Euclidian geometry (really going out on a limb here) to change some fundamental assumptions - let's assume the shortest distance bw 2 points isn't a straight line & see what happens ? Obviously there is the application to geometry on the sphere, but don't y'all worry about shit like that just for the fuck of seeing where the cards fall ?
the comparison with the elders of scion is inappropriate: that volume was presented as historically accurate, not as a work of fiction.
Fine about the contrast to Elders of Zion, but what the believers fear is that Brown will be taken as factual since it mixes historical fact and historical figures (avoid confusing zeugma, AI) with fiction. It's reasonable that they fight the inaccuracy if there is something provably wrong (as they assert). Like you I haven't followed the argument or read Brown's nonsense so I am not sure what the brouhaha is about, specifically. Let's go to parable:
An example would be my writing a novel halfway fictionalizing Michelangelo's life and I portrayed him as an Orthodox Jew lashed to his scaffolds by a vicious pope and forced to paint and sculpt under threat of death to his family. But I put in a lot of correct detail about what he did when technically,...
Nothing wrong with that, right? But historians of art would be right to holler loud and clear that what I have written is bullshit and I am distorting the story of a major player in their field.
The tangent on geometry makes no sense to me without further elucidation on your part. Math is not interested in the truth of one kind of geometry over another.
right but, like you said, historians would have a reason to object to the Michelangelo story, but would find no reason for offense!
As far as lay people go, i don't think theyy would care either way: look at how hollywood cinema butchers historical characters just to make a story sellable. It is the role of historians to point out the truth, but that's where the debate ends.
With JC, pretty much everything is plausible and so people hold on to their dogmatiic conceptions: if some astrophysicist claimed that the moon were made of swiss cheese, no one would make a big deal out of it because it would be easy to prove otherwise.
I don't think Brown makes much up about JC. Why don't we find out what these guys are arguing about? I'll look after a while. I am super busy at the moment.
Look, this guy Dan Brown is not even original -- despite all his pretensions and the hype, he basically rehashes conspiracy theories dating back to the gnostics. Big whoops.
And the factual errors (the ones where you can actually pin him down on) are ludicrous. For example, he claims that, at the Council og Nicaea, convoked by Constantine the Great in 325 AD, there was a "relatively close vote" among the bishops affirming the divinity of Jesus. Perhaps he views >=99% as being close to 50%? Fake but accurate in all its glory--no wonder Liberals love it! For more details, see here.
i think much of the argument is over whether or not jc porked magdalena. i wonder how much we can actually ever know about that.
Pepe said: In your effort at being intellectually honest, you should really include the crusades and the inquisition to the list of contributions of christianity to western civ.
Whenever I can remember, I never give up the chance to talk about Church-sanctioned witch-burnings. Thanks for reminding.
pepe said: I'll go out on (another) limb and submit that the church's contribution to the political process has pretty much always been disastrous and that where religion does best is in the private realm. any counter-examples ?
I'll go out on a limb (though in no way can I hoist the misanthrope flag), taking it even further, and say that the human contribution to the political process has pretty much always been disastrous. That's merely a handy, "big idea" in the historical realm (perhaps something a freshman might write an final essay about). When Rome fell, vestiges of the Church remained, even if isolated and scattered. In the secular sense, at least some type of human institution still existed. To say that each and every one of those institutions "was pretty much always disastrous" is, I suppose, up for interpretors who like their history with broad strokes.
Pepe: I think you and I would be in agreement when it comes to keeping the Church out of the State's affairs, and keeping the State out of the Church's. These, however, are sweeping statements that are fashionable for any politician to spout. In this Kapitalist Society that you and I both know is not purely Capitalist, nor purely Socialist (w/o dealing with the ambiguity surrounding either -ism), it has obviously oppressed you for so long. I suppose the one good we can get from those dead, white, bourgeois 18th-century Colonists was the idea that religion and state should be seperated.
In the Enlightenment sense, Jefferson the diest admited that J.C. lived, but he remained skeptical about the voo-doo and magic surrounding his existence.
ai said: Look, this guy Dan Brown is not even original
I hear ya, ai. In the humanities, the only original idea (and it's not even original) I could ever come up with was the idea that there's nothing original anymore. For some reason, this idea disturbs alot of people.
MFT: I don't disagree with your perspective, but I think it's a bit too Americano-centric, if I may coin such a word. The debate about religion is much older, and whatever the 18th century colonists thought about it (and they had a very laudable point of view), was overtaken in much of Europe by certain events, such as the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of Communism. Those ideological movements harbored a deep animus against the Church -- for they could brook no challenge for their unquenchable thirst for absolute power. So they proceeded to ruthlessly destroy religiosity, killing thousands during the Reign of Terror, and then countless millions during Lenin, Stalin, and their cohorts,
With this historical context, when I see an attack on the Church like this one -- be it a pale reflection of previous attacks, but still, I suspect, animated by the same impetus -- I cannot but cringe. For, behind all the smirking and sophistry and cynicism, I can feel in my bones what impulses lie behind, and what such impulses could do if given free reign. We are lucky not to have experienced anything remotely like this here in the US, but think a bit once, if you have the time, about the millions upon millions who perished in the Gulags, sacrificed on the altar of "le Culte de la Raison," as Robespierre and Saint-Just called it, to feed a modern-day Moloch.
AI: although I'm never ashamed of being American-o-centric, yes, I see your point. Crossing the Atlantic really allows for further development of depth and scope. In no way would I defend shipping any one to anywhere because they happened to hold Jesus dear. This is the latest piece of gulag scholarship I read, about a year ago. My apologies if it sounded like I was slighting what terror Stalin brought to the world AI.
Anne Applebaum's book seems very powerful. I must confess I have not read any new book on the subject since the classics by Solzhenitsyn, just bits and pieces I could find on the net. Here is a pictorial description I found recently. Though most of the commentary is in Lithuanian, the meaning is rather clear. And shows what the Übermensch, bereft of any fear of God, can do to their fellow man, if they put their mind to it.
Those were equally powerful pictures ai. Very sad to see what humanity does to itself. It reminded me of what ordinary men are capable of. It also reminded me of a quote:
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
—Nietzsche
Or: bad things happen when good people do nothing.
Or, as Burke said, All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
See here for many more variations on this theme.
A codicil to this discussion: far from being "zealots" and "intolerant" as predicted, Christians by and large have reacted quite maturely to this provocation. Then again, as the guy says at the end, it's easy to knock out of the ballpark such a big, juicy softball. Any knuckleballs left?
The article does make a good point in that it gets folks talking about what they might profess to believe. It also creates a lot of job-opportunity for pro historians.
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