Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Andrew doesn't seem to know what a myth is:

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.

If stories are not meant to be taken literally, then why take them so literally?

The real point is that a myth is not a falsehood taken for truth. It is an imaginative leap into the inner world of human experience.

Myths are the first human attempts at understanding human psychology: our haunted, wounded, despairing, doubting selves made better through storytelling. Myths are neither true nor false, reasonable or unreasonable, they are what make facts meaningful and understanding possible.

The Gospel of Christian Atheism

The radical theology of Thomas J.J. Altizer:

An absolute immanence dominates a uniquely modern thinking and vision, one which is an inversion and reversal of a pure transcendence, but the apocalypse of God could be understood as the final realization of the pure immanence of God, one releasing an ultimate Yes-saying, and a Yes-saying which is greeted with a total joy. Perhaps it is joy itself which is most missing from a uniquely modern Christianity, but it is ecstatically present in both Blake and Nietzsche, but only so present as a consequence of the death of God. Hegel could know that death as the self-negation of abstract Spirit, or a wholly self-alienated Godhead, one which Blake could name as Urizen or Satan, and Nietzsche could know as the deification of nothingness. Only in Hegel and Nietzsche does there finally occur a philosophical understanding of nothingness in the West, and this occurs only by way of the philosophical understanding of an absolutely self-alienated God, one which Nietzsche could know as an absolute No-saying, and one which Hegel could know as an absolute emptiness. But that is the very emptiness which is emptied in an absolute movement of kenotic self-emptying, a movement which Hegel could understand as a repetition of the Crucifixion, and a repetition ushering in the final age of the Spirit. So, too, Nietzsche could understand such an ultimate and final movement as the dawning of absolute immanence, and an absolute immanence only possible as a consequence of the death of God. Only Christianity among the world religions knows the death of God, and nothing else makes Christianity so unique in the history of religions, but so likewise nothing else in modernity is more unique than its comprehensive realization of the death of God, and if nowhere else there is here a full coincidence between the depths of modernity and the depths of Christianity itself.

Secular Christmas

The truth about Christmas:

In short, everything WE secularists value in Christmas has been entirely appropriated by the Christian world.

Did You Make Mankind After We Made You?

Andrew Sullivan points to an article about how Creationism is pushing people away from the real message of Christianity. But if you read the comments, you find a lot of Christians reiterating YEC positions, pre-tribulation, Calvinism, and the KJV-only movement, and contorting themselves into all sorts of complex rationalizations in order to seem reasonable while still keep their Christianist bona fides.

Even recently I thought there was a moral dimension to Christ's message that spoke to a humanist core without the need for a lot of supernatural hocus pocus. I thought that if you looked at Jesus the philosopher, you might understand him simply through his imperatives to help the poor and to love your neighbor. More and more than seems like wishful thinking.

The message that I'm getting today, even from Sullivan, is that the only message of Jesus is one of personal salvation and transcendence. That the love your neighbor stuff is really secondary; something you do, maybe, along the way. Ultimately it's all about getting saved and going to heaven. In other words, it's ALL hocus pocus.

It's all about sin and redemption for a fallen world that in the context of five billion or so years of universal history seems more than a little short-sighted and self-absorbed. Who shall redeem the arboreal squids in 40 million years time?

More importantly, there is no moral center to a religion whose only good is that which gets one into heaven. Sometimes you feed the poor, sometimes you kill them. Depends on God's mood that day.

So I guess the answer to the larger question is "yes." Creationism is pushing people away from Christianity. It's the loose thread that destroys the whole sweater.

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Listening to: Son Volt - Chaos Streams
via FoxyTunes

Terry Eagleton on Bakhtin

Though he can't avoid taking a few pointless swipes at Saussure and Postmodernism, Eagleton has an interesting review in the LRB and Bakhtin is always an interesting subject.

In Rabelais and His World, this orgy of signification takes to the street in the form of a carnival. In the Russian tradition of the holy fool, the ancient art of the people debunks all transcendental signifiers and submits all official values to satiric parody. Like the novel, it celebrates flux and mutability, the dynamic and unstable. All absolute values are ridiculed and relativised. Against the high-mindedness of official doctrine is pitted the lethal power of laughter. Travesty, disfigurement and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane, man/woman, high culture/low culture) rampage for a euphoric moment through the byways and marketplaces. Rigid oppositions are scabrously dismantled. Birth and death, destruction and renewal, body and spirit, wisdom and folly, the anal and the angelic are sent packing with their tails in each other’s mouths. Orifices are seen as the places where bodies breach their boundaries and merge ecstatically into each other. Everything about the practice is ambiguous, Janus-faced, too slippery to be pinned down. Carnival deflates the sublime and portentous; and behind this desublimation lies the bathos of the Christian gospel, for which salvation comes down to the gift of a cup of water. As the first movement in history to consecrate the common life, Christianity stands at the source of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the everyday, just as it lurks distantly behind the current fascination with popular culture.

This a wonderfully descriptive paragraph with all sorts of amazing ideas to unpack. Debunking transcendental signifiers. Ridiculing and relativising absolute values. Travesty, disfigurement, and inversion. Dismantling rigid oppositions. This all sounds very postmodern to me and its a shame that Eagleton can't get past his bias and distaste. Perhaps it is the insistence that Eagleton reads through Bakhtin that there must be something behind the Carnival, a source for his preoccupation with the everyday. Some find Christianity, others would try to replace it with Marxism. For a postmodernist, there is nothing behind the desublimation. It is hyperreal, it is simulated, it is self-referential. The everyday and the fascination with popular culture is the life we have, nothing more. Travesties and monsters are there to remind us that language and art are themselves the forces that "make for human misery and oppression [and the forces that] can also make for emancipation and wellbeing".

Church and State

Andrew Sullivan complains that Jesus was most certainly not a socialist:

I'm struck by how many readers seem to believe that the Gospels mandate an expansive welfare state. I can't see it myself. Jesus was admant [sic] about eschewing politics; and his injunction to help the poor was not an injunction to get taxed in order that others may help the poor (or more generally with government attempts to reduce poverty, to keep them poor). And, of course, in socialist countries, the government both takes more of your money and tells you that the needs of others are the state's business, not yours. No big surprise, then, that no other country gives even half as much in charity as Americans. A free society, low taxes and limited government actually leaves people with the means to do good. The French give one twelfth of what Americans give. Britain is the second most generous country, and, despite Tony Blair's best efforts, still the least socialist of the European powers.

It's all about attitude vs. approach. His natural bias is toward the Church rather than the State, and toward "charity" rather than "taxes", but it's just rhetoric. It's all the same when someone's shaking that collection basket in your face on a Sunday morning. I think the point he's missing is that countries without social supports NEED to be more generous because there is nothing else.

The difference is that in a socialist country this generosity is built into the national infrastructure. In a charity-based society, it's left to one's leisure time and Sunday observances.