Ducking the Big Question

    First the story, then the point:
    The young man was full of himself, in the way young men can be. He was puffed up with his new scientific graduate degree. And his girlfriend was listening. He was showing off.
    He announced to fellow dinner guests (who had not raised the subject) that the Christian gospels are so much hooey. Full of discrepancies and contradictions. Not even close to the standards of real history. Written 100 years after the events they purport to record, by persons unknown who could not have been eyewitnesses.
    Our young lecturer did not know that the earliest Christian scriptures were written 18 to 20 years after the events of Jesus' life. They are Pauline letters. More to the point, these letters  were written by Paul to congregations already up and running across the region. In the bosom of an ancient theocracy, something fundamental had happened. It had caused people in numbers to abandon their very concept of reality, even at the risk of their lives.
    Our young dinner lecturer, being thus uninformed, had no occasion to consider some points of simple fact: The existence of the man Paul is settled. The authenticity of the main body of his letters is settled.  In these letters he says he did business with the apostle Peter and Jesus' brother James.  He says he met people who had encountered the resurrected Jesus. And he says he met the resurrected Jesus himself.
    Had our lecturer known as much, he would have faced a decision: Where would he place the information on a yardstick of credibility?  At one extreme, he would conclude that the man Paul gave his life to propagate a cockamamie yarn among folks indulging a mass delusion. At the opposite pole, he would conclude that Paul knew what he was talking about and meant what he said.
    That's the story. Here's the point:
    The young lecturer has brethren in attitude. Our rational and enlightened age hosts a mode of thinking that is neither. It embraces an ethic of skepticism that questions everything but itself. It swallows whole the doctrine that faith and reason are foes. It tolerates and even celebrates a  certain kind of cultural ignorance.
     Holding the Christian gospels to standards of modern history is simply silly. The discipline of modern history did not exist at the time of the gospel writings. Judged knowledgeably and objectively, the case for the historicity of the Christian gospels is sound. The evidence is available to anyone who knows how to read and bothers to look.
    But we moderns don't do a lot of bothering. Our reasons may seem good-hearted.
We are put off by the loons and scoundrels who caricature religion to their own benefit.  Or we are put off by rule-mongers who use the Bible to push what one writer calls "a narrow, hard and exclusive piety." Or we are confident of pursuing morality without religion.
    Or we're just too modern and too skeptical. In the upshot, a wise and beautiful book languishes at the outskirts of cultural literacy,  and supposedly discerning  people tap dance past the essential question about Judeo-Christian scripture.  The question is not whether the Bible describes an elevated system of morality. The question is whether it tells a story that is, in its essence, true.
    Ultimate questions can be mercilessly simple, also the decisions they imply.
    True? Or false?
    Yes? Or no?
    On this question, our rational age has not dealt rationally with the fact that automatic skepticism amounts to a  lazy form of evasion. Our young lecturer hadn't dealt rationally with it, either.  For intellectual  rigor, poor marks all around.



 

Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall ...

                                             
                                                  You can't even do wrong right.
                                                                                Blues Lyric

    An old friend used to call them The Baddies. They are the kind of day when things go wrong from the start. You oversleep. Breakfast is rushed. Some of it gets stuck between your teeth. Then you get toothpaste on your sleeve.  That kind of day. Bad karma right out of the gate.
    I've thought of The Baddies as the presidential campaigns lurch to a start.  Of Republicans, we can at most say that their dueling publicity stunts have offered counterpoint to the yawn-fest on the Democratic side. Over there, while Hillary Clinton still seems the one to beat,  tepid poll numbers say that even supporters are not enthusiastic about her.
    At this rate, our next president will be sent to the White House by people voting with their fingers crossed. Such are the possibilities of politics in a safe and affluent country. We have evolved but not improved our definition of the phrase "consent of the governed." The first Continental Congress received its consent in an affirmative sense of the word. It had no established authority within the norms of the day. It was  sent to do the work of the people who did the sending. Nowadays, government has vested interests of its own. It is large beyond any valid need. It is extravagantly wasteful of the public's money. And it is peopled by careerists who are serenely confident of the rightness of their judgments for the rest of us.
    This should be fertile ground for Republican politicians, who do indeed like to prattle about limited government. However it is only prattle. In saying they'd like to scale back government enterprise, they mean they'd like to scale back government enterprise to someone else's constituents. When it comes to sending boodle to the home folks, Republicans are champs. The day of truly limited government is over in this country, and this is why politicians who preach it sound so often callous or silly.
    According to the news-celebrities who call their opinions analysis,  time favors Democrats, because their natural constituencies are growing.  But which Democrats does time favor?  Consider what the Bernie Sanders phenomenon reveals:  A candidate who has remarkably energized voters is a renegade by established political norms.
    These norms have given the Democrats Hillary Clinton. In her, a talent for policy is evident. A personal gift for politics is not. Direct conversations with the people are visibly a chore. Thus her campaign seeks to reduce political leadership to an exercise in packaging and posturing. (Note to Clinton staff: Lose the official photo that makes her look as if she's been startled out of a nap.)
    And so, on both sides of the partisan divide, we find today's chosen vehicle for obtaining the consent of the governed: Politics by marketable pose. This is what we get when we mix show business into public affairs. (See: Donald Trump.) Also, this is what we get from candidates who don't quite know what to say to the American people.   We are beset by would-be leaders who are quite willing to tell us what they think we want to hear, if only they can figure out what that is.
    Along with ineptitude -- or because of it --  not a few of the candidates have a second deficiency. They have embraced the notion of political doctrine as higher truth. Some of them appear actually to believe this. For others, claiming to have the one true vision is a shortcut past the labor of crafting a coherent program of governance from the competing values of a diverse society.
    A lack of political aptitude is a serious shortcoming in candidates for an office that is, foremost, a position of political leadership.  Some of this country's highest achievements in democracy have gone forward on the sweaty shoulders of political craft.  The nation can negotiate many circumstances with a mere manager in the White House, but moments inescapably come when it needs a leader.

Faith In The Closet

    Usually I dislike sermons.  The form is lost on me. This has occasioned some awkwardness in my life, as I've had good friends among clergy. They in turn have compounded my problem by being exceptions who vividly proved the rule. It is a mildly uncomfortable conundrum.
   In any case,  I usually dislike sermons. But I perked up at one a few Sundays ago. The preacher began with a story of visiting a backyard barbecue at a neighbor's house. One of the other guests, on learning that he was a clergyman, treated him to a lecture. It began with words on the order of, "Do you really believe all that stuff?"  It ended with words on the order of "You can't prove any of it."
    The story resonated with me.  From time to time I have a layman's version of the same experience. People who are not religious seem to be bothered by the fact that I am.
    I take care not to wear religion on my sleeve.  But I don't dissemble. If the subject comes up in social conversation, and the question lands in my lap, I acknowledge being observant in a Christian denomination.  Several kinds of reaction may occur. Some people shoot embarrassed glances toward far corners of the room, as if I had claimed to be a chicken pot pie. Others go blank and silent, as if to forbear through rudeness.  Still others go rigid with something that looks very like annoyance.
     Granted, religion can nowadays be a cringe-worthy subject. Choose your culprit, starting with the scalawags who will cure your bunions or save your soul -- your choice -- if only you'll pony up.  At the other extreme are the sweet folks whose faith is utterly sincere and comprehensively vocal. Nobody likes to be harangued. I'd rather not be blessed by the cashier at the grocery store.
    In between, we have hate-mongers, politicians who claim God as an ally, and mega-preachers whose definition of reverent humility permits them million-dollar homes. Praise the Lord, pass the loot, vote for me and scorn the neighbor of your choice.
    To all the above I plead not guilty. Even so, I may wind up being -- figuratively speaking -- the guy who stops conversation by telling the wrong joke or grinning with spinach between his teeth.
    Perhaps it is not irrelevant that atheism has become stylish. It has its own mega-preachers and proselytizers.  And like my friends on the religious side, its adherents can be artfully selective about which tenets they embrace and which they ignore.  I particularly enjoy the Christmas season's manger scene mania, in which religious tradition must not put so much as a toe on secular turf. I wait for the manger police to reject the tradition of taking the Christian Sabbath as a day off from work. So far, no go.
    With the rest of the human race, I am capable of petty resentment. I do become annoyed in those moments when I realize I'm being regarded as a walking, talking faux pas.  In years past I might venture to talk my way through them. The result was always social disaster. I babbled earnest endorsements of the theory of evolution, and abject admissions of scriptural contradiction, until I sounded as if I were selling door-to-door magazine subscriptions. I embarrassed whole rooms full of people, including myself.
    Social mores are bearable if not always sensible. But the ones here at hand reflect a larger context that I think terribly sad. The hucksters and pols and zealots have so thoroughly poisoned the vocabulary of religion that it is genuinely risky to mention the subject in polite company.
    As for my social life, perhaps I will try to hint -- without actually fibbing -- that I am a Druid.
    And come to think of it, I wonder if Druids have sermons.