First, to set the mood: A 2-minute clip from Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, in which Mickey’s (played by Allen) Jewish parents are freaking out because he has found Jesus Christ and converted to the Catholic faith. It ends with one of my favorite comic lines in film history:

–It’s also a line I think China’s religious sages would find wiser than most of what they hear coming from the West about these questions.

And here we go:

~     ~     ~

Of Confucius, Holy Clowns, and Holy Murderers:
Some Advantages of Chinese Religious Atheism

           MOTHER
  (offscreen in the bathroom)
Of course there's a God, you idiot!
You don't believe in God?

          MICKEY
        (sighing)
But if there's a God, then why is there so much
evil in the world? Just on a simplistic level...
Why were there Nazis?

          MOTHER
  (offscreen in the bathroom)
Tell him, Max.

          FATHER
       (offscreen)
How the hell do I know why there were Nazis?
I don't know how the can opener works.

--Woody Allen
Hannah and Her Sisters

I. Why Today’s Students, Particularly, Should Care

Why should anybody today care about knowing ancient Chinese religion? A few sentences can make the case:

First, anyone who is East Asian — Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Thai, Vietnamese — should care because their family life and personality are very likely molded by the ideas that arise in the Warring States Period.

Even people who are not East Asian have good reason to learn it: it’s no secret that the 21st Century is shaping up to be the Century of China (and, yes, India), so odds are that anybody with a future will cross paths with East Asia either socially, romantically, or professionally. So they should know what a different world they’re entering when they do, and thus be able to navigate that world with better success, be it at the business dinner or the girl-friend’s parent’s dinner.

A third reason, of course, is that it’s simply good mental traveling to learn about all this.

II. Confucianism

Point blank: when we talk about East Asia, we’re talking about Confucius, the man most religious studies scholars agree is by far the most influential “religious” figure and moral philosopher of all time — more than Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed. One in four people on the planet today is Chinese; from the beginning of history to today, China’s population has always been larger than that of Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and the Americas. And China’s  people — plus, later, those of Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore — have lived the core Confucian values since 200 years before Jesus until today. (And they live them seven days a week, not just on the Sabbath.)

Even Christianized Asians live Confucian lives as their daily norm: family values, respect for elders and authorities, humility and a distaste for vulgarity and boasting, a gentle distaste for conflict, the importance of “face” and, glaringly obvious at SAS, of education — all of those things go back to Confucius.

So understanding Confucius is understanding most of East Asia today — from family life to social attitudes to manners and etiquette and sexual norms. (And to understand Confucius, the Shujing we read from last week will take you a long way.)

Second, Confucius is not a teacher about religion and life after death; on the contrary, his focus is the good life on earth, and how to live it wisely, happily, and graciously. When asked about who made the universe, where we go after we die, and the other Ten Thousand Unknowable Things, Confucius said:

To know when you know something, and to know when you don’t know something: that is wisdom.

He knew humans don’t know about the Unknowable, so he advised it best to pay attention to ritual and ceremony, yes, but to keep a clean distance from questions that can’t be answered — and from people who claim they know the answers. He thought those people dangerous to social order, and their superstitious claims dangerous to individual intelligence.

The Analects, the major collection of Confucius’ alleged sayings as recorded by his students, is a refreshingly easy book to read. Nothing in it is hard to believe except that its common sense and rationalism, which arrived in the West only during the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment a short 500 years ago, rose in China a very long two thousand, five hundred years ago.

III. A Holy Clown: Zhuangzi and the Tao

Zhuangzi dreaming he's a butterfly dreaming he's Zhuangzi dreaming...

And while Confucius does have a sense of humor in places, it’s one that at most makes you smile a little as you read. Like practically every other religion or philosophy, laughter and a sense of humor seem somehow against the rules. Confucius is serious this way too. But his “opponents,” the Daoists? They give us laughs by the belly-full, while all the while discussing the same subjects the more sober religions talk about. Reading the great Zhuangzi, Daoism’s second great sage, is like reading Jesus doing stand-up comedy. You can’t help but love the guy. He’s a hoot, and he’s also as deep as they come (in my book, anybody who insists there’s nothing unholy about laughter, that it’s every bit as sacred as all the more depressing emotions we usually find glooming up houses of worship, is wise by definition. Why shouldn’t laughter and play count among the holy things? What’s more heavenly than that?).

Zhuangzi had no patience for the Confucians. He was an individualist and an escapist, believing the wisest reaction to suffering is not to try to “fix the problem,” but instead to flow with it, “like water — seeking the path of least resistance.” You can’t fix human society any more than you can fix an earthquake or a drought. You fix your own mind’s way of reacting to things, stop freaking out when life is hard, slow down and enjoy it, and don’t get caught up chasing gold and honors. It’s all a fool’s errand to him. He prefers to go fishing and tell good, deep, playful stories. Your favorite weird uncle. (And one of my five favorite human beings in history.)

IV. A Tangent: Connections to Greece

These might help, if you remember the basics about Greece from other classes:

Greek and Chinese philosophy share a sort of “philosophical relay race” pattern: Socrates taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle. In China, Confucianism has a similar threesome: Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi.

Socrates, like Confucius, never wrote his philosophy down. We know Socrates through the writings of Plato, yet Plato took Socrates’ ideas into areas Socrates may not have agreed with. Similarly, Mencius studied under Confucius’ grandson, so there’s a Socrates-Plato/Confucius-Mencius pattern there.

Aristotle studied under Plato, but ended up arguing against his master. Xunzi similarly argues against Mencius concerning, above all, human nature. As Ebrey explains, Mencius thought human nature was essentially good, but a bad environment can corrupt it (thus the importance of a model king). Xunzi says this is naive, that human nature is prone to stupidity and vice, and thus needs education. (Not the kind of education in today’s world, which more and more seems to teach that education is simply a means for getting a job and making a lot of money, which is what success means. Confucians taught that the pleasures of an educated life are themselves the wealth, and the success. The gold is in the mind, not the bank.)

Xunzi is also interesting as the first flat-out atheist in Chinese philosophy. Confucius was not, mind you, an atheist. He said “We can’t know about God, Gods, and before and after life.” That’s an agnostic position: “a-” means “not,” and “gnostic” means “knowledge” — so Confucius is agnostic. Xunzi is different. He says, flat out, no gods are out there, as plain as an atheist can put it. But he continues with a totally interesting argument: “Even though all of this religious belief is superstitious nonsense, we should continue and support it.” Why? Because first, rituals are beautiful. They add pleasing colors to our days. And second, they’re useful. People need an outlet for fears of death and frustrations with life, so let them pray away, even though it’s totally pointless. You AP Lit people might think of Aristotle’s argument that Greek Tragedy was healthy because it was “cathartic” — it let people drain out all of their fear and horror at the dark sides of life. Xunzi seems to think religion is a similarly useful form of “mental hygiene.”

And then there’s Laozi, Daoism’s “Old Master.” Laozi wrote the Dao de Jing (“The Classic of the Way”), and it’s so deep, mysterious, and paradoxical that I pretty much refuse to even try to teach it to high schoolers. Deer in headlights gazes is all I’ve seen each time I’ve had students read it. So taste it if you’re curious, but we won’t focus on it in class much, if at all. We’ll focus on Zhuangzi instead.

V. Holy Murderers

There’s one final “So what?”, and I’ll close with it: it’s tantalizing to wonder what Jesus and Mohammed would have thought about Confucius. I picture them totally approving of his morality: he argues, like they do, that greed and the fever for gold are vulgar and the “root of all evil.” He also argues that we should love our neighbors and treat everyone well. Confucius, too, would approve of the moral teachings of Jesus and Mohammed — at least their social ones. But Confucius probably would have drawn the line at believing their claims to “know” about beginnings and endings, heavens and hells, spirits and demons. One can only imagine how interesting their conversations would be if they had the chance to debate these things. And while that’s impossible, of course, somehow it still points to something I notice every time I pass through airports in the Middle East, the West, and in China: pretty much everywhere but China, soldiers patrol airports looking for suicide bombers — and they obviously do it for good reason. Muslims, Jews, and Christians have been fighting for thousands of years because of their conflicting knowledge-claims based on their ancient religious texts.

But traveling through Confucian airports, you simply don’t see these soldiers, and you don’t see the terror threats (nor do you see doctors who provide abortions being murdered by Those Who Know When the Soul Enters the Embryo, or political priorities in an age of global warming, economic chaos, and several other urgent problems, being dominated by strange issues like gay marriage by  Those Who Know that Homosexuality is an Abomination. Chinese newspapers and TV don’t argue about whether their president is a secret Muslim, either. On and on.)

Confucian countries are free of all of these strange things because in their culture, they know, thanks to Confucius, that they are Those Who Cannot Know Some Answers and, knowing they can’t know these things, they have no such Knowledge to Kill For. In their airports, instead of soldiers patrolling for Those Who Do, you more often see just a bunch of families, parents leading the kids, the kids leading their suitcases stuffed with textbooks, cramming that education day and night to please their parents — people who don’t know what any Creator of the Universe thinks, but who do know this: family is important, and education is important.

And it’s all because of a guy who read the Shujing during the Warring States Period 500 years before Jesus, thought it was wise, taught it to students, and left teachings that, 2,500 years later, have worked for more than half of the world.

Related posts:

1. “Lies My Teacher Told Me” Author Censored in China
2. Fugue: Jesus, Plato, Confucius, Goldman Sachs
3. Advice for Teachers Scorned
4. Farewells, Four Loves, Confucius, etc.

What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own day.

Exhibit One: Twain as the Fifth Horseman

This reads like something straight out of Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, or Hitchens:

Transcribed:

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is — in our country, particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree — it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime — the invention of Hell.  Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

Exhibit Two: Twain Against the Neocons

This snippet, if you look at the top, picks up after quoting Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s apparent statement concerning a US Army massacre of Philippinos during or after the Spanish-American War.

Transcribed:

[TR's] whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms — and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets….

Who wants to place bets that teaching Twain in American high schools is going to become an even dicier idea once this book filters out into the mainstream?

And who else notes that Twain’s objections both to American religion and American politics are based on simple morality — that standard so important to so many free-thinking heretics?

5 Comments

• At July 11, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Twain's weird story The Mysterious Stranger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger) gave many clues as to these thoughts... I was surprised and amazed when I stumbled across Mysterious Stranger some years ago completely by accident, and it definitely made me appreciate Twain even more. Excerpt:

  Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best - to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history - but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian - not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with."

• At July 12, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Wow, Laura, nice find.

  Interesting that he wrote this from 1890 to 1910. That perfectly bookends the Boxer Rebellion in China, during which Chinese locals got fed up with missionaries and their Chinese converts ("rice Christians") and went on, as your Twain quote pegs it, "to kill missionaries and converts."

  Unfortunately for them, they didn't have the cash to buy the Western guns, and believed their own superstitious magic would protect them from the Western armies (always ready to back up beleaguered missionaries via the infamous "Gunboat Diplomacy"). It didn't. Instead, the West used it as a pretext to invade Beijing, storm and loot the Forbidden City and Imperial Library of much of their treasure, and finally to force more concessions to Western imperialist nations than they'd already forced after the Opium Wars of the 1840s and '60s.

  It amazes me that Westerners know so little of their crimes against China a short century ago. China certainly hasn't forgotten it.

• At July 13, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  So true about Chinese history! One of the things that really struck me about the Robert McNamara documentary Fog of War was the his admission that during the Vietnam War he knew nothing at all of Vietnamese history and only later, as he learned about it, did he gain some insight into the dynamics that he was oblivious to during the war itself!

  About Mysterious Stranger: I was listening to a bunch of public domain audiobook stuff five or six years ago and stumbled across this book. It had me completely mesmerized. I could definitely see myself teaching a course on folklore and literature about the devil - what a device he is for intense thought experiments! This book would definitely be on the reading list for such a class...

• At July 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Laura, Fog of War is a great film, and so are so many other documentaries by that filmmaker (whose name senescence hides from me at the moment).

  McNamara's a great example of an expert who knew next to nothing about Asia. If he'd looked into Vietnamese or Chinese history, he'd have quickly found that China tried to conquer Vietnam -- as a neighboring state with far larger forces -- for 2,000 years, and never could. The Vietnamese never say "quit."

  The Twain story is on my reading list.

• At July 16, 2010, Harold Jarche » From Mark Twain to the Future wrote:

  [...] Mark Twain’s Posthumous Bombshells by @cburell Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying. [...]

Related posts:

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2. Fear-Based Curriculum: A Language Arts Tragedy (More on Teaching Lolita)
3. How Modern People Read
4. Meme: High School Daze to Praise (For Mature Audiences Only)

Jesus’ Needle:

It’s too easy to start with Jesus’ views on wealth laid out in Matthew 19:21-8 — surely one of the most embarrassing of all Bible passages for wealthy church-goers. A “young man” asks him what “good things” he should do so he “may have eternal life.” Take it away, Jesus:

Jesus said to him, “If you will be perfect, go and sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions. Then said Jesus to his disciples, “Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus beheld them, and said to them, “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.”

(Any reader of the Gospels has to love how often Jesus does the equivalent of a forehead-slap when his students don’t get what he’s trying to teach. It’s the same old story in classrooms today.)

Plato’s Sting:

A quick glimpse at Book 8 of The Republic gives us Plato’s take, via his mouthpiece “Socrates”, on democracy and plutocracy (which Plato calls “oligarchy”):

Socrates: Say then, my friend, in what manner does tyranny arise? — that it has a democratic origin is evident. Glaucon: Clearly. Socrates: And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as democracy from oligarchy — I mean, after a sort? Glaucon: How? Socrates: The good which oligarchy proposed to itself and the means by which it was maintained was excess of wealth —  am I not right? Glaucon: Yes. Socrates: And the insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things for the sake of money-getting was also the ruin of oligarchy? Glaucon: True. Socrates: And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution? Glaucon: What good? Socrates: Freedom, which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of the State — and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of nature deign to dwell. Glaucon: Yes; the saying is in everybody’s mouth. Socrates: I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny.

Confucius Says:

Confucianism in China, from 2,000 years ago until very recently, also saw problems with both a system based on profit, and with one based on the desires of the democratic masses. This record of some Confucian advisors to a Han emperor in 81 b.c.e. about whether or not to encourage commerce should raise the eyebrows of Westerners to whom the concept of “sustainable development” is new. The Chinese voted for it 2,000 years ago, when they instituted their Imperial Examination System — an “IQ test” of sorts for anybody wanting to enter politics, which is something long overdue in America, whose rogue-infested and intellectually-challenged congress, Supreme Court, and White House argues the case for such a political qualifications test eloquently. (These Confucians, you’ll notice, have much in common with Plato on the problems of democratic “rule of individual desire” and oligarchic/plutocratic “rule of excessive wealth.” And is it me, or do they have much in common with Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian American republic, instead of a nation of shopkeepers?):

It is our humble opinion that the principle of ruling men lies in nipping in the bud wantonness and frivolity, in extending wide the elementals of virtue, in discouraging mercantile pursuits, and in displaying benevolence and righteousness. Let wealth never be paraded before the eyes of the people; only then will enlightenment flourish and folkways improve. Lead the people with virtue and the people will return to honest simplicity; entice the people with gain, and they will become vulgar. Vulgar habits would lead them away from righteousness to follow after gain, with the result that people will swarm on the road and throng at the markets. A poor country may appear plentiful, not because it possesses abundant wealth, but because wants multiply and people become reckless, said Laozi. Hence the true King promotes agriculture and discourages non-essential industries; he checks the people’s desires through the principles of propriety and righteousness and provides a market for grain in exchange for other commodities, where there is no place for merchants to circulate useless goods, and for artisans to make useless implements. Thus merchants are for the purpose of distributing surplus production, and the artisans for providing tools; they should not become the principal concern of the government. . . . . If a country possesses a wealth of fertile land and yet its people are underfed, it is because merchants and workers have prospered unduly while the fundamental occupations have been neglected. If a country possesses rich natural resources in its mountains and seas and yet its people lack capital, it is because the people’s necessities have not been attended to, while luxuries and fancy articles have multiplied. The fountain-head of a river cannot fill a leaking cup; mountains and seas cannot overwhelm streams and valleys. This is why [earlier emperors] P’an Kêng practised communal living, Shun hid away gold, and Kao Tsu forbade merchants and shopkeepers to be officials. Their purpose was to discourage habits of greed and fortify the spirit of extreme earnestness. Now with all the discriminations against the market people, and stoppage of the sources of profit, people still do evil. What if the ruling classes should pursue profit themselves? The Zuo Chronicle says, “When the princes take delight in profit, the ministers become mean; when the ministers become mean, the minor officers become greedy; when the minor officers become greedy, the people become thieves.” Thus to open the way for profit is to provide a ladder to public crime.

But that was then, and it was just Jesus, Plato, and Confucius anyway. This is now:

Source: Institute for Policy Studies, via Business Insider’s chart-filled “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth and Inequality in America“

Citigroup’s Wisdom:

The plutocrats/welfare queens/corporate socialism beneficiaries at Citigroup celebrate the current American and, in their view, global plutocracy as a “Plutonomy” in this report to their top-shelf investors. Jesus never said much about political or economic theory –  so I guess he’d just say unto them,  “no kingdom of heaven for you lot” — but the readings from Plato and the Confucian politicians above make these guys an interesting read. I’ve embedded the entire report at the bottom of this post, but here’s a representative snippet of these investment bankers’ philosophy:

Plutonomies exist, and explain much of the world’s imbalances. There is no such thing as “The U.S. Consumer” or “UK Consumer”, but rich and poor consumers in these countries, with different savings habits and different prospects. The rich are getting richer; they dominate spending. Their trend of getting richer looks unlikely to end anytime soon. [Because, they note elsewhere, the US, British, and other liberal democratic governments show no signs of any willingness to address these imbalances, thanks to lobbyists, the government-business revolving door, and campaign donations.] How do we make money from this theme? We see two ways. The first is simple. If you believe, like us, that the Plutonomy exists, and explains why global imbalances have built up (for example the savings rate differentials), and you believe there is no imminent threat to plutonomy, you must in turn believe that the current “end of the world is nigh” risk premium on equities, due to current account deficits, is too high. Conclusion: buy equities. There is however a more refined way to play plutonomy, and this is to buy shares in the companies that make the toys that the Plutonomists enjoy. . . .

Slavoj Žižek’s and Bill Moyers’ Uncomfortable Questions:

We’ve been playing with the problems, in a nutshell, of not only capitalism — you don’t have to be a Marxist to admit that our world banking crisis, our widening wealth gap, our dependence on and enabling of our felonious oil companies, and our vulgar and insatiable consumer culture all point to serious problems in today’s capitalism; all that takes is informed honesty — but also of liberal democracy. And I find myself needing someone to point me to any contemporary thinkers who can inspire my own flagging faith in its promises. (That’s a sincere request.) While reading up on Mao for my Chinese history class, I came across this quote from Slavoj Žižek:

What, today, prevents the radical questioning of capitalism itself is precisely the belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism. . . . Yes, the economy is the key domain, the battle will be decided there, one has to break the spell of global capitalism — but the intervention should be properly political, not economic. Today, when everyone is ‘anti-capitalist’, up to and including the Hollywood ‘socio-critical’ conspiracy movies (from The Enemy of the State to The Insider) in which the enemy is constituted by the big corporations with their ruthless pursuit of profit, the signifier ‘anti-capitalism’ has lost its subversive sting. What one should problematize is the self-evident opposite of this ‘anti-capitalism’: the faith in the democratic substance of honest Americans which will break up the conspiracy. This is the hard kernel of today’s global capitalist universe, its true Master-Signifier: democracy. (Mao on Practice and Contradiction, p. 7-8)

And if Žižek is too rich for your blood, how about a former White House Press Secretary who recently entertained similarly dark thoughts about the fate of American democracy in his final broadcast on PBS — Bill Moyers:

Outro:

I had no intention of writing on this all day, and I can’t even end it because I have no answers. I’ll just stop here instead, while it goes on and on regardless. Blame it on a conversation with graduating students last week, whose excitement about the future I found uncomfortably hard to share. If nothing else, maybe this post shows how history, philosophy, and religion — so often taught as dead abstractions in the classroom — are really everything but, when used as lenses on the present and future. So I’ll scratch my head as I close this one, and comfort myself in knowing that, if nothing else, the readings above might come in handy for some future essay or debate in one of my classrooms. —— Here’s that <a href=”http://beyond-school.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/6674234-Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1.pdf”>Citigroup Plutonomy Report</a>

2 Comments

• At June 16, 2010, Ric Murry wrote:

  Well done Clay. Two things of note, with little expansion.

  First - As I stated on Twitter, Since 1981 the USA has seen either a Bush or Clinton playing a major role in national politics of the country.

  1981-89 GHW Bush = Vice President

  1989-93 GHW Bush = President

  1993-2001 Bill Clinton = President

  2001-09 GW Bush = President

  2010ff Hillary Clinton = Secretary of State

  Interestingly, the role of Secretary of State could expand the oligarchical powers of influence more than the White House roles.

  Second - The reason history, philosophy, and religion have become these "dead abstractions" is likely intentional (I have come to believe). Everything we really desire our lives to be are issues of these social sciences. We cashed in the disciplines which lead to critical thinking for 3Rs decades ago. One must think deeply in order to understand any of your post here today. It's too much work for the brain.

  So we have delegated (as a democratic society) our thinking to the politicians and wealthy. After all, we equate wealth with wisdom in capitalistic societies. Therefore, they must know what is best. As such we do not have to think deeply, critically, and in many cases, at all. They will do it for us.

  In realizing that the will of the people is for the oligarchy to do the thinking, these same people are "reforming education" to exclude the history, philosophy, and religion that could remove them from the power and wealth.

• At June 17, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  The Bush and Clinton Dynasties -- plus the Reagan counter-revolution -- are my only experience as a voter too. We seem about a year different in age. I left Chattanooga for L.A. when I graduated high school in Spring '80.

  It's interesting writing again after the year of being back in the classroom. "Deep thinking" posts don't seem to sell well. I need to write about the iPad, I guess :)

  Not that I blame anyone for skipping this abortive post. The real point of interest for me these days is how little the West gets what China -- especially traditional China -- has to offer the future. I probably should have left Jesus and Plato out altogether, since readers probably think they know them (and are probably more wrong than they know, especially about Jesus).

  Anyway, your comment is rearranging some brain cells and making me think of a few experiments for writing future posts -- imaginary classroom stories maybe from the savvy student's point of view, who knows he's being sold a bill of goods and learns unintended lessons against the reformist grain -- so thanks for that.

  Whether they're ever written or not, of course, is a different question. I want to get the Gilgamesh monkey off my back before school starts in August. Too distracted by the trainwreck of American tragedy to turn my gaze from the gore.

Related posts:

1. Of Confucius, Holy Clowns, and Holy Murderers: Some Advantages of China’s Religious Atheism
2. Cassandra, Mammon, and the Death of Critical Thinking
3. “The New York Times is Always Right”: A Media Literacy Lesson
4. Farewells, Four Loves, Confucius, etc.

Lastly, the superstitious man becomes a fanatic, and then his zeal becomes capable of all crimes in the name of the Lord.

Voltaire – ON SUPERSTITION – Toleration and Other Essays

Related posts:

1. Voltaire on Superstition, Suicide, and Murder
2. Tea Party 1.0: Voltaire on the First Estate
3. Voltaire on the Christ and Institutional Christianity, 2
4. Voltaire on the Christ and Institutional Christianity

Dear President Bush,

Don’t let that liberal media get you down with their polls. As one of the 17% of Americans who knows you were a great president – history (and your heavenly reward!) will prove the “Negative Nellies” wrong – I just want to say “Thank you!” for all the great work.

Because of your support for abstinence-only sex education, my teenage daughter and son are still virgins. As for the mean-spirited gossip around town that they’ve been playing games with their non-virginal zones in ways that make Sodom seem like Sunday School, well, let me tell you that they’re just not true – my daughter’s walk is that way from too much horseback-riding. She swore to that while we slow-danced at our Purity Ball last week. (And I double-darn guarantee you that Ball was a heck of a lot more fun than Barack Hussein Obama’s inaugural ball will be. You should come next year, and bring your own lovely daughters!)  Likewise, those little blemishes on their mouths and other parts of their pure bodies are just cold sores and pimples. That school nurse who said otherwise, and who showed me that study about how abstinence-only education is causing kids to increase in both sin and sickness? She can stick her liberal science where the sun don’t shine.

Speaking of “science,” I also want to thank you for putting those pesky, elitist, know-it-all “scientists” in their place over the last eight years. You and me both know that evolution is just a “theory,” and that no matter how much some of us may look like monkeys, the Good Book says otherwise right there on page 2 of “Genesis” in God’s own red, white, and blue English. Same with that so-called “global warming.” You were right to silence those government scientists who drank the Al Gore kool-aid. Heck, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s hotter these days because of the population boom down in Hell. (More sinners, more fires. Heat rises. Boom: global warming. It’s basic physics.)  Anyway, thanks to you, my children know better than to believe all this “scientific research.”

(You should see my kids, whenever “global warming” comes up, imitate your “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter!” joke at your last G8 Summit. They do the fist-jab as they say it as perfectly as you did in front of all those world leaders. Thank you for setting that example for the young, Sir!)

Finally, I want to thank you for improving my children’s reading and math skills. I can’t believe how good they have become at choosing the right bubbles on all those state tests they’ve been taking. Those Nellies who say that those reading tests don’t measure literacy should come to my house and watch my son and daughter read classics like Answers in Genesis, The Bell Curve, and Mein Kampf. I grill them after every chapter with comprehension questions, and they’re 100% right every time. They understand the genius of these great works and argue their points against liberals who try to debate them with a force that makes this father proud.  (As for math, they’re better at calculating how much my savings have shrunk than I am!)

Mr. President, I could say much more, but I think I’ll stop here. God bless you, Sir, for all you’ve done in your service to America – and God save us from the years of liberal tyranny we face when you’re gone.

Sincerely,

Wilber D. Snipes III
Crawford, Texas

P.S. Congratulations on the postage stamp! I was in a fraternity too, and let me tell you, I surely appreciate your whacky way of telling the liberals where to get off!!!

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No one can deny that it is possible for God to shower his finest gifts on one of his works. We may, therefore, believe in Jesus as one who taught and practised virtue; but let us take care that in wishing to go too far beyond that, we do not overturn the whole structure.

Voltaire – ON SUPERSTITION – Toleration and Other Essays

Related posts:

1. Voltaire on the Christ and Institutional Christianity
2. Voltaire on Superstition, Suicide, and Murder
3. Voltaire: On Fanaticism and Holy Murder
4. Tea Party 1.0: Voltaire on the First Estate

The gospel did not say to James, Peter, or Bartholomew: “Live in opulence; deck yourselves with honours; walk amid a retinue of guards.” It did not say to them: “Disturb the world with your incomprehensible questions.” Jesus, my brethren, touched none of these questions. Would you be better theologians than he whom you recognise as your one master? What! He said to you: “All consists in loving God and your neighbour”; yet you would seek something else.

Voltaire – ON SUPERSTITION – Toleration and Other Essays

4 Comments

• At June 10, 2010, Tim Goree wrote:

  “All consists in loving God and your neighbour”

  Since there isn't a reference to the Bible verse here, I'm going to guess this is a deformed (and out of context) version of Matthew 22:36-40, which says:

  36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”

  37 Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’[d] 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’[e] 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

  The "All consists..." portion of the first quote in this case would refer to the idea that "loving God and your neighbour" sums up the Law (Ten Commandments and other laws given by God to Moses) and what the Prophets taught, but not necessarily what post Law Christians should be focusing their lives on today, as the Voltaire's statement implies.

  If Voltaire is looking for a statement from Jesus that instructs the lives of Christians today, he should have quoted Matthew 28:18-20, which says:

  18 And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go therefore[c] and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.[d]

  I imagine the problem with that would have been that the proper quote, in context, wouldn't have supported his thesis very well.

• At June 10, 2010, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Christendom has been lost a long, long time.

• At June 11, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Tim,

  First, I appreciate anybody who makes a conscious space for decency and spiritual values in life, even if I disagree with them on the details. So let's shake hands first so the disagreement is among friends.

  We part in several places, it seems:

  I appreciate Voltaire's elevation of the humane spirit of the first verses you cite from Matthew -- loving the Ground of Being ("God") and loving all who cohabit it with us. This comes close to my view of what "The Christ" (or Christ-head) is, and how it does good in the world.

  And I wish, with Voltaire, that this takeaway from the Gospels, and not the "incomprehensible questions" that your second quote raises, was the true mission of institutional Christians, instead of the proselytizing and missionary meddling that has such a divisively sad and problematic and cross-culturally "disturbing" history.

  You identify the second quote as somehow "truer" than the first, and seem to fault Voltaire for omitting it. Yet I'm sure you know that this claim of Jesus in Matthew is strangely absent from the earlier Gospel of Mark, as is the resurrection itself (in the earliest autographs), which begs many interminable and tiresome questions concerning truth, logic, textual criticism, philology, epistemology, faith, notions of biblical inerrancy, and the whole kitchen sink--none of which I any longer have the stomach for, having come out the other side of these issues long ago.

  Anyway, your citation of the verse which "instructs the lives of Christians today" seems to make the point Voltaire was trying to make: that the further we get from issues of ethics and the heart (love and the Golden Rule), and the further we descend instead into issues of the head (unprovable theological truth-claims that will always "disturb" society, and cause the faithful to consider themselves "right" and those who disagree "wrong" and in need of good-hearted meddling), the harder it is to be a force of love instead of strife and contention.

  Muddy, I know. No time to edit, and it's very late here.

  In a nutshell, we seem to read the Bible differently. I read it like I read other wisdom texts with ideas and insights worth taking seriously. I also read it as an historian familiar with the difficulties of even knowing with any certainty which, if any, of the words attributed to Jesus in the NT were actually his words. Biblical scholars, believer and secular alike, are very aware of these issues. They're also in agreement that there are errors and contradictions galore in the Bible. Both of these bodies of fact make the text, as I've written elsewhere, something that I read on my feet, and not on my knees.

  So while I still find devotion to The Christ important, it has next to nothing to do with the divinity of the Book. It's a Tao, not a Dogma, to me.

  Here's a great debate between two biblical scholars on matters of Biblical error:

• At June 11, 2010, Tim Goree wrote:

  We don't seem to read the Bible differently, we definitely do read it differently, you and I. Those who believe, as I do, that the Bible is the source book of truth inspired by God Himself to be written by many different individuals over time will understand and see things in the Bible that those who don't believe (Dogma is the word you used, and that's okay) won't see. That is to be expected - no problem.

  What my original statement was simply trying communicate was that Voltaire was using a concept in the Bible to try to make a statement, it seems, directly to Christians. He was trying to cleverly use the Bible to show us that we are being hypocritical about the way we live our lives (in general). The problem I was pointing out with this is that he was using the statement from the Bible completely out of context (from a Christian's perspective) so that the entire statement is completely invalid, at least to a Christian.

  It irritates me when someone tries to tritely scold a people group for their actions when they are coming from a completely different world view than that people group, and they don't seem to have tried very hard to understand that people group's world view at all before doing so.

  Your world view, for instance, is very different from mine, which is one of the reasons I subscribe to your blog. There are probably a number of things that I could say about you or the people that you work around that might seem clever to me - understanding the world in my own way - that would likely seem pretty stupid to you, knowing what you know about the people in the part of the world you work in. I don't think there is any difference here.

  I'm not trying to start a theological debate, just pointing out that Voltaire was using a method in his writing that he would likely consider ludicrous if it was turned around and used on him. I think he needs to be more aware of that while he writes - that's all.

  I do appreciate your perspective, and I can agree to disagree with you peacefully. If I couldn't, I wouldn't subscribe to your blog. Thanks for doing what you do!

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2. Voltaire on Superstition, Suicide, and Murder
3. Voltaire: On Fanaticism and Holy Murder
4. Tea Party 1.0: Voltaire on the First Estate