The Arrow in Harold’s Eye

I’ve always enjoyed reading history, but have never had the discipline it would take to be a professional historian; I would never be willing to spend the necessary thousands of hours poring over manuscripts in dusty libraries and the like. But increasingly over the years I have been unhappy simply reading the cut-and-dry accounts meant for a general readership or even for, say, undergraduate courses. So I’ve been delving at least a layer or two beneath that, seeking out more specialized books with thick bibliographies, tracking down papers in scholarly journals, getting to know the controversies, getting at least some sense of how history gets written.

Thus it happened that when a few days ago I stumbled upon Frank McLynn’s 1066: The Year of the Three Battles, in which the author boasts of demolishing the schoolboy version of Hastings, I had already read several articles in the Proceedings of the Battle Abbey Conference which touched on several of the precise sources he was dealing with, and could see that his version of events, while well written and plausible, represents after all just as much an oversimplification of the arguments as the schoolboy history – his reliance on the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, and his dismissal of the scene in the Bayeux tapestry traditionally taken to depict Harold grasping the arrow, are positions that have been argued both for and against with a lot more vigor and with citations of a lot more evidence than you would know from just reading McLynn.

Conservative Christians often accuse opponents of treating the Bible with greater skepticism than they do any other comparable book. Those who say this probably just don’t know how skeptical the scholarly-minded are towards all sources.

Our friends the Turks

are having another of their recurring crises of Secularism.

You see they have a proudly, militantly secular state, founded in the 1920’s by Ataturk, who strictly limited public expressions of religious faith, de-Arabized the language, etc. As a military man he naturally had a strong authoritarian outlook, which he justified on the grounds that as long as the people were largely uneducated and under the influence of the mullahs any attempt at democracy would end up putting reactionaries back in power. In this and in other matters (like the organization of the economy) he claimed to follow the French revolutionary tradition, with its strongly centralized State.

After the death of Ataturk the dictatorship gave way to an elected government, but the people kept electing parties to power which were, though as a rule not religiously authoritarian, at least softer on religion than Ataturk was. So repeatedly the Old Guard, which still dominates the military, judiciary and civil service, has intervened in the process, overthrowing governments when they see fit.

Meanwhile the public has gotten more and more fed up with the corruption and inefficiency of the secularist parties.

So: what we get is violations of human rights and democracy in the name of secularism, while on the other side the Islamists are actually now the modernizers, trying to make the country conform to Western standards of governance.

Very odd.

Personally, I sympathize with the Islamists in this situation. Banning head-scarves from public institutions and functions is just stupid. I will defend the Islamists against militant secularism unless it becomes clear that the only alternative is in fact a return to religious authoritarianism. Given a choice between authoritarianisms, I’d prefer the secular kind, because I think at least I could learn to speak its language and deal with it. The more corrupt the better, in fact; corruption gives people some wiggle-room. Crooks can be more pragmatic, better at compromise than self-righteous saints.

But in Turkey it’s the secularists who are more afflicted with self-righteousness.

Religion in today’s Times

Steinfels covers the Secret Gospel of Morton Smith. Seems there are three new books out about it, one defending and two debunking. All the usual arguments. Paleography, anachronism, clues pointing back to Smith…

Stanley Fish on teaching the Bible in school. Time had a cover story you see, at least for their US edition; overseas they put the Taliban on the cover. There’s a dKos diary today blasting the magazine’s treatment of the topic. But as to the Fish op ed, it is quite incoherent, accusing the Bible-as-literature and other approaches that bracket truth-claims of “tearing the heart out of religion” because after all, truth-claims are what it is all about, at least for “religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam.” If you’re going to teach religion without taking truth-claims seriously, why teach it at all? he asks.

Where to begin.

First of all, what would Fish have us do? Getting into the actual truth of religious truth-claims is clearly something we do not want our public schools doing, so an ethnographic approach is the best we can expect: teaching the objective fact that certain truth-claims are or have been made, without getting into discussions of their validity.

Why bother? Because the subjet is out there. Not only do lots of people take these things seriously, but there is a lot of art and literature and general culture which are incomprehensible otherwise.

But the whole relationship between “religion” and its truth-claims, even the very coherence of “religion” as a category is something I have serious doubts about. I am not at all sure it makes sense to talk of “religions like x, y, x” because it first needs to be examined in what way they are alike, or not alike, and which of the similarities or differences we consider significant. Which in turn depends on our purposes.

Yes, it is a fact that people generally treat certain clusters of cultural phenomena as parallel things called “religions.” That fact can be taught. But the question of whether the classification is coherent is distinct from the fact that people make it, and needs to be examined separately.

Then, there is the confusion between the mass culture phenomenon of, say, Christianity – the large share of the world’s population which identifies with it in one or another way or form – and the specific sets of doctrines which have been put forward as “essential” to it.

I am as always suspicious of “essentials…”

But in any case the existence of the broader cultural phenomenon is an important objective fact, which surely can and should be taught as a fact, without making any assumptions about which if any of the purported “essentials” really are essential, or how many of the mass of identifiers really understand or assent to any such claimed “essential.”

It is all too complex for Fish’s rhetoric. Maybe too complex for High School also… but what can we do?

Religion Today

The Times reports that Sikhs in India are upset because large numbers of their young men have been getting their hair cut and abandoning the turban. Turbans are inconvenient for sports, it takes too long to wind the long hair up and oil and pin it every day, they just don’t want to stand out anymore.

This in Amritsar, not just in more cosmopolitan places like Delhi.

Sikh heritage groups are taking urgent action, giving courses in traditional grooming etc.

Are those efforts working?

Not according to Namrata Saluja, manager of the Color Lounge hairdressers in central Amritsar, which every week turns away young Sikh men who want their long hair cut off. “Kids come in groups,” she said. “There’s a lot of peer pressure. But we won’t unturban them here. We don’t want to be responsible for that upheaval in their families.”

Instead, the barbers advise the boys to cut their own hair at home and come back for styling.

“It’s usually college-going students who are more worried about looking good than about their spiritual identity,” Ms. Saluja said. “It’s a thrilling moment for them. You can see a flush on their faces. Taking eight or nine meters of cloth off your head releases a certain amount of pressure.”

But while it is good for business, as a religious Sikh she feels ambivalent about the trend. “At the end of the day, it is a bit hurtful,” she said. “It means one more identifiable Sikh is missing.”

“Spiritual identity” is of course a term I take issue with. It’s more a matter of tribal or ethnic identity. People followed the teachings of Sant Kabir and Guru Nanak long before the “5 K” uniform was adopted, and they can still do so if they so choose.

This is something I want to write about at length. We too easily attribute real religious faith, spirituality, understanding and assent to the tenets of their tradition, to people who adhere to the tradition merely because they were born into it.  For most people “faith in God” really amounts to faith in whoever it is that told them about God…

Meanwhile, in Israel, the Green Leaf Party has acknowledged that marijuana is not kosher le-Pesach. It seems the Rabbis classify cannabis seeds with beans and other potentially fermentable items.

My latest must-read

(seen in the HUP display room)

Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible

- goes into some questions we don’t normally think about: what was a “book” in the pre-modern world? How was writing used, how did things come to be written? And what does this tell us about the meaning of what did get written? What can we infer about the Bible from what is known about the uses of writing in other, contemporary cultures, especially Mesopotamian?

He says, the “book” as we know it, a thing to be taken home (or at least sat down with) and read, was a creation of the Hellenistic period. Before that time writing was always connected to performance, i.e. recitation.  The Bible thus should be seen as a part of the “flow of tradition.”

A definite must-read. As soon as I’ve got two or three other things out of the way.

Today’s conundrum for conservatives

Reported in today’s NYT:

A school principal in Alaska suspended a student for carrying a banner, at the procession of the Olympic torch through town, saying “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” So of course the Bush administration is in favor of the school district’s action, and the ACLU is against.

So what else is new? Well, some of the conservative “religious freedom” groups realized that any power given to school administrators to censor student expression could be used to censor religious expression as well, so they have come down on the side of the student.

One factor in the arguments is that a provision in the No Child Left Behind law apparently jeopardizes federal funding for schools that do not convey a consistent message opposing drug use. More broadly, the principal and her defenders argue that a school has a right to control student speech in the interest of the school’s educational mission. This has the religious folks very worried.

And just yesterday there was a story in which a law meant to ensure equal treatment for religious student groups has turned out to require equal treatment for the Gay/Straight Alliances too.

I love it.

Today’s religion columns -

Steinfels in the Times writes about Charles Taylor, the new Templeton winner, and about the awkwardness of the terms “progress in religion” and “discoveries about spiritual realities.”

Rich Barlow in the Globe discusses a theologian named Kirk B. Jones, who challenges the Purpose-Driven Life idea. He posits a loving God who, rather than having a fore-ordained plan for us, wants us to explore and make our own choices in life and is happy with whatever we choose. (What becomes of sin then? Hopefully it’s out the window altogether…)

Last night

at King’s – specifically the chapel in the Parish House; the King’s Chapel House Chapel? – Branden gave his psychological profile of UUs.

It incorporated much the same material he used in his talk at GA in 2003. It was good to see again his finding that UUs compare favorably in thrill-seeking with a sample of canoers and kayakers.

The question: how do we grow? Do we try to bring in more people like us, open-minded friendly types, predominantly well-educated professionals (and nearly all white), or do we try to become a “world religion” by changing drastically into something more ordinary people will find appealing?

I found particularly interesting the way personality factors sort among UUs, fundies, liberal Christians and generic folk: we don’t share the freedom from neuroticism that both Christian types have, we’re not as outgoing as the liberal Christians but of course we way outdo everyone in openness to experience… And, the breakdown of subgroups: the Pagan and “other” UUs are way out ahead on some factors vis-a-vis the humanists and theists.

Also picked up a copy of the Voice, a dissident publication that goes on and on about how cluelessly bureaucratic 25 Beacon is but I’m not quite clear yet on what it offers as an alternative…

So far no sign of the promised snow. But the sky is gray enough…

Weather

rainy but still warmish.

Last night attended the first of this year’s Minns Lectures by Branden Thornhill-Miller. Covered a broad range of findings and theory regarding the Psychology of Religion.

Odd factoid: some of the prayer-and-healing studies seem to indicate that people who know they are being prayed for have more complications than others. He speculates that it may be because they are thinking “Things must be bad if I’ve got so many people praying for me.”

Are we “Wired for God” or simply wired to imagine personal beings where none are present?

Tonight: the psychology of us UUs.

My problem with faith

(apart from my not seeming to have been born with any, that is)

is that it seems incapable of answering the vital question, “Is the object of my faith the right one?”

Or rather, faith by its nature always answers “Yes,” which is worse than not having an answer at all.

Rather than the Will to Believe, I will, like Betrand Russell, go with the Will to Find Out.