Clay Burell's Library tagged religion →  View Popular

For Mr. Wilson, he cause of the war's prolonged ferocity was not religious fanaticism but dynastic ambition and political fissure. The empire's hundreds of small territories were cash poor. To fight, they assumed impossible debts, adulterated their coinages and triggered a ruinous inflation. Unpaid armies could be neither supplied nor disbanded. They thus remained in the field, nourished on plunder. Starving imperial troops fighting along the Rhine in 1633 devoured their own pack animals. The defenders of Mainz were reduced to eating their boots. More than military tactics, material need drove campaigns as generals sought "fresh" territory to bleed dry. Exhaustion, not victory, ended the war. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) stabilized the borders of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire was preserved but weakened, a relic of Christendom in the dawning age of nation-states.

If there are implied villains in Mr. Wilson's grand tragedy, they are the foreign powers—Sweden and France above all—whose meddling prolonged the war for a generation. But again, their bellicosity was not driven by religious fervor. Gustavus Adolphus is remembered today as the valiant protector of Protestants, but he fought chiefly to seize Baltic lands. He once scoffed that if religion had been his cause, he would have attacked the pope. France's vulpine statesman Cardinal Richelieu, who also did much to perpetuate the cataclysm, is often commended as a political realist amid the unhinged fanatics of the time. But his war for "reasons of state" was no less pitiless for that. Indeed, Mr. Wilson's masterful account of the Thirty Years War is a reminder that war, and peace, are almost never the offspring of conviction alone.

The intelligent design perspective, which is so prominent now in the evangelical church and, of course, is a flashpoint for debates about the teaching of science in schools, is basically that evolution might be OK in some ways, but it can't account for the complexity of things like the bacterial flagellum, which are considered to be irreducibly complex because they have so many working parts and they don't work with any of the parts dropping out, so you can't imagine how evolution could have produced them.

This is showing severe cracks scientifically in that the supposedly irreducibly complex structures are, increasingly, yielding up their secrets, and we can see how they have been arrived at by a stepwise mechanism that's quite comfortable from an evolutionary perspective. So intelligent design is turning out to be -- and probably could have been predicted to be -- a God-of-the-gaps theory, which inserts God into places that science hasn't quite yet explained, and then science comes along and explains them.

I think I would also say intelligent design is not only bad science; it's questionable theology. It implies that God was an underachiever and started this evolutionary process and then realized it wasn't going to quite work and had to keep stepping in all along the way to fix it. That seems like a limitation of God's omniscience.

So science figured out that one way to try to explore spiritual experience and look at the brain mechanics of religious experience is to look at people with temporal lobe epilepsy on the theory that the extreme elucidates the normal. Temporal lobe epilepsy is basically an electrical storm in the brain where all the cells fire together. Usually seizures are really horrible things. I went to a Henry Ford hospital to the epilepsy clinic and it was just -- it's a horrifying experience to watch a seizure. But in a few rare cases, people have ecstatic seizures, and they believe that they are having a religious experience. They may hear snatches of music or words, presumably from their memory bank, and they interpret it as a message from God or the music from the heavenly spheres. They may see a snatch of light and think that that's an angel.

Today a lot of neuroscientists have kind of retrofitted a lot of major religious leaders with temporal lobe epilepsy. Like Saul on the road to Damascus -- was he blinded by God and heard Jesus' voice or did he suffer, as one neurologist said, "visual and auditory hallucinations with photism and transient blindness"? Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, did he see a pillar of light and two angels or did he suffer a complex partial seizure? What about Moses and the burning bush, hearing God's voice?

Now I've got to say, I have a little trouble with this kind of retrofitting, because it's hard to imagine something as debilitating as epilepsy being helpful in writing, say, the bulk of Christian doctrine, as did Paul; guiding a nation through the wilderness for 40 years, as did Moses; or founding one of the three monotheistic religions, as did Mohammed. But I do think that scientists are onto something. I think the temporal lobe may in fact be the place that mediates spiritual experience.

One of the people who convinced me of this is a guy named Jeff Schimmel. Jeff is a writer in Hollywood. He was raised Jewish, never believed in God, had no interest in spirituality. Then a few years ago, nine years ago, when he was 40 years old, he had a benign tumor in his left temporal lobe removed. The surgery was a snap, but a couple of years later, unknown to him, he began to suffer from mini-seizures. He began hearing things and having visions. He remembers twice lying in bed when he looked up at the ceiling and saw a kind of swirl of blue and gold and green all settle into a shape, a pattern. He said, then it dawned on me, it was the Virgin Mary. Then he thinks, why would the Virgin Mary appear to a Jewish guy? But a few other things began to happen to Jeff. He became fascinated with spirituality. He found himself weeping at the drop of a hat when he saw pain in other people. He became fairly obsessed with Buddhism.

But he began to wonder, could his newfound spirituality have anything to do with his brain? So the next time he visited his neurologist, he asked to see a picture of his brain scan, the most recent one. And, in fact, the temporal lobe was very different before and after the surgery. It had kind of pulled away from the skull. His temporal lobe was smaller, a different shape, it was covered with scar tissue, and those changes had begun to spark electrical firings in his brain. He essentially developed temporal lobe epilepsy. But there was no question in his mind that his faith, his newfound love for his fellow man, all of that, came from his brain.

Another key idea that occurs in Deuteronomy is the idea of Israel as
the chosen people. We find it here for the first time. It's an
expression of the particularity of Israel and its unique relationship
with God, and that uniqueness is expressed by this term, bachar,
which means "to elect" or "to choose." This is the first time we
encounter this. Yahweh has chosen Israel in an act of freely bestowed
grace and love to be his special property. Deuteronomy 10:14:

Mark, the heavens to their uttermost reaches belong to the
Lord your God, the earth and all that is on it! Yet it was to your
fathers that the Lord was drawn in His love for them, so that He chose
you, their lineal descendents, from among all peoples--as is now the
case.

Other people drink tea or go jogging; I like to deal with my obsessions through research. In my research, I discovered that Good News Clubs are sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), a worldwide organization founded in Warrenton, Missouri, more than 70 years ago. The declared mission of the CEF is to produce conversion experiences in very young children, and thus to equip them to “witness” for other children. “I was told that a child at five, if properly instructed, can as truly believe as anyone,” said Mr. J. Irvin Overholtzer, who founded CEF in 1937. “I saw that if there was any truth in this statement, there was a door of opportunity lying open before us.” As of 2008, according to CEF Vice President of U.S.A. Ministries Moises Esteves, there were approximately 3,410 Good News Clubs in public K-6 schools around the country.

The CEF labels the Good News Club program as “Bible Study,” but the term “study” in this context is a euphemism for indoctrination in and practice of a particular religion. Once class begins, there is no pretense of analyzing the bible as a literary, cultural, or historical document. The program moves directly to the CEF’s stated purpose, which is “to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, disciple them in the Word of God, and establish them in a Bible-believing church for Christian living.”

Often, instructors arrive on campus before the bell rings. When young children exit their regular classrooms, they find the instructor outside the door bearing treats and trailing balloons. In Valencia, California, a parent of a kindergartener reported that the Good News Club actually started 15 minutes prior to the end of her child’s school day. The instructor, she said, would enter the classroom as kindergarten was winding down and perform a roll call — effectively segregating the children by religious affiliation.

The club’s best promoters, as the CEF well understands, are the children themselves. Participating students are instructed to invite their classmates to join the group, and prizes are often given to those who succeed. The group’s focus, indeed, is concentrated on the “un-churched” children more than it is on those already in the fold. “If every public elementary school student in the United Sates could join a Good News Club,” the CEF Web site states, “we could revolutionize our culture in one generation!”

Schools routinely exclude from their programs entire categories of activity — dancing, martial arts, whatever — for a variety of compelling reasons. In the wake of Milford, however, the one category that cannot be excluded for fear of litigation is religion. In other words, if your school lets in a lacrosse group, it will see itself as practically bound to let in the Good News Club; but if it lets in the club, there is nothing to stop it from excluding lacrosse.

The CEF has been able to achieve this enviable result thanks to the support it receives from a team of aggressive lawyers. CEF is represented by the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a powerful legal arm of the Evangelical movement. The ADF organization is extraordinarily active, interceding in the moral hot-button issues favored by the religious right. In the first three months of 2009, ADF was involved in more than 30 legal actions pertaining to its opposition to same-sex marriage and reproductive freedoms, its support for Christian groups and prayer in the schools, and other causes linked with a right-wing religious agenda.

Are you religious yourself?

I would say yes, but in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all. Or as Martin Heidegger asked, why is there something rather than nothing? There's no answer to that. And yet it hovers behind all of our other answers as an enduring question. For me, it puts a kind of miraculous glow on the world and my experience of the world. So in that sense, I am religious.

What about God? If God is defined as some sort of transcendent reality, do you think God exists?

[Laughs] Frankly, no. But there are so many different conceptions of God. Take, for example, the medieval Christian, Jewish and Islamic mystics. It's a very rich period from the 12th to the 15th centuries. They began to realize that in each of their traditions, it was impossible to say exactly who God was and what he wants and what he's doing. In fact, human intelligence has a certain limitation that keeps it from being able to embrace the infinite or the whole. Therefore, every one of our statements about God and the universe is tinged with a degree of ignorance. I would say that I am deeply moved by the thought of an unnameable mystery. If you then ask me, exactly which mystery are you then referring to? I can't answer. That's as far as I can go. But it's got its grip on me, for sure.

Given what's happening in the world right now, do you think there's a lot at stake in how we talk about religion and belief?

Absolutely. In the current, very popular attack on religion, the one thing that's left out is the sense of religion that I've been talking about. Instead, it's an attack on what's essentially a belief system.

Are you talking about atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?

Yes. There are several problems with their approach. It has an inadequate understanding of the nature of religion. These chaps are very distinguished thinkers and scientists, very smart people, but they are not historians or scholars of religion. Therefore, it's too easy for them to pass off a quick notion of what religion is. That kind of critique also tends to set up a counter-belief system of its own. Daniel Dennett proposes his own, fairly comprehensive belief system based on evolution and psychology. From his point of view, it seems that everything can be explained. Harris and Dawkins are not quite that extreme. But that's a danger with all of them. To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

You have a provocative view of Jesus. You claim that "the vast literature on Jesus is not about anything; that, in fact, it says nothing." That's hard to swallow, given that we've had 2,000 years of inquiry and debate about who the real Jesus was.

The most difficult part of understanding Christianity is trying to get at who Jesus was. The New Testament writers were very confused about who Jesus was and what he was doing. And during the New Testament era, there was great strife among Christians. They were quarreling with each other over a number of questions. Was Jesus really God? Or was he only appearing to be God? Was he simply a person of such perfect morality that God adopted him? Was he created by God after the creation? Where does he belong in the Trinity, Augustine asked in the early 5th century?

Later on, St. Thomas, the great theologian of the Catholic tradition, understood the church as the historical extension of the incarnation. This is a very radical idea. So you know Jesus not through Scripture and not through some kind of internal experience, but through the existence of the church itself. And then you get Martin Luther, who rejected that idea and said the only way you really get to know Jesus is through Scripture. It couldn't be more different than Thomas' conception. Then you get Calvin, a contemporary of Luther's, who understood Jesus strictly in Old Testament terms, as prophet, priest and king. And then you have Soren Kierkegaard, under the influence of Hegel, who saw Jesus as "the absolute paradox," the eternal and the human combined in one historical moment, which is in fact unintelligible. I call this long history of how Jesus has been understood and interpreted "an abundance of Jesuses."

And we're not even up to the 20th century. You could say this convoluted history is a mess. After all, what are Christians supposed to believe? Or you could say all this passion over competing interpretations reveals the vitality of this religion.

What's striking to me is not that Christians keep disagreeing about these things. They can't stop arguing with each other. The issue doesn't go away. You'd think, we can't settle exactly who Jesus is, so let's forget it. But the subject burns. It holds people's attention and requires some kind of response. I think Christianity is the attempt to answer that very question. And that's why I made what may seem to be an outrageous remark: When you look at the way Jesus has been interpreted over the centuries, it says nothing. What do we actually know about Jesus? Well, there's only one historical contemporary reference to Jesus. That's in the historian Josephus. All he said was that Jesus lived, he was loved by his disciples, and was executed for a crime that Josephus doesn't indicate.

Even the Gospels are not contemporary accounts. They were written after the life of Jesus.

They were written many years later. The earliest is the Gospel of Mark, probably written 35 years after the death of Jesus. The Gospel of John is written anywhere from 60 to 65 years later. They were written by Greeks, not by Jews. These were people who couldn't speak Hebrew. They probably had never even been in Jerusalem, and they certainly did not know Jesus personally. They probably knew no one who knew Jesus personally. So if we have to get down to solid fact, what we have is an illiterate young man, a homeless man, who wandered about the area of Galilee -- a backwater in the Roman Empire -- who taught some things, healed some people, and was executed by the Romans. That's about it in terms of historical verification. That's not much.

Isn't this a point of great contention? Some biblical scholars say Paul's letters were written just 15 to 25 years after the death of Jesus. In Corinthians, Paul refers to hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw Jesus after he rose from the dead. And the author of the Gospel of Luke claims that he got his account of Jesus' life from eyewitnesses who were still alive. Christian scholars point to these accounts as evidence that the story of Jesus is grounded in history, not just myth created long after he died.

It is true that Luke says he's basing his Gospel on the many stories being told. Even more interesting, John closes his Gospel with the remark that if all the stories being told about Jesus were written down, the world could not contain them all. John also gives us a very different Jesus from the other Gospels. Some of Paul's letters are the oldest in the New Testament, written before the Gospels, and Paul does refer to Jesus appearing to 500 witnesses. But Paul has nothing to say about the life of Jesus, not a trace of his teachings or his healings. If we had to rely on Paul for a portrait of Jesus, we would know nothing more than Paul's personal reaction to a mysterious event.