Davison's Doodle

Theological Weather Forecasting

Back in April I was watching a storm chaser doing what they do, live, and during a pause he said, “Weather events can cause tragedy.  People think of tornadoes and weather as evil.  They are, it is not, not evil.  This is how the planet balances itself.  We don’t really know why, but it happens.  People are just in the way sometimes of the planet balancing itself.”  This article from Religion Dispatches caught my attention.  I don’t often watch the 700 Club or listen to Focus on the Family where one might readily hear this kind of “punishment theology”, but Robertson and his ilk must be keeping a low profile because the national news media have not booked him or others to talk about the sin of Midwestern states or that of the South that are causing the bad weather and flood waters.

Tornado Hits the Heartland: Is God Punishing Us?
By Jay Michaelson

The city of Joplin, Missouri is in ruins today, the most recent casualty of the worst storm season in more than half a century. In April, tornadoes ripped through Alabama, and swaths of greater Memphis spent part of early May underwater thanks to record-high flooding of the Mississippi river. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was some kind of Divine punishment visited upon the South—and now the Midwest, the American heartland.

Which is funny, because when earthquakes struck Haiti, wildfires burned Israel, and a tsunami drenched much of Indonesia, plenty of religious leaders didn’t know better. Remember? How Pat Robertson blamed the Haitian earthquake on an 18th century pact with the devil? Or when Sephardic Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Ovadia Yosef blamed Israel’s latest bout of wildfires on secular Israelis not keeping the Sabbath? Or how about the time some Christian fundamentalists said that he 2005 tsunami in Indonesia was punishment for, in the words of one, “worldliness, materialism, hedonism, uncleanness and pleasure-seeking”? Where are these self-proclaimed prophets of Godly vengeance now? Do storms only evince heavenly displeasure when they land on blue states?

Sightings

Sam Harris’s Atheism
— Martin E. Marty | May 23, 2011

“Same Old New Atheism,” last week’s clipping about religion sighted in the public sphere (it might as well be labeled “Same New Old Atheism”) is a 6800-word review which places the trendy “New Atheism” in the context of previous efforts to establish scientific positivism in the place of religion. Religion, in turn, is to be done away with, as it’s been done away with for centuries. The review in question is not a fundamentalist screed against defamers of the faithful, but the voice of Rutgers Professor Jackson Lears, whose critics describe him as a “man of the left” in a “magazine of the left.” Lears reviews three books by Sam Harris, who to Lears is a “scientific fundamentalist.” Harris, in turn, has responded that Lears’s review is “idiotic.” It isn’t.

We can only hit some high spots of Lears-on-Harris and hope that readers will all follow through by reading the whole article, one of the best short criticisms yet of the old/new or new/old atheism. Lears locates the genre in a “back-to-1910” cultural fashion in which now “deregulation” and “starvation of the public sector” have returned to the pre-World War I style. The key in philosophy, including manifestly in Harris’s works, “depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes.” The positivists, their outlook revisited by Harris, “assumed that science was the only sure guide to morality, and the only firm basis for civilization.” With them came “pop-evolutionary notions of progress,” “scientific racism and imperialism” and, most measurably, “eugenics” and the like.

Sociologists of knowledge (Karl Mannheim, Peter Berger, Thomas Kuhn and others) countered positivism, but it has come back in the works of authors Lears cites. They were also countered, in turn, by fellow scientists who found it philosophically and scientifically weak. But since 9/11 it is back again in Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and, of course, Harris, who now “press the case against religion with renewed determination and fire.” The Christian Right’s absolutism next provided a fat target, and Islamic Fundamentalism one even fatter. Its presence legitimates torture—in Harris’s books, at least—while “multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance,” writes Harris, hobbles “the West” in its war against “radical Islam.”

Harris argues that to be un-hobbled, the West must reject “both religion and cultural relativism, and [embrace] science as the true source of moral value.” Lears praises sciences but rejects the implicit (and sometimes explicit) metaphysic which the new atheists do not discern in their putatively scientific empirical approach to morality. How Harris roots his metaphysic in brain research, which is his main work, and how Lears criticizes it is a story too complex for this brief article, but is available in Lears’s essay.

The title term “Infidelity,” the colonial and early modern word for atheism, agnosticism, and radical religion through three centuries, was the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation in 1956 in “The Uses of Infidelity.” Protestant conservatives would show how unmoored Christianity and faith in general were when infidels, never great threats on their own, got a hold of them. Now again, it is usually “infidels” who do the most telling reviews of fellow infidels’ books. Conservatives through the decades hollered, and gave those of other faiths and no faiths a potency they had otherwise not known.  Now, again?

References

Jackson Lears, “Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris,” The Nation, May 16, 2011.