Christianity as a personality cult

Christianity is, at root, a personality cult. Its central message is the story of a person, Jesus, whom Christians believe is also the Christ (from a Greek word meaning ‘Anointed One’): an aspect of the God who was, is and ever shall be, yet who is at the same time a human being, set in historic time. Christians believe that they can still meet this human being in a fashion comparable to the experience of the disciples who walked with him in Galilee and saw him die on the Cross. They are convinced that this meeting transforms lives, as has been evident in the experience of other Christians across the centuries. 

from A history of Christianity: The first three thousand years (Penguin Books Limited: 2009), by Diarmaid MacCulloch

religious freedom in Moldova: very good for the Orthodox Christians, worse for Pentecostals and Catholics and very bad for Jehovah Witnesses and Muslims...

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the State Department has released its annual International Religious Freedom Report for the year 2011. 

In the case of Moldova the report confirms two trends:

- a significant bias of the Moldovan state in favor of the Eastern-Orthodox Christians. 

- although the Government has taken steps to improve the situation of non-Orthodox religious groups, being a Jehovah Witness, Muslim, Pentecostal or Catholic in Moldova still means that you are more likely to be abused verbally or physically, your right to build a church/kingdom hall/mosque to be denied and your property confiscated by the Soviet state not to be returned. 

Racism is bad but sexism is ok

The Guardian tells the story of the judicial process that opposes the Chelsea captain John Terry and the QPR's defender Anton Ferdinand over a supposedly racist incident that took place during the match between the two teams on 23 October 2011.

Back then, Terry has shouted to Ferdinand: fuck off, fuck off…fucking black cunt, fucking knobhead.

A first moment of stupidity: Terry admitted he was using racist insults but he said he only did so “sarcastically”. As if sarcasm justifies the act of insulting.

A second moment of stupidity: the very target of racist insults, Anton Ferdinand said that being called “a cunt” was fine, “but when someone brings your colour into it, it takes it to another level and it’s very hurtful”. As if using pejoratively the name of female body parts is acceptable while mentioning skin color is not.

No, our dear Anton, racial insults are not more serious or more grave than sexist abuses. Nor does racism justify sexism. Both stay at the same level of unacceptability.

I hope your wife/girlfriend will sue you.

getting to school in Colombia

Every day, Daisy Moro and her brother risk their life to get to school, by flying high across a canyon attached only to a thin steel cable. 

Link to the complete story in The Guardian 

sexualization of beer drinking

Images from a menu in a cafe in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova.

Utopia in the Soviet Evangelical Movement

The following year, armed with a permit from the Commissariat of Agriculture,
Prokhanov and another engineer led an expedition to the Altai region
near Mongolia where, after enlisting the assistance of experts from
Tomsk University, they proceeded to survey various potential sites for a grand
evangelical ideal settlement, the City of the Sun or Evangel’sk (both terms
were used). With local government representatives looking on, they planted
three cedars and three maples to mark the chosen spot. Plans progressed after
their return to Leningrad, and in the spring of 1928 the same team set
off for the Bethany commune in Tver’ Province to study in detail whether it
might serve as a model for organizing the new Christian society.
The City of the Sun was never built, for by 1927–28 the tide was turning
against religious organizations, independent public initiatives, and dreamers
whose visions could not be channeled to the party’s cause. But the Evangel’sk
proposal stands out as a prime example of the possibilities for exploring
alternative models of social transformation in the early Soviet era. At this
very time the Party press was full of projects to reconstruct not just the structure
of everyday life (byt) but citizens’ whole worldview along Communist
lines. Visionary town planners were also imagining new kinds of cities that
would express the collective spirit of a radically transformed humanity.120
Here was Prokhanov, proposing to bring a Christian perspective to this
utopian thinking—and receiving government assistance to do so!

from Russian Baptists And Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929, By Heather J. Coleman, Indiana University Press: 2005.

politics and religion

Emilio Gentile, the author of Politics as Religion (2006) in an interview:

I think this is a very dangerous period, because whenever politics is allied, fused or confused with religion to impose a new rule on man’s life, freedom is at stake. They both express human needs. But when politics and religion join forces, there is always a danger to human dignity and human freedom. Today a lot of people think you have to unify politics and religion to save the world. Whenever this happens, you can have lasting peace, but not freedom, not the dignity of human beings. It’s not my prophecy, but my fear for the future, looking at the experience of the past.

in defence of social sciences

Charles Lane has written an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he argues that the NSF should cut funds for social sciences:

Though quantitative methods may rule economics, political science and psychology, these disciplines can never achieve the objectivity of the natural sciences. Those who study social behavior — or fund studies of it — are inevitably influenced by value judgments, left, right and center. And unlike hypotheses in the hard sciences, hypotheses about society usually can’t be proven or disproven by experimentation. Society is not a laboratory.
The NSF’s budget includes $247.3 million for social sciences. At a time of trillion-dollar deficits, and possible cuts to defense, food stamps and other vital programs, this is a luxury we can live without. Cut the NSF’s entire social science budget. Use half the savings for hard science and the rest to reduce the deficit.

Is there a need to write an apology for sociology as a social science? I don't think so. As long as sociology empowers - as it did for Martin Luther King Jr., BA in Sociology, informs - look at any poll from the Pew Research Center, challenges - go to a meeting of the World Social Forum and provides insights about the world we live in, I am confident in its future.
To oppose soft to hard sciences represents a meaningless activity. It means not to know what a social science is, what constitutes its field of study and how social actors make sense of the developments in social sciences in order to understand and change the social world.
At the same time, I think, Charles Lane is not familiar with the "objectivity of the natural sciences" either. Even a superficial reading of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or a distant familiarity with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would provide him with the understanding that science in general is a human enterprise subject to errors and limitations.
Further, I think society is a laboratory. Not in the sense that you can operate with people as with stones or rats, but in the sense that society represents in many ways series of patterns of action and interaction that repeat themselves or vary over time. Institutions, inequalities, relations of class, gender and race, all of them are subject to these processes of reproduction and variance. A laboratory existing in the real time. As for the ethical concerns related to scientific practices, that what IRBs are for.
Finally, a somewhat personal point. The argument of sacrificing social sciences to other needs - technology, defence, food resembles the Soviet argument about the need to ignore social sciences as bourgeois (i.e. ideologically biased, as Charles Lane suggests) and to focus efforts on the space race, the factories and the huge nuclear arsenal. The end of that story is well known - unable to communicate with its own society and to understand its tensions, the Soviet Union simply collapsed. And its citizens remained as hungry and defenceless as they were before.



Here is an answer from the Pol Sci community. 

Week-end readings 1

But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness.

MONA ELTAHAWY in The Foreign Policy.

The secular age, then, is characterized by the fact of pluralism—an irreducible pluralism of beliefs, values, commitments. Yet we secular moderns also give special primacy to freedom of religion. Freedom of religion is standardly presented as the archetypical liberal right. So the paradox is this: how (and why) do we protect freedom of religion in an age where religion is not special?

Cécile Laborde on the Immanent Frame.

The investigative website Mediapart published what it called"compelling new evidence" that the Libyan regime decided to help finance Sarkozy's successful election campaign in 2007. A document that it said was signed by Gaddafi's foreign intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, stated that the regime had approved a payment of €50m (£40m). 

 Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian.

When you look at America, you have to concede that we have failed. Most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today than he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding – half a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously – when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working. We also have to ask of the German system whether it has been delivering. I haven’t studied all the data, but my impression is no. I don’t want to talk about GDPanymore, I want to talk about what is happening to most citizens.

 Joseph Stieglitz in The European.

social sciences and humanism

Few of the social science theories we employ in our disciplines model human beings in ways that justify for account for ... humanistic moral and political beliefs. Few representations of the human in social science theories make it at all clear why such objects should be bearers of rights, equality, or self-determination. If anything, much theory portrays humans as essentially governed by external social influences, competing socially for material resources, strategically manipulating public presentations of self, struggling with rivals for power and status, cobbling identities through fluid assemblies of scripted roles, rationalizing actions with post hoc discursive justifications, and otherwise behaving, thinking, and feeling in ways that are commonly predictable by variable attributes and categories according to which their lives can be broken down, measured, and statistically modeled. Perhaps all this is true. But that picture does not obviously justify belief in human rights, social justice, equality, tolerance, and emancipation.

Christian Smith talks  in What is a Person? about the tension between the ideal of objectivity in social sciences and the moral appeal they should contain.

Ceddo (1977) by Ousmane Sembene

Just entered an African-movie mood.

Ceddo (1977) by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene tops the list.

The best and shortest description of the movie belongs to Mark Leeper: a very big film on a very small scale. Put differently: an Akira Kurasawa movie on the scale of a village. A micro-epic. 

The movie tells the story of an African tribe forced to covert to Islam. A small group of rebels - the Ceddo - refuses to follow the majority and decides to keep alive their traditions. 

It is not God that makes people human, says one of the rebels.

It is Him, argues the imam. And actually, if you don't recognize Allah you are dogs that should be killed.

But we have our own traditions and beliefs, continues the rebel.

It doesn't matter.

They should be killed, tells the imam to his followers. 

(a very personal and liberal narration of the movie). 

Don't forget the Catholics. They are watching on the margins, they are selling wine and guns to the natives. They are buying slaves and baptize them thereafter. 

In the end, some of them are killed. The king, because the law of Allah does not allow two different authorities (a religious and a secular one) to reign in the community. Catholics, because a village is too small to accommodate two Deities. The imam himself got killed. For the power of blood is stronger than the appeal of religious texts. 

Other people choose the exile. The movie has a sad end. 

Here a review from the New York Times. 

A Poem I Wrote Standing Up-Indictment by Blessing Musariri

We are proud to be Africans on distant shores,
learning ancient tongues, fighting for their survival,
while forgetting our own.
We adopt new inflections
and sing-song ways of speaking
to camouflage our origins,
hiding from the tainted brush.
We are the new Celts – darker, more robust.
We sanction our memories of sun and hunger
and hopeful hopelessness.
We unlearn our songs and disappear through our children –
the pristine generation, unmarked by unpopular citizenry.
We are not proud. We are not Africans.


source.

Atheism without Dawkins and Khrushchev

Alain de Botton, the acclaimed author of “The Consolations of Philosophy” has written another book, “Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion”. This one could have easily been called The Consolations of Religion.

The similarity between these two books lies in the common approach used by the author. In the first book he has tried (and has succeeded!) to go across a good deal of philosophy and to extract from it ideas, concepts and role models that could be applied to the everyday life and its problems such as Unpopularity, Not having Enough Money, Frustration, Inadequacy, a broken Heart and Difficulties.

Now he proceeded in the same way with religion – he reads it not as a compendium of cosmological truths or exact depictions of alternative worlds (paradise/hell), but as a powerful source of solutions to the difficulties we encounter in our daily lives: loneliness, quest for community, moral support, role models and inspiration.

Taken this way, argues Botton, religion represents a useful strategy to be used along our secular ways – science, technology – in order to create harmony, mutual understanding and ethical guidance.

Botton’s approach is quite simple: he makes religion (previously philosophy) accessible for the average Joe.

But to be fair, he has also another reader in mind: the militant atheists who dismiss religion entirely, in the name of science, technology, psychiatry or common sense. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and to a lesser extent Bill Maher or George Carlin would qualify for this category.

To be fair, Botton’s way of approaching religion is also biased: he sees in it only the bright sides while putting aside the dark ones. For example, the intense feeling of community that religion provides for its members is almost always accompanied by a feeling of exclusion and sometimes even hatred for the non-members or for the members of other religious groups.

One of the greatest points of the book is to demonstrate how inappropriate for social harmony and community our secular ways of living are.

Universities have long ago abandoned the idea of being not merely transmitters of knowledge and skills, but also educators of citizens and moral persons. More sermon-style lectures, suggests Botton.

Art has also renounced to preach or to teach what a good life is and has made a virtue from being non-engaged. Art should be used as a teacher. Religious art is an example of how to do it.

Public spaces are arranged in a way that helps separate human beings instead of putting them together. Airports or train stations, for example, with their huge crowds of anonymous persons going to or coming from somewhere represent an illustrative example of this tendency: “ they conspire to project a demeaning picture of our identities, which undermines our capacity to hold on to the idea that every person is necessarily the centre of a complex and precious individuality. It can be hard to stay hopeful about human nature after a walk down Oxford Street or a transfer at O’Hare.”

To these Botton opposes the solidarity and fraternity encountered in a church. Recently Botton has gone so far as to argue that we need to erect an atheist temple!

Food, another great unifier, has been transformed into a great divider: “The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company – cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants – but what is significant is the almost universal lack of venues that help us to transform strangers into friends…The focus is on the food and the décor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections.” Ritual and religious food consumption is anything but anonymous, argues Botton. In religion food creates and maintains community.

There is, in the book, an implicit critique of militant atheism, the one that believes people are just blinded by religion and once the “veil of lies” is destroyed religious beliefs will just disappear. As if, the fact that religious cosmology does not fit into Einstein’s relativity theory or its cosmology cannot be integrated with the theory of the Big Bang, is somehow enough to erode faith.

Religion, as Alain de Botton convincingly shows, operates at many levels: on the individual psychological, on the societal, on the communal, on the spatial, on the cosmic, on the ethical and on the ontological levels.

The failure of the Soviet anti-religious propaganda could prove instructive to defend Botton’s point of view. Here are two examples.

In the novel “Sowers of seed” (russ. Сеятели) written by Mikhail Gh. Ciubotaru, a Communist activist is confronted with the fact that the entire village has gone to the cemetery in order to honor their dead. When he tries to help the people put the cemetery in order, the local party boss admonishes him by pointing out that to encourage cemetery-going contradicts the Communist policy of eradicating religion. The activist answers: I thought it is good to take care of the dead. I also believe you cannot just destroy the church and not to replace it with something at least as meaningful.

The second example comes from the Soviet anti-religious movie “Тучи над Борском” (Clouds over Borsk, 1960), where a young pioneer discovers that a colleague of her is a believer. Shocked and in tears, the girl points out to the deficiencies of the militant atheism of the Soviet state: We do not have a spiritual approach to our fellow citizens! (russ. "Нету у нас душевного подхода к человеку.")

As long as secular science is not able to offer role models, ethical systems, guidance in everyday life and a sense of community, the appeal of religion will be still alive, and its various functions still useful.

To sum: Alain de Botton’s book represents a wonderful atheist apology of religion.