UniBrow

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn’t true; I like plenty of things that aren’t true. It’s that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

A new book of her letters … show [Mother Teresa] struggling for decades against disbelief. … That may rattle some believers, but it is a welcome reminder that saints, too, are only human, and that stories of dauntless piety tend to be false.

–The New York Times, Sept. 5, 2007

Ask yourself, when even the doubts of experts are thought to confirm a doctrine, what could possibly disconfirm it?

–Sam Harris, The Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2007

Well, I wouldn’t begrudge the Times editors their point about the humanizing of Mother Teresa. She is very definitely and very considerably humanized by the news of her–let’s call it what it is–panting inability to believe in the Christian god. It’s just that it’s a little bit difficult to see how these revelations could possibly fail to jeopardize her canonization, given the standards of once-upon-a-time (of which more below), and surely the church is–at a minimum–denying that anyone it confers sainthood upon is “only human.” Then, too, it’s dispiriting to see The New York Times joining the spin chorus. Struggles with doubt may indeed make Mother Teresa’s story more moving and render her a more relatable figure; grappling with doubt may even place her in company with St. Augustine and St. John of the Cross. But her apparent inability to shed those doubts separates her from those icons irretrievably. And I would think that this might matter to the Vatican and to ordinary Catholics as well. But standards are slipping everywhere, even in St. Peter’s, and PR sham is the sovereign imperative. It was well known before all this surfaced that Mother Teresa had been placed on a fast track to sainthood by the late Pope John Paul II–a transparently cynical gambit, in Christopher Hitchens’s view, to distract lay Catholics from the child-rape scandal that it nurtured for decades and to give them something positive to rally around. So the Vatican has been unequivocal in its willingness to overlook some of the niceties it once observed–um–religiously in stocking its pantheon, at least in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning international celebrity who carried the white-man’s burden to the Calcutta slums. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anyone if this latest development doesn’t slow things down.

Your dutiful host was raised in the Catholic tradition and found it to be (among other things) superb training for a lifetime of godlessness. I even attended a gender-segregated Catholic high school, where in my sophomore- or junior-year religion course I was told of a religious figure (I cannot remember his name) who had been under consideration for sainthood but was rejected after church officials–for whatever reason–exhumed his body and found him in a position that suggested he had been buried alive. Any chance of canonization ended right there, apparently, because the church couldn’t be sure of the man’s state of mind during those final, desperate, horrifying hours or days while he still lived in the ground. The strongest piety might not be proof against God-denying thoughts under such harrowing circumstances. This is the story we got, at any rate, from the meek and wizened little Christian Brother who taught the class. The case of Mother Teresa isn’t exactly the same as this, of course, but we should remember that God denial counts as blasphemy, and if Teresa didn’t deny God, lamentations like this come awfully close:

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love–and now become as the most hated one–the one–You have thrown away as unwanted–unloved. I call, I cling, I want–and there is no One to answer–no One on Whom I can cling–no, No One.–Alone … Where is my Faith–even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness–My God–how painful is this unknown pain–I have no Faith–I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crows in my heart–& make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them–because of the blasphemy–If there be God–please forgive me–When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven–there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul.–I am told God loves me–and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?

I can’t read these words without sympathizing with the person who wrote them, and even admiring her honesty and courage in committing them to paper, whether or not she ever expected them to become known. But seriously–when it comes to her prospects for sainthood, it doesn’t matter that she ended her days in this state of mind?

Here’s a Time magazine report on the revelation that the late Mother Teresa, who’s been put on a fast track to sainthood by the Vatican boys who decide these things, was tormented for the last several decades of her life by spiritual doubts that look an awful lot like simple unbelief. All this is according to letters M.T. wrote throughout her life, as quoted in a new book titled Come Be My Light. You can’t help feeling for the woman; she must have been completely miserable–and the light it casts both on her and the motivations for her good works (if that’s what they were; see Christopher Hitchens’s The Missionary Position for a very different point of view) must trouble her admirers. Or so I would think–but the spin is on. From the Time article:

Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book “a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life,” and says, “It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone.”

Some have also predictably drawn an analogy with St. John of the Cross–except that Mother Teresa seems never to have emerged from her dark night of the soul as St. John, St. Augustine, and Merton did to find the peace she sought. Hers seems a tale of unrelieved pain, anguish, and disillusionment and nothing at all like ”an autobiography of spiritual ascent.” See for yourself–and here are Hitchens’s and Sam Harris’s reactions. 

There are days when the universe manages not to seem like a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. I’m permitting myself a small degree of encouragement from the interest that the general reading public has demonstrated over the past few years in books that are calling religion to account for its crimes and fatuities. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and now Christopher Hitchens have all moved boatloads of product with texts of this sort. Hitchens’s brand-new God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is No. 3 at The New York Times, and Dawkins’s The God Delusion–which appeared last September–reached the No. 1 slot at the Times and then remained at or near that wintry pinnacle for several weeks. Even now, eight months later, it’s fallen only as far as No. 17. And then what do you know but Jerry Falwell goes tits up, and I’m blown if I don’t notice in the media a somewhat more just appraisal of the reverend’s life and works than I had been bracing for. It’s true we’ve had to rely on Hitchens–both in a Slate column yesterday and also two nights ago on the TV with Gloria Vanderbilt’s boy–to carry the greater part of the load all by himself, but attention to Falwell’s more disgusting public pronouncements, his primitive eschatological lunacy, and general lowbrow hucksterism didn’t seem to be entirely lacking in the mainstream media. I had expected the major organs of American journalism to greet Falwell’s expiration with a wall-to-wall soft-focus affirmation of all that is faith-based–not that there wasn’t plenty of that: see, e.g., yesterday’s New York Times–but I was pleasantly surprised on the whole. Spring is here. The buds are on the trees; the lambs are in the meadow.

And I’m sure I’ll be better tomorrow. Here, meanwhile, is the clip of Hitchens with Anderson Cooper:

And here he is, appearing slightly the worse for drink, having his way with Sean Hannity:

Here’s an infuriating story about Matthew LeClair, a junior in a New Jersey public high school, who tape recorded a history teacher telling his students that they’re going to hell if they don’t believe that Jesus died for their sins, that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark, and that there’s no scientific basis for evolution or the Big Bang theory. The school board has up to this point kept mum about what, if any, disciplinary action it has taken or will take against the teacher. So far it has only removed him from LeClair’s class, and it’s the student who seems to be catching the flak:

Since Matthew turned over the tapes to school officials, his family and supporters said, he has been the target of harassment and a death threat from fellow students and “retaliation” by school officials who have treated him, not the teacher, as the problem. The retaliation, they say, includes the district’s policy banning students from recording what is said in class without a teacher’s permission and officials’ refusal to punish students who have harassed Matthew.

Steven Pinker has been flickering for years somewhere out beyond the circle of my intended reading, roughly since he published The Language Instinct in the late ’90s. (His most recent book is, I believe, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.) Here’s an article he wrote recently for Time on developments in cognitive neuroscience suggesting that consciousness is reducible to the structure and functions of the brain (as opposed, say, to conceiving it as transcending cognitive function and constituting evidence of an eternal soul). Most scientists, Pinker says, now believe

that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices–not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, “the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase ‘the total eclipse of all values’ seem tame.” …

My own view is that this is backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It’s not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings–the core of morality.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people’s sentience becomes ludicrous. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew–or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog–a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.

At one point in Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Žižek quotes from one of Brecht’s ”Herr Keuner” stories, as follows:

Someone asked Herr Keuner if there is a God. Herr Keuner said: I advise you to think about how your behaviour would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided: You need a God.

Žižek goes on to argue that the choice between theism and atheism is an illusion, since the decision itself is “located within the field of belief.” The question of belief is irrelevant for a true atheist, he says, and puts his finger on a frustration I’ve had with all the recent popular attention that atheism has been getting thanks to best-selling books by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, among others, and even with the internet dialogue on belief v. unbelief that has been under way for some weeks now between Harris and Andrew Sullivan. As a practical matter atheism is constrained to define itself against theism, and seems in consequence often to be merely pitching its tent on the vast estate of belief. Harris seems to share that frustration when he says, in Letter to a Christian Nation, that the term atheism shouldn’t even exist–that atheism is “not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world. … No one ever needs to identify himself as a ‘non-astrologer’ or a ‘non-alchemist.’ … Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.” One would like to have no relation to belief, not even a negative one.