why I didn't include a love interest in my nanowrimo novel

So I just finished reading a novel that might've been just about perfect if not for the fact that the most prominent female character -- and one of the only female characters to appear throughout the whole book rather than in a scene or two -- is also:

a) one of the least developed characters in the book

b) plot-wise, mainly serves as an objective sounding board for the protagonist (though there are several other better-developed male characters who can and do serve this purpose)

c) repeatedly and primarily described in terms of her breasts

d) in the end, seems to be there to assure us that this man is a heterosexual, by giving him the opportunity to have heterosexual sex over the course of a plot in which sex is totally unnecessary.

This isn't a pulp or noir or detective story where genre tropes are informing this choice. And nothing would justify the first point anyway. It was enough for me to deduct a star in my Goodreads rating -- it doesn't help that there was such a dearth of female characters in general -- and would've been more if Goodreads did half-stars.

It got me thinking about the decision-making processes I had gone through recently in National Novel Writing Month this past November.

The first novel I finished -- after the usual years-since-childhood of starting many novels, getting a few pages or many brainstorming pages into them, and then moving on -- was a historical novel about the life of Jesus, during National Novel Writing Month many years ago. It's a good way to get over the mental hump of novel-writing: the process of constructing a beginning, middle, and end, developing an idea that is significantly longer than that of a short story, getting through the challenges of Act II, and so on. It makes you keep writing. I've written a good number of novels since, published a few, I did what I wanted to do: I learned how to get it done.

I hadn't written one in a while, so since my fiction writing agenda in 2015 was very informed by "going back to the beginning" -- writing stories in the genres where I started 25 years ago, etc -- I thought it would be a good time to do Nanowrimo again, so I did, and I got it done.

My 2015 novel takes place in an alternate 21st century where aquatic aliens landed on Earth in the early 20th century and colonized the deep sea. Due to the differences in living environments, contact since then has been sporadic and difficult, but the course of the 20th century unfolds differently. My protagonist, Shout, begins the story as a member of a church that was founded in 1970, a syncretic religion combining elements of Christianity and Judaism with the religion of the aliens, inspired by surprising coincidences in the aliens' scripture. In the 21st century, that religion falls apart when it'd discovered that the alien colonists consider their scripture a hoax, invented by a separate race of alien overseers and delivered to them sometime in their past. The story is in large part about how Shout deals with the dissolution of a religion he has spent more than half of his life in, and which was the center of his social and cultural world.

I decided Shout should be in his early 40s for two simple reasons: it's roughly my age, which makes it easy to relate, and since this is a new enough religion that most members were converts, it meant he had been a member long enough that the loss would be significant. But this brought up a serious question: should he be in a relationship?

If he's in a relationship with a fellow member of the church, then I'm writing about the effect of this church's dissolution on two people, not one, and of the effect they have on each other if and when they don't respond exactly the same way. That's an interesting story, but less introspective, less Dark Night of the Soul, than the one I had in mind, though I may always change my mind in revision. If he's in a relationship with someone who isn't and has never been a member of the church, the frictions might be even more difficult -- he'd be living with someone who might on some level be relieved that this religious difference was going away, or might expect him to give her religion (or lack thereof) a shot. Again -- interesting story, but didn't feel focused on the material I wanted.

So I established a breakup in the recent past as a result of his girlfriend leaving the church before he's ready to do so. The breakup is recent enough that he's not on the market.

What I didn't want to do was include a love interest that he meets over the course of the story -- a love interest who exists not because that's what the story is about, but because that's the arbitrary way to include a prominent female character, or because it's somehow necessary to establish the heterosexual red-bloodedness of the protagonist even in a story in which sex has no plot relevance.

On the one hand, that's one reason why, less than two weeks later, the love interest in this book I've just read stood out so much. On the other, the only reason I made this decision in the first place is because I was aware of how common that trope is. The interesting roles, the plot-moving roles -- the protagonist, the antagonist, the obstacle in this chapter, the person who needs to be convinced in that chapter, the ally from an unexpected place in this other chapter, the confidante over here, bonding over war stories over there, the mentor -- these roles all get filled by men, and then it feels weird to have a book that's just men (maybe it's a little gay, maybe they'll bump into each other backstage when they're getting dressed), so maybe a female victim is introduced in order to be avenged, or maybe a woman is introduced for men to fight over, or maybe a woman is introduced in order to sleep with. It's enough just to include them, right?

And even when it's not that bad, this "including a love interest just because for some reason a protagonist is supposed to have a love interest" trope has always felt lazy to me. There are so many other ways people fit together.

Just some Sunday morning thoughts.

recent reading: theology in the context of world christianity

I think this is the last of these for now, though of course if I don't blog about something else before the next relevant book I finish reading, that will prove wrong.

Theology in the Context of World Christianity:

This is a book for theology students, and Tennent is not only an orthodox Christian -- which I am not, at least in some respects that orthodox Christians would find important -- he is a relatively conservative one, and his skepticism where progressive Christianity is concerned is frequently clear. Nevertheless, that doesn't take anything away from the many valid points he has to make about the growth of Christianity in what this book calls the "Majority World," which you may more familiarly know as the Third World and which in my encyclopedia work is often called the Global South.

I've blogged about this book before, last week. Moving on from there:

"These new Christians believe the Bible [which is to say, incline more toward literalism and authoritarianism], are Christ-centered, and are supernaturalistic ... in contrast to their Western counterparts, they have 'a much greater respect for the authority of scripture' and 'a special interest in supernatural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions, and healings.' They also believe in the 'continuing power of prophecy.'"

While on the one hand this rise sounds similar to the religious revivalism that punctuated American religious history until culminating in the takeover of American Protestantism by charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical, and fundamentalist elements, the important context here is that these are "revived" Christians, these are converted Christians, Christians living in cultures much more religiously pluralistic than the United States, Christians who have chosen this flavor of Christianity over other religions, rather than simply over other flavors of Christianity. The religious history of the United States is so incredibly and improbably diverse within the bounds of Judeo-Christianity that it is easy for Americans to lose sight of how different Christian life is when you have, instead, many religions and fewer variations within Christianity.

"Five trends in the theology of Majority World Christians:

"1: These believers accept the authority of Scripture and, by Western standards, hold a theology considered conservative, orthodox, and traditionalist;

"2: Majority World Christians are more likely to be morally and ethically conservative;"

And yet ...

"3: These new, younger churches are more likely to be sensitive to the Christian responsibility to address issues related to poverty and social justice;

"4: These younger churches are experienced at articulating the uniqueness of the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism;

"5: Majority World Christians are more likely to grasp the corporate (not just individualistic) dimensions of the teachings of the New Testament."

"These younger churches are experienced at articulating the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism. Many of the younger churches are springing up within the larger context of the sometimes dominating presence of some non-Christian religion, such as Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. ... They often approach the continuities with less defensiveness while, at the same time, are surprisingly frank and candid about the glaring discontinuities that inevitably arise when other religions fail to recognize the true dignity of Jesus Christ."

"Many of these new Christians cannot be easily categorized under any of the traditional and familiar headings of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. These Christians had no part in the European 'protest,' so it is difficult to call them Protestant. They are not related to the pope or the magisterium in Rome, so it is difficult to call them Roman Catholic. They are not submitted to the authority of any of the Eastern patriarchs, so it is difficult to call them Eastern Orthodox."

To be fair, this is true for many, many Christian movements in the United States from the 19th century onward, with the Latter Day Saints, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and aforementioned fundamentalists and evangelical movements as the obvious examples. Nevertheless there is a good point to be made here, it has just been worded poorly: these younger "Majority World" churches are in many cases independent or have only tenuous formal connections to western ecclesiastical organizations.

"The delegates to the Council of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon were seeking to be faithful to the hundreds of Christological 'pieces' found in the texts of Scriptures. It was their unenviable task to put the whole 'picture' of Christ together for the very first time in such a way as to find a perfect match for every piece. ... The proceedings of these councils did more to declare which pieces were not true pieces of the puzzle and should be discarded, then to provide a final, definitive statement of Christology that would silence all future discussions."

First of all, see what I mean about orthodox Christianities defining themselves by opposition, vis-a-vis what I mentioned in passing in my Qur'an in Conversation post? Second, this is mainly a reminder to myself to expand my reading to include more in-depth reading about the Council of Chalcedon, which lies just outside the time period I have usually focused on.

"Another example is reflected in the insightful question about Chalcedon raised by Millard Erickson: 'How do we integrate and understand a Christology 'from above' with a Christology 'from below'? In other words, the Council of Chalcedon was looking at the Christological puzzle from the upper side, that is, from the divine perspective of God's initiative in becoming a man. They did not deliberate or discuss how the incarnation is understood from the perspective of, for example, fifth-century Persian Christians who, at the time of this council, were being persecuted for their faith in Christ.

"Even these few examples reveal two important insights about Chalcedonian Christology. First, even if we accept, as the sensus communis has, that every single piece Chalcedon placed into the Christological puzzle was a perfect fit and every single piece they rejected was truly worth rejecting, we must still recognize that the puzzle is much bigger than Chalcedon or any other council could fully tackle. Second, as it turns out, the puzzle is more complex than an ordinary one because each piece of the puzzle seems to have two sides: an 'upper side' revealing God's perspective on Christ (eternality, Trinity, Son of God, etc) and an 'under side' revealing the human perspective on Christ (teacher, healer, friend of sinners, etc)."

"African Christology tends to be more holistic in the way it integrates the person and work of Christ. Its view of the person of Christ is constantly informed by what Christ has accomplished in history and what he continues to do in the world. There is a deep concern in African Christology to demonstrate that Christ is no stranger to the practical realities of poverty, illiteracy, ethnic tensions, colonialism, dictatorship, illness, disenfranchisement, and suffering, all of which Pobee and Akinade have aptly called Africa's 'multiheaded hydra.'"

"The second implication of Africans' starting their Christology 'from below' is that its overall approach is more holistic and integrative in explaining how the person and work of Christ apply to the whole of African life. ... The early preaching [by European missionaries] did not, for example, point out that Jesus was Lord of the crops or the one who provided protection during dangerous journeys or who assisted in the safe birth of a new baby. The nineteenth-century missionaries did not generally come from Christian traditions that practiced casting out demons or were accustomed to praying for God to bring in the crops, except perhaps during times of extreme drought. In short, the Jesus Christ who was preached was often a truncated Christ, not measuring up fully to the biblical picture of Jesus's life, work, and ministry."

"The second distinctive feature of African Christology is its conscious awareness of traditional Christological formulations from the West. Unlike Western theologians who often write in isolation from the wider global context, African theologians are keenly aware of the historic Western Christological focus on precise philosophical and metaphysical questions concerning the person of Christ. It is true that some African theologians are critical of the way the councils produced 'metaphysical rather than biblically functional images of Jesus,' or complain that the historic formulations are 'static,' and fail to 'touch the souls' of Africans or relate to the 'concrete lives of people.' But the overall tenor of African Christology is marked by a profound respect for historic Christian confessions.

"In fact, John Pobee encourages emerging African theologians to listen carefully to those who have gone before us so that we 'do not go hopelessly wrong.' He reminds Africans that they are not 'starting from scratch,' but that they must write in the context of the depositum fidei that should inform all African Christology. John Onai-yekan calls the classical formulations 'valid reference points' and argues that every African Christian should 'consider this classical Christology part of the common theological patrimony of the Church, of which we are full-fledged members.'"

Some of this can sound a little paternalistic, like the concern here is to make sure that new Christians don't "accidentally" stray from orthodoxy and wind up with a Christianity that's too far removed from western Christianity, but to be fair, it is true that in two thousand years of Christian history, chances are pretty good that past theologians have addressed -- and disputed -- and countered -- and doubled down on -- just about every question you can think of, and that there is little point in reinventing the wheel without at least consulting everybody else's wheel blueprints first. Even so, after reading a chapter on African Christology by a non-African, I sort of feel obligated to read some African theology by an actual African theologian.

Moving on from Africa:

"... two important branches of Vaishnava Hinduism are the Vadagalais and the Tengalais. The Tengalais teach that salvation comes through a total surrender to the sovereignty of Lord Vishnu and a full and complete trust in his bestowal of unmerited grace. Being saved and surrendering to God is like a young kitten totally dependent on its mother. We have all observed how a mother cat will pick up her kitten with her mouth ... as it hangs helplessly and in complete trust. The Tengalais say that the baby kitten is the perfect picture of grace ... so the devotee must totally surrender to the will of Lord Vishnu.

"In contrast, the Vadagalais teach that salvation depends on some exercise of our human will and our participation with God in his sovereign act of grace. Rather than a kitten, they use the analogy of the baby monkey. A baby monkey must actively cling to its mother as the mother moves around for food or shelter or seeks safety. The baby monkey is, for the Vadagalais, the picture of our participation with God in his sovereign work."

And some points about the Holy Spirit, in a chapter about the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in historically Catholic Latin America:

"This ambiguity [of the Holy Spirit] and neutrality is reflected in the Apostles' Creed (which is probably based on the earlier second-century Roman Creed) and the original Nicene Creed of AD 325, which simply states, 'We believe in the Holy Spirit,' without further commentary. In 381, a second ecumenical council met in Constantinople. The further deliberations on the Holy Spirit led the council to amplify and clarify the faith of the Nicene Creed so that it unequivocally declared the deity of the Holy Spirit. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed declares,

"'We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.'"

"Because the ecumenical discussions about the Holy Spirit were focused primarily on its deity and relationship within the Trinity, there was a serious neglect of a full development of its work. Indeed, William Menzies points out that 'the ancient church from the second century through the ninth century was almost totally preoccupied with questions pertaining to the identity of Jesus Christ, so that what was said of the Holy Spirit was largely an appendage to theology, and was limited largely to ontology, the Being of God within his inter-trinitarian relationships.' That remained largely unchanged during medieval scholarship."

For context, the Holy Spirit is the source of "gifts of the spirit," i.e. speaking in tongues, prophecy, the casting out of demons, "faith healing," and the other distinctive features of Pentecostalism. There is a sense -- and this is me saying this, not Tennent -- in which what happened here is that Trinitarianism was established but the role of the Holy Spirit was so ill-defined (especially in Protestantism, which largely lacks a distinctive vigorous theology of the Trinity but usually preserves the concept of the Trinity) that the Pentecostal movement was able to find this conceptual gap in received Christian thought and wiggle into it, providing Biblical and theological justification for religious activities that are in other respects very foreign to the Christian experience of worship.

"The bhakti movement allows for Hindus to focus their worship on a particular god ... these Jesu bhakta [Jesus-worshiping bhakta] follow an ishta devata theology within Hinduism. The practice of ishta devata allows a person to worship a particular, chosen deity without necessarily denying that other gods exist."

INTERRUPTING BILL SEZ: This is similar, it sounds to me, to the term "monolatry," originally used in reference to classical Greek religious practice but also used in discussions of ancient Jewish religion, specifically the theory that the ancient Jewish religion shifted from the monolatrist worship of El (Yahweh) while acknowledging the existence of gods such as Baal, to a strict monotheism that denies not only the validity of worshiping other gods but the existence of those gods. The textual evidence for this is rampant, and it feeds into an alternate origin story for Israel: because there is no archaeological evidence for an Exodus (and because this lack of evidence is not easy to explain), a popular theory is that Canaan became Israel not through the invasion of Hebrews who had escaped bondage in Egypt, but through internal revolt as Yahwists overthrew non-Yahwists, whether by force or cultural shift.

So that was a total tangent.

"They are, therefore, allowed to focus their worship exclusively on Jesus and yet maintain their cultural and social particularities as Hindus. If asked, they continue to call themselves Hindus. They will not identify themselves as Christian, and many do not attend any church. This unwillingness to identify with the church or with baptism is not due to any shame about following Christ, but to strong cultural associations surrounding the terms ... many Hindus think that to become a Christian means using Western style eating utensils, eating beef, and drinking alcohol ... they do not understand why Christian women no longer wear bangles or participate in popular cultural festivals. In short, even if a Hindu is drawn to Christ, they may find membership in the church or the term Christian repugnant."

There's a longer and more complicated section on people in the Muslim world who, while worshiping Jesus, continue to identify as Muslim, with the note that there is not nearly enough research in this area.

So. Overall a very good overview with lots of things to explore more in the future.

recent reading: qur'an in conversation

I'm much earlier in my education on Islam than I am in my education on Christianity or Judaism, which I expect is the norm for religious studies scholars who don't actually specialize in Islam (or in comparative religion) -- at least of my generation. For the younger generation, the ones who started school after 9/11, maybe it's different. On 9/11/2001, both my graduate career and my professional scholar career were already launched -- I was researching a Master's thesis on King David, and I had my first professional nonfiction assignment (the prefatory essay to a Mark Twain collection), which happened to be due 9/12/2001, a deadline that is for obvious reasons easy to remember. Though I remember some colleagues who were interested in the Nation of Islam and Islam in the African-American community, for instance, there was otherwise little discussion of American Islam, which is now receiving considerable attention in the scholarly community (and newspapers, every time some group of shitbirds protests the building or expansion of a mosque) after post-9/11 Islamophobia reinvigorated American Muslims.

But it seems particularly silly to be a religious studies scholar in 2015, nearly 2016, without a decent handle on Islam, and while just by virtue of being able to read a book with grown-up words in it I know more about Islam than the "ban all Muslims" knuckleheads, the prevalence of ignorance is not an excuse to lower standards -- there's no reason to grade on a curve here.

As with my early reading on Christianity or Judaism, my reading on Islam is a little scattershot, and I will eventually have to doubleback and reread things that will make new sense the second time through. (This is not the first book I've read on Islam, to be clear, just the first since starting this blog. My formal education, though, was limited to Medieval Islamic philosophy, so I don't have the same foundations that I do for discussing western religion and philosophy, the ancient Near East, or the development of religion in the US. In my own research prior to the last couple years, my primary interest in Islam has been with regard to its place in one of my ongoing areas of scholarly concern: the way orthodox Christianities [meaning principally the Catholic Church in this case] have defined themselves in terms of opposition to other belief sets, i.e. through the identification of heresies and so on. There are a lot of parallels between the early reception of the Latter Day Saints and that of Islam, by mainline Protestants in the first case and western Christianity in the second: "is this a kind of Christianity we're looking at? it claims to pray to the same God but also possesses a new scripture from that God." The reasons why everything played out differently from that point, and so on, well -- that would be a good subject for a book by someone better versed in both topics.)

Qur'an in Conversation:

This is a collection of essays, loosely sorted by theme, by Muslim scholars on different suras of the Qur'an. Though I wish the project were more global in scope, I understand why only North Americans (specifically Americans and Canadians, I think, but forgive me if I'm forgetting someone) were included. Virtually every page of it contradicts the popular press image of Islam as an ultraconservative and unchanging monolith.

Intellectually I knew that. Even when you insist on "taking the Qur'an [or the Bible] literally," there is always a necessary act of interpretation, because there is no language that is free of ambiguity, and putting centuries between the writer and the reader nearly always increases rather than decreases that ambiguity. The most conservative, most literalist possible version of Islam couldn't be monolithic, without strict centralized control (which would only control what people can say and act on, not what they believe), which simply does not exist. But there is knowing that this is true, and there is reading scholars' essays on the specifics of it.

Most of what I read here, I didn't mark any specific passages from. My takeaway was much more basic, along the nature of "oh okay, this is an example of how a modern feminist Muslim deals with the Qur'an." At my level of education, those basic takeaways are still the most important. The specifics are important for their demythologizing effect. But that's the thing, part of religious literacy, perhaps a large part, is avoiding the caricaturing and broad sketches of faith groups.

For instance, I'm not clear on how many people are aware that only 20% of the Muslim world is Arab. I think maybe a lot of educated people would have guessed that the Muslim world was at least not majority-Arab, given some time to mull it over, based on two things that should be part of the common knowledge canon: the role played here by the Indian subcontinent, and the fact that Christianity is no longer mainly a religion of Palestinian Jews, nor Buddhism mainly a religion of India. Among world religions, in other words, this is one of the models for becoming a world religion.

But one of the things most people seem to know about Islam is its insistence that the Qur'an is read in Arabic, the language in which it was revealed to Mohammad. This is one place where that "only 20%" becomes very important to our discussions of Islam, because the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not read the Qur'an in Arabic, and I have seen many, many people insisting that they do, and insisting on the dominance of a form of literalism or fundamentalism that a) simply is not dominant and b) is functionally impossible given the size of Islam and its many, many internal divisions.

The predominance of translated Qur'ans is important for a number of reasons. Biblical translation is an area the layman knows little enough about as it is -- you have only to glance at the headlines about the recent KJV draft discovery to realize that. But as complex an issue as Biblical translation is, Qur'anic translation is not only more complex, it is far more politicized, and involves state actors.

Anyway, on to some notes.

Emran El-Badawi:

"Within the Arabian sphere in which the Qur'an operates, Jews, Christians, and hanifs -- 'proto-Muslims' -- were competing with one another at times through Arabic oral tradition, at other times through forms of Aramaic writing. When the Qur'an identifies itself as 'clear Arabic language,' it acknowledges its existence in a multilingual context, hence the significance of the 'Arabic Qur'an.' Why would such descriptions have been significant if all members of its audience simply spoke Arabic? It would have been a nonissue. Such descriptions are a statement that THIS Scripture is in Arabic -- a new revelation to be added to Hebrew and Christian Scripture."

"One thing I argue in the first chapter of my book The Qur'an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions is that there exists some serious sectarian and missionary activity in the environment of the Qur'an. Some Muslims feel uncomfortable when I say that, and fear that I am subjecting the text to a secularizing or even orientalist reading. In such cases I say, 'No, I'm reading the Qur'an and you're reading tafsir, the commentary that came about later on.' The Qur'an discusses the sectarianism of its day explicitly, a small sample of which can be gleaned from such words as shiqaq (division) and ahzab (parties) and when it talks about groups or sides. The Qur'an is adding its voice to a multiplicity of competing theological and legal schools and proposing its own to be the correct one."

I don't know how much I am reading in my Christian scholarship here, but this sounds similar to the role of the Gospels, which did not create Christianity -- even though moderns now treat them as the foundational Christian texts -- but were written by existing Christian communities to compete with, correct, or convert audiences away from other Christian communities which owed their existence to other written and oral sources.

"To push this argument further, some Muslims are hesitant to look at such texts as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas or the Protevangelium of James. Muslim tradition is not based, as it were, on such texts but rather on exegetical, prophetic, and biographical literature -- tafsir, hadith, sirah, and so on -- which flourished about two centuries after the Qur'an. However, in the premodern Muslim scholarship of the ninth to sixteenth century, widely accepted authors like Ibn Qutaybah, Tabari, al-Suyuti, and others were looking at and debating the textual context with which the Qur'an is in dialogue. I say 'in dialogue' because it is talking to the audience of those texts. In the fifteenth century, in his multilvolume Tafsir, al-Biqa'i considers the canonical Gospels to be the injil referred to by the Qur'an. Most Muslims today would not agree with that. And yet this line of thought was afforded some space within Islam in the past."

Jamal Badawi:

Sura 9:5: "Kill the idolaters [mushrikin] wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, lie in wait for them at every place of ambush."

This is obviously one of the most incendiary lines in the Qur'an, one that both jihadists and Islamophobes will point to. But given that this religion has been around for a long time and that most of its members have not, in fact, called for the death of non-Muslims ... sometimes I can't believe I have to point this out, but in all religions there is, clearly, a long tradition of grappling with the challenging or the problematic, whether that means discounting something as simply wrong because we have moved on from its original historical context (as liberal -- and really, most moderate -- Christians do with the violence, homophobia, and misogyny of the Bible), or looking deeper to see if there might be another less problematic level of meaning.

That struggle is the sort of thing I have seen New Atheist writers dismiss as "cheating," as though somehow religious people have an obligation to live up to a cardboard stereotype. Let's be very clear: grappling with scripture in this way is not a modern preoccupation. It is a major component of the very substance of religious life and religious thought, and in every religious tradition with which I am at all familiar, you will find it dating to its earliest generations.

Badawi begins:

"This is one of the most misunderstood verses of the Qur'an, and so it offers an excellent opportunity for exploring an appropriate methodology of reading the Qur'an. The Qur'an describes itself as a book of guidance ... it tells its readers what to believe and how to behave. Yet there are some verses that can seem, at first glance, to be in tension with or even in contradiction to other parts of the Qur'an. Islamic tradition offers a way to approach these verses and to set them in the context of the larger message of Islam's holy book...

"First of all, in order to evaluate whether or not a given act or argument conforms to the normative teachings of Islam, there must be some criteria for such evaluations. How are these norms to be identified? In the case of Islam, the primary sources are the Qur'an and authentic or sound hadiths, which are reports of the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad... These primary sources are supplemented by secondary sources of Islam. The generally agreed to sources are consensus of the scholars on a given issue, or ijmaa', and analogical deduction, or qiyaas. Secondary sources are not revelatory, even though they are based on interpretations of revelatory sources.

"... Next, a solid interpretation of the Qur'an must be based on a study of the text in its original Arabic form. Translation results in ambiguity. Furthermore, the Arabic language itself has evolved since the seventh century, and some words have changed in meaning...

"Historical context is another tool, particular what is termed the occasion of revelation of a particular verse. Some verses were revealed to address a particular situation or to settle a particular dispute. A knowledge of this context can help to understand a verse that otherwise might seem to be incoherent with the larger message of the Qur'an."

So there's some simple "how to use the Qur'an" takeaway here:

1: As with the Bible, it is inappropriate to pick a verse and use it in a vacuum -- the meaning of a verse has to be considered against the context of the text as a whole.

2: There are traditions of commentary and interpretation, just as Judaism has the Talmud or Christianity has the Church Fathers and later theologians (and a history of continuing to adopt new doctrine, cf. the Immaculate Conception). No religion is limited to its original text. That is not how people do religion.

Back to Badawi:

"Read in isolation ... it suggests that people who do not accept Islam deserve to die. We cannot say, as some extremists do, that this single verse cancels out all the Qur'anic verses that speak of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. The historical context reveals that the idolatrous Meccans had broken the treaty of Hudaybiyya, which they had made with the Muslims in Medina, and murdered peaceful Muslims. ... The treaty ... stipulated a ten-year truce between the two cities, but not all Meccans abided by the conditions of the treaty. By today's standards that would be considered a war crime. So now the verse is limited to those who had committed that aggression.

"To someone first reading this verse, without understanding its context, it may sound like a general principle, but this verse is limited to those who carried arms and killed innocent people.

"Another important word to notice in this verse is the word mushrikin in Arabic, often translated as 'nonbelievers' or even sometimes as 'infidels.' Some polemical, anti-Islamic writers claim that this refers to Jews and Christians and therefore enjoins a wholesale slaughter of these communities. In fact the Qur'an never uses the word mushrikin as an epithet for Jews or Christians. ... in this verse, the term mushrikin refers only to idolaters, specifically idolatrous Arabs, and of those, only the [treaty-breakers] who committed this atrocious act."

"Another principle for proper interpretation is that 'the few must be interpreted in light of the many.' For example, the Qur'an repeatedly affirms freedom of conscience and rejects compulsion in religion..."

That principle would do homophobic Christians a lot of good, given how little the Bible says about homosexuality -- the New Testament in particular -- and how much it says about judgment and compassion.

"Islamic tradition also includes the concept of nashk, which is often understood as abrogation but is more properly translated as supercession. A verse that was revealed later in time is understood to replace an earlier verse with which it seems to be in tension. In the case of 9:5, some have claimed that since it was revealed later than the earlier verses that promote harmony and peaceful aspirations with Jews and Muslims, 9:5 instituted a new policy of Muslims toward all non-Muslims. This argument does not hold because there are many verses that were revealed during the Medinan period that likewise endorse a relationship of respect and peace with the People of the Book."


And back to me:

Like I said, there was much more that I read here, it's just that a lot of it washed over me without my thinking to mark specific passages. But even these two essays, I think, offer so much food for thought.

recent reading: deep structure of biology

Since the primary purpose of this blog is to keep track of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading - some brief thoughts on things I read in the last couple months that I didn't have time to write up longer thoughts about (but which are part of longer rivers of reading which will undoubtedly entail later stops and longer tarries).

This entry ended up longer than anticipated after just the first book, so perhaps I'll do one entry per book, which also lets me post it earlier than I'd otherwise have time for. So.

These are basically my class notes, really, for a class I'm both constructing and attending all by myself, and I don't expect them to have the same value for you; that's just the nature of this blog.

Deep Structure of Biology --

A succinct summary of the phenomenon of convergent evolution:

"Beyond all reasonable doubt -- and here we can draw on embryology, comparative anatomy, histology, molecular biology, phylogeny, and the fossil record -- the common ancestor of the octopus and the blue whale could not possible have possessed a camera-eye. Each group has independently navigated to the same evolutionary solution, and it is one that not only works very well but has arisen at least five more times, in animals as diverse as snails and, more extraordinarily, jellyfish."

Another example, later:

"The cartilaginous fish and the bony fish both solved the physics of swimming back in the Silurian by evolving streamlined, fusiform morphologies. Some 230 million years later, a group of land-dwelling reptiles rediscovered this same morphology in their evolutionary return to the sea. And around 175 million years later, a group of land-dwelling mammals also rediscovered this same morphology in their own evolutionary return to the sea."

(The "return to the sea" here is a reference to the Devonian era, when the first land-dwelling animals evolved from sea-dwelling ancestors; before the Devonian, life was primarily a watery phenomenon. Today's aquatic reptiles and mammals have an evolutionary family tree that came up to land before returning to the sea.)

"The evolution of an ichthyosaur or porpoise morphology is not trivial. It can be correctly described as nothing less than astonishing that a group of land-dwelling tetrapods, complete with four legs and a tail, could devolve their appendages and their tails back into fins like those of a fish. Highly unlikely, if not impossible? Yet it happened twice, convergently in the reptiles and the mammals, two groups of animals that are not closely related. We have to go back in time as far as the Carboniferous to find a common ancestors for the mammals and the reptiles. Nonetheless, the ichthyosaur and the porpoise both have independently reevolved fins.

"Contrary to the dictum that 'biological evolution has no predictable destination,' I predict with absolute confidence that if any large, fast-swimming organisms exist in the oceans of the moon Europa -- far away in the orbit around Jupiter, swimming under the perpetual ice that covers their world -- then they will have streamlined, fusiform bodies; that is, they will look very similar to a porpoise, an ichthyosaur, a swordfish, or a shark."

Gould argued strongly against this kind of conclusion with his famous "rewinding of the tape" analogy: 

"Any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken ... The diversity of possible itineraries does demonstrate that eventual results cannot be predicted at the outset. Each step proceeds for cause, but no finale can be specified at the start, and none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages."

The Gouldian argument is not disproven by convergent evolution -- that is, you do not have to deny that convergent evolution is a fact to support Gould's view of evolution. But I think it's important to remember that he constructed that view in the 1980s, and even for scientists it can often be easier to fit new evidence into an existing model -- especially when nothing is going to come along that actually proves it one way or the other, by the nature of the theory -- than it is to re-weigh the evidence every time the balance changes and decide all over again. It's always politically dangerous to talk about the fallibility of scientists because climate change and vaccination denialists pounce on it to "prove" that science is "lying" or "wrong" about those things, which is ridiculous: here we are talking about a very small subsection of a very small corner of a particular science, and how one school of thought may have differed given thirty years difference in the accumulation of evidence.

The phenomenon of convergent evolution raises many questions about:

a) extraterrestrial life, with reference to the Gouldian argument -- if the conditions necessary for life are or have been present elsewhere in the universe, has life evolved in a recognizably similar way? and especially, once simple life has evolved, is it inevitable (assuming that the necessary resources are available) that multicellular and more complex life will evolve eventually?

b) the evolution of intelligence: nevermind the "not all people are smart in the same way" discussions, which are interesting in of themselves. Are the differences between potentially evolvable intelligences enormous, even enormous enough to be mutually unrecognizable, or will intelligence evolve more or less convergently, the way sharks and swordfish are significantly different from one another but still evolved substantially similar structures of swimming?

On primate and corvid intelligence:

"It is certainly plausible to argue that surviving the trials and tribulations of a complex social world makes intellectual demands on many primates. Individuals need to know who is who, they need to keep track of who did what to whom, where and when, and to use this information to predict the actions and intentions of other individuals in their social network, as well as understanding how these relationships change over time. In short, the need for effective competition and cooperation with conspecifics may have provided the main selective advantage for the evolution of primate intelligence.

"That said, there is no reason to assume that intelligence is restricted to primates or that such abilities have evolved only once. Indeed, we shall argue that there is good reason to believe that complex mental characteristics have evolved several times and that the existence of intelligence in different, distantly related lineages must have arisen as a result of convergent evolution in species facing similar social and physical problems. ... perhaps the most dramatic case for convergent evolution of cognition comes from comparing primitive cognitive abilities with those of crows, given that the common ancestor of mammals and birds lived over 280 million years ago and that not all birds and mammals share the complex mental abilities found in crows and primates."

On social and cultural evolution in the ocean:

"Steele notes that, in the ocean, environmental noise (after removing predictable cyclical variation: diurnal, lunar, annual) is largely 'red' (greatest over large time and space scales), while, on land, it is more 'white' (roughly constant over all scales, up to a century or continent or so). The fundamental contrasts between the two habitats are illustrated by the methods of the scientists who study them: terrestrial landscape ecologists plot habitats using geographical information systems, while their oceanographic counterparts use the partial differential equations of fluid dynamics to describe the marine environment. 

"The environment is the stage for evolution's greatest play: organisms evolve to maximize their fitness given the environment. Two general environmental traits known greatly to influence evolution are connectedness and variability. In these respects, and many others, marine and terrestrial systems differ radically. And so, with these different sets, we might expect immense contrasts in both the action of the evolutionary play and its results, whether it occurs on land or in the ocean. And there are. Looking out my north-facing windows onto the land, most of the primary productivity I see is in large, long-lived, slowly reproducing spruce and maple trees. To the south, in the sea, the primary productivity is in microscopic diatoms and dinoflagellates. There are squid on one side, neutrally buoyant and forming large schools in an open three-dimensional habitat, and foxes on the other, negotiating trees and rocks and roads by themselves or in small groups, anchored by gravity. These are very different creatures in very different environments. Terrestrial and oceanic environments provide a tough challenge for convergence. When traits do converge, something remarkable has occurred.

"... as we move up the trophic web, convergences between oceanic and terrestrial animals begin to appear. The eyes of squid and foxes are an example. But at the trophic peaks and at the highest levels of biological organization, then the convergences between oceanic and terrestrial systems become particularly strong and provoking. A diatom and a spruce tree have little in common other than being autotrophs but, as I will try to show, the social structures and cultures of sperm and killer whales have much in common with those of elephants and humans.

"Phylogenetic constraints play a part in this. The diatom and maple are about as distantly related as any two organisms on Earth, whereas elephants, sperm whales, killer whales, and humans are all mammals and share all the constraints and advantages of the mammalian order, including backbones, air-breathing, warm blood, live birth, and lactation. But their common ancestor, perhaps one million years ago ... was small, likely socially and culturally primitive, certainly nothing like today's large and dominant mammals of land and ocean."

Later in same section:

"However, the most comprehensive convergence between marine and terrestrial mammals is between ... the sperm whale and the elephants. Termed 'the Colossal Convergence' by an editor at American Scientist, it features a wide range of traits in which elephants are more similar to sperm whales than they are to other terrestrial mammals and sperm whales are more similar to elephants than other marine mammals. In both species, females live in largely matrilineal social units of about elevan animals within which there is communal care for the young and communal defense against predators. These social units aggregate to form larger social structures, including groups of about twenty animals. Males leave their mothers' social units, segregate from the females, and grow to become much larger than their mothers, In their late twenties, the males return to the habitat of the females to mate, roving between the female units, competing with each other and being selected by the females.

"There are additional nonsocial parallels between sperm whales and elephants. For instance, the species have very similar life histories and are nonterritorial and quite mobile. And both are extreme in other respects. These include body size and brain size: the sperm whale has the larges brain of all species, and the elephant the largest among land animals. Another parallel is in ecological success. Elephants, due to their size, numbers, and feeding methods can restructure habitats while the world's sperm whale population, even though substantially reduced by whaling, currently removes about as much biomass from the oceans as all human marine fisheries combined. 

"This convergence between a terrestrial herbivore and a marine teuthivore (the sperm whale principally eats deep-water squid) is striking, especially given the radical contrasts in their habitat and food: quite a puzzle for the evolutionary biologist."

Then the author (Hal Whitehead) goes on to explain his theory, that the convergence begins with the nose, which is interesting but not as interesting, overall, as the Colossal Convergence itself.

Explaining convergence:

"Two prime candidate theories have been proposed:

(1) "One is that convergence is evidence for what might be called the limited scope of biological materials; favored by authors such as Stephen J Gould, this explanation rests largely on the idea that phylogenetic, developmental, and physical constraints restrict the forms that biological systems can take, and, therefore, change tends to be strongly limited to what is developmentally possible. This explanation has been considerably reinforced by the evidence for the deep conservation of regulatory genes across many lineages.

"However, there is also mounting evidence that the genome can be dynamic at this level. These same regulatory genes are capable of producing widely divergent phenotypes at a very fundamental level, and convergence at the very basic level of biological systems, such as the evolution of multicellularity, can occur there through entirely different genetic means.

(2) "An alternative view is that convergence is so common because the adaptive problems faced by organisms in the struggle to survive recur frequently, and so selection tends to favor the same solutions. In this case, it is not the nature of biological materials that is limited but the 'imagination' of the selective forces."

This is the view that would have us predicting the nature of sufficiently large swimming life on Europa, for instance. (Naturally the author points out that both views are probably right in various cases.)

when atheists are just christians who don't believe

I have a post coming up that is mostly notes from a bunch of different books, because when I didn't have time to blog, that's what I had time to do - so I'm just warning you about that.

In the meantime, a quick post that isn't really a complete blog entry, just something on my mind lately -- the phenomenon of atheists, particularly New Atheists, as Christians who have simply rejected belief.

Most atheists in the West have been raised in a predominantly Christian culture and environment, whether or not they grew up in a church-attending Christian household. One of the consequences of diminished religious literacy is that Christians don't know much about other religions (nor their own); one of the consequences of that is that ex-Christians turned atheist continue to deal with religion from a Christian framework, because although in theory they've rejected all religion, in practice and of necessity their rejection is far more narrow, much like the kid who has "given up on girls," when what he means is he has given up on Denise and that at the moment all girls are viewed through post-Denise-colored lenses.

We see this in shooting-the-shit political thought all the time and are familiar with the problems -- the college kid, or fortysomething who ought to know better, who has given up on "the whole thing" and, though insistent that "both parties are just as bad and indistinguishable from each other," has little to no knowledge of political systems or ideologies in other countries, except maybe a little internet libertarianism or fanzine anarchy. Their immediate experience of a thing was dissatisfying enough to convince them that it was more valiant to opt out than to thrust their fists against the posts.

But why does this matter, the New Atheists insist, if they chuck the whole thing out? If they throw the whole box out, does it matter if they know what's in the box? Why should they care about the variations between different flavors of make-believe?

It probably shouldn't. But there are a few reasons why it can.

One bears on the difference between the New Atheists and the atheists who came before them: the new furor and aggression, the new insistence on not just rejecting religion but characterizing it and making claims about it, despite what I've just described as a pretty comprehensive ignorance of it. Even the New Atheists' atheism is constructed from a conservative Christian point of view, given that it treats as synonymous atheism and irreligion, ignoring a long history of non-theistic Hindus and Buddhists, and the strong traditions of doubt, deism, nontheism, or agnosticism within the Abrahamic religions. The fundamentalist firebrand and the New Atheism convert both agree: those folks don't count. They're cheating somehow.

Atheists who are still culturally Christian continue to deal with religion in Christian terms. They continue to treat Christianity as the normal religion, and continue with the common Christian misconception that on some level insists that other religions are basically analogous to Christianity with different names and different lists of sins. Because the New Atheists favor the fundamentalist view of Christianity, this not only validates fundamentalism, it feeds into Islamophobia and other areas where the borders between racism, xenophobia, and religious bigotry are especially blurry. Any examination of the Granite State (the least church-attending state in the country) on Facebook makes this pretty clear, as does every damn word out of Dawkins' mouth this year.

It's the combination of these things that causes the problems. Simple rules that ought to hold true all day long hold just as true where religion is concerned: if you don't know anything about it, you probably don't need to express your opinion on it, and certainly should think three times before actually arguing about it.

This, I think, is one of the things that has been bugging me for a ... for the 21st century, I suppose, because the new converts to atheism and especially the new writers on atheism (coming from different academic backgrounds and intellectual traditions than the older writers) say such different things than I was used to hearing from the atheist side before. The aggression was easy to identify, and the misinformation had been catalogued long before Bill Maher decided to get on board and make things worse. It took the recent rise in Islamophobia for me to put my finger on some of the rest.

the future of christianity

In the past couple years, I've read six or seven books on "the future of Christianity" or very recent trends in Christianity. That's on top of the ... probably about twenty, I guess, similar books that I've read since my education in religious studies began at the turn of the century. (It's interesting the differences in trends and emphases since then.) Where these books have commented on the future of conservative Christianity or specifically conservative Protestantism, which most have done, they have all been clear in their predictions that its days of dominance are numbered: there are signs of rebirth in liberal Christianity, as well as promising new movements in progressive Christianity, even among the evangelicals.

I'm reading a book on global Christianity right now, intended for theology students, and I think these books have it badly wrong.

In my lifetime and the decades immediately preceding it, these trends have held true in the United States:

1: Conservative evangelical Protestantism, including but not limited to fundamentalist sects, has gradually overtaken mainline Protestantism.

2: Church attendance and religious engagement have declined overall, but especially among liberals. Though this is not the only factor causing Protestantism to become more conservative, one of the effects has certainly been that the "everyman" Christian American has become more and more conservative with each decade.

3: Catholicism has remained largely liberal while taking heat for its conservative positions on abortion, birth control, divorce, and sexual ethics.

4: The number of people identifying as "spiritual but not religious" has grown significantly.

5: Religious literacy has declined significantly. The fact that I can not only have a conversation with a well-educated friend who knows zip about religion and who finds it reasonable and unremarkable that he knows zip about religion, but that he also finds it reasonable that he argue about religion anyway, tells you a lot.

6: For the most part -- waxing and waning more than these other points, and varying more according to specific religious group and political issue -- conservative Christians have become more politically engaged and more willing to bring their religious beliefs into the political arena, while liberal Christians have become less willing to affiliate their political engagement with their religious affiliation. That is, liberal Catholics are as likely as ever to fight poverty and human rights abuses, but are less likely to identify themselves as doing so because it is the Christian thing to do. Conservative Catholics are not similarly reluctant to talk about their pro-life views.

Some of those trends have recently shown signs of change. For instance, although evangelical Christianity has become virtually synonymous with fundamentalism and is grouped in with the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, it predates all three of these movements. Though moderate and liberal evangelicals never entirely disappeared, especially in historically black churches, American evangelicals have largely been dominated in recent decades by politically engaged, politically conservative factions descended from segregationist groups, who sought a political alliance with Catholics and so adopted an anti-abortion stance. For the last fifty years, they have been America's Grumpy Racist Grandpa, complaining that every social change is the end of the world and that all our ills would be repaired if the womenfolk would just listen to their husbands and if kids listened to their parents and parents listened to the Good Book. Only a bit less harmless than that.

Fundamentalists have always defined themselves in opposition to other Christian groups. They are, as I keep pointing out because it's important, a relatively new movement, dating to the late 19th/early 20th century -- making them, for instance, about as old as canned pineapple. They are the self-appointed conscience of Christianity, deriving their identity from being purer and more Christian than the Christians around them, by adopting an artificially strict interpretation of the Bible. They don't really want everyone else to adopt their form of Christianity. They want for there to be a larger group compared to which they can be the VIP room.

It sort of makes sense that as fundamentalism and evangelism cross-pollinate as much as they've done over the last century, this definition-by-opposition idea would permeate even the non-fundamentalist evangelical groups. And of course, the best way for an evangelical group to stand out is to reject conservative Christianity.

That's not necessarily the mechanism or the only factor by which liberal and progressive evangelical Christianity is growing, but it is growing, and not because of millennials. Everyone likes to use Jay Bakker -- son of Jim and Tammy Faye -- as an example, but there are other routes to take than being the son of scandalous televangelists.

That trend is one reason these books keep predicting an end to the dominance of conservative Christianity. People like me -- which you could read either as "liberal Protestants tired of the conservatives being the only voices people hear" or as "churchless Christians" -- are another reason.

But of course, this whole conversation is only talking about the United States (and to some extent the West as a whole). And in the next few centuries, the United States is really only a footnote in Christianity's story.

That's what this book drove home for me. It's something I sort of knew without thinking about the implications of it. The majority of Christians today don't live in the West. Christianity is going through the most dramatic expansion in its history, and it's happening in Asia, the Middle East and India, and especially Africa. We sort of already know this when we stop to think about it, because it's in the news in the form of the trouble Anglicanism is going through, with its split between mild-mannered liberal English Anglicanism and ultraconservative homophobic African Anglicanism.

Christianity in what most people still call the Third World and this book calls the Majority World (following the convention adopted at a theology conference) is unabashedly conservative in matters of social and sexual ethics. On the other hand, it's also a Christianity introduced in and growing in a religiously pluralistic society -- a Christianity made up of members who are thoroughly versed in at least one other religion and often several other religions, whether traditional African religion, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or something else. Just as the Christianity we know was dramatically shaped by the Greco-Roman thought familiar to (/ useful to / important in) first in the antiquity of Paul and Augustine, later in the Europe of Aquinas and the Renaissance, so too will these Christianities -- these majority Christianities -- be shaped by the parlance of their converts.

This post might be a little Inside Baseball; most of my readers are Americans, I imagine, and the fact that Christianity outside the West is going through very different changes might seem to have little impact on you. We'll see.

religious literacy

I know I said I'm on hiatus, but let me finish this one post, at least, on some fundamentals of religious literacy that a staggering number of people get wrong.

Listen, I have one mission here: Stop making assertions about religion unless you have good reason to believe you know what you're talking about.

These two things do not count as good reasons:

1: I don't believe any of it so the specifics don't matter.

2: I am a member of Religion X, and that alone qualifies me to make assertions about Religion X.

Everyone is an expert on what they personally believe, although in my experience they have not spent much time thinking about it; no one is an expert on theology or religious teachings if they have not specifically devoted time to becoming one. In between ignorance and expertise is a vast middle that should, in a sensible world, be well-populated, but as religious literacy has dimmed, this has ceased to be true.

There are so many fucking areas I could cover here, but let's scratch the surface and see what gets under our skin.

"All Religions Basically Teach The Same Thing"

This is one of the dumbest things people say about religion. There's often a Christian variant of it -- at least I have personally heard it from Christians the most often -- whereby when looking at or asking about another religion, they ask about the analogues to aspects of their Christian faith: how do you get into your Heaven, and who forgives your sins?

The problems here should be obvious, but for starters not every religion believes in an afterlife, and "sin" is at best a problematic term to use outside of the Abrahamic religions (it means more than "wrong thing to do"). Not every religion that has an afterlife has a gated afterlife, and not every religion proffers a relationship between sin and the afterlife.

Going further than that, there are religions that teach that the world is fundamentally evil, corrupt, suspect, or unreal, and that proper behavior requires removal from it, and religions that teach that the world is fundamentally good and sacred, and that proper behavior requires engaging with that sacredness. These are not basically the same thing, except insofar as a square and a circle are both basically not a triangle.

All religions do not teach the same thing. There are some benign factors in recent intellectual history that account for this fallacy -- nineteenth century scholars and the 20th century field of comparative religion were very interested in identifying the common ground shared by many religions, and these findings were often overstated or misunderstood to amount to something like "all religions are basically the same," when it would be more accurate and helpful to say that "most religions deal with similar material, even when they have not had contact with each other." That latter bit was the actual point: the discovery in anthropology and other social sciences that it was not necessary to posit one original prehistoric religion from which other early religions had descended, but that religions would independently develop in communities that had no contact with one another, and that despite this lack of contact, these religions could have many things in common. However, it's not necessary for the religions to agree for this to be interesting. And we see these similarities in language, economic systems, political systems, and family units, without also saying "all governments basically do the same thing."

Social sciences have also muddied the waters, though.

For example, we have one word for "soul" in English, and in discussing the beliefs of various systems, this can make it seem like we're talking about a disagreement over what "the soul" is. It's more accurate and helpful to realize that we're using one word to refer to many very different and distinct concepts. There is no single soul-concept that is present in all religions, or even in all religions that have some kind of soul-concept.

The soul may or may not be located in the body and have a physical presence.

The soul may or may not be the part of an individual that persists after death, either in the afterlife or through rebirth.

The soul may or may not exist before the individual's body is formed.

There may be one soul or several (I think one constant we can point to is that while an individual may have multiple souls, any given soul belongs to only one individual at any given time -- but I could be wrong about this).

The soul may or may not be related to the phenomena of consciousness, emotion, and personality.

When a Christian asks about another religion, "what do they teach about the soul?", the conversation is already at the point where it needs to be backed up in order to explain that it's misleading to think that all religions basically agree on what we mean by "the soul." Some religions have little to no official teachings about the soul, in fact, because across time and cultures, "the soul" is not always within the purview of religion. Our modern separation between science and the supernatural, and classifying the soul in the latter camp, is a recent thing.

There have been attempts to distill the world's religious teachings into a proto- or world religion, but these attempts belong in the crank file alongside schematics for perpetual motion machines and proofs of the Hollow Earth. When serious scholarship, they are not successful. When seemingly successful, they are not true.

"All religions teach basically the same thing" is often the mantra of someone who is trying to make the case for religious tolerance -- or, especially some decades ago, the case that non-Christian religions are not "primitive religions." In this form it's a variant of "people are the same beneath their skin," which is a statement that tends to normalize the experience of the dominant culture and minimize the importance of the experiences of the marginalized and minorities. It's counterproductive to emphasize that people are "the same beneath the skin" when it glosses over the very different experiences resulting from the skin, and it's equally damaging to teach that all religions are "basically the same."

Even when the "basically the same" argument is whittled down to "every religion teaches the same fundamental ethics" -- which is the Dalai Lama's argument, for instance -- it's both incorrect and damaging.

"Basically the same" is what encourages conversion, for instance. It trades gods and spirits for saints, renames religious celebrations, burns old idols. "Basically the same" usually secretly or not-so-secretly means "basically the same as Christianity, you know, the normal one." Positing a "normal" religion is counter to the ideal of religious freedom, because if we undervalue our religious differences, we turn them into something no longer worth protecting. Why not leave "In God we trust" on the money, why not put the Ten Commandments up at the town hall, if "all religions are basically the same." after all? Where's the harm -- if they're all basically the same, then any Christian utterance, any endorsement of Christianity, is basically fine, right? Let me give you a spoiler: this has already fucking happened. This is already how people are thinking.

"All religions teach basically the same thing" normalizes the Christian experience, and the secular experience of those raised in a predominantly Christian culture, in the same way so much of the rest of American culture normalizes whiteness, and should be opposed for the same reasons. This normalization affects the way we view and are able to understand other religions -- Buddhism is misrepresented in numerous ways because it's so unlike Judeo-Christianity, and the lower the levels of religious literacy become, the more the general public's understanding of religion becomes coequal with its understanding of the dominant religious culture. This leads to attempts to map Buddhism (a religion founded by someone who said that the creator deity and the idea of a divine creation are either untrue or completely irrelevant) to an Abrahamic framework (in which the divine creation and a covenant between the creator deity and the followers of the religion are among the most defining elements of the faith), or even to reject its religiousness altogether and call it "a philosophy."

On top of all these problems, the very impulse to say "all religions teach basically the same thing" should be questioned. Why is "we're all basically the same" the argument in favor of tolerance or compassion? This implicitly condemns difference -- there is no way to say "we should be kind to each other because we're the same" without saying "let's be less kind to those who are not the same" -- and differences among people are never going to go away.

What's crazy to me is that most people know there are significant differences between, for instance, Protestants and Catholics, or Jews and Christians, and yet they can't take an extra ten seconds to recognize that such profound differences among cousins must surely imply even greater differences between family trees.

The myth of "scripture alone"

I got into an argument not long ago with someone who thought the best way for them to learn about religions -- not as a religious party themselves (I have no idea what his religious views were) but just out of interest -- was to read the sacred texts of every religion he could think of, and nothing else about the religion. He wanted to "come to his own conclusions," see, rather than read "what other people think." This is one of the worst possible ways to learn about religion. More than that, I think I can fairly say that it is not actually possible to learn about religion this way.

Let's confine our remaining discussion to Religions of Sufficient Age and Population, with the understanding that a religious group founded thirty years ago, or practiced only by a small group with little geographic distribution, may be an exception. I'm specifically going to talk about the Bible, and mainly from a Christian perspective, but it's important to understand that similar things could be said about any other religious scripture -- I promise, every religion with a scriptural tradition has a theological one -- and further, that not every religion has a text that is as central to that religion as the Bible is to Judaism or Christianity.

The Bible tells you next to nothing about Christianity or Judaism, and again, since everyone knows there are fundamental differences between Jews and Christians, how could anyone think that reading "The Old Testament" would be sufficient to understand Judaism, and that by simply adding the New Testament to your reading list, you'd arrive at an understanding of Christianity? The Jewish Scriptures aren't even arranged in the same order by Christians, nor are they read or understood in the same way. The fact that I even have to point this out is making me grit my fucking teeth.

Which part of the Bible tells you what a Presbyterian believes that a Catholic doesn't?

Which part of the Bible tells you about the Rapture? Abortion? Christians have historically vilified premartial sex -- where's that in the Bible?

Do you have any idea how little about the afterlife is in the Bible, compared to the detailed beliefs Christians have about it? Even most non-Christians can tell you more about the Christian view of the afterlife than the Bible can.

Jews and Christians alike have experienced two thousand years of history since the Bible was assembled, and before Christians even had a chance to assemble their New Testament, there was as great a diversity of belief among different Christian groups as you find today, if not greater. Multiple councils and other orthodox (little-o) efforts were required to create what we now call the Catholic Church, and to define mainstream Christian belief -- a process of centuries, and arguably a process that never ended.

Religion is not scripture.

Religion is, among other things, scripture as interpreted by tradition, amplified by both doctrinal and folk belief and practices, informed by theology, philosophy, and other elements of culture.

Maybe to those with a low level of religious literacy, they don't understand the importance of that interpretation because they're thinking of English class. In a serious literature class, you don't just read Huck Finn, you read Huck Finn and what people have said about Huck Finn. You talk about Huck Finn in its historical context, in terms of language, in terms of race. But the purest experience of Huck Finn, at least until our language changes enough to push it into the Shakespearean past, will always be to simply read Huck Finn.

The Bible isn't Huck Finn. Religious texts don't occupy the same space, aren't written for the same end, aren't used in the same way. By itself, the Bible is meaningless -- though read by itself, most contemporary Americans would bring to it an unconscious model of Christian belief that they've absorbed through osmosis, reading into the text things that are not actually on the page, things they've absorbed from political arguments and 7th Heaven and whatever.

Every religion has some tradition of theology, interpretation, and supplementary text; every religion, furthermore, has sects, denominations, or other groups that are defined in part by their disagreements over interpreting their shared texts (written or oral). On top of that, every religion has changed over time. You are not practicing the religion of your great-great-grandparents. It's often very important to people to claim that they are, but these claims are incredibly flimsy. Consider the fact that the most backward-looking, modernity-rejecting form of Christianity -- fundamentalism, Biblical literalism -- is younger than the automobile.

To understand Christianity, in addition to reading the Bible you would need to define some goals -- what exactly is it you're trying to understand? Current practices? The history and origins of those practices? The origins of the religion? I would argue that there is an important sense in which what we now mean by "Christianity" didn't exist until the fourth century, and was preceded by a wide variety of religious groups descended from the movements founded by John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, and a handful of Jesus's disciples. The Bible won't tell you anything about that because all of its texts were written in the second century or earlier, but it's the formative period of Christian history, and leads into the period in which Christian belief began to incorporate elements from classical philosophy to fill in gaps left by the Bible or to help interpret it.

Reading the Bible alone will leave out many of the key elements of Catholic faith, including the existence, nature, and function of the saints, the immaculate conception and most other beliefs about Mary, the role of the Church, or the sacraments.

Reading the Bible alone will not tell you why there are so many different Protestant denominations or why they differ, or how the evangelicals who arose in the early 20th century differ from the mainline Protestants they have gradually overtaken.

Reading the Bible alone will not tell you what to do with the book of Revelation, nor what the Old Testament is supposed to mean to Christians.

One incredibly important thing that varies is how much leeway is left to the individual practitioner. Most Christian denominations, for instance, do not have an official stance on evolution beyond declaring that they are not opposed to it -- in other words, members are free to believe in it but it's no more a specific tenet of belief than is gravity or arithmetic. (Obviously there are cultural reasons why nonopposition to evolution plays out differently than nonopposition to arithmetic.) One reason this is important is because the fundamentalist takeover of the discussion of religion in this country has promulgated the myth that the Bible requires a very extensive set of beliefs, and Christians are helpless to do anything about it. The New Atheists have co-signed this myth, further weakening liberal or moderate Christianity's influence in the culture.

Requirements of belief and practice come almost entirely from traditions of interpretation, as codified in official doctrine or as passed down through the theological traditions of a given denomination. "Interpretation" is not the same as "taking liberties with." The Bible simply doesn't cover everything, and is often unclear, and consists of numerous parts with undefined relationships to each other, and interpretation is a necessary part of using the Bible as the basis for a moral and ethical code, and for deriving from it a view of the world and of human nature.

The New Testament in particular is not a manual of religious belief and practice. It consists of a series of stories that contradict each other in ways both minor and significant, a series of letters addressed to specific early churches, and a prophetic text in the form of Revelation. Despite the tighter focus, ostensibly on Jesus, it is a less complete text than the Old Testament -- which itself can only be understood in a Jewish context when amplified by the midrash and the Talmud, and which is extremely difficult to approach from a Christian standpoint without a lot of theological supplement.

I sometimes use the comparison of trying to apprehend American law by only reading the Constitution and somehow extrapolating everything else from that, but American law is only 200-something years old and doesn't exist in the form of dozens of related but distinct systems. Christianity is 2000 years old and shares a heritage with a religion even older than that. To expect to come to terms with it by reading an ancient text and nothing that has come since is ridiculous, and yet this keeps coming up.

As I said, I'm using the Bible, and mainly Christianity, as my examples here, but similar things are true for all religions. No church just passes out a book and says "okay everybody, just do what it says," and even those that would attempt to do so wind up with theology anyway if they survive long enough for people to ask questions or forget the cultural context of the original text.

brief hiatus

I may have a chance to finish one of the entries currently in draft, but otherwise this blog is on a brief hiatus until December - I'm on migraine meds that keep me too foggy to follow through on the blog's purpose, and in November I'll be busy with National Novel Writing Month. It was always meant to be sporadic anyway, so don't worry.

pope francis

I'm not Catholic. I'm not even culturally Catholic really, although the fact that some of my formative years were spent in New Orleans, and my formal education in religious studies began there, is non-trivial. I was raised Congregationalist, which is about as far from Catholicism as you can get in the mainline Protestant denominations -- far from revering the Blessed Virgin Mary, Congregationalists don't even believe the virgin birth happened.

So that's my background. Now let's talk about the dumbass things I have seen people say in response to Pope Francis's visit to the United States.

Chronic migraines have me exasperated with a lot of the stupidity in my field of view; my tone reflects this.

1: Why does everyone care about the pope so much? I'm not even Catholic. Who cares what he says?

Well, you live in the fucking world, chuckles. Open the window and let the air in.

Francis is the spiritual leader to over 1 billion people, about 15% of the world. The Dalai Lama, in comparison, represents 20 million people at the outside. While the Catholic Church is not the political force it once was -- and ever having been that force is a subject of valid criticism -- the Catholic population is both widespread throughout the world and heavily concentrated in some areas, such that Catholic beliefs have significant political influence.

One of the things I will rail against over and over again in this blog is declining religious literacy. Declining religious engagement is a more complicated topic, and one in which I am a hypocrite -- I am not a churchgoer myself and can't fathom becoming one -- but it is definitely implicated in the decline of religious literacy. Religion is a key element of human culture, a key impulse in human nature, and may have been since before biologically modern humans even fucking existed. It doesn't go away just because science overtakes supernaturalism, nor is there reasonable basis to claim that religion depends on or extends supernaturalism.

That's another area for another time too, really, but the point is: the spiritual leader to a seventh of the world is someone whose views influence a great many people, and the views of a great many people are the musculature that bend the shape of the moment of that world that you get to experience, and what the fuck is wrong with you, you stomatous wet turd, that you think you can recuse yourself from caring about what happens in that moment?

If the President of France started making multiple speeches condemning, I don't know, Islamophobia and economic inequality, I would be interested and glad because these are utterances that can improve the world, and while I don't live in the part of the world that would be affected, because I am a living breathing human, I care about the lives lived in other parts of the world.

Francis is an especially newsworthy pope because of the ways he differs from recent predecessors. Though he is absolutely liberal in a Catholic framework, there's no denying that liberalism. Vatican II aside -- and most of its promises and intentions were never followed through, despite its reputation -- the general trend of American religion for the last five or eleven decades has been increasing conservatism and increasing alliance with political conservatism. The evangelicals succeeded in creating a political alliance with Catholics over abortion, which redirected Catholic political efforts traditionally spent on advocating for the poor, the sick, prisoners, and immigrants. (I'm not saying Catholics would not have wasted their time on the pro-life movement without evangelical involvement, don't worry.) Evangelical Protestantism has overtaken mainline Protestantism. In a handful of centuries we have shifted from a country in which church folk spent their time caring for the poor and pressuring the government to provide social services to one in which church folk are mobilized by -- let's call them what they are -- fuckstick evildoers to stop the poor from getting medicine.

So it is a good sign that there is a Pope who echoes the concerns of the Social Gospel, a Pope whose social and political priorities are aligned with what we like to think Catholicism has traditionally been associated with. This is a man with vast resources and vast influence. You have to be a dunce not to give a shit what he thinks.

That brings me to...

2) Fuck this Pope, he hasn't done anything about the sex abuse cover-up, abortion, or female priests.

Those issues are very important to me. There are a host of other concerns people have brought up in criticizing Francis, and I agree with many of those as well, but these seem to be the big ones -- the continued failure to do anything about the Church's orchestrated cover-up of rampant child sexual abuse, the Church's ongoing opposition to abortion, and the way it has dragged its feet on the inevitability of ordaining women as priests. (We are several decades into a severe shortage of priests, and the functional health of the Catholic Church depends on addressing it.)

However.

I voted for Barack Obama twice, in 2008 and 2012. My 2008 vote was predicated on several key issues, apart from being a vote against McCain/Palin: universal healthcare, serious finance reform, serious reform of higher education (including but not limited to the student debt crisis), the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and the de-escalation of our involvement in / instigation of foreign wars. In 2012 I knew I was only going to get one of those things, and voted to re-elect him anyway.

Yes, of course Obama has been a disappointment to progressives -- ironically, obviously, given how much idiot conservatives paint him as a socialist, when he has sadly turned out to be a centrist on most issues. Only some of this can be ascribed to Republican obstructionism. Some areas where he has failed to act pose disastrous consequences if they are not handled by his successor, and other areas simply reflect badly on us as a people.

So too with Francis. Neither Catholic nor non-Catholic voted for him, but that doesn't mean he doesn't represent an alternative to other possible Popes, and just as Obama's race signalled an end to a long-present barrier to entry, so does Francis's Argentinian nationality, which makes him the first Pope from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere. Given the cultural differences in Catholic concerns throughout the world, this is not a minor thing.

While Francis has not abandoned many of the conservative positions of previous modern popes, he has not placed special emphasis on them either. He fails to give us the answer we want when talking about ordaining women, homosexuality, or birth control, but they're not part of his platform, as it were, either. (Abortion is another matter; his pro-life commitment is clear.) Meanwhile, he has advocated for the poor, condemned wealth inequality and the institutions that keep it in place, reaffirmed the Catholic opposition to the death penalty, reaffirmed evolution's compatibility with Catholic belief, and become the most prominent speaker on the necessity of addressing climate change.

He's a radical, as far as the far right is concerned.

As with Obama, he faces structural issues. I'm not saying that I believe he wishes he could be more progressive than he is. I'm not convinced that's true. But the Catholic Church by its nature moves slowly. Part of the decline of religious literacy -- or one of the factors contributing to it, maybe -- is that people have trouble perceiving in context the behavior of slow-moving institutions. Something as large and as old as the Church cannot pivot as quickly as we did from conservative Bush to centrist Obama any more than an elephant can do cartwheels. Change has to be understood in context and with an eye on the timeline. That's not always a great thing, though it has undoubtedly saved our asses a number of times in the past.

At his first consistory, Francis appointed 18 new cardinals, 16 of whom are young enough to vote in a papal conclave and who will likely be involved in voting for his successor. More than half of those 16 are from Third World countries, reflecting Francis's commitment to inequality and poverty issues. There are pretty good odds that whatever Francis doesn't get done will be followed up by the next pope.

evolution again

Suppose I show you this tree, right.

Suppose I show you this tree that grows watches.

I'm not going to show you a tree that just has a lot of watches hanging off it or fastened around the branches or anything. That's no big deal. You could hang watches off any tree.

Suppose I show you this tree and we sit there for a while, couple of sandwiches, maybe a little whiskey, and we keep an eye on things. We see the little buds form, these solid gold leaves. Every once in a while we pry one open and we can see tiny little gears growing inside. Springs sprouting and coiling up. Those gears shift and grow and converge in a gear train. After a period of time, although we saw each piece growing in turn, somehow we're still startled to see a complete balance oscillation system. Hey look at this, the escapement is growing. Holy shit, now it's a whole fucking watch. When we sat down for lunch, it was just this little bud.

That's a pretty cool tree.

A couple hundred years ago, archdeacon William Paley used a metaphor to "prove the existence of God," which has since been adopted by Creationists:

"In crossing a heath suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But supposing I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there."

GET IT? A rock is just a rock, it's no big deal, but if you trip over a watch you trip over evidence of a watchmaker. The watch by its nature implies the existence of a watchmaker.

Except there's this tree, right.

Because Paley was writing before Darwin, before molecular biology, before paleontology, before DNA. He correctly identified one of the mysteries of biology -- how did all this shit get here? But his solution comes up wanting given what we know now. To be fair to Paley -- because it's not his fault what people do when quoting him -- it's very unlikely he would make the same argument today.

There's this tree, and you can watch the watch, man, you can see the watch forming now. It's not some crazy complicated object you tripped over crossing a heath, some magical watch from the ether. Our science got better. We have more data now and better tools for looking at the world. We've figured out germs and meteors, and the moon turns out to be this big dusty rock that we can fly to. We don't cling to our pre-scientific understandings of astronomy or medicine, and there's no value in clinging to Paley's inability to explain a watch.

Rejecting evolution requires freezing your scientific knowledge in the 18th century. Ignorance is the kindest word for it. If you believe in a God who's responsible for the universe's existence, how on earth do you justify remaining intentionally blind to the way that universe works? Especially when it comes to something as awesome and impressive as evolution -- the miraculous workings of which surely count to God's credit, if you really do believe in God.

Am I questioning the legitimacy and sincerity of the faith of people who can only believe in God by dismissing science, people who are so certain that scientific understanding threatens faith and belief in God?

Little bit.

The problem isn't just the Creationists, it's the fact that even religious people who accept the truth of evolution -- and really, Americans in general regardless of their ism -- tend to shy away from any specifics about evolution. I don't think I could get an overview of the modern synthesis out of many of the the graduate-degree-holding people I know, at least the non-biologists. I'm not certain how many of the people I know could even recall the term "modern synthesis" without prompting. And I know a lot of smart, smart people. This is not about not being smart. This is about avoiding certain streets without good reason.

Evolution is the biography of life. It's literally our heritage, and certainly as important to understanding the story of ourselves as the shot heard round the world and Joseph's technicolor dreamcoat. Deliberate ignorance is never an acceptable thing to make sacred, but ignorance about this, about the functioning of the world and life itself? Fuck that.

Meanwhile, it turns out that insects are evolving into watches, so hang that from your fob and wind it.