I’d like to introduce myself as a new Dean’s World contributor. I’ll be blogging primarily about religion and philosophy from a non-protestant Christian perspective. I was baptized Greek Orthodox, though my education has largely been Catholic, and I’m quite sympathetic to Scholasticism (which can loosely be defined as catholic theology combined with a very healthy respect for greek philosophy, the most famous Scholastic being St. Thomas Aquinas). I was also briefly an atheist when I was 16, so I’m especially interested in apologetics and atheism: there’s no critic so harsh as an ex-supporter.
There are only two ways of convincing a man of the truth of some proposition. The first and usually most reliable is to appeal to some authority which he recognizes. The other is to show him that the proposition follows necessarily from his premises. I’m not interested in appeals to authority as a matter of personal taste, so I’ll mostly be writing about where premises lead.
The only problem with this is that it’s fairly common for people not to believe in their own premises. To give a simple example, a man who doesn’t believe in free will still says “thank you” when someone passes the salt. There are consistent ways that a determinist can say “thank you”, even apart from the trivial sense that nothing he does is his fault since he didn’t have a choice, but they’re all very cynical and generally some variant of, “if I do this, the animal I’m interacting with will behave the way that I want it to”. I’ve never met a determinist who’s managed to be consistently ungrateful and cynically manipulative, though.
If a premise leads to an intolerable conclusion, one can either throw out the premise, or the reasoning that connects the premise to the conclusion. If the reasoning is valid then your only recourse is to throw out the premise. The modern solution seems to be to throw out the act of reasoning from premises. This is probably why the modern age is so slavishly devoted to authorities.
I believe that every author should do his readers the courtesy of saying what he’s going to assume to be true. I’m going to assume that reasoning is valid, and that my readers have the courage of their convictions. I hope that those of you who agree find my posts interesting, or at least entertaining. To those who don’t agree, I apologize for taking up space on a blog that you otherwise like.
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Welcome. Shake things up.
The second way to convince a man about the truth is to screw a Smith & Wesson into his ear, cock the hammer, and wait patiently until he says something interesting.
Then pull it out, show him the empty chamber, and smile. That way he knows you are his friend and not his enemy.
What does Thomas Aquinas have to say about that?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Heheheheh. Arnold you crack me up.
By the way, though, just so you know, Thomas Aquinas was the Christian philosopher she admired most. Since I know you’re a fan of hers, I thought you might find that little fact interesting. Augustine is considered a giant of the early Church precisely because of the power of his mind and how he influenced the intellectual development of the church.
Oh, and to CTL: yeah, I accept your premises. I wasn’t sure at first when you said Greek Orthodox if you meant literally the Grecian Church; although technically incorrect, sometimes you’ll see people call *all* Orthodox Christians “Greek Orthodox” which isn’t really correct; Russian Orthdox, Ukrainan Orthodox, etc. are all distinct although they share a common theology and a shared apostolic succession. I am never sure why *all* Orthodox are referred to as ‘”Greek Orthodox,” except maybe because they’re mostly Eastern Churches and the original Church in the East (before the first schisms) used ancient (Koine I think?) Greek as their liturgical language. Also maybe for a while now the most common Orthodox found in the U.S. is Greek Orthodox in specific.
Anyway, blah blah. I welcome this perspective and I’m looking forward to reading more.
I blame the Jews.
Welcome, I look forward to reading your posts ;-)
Dean,
No, I do mean Greek Orthodox. Though I believe that they would generally repeat everything in English as well. I pretty much never went to the church that I was baptized in, and I was a bit young at the time, but they definitely used greek in the services. And Sunday school — from what some people I knew who did attend that church said — included greek classes.
The maternal side of my family is all Greek. My maternal grandfather was born in Greece, and my maternal grandmother was 1st generation American from Greek parents, and grew up in the Greek part of New York city.
Arnold, this is for you: According to Aquinas: Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good . . . . ST IIa-IIae, q. 64, a. 2.
Arnold, for you: According to Aquinas: Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good . . . . ST IIa-IIae, q. 64, a. 2.
Arnold,
According to Aquinas,
“Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good . . .”
Well, CTL, welcome to Dean Esmay’s eclectic world of fact and opinion. He will plainly tell you that I am the friendly and neighborly apatheist. The only thing I have against his religion, yours, or all the others is that they all are based on belief; an appreciation of which I more or less totally lack.
My wife Stefi and I travelled in the Balkans in late summer 1974 and stayed a view days in Athens. (Good food for only a few drachmas. Good times in the Plaka. Bad lodgings in the Hotel "Diana the Huntress", where we endured a rain-soaked room on the roof and walked downstairs to get to the nearest bathroom. Yes, we were graduate students then.
Stefi was born and raised in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, then a supposedly autonomous republic of the Socialist Federated Republic of Jugoslavia. We were on our way up there from Greece, where we would stay with her parents for a few months before returning to the USA.
I noticed what had been long apparent to Stefi, that the dividing lines of religion — latinic Christianity in Croatia, Slovenia and parts of Bosnia; orthodox Christianity in Serbia, parts of Bosnia and Makedonia; Islam in parts of Bosnia and most of Kosovo — ran through that country like the edges of the earth’s tectonic plates. One can plainly see under these circumstances why the wars of independence assumed their most vicious form in Bosnia.
The south slavic word for the orthodox is "pravoslavci", which means "true believers". The irony of it is that the mostly catholic Croats and the totally orthodox Serbs use the same term to describe the orthodox communities. I use the term community in the plural, because I could clearly see that having an independent national orthodox church was the factor that defined and in fact legitimized the very nationhood of each such national group. Thus, there is a Serbian Orthodox Church, a Bulgarian Orthodox Church, a Makedonian Orthodox Church. I assume the Greek Othodox Church is organized the same way.
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Dean, I know about Augustine and I even know something about Aquinas. But thank you for the reminder.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WIÂ
Welcome ctl. I was a philosophy major in college, and now work in economics, so I’m sympathetic to your desire for consitency, but I do think it is a bit much to expect most people to be philosophers. They just don’t have the time.  But I like Hayek and accordingly believe there is much to be said for the content of traditional knowledge, even if it hasn’t all been constructed from the ground up by each individual mind.
My second point is that I wouldn’t expect a determinist to behave in the way you said he would. That sounds more like a person who knew he had free will but believed all other people’s behavior to be completely determined.
I’ll play the game and give you a couple of my own premises. I straddle the fence between free will and determinism — I suppose I’m a compatibilist. I think as humans gain knowledge and imitate God’s characteristics they approach free will, but that God is the only being with absolute free will. Also I’m a Muslim. I grew up in a liberal Protestant church. I still have great respect for Christianity, but I just had trouble believing that Jesus is God. Within Islam, I am sympathetic to the rationalist and mystic strains of thought which were once more central to the Sunni tradition than they perhaps are today. I have read a lot of al-Ghazali and found (even though I can’t accept all of his premises) that his thought is clear and refreshing, and I see many parallel’s between much of his thought and Aquinas’, even though there are a number of differences as well. I’m also somewhat of a liberal and a modernist (and even pluralist), so I don’t limit my influences to any one tradition in particular.
When you have a religion like Islam, and you deal with a theology which plainly states that certain specific older religions have some things right and some things wrong, it seems to me that religion can go one of two ways: either condemning and harassing the older religions it’s based on, or, accepting that the differences are real.
For Islam, as I have long viewed it (and I studied the religion well before 9/11), it seems that being graceful toward at least some other religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity, is very easy; the Koran is very specific that both of these other religions are in possession of very important truths, they’re just wrong on some things.
This is actually a harder mentality for Christians, because Christian thought (which only partially includes the Bible, historically, although you can find what I’m saying here in the Bible) is that Jesus is absolutely the promised Messiah and is absolutely God in human flesh. It’s pretty explicit that Jews who deny it are very wrong, and it can be pretty rude about Jews. But a liberal Christian theology would say that we just hope Jews will come around and recognize the Messiah; more conservative would say they are obvious liars who’ve denied God’s truth and should be punished for it. There’s really nothing pushing either viewpoint into it; there is no concept in Christianity that any other religion is "partially true and to be protected." You have to work hard to find the verses and the philosophy and the traditions that strongly condemn harassment of non-Christians, and that’s probably because at the time the New Testament books were written, Christians were regularly under assault and rarely had to deal with other religions except in a defensive posture.
Islam lays out plainly that Christians and Jews are "people of the book" and to be respected and protected. And I think that’s pretty obviously because at the time Muhammed came around, there was clear friction between those two religions that was ongoing.
Dean,
Christianity inherently affirms that judaism is largely correct. One of the central claims of Christianity is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is indeed the uncreated creator of the universe. Christianity affirms that the Mosaic law did come from God.
Yes, Christianity affirms that where Jews disagree with Christianity that they’re wrong about those disagreements. That’s just a feature of all statements about the world.
What you’re saying about Christian attitudes towards Judaism seems to presuppose that Judaism’s only tenet is that Jesus was not the messiah.
DanielH,
I don’t expect most people to be philosophers. I’m just being up front about what my writing is going to be about, so that people can decide ahead of time whether it’s likely to be a good use of their time.
The fact that a determinist doesn’t believe that he has free will does not, so far as any determinists I’ve ever met have claimed, get rid of the feeling that they have free will. They may believe that they’re stuck on a set of rail road tracks, but somehow they do, as a matter of practice, have to come up with an answer when the waiter says, "what would you like?"
Indecision doesn’t plague only those of us who believe in free will.
(By the way, free will doesn’t imply omnipotence; nor does it imply a complete absence of influences.That God will answer prayers is sufficient to prove that even free will combined with omnipotence can be influenced (though obviously not constrained) by outside sources. And clearly being God’s creature God can make us do anything he pleases; our will being free even of God is a gift from God, not some sort of "natural" condition.)
CTL: Well, the problem is one that started between Christians and Jews pretty much in the 1st century, and continued to be compounded over the centuries; much of the New Testament show The Twelve and The Seventy trying to wring out what in the Mosaic Code applied to gentile Christians and what did not, with debates flying back and forth pretty furiously even between people like Peter and Paul. The resolution the Church came up with at that time was that most of the dietary codes or other laws applied to nobody but the Jews, therefore, none of it should be expected to apply to Gentile Christians, who eventually became the great majority. Since that was also the basic proposition the Jews held to, it seemed the best answer at the time (and I concur with it).
Further compounding the matter is that the Judaism we know today is simply *not* based on what is thought of as the "Old Testament." It is based on the Judaism as practiced by the Pharisees that Jesus was so often in conflict with, for one thing. For another, it is based strongly on the Oral Torah as was eventually written down in the Mishnah. It is also based on the all-important Talmud, which is centuries of Rabbinical commentary on all of this, including debates between major Rabbis. Much of this all happened *after* Jesus came and went.
Still further compounding the matter is that at the time of Christ, the vast majority of people, Jew and Gentile alike, did not speak, read, or write Hebrew, or if they did it was only a little. The most widespread Old Testament at the time was the Septuagint, which was a very special (some said, and still say, Holy) version of the Jewish scriptures translated into ancient Greek a few centuries before Christ. Indeed, the New Testament authors almost never quoted from Hebrew scriptures; they relied almost exclusively (with only a tiny handful of exceptions) upon the Greek Septuagint whenever they quoted from the old scriptures.
The Jews and the Christians both used the Septuagint almost exclusively until the 8-10th Centuries. The Eastern Church continued, and still continues, to use it. But the Jews decided that they wanted to get back to using Hebrew again, and so began a lengthy and laborious process of finding the oldest versions of the Hebrew versions to compile and work from. Now remember, this was about a thousand years ago, but what they produced was what they dubbed the Tanakh, and that Tanakh wound up having some very significant deviations from the Septuagint. In fact, a number of Christians who looked at it said the Jews had intentionally and maliciously altered it, because many of the strongest prophecies affirming Jesus as Messiah suddenly read different and made it much less obvious that Jesus could be the Messiah, and tended to bolster Jewish arguments that he couldn’t possibly be the Messiah.
The Jewish perspective was that this was more accurate. The Christian perspective was Jews were wildly wrong in their newfangled version of the scriptures. This all by itself may be where the worst of Christian persecution of Jews really began.
This by the way points to a major head-scratcher for me: Martin Luther and the Protestants of his era were horrifically awful anti-Semites, but, when they decided to revise the Canon, they removed a handful of books–and they were the same ones the 10th Century Jews removed. Those are the same handful of books that are now thought of as "apocryphal" or "deuterocanonical," and if I recall correctly the main reason the Jews chose to remove them is that they were originally written in Aramaic and not Hebrew.
So why would 15th Century Protestants accept that this handful of books should be removed just because the Jews said so, when they were inhesitant about accusing Jews of lying about this and other theological matters in the first place? I’ve never quite understood it. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles still mostly keep those books, and a growing number of Protestant Bibles are putting those books back in, I think because they now realize removing them was a rather hasty decision.
Also, by the way, the Dead Sea Scrolls? The discovered ancient scrolls written in Hebrew? They have a tendency to be more in line with the Septuagint than with the 10th Century Tanakh that Jews today by and large use. Indeed, a number of Jewish scholars–the majority, I believe–will say that the Dead Sea Scrolls are inaccurate, and cannot be trusted because they were put together by a branch of Jews that died out and was never mainstream. They respect the Septuagint and still use it occasionally if the ancient Greek translation may shed light on something, but it’s otherwise something they discarded over a thousand years ago. And the Dead Sea Scrolls aren’t more accurate as far as they’re ocncerned; the fact that they’re older doesn’t prove a thing to them.
So, what does all this add up to?
1) The Judaism in practice today doesn’t look very much like what most Christians assume it looks like, in either thought or practice.
2) The Judaism of today has a version of the scriptures that, by their understanding of those scriptures, makes it absolutely, irredeemably impossible for Jesus to have been the Messiah, let alone God.
It’s not even a source of debate for them; the only question they really have is whether or not Christianity leads people closer to the truth about God, or farther away from it. Otherwise, it’s all pretty clearly crazy heresy to them–every word of it. Although they’re usually polite and skittish about saying so out loud, because they’ve been horribly persecuted many times in the past for it (and as a people they have long memories).
This is also why I laugh when I see people who think, "Yeah, the Jews just have the Old Testament, which the New Testament completes, so if we could just show them where they’re in error, and how all of the Old Testament clearly points to Jesus, they’ll come around!"
Nope. The Jews of today are direct descendants of the Pharisees, their Tanakh diverges quite considerably from the Old Testament of most Christians, and they have a variety of sources they consider every bit as important, or even more important, than the Written Torah and the Tanakh that they look to. Most Christians also have their version of the Oral Gospel (Catholic and Orthodox do anyway) and the Bible itself quotes at times directly from the Oral Torah as understood in Jesus’ time, but the two traditions have diverged considerably over the last 2000 years.
All that’s a long way of saying, after 2,000 years of development, these two religions are wildly apart. Islam, as I’ve noted many times, is actually more compatible theologically and otherwise with Judaism as it’s practiced today than Christianity. There’s just no getting around it. It used to be an excuse for persecution by Christians, and in a few cases you’ll still see that, but most Christians have come to recognize that violent antisemitism and anti-semitic persecution is incompatible with Christian belief.
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