Lex Bayer + John Migdor's "Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart": Book Review

If you don't believe in God or gods, what then? Stanford humanist chaplain Migdor and his colleague, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Lex Bayer, offer a reasonable, calmly argued, and philosophically constructed set of Ten "Non-commandments" aimed to guide the growing numbers of non-believers along a straightforward path.

The first five emerge from atheist tenets based on observable reality to distinguish truth from false claims. Data and evidence derive from what can be tested and what is open to verification, correction, rejection, or acceptance. Basically and unsurprisingly, the authors establish that truth-claims about divine existence fail to explain why one manifestation is to be proven among myriad competitors past and present, and they offer a stimulating analogy to a "religious lottery" (50). A secular spin on Pascal's wager, this game of chance means no believer in this life can be sure that his or her choice will "pay off" as opposed to competing versions of a deity or gods. Religion is redefined as a "set of starting assumptions" rather than truth-claims able to be verified. God, the authors assert, is an assumption rather than a belief. (53) "Beliefs are simply inserted into a space left empty by a lack of effort." (136) Strong words in a generally genial study. However, Bayer and Migdor roll out a logical response that confirms that belief in an unseen presence with the names we are most familiar with is no different than that which insists elves or Thor or Babalú must exist.

There may endure a "high level of confidence" among atheists (whom they align more or less with humanists and agnostics early on if with some slight delineation) that God may not exist. But the writers also agree with Richard Dawkins' 6.9 (who ranks himself on his scale, 7 as total non-belief) that the odds are stacked against divine existence. Still, logically total certainty can never be claimed.

The second half of this brief book articulates the humanist comfort gained when one acts to increase the well-being and happiness of others, and so ensures more contentment for one's self. No facile reduction to Utilitarianism, yet this asserts a thoughtful consideration of how we may treat each other better. I found the tone shift here, as a more relaxed, expansive attitude appeared to replace the rigor of the preceding section. I was not sure if one author took charge of one part more than the other, or if the subject matter created its own mood, but it was noticeable from the start of the ethical portion.

Overall, this is very readable. I expected a refutation of the classic ontological arguments of Anselm, the teleological and cosmological ones of Aquinas, the argument from design by Paley. But no trace of these terms, or even Primum Mobile or uncaused cause, watchmakers or a 747 in a junkyard can be found. So, this may fit the needs as the authors encourage of more of a self-study book for those needing reflection and direction towards a more articulate type of non-belief. Two pages are included so you can make up your own tenets to mull over, for in this process, the authors find their own rationales have been tested and made stronger. I like the conversations they have with each other that show how one person's range of subjective views build up one's moral standards. They refuse any universal objective set of morals can be defined. I wish more depth had been given to the common challenges to this, and in the "Common Religious Objections" to some of the venerable theorems for God's existence. For, these will be faced by nearly anyone tackling this in conversation or debate with Christian believers. Only one medieval thinker is mentioned. Cleverly, Ockham's Razor is applied to advance the logical preference for the simplest explanation for what we observe, God-free.

Bayer and Migdor favor reasonable interactions, to strengthen community, and a just, rational society. They turn to the case of the Boston bomber who hid under a boat and wrote on its hull a literally "unintelligible" scrawl justifying in the name of Allah the immoral action perpetuated by "heinous acts" such as the bombers carried out. (117) This haunting comparison reminds readers of the irrational motives which continue to attempt to rally people in a supposedly advanced century to take on outmoded and illogical rationales to perpetrate violence upon those outside their own belief system. Such fanatics chant the name of one of the many competing versions of God or gods which Migdor and Bayer seek to prove as false. (Amazon US 12-11-14; Vote for beliefs; author's website)

Robin Le Poidivin's "Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction": Book Review

This is a densely written, concentrated set of chapters by a British professor of metaphysics, reading like a series of lectures. Robin Le Poidevin balances theist and atheist perspectives as expected, while claiming ground for agnosticism as a respected and defensible perspective, rather than the one despised by some non-believers and dismissed as waffling by many believers. He reasons calmly and doggedly, in a philosophical tone. For me, some of this material was compressed too much, but I cannot be too harsh on the constraints, after all, of these erudite primers.

Yes, Bertrand Russell's teapot is here, and Carl Sagan's dragon, and from these, after a brisk introduction to the history of the concept, the author delves into the presumption of atheism if God's existence remains unproven. Then, he examines positive arguments for agnosticism, or whether it's based on a mistake. Faith, morals, and scientific theory follow, to see if these rest on grounds compatible with or conflicting with what may be false conceptions of agnosticism. Can you live religiously while remaining agnostic? Should schools teach agnosticism? What about religions: do these come across best when taught from an agnostic perspective? You get Pascal's Wager handled deftly, and you also get a nod to zombies.

All these topics gain some attention in 150-odd pages. I found this stimulating, and one part helps me in discussing the existence of evil with students. Le Poidevin wonders as to the "superfluity" of evil in nature, not only human but in the physical realm, if this might be an answer, from a believer's point-of-view, in why bad things exist in nature beyond the fault of what can be blamed on human action or inaction. "In so far as the world and its inhabitants are the product of blind (although not random) forces, it is up to us to shape them as we see fit. What good there is must come from us. Any indication that it will come from elsewhere might lead us into dangerous passivity. It is as if (so the story goes) God intends us to look at the world and feel alone, for only then will we realize that it is up to us to make heaven on earth." (75) That's a sample of the book's style.

As he presents agnosticism, it's "namely an uncertainty as to whether there is, or is not, a being that is quite independent of any human thought or activity, a being that would, if we understood its nature, provide a single unified explanation of why the world exists, what we are doing in it, and how we should live. That issue will not go away, even if every theologian decided to ignore it." (86) In such a direct, accessible style, Le Poidevin sets out his case. This compliments Julian Baggini's "Atheism" in this same "Very Short Introduction" series very elegantly, by the way (also reviewed by me). It's a pleasure to find such contributions that respect all sides in this eternal debate with consideration, tact, and seriousness.(Amazon US 8-5-15)

"The vision of blind sleepers such as I"

As readers of this blog know, William T. Vollmann, as a hunt with that search term here will verify, remains one of my favorite authors. Although I find his fiction and essays sometimes too sprawling, and as his fierce determination to remain free of editorial control or publication fends off brevity, Vollmann reveals a restless mind, a vast range, and confident erudition seasoned with moral humility and wise insight.

He begins an essay in the New York Times about the Gnostic scriptures in his typically direct voice: "Have you ever wondered whether this world is wrong for you? A death, a lover’s unabashed indifference, the sufferings of innocents and the absence of definitive answers — don’t these imply some hollowness or deficiency? For my part, the wrongness struck when I was 4 years old. I was at my grandmother’s house, and I saw a cat torture a baby bird." He also, in other accounts, has narrated his failure as he sees it to take care of his younger sister when he was a boy, and how she then drowned. As with me, death haunts him always.

As one who has roamed into Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban, who has investigated the plight of the poor in Asia and in Latin America, who has roamed the rails of America, and retraced the steps of the natives into the Arctic, the Maritimes, the Virginia estuaries, and the Western plains, Vollmann counters the cant or easy pieties of many of his writing contemporaries with observation.

Similarly, although many of his many books find him not taking on belief directly, he acknowledges here its hold on him. "Hoping to understand the purpose of our situation, I visit possessors of maxims and scriptures. Most of them are kind to me. I love the ritualistic gorgeousness of Catholic cathedrals, the matter-of-fact sincerity with which strangers pray together at roadsides throughout the Muslim world, the studied bravery and compassion in the texts of medieval Jewish responsa, the jovial humility of the Buddhist precept that enlightenment is no reward and lack of enlightenment no loss, the nobility of atheists who do whatever good they do without expectation of celestial candy — not to mention pantheists’ glorifications of everything from elephants to oceans. All these other ways that I have glimpsed from my own lonely road allure me; I come to each as a guest, then continue on to I know not where." His writings strive for compassion, cultivating one's patience for poverty and pain.

I understand his search. "Somewhere beyond us is the true God, or Goddess, who calls us to come home. She is calling me now. As I walk my own many-curving way toward death, I can’t help wondering how awake I am. Hence certain Gnostic lines haunt me. Someone beyond this world has named herself or himself the vision of blind sleepers such as I. This voice calls itself the real voice and insists that it is crying out in all of us. I wish I could hear its cry." He, like me, continues to wonder and wander and study scriptures and listen to accounts, even as he feels distant from many.

He is mature enough to acknowledge the weakness of those before us who have insisted that they channel the divine through themselves. "As a corpus, the scriptures are nearly incoherent, like a crowd of sages, mystics and madmen all speaking at once. But always they call upon us to know ourselves." And, Vollmann is perceptive enough to recognize their appeal, no matter our rationality.

(Image: Fra Angelico, Predella of San Marco Altarpiece, The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, Museo di San Marco, Florence. I first saw this illustration in this fine book.)

John Calder's "The Theology of Samuel Beckett": Book Review

As Beckett's British publisher, John Calder has much in common with his friend: a despair at human folly, disgust at our stupidity, and dismay at the God who won't go away despite our diligent efforts to flee or fight Him. Expanding his argument from The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (2001), Calder refuses to reduce Beckett to an existentialist paragon, but for Calder, Beckett comes close: he's 99% of the way there. The difference lies in "perhaps"; that qualifier allows Beckett's persistent dismissal of the divine to keep its slight saving grace. For, Calder insists, one's loss of faith need not produce a loss of interest in God. Beckett shows us this obsession by his quest.

Pursuing this theme throughout Beckett's life and works, this very short study relies on familiarity with many decades of his oeuvre. Often, Calder skims over the texts themselves, assuming we can recall the actual scenes and quotes as well as he does. While aimed at those already engrossed in Beckett, and convinced that his and his subject's cold eye cast on his fellow humans and their purported Creator will be shared by their audience, Calder for all his fulminations against American triumphalism, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist (or socialist) indifference to environmentalism remains an accessible, if acerbic, guide to the highlights of Beckett's later work. Calder shifts his previous book's scope forward to Beckett's post-1960 period.

Analogous to Beethoven's career, Beckett, in Calder's model, shakes free of a dominant predecessor. He leaves behind imitation, fear, and anguish, to enter a spiritual stage that elevates the secular genius and liberates one's self. As Mozart, so for Joyce: the two B's had to outlive their mentors and forebears long enough to hear their own voices, and let them sing in works that still daunt today's audiences. Calder places both talents within a stoic, defiant stance against conformity and creators.

He begins by balancing Beckett in a dualistic stance, between "a nostalgic belief and the rejection of belief". After his marginalized early poetry and fiction, his harrowing period working for the French Resistance, and his fame after the prose trilogy and Waiting for Godot, Beckett drew the attention of academics whom Calder figures had exhausted the texts of Joyce. Leaving behind death and afterlife as explored in his works "in terms of childhood devotions", Beckett "invented his own afterlife in imagination". What this "agno-atheist" conjures up, for Calder, reveals Beckett's characteristic concerns revealed or evaded by ambiguity, defiance, resignation, hope, austerity, and pessimism.

While Calder seeks to explicate how Beckett channels his later concerns into his novella Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) and his prose piece Worstward Ho (1983), the depths of these ambiguous works, despite Calder's elucidation, remain occluded. He does not dredge these up out of their murky substrates to scrape off all their muck, but they dazzle him. The first has God destroy His creation all over again. The second plumbs evolution into dim eternity. Calder regards these overlooked texts with awe, chastising professors for ignoring them. One delves into creation's elimination, as God reverses His deeds; the other suggests Gnostic malevolence. The long shadow of Irish reaction to "dark" visions, Calder reasons, shrouded even later texts within themselves, as their creator refused full revelation.

God-like, Beckett in Calder's view retreats as did God in Genesis. Beckett's humor recedes, too, making these later, astringent writings less popular among academics. While from my own published research into the purgatorial and into the Buddhist traditions drawn upon by Beckett (enriched by the publication of his correspondence the past few years, which Calder draws upon now and then), the amount of direct gleanings seems slim, this reviewer agrees that Beckett clouded in suggestion many of his references. Reminding me of Shakespeare, ambiguity permeates Beckett's works, which evade facile explication. Calder in turn nods to not only the usual influences such as Dante's settings and Schopenhauer's indifferent but world-generating will here, but in passing (much less than the publisher's blurb lets on) to Milton and to Darwin. More research needs to be done to tease out these connections. Calder assumes nearly no scholars have applied religious contexts to Beckett, but again from my experience, this appears easily refutable from a fair scan of the voluminous concentration given over to the study of Beckett, who seems now to rival his predecessor Joyce in this regard.

Calder convinces, however, that Beckett applies Schopenhauer's ideal of a purposeless, amoral will unconsciously forcing all towards its emergence. Uncredited here, Thomas Hardy's musings of a similar generation of the universe by a dumb vegetable come to my mind. In terms of a non-theistic conception of how this slow, grumbling universe may rumble forth without a Creator, while Calder repeats his 2001 assertion that Murphy (1938) shows many Buddhist themes at work, he does not support this with any sustained examples from it. Beckett's recently published letters fail for me to provide any direct backup for this period as revealing specific Buddhist contexts for that novel.

Rather, his nod to Schopenhauer appears a likelier inspiration, for through that German philosopher in the early nineteenth century, a prototype of quasi-Buddhist concepts filtered into Europe, if in advance of scholarship that placed Buddhism more firmly in its proper setting. All the same, speaking of origins, as Calder reminds us, Beckett's pre-1950 fiction had not shaken off the impacts of his bourgeois Irish Protestant upbringing. His reluctance to do this had to wait until after his mother's death. Calder pulls out the ghostly presences she and others left in Beckett's mid-century writings. Alluding to his own conversations with Beckett, Calder implies this maturity was long delayed.

That freedom came late. Even in Beckett's long life, there was not much time for this to bear fruit. Calder harps upon the exigencies of any human's short span, and he laments the increasing fragmentation of knowledge in an Internet era enabling easier plagiarism, and less originality. His constant theme, one Calder emphasizes Beckett embodies, is the "enclosing of the enquiring mind in a small space". The loss of faith may be accepted logically, but not emotionally. In reticence, Beckett countered this lack with generosity and kindness in personal and often anonymous actions. Calder laments his friend's capitulation to coma and slow decline before his 1989 death, but Calder ends this thoughtful monograph affirming Beckett's affinity with Beethoven, aspiring toward a secular heaven. (PopMatters 4-10-14)

Ag tráthanna na gcéist

Bím ag tráthanna na gcéist ag cur ar Aghaidh Leabhar le déanaí. Beidh mé ag dul a roinnt beagán anois libhsa. Tá cuid acu greannmhar agus cuid acu tromcúiseach ann.

Ar dtús, bhí mé ag fhoghlaim go bhfuil leath ró-intleachtúil, 25/50 agam. Is é mo inchinn 53% réasúnach agus 47% iomosach. Go nádúrtha, tá mé cineál INTJ ann; tá mé stuamaí agus fealsúnachtaí, go nádúrtha.

Tá mé 93% dhaonnach ann. Ach, bhí mé ina cheannaire spiorodálta i saol atá caite ann. Agus, bhí mé ag obair is fearr chomh mar sealgaire ina meanaoiseannaí ann, Hamlet ansin, nó mar scríobhneoir anois.

Áfach, níl "jock," feidhmiúcháin, nó le chroí mór, sílim in ainneoin na torthaí. Bheul, tá Indiacht phearsantacht náisiúnta agam. Agus, tá náisiúntach fo-comhfhiosach go bhfuil Éireannach agam, go fírinne.

Anois, is maith liom is fearr an aois na Tonn Nua i roc-cheol. Tá mé ar nós Led Zeppelin i roc-cheol claiseceach ann. Agus, tá mé ar nós Radiohead i roc-cheol Britpop fós.

Mar sin féin, leanaim air John Entwistle de réir baill den The Who. Äfach, tá Emma Goldman agus Mikhail Bakunin mo samhlachtaí réabhlódeachaí ann--níl Keith Moon! Ar deireadh, lean mé ar an taobh clé ach chomh neamhthairiseach nó ainriail liobraióch leis Na Tochaltóirí agus amhran le Leon Rosselson suas.

Taking quizzes. 

I've been taking quizzes on Facebook lately. I'm going to share a small portion with you now. Some of them are funny; some are serious.

First, I learned that I am half too-intellectual, 25 out of 50. I have a brain 53% rational and 47% intuitive. Naturally, I'm type INTJ; I am prudent and philosophical, naturally.

I am 93% humanist. But, I was a spiritual leader in a past life. And, I was best suited to work as a hunter in the Middle Ages, Hamlet then, or as a writer now.

However, I am not a "jock," an executive, or big-hearted, I think despite results. Well, I am Indian in my national personality. And, my subconscious nationality is Irish, certainly.

Now, I like best the New Wave era in rock music. I resemble Led Zeppelin in classic rock. And, I am similar to Radiohead in Britpop, too.

Nevertheless, I follow John Entwistle in the matter of members of The Who. However, it's Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin as my revolutionary role models--not Keith Moon! Finally, I lean to the left but as disaffected democrat or a libertarian anarchist, like the Diggers and the song by Leon Rosselson above. (Posteár le/Poster by/ Erik Ruin by way of/ ar bealach Justseeds.)

Christian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss": Book Review

Diagnosed on his thirty-seventh birthday via a “curt voice mail message” with cancer, Christian Wiman confronts his fate, his drift from his West Texas Baptist small-town upbringing, and his decision to revive his “latent” faith, conscious of all its confusions and ambiguities. After twenty years a poet, he analyzes in these spare essays his seven years living with bone marrow transplants, and with his two twin daughters and his wife, as he faces down pain and as he examines belief.

Mr. Wiman warns early on: “if you have believed at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life”. His life has been a wandering one; he mentions moving forty times in fifteen years. While little of his background or subsequent profession emerges from the few facts he chooses to share, he shares much about his thoughts on death, mortality, and divine presence, or the lack of such when examining the impact of his prognosis. 

The essays, which an acknowledgement notes were published in some form in eleven different publications, may stray from the themes of modern belief. Yet, for all its dispersion, this book roams around a central concern for a contemporary Christian. For one schooled in modernism, and for one committed to the craft of literature, Mr. Wiman contemplates the predicament of those raised after post-modernism, who prefer to believe in -- or argue over -- a good book more than the Good Book. 

Borrowing Paul Tillich’s phrase, Mr. Wiman posits that art replaces death as the “ultimate concern” today. Whereas for Dickinson, Stevens, Beckett, and Camus, a transcendental absence beckoned, for more recent writers, post-modernism “sought to eliminate death in the frenzy of the instant, to deflect it with irony and hard-edged surfaces in which, because nothing was valued more than anything else, nothing was subject to ultimate confirmation or denial”. Certainly, “ultimate” hovers as a telling term here, as Mr. Wiman urges a fresh way “to imagine ourselves in and out of death”, even if “the old religious palliatives” such as the Christian idea of heaven certainly appear inadequate. 

Citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mr. Wiman finds a congenial if chilly voice: “The God who lets his love in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.” 

Yet, like dew, his own faith rests as he awakes some days, full of promise. Then “it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxieties, ambitions, distractions”. Such honesty offers readers skeptical of faith-claims and inspirational bromides a brisk, sobering series of reflections on a mature acceptance of faith affirmed cautiously. 

Alienation permeates many of these short chapters. They may stay calm or they may turn edgy. Language, lies, his calling as a poet, frustration, and death as our inevitable sentence: all crowd these pages with a serious look at faith. “Faith is the word faith decaying into pure meaning.”

After tenderly commending the love and support given by his daughters and his wife, Mr. Wiman in his chemotherapy-induced pain realizes: “It was God straining through matter to make me see, and to grant me the grace of simple praise.” The final chapter of these accessible, yet learned, meditations tries to avoid the tone of an elegy. Still, its author admits, “the very things that have led us to God are the things we must sacrifice”. 

Recommended for readers who prefer poetry and criticism to platitudes or self-help texts, this memoir suits an audience able to balance intelligent insight with open-minded possibility, as a talented poet challenges his own and our verities. (4-20-13 to New York Journal of Books)

Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell": Book Review

Every reader of this book needs to constantly keep in mind Dennett's reminders about his authorial attitude. On pg. 103, speaking of the three favorite purposes for religion (comfort, explaining, cooperating), he reminds us: "The main point of this book is to insist that we don't [italicized emphasis in original type] yet know--but we can discover--the answers to these important questions if we make a concerted effort." That is, questions about why these three purposes emerged, how they were diffused, and why these and not other ideas about religion's efficacy. "Probably some of the features of the story I tell will prove in due course to be mistaken." He stresses: "The purpose of trying to sketch a whole [italics in original] story now is to get something on the table that is both testable and worth testing." (103-4) As he says, so I concur: "Many people may wish that these were unanswerable questions. Let's see what happens when we defy their defensive pessimism and give it a try." (104)

Now, I as with anyone who has actually read all of this book (including endnotes and appendices), can cavil with some of his "sketch"--but like Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Dennett is giving us the big picture, not filling in the details. This does make for a very uneven survey.

If I could finesse my rating it'd be 3.65/5 stars at best. It could have been so much better if he took more time to polish his arrangement and explication. He wants to pour it all out right away on to paper, and the book for all its learning documented reads as if too rushed off to take advantage of the notoriety aroused by 2004's Sam Harris' "The End of Faith." Too often--in both books--chapters drift in and out of focus. Subtopics come up as in an intelligent conversation, but in permanent form (for both Harris & Dennett) more cohesion with the rest of the chapter is often woefully absent. Inevitable perhaps for popularizing books tackling for a wider audience an immense and subtle and rather intangible morass of belief, fact, and supposition. Dennett's engaging, even if he too thinks smugly from his tenured comforts and rarified perch that "brights" are smarter, better, and wiser than believers.

He also, I find, tends to assume brights are all atheist. Liberal Christians and progressive Jews, I suggest, share many of the "God as essence but not as being" tendencies that exposure to higher education (in or out of college) has given recent generations raised with notions of biblical 20c "higher criticism" or Mordecai Kaplan's "Judaism as a Civilization." He also gives but one bare mention in the entire book to even the word "agnostic." (Not to mention Buddhists and their own approach to the divine.) I think many of the topics here are mulled over also by agnostics and rationalists who still support culturally religious identities. Dennett seems to want to set off a binary atheist vs. believer standoff, but glosses over many millions (perhaps billions if more of us were honest with our own souls and selves?) who waver in between the two too easily polarized and stereotyped positions of faith vs. reason, assertion vs. evidence, secular vs. spiritual. Lots of us live in the middle.

I think too he takes easy potshots at those smart people who have chosen to place their trust in prayer--especially those in contemplative monastic orders, for example; his attempt to explain "ex nihilo" creation as if it came out of a substance nearly indistinguishable from nothing (a close paraphrase of his phrase) seems shaky when placed against those positing a prime mover or first cause: are not theists and scientists occupying the same ground (or lack of matter!) for argument here, when the names and labels are removed? But, Dennett's a good sport, and notes again with italics: "Assuming that these propositions are true without further research could lead to calamitous results." He wishes on pg. 311 this could be placed as a cautionary sticker on this book's cover: may I suggest this for the paperback edition?

His conclusions are about as commonsensical or as quixotic as those of Sam Harris' "The End of Faith" (also reviewed by me on Amazon): Harris urged idealistically that if only all parents told their children only the truth, the future could be secured for rationalists. Dennett too places his trust in the secular. That's about it for big answers. These are so simple, yet so elusive: do not many true believers of gods or God or no gods think exactly that? That we no matter what we preach have a handle on the truth, and that we mean best for our progeny as we raise them in the light of our own understanding; all the while, however, unable to step out of our own limited perspective of the universal and the eternal?

Dennett's devilishly entertaining, if a bit too enamored of his own cleverness. You need to imagine him on the first day of the term impishly riling up a class full of naive freshmen. He manages to make you think, although I personally was never shook up, let alone shocked, by what he had to say--despite his oft-repeated desire to ruffle (if not pluck out) all of our protective covering of faith-based feathers.

A savvy reader, in fact, will note that his book does not exactly disprove God/gods. Dennett's only asking why and how do many believe based on natural rather than supernatural explanations. A good counterpart: Randall Sullivan's "The Miracle Detectives," all about how the Vatican investigates the veracity of otherworldly visions and purported miracles. Like Dennett, Sullivan creates a readable, erratic, but thought-provoking account of how grownups in the early 21c can go about asking tough questions about faith-based suppositions and expect honest answers, or at least acknowledgements that none of us have all the answers. Both authors (like Harris, too, in another erratic but worthwhile screed) express refreshing caution in an era too in love with righteousness. Dennett's book makes a big splash, and gets our attention. From here, it's up to all challengers to take him on and support or qualify his initial rabble-rousing. He wakes us up. What will we do when jolted out of our spell?

His note #18 on pg 412 bears repeating: "(As all you careful readers know full well, I am an equal-opportunity teaser, who refuses to tiptoe around for fear of offending people--because I want to take the 'I'm mortally offended' card out of the game.) It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, falls into my trap. They won't be assiduous note readers, will they?" Caveat lector.

(Amazon US 5-12-06. As I wrote this before I started blogging, I figured it merited a reprise here.)

Tara Carreon's critiques of Tibetan Buddhism

Tara Carreon tells of her frustration with long giving in to a lifestyle based on corrupt and illogical practices. While her arguments may be familiar to anyone who's read such from disillusioned former true believers, I found, as an interested bystander looking in on how Buddhism is marketed and disseminated in the West, a worthwhile articulation in 2000-odd words of her discontent with this popular if certainly off-beat justification for returning to what drove Tibetans, in Robert Thurman's worldview, to attain a spiritual revolution full of superlative, supernatural, and utterly fabled or fabulous, incredible, incredulous to me, achievements. You can find Carreon's reaction as a Kindle single, or in earlier publication on the website she co-authors, American-Buddha.

My review of "Inner Revolution" remarked similarly on Thurman's combination of sincerity and naivete, nostalgia and wish-fulfillment in Sept. 2009. Congenial to Donald S. Lopez's "Prisoners of Shangri-La," (see my review in July 2009) Carreon castigates the outmoded concepts of a medieval dharma combined with a naive Western audience eager to embrace anti-democratic, theocratic attitudes they'd never support if presented to them in America or any advanced society for fealty.

Carreon in an 8000-word-plus essay "Another View of Whether Tibetan Buddhism Is Working in the West" here (or Kindle single) responds (as of a decade ago) to Alan Wallace who at the magazine "Tricycle" settles into to a comfort zone that for me has been vaporized via the project at Glenn Wallis' "Speculative Non-Buddhism" the past year. As he typically comments on Thurman, DL, Wallace, et al.: "x-buddhist=a species of clown." (I note, in passing, synchronicity as Carreon credits on her "Nihilism" page a collage via "Killer Klowns from Outer Space," a pre-Jugaloo and therefore interminable cult film I saw in the glory days of VHS.) Although I confess that the Pixar co-founder's-funded Juniper initiative seeks less jarringly to pioneer a secularized Tibetan-spiced dharma more harmonious with the science and the everyday outlook we less-enchanted types share, before Juniper or Wallis promoted their philosophies online, Tara and Charles Carreon had produced an enormous website chock-full of personal musings, New Age or occult readings, and an enormous mix of ideas culled from and culling many sources--this resulted in Penguin suing them in 2009.

That aside, the couple's site advocates, unsurprisingly, a very vocal team of naysayers who share her jaundiced reaction to a belief and practice she'd spent over twenty years immersed in devotedly, before turning away from it in dismay, to popularize Jeffersonian tenets and homegrown, less obsequious approaches to advance res publica and to pursue a betterment of humankind. (The legal battles of her husband, Charles, I leave to those able to follow relentless litigation and to conjure some edification out of vicarious struggles in court and on the Web, well-covered elsewhere. As all parties involved air considerably blunt rhetoric, I keep a neutral stance, and direct you to a search engine if you wish to find out more about the ongoing machinations that may turn out to be longer than Bleak House's Jarndyce. v. Jarndyce's "scarecrow of a suit." Given bewildering or bizarre claims shared by legally, diligently documented "legendary hatreds," spontaneous combustion may ensue.)

All the same, I'd be cautious of advocating as enthusiastically as do the Carreons two dissidents who adapt the pen-names of Victor and Victoria Trimondi. As Swiss Tibetologist Martin Brauen documents in his enlightening survey of Tibetan collusion with Western occultism, "Dreamworld Tibet," (see my review in Feb. 2012), these German far-left critics, originally Herbert Röttgen and his wife Victoria, crusade relentlessly against the Dalai Lama's cult, and they've sought to establish its past ties to the psuedo-Aryan quest of the Reich. Other Tibetologists, from my estimation on the sidelines, warn to approach the Trimondi critique with due allowance for the pair's own bias--Victor's rooted in '68 Maoism and their demystifying ambitions may have caused them to confuse symbols with reality as they tried to interpret notoriously coded and esoterically occluded Tantric texts--in their attempts to right the historical record vs. present-day adulation for the exiled celebrity-leader.

As I've reviewed (see my search engine/keywords embedded for my blog) many accounts of the Tibetan predicament, I'll add as an aside that Tara Carreon stands with certain far-left colleagues I know in calling for a radical end to any hopes that Tibet will recover its patrimony. I've found that a lot of progressive types deny Tibet its future except in exile, and that they denigrate as a lapse back into feudalism any plea that China step away so Tibet can advance towards a democracy. After all, the Dalai Lama has relinquished the political rule over his former realm, and from what I can find since perhaps Carreon penned her pieces, a crackdown has only worsened post-2008, as my review of Tim Johnson's "Tragedy in Crimson" explores in-depth, in Tibet and abroad, under PRC surveillance.

I'd agree with how the Carreons remind audiences of the dangers of idol worship. I've noted in my reviews of the books "authored" under the Dalai Lama but surely written by a team of deft ghostwriters off of his venerable input, so to say, that the acclaim showered upon them seems overwrought and easy, as if none dare take criticism into account. His popularized versions of Tibetan wisdom, ethical advice, and inspirational guidance I regard as hit and miss. Given the disparity between his spoken English and what we read in that language conveyed, I suspect "lost in translation" or glossed are many subtleties his cabal coats for mass consumption. I've found wisdom in passages attributed to the DL, but often "he" dispenses sensible observations akin to those of humanists. He does appear to charm any skeptical journalist who approaches, but as my wife avers: maybe this is a willful surrender, a public-relations ploy? I tend towards leniency, but given the scrutiny with which the Fifth Estate examines other statesmen and preachers, one does wonder about objectivity. For all his flaws, the DL does command a media spotlight that reminds us with our own faults of at least our aspiration towards a less destructive direction. However cleverly promoted, he appears to comfort many seekers in a less injurious fashion than many leaders, religious or otherwise.

I am aware from my medievalist training of the multiple levels a religious presentation may inculcate, and how certain texts address the initiate and others the novice; some see within the DL's esoteric discourses sinister subtexts, but I leave those to the Buddhist scholars, frankly. My encounter has been more detached, and less gullible; I don't bow to role models. I've read widely in Catholic, Jewish, agnostic, atheist, and pagan sources. I spent a long time in grad school under the scrutiny of those who grappled with one theory and then another, trying to stand tall on Continental crests. I tired of this; it reminded me of Gulliver's reports on bladder-bearers and excremental exegetes in Laputa.

Those who have fallen out with their mentors often bring valuable lessons. They show us what happens when one stops thinking for one's self, and one embraces a code or creed that silences doubt. For a while, at least, if one still harbors a sharp mind or a suspect soul. My tendency remains not to elevate one particular tradition or denial of tradition above any other, and while this eclectic mentality may enrage some, I find it the more sensible and less provocative way to learn from what's around me, and to go my own way rather than follow a lama, a messiah, a politician, or a pundit. Didn't Van Morrison title an album not (only) "Enlightenment" but "No Guru, No Method, No Teacher?"

(Image credit) 

Shulamith Hareven's "Thirst": Book Review

As biblical novellas narrating the raw core of what became mythic tales of Exodus and the settlement of Canaan, "the Desert trilogy" explores everyday characters on the fringes of the Hebrew migration and conquest. Hillel Halkin skillfully translates Israeli novelist Shulamith Hareven's spare, poetic, and blunt shifts of tone. Her characters struggle at the margins, far from Moses or Joshua, and they witness the dramatic changes in their lives distanced from the heroes, among scrub, wilderness, mountain hamlets, flimsy campsites, and uneasy cities, isolated and vulnerable. How the Exodus felt, if you were the type who was pushed aside or stayed out of Moses' way.

These accessibly told, yet literate and elegantly phrased stories combine vivid protagonists with an omniscient point-of-view which glides from interior observations of characters with untutored, basic perceptions to unsparing, distanced, modernist dispassion about their fates. We care about them, but we also watch them along with Hareven, as from a detached, resigned, existential perspective. All three figures "thirst" for understanding, but they confront a tense terrain where borders are invisible and where journeys may end in betrothal, betrayal, or sudden execution, and where enemies lurk unseen.

Eshkar's resentment of Moses and his fellow Hebrews who keep wandering in Sinai when they could easily enter the Land of Promise comprises "The Miracle Hater." The rabble of fleeing slaves and castaways from Egypt, along with hangers-on and no-accounts, relies on their leader. Moses promises the crowd they will enter the Land, but he exacts from them fealty. "He talked on about olives, about pomegranates, about grapes, about figs, and wearily they answered, yes, yes, anything you say, as long as we don't all have to drop dead in this desert, amen. No, they would make no more statues or graven images. Yes, they would not murder. They would not bear false witness. Whatever he told them, amen."

After the Golden Calf debacle, they submit to the Law. But, Eshkar cannot, and he herds beyond the movable camps of the desert tribe. "The deception of miracles was keeping them purblind and lost." (51) He enters Canaan, he sees it, and he returns, wondering why those he leaves behind delay.

There's no pat endings for his tale or the other two, but Hareven arranges the simple events in a manner that reflects how what the Bible makes grand once was so ordinary, as with Passover and the "tenth plague" emerging out of events barely elaborated upon, in an existential time without miracles at least as Eshkar can see. For Hivai, in the middle novella, "Prophet," his failure as such for his besieged city of Gibeon compels him to flee to seek sanctuary in nearby Ai, as the Hebrews press their campaign. (This is the longest entry and there's some wandering in its telling; the other two are more tightly told, but it never lacks inherent interest.) What transpires leaves Hivai "neither Gibeonite nor Hebrew," and the original situation for the Hebrews as marginal border-dwellers and outcasts becomes, inextricably, his identity as he shares their fate but not their satisfaction with the Land of Promise, until he meets another exile.

"After Childhood" takes us to the other vantage point, that of Salu, a "blinker" who lives in a hardscrabble hamlet near the Wilderness of Zin a few years or generations later. His marriage to a mountain dweller, Moran, allows Hareven to alternate between two main protagonists, and this enriches this evocation of the barren landscapes and intimate challenges faced by a bickering couple.

Just before the story concludes in a moving scene, Moran prefers--much of the book is in interior monologue with little dialogue--to stay apart from her Hebrew neighbors and family. "[S]he would rather God stayed away from her. Let him ignore her in his heaven, because the gods burned all when they came. They brought death and sickness and madness and drought. It's all we can do to make good what they ruin. Spare us both their honey and their sting. We're no match for them." (183)

Hareven's trilogy may be a metaphor for Israel and Palestine since, and this adds depth to her story, but taken on its own terse terms as an eloquent evocation of how people once scraped out a bare living in harsh times, it's also a universally applicable theme which will reward any careful reader. (Amazon US 6-4-12)

Buddha estranged: Ruin & Glenn Wallis

I stumbled upon Glenn Wallis' music after I reviewed his compilation "Basic Teachings of the Buddha" on Amazon US. Far from the quick introduction that its title or brevity may suggest, it's a challenging, iconoclastic confrontation against speculation and "Buddhist Hybrid English" which interferes with our understanding of what the earliest Pali texts convey about dharma. Similarly, his hardcore punk ethic, as in the band interview at "The Worst Horse: The Sub- and Pop-Culture Buddhist Site" reveals Wallis and his Philadelphia comrades as committed--for Wallis from the age of fifteen--to a principled combination of outreach and testimony. Inspired not only by MC5, Stooges, and Motörhead, Ruin covered simpatico Leonard Cohen more than once, and they managed to edge towards rock during their stint from 1980-87, before debt wore them down.

I'd never heard of Ruin, although last year when reviewing for "Interface: A Journal of Social Movements" Gabriel Kuhn's straightedge-anarchist anthology Sober Living for the Revolution, I lamented in a footnote left out of its scholarly incarnation Kuhn's exclusion of any religious or spiritually oriented bands. A priori, as Kuhn set his nonsectarian sXe parameters, but I wondered how many punks had turned towards Buddhism, as some did to Krishnacore. I'd written recently on testimonies of Noah Levine's "dharma punx" and Brad Warner's "hardcore Zen." Levine's a decade behind me, recovery from his Santa Cruz skate-punk juvie-detox rite of passage underwritten as Asian Grand Tour. Warner emerged from mid-Ohio's collegiate shadows. Levine's return to dharma (his father's a prominent Taos teacher) seemed after his hardcore hijinks, while Warner's band Zero DFX appeared not to share his own direction, started when he'd started at Kent State. Back then, regions mattered. Philly or Akron's basement draws might stay "the unheard music" out here in L.A.

I found Wallis' own websites. I learned of his hardcore punk roots. A radio interview delves into Ruin's Nichiren practice, as of the (anti-)Reagan years. Two LPs, He Ho & Fiat Lux, languish out-of-print, along with an anthology. I searched online but it's vanished from MP3, impermanent.

I'm intrigued by his German and Harvard-trained, yet raw and passionate, approach as "an observer of Buddhism" towards a secularized, skeptical non-Buddhism aligned with my own academic formation and internal orientation. I agree with his warning that advises those new to Buddhism to take time to learn about it for a few years, and then to come back to his site. I make an analogy of a mature artist able to challenge the treasured canon after he's studied it lovingly--and rebelliously. 

Reviewing "Basic Teachings" (2007), I wrote how it jibed with my take on Stephen Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Beliefs" and "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist." Now, I'm glad I read Batchelor first. Wallis today veers decisively away from any parallels to Batchelor; Wallis has contrasted "an aporetic-speculative argument with one that seeks to stoke Buddhism's charism." Both have stared down over decades the Pali texts; Wallis wearies of a secular search for canonical verity. He rejects the "recovery of a lost truth" by secular Buddhists and he rejects the historicity of its "Protagonist."

Wallis elaborates: "I think that I have arrived at my Speculative non-Buddhism view in large part because of the fact that it continually dawned on me that sitting—session after session, sesshin after sesshin—was empty of the complex representations that Buddhism insisted on." In an existential sit with my (similarly non-labeled if non-Buddhism="acid" and "subtraction" as Wallis sharpens his incisions into the dharmic subject) meditation mentor, albeit committed to the "recollective awareness" ("anupassana") of the Skillful Meditation Project, he mused: The Buddha uses [or he's ghostwritten with] language based on his experience. How do we express our distinct experience?

Wallis now rejects what he christens as adjective-laden "x-Buddhisms"--he identifies "buddhemes" as endemic labels with which we obscure its this-worldly teachings. Can dharma's syntax be "shorn of its transcendental representations"? He's sick of pursuing a "shell game" that keeps admiring its own reflection; he wants to shatter its illuminated mirror. It's an "archaic relic", a sop to modern vanity. He wants to "empty the dharmic dream". He prefers Charlotte Joko Beck's "no hope" and his own "unhitching" from the Buddhist bandwagon. He's "breaking apart the dharma raft," on a barren shore.

His eponymous website's files reveal speech and silence, "Ovenbird" his poetics and meditation. He confronts, after three decades-plus of practice, "this tedious tessalation called 'Buddhism.'" He links to his record of sound (see below). He penned an eloquent commentary on the "noble truths"[sic]. He's dogged but wry. He teaches "devastation". Peering into the SN-B arena, I've no dog (or bet) in this x-Buddhist fight. I like his self-summation: "The older I get, the more I shrug my shoulders."

My blogroll's added Speculative Non-Buddhism: creative criticism of Buddh-ism. This flips (a bird to) the paradigm. Wallis emphasizes in "Basic Teachings" the Buddha's sensory-grounded dharma, opposed to untenable speculation. Perhaps at times--as he and the Buddha warn--papañca proliferates on SN-B. Wallis calls that forum a stoa, where he's "interrogating a pathologically nice tyrant." The Buddha warned of the "fifth hindrance" of doubt, a "a tiger-infested journey" resolved by deepened commitment to dharma. Wallis' liberation from this path may draw critical inquirers to enter back into doubt's stream, unbewitched. SN-B delights in a call to "pump up the polemos" by ethical polemics.

Yes, Buddhism may roam anarchic. SN-B opens up a "what-if" thought experiment. The Buddha encouraged followers, once across the river, to abandon even the dharma, as a raft's burden. SN-B's seekers wish to reach the opposite shore, where they can "let the collapsed house lie in shambles". 

Yet, might they drift in samsaric miasma back to the other shore where the rest of us shuffle? Wallis quotes Kafka: "Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point must be reached." Steve Hagen defines "the dark end of 'duhkha'--existential angst"; SN-B traffics in blunt dialogue. Harsh tonic, a fire alarm to wake us up. Dissidents explore an amplified, profane, if ludic, ens sacra. Lately, they wonder: “Can Buddhist practice be the one place where we are still allowed to open our eyes to the truths that shape our lives everyday? Can it teach us not to hide from the truth inside a cloud of incense, mindfully experiencing our bodily sensations?” Has Buddhism ultimately failed the human?

A gompa as mosh-pit, where Situationists, Crass, Beckett, and Heidegger resound as blooded participant-observers face off agonistically. Bob Mould wrote in his memoir (my review) how Hüsker Dü envisioned punk to be for such--shy spectacled misfits, the gays, the art crowd, those at the edge of the crowd--as much as L.A.'s mohawked who gatecrashed, in poses I stepped aside from, wearing glasses as I did, soon after. With a jolt, SN-B's an antidote to anemia. ("Ipecac"?) Its philosophical level's steeply elevated. Tenderfoot climbers seeking vertiginous vistas may not acclimate easily to its exposure at rarified heights. But we can gloss our topographical charts. We can call upon scholarly Sherpas as guides. Maps lure us, goad us, sway us into braving thinner altitudes.

SN-B's heuristics remind me of epistemological lamas shouting demystifying, dadaist disputations citing Slavoj Žižek more than Śāntarakṣita. Interlocutors extend Professor Wallis' investigation into what--or what does not-- underlie the "hybrid" formulations we've imported or imitated. Wallis delights in "theory-fiction" and his "Before You Read" demands to be done. Peeking out from my medievalist training and Irish-language regimen to suss out linguistic walls and gaps far from my native habitat, I admire Wallis' "lyrical and aggressive" direction into derivations, where they've blurred and warped over time and translation. These commodify the branded export of/as the Buddha.  Given my interest in how dharma's marketed and transmitted West (as in Ireland) via such "x-Buddhisms," adding my (post-)punk leanings, my lurking's a bracing if disorienting encounter.

The Existential Buddhist ("dharma without dogma") critiques Wallis' own "corrosive" SN-B claims; he and others respond over three weeks of testy inquiry, three Monty Python allusions; "Rainer" muses on Wallis' punk motivations among 95 comments nailed to EB's cyberdoor. Dana Nourie sums up "Basic Teachings" in the generous resources of the Secular Buddhist Association. After I drafted this, I found valuable, pointed debate in a SBA exchange via Stephen Schettini with SN-Bers (You can search its wordcloud for entries by Wallis, now a defector approaching escape velocity from any dharmic "vibrato" as I revise this draft. Again, as SN-B generates dozens or hundreds of comments per post, so I've been trying to keep up as comments replicate. I barely grasp the day's thread, before it unravels like Penelope's loom.) Before the Pali texts he rendered as "Basic Teachings" (advanced as they are), before his "pathless path" of aporia, Wallis translated the text that got him started decades ago, the Buddha's "verses on the way," as the Dhammapada, in rounded resonance.

I've reviewed Valerie Roebuck's didactic austerity in her Penguin edition in 2010. Wallis at anarchic fifteen had read the superseded Juan Mascaró version. If I had ruminated in a high school of a far different sort, what might I have pursued for my doctorate? I had glanced into the bardo early in my dissertation but I had to return from Tibetan "psychonauts" to Catholic Europe. Purgatory's ideological and literary echoes, still, resonate as my karmic what-ifs. Would I have blazed another trail earlier, East not West, with or without the jolt of first musical and then intellectual energy that punk's arrival sparked? Hard to tell, as my companion post confides, given I grew up next to a dog kennel by the rail tracks. Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce, Kafka, Tolkien, Borges, Beckett: my ur-texts. Given my reluctance to limit or define myself now by any ideology, who knows. Did Warner or Levine in 80s hardcore forays cross-country know Wallis? They may've mentioned him in their memoir-accounts without my being clued in to Ruin or his later scholarship.

As for his band, Ruin reminds me of O.C.'s Adolescents' debut with anthemic, bucking, propulsion, while embedding--as if Martin Hannett-haunted--Mancunian post-punk shards honed into uneasy tempos, swaying lyrical shifts. Later emanations, gleaned from my limited access to a videostreamed 1986 show, demonstrate a Dead Kennedys lurch; reunion concerts resemble a lysergically enhanced Big Black--albeit clad in white. The glyph Wallis drew in a trance, spacing out at Temple U. in 1980 (I studied religious themes in lit at L.M.U. that same year: the design reminds me of not only the Aryan sun symbol but a solar wheel within "noble" Brighid's Imbolc cross/ Cros Bríd) is their logo.

Ruin opened once for Boston's own The Volcano Suns. Roaring, pummeling pop-punk; skewed, melodic, rambling, mocking albums mixing Mission of Burma's intelligence with raucous, sophomoric wit. And, is there a Buddhist nod(-off) in their title (cover below; see review) of record #2, "All Night Lotus Party"? Find out more in my next post as I dive into Ruin's shards, mornings after. He ho, let go.

"The Buddha, our guide, becomes a stranger;/ The Dharma, our doctor, goes mad;/ The Sangha, our friend, weaves bloody tapestries./ Might hidden treasure lie in ruins?/ Our ruin is a ruin because of treasure."

Ruin's website

Lyrics + Discography

Streamed soundfiles

"The Pessimist Club" where Anonymous' post raves: "Ruin were incandescent. They were otherworldly -- phantoms, ghosts, bewildered gods. White clothes, black light, darkness, candles." And perhaps (not) again, being the same moniker, raves the soundboard guy at a reunion show: "they are a nuclear bomb brought to a knife fight.."

 

J.C.A. Gaskin's "The Quest for Eternity": Book Review

Do we define God by faith or logic? Miracles or belief? Reason or inspiration? Open-minded yet skeptical, balanced while probing, this philosopher tackles the Big(gest) Question. In 180 pages, intricately argued, J.C.A. Gaskin examines the familiar, and scholarly, cases for and against God. It's an extremely slow book to read, in the best sense: it packs reason and reflection into every sentence.

Gaskin starts by defining the concept in a way agreeable to the major monotheistic faiths: "There exists one God who is creator and sustainer of all things; who is omnipotent, omniscient and eternal; who is an agent able to act everywhere without a body, and who is morally concerned with mankind." (24)

He continues as he begins chapter two--grappling with "initial obstructions," with sly wit as well as insight. "One of the ways which the devout believer may seek to insulate his belief from criticism is by adapting a fideistic attitude: 'The certainty of my faith comes by the grace of God alone, not from dubious evidence and uncertain chains of reasoning.' One of the ways in which the atheist may do most harm to religion is by agreeing with him." (25)

After fideism and Freudian attempts to analyze faith are examined, and causes are distinguished from beliefs, chapter three looks into four "public arguments" affirming belief in God. The cosmological and regress arguments are shown to be "a priori"; two versions of arguments by design from an intelligent orderer and an adaptation of means to ends by a designer are "a posteriori." Anselm's ontological proof's examined, and many more, in light of Aquinas, Darwin, Kant, Hume, and Leibniz. This is daunting territory, but Gaskin guides us.

Gaskin's at his sharpest when inquiring into divine omniscience and "timelessness" as attributes that defy logic or probability. While (I before reading this) always figured God by definition could write his own rules, Professor Gaskin insists that our human conceptions of God need to align with how God works within our world and limits, not by simply transcending or overruling our own laws. This segues later in chapter six into a deft look at claims for God's existence by way of supposed miracles, as "violation or coincidence concepts."

Chapter four peers into "private illuminations" that people have, claiming God speaks or manifests himself to one in an interior fashion, which by definition lacks "public" exhibition. The "numinous" gains thoughtful consideration, and the longing many have of awe or wonder or terror at the contemplation of the all-powerful or eternal elicits a moving corroboration that anyone might agree with, no matter their own predilections, in an eloquent passage from Gaskin.

He remains cautious, by profession. The next chapter moves into "external skepticism" as an argument against God. If God is beyond easy comprehension after thousands of years of human efforts, "that is exactly what one would expect if the world were in fact the creation of an intelligence which intended to leave us to our own judgements, and free of the crushing and distorting knowledge that he was in fact as we suppose him to be." (116-7)

Logical positivism earns Gaskin's scorn as a way to devalue statements of belief; the coherence of a totally powerful God outside space and time while dominating every aspect of it makes my head spin, as Gaskin patiently dismantles some of the claims that hold God to our rules while allowing him a free pass at the same time. How God can overrule the rules by which his universe works and by which he exacts fidelity and obedience from his human subjects, Gaskin suggests, wearies rational puzzlers. How can God have it both ways, as we conceive him? Gaskin alludes to Milton's Satan: "More succinctly, either Satan has a chance, or God is unjust, or the believer is 'in wandering mazes lost'. The agnostic may well feel tempted to let him stay lost." (136)

Atheism has its own limits, he concludes after another chapter. Not that this strengthens theism, but without some appeal as religion impels to look to "moral eternities" to hammer home the ethical imperatives, secular morality may lack the added punch that religion's gained to compel modern people to take problems of global destruction seriously, when every moral lapse and slight sometimes seems to be inflated to a human rights violation in an era where all appeal to human courts alone for redress of wrongs and for restitution. Also, a coldly existential or utilitarian outlook may leave us with less comfort than that enjoyed by a believer.

This guide appeared in 1984, so Marx gains a bit of attention, if briefly, for its attempt at a model of a "secular salvation." This aspect near the end of this compressed book merited more elaboration, as did the existentialist p-o-v. The sociological ramifications, for instance, of religion regarding its utility don't earn attention. However, for a short book, this packs considerable heft.

Overall, this is recommended, but with a reservation: this "outline of the philosophy of religion" looks far more closely at proofs for and arguments against God's existence, and not much at the wider issues concerning monotheistic religions. Islam's barely touched on, Judaism not much, and Christianity more in general fashion. (I found Donald A. Wells' 1962 study "God, Man, and the Thinker" more comprehensive, but less chatty: it's around 500 pages compared to Gaskin's compact, if challenging, primer.) 

For Gaskin, Marxism ignores "cosmic questions," as does a postmodern "godless" Christianity as invented by some theologians. Still, secular morality suffices, Gaskin argues if with a bit of regret. While it lacks the ability to address the longings embedded in us who wonder for more "potentialities" harnessing "ultimate creative good against destructive evil" in an almost mythic sense (he brings in Tolkien well here), it must be enough for skeptics and atheists, who by definition may never be metaphysically satisfied. (170)

He wraps it up with a summation of the coherence or incoherence of our definitions of what we understand to be God. He elaborates a metaphorical "Garden" for belief and "Desert" for atheists as alternative scenarios. Both are reasonable, both possible, both supported by "some evidence." (175) What's the "ultimate reality of the world" as it "actually is"? Which model do we prefer for "human purposes"?

Theism is "coherent," but in philosophical terms, a "weakly reasonable belief" with a "weak probability of truth" (178) given the lack of strong evidence. Yet, for "the generality of the world," Gaskin hesitantly concludes, "most of the surviving influences of theism are better than most of the consequences of atheism." (179; his italics) If "man does not live by bread alone," the central "insight" of religion, than maybe an Epicurean "acceptance" works best, "that the world is as it is, and is all there is; but the hope of other worlds somehow lingers."

The nuance of this study makes it a worthwhile companion. I was surprised by his closing argument, but in reflection, it fits the subtle and dogged nature of this thought-provoking examination of one of our most enduring questions. As a philosopher (and gardener and teller of ghost stories), he's a patient tutor. (Amazon US 1-6-12)