The Pope's speech to the German Parliament

[fpb]

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_listening_heart
As ever, the man is worth listening to. But the responses in the comments thread just show how bloody useless it is to deliver intellectually distinguished and morally valuable speeches in a world where most people know no history but are stuffed full of out-of-context factoids and believe themselves entitled to judge.

Comments

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

I'm going to admit that I disagree with the Pope's speech pretty much in its entirety, and I found some interesting threads in the comments that seemed to be decent exchanges, amongst the vitriol.

This might be because I find nothing intellectually worthwhile in faith itself, and I don't believe in free will, teleology, natural law, or theology. But beliefs aside, I think there are plenty of reasons to uphold justice, obligations, rights, and other ideals without Christianity or a deity, not only due to philosophical reasons but also historical ones. Roman, Greek and Chinese traditions had a number of secular systems and thinkers that believed in human equality and dignity (even if in the context of political hierarchies, which persisted under Christian Europe anyway), such as Solon the Athenian, philosophers to include the Stoics which the Pope even mentioned, and various Confucian and Buddhist scholars. Even Enlightenment and American thinkers who took notions of equality and rights forward often had sharp theological differences with the Church.

Yet, religion is not incompatible with concepts of justice and rights either, and an unfortunate number of my fellow atheists want to eradicate religion as a pretext to a just society rather than cooperating with religion even as we present arguments against it elsewhere.

I still cringe at many internet comments on various blogs, articles and videos...they often (although not always) bring out the worst (in?) people to say inflammatory bumper sticker slogans or extremist positions. I plan for anything I upload on YouTube (my Egyptian film, serial documentary, etc.) to have comments disabled for that very reason.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

"...I find nothing intellectually worthwhile in faith itself..."
Even the faith that there is such a thing as yourself and such things as the world outside you?
"....I don't believe in free will [or] natural law..."
Wow. I take it you have a few issues with the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.
"...Roman, Greek and Chinese traditions had a number of secular systems that believed in human equality and dignity..."
I won't take you up on the Chinese - except to say that any egalitarianism in their intellectual traditions seems to have been pretty effectively denied by their political institutions, but there was NOTHING that Plato and Aristotle shared so completely as their joint certainty that Greeks - especially upper-class Greeks - were born to be masters, and barbarians to be slaves. And until Paul of Tarsus, acting as interpreter of the views of Jesus of Nazareth, nobody, but nobody, explicitly refused them ("no slave or free, no Greek or barbarian..."). As for the Jews, I suggest you have a look at the apocalyptic war of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in which God would lead His Chosen People to conquer the rest of the world in a very physical, very material war which would reduce all non-Jews to slaves or corpses. And in case you thought this was a wish-dream, I would point out that Bar Kochba's revolt can only be interpreted as a determined attempt to actualize it. As for Rome, the certainty that Rome existed to rule the rest of the universe was as rooted in Roman culture as the ceremonies of the Vestals. Just as the God of the Dead Sea Scrolls promised the Jews triumph over every nation in the world, the God of Virgil said in so many words: "To them I place no end in space, in time;/ To them I've given empire without end." And let's not even speak of India or of the civilizations of the New World. No, the equal dignity of every human being, not as a vague speculation, but as a principle of action and law on which political systems are built, is firmly culture-specific. And guess which culture we're talking about?

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

I act under the belief that there are things such as myself, and things outside myself, because I observe them and because it makes the most sense; it is self evident. This could all be some sort of delusion hoisted upon me by a Cartesian demon, but appeal to such is sophistry, and could easily be applied to any faith I have as well. We don't need belief without proof at all to presume the existence of the world. It may not be 100% certain, but there is enough certainty and likelihood through the intersubjectivity of human observation means it is probably the case. Faith has no influence upon my thinking or life, but that does not mean I confound it with trust, probability, or hope.

-----

As to the origin or rights, sure: I don't believe in the existence of natural rights like Platonic motes of essence imbued in our beings. However, the Constitution is the governing document of my country and we adhere to that as our shared guidelines, not the Declaration of Independence. I'm not about to believe something just because Jefferson thought it so. Although it is worth noting that many of the signatories of the Declaration also wrote scathing attacks on the Church, feeling their philosophy to be superior to the clergy's.

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Paul's quote was historically interpreted as giving spiritual equality but was not given its spin of political equality until recently. Slavery was still around and was both supported and opposed on religious grounds, especially in my own country's history. Beyond that, the middle ages were full of serfs who were essentially enslaved to the land via their landlords...and religious thinking at the time dictated that God had ordained everyone's proper place as serf, freedman or noble, so mobility was difficult if not impossible. Likewise the divine right of kings prevented any meaningful participatory government and held the monarch as the divinely ordained autocrat, and hence political speech against him was punished severely.

The idea of 'all men are my brothers' was also in evidence during pre-Christian Rome amongst the cosmopolitanism of the cynics and stoics, many of whom argued against slavery. Likewise Solon the Athenian also advocated for the abolishment of the practice before the rise of Rome, Jesus or Paul. The Pope specifically cites Stoic natural law as something the Church carried on regardless.

Europe has had its own struggles with inequality: Catholic Spain had the concept of "Cleanliness of Blood" that ranked 'blue blooded' European aristocrats higher than the Sephardic Jews and Moors who remained and converted to Christianity post-Reconquista, and antisemitism was justified along religious grounds for centuries. The Inquisition, even if not the torture-fest as commonly perceived, still saw people being punished for thought and speech that the local authorities felt was heretical, not helped by the papal bull "ad extirpanda", issued by Pope Innocent IV, which authorized certain types of torture. The crusades against the Cathars is another example of Europeans behaving badly on account of religion towards each other.

This isn't to say that I think Christianity directly leads to torture and murder (just like atheism does not lead to Nazism), but that the antisocial views and abuses you and I have brought up, as well as their remedies, are HUMAN activities as opposed to religious: people can and have used religion to justify both the social and antisocial tendencies of their personalities.

Modern rights that we take for granted are formulated upon, and assume, modern institutions, and things like freedom of religion, expression, education and such were nonexistent until recently in their current form. Only with the Enlightenment (most of the philosophers of which were highly unorthodox in their religion or else critical of the Church, especially the founders of America) did things start gaining steam...and even then, it's still unfinished. The Magna Carta, while pre-Enlightenment, was borne out of legal disputes between nobles, not a fiat of church edict. Christianity and other religions can certainly be compatible with them as evidenced by the re-interpretation of Paul's quote you referenced, but we should not retroactively apply our viewpoints to assume that the Church gets credit for modern ideas of egalitarianism other than being another (valuable) link in the chain of Western thought.

One

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are wrong about slavery: by the year 1000 it had been effectively abolished in Christian countries (by the transformation of slavery into serfdom, with limited and definite rights and duties), and the only state that dealt in slaves proper was Venice, because it was the only one that had wide-open borders with non-Christian countries. In 1437, I think, the Portuguese asked for and received from the Pope, as ultimate authority in law, a permission to trade in African slaves (a trade that already existed in West Africa - the Portuguese only wanted a piece of the action) in order to finance a crusade against Morocco. At the time, nobody imagined such a place as America existed, and the disastrous consequences of what seemed like a very minor leave could not possibly be foreseen. (The crusade actually did take place in about 1510, and was an unqualified disaster.) But when the Iberian powers discovered America, the minor issue of a few slaving boats between African harbours slowly grew into a major trade which skewed the social composition of the coming European colonies in America in ways that had been utterly unknown in Europe since the end of the Roman Empire. Even so, the real catastrophe was the Protestant Reformation, which removed several involved parties from the Pope's jurisdiction and weakened his hold on the rest. The Dutch threw themselves on Portuguese trade routes like vultures, and the British started settling colonies with slaves bought first from the Dutch, then from their own ships. Furthermore, the immediate softening and legal correction imposed by the Church on slavery in CAtholic colonies through the advocacy of such men as Bartolome' de las Casas and St.Peter Claver was wholly absent in the Protestant powers; indeed, slavery did not actually begin in the English colonies with imported Africans, but with tens of thousands of enslaved Irish Catholics - the Africans only came later. (In the first half of the seventeenth century, as I pointed out elsewhere, England suffered from a serious shortage of valuta and might not have been able to pay Dutch prices for them anyway. But she could and did drag tens of thousands of wretched Irishmen and women to be treated worse than the Portuguese and Spanish treated their Africans.) Even so, the poison of slavery, having been reintroduced into the body of European colonies (there never was slavery in the mother countries) was eventually spat out again, in one case at a very high cost in lives and treasure. Western civilization could not live with it. China, India, and the Muslim world, on the other hand, lived happily with it for millennia.

Two

[fpb.livejournal.com]

There was no such thing as "the divine right of kings" in mediaeval Europe; it is a French invention, dates about 1500, and was justly dead by 1792. All the European rulers, apart of course from those who were full-blown republics, were flanked and limited by representative parliamentary bodies. It is significant that every single historical European language has a native word for "Parliament" - English, French (Etats-Generaux), Spanish (Cortes), German (Diet, Tag), Italian (Maggior Consiglio, Arengo), Sardinian (Corona de Logu), Serbo-Croat (Skrupshtina), Russian (Duma), Scandinavian languages (Thing, Folketing, Althing), Welsh (Senedd), not to mention a few defunct ones - Longobard (Gairethinx), Anglo-Saxon (Witangemot). Representative government is native to the Christian West, and was theorized as early as St.Thomas Aquinas in 1200. "The divine right of kings" is a fallacious invention in the service of the creeping usurpation that was the modenr French monarchy, which continously bent and broke its own legal support.

Three

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All the factoids you quote to the dishonour of Europe are minor and local. You are probably not aware that when the Jews were driven out of Spain, many of them fled straight to... Rome. The Pope's own capital. Why? Because that is where the most ancient Jewish community in the world has resided and resides still, under the Pope's protection. I am told that some Roman Jewish families can trace their descent, son to father, to 250AD and the Roman Empire. Indeed, the whole idea that there is a special hatred between Christians and Jews is due to a Muslim peculiarity. Christians expel unwanted minorities. Muslims, if they have such a problem, bury it. And if it was otherwise, ask yourself: why is it that, by 1800, nine Jews out of every ten lived in Christian Europe?

Four

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The crusade against the Cathars was started by the Cathars. They murdered a papal ambassador. Anyone who starts a war has only himself to blame for the results.

Five

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The Declaration of Independence was not some sort of personal effusion of Jefferson's. It was an official document released in the name of the legal authorities of thirteen colonies - which were also legally states, something that is not very clear to modern minds but on which the signers were perfectly correct - and embodying their reasons to dethrone their former sovereign and go to war against him and his supporters. You are quite right that Jefferson and a few others were anti-clericals of a rather foolish and provincial stripe, and I have castigated Jefferson for his personal silliness on a couple of occasion. But it is just in the kind of personal effusion which this document is NOT that Jefferson indulges his silly prejudices; in this document, written as the spokesperson of thirteen free peoples, he and his fellow-founders declare their reliance on Divine Providence and build their claim on the rights bestowed on them by Him. If you deny validity to this claim, I expect you to say that the Founders were wrong in their principles and in their reason to act, and that their war was therefore nothing more than illegitimate and cruel revolt.
Incidentally, two of the Founders were not just Christian but Catholic. One of them was the cousin of the USA's first consecrated Catholic Bishop, later archbishop, John Carroll - a member of the first great Catholic dynasty of America, who provided the country with two more centuries of fine servants and sons before ending, alas, very much in piscem with the ghastly James Carroll.

Six

[fpb.livejournal.com]

A few Stoics and the odd Cynic (and the Cynics weren't taken seriously as philosophers) may have argued against slavery as a piece of clever talk, in the certainty that society would do nothing to change something so fundamental to it. Christian Europe abolished it TWICE. When it was reintroduced by Venice, they had to invent a new word to describe it ("Slave", from the ethnic Slavs who were the first to be conqured and sold by marauding Venetians), because the old Latin word seruus had been wholly emptied of meaning and reduced to a kind of contractual relationship. No other society has ever even tried to abolish slavery. None other. Enslavement and sale was still a regular government-mandated punishment in nineteenth-century China, and the slave markets flourished in India and the Muslim world until armed European invaders shut them down by force.

Seven

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Modern ideas which we take for granted existed nowhere but in the West. It is the worldwide triumph of the West that has made them universal. Ataturk learned nationalism and secularism in the military school in Berlin, and Gandhi got the idea of an Indian-flavoured nationalist movement from GK Chesterton.

Free will

[fpb.livejournal.com]

P.S.: I can't help but feel bewildered by the state of mind that can be stung into putting a brief, negative rejoinder to an article only just read and not heretofore known, and still can say: "I was doomed to do this and nothing else from the beginning of the universe". And, on top of it, to do so while denying any Mind originating any such doom.

Re: Free will

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Just because I don't believe in free will does not mean I am hard determinist (I believe in the role of probability and complexity in our actions). My response was prompted by a personality that feels the urge to discuss such matters, and the brevity was due to a time constraint, etc. I assure you there is no ghost in this machine.

free will

[dean steinlage (from livejournal.com)]

Maybe I'm missing some deeper philosophy here, but if there is no free will, why care would you, or could you, care about justice, obligations or rights.
I very much doubt that a cog on a gear cares about the end use of the machine it is a part of.

Re: free will

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Because free will is different than emotion, instinct, need and desire. My "cares" about justice and obligations stem from my mental makeup as a social being with physical and psychological needs. Simply because they are material in their substantial origin does not make them any less important.

[kennybhoy.livejournal.com]

You consider the Essenes' apocalyptic to be representative of C1st mainstream Jewish thought?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for an intelligent challenge. Yes, on the whole, I do. Specifically, I think that the concept of the relationship between Jews and Gentiles only shows variations on the superiority complex manifested in the DSSs. Even in the Gospels there are statements that make the blood run cold - think of the Syro-Phoenician woman begging Jesus to treat her as a dog who picks up the scraps from her masters' table, the masters being the Jews. And politics eventually followed the shape of Jewish dreams. The revolt of 64-70 may be mistaken, because of its short reach, for a struggle for national independence, but nobody can call the later Bar Kochba phenomenon anything but an attempt to take over the whole heart of the Roman Empire, that is all its eastern provinces. And there can be no doubt that the disasters that followed were what led to the great Rabbinical reworking of the following centuries, with the Jews adapting themselves to being a minority in the realms of others.

P.S.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

When I said, "thanks for an intelligent challenge", I did not mean to demean any of the people who actually answered here; rather, I was thinking of the sort of thing that turned up in the comments thread after the Pope's speech.

Re: P.S.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Well, and in any case there is plenty of reason to be grateful for concise and literate questions.

Re: P.S.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The more reason not to suggest, even by implication, that Kraygern and Dean Steinlage have anything to do with the sort of thing that makes one grateful for concise and literate questions. (Lovely formulation, by the way!)

[kennybhoy.livejournal.com]

I beg to differ. The Essenes are about as representative of mainstream Second Temple Judaism as Rapturists or Mormons are of contemporary Christianity. I would even go so far as to say that the first Christians, initially a liberal Pharisee sect in the tradition of Hillel and Gamaliel, were closer to the mainstream than the Essenes.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am no scholar of Hebraism, but my problem with what you say is that all our Jewish evidence is the result of centuries of selection. Until the discovery of the DSSs, we had little or nothing that was not either the result of centuries of selection and preservation, or, even worse, of Christian preservation (Philo and the books of Enoch were, I believe, preserved only by Christians). The Essene literature, if it is indeed Essene and not from one of the seven or more sects many of wich we know only by name, have allowed us to understand the Bar Kochba outburst, which was simply not explicable from the perspective you describe - I cannot underline strongly enough, first, that it was an all-out assault on the whole Roman society and empire, and, two, that it involved a very large section, probably the majority, of Jews across the empire. Such things don't happen out of nothing.

[kennybhoy.livejournal.com]

PS Flattery will get you everywhere boys!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I calls'em as I sees'em.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Amazing speech. Thank you for pointing us to it.