Thoughts for liberal Christians on the "solstice star"

Jupiter and Saturn on Dec. 21 had their closest conjunction in 400 years and their closest nighttime, visible one in about 800 years.

And, fitting for methodologically naturalist science, it's on the winter solstice.

And, I appear to have indeed gotten it, as ragged as it is, on camera, handheld, as you can see at left. That would be Jupiter at left in the photo, and I believe Io above and Europa below.

And, per a blog post of several years ago on my primary blog, as far as modern explanation of the development of our Solar System, Laplace is the reason for the season. That's French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, who articulated the "nebular hypothesis" more than 200 years ago.

For  latest modern modelings on how the nebular Solar System developed, see this great Nautilus piece. Among other things, it explained why Jupiter and Saturn likely moved out, rather than in closer to the Sun, as they gained mass.

From here on out, I'm going to expand on what I wrote on my primary blog about this conjunction, to reflect further on the title of the post here.

Per two paragraphs above? As a secular humanist, I can appreciate the wonder and joy of astronomy without having to put either Christian or New Age veneers over it. I can also appreciate the wonder of reaching across 800 years of history. But also, unlike some of Laplace's older peers (Diderot, d'Holbach even more) I don't have to act like a Gnu Atheist, either.

After I did editing of pix and an initial wrap on the blog post (I already had the Nautilus and my old blog post in place yesterday) I started thinking about "miracles" of human ingenuity.

First, of course, is the cultural evolution in astronomical understanding that led Copernicus to re-invent the heliocentric theory and for it to gain acceptance. Then came the big step of Kepler's gathering of empirical evidence to establish elliptical orbits. Then, Galileo with Venerean phases giving empirical support for heliocentrism. And so forth.

On the personal side? The camera and lens I used to shoot that photo? Arguably better than ones I would have paid 10 times as much for 15 years ago.

And, per the verse from Proverbs? Not always, but often, with all our new knowing, has come new understanding as well.

And, now to the header in more detail.

I saw plenty of #ChristmasStar hashtags on Twitter. This ignores, of course, that it fell on the solstice, per good old Laplace. It also ignores that the ancient world had all sorts of winter festivals, that Christianity "pegged" Dec. 25 as Christmas' date because of a festival of Mithras and other things, such as the date that the Romans celebrated the winter solstice and emperor Aurelian setting the festival of Sol Invictus on that date. Also, fittingly, since Saturn is one of the two planets in the conjunction, and Saturnalia ran Dec. 17-23 on the old Julian calendar, that we could call it the #SaturnaliaStar just as much as the #ChristmasStar.

To this point, I'm primarily refuting fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Protestants, traditionalist Catholics, etc.

But, now we're going to speak to liberal members of suburban and urban congregations within ELCA Lutheranism, the United Methodist Church, etc.

Some of you were tweeting #ChristmasStar, too, of that I have no doubt.

Well, let's look at Matthew's story, specifically 2:1-2, 9:

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” … 

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.

A few notes.

The opening would seem to indicate a traditional star (including the "planetoi," as known in Greek), interpreted in the light of Zoroastrian / Babylonian astrology.

But, ordinary stars don't stop. Planets do. Venus and Mercury, being inside Earth's orbit, cannot stop overhead, though. So, that would leave Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

But, would that really be enough for Magi to say "This is it!"? After all, Mars in opposition and standstill is stopped relative to every place on Earth. Ditto for something like a Great Conjunction, excepting nearness to the horizon affecting visibility, of course. (Update: Mars and Venus have their own "great conjunction" on July 12. And, although Venus cannot be directly overhead, arguably, because of its moving, it could kind of fulfill the Magi's alleged perception. Plus, Venus is brighter than Jupiter and Mars is brighter than Saturn. OTOH, Venus-Mars conjunctions happen much more often than Jupiter-Saturn ones. As in, every 2.1 years on average, 10 times more frequently than Jupiter-Saturn, meaning that it would be no big deal, even a really close conjunction.)

So, we are presumed to be invited to see this as a miracle. Just like Joshua making the sun stand still.

Well, if you're a non-literalist Christian, that leaves you with only two logical alternatives.

Either you accept that there was a literal miracle, or you accept that Matthew, writing some sort of pesher on various passages from the Tanakh, went way overboard on trying to sell this as a literal miracle.

Because, just like Joshua making the sun stand still, and contra the bogus story that there's a computer that traces planetary and solar moves back 3,100 or whatever years until it hits a glitch, there is, per people from David Hume to Carl Sagan, NO EVIDENCE for such a thing. That doesn't even take into account the psychological factor that there were world civilizations 3,100 years ago that would have reported a 28-hour day or whatever.

And, an ordinary planetary opposition, or a close conjunction even with an opposition, would not have been eye-catching like this, quite literally.

So, non-literalist Christians about Moses or whatever? You're invited to extend your non-literalism further.

Jesus and Hell — another liberal Christian fail

The Economist has a very interesting, and generally quite good article, about Hell, its literal vs. metaphorical existence and more.

That said, there's a "fail" here. Not in the Economist, but in the opinions of some people:

Worst of all, Hell was apparently prepared, and waiting, even before poor venal man was created.

Modern biblical scholars have done their best to adjust the picture. They point out that Jesus himself, and even tetchy old St Paul, made no mention of “Hell” or “damnation” in the New Testament. The Greek words used there meant only “judgment” and “condemnation”; and only for “a long time”, aionios, not for ever. Jesus, having evoked that ruthless farmer’s bonfire, also said that a man should forgive his sinning brother not seven times, but “70 times seven”. Paul said God would have mercy on everyone. To all this the Infernalists retort that Jesus really did mean everlasting fire; that God’s ways of caring for his creatures are not man’s; and that alongside God’s infinite love burns God’s infinite justice, which is just as unconditional.

Of course, these scholars are the same ones who try to claim Paul enver condeumned homosexuality, and with about as much actual scholarship behind their claims.

The Greek word? Tosh. It's the normal word for "forever." If you want to claim Hellenistic Greek in general had no word for "forever," or even no concept of the idea, fire away.

That said, later in the essay, its author claims that ideas of infinity didn't arise until medieval Chrstian Europe.

Tosh. As shown here, Archmedies knew about infinity as an idea 250 years before when the alleged Jesus allegedly lived.

Jesus' 70x7 of course applied only to relations between two human beings. It doesn't mean one damned thing, pun intended, about god.

As for modern Biblical scholars claiming Jesus wasn't that harsh. Err, the parable of sheep and goats? The parable of Lazarus and Dives? The book of Revelation?

It's not the first time I've said it, but again, it's another reason why, at times, I prefer the most straightforward fundamentalists to liberal scholars like this. At least they don't have dishonest waffling (by and large).

'Blessed rest until the resurrection' — the problem with Xn dualism, theodicy

An old college prof, from my small Christian college, died yesterday.

And, among the comments at a Facebook page for alumni was one asking that "God grant him blessed rest until the resurrection."

And, that exemplifies the problem with ontological dualism.

If, per the parable in Luke, long-ago known as "Lazarus and Dives," the faithful person has an immortal soul that already goes to heaven, he doesn't need wishes for blessed rest. And, to go hyper-Platonic, he doesn't need a physical body in the first place. An omniscient, omnipotent god could have made him a soul-only creature, whose primal ancestor wouldn't be tempted by forbidden fruit because he didn't have a body to be fed anyway.

OK, fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, shot down.

But, what about "liberal Christians"? What do you believe is happening when a person  like this dies?

If he or she has a soul enjoying bliss right now, then the same as above applies to you.

Even if that soul is in limbo, if it's alive in some way outside a physical body, it applies to you. So, both liberal and conservative Catholics don't get off with the purgatory answer.

If said soul exists but goes into "soul sleep," for fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, then why did Jesus tell such a non-literalistic parable? For liberal Christians, if Jesus really was divine in a western monotheistic tradition, why didn't he spread Buddha-type enlightenment about the reality of what happens at the moment of death?

Otherwise, to riff on Susan Jacoby's great op-ed column, it's arguable that atheists can offer MORE comfort at a graveside than liberal Christians, in some ways. Or at least more sympathy, possibly more empathy.  Or, at a minimum, less muddle and pretense.

That said, liberal Christians continue to have available rejecting one fork of the dilemma of theodicy — either god is not all good, or he's not all powerful. But, despite embracing things like a "ground of being" or saying that Jesus' "divinity" may not mean what it was  understood to mean 2,000 years ago, even the intellligentsia of liberal Christianity don't seem lined up to make this choice.

Paul was wrong in 1 Corinthians — a belief n a divinity for this life only can still have power. That's even if it's the power of positive psychology, wishful thinking or self-deception. But, it requires keeping up appearances, or masks, as to what comfort is offered beyond this life, if any. It's just that literalists and non-literalists wear different masks for different situations.

For liberal Christians, for the dailiness of life in this world, does it offer that much comfort for a religious leader to say, I really don't know why those bad things are happening in your life? Does it offer that much comfort when you try to tell yourself that?

At the same time, if you reject traditional ideas of god, whether because you recognize problems with the "problem of evil," i.e., that a god can't be both all-good and all-powerful unless you want to put your own mind inside a permanently black box, does it really offer that much comfort for a life beyond this one? Are you able to offset that relative lack with the degree of comfort a god of less-than-all offers this life?

Or are you able to detach from such questions? And, if so, how do you square that with Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead in general, even if you reject a bodily physical resurrection?

You see, this is all part of what I went through on my journey from conservative Christian divinity student to secularist. In many ways, it was a psychological and emotional decision, after wrestling in those areas; it was by no means just an intellectual one.

But, just as I realized liberal Christianity had to use what Dan Dennett calls "skyhooks" to defend what in the bible it thought worthy of belief and worthy of semi-literal understanding, it had to do the same with questions of the justice of god, of theodicy. (Ditto, if you will, for liberal Judaism.)

And, so, in the face of a Newtown mass shooting, let alone if something even close to that happened in my life (and enough happened in my life at pre-adult level), I couldn't "stop" at say, the United Church of Christ, or even Unitarianism, as I left conservative Lutheranism.

If you'll click the "atheism" tag, you'll see in this blog a series of posts that go into more detail about that journey.

Stacking the deck on faith at Christmas, part two

Jonathan Sacks is worse, far worse, than Simon Critchley, who was the focus of my immediate prior blog post.

Sacks, in Britain, is chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, so his claims, overblown as they are, are not Christian-specific.

First are the obligatory nods, wrong ones, to neuroscience and behavioral psychology. Mirror neurons are overblown, Mr. Rabbi. And Kahnemann's fast-vs-slow thinking has little to do specifically with religion. (Indeed, in orthodox Christianity's past, many an alleged which was burned as the stake based on "fast" thinking; religion has no monopoly on slow thinking.)

That's why this is dreck:

If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track.  

Sachs, content to quote pop science when it suits his ends. But, when it comes to the empirical basis of science, not so fast! For these claims, and those that continue later in his paragraph, like this:

It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray.

He is perfectly content to make these claims without a shred of evidence, of course.

And, this is why I actually prefer fundamentalists at times compared to the more liberally religious, who will dip their toes into the waters into behavioral psychology, or biblical archaeology, then dive full in to a 2-inch-deep pool while pretending it's not a 2-inch-deep pool.

Related to this just above, while Robert Putnam has had some good sociological observations, he too is overblown. And, as for religious persons' contributions to charity, that one is way overblown. (For one thing, if church operations, etc., count as charity ...)

Beyond that is the dreck of claiming that all of these findings from evolution, about the nature of altruism, along with fast-vs-slow thinking, etc., find their "summa" in organized religion.

Nonsense. Given how fast organized religions have, in just the past two centuries, and within different liberal or conservative strains, stripped their gears on the morals of slavery, women's rights and gay and lesbian rights, to take three biggies, show that Sachs is, per Wolfgang Pauli, "not even wrong."

And beyond that, on slavery? In both UK and US, much of the push for abolition was from secular sources.

‘Critical’ Xns not any more rational than fundys?

Or at the least, they can be just as determined in their habits and depth of motivated reasoning, perhaps.

In one particular case, I know that’s true.

In an extended debate on Google Plus with a new Harvard Divinity School student, I wound up learning a number of things along that line.

I started the thread with this post:

If God wants us to be unselfish and think of others first, then why does he want us to think above him above everyone else?

I explained that this was influenced by an actual religion column by a conservative, mainline Protestant (Lutheran) but nonfundamentalist minister.

Eventually, Mr. Harvard Div responded:

When you base your joke on an if that presumes the Christian God, you leave the question of whether God exists behind. You enter a world that assumes such a God exists.

So, thing No. 1 I learned?

This person thinks a rhetorical device use of “if” thinks that I’m actually committed to the propositional statement that follows the “if.” Either he’s clueless about use of rhetoric, or he’s willing to distort my rhetorical stance that much that he’s willing to engage in intellectual dishonesty. Or a bit of both.

Anyway, he then goes on to make a claim I expected more from a conservative, non-critical-scholarship Christian.

So you seriously think that, granting a creator of everything, literally an author of everything, that one could effectively do good without loving the author?-- and further you believe that so strongly that you think it's not even a passably good argument?

I responded in two ways, saying, basically, I and many other secularists feel that way, and we have nearly 2,500 years of philosophical history behind us.

Plato raised this issue 2500 years ago in the Euthyphro – are things good because god(s) say(s) so, or is/are god(s) good because they follow an order of goodness outside it/them? Plato saw way back then that one cannot logically anchor morality on the existence of adivinity. I know many Christian apologists claim he presents a false dilemma, but their counterarguments are weak. … The answer to your question, not just from me, but from many secularists of all sorts of nametags ... is YES. Yes, I believe one can do good without loving a creator, and that logically, claiming a creator is necessary is horribly illogical.

By this point, I wasn’t expecting him to accept Plato’s argument. And he didn’t, with this response:

Plato's gods in the Euthyphro are not all that similar to the Christian God which you were here critiquing, and Christian thinkers have described their God largely in terms that avoid the Euthyphro dilemma.

To which, and other things, I said, basically, “that’s your perception.” It wasn’t the first time in the thread where he made a statement of his opinion, IMO, assuming it was right. 

Beyond that, the Wiki article on the Euthyphro dilemma, linked above, directly addresses his absurd claim that Plato’s thought can’t apply to the Christian god.

The dilemma can be modified to apply to philosophical theism, where it is still the object of theological and philosophical discussion, largely within the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. As Leibniz presents this version of the dilemma: "It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things."

The fact that hordes of Christian, Jewish and Islamic philosophers worried about it shows they damn well knew just how much it applies.

And, the disingenuousness of their response shows that, too. Still from the Wiki article:

Anselm scholar Katherin A. Rogers observes, many contemporary philosophers of religion suppose that there are true propositions which exist as platonic abstracta independently of God. Among these are propositions constituting a moral order, to which God must conform in order to be good. Classical Judaeo-Christian theism, however, rejects such a view as inconsistent with God's omnipotence, which requires that all that there is is God and what he has made. "The classical tradition," Rogers notes, "also steers clear of the other horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, divine command theory." From a classical theistic perspective, therefore, the Euthyphro dilemma is false. As Rogers puts it, "Anselm, like Augustine before him and Aquinas later, rejects both horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. God neither conforms to nor invents the moral order. Rather His very nature is the standard for value.”

The last two sentences, per the analytic philosophy that said Harvard Div student showed elsewhere he (for good reasons, I guess, from his point of view) doesn’t like, are basically meaningless. The last sentence, if anything, accepts the first “horn” of the dilemma, that things are good only because (a) god says they are. 

The second-last sentence, combined with it, if it came out of Paul Tillich’s mouth, would be calling God the “ground of moral being.” But, wordplay can’t escape logic.

He follows with this:

Now, you may find such a God logically impossible, but it is still a mis-representation to say that if this logically impossible God exists, then he couldn't do X because it is logically impossible (ha ha, let's all have a laugh because of how these people didn't think of this). They did think of this. Their answer is fully consistent with the nature of God that they point out; if God's nature is the embodiment of moral value, as in Christian thought, then it follows that to love him is to love what is good.

I realize how wedded he is to Tillich-type thought with that statement. In fact, in an earlier thread, on Facebook, he more directly referenced Tillich, in the same comment as saying how he rejected analytic philosophy.

Yep, and we know why.

Well, sir, Paul Tillich is as dead as god, and so is Tillich’s theology. Really, if that’s the best a supposedly broad-minded student can bring to Harvard (it’s his first semester, so, I won’t blame it ON Harvard yet). In fact, I’m surprised the Wiki article on the Euthyphro dilemma didn’t bring Tillich into the discussion. After all, his theology is largely based on ontology, and, as I’ve blogged before about Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of god, it fails because …

Here’s that damned analytic philosophy again …

Because it commits a category mistake. “Existence” is NOT an attribute.

And, that said, I know where Mr. Harvard Div’s claim that Platonic gods are not like the Xn god comes from. They’re not “the ground of being.” And, that’s why people like this don’t like analytic theology – because it cuts through the attempted word play to get at actual meaning and content.

Anyway, lesson learned. Any time I should again get in a discussion of morals, ethics or related issues, let alone the “problem of evil,” with a “critical scholar” Christian, I’ll ask questions first. Starting with what they think about Tillich in particular and modern “ontological theology” in general.

That said, and again, it’s meant to be snarky … what if a Hindu claimed Krishna was the “ground of being”? I suspect that at least some “enlightened, tolerant” critical-thinking Christian scholars would first laugh, then go on the critical-philosophical attack.

UPDATE: Speaking of, a Western academic Buddhist, on a FB thread, says "Karma and reincarnation aren't falsifiable claims." So, this isn't even a liberal-vs-conservative Christianity deal, with them being the two sides of the same coin, it's really a religion vs. naturalism claim.

I of course responded that David Hume first pointed out, even if not using Carl Sagan's words, that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I also, riffing on Ben Johnson's comment about patriotism, politely said the claim "metaphysical stance X isn't falsifiable" was the last refuge of the religious, without adding the word "scoundrel."

For both conservative and liberal Christians, not only is Yahweh jealous – so are his followers. That's the second lesson learned.