Black Fire on White Fire

Concerning Fashion Magazine Bibles

2010-07-17T12:49:00.002-05:00

Artifacts in Question:
Revolve
Bible Illuminated: The Book

Let's open a fashion magazine. Which means The beautiful person has their shoulders square to the corners of the magazine, though their eyes may laugh upward or blush down. Sometimes one shoulder or the other has to kick up in a gesture of sass, but a flip-book of all fashion magazines would show the beautiful person jittering only slightly, looking around as if bored by us, but always with their shoulders flat against the glass of the glossy cover. They press against the viewer like the wings of a pinned moth or the shoulders of a hieroglyphic Pharaoh.

The beautiful person presses as close to the viewer as it can, meeting us halfway. If the flip-book of all fashion covers ran forward in time, we would see little signs popping up, denser and denser, around their body like the little sign under the moth or the writings around the Pharaoh. These are the near ends of trails that lead down and in, maybe a dozen golden threads that we can follow into the maze of the beautiful person, these paths are labels on the beautiful organs: refined tastes, timely interests, sexual talents, morals, beaded chains that we can follow inward as we peel the beautiful person open and figure out what is inside of them.

This is how we learn to be beautiful. We buy fashion magazines and go spelunking within the bright caverns of the beautiful person. We follow twists of words like threads, strings running in from the words on the cover, through tables of contents, page numbers, chained sentences, onward and inward, splitting through internal reference and holding the bright images together like chains of pearls. Maybe this is what one might mean when they say that an image has "depth."

Consider two efforts to take the Bible and make it a work of depth [this is not news, per se, but I thought I would share]: The first, "Revolve," published first in 2003 by Thomas Nelson presents the beautiful person as a young woman in the company of laughing friends, and offers several paths down and through the New Century Version which is the raw material of her body. Paths like "Guy 411" and "Caught in a Sin Spiral?" in this year's edition, or "Relationships 101: Keep the friends, lose the drama" and "Rock your outlook" in last year's draw the biblical text together into chains beaded with pictures and clasped with sidebars.

The second, "Bible Illuminated: The Book," published by the Swedish company "Illuminated World" in 2008, resembles a fashion magazine on the inside, now building pearly cords from the Good News Translation that follow more subtle headings inward: "A Good Investment," "If Love Gets Cold," "All Power Comes to an End." The glaring difference though is that the beautiful person here has been refigured entirely. We are not peeling back the sides of a body presented with squared shoulders, but a single beautiful eye that watches us askance and over heavy eye makeup. The beautiful person here has perhaps been crying, maybe finally walking out of a nightclub, giving one last look to someone who should not forget her. The beauty here is that of a gaze presented to be seen, but not one that looks at us, pure sight, sight without seeing. Here we cannot know if we are looking at a beautiful believer that we should dissect to better impersonate, or if this is the beautiful, obscure body of God crying off her liquid eyeliner.

These books are the same, of course: If the letters of the Bible are cells, both draw them into tissues, organs, and systems by tracing trails in and down. Both are moralizing works that push hard to define the ways that our own body might become beautiful.

But they are as different as their covers. The beautiful in Revolve faces back, calling for the simple impersonation against which we have defined art. We can work at a reflective reconstruction, reassembling our bodies into meaningful, Biblical chains, by staring back along that gaze, as easily as learning wisdom from Cosmo, or as easy as using a mirror to retrain facehair.

The moralism of Revolve comes up from the Book of Revelation, up from the end of time, back across the text toward the cover, and out into the reader's body with the random variation and inexorable straightness of bubbles rising from deep water.

But the beautiful person on "Bible Illuminated: The Book" refracts. It bends the text into a series of complex exchanges, lenses and not panes. We don't know whose components we are learning here, whether someone like us or God herself. That eye could be not looking back glassily for any number of reasons, and those titles offer no clue.

This is the great work done by the word "art." Since Kant, art has been the engagement with indifferent beauty. One does not fuck art or eat it, or touch it, or get excited by it. One might become motivated by art, but not aroused. Art, then, is created by injecting distance into the obviously desirable. Thought itself becomes exciting through panes of glass and empty space, what we call "reflection" happens in the gap between the velvet rope and the Mona Lisa.

But, again, this is not merely distance, this is distraction. The beautiful person here on the cover traces downward as in any fashion magazine through trails of images strung together with trails of text. But the beautiful glance aside fissures each chain into a tangle. Even the apparently thick cords of images, Revelation illustrated with heartrending photographs of environmental degradation, or Acts with photos of the celebrity activists and philanthropists, never tie in a simple way. To know whether the young Black men paired with the description of the three kings are representations or contrasts would first require making a function of that beautiful eye, making those eyelashes God's or our own.

If you would be curious to read a Bible recomposed into chains of the most complexly moral, reflective and obscure art, and to undertake the recursive and paradoxical work of remaking your insides to resemble the beauty of such a process, you can see the whole thing online.

Do.

Jouissance

2009-11-24T01:29:00.003-05:00

[A story in which a man is quickly reduced to abject misery by God, made proud by an unwhirling wind, and prospers greatly as the devil heals him and gives him a lovely life.]

1

Oh Shea who is a threat interception Chumash - Israel was a record 1
: Stacked destroyed Mihla lions roots Seth

: Girls Boys tripled in seven and drawing of water 2

Thousands Tslso Nacho - thousands Tabs revenge will be c 3
Tonota glad decay hundreds - hundreds of happy Milmg Dmtz
Oh Shea Lodge will be very wild Hdbo
: Mdk - Bnei - of any

Moi weak peak suspended New York Law Beit Hu D 4
: VAT Totslo as Mhitiha Tslsl Marco

Weak threat that produces user days will be the 5th
Malik cost Hlahu number Rkbb Michshu Msdkio
Bnei Oath Mihla Harbaugh said that the threat perhaps
: Chemistry - to threat Hshay Hcc Mbblb

Bnei Btzithl Mihlah today will be his father and 6
: Writer Natasha - from Obi Wah! - The

Natasha Natasha Naio Abt Niam - not my might cheat M 7
: Second Clhthmo Israel Toshm cheat my might - to

Idba threat - the cable Tmsh abandoned - not my might Rogue H 8
Ari Seth Mihla roots there is no record that few in Israel
: Stacked destroyed

Ari Moderator threat cheat my might - the abandoned Naio T. 9
: Mihla

And - which - to Dabo spelling - Dabo Odab Tcs cell - these Y. 10
: Israel Attach avenged Tcrb hands cork Bivsm

To - and if - which - to ridicule any stars - weak imprisoned island 11
: Ccrbi face-- the

Dib and cold - which - here's to Natasha - my might not cheat me 12
: Wah! From Natasha Ezio face-to weakening - not filled

Wine Mitso Millacha Oitnbo Weinbo today are Guy 13
: Ride Yeha homes
Tosrh were Rkva fraud threat - no father Elmo
: By - the Toar Tontahu
Escaped - according anyway Mirana - clutching cell Mhakto Abs
All Dighl Idbl I - cold Htlmao
Sa Mihla aspect of this master deceiver why this desert
Mllachato Miranbo Nazv starvation was used - a miracle
All Dighl Idbl I - cold Htlmao
Marble Chumash Midsc this master deceiver why this desert
Mirana - buffalo Mohakio Milmgh - the Otsfio Stay
All Dighl Idbl I - cold Htlmao escaped - according anyway
Citonbo building this master deceiver in this desert Know
Rides Yeha homes wine Mitso Millacha
Agio on four desert beyond the large hole in both the parent
Htlmao Tommy Mirana - whereby the box Tonf
All Dighl Idbl I - cold
Other - the Zgio people - the threat Arkio Kew
: Ohtshio land that
Five object crouching mummy Ntbm Ittzi companion cheat but
: Crbm my might be Hakal Huhio name Natan Wah!
: Mihlal turnip Natan - these Ath threat - al However - each

Hello Again, Great Silence

2009-04-10T15:13:00.003-05:00

So, friends,
I have not yet made the official statement, and since no one reads this, beginning here is a far cry from making it, but I think after a year and change of calling myself an Atheist, I am giving it up and returning to Christianity.
A Jewish friend whose pragmatic approach to God-talk in defense of justice I find moving, both emotionally and socially, asked me this morning what that means. Had I spent the last year consciously batting down thoughts about Jesus. I told him that amateur meditators like me can only make a little headway against thoughts by allowing them to pass by, not by resisting them. We have to work to see them as bubbles that float up, and smile gently at them as they pass, thinking (if one must think) "Oh, a thought" and allow them to go with bitterness neither for the thought nor the thinker. In this way, I told him, for a year, when I heard ideas like "This resembles the complaints of Job's friends," or "Perhaps this is what is meant by sin, actually" I would just glance at the thought and let it drift to wherever it was going. After a year of practice, they quite nearly stopped.
And now, I am seriously considering designing a slight modification into my pneumatic fishbowl, so that when, like bubbles, typological or otherwise Christian notions pass through, a net will catch them, holding the bubbles together so they can cluster and merge for a while.
His totally reasonable question: Why bother?
There are not enough hours in the day, especially during holy week. I will answer that later.
-V.

Defining “Religion” as the Art of the Impossible: A Perspective on Religious Studies and Anthropology

2007-12-11T14:56:00.000-05:00

[Friends,

This is a short paper that I am submitting for my anthropology seminar. It is not my best writing, but upon looking at it I realized that it was to blog post as a seminar paper is to journal article, so I decided to put it here. Put 'er there!

Thank God no one is reading,
Vincent]

In the religious studies proseminar –the structural equivalent of ANTH701– Tom Tweed, our department chair, opened our discussion of Mama Lola by saying that it represents sophisticated new trends within the “ethnographic turn” that religious studies has taken since the second World War. Of the several points which could be taken from this off-handed comment, the most important is that religious studies is a thing which can turn towards a discipline, and not a discipline in its own right. Further, I would propose that religious studies -unlike Jewish studies, for instance- is neither a data-set. With this turn the term “religion” came to more prominently designate patterns of life which it had largely neglected; New Religious Movements, religious hybridities, and various social movements which had been left on the far side of a foggy border came to be “religion.” Religious studies, thus, cannot be located by a data-set, but by the ideological proposition of a data-set. Echoing Saussure's call for linguists to define and delimit their field of study, we are those who say that there exists something well designated “religion” and then set out, through the various disciplines that led us to its borders, to examine it. So, in this light, what is an ethnographic turn? Where has post-war cultural anthropology relocated religion? I will wander towards an answer arm-in-arm with three post war theorists, two seminal and one potentially useful, to consider where religion is and where it might be soon.

In “The Structural Study of Myth” Levi Strauss presented religion as a set of “processes which, whatever their apparent differences, belong to the same kind of intellectual operation,” rather than emerging from “inarticulate emotional drives” whence he claimed “Tylor, Frazer, and Durkheim” as psychologizing theorists had traced them.1 Setting aside the fact that all three of these theorists saw the religious impulse as a sort of precursor to science, and a preeminenly logical drive, it is notable the directions in which this conviction brings Levi-Strauss. He is absolutely right, of course, that the analysis of myth as he found it (and perhaps still would find it) lacks significant structures of accountability between various theorists, and that myths can be examined towards nearly any foregone conclusion, but it is questionable whether this is entirely overridden by his para-linguistic reframing,

Given that “myth” functions as a synecdoche for religion in this essay, it is notable that he has relocated its “meaning” not in “the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined.2” That is, a story cannot be identified as a myth merely because it contains ostensibly supernatural elements or characters. It must be “bundled” in the manner characteristic of mythical speech, having curiously weak temporal claims. This allows myth -and thus religion- to be located in any kind of story that bears non-propositional temporality. Though Levi-Strauss seemed content to use this method to study only those stories which are commonly identified as religious, it is the necessary ground for those recent theorists like David Chidester or Gary Laderman who explore the religious implications of Disney's narratives and other mass mediated stories.

Continuing along the same trajectory, Geertz' definition of “religion” again opens the field to new areas of inquiry by considering “religion” best demarcated by arrangements rather than contents. If we figure religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men3” it is neither necessary that ghosts be religious, nor that religion be ghostly. This has, of course, drawn critique from those scholars of religion who do not want “everything” (often meaning specifically sports, advertising and other areas of Roland Barthes' specialization) to become religion. However, I have personally found it a quite useful reframing in that it allows for a more adverbial use of “religion” in the case of videogames and other popular cultural phenomena, allowing that certain elements may operate “religiously” even if their total conjuncture is unlikely to be well received as fully “religious.” Toward this sort of work, Geertz' is a fruitful extension of structualist framings of “religion” in that it does not ask about characteristics of the system of symbols, but about the roles it plays in the lives of those engaged with it.

It is notable that both of these efforts, however, have been applied exclusively towards bringing new elements under the label “religion.” In Levi-Strauss' methodology of including all variants of a myth, this makes some sense, but one would think that Geertz would be well applied towards the claim that some phenomenon that had been labeled “religion” was actually incapable of establishing moods and motivations of the right sort.

Niezen's World Beyond Difference follows this same trajectory. Just as Levi-Strauss had located “religion” in a particular sort of para-linguistic interaction rather than in content traditionally termed religious, and as Geertz had brought this consideration into the particulars of lived life by considering the interaction of elements in life, so Niezen locates the religious in structures of global organization. This is an extension in that it retains the focus on the effects (and affects) that these arrangements have upon their members, but obviates the regional focus visible in Geertz' work. By allowing the identifying features of religion to combine without spacial reference, Geertz' spirit-neutral framing of religion is empowered to explain many movements that could not have been discussed otherwise, not only including patterns of global capitalism and Fundamentalism in the present, but even, for instance, patterns of historical Catholicism. I have designated this a “potentially useful” text, however, because it, like much work in anthropology, expounds its theories of religion without ever demarcating its object clearly.

The most explicit descriptions of “religion” here, however, are groups whose religious nature seems to largely emerge from the fact that their claimed precedents were designated so by Niezen's. The “religious dissension” he describes seems to be only a form of dissent shared among various types of groups, but which is being enjoined here by Muslims.4

But there are glimmerings of a much more useful understanding of “religion” in this work that deserves to be unearthed. Consider his reflections on the strong sense of “Globalization,” the process of accelerating global networking irrespective of whether its specific nature is basic or superstructural: “For some, the rapid pace of change attributed to globalization is a source of almost millenarian hope, an expectation of the end of history... It is almost a secular source of spiritual awe that rules human fate beyond the reach of petition or salvation.5”

My only complaint about this location of religion is Niezen's conservative use of “almost.” There is nothing “almost” about it, particularly if this is only “for some:” In my ethnographic work with the Ordo Templi Orientis in Atlanta, a group who envisions the world as having entered a New Aeon of human interconnection in autonomy in 1904, the internet was positively proof of their apocalypic doctrines; Timothy Leary, in Chaos and Cyber Culture explicitly detailed the net age as the new world which prophecy had been unable to articulate clearly; The Kabbalah Centre, likewise, has framed globalized modernity as the age which is properly prepared for the messiah.

But Niezen's “for some” is by no means insignificant. All of the groups I have detailed are constituted largely by internet culture, the OTO managing their 3000 members and disproportionately large sphere of influence in the New Age movement through podcasting and web archives, Leary's followers continuing to publish his texts online, and the Kabbalah Centre clustering a network of perhaps millions around their own online store. These groups are religious with regard to their discourse on globalization both because they have framed the current configuration “mythically” through Levi-Straussian atemporality -these things were explained by ancient prophecy much as they currently being recounted on the news- and because their members are engaged with them in the ways that Geertz would designate “religious.”

The work that remains to be done in demarcating the bounds of “religion” is precisely that which Niezen may not have realized he was doing by writing “for some.” The bounds of “religion” usefully pushed out by (post)structuralism have in fact come to encompass nearly everything, and are beginning to take on the uncritical possibility which Levi-Strauss had seen in the study of myth. The next task is to ask for whom various arrangements actually act on their constituent members as any given theorist has decided to characterize “religion.” If the term is to encompass groups like the Kabbalah Centre which describes itself as the opposite of a religion, should they behave (as, I argue, the Centre does) “religiously,” the possibility must be left open that some groups commonly so designated may need to be reclassified. This need not mean, of course, that anyone say “Methodism is not a religion.” My best prediction is that a structuralist drive focused on affective and network structures could eventually clarify religious arrangements down into more workable units by emphasizing specific affective and network structures: “Methodism includes sixteen religions.” It is a work worth doing, and one towards which it seems religious studies is turning.

-notes-
1. Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 270 (Oct. - Dec., 1955), 428.
2. Levi-Strauss, 431.
3. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 88.
4. Niezen, 65.
5. Niezen, 36.

And Experiments

2007-12-09T02:02:00.000-05:00

Friends,

The effort following the thyspace group has been a Facebook type group on a similar attempt to plant a node for digital and progressive Christianity. This, incidentally, worked only slightly less terribly [ http://unc.facebook.com/group.php?gid=15020685067 ]. Time, I suppose to reconfigure the way I am imagining internet nodes.

Good to think,
Vincent

An experiment

2007-09-15T19:57:00.000-05:00

Hello friends,
The application of Deleuze to that music video seemed like a fine way to resume this strange little effort, didn't it? Oh well, you can't win them all. As it turns out, Deleuze's Cinema is one of those books that I encounter periodically and have to admit I cannot read. I can't, not now. (Though his claim that watching The Passion of Joan of Arc proves the existence of a "non-psychological spirit" in the human seems to be hinting at something that needs to be said, and said quickly, to me.) So I am going to return to the thousand tiny projects that made this seem like a useful project in the first place. I doubt anyone will mind.

I have recently set out to try a meta-theological, meta-ecclesiastical (meta-heretical would not be entirely unfair) experiment on the new Christian social service "Thyspace." Perhaps it will be worth writing about here:

Critical Mass: A Meeting Place for Christians with Unpopular Questions
“COME, LET US REASON TOGETHER” -Isaiah 1:18-

This is a group for Christians without a sense of their place in The Body because the questions that occupy their thoughts and prayers are not only unanswerable, but even unaskable within their communities.

Here Christians can meet up to discuss all of the intellectual and theological matters not (or not adequately) discussed within the narrow spectrum of our denominations. And can do so without being pressured to accept any answer that does not satisfy their intellect.

The commitment here is to the proposition that just as The Body encompasses Catholics, Congregationalists, and Quakers, just so does it have room for the many creative theologies which are currently adrift without communities. This is a meta-group, one that hopes to serve as a rally-point around which people can meet, and begin conversations that can continue here and elsewhere.

Thus, this group invites all of those who would like to meet to discuss Christian perspecives on (and not merely against) evolution or atomism, pan(en)theism or deism, agnosticism/fideism or monism, anarchism or feminism, radical literalism or radical anti-literalism... or any of the other theological and intellectual visions which are legitimate possibilities within our shared heritage.

That also means that this is not a group for would-be heresy hunters who want to tell others that their Christianities are invalid. Nor is it a group for those who do not consider themselves Christian (may they find their peace). There is a forum for efforts to draw people in to a denomination or push them out of Christianity entirely. That forum can be found (unfortunately) in most churches and nearly everywhere else.

Any Christian who feels alone in their intellectual pursuits, any Christian who thought there was no community in which they could think freely (and who does not want to use such a forum to promote hatred of other people, whether Christian or otherwise) is welcome here.
----------------------------------------------------

Admittedly, this is an effort to repair the past: I was eighteen when I was first traumatized by Darwin and by the presumption that women are men's equals in all senses relevant for politics or theology (that is, this world or any other). I was traumatized, of course, because these ideas struck me as both entirely convincing and absolutely impossible to discuss within the frame of my church. I was sent back, sore with questions, to the Bible. My fissure was then quickly opened into a complete fracture by the fact that the cosmological (and occasionally angelological) questions that seemed necessary parts of the Bible stories at hand were avoided by everyone from whom I sought answers. I spent five years convinced that I could not call myself a Christian, before realizing that every issue that was killing me has been answered in many different (and occasionally satisfying) directions by generations of Christians from whom I was kept. Whether this was through malice or ignorance hardly matters now; if the medium is the message the internet itself may be a balm for either. Maybe a wikilisiology will sustain Christians who thought they had the sin of inventing and the sad burden of sustaining their heresy alone.

Of course, this could fail in a dozen ways: "Thyspace" could never really catch on; I could be thrown off (though I can hardly imagine a clearly worded rebuttal for this sort of group as a whole); No one within the thyspace community could care or want to join. But the visions for success are messy enough that simple failure is hardly a worry.

Maybe there will be nothing to report, but if this becomes beautiful (or otherwise), I will tell you about it.

Love always,
Vincent

Oh yes, and I've learned something.

2007-07-16T20:09:00.000-05:00

I am setting out to coherently discuss (as an experiment in my apprehension of Deleuze) a single goddamned music video. This is me reopening this file. I will be writing here more often. So, my homework:
Yeah,
Vincent

Art Games 1

2007-01-23T21:38:00.000-05:00

Friends,

The basic assumption of this whole project is that religion is enscribed in whatever religious people have close at hand. Those who make speeches, write symphonies, or paint on paper plates with string sometimes do it with religious themes, and sometimes even as a religious practice, and they do it because that is what they can do with what is around. The digital is the question only because we have way too many ones and zeroes. But because it shows up everyplace, there is no reason to say that religion is better expressed in high (that is, elite and elitist) art than in low (that is, popular and populous) art. It would be well argued that the Christianity owes its vitality (for better and worse) more to crappy popular sermons than to the Sistine Chapel. Remember also that much of the Bible was certainly low (at least functional and popular) before it became the highest art of all. But the high does effect ranges of culture and last over periods of time inacessable to the low, and since we are turning our attention to different sorts of media, it is fair to wonder how the division between high and low art will affect the mediation of religion. For now I am particularly curious why videogame designers are not yet producing high art. Can they? Would it change the possibilities for digitally mediated religion if they were to? If Eternal Forces is a crappy popular sermon of a game (and the Wisdom Tree masterpieces of the 80s and 90s were almost blasphemous jokes), what has to happen before Sega's "David" can be produced? (This post is about games as a segue to later thinking about relgion, so if that bores you, please go bore yourself someplace else.)

But, you say, videogame art has already arrived! If art is a matter of representation filtered through the perspective of the individual creator (the view held by some Objectivists and "culture decay" theorists), if a good but simple still life is art, surely the attention to representational detail and subtle creative adjustment in even a run of the mill fighting game keeps up. And if art is about drawing the audience into an emotional relationship with the subject matter, wasn't Eternal Darkness' effort to make the player slowly lose their mind in time with the main character a moment of art (cf. Eternal Darkness review )?

The short answer is, I don't really want to argue about what is and is not art, maybe a strange position for this particular blog, but I don't. There are so many definitions of art (like "religion" or anything else that matters to at least one whole department at at least one university) that I am sure one can find examples for several of them in videogames, but that does not make videogames meaningfully art-like. It only means they are fair targets for the sort of youthful sophisty that finds art (or religion) on the fronts of cereal boxes, and often in the prizes inside.

The point is that beyond the committed faithful, those basement dwellers who want to say that Final Fantasy 7 is art, perhaps convinced that mythological themes are incredibly rare, and the aforementioned well meaning young people, there is no widespread recognition of any videogame as art. The question is not art, but high art, socially certified art. And to say that art world's indifference to videogames is only prejudicial conservatism is hardly helpful. Those who publicly recognize art have been quite willing in recent years to discuss video installations, and even some interactive digital media when presented in installation. But not videogames as gamers tend to recognize them. (For some comments on the subject which have a fine time essentializing art and complaining of antigamerism see: Are Video Games Art?)

Videogames will be high art when enough people start recognizing the artgame as a meaningful category, a change which I say will take two major changes. First, high art is a classed phenomena. The paradox is that at present high art is by and large not that produced by the wealthy, but by the poor, or atleast by a class of artisans separate from the art-buying class. The wealthiest legally recognized individuals in our culture are corporations, and when they make art they do it for the widest possible audience, necessarily classing the art as popular and thus low. Because high art is art made by the obscure but talented for the gourmet tastes of the wealthy, it seems unlikely that present videogame production models will ever produce high art at all. Anyway, can only one person own a videogame? Can it be something purchased at a premium, stored and treasured? The democritizing power of digital media continues those trends Walter Benjamin pointed out back when the issue was only copying of originals. ( "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction") Mechanical reproduction moved the primary question of artsiness from ownership to originality, and digital (re)production is moving it from originality to a sort of existential "authenticity." The digital original is always already a copy. Digital art will only be high when it can somehow be made rare.

Secondly, we will only recognize these videogames when works begin to emerge which apply common (perhaps even trite) conventions of high art, in format or in content. But again, there is no reason to whine; this is just how it works. We need several examples that will draw the eye of art scholars and connoisseurs so a conversation can begin, and so the rare breed of programmer artists (I know at least two... are you listening?) can start working to produce certified and interactive high art. Odds are that this will not mean that either the novel or the still life will be made digital (The Da Vinci Code game and Myst come close enough to each of these). Perhaps when art films rather than action flicks and kids movies are adapted as games we will start seeing it. Moreover, it will be necessary that the works not model after pre-certified art so fully that no one identifies them as games. Hypertext novels and poems have already become fairly commonplace and have already begun keeping interprising literary scholars awake at night, but neither form are recognized widely as "games."

Recently I have come across some examples which work to fit both the classed and the thematic requirements for high videogame art ( "Art Games Network" http://www.artificial.dk/articles/artgamesnetworks.htm). And even here you can rightly ask which of these qualify as either games or art. Pac Mondrian (not to be confused with the cosplay character, who is undoubtably art) is a game loosely based on art, but hardly any more a digital artgame than drawing mustaches on reproductions of paintings would be an analog artgame. The same, I suppose, could be said of Natalie Bookchin's adaptation of Borges' "The Intruder," but because it is the single most dramatic dramatic reading of a short story I have ever encountered, I think it deserves particular mention at least as a notable continuation of that tradition. Play it. The Super Mario clouds and Distellamap, may or may not be art, but they are from games, not games in their own right. I recommend all of you dig through the rest of these and think about whether any of them could ever be recognized as art outside of gaming circles. And while you are at it, go and see The Polyphonic Spree's "The Quest for the Rest" , and ( "Operation Urban Terrain" ), a deeply inventive something which strains between game, protest, and artform. Of course, there remains the problem of rarity in all of these cases, but for now obscurity should serve about the same function as would private ownership. Maybe digital high art will only last as long as anything else digital, remaining high for a time and suddenly falling into pop culture banality once people know they are interested.

Frankly, I can't say anything else until I have more sincere candidates. You can only say so much about non-existence. If you have some artgames that have a shot, please send me links. I'd love to make a nice list.

Cheers,
Vince(nt)

Video Theology 1.1

2007-01-23T19:49:00.000-05:00

So Friends,

In my awkward prologue to this strange thing, I did more ranting than explaining, leaving even the idea of "video-theology" dreadfully unclear, so my work is cut out for me now. I will start at the end. I claimed that inspired video-scripture was coming, that we would soon have to deal with the Divine Word in unprecedented forms and have to find new exigetical tools for playing with and living through (or even around) it. Not only will people start talking about movies, hypertexts, and videogames as Bible, but I think they already have, if in hushed tones. First I guess we should think about why, later we'll deal with how.

My professor in Hebrew Bible told us, with no little touch of irony, that it was amazing that when few enough Jews could read Hebrew, God decided to give them an authoritative and personally inspired Greek version. And when few enough could read Greek, God inspired the Aramaic targumim [translations]. We can follow this amazing tendency of God to accomodate illiteracy further still, through the Latin Vulgate [meaning, of course, in "common language"], past Luther's German translation, and right up to the KJV1611, which so many Evangelical Christians with their apparently forgivable monoliteracy maintain is the inerrant Word.

And, yes, I am being facetious and a little snide. I am personally not convinced that God does this, for all I know God is really sticking with the lost and perhaps irreconcilable tatters of what was later shuffled into scriptures. There is no reason to believe that God is necessarily accomodating on this one. Consider how the first set of Ten Commandments had been written by God personally [Exodus 32:16], but when Moses smashed them, though God said more would be divinely inscribed [34:1], Moses had to write the second copy himself anyway [34:28]. And these new Commandments, the only ones the Bible calls "the Ten Commandments," by the way, are neither like those God wrote personally, nor like those which Dr. Laura and certain judges think all of us should take very seriously. Go and look at the Commandments which the Bible actually calls the big 10, friends, you may be surprised. In any case, there is precedent for God deciding that when we ruin the inspired Word it is mostly our business to fix it up, and sometimes that involves shifts which hardly scream "inerrant."

But what matters here is not what God actually does, what matters is that many people who talk about Bible, perhaps even most people who have done that since the first century BC, have thought that God is quite willing to do inspire translations, and with serious theological consequences. Leaving aside specific issues of what should be translated as "young woman" and what should be translated as "virgin" for the moment, consider how many Christian groups, even those who read more contemporary translations, use a distinct register of speech for prayer liberally peppered with thees and thines. And it was with translation into English that the Bible was peopled with unicorns [Psalm 92:10, among others], though the Hebrew certainly had its own menagerie of monsters which sometimes became creatures as docile as goats through the miracle of translation [cf. Lev. 17:7]. Going back further, consider the fact that some Jews have drawn inspiration even from the shapes of the Hebrew letters, which are certainly not the first script in which the Torah was patched out. Translation matters. And it matters especially when it is scripture, because the accidents of translation can gain the status of the earlier text.

So what? The so what is that the issue is no longer what people read, but whether people read, and if they read, how they read. Movies and videogames, textmessages websites and billboards give us most of what we think we read, but maybe we read more cereal packages and t-shirts in a day than all of those things combined. The book is changing.

Which not to say that the good old codex [the bound book, the "biblion"] is totally outdated. We are making more books than we know how to think about, but that is part of why the Bible as Biblion is becoming a problem. With the present glut of books, the canon is falling apart. We can establish a common literature only where powerful institutions tell us what matters; at school we read Huck Finn and The Scarlet Letter, at Church we read hymnals and Bible, and they give us things to talk about, and a language to talk about them in, but these institutions are competing with modes of media distribution like nothing ever seen before. The tools behind Fox are not like early modern pampleteering, or even like modern propagandizing. Our common language is being forged in a sprawling arms-race between organizations that can strategically unveil new idioms at will all over the world. And the biblion is only the smallest part of what they are doing, so increaasingly it is only the smallest part of what WE are doing.

We, friends, cannot be disentangled from those organizations that are each fighting to teach us first what we already wanted to say we knew. Once enough of us want media, edible media, watchable media, wearable media, it begins to exist. And if we do not yet want media that seems to follow from our current wants, we are given it anyway to see what we think. So, whether God is listening and whether God will give a world of movie-quoters a movie-Bible is hardly the question. Unless God intervened to stop it, it was going to come. Whether God has tried to stop it is something to think about later, but once a few thousand people to started wanting their Bible to be as shiny as their movies, it began arriving.

Movies like The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt are not quite the point, though. No large outcry pushed these movies towards canonical status so they were only on topic of Bible, not Bible proper. These are two totally distinct types of religious media, secondary and primary texts. Movies about the Bible are really only a matter of manuscript illumination, not really more interesting than The Precious Moments Bible (oh yeah, really), because the images cannot be unpacked for new scriptural data. Moses did not sing that song, but he is also not Charlton Heston, nor a doe-eyed Precious Moments hydrocephalus, and few if any are shocked or scandalized.

The first real sign which I can think of of the canonization of video is, strangely, The Last Temptation of Christ. When the movie was released in 1988 its depiction (though, everyone must remember, depiction of a dream) of Jesus having sex raised an uproar. It was driven out of several theatres for it, but most importantly Protesters (caps intentional, if a little unfair) marched around with signs that said "This movie lies!" Of course it lies! Jesus did not have that dream, like Moses looked nothing like Charlton Heston! The complaint is not interesting. The point is that somewhere around here, somewhere around the cable television boom, people began complaining about the lack of divine inspiration in movies. The complaint that this movie was not true, it seems, contains in it the notion that such questions are worth asking; that a True movie was thinkable. It took a few years, but of course it came. Of course.

We have no way of knowing whether the Pope really said "It is as it was" about the Passion of the Christ (though if he did we can only hope that the myth of him doing so in Latin is true too), but it cannot be denied that many Protestant churches did so. In groups that were talking about a "culture war" where the other side (yes, ALWAYS the other side. For now there is only one side in the culture-war, though maybe we should reconsider that too) was Jewish-inclusive and anti-Christian, the claims of antisemitism and anachronism actually bolstered the movie's truthiness to the point of Inspiration. It became scripture because it is shit. And it will happen again, because we still want it. Until the annunciation of Mary's surprising but less-than-mysterious pregnancy, it seemed that The Nativity Story was a real contender. Imagine if it had been canonized, friends. If not for teenage pregnancy, if it also had been "as it was," we would have to decide why the Temple service was in later Rabbinic idiom, why God spoke like a smug 30 year-old, and where all of that corn came from. The corn would have to be read as an unsung miracle. I say we should be ready with our shit-scraping tools close at hand.

So what? How did the translation change the text? How is pouring the old wine of scripture into the new skins of digital media changing that media? That is what I am trying to think about here, and what I am sharing as I think it. So, I guess there will be more later.

Cheers,
Vince(nt)

Video Theology 0

2006-12-09T19:47:00.000-05:00

Friends,

So, I am in the middle of exams and cannot really write this blog as I would, but I thought I should say that I have found a place to begin a series of blogs that have been brewing in me. As some of you know, I am a Christian again after a long and mostly Atheistic hiatus, and have returned with no small amount of anger at both Christianity as I tend to find it, and at the options into which I had drifted.

The symbolic universe of Christianity offers endless possibility for relevant interpretation. The death of Christ was not only an explosion of redemptive blood. It is a fruitful analogy for the relationship of a symbolically rich human to their body, a foundation for radical politics, a poetic trope of incredible power, an image of war against God, an act of magic, and most probably a historical non-occurance. An incredible lie, a saving lie. Not to rant, but those are the first that come to mind.

To come back to Christianity convinced of the fantatic potential of its stories has been a disappointment, to say the least. Christian rock music, for instance, ruins my day. With its cloying obsession with salvation, its absolute illiteracy and its shared organs with American Republicanism, one need not say that their theology is wrong (and I am not really convinced that it is) to say that it is selling Christ short. There may be more, but for now Sufjan Stevens' album "Seven Swans," and maybe Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" are the only decent works of Christian rock I know of.

For the record, I locate myself as a soon-to-be member of the UCC's and part of the Emerging Church movement, for which one need not submit an application. In my spare time (when I find it), I want to begin thinking about popular culture and theology, and maybe sharing it here where you may or may not read it as you like. Time needs to be spent thinking about whether the symbolic traditions of Christianity can be rescued from their present tarnish. (Yes, Jesus saves, fine. But who will save Jesus?) What the emergence of an inspired video-translation of the Bible will be, and how we will deal with it, because the frequent public reception of The Passion of the Christ as "true" shows that it is coming.

What follows does not draw heavily on Christian symbols, but it hit me as a pleasant way to begin thinking about things, and it falls heavily across the Pythagorean traditions that have motivated some generations of progressive and daring interpreters of Christianity. For the most part, though, I just liked it. And it seemed like something to place at the end of the above babble, none of which I would have written had I not been so exhausted that I could not write more.
Cheers and sorry for the pretention,

PS. I appologize for the sexist middle part of the song. It is ugly and vacant, but I am not able to remove it. I struggle to imagine for whom this video was made. Hipster ironists? I do not have time to talk about it, but I thought the total package, including the ugliness, was good to think.
Vince(nt)

.. width="425" height="350">..>

LYRICS:
When ink and pen in hands of men
Inscribe your form, bipedal P
They draw an altar on which
God has slaughtered all stability
No eyes could ever soak in all the places you anoint
And yet to see you all at once we only need the Â..
Flirting with infinity, your geometric progeny
That fit inside you oh so tight
With triangles that feel so right

(3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974 94459)

Your ever-constant homily says flaw is discipline
The patron saint of imperfection frees us from our sin
And if our transcendental lift shall find a final floor
Then Man will know the death of God where wonder was before

Yeah, I know this Pi shit backwards and forwards
Check it out

I did three chicks then I pointed at the door
A girl entered in so that made it four
I snapped one time in came another five
Add 'em all up and that makes nine
The average age 26.5
Now that's what I call gettin' some pi
Five of the chicks wore 6-inch heels
Two of the nine squealed like seals
514 was the area code
Quebec, Canada my winter abode
And my 1.3 million dollar chalet
Pi backwards, pi forwards, all night and all day

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939 9375105820974944 5923078164062862089986280348253421170679
821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502 84502(fade out)

USA Baptizing Terror Suspects

2006-10-27T20:03:00.000-05:00

Friends and Fellow Citizens,

Now more than ever, given the still-growing political power of those who equate American values with their particular and quite recent visions of Christianity, we must remain vigilant in our defense of the anti-establishment clause and other measures established by the founders of our country to prevent church-state fusion. Maintaining this separation has long been only a theoretical drive among progressive Americans of their several faith affiliations (in which I of course include the venerable faith in progress and reason which orients progressive Atheists and Agnostics), but now, given the recent shocking statements of our vice president which clearly allude to the involuntary baptism of suspected terrorists, the time has come to take action.

For those of you who have not been following the news, this last Tuesday at a White House photo-op, conservative radio host Scott Hennen (WDAY, Fargo) reported that his callers endorsed a practice obliquely referred to as "dunking in water." "Please, let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves lives."

Asked by Hennen whether he supported that this life-saving practice of dunking in water, vice president Cheney replied, "Well, it's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture," Cheney said. "We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in." If not torture, then what is this administration "involved in?"

In defending Cheney, presidential spokesman Tony Snow said the question put to Cheney was vague and could refer to many practices. Snow's only clarification as to the dunking was to say, "It's a dunk in the water."

This ambiguous endorsement has drawn the attention of several human rights groups. Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, for instance, has understood this as an endorsement of torture: "What's really a no-brainer is that no US official, much less a vice president, should champion torture." While Mr. Cox's sentiment is absolutely correct, his, like other human rights groups seem to be missing the fact that this "dunking" was explicitly endorsed as a life saving measure, and thus, given the ambiguity, is more likely to refer to baptism than any torture practice.

Cheney, a Methodist, would certainly endorse baptism as a life saving measure on three important counts. First, Methodism unambiguously discusses baptism, often administered by "a dunk in the water," in these terms. Article XVII of the Methodist Confession of Faith, for instance, calls the sacrament ..a representation of the new birth in Christ Jesus and a mark of Christian discipleship... Second, the recent blurring of Muslims, terrorists, and fascists in official statements from the president and his administration (see, for instance, http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/10/washington.terror.plot/index.html) may indicate that making Christians of terror suspects is increasingly seen as a life saving measure for Americans at large. To this should also be added the fact that Hennen is deeply enmeshed in the networks of popular media which have recently coined the barbarous neologism "islamofascism," making it quite likely that dunking terror suspects into Christianity was the intended meaning of his question. Third, a life-or-death issue of a different sort may be at hand, given that it is unlikely that clergy members are available to baptize the suspects. In most Christian denominations including Methodism lay baptism is only allowed in cases of in cases of a genuine emergency. However, in life-or-death circumstances, that is, in circumstances like those created in our international network of torture facilities, any Christian may perform the rite. Which, we must ask, is the real motivation? Is it not possible that this administration has begun to risk lives in order to "save" them by this, their preferred method?

It is no longer enough only to oppose torture, though we must continue that fight as well. We, as Americans who oppose the union of church and state, must stand together and oppose this practice!

An Objectivist and a Relativist Walk into a Bar [Pt. 2]

2006-10-26T20:14:00.000-05:00

On religion and reason: a request for clarification [Aug 29, 2006 11:27 PM]

Dear Adam,
I apologize for the tardiness of my reply. In no small part it has been because I have been busy adjusting to this program and this city, beginning my studies in Latin (to continue studying the Renaissance, incidentally) and finding a comfortable study routine, but this is not the primary reason that I have not replied. There are, of course, evenings and weekends when I am relatively free to pursue my fancies and I have spent several of these drafting an appropriate response to your last letter, but none of them were fit to send without first explaining my personal and professional dilemma over our dialogue, and asking for some clarification as to the definitions which orient our discussion. Today, upon receiving the message that Shane had received our conversations, I realized that we have an audience to inform, decided to ignore all previous attempts and start writing afresh.

As I am almost sure you know, I am professionally and personally dedicated to the study of religion and particularly to New Religious Movements (meaning ones from the last 200 years or so and usually American ones), which I argue have been grievously ignored in the academy. Thus any discussion of what religion is and how it affects (and effects) human life is of great importance to me. So if you want to keep discussing this topic I might, with occasional pauses for moral panic, continue discussing it with you forever. I am, in fact, happily (though involuntarily) taking one of my graduate seminars in the history of the field with a professor who is almost obsessively dedicated to examining the wildly divergent definitions of religion which have been posed by scholars of religion since the discipline took its earliest recognizable form some time in the mid-nineteenth century.

There is one article on this subject written in 1901 by James Leuba which I recently read and which I think may interest you. It proposed that even at that early date definitions of religion had spiraled out of control. In the attempt to find what made every one of the things which seemed to be religions fit under one heading (particularly particular forms of Buddhism and certain indigenous practices which do not have spiritual concerns as we tend to discuss them, points to which I will return often) a ridiculous variety of divergent and imperfect definitions had already emerged. His appendix, the part I think youll enjoy most, includes 50 some of them. Following his criticism of the field, some more recent scholars like J. Z. Smith have proposed that because this category of religion-in-general was created by people working to compare religions, it is a category that is ours to debate, without reference or responsibility to religious people and their perspectives, a nexus for in-fighting and nothing more.

From your previous letter you seem to have a clear category for religion-in-general in your head, and while I am somewhat less confident than you in this, I will also not follow the Smiths and Leubas in giving up so easily. Nor, as it turns out, will the professor of the class who characterizes himself as a moderate realist. I think there is a general range of human tendencies which makes most sense when clustered together as separate from others, and which contains all of what is commonly thought of as religious, though, as I will explain, it also contains some surprises, a few of which are very relevant to our discussion.

In trying to find a definition which encompasses indigenous religion in Nepal, the Pope's Catholicism, Transcendentalism, and American Buddhism (only half of which appeal to any unseen order, and only one of which has a God as we might recognize it) I have found a provisional definition which seems to circumscribe my subject matter. Though I am fond of Paul Tillich's definition of religion as "ultimate concern," this seems to leave out so much that could be well contained in a pithy phrase, like the fact that religions are dynamic entities, and that they motivate more than just "concern." As far as I can tell there is a clear category of "communities in embodied dialogue on significance." As far as I can tell, this circumscribes the four movements listed above and all of the others that seem to me importantly religious. I will admit, though, that I am a rank novice, still very much a graduate student, and this is only the definition which I am currently testing against my data. I will find another if it falls apart, or reject the enterprise of definition entirely if I must, though I, like you, believe that the category does make sense under some rubric.

Though epistemologically valuable, for my work this sort of definition is somewhat ethically problematic because I am studying groups like the Kabbalah Centre and the Ordo Templi Orientis, neither of which claim to be religions. I bring all of this up because though, like Marxist discourse, Objectivist discourse defines its work against religion, I find it impossible to discuss it as anything else. I realize that you will contend that Objectivism is not a religion because it is based on pure reason, and I will not debate that here, but only add that irrespective of what its origins were, it functions as a religion in the lives of its adherents.

But you see, because I am slowly becoming an ethnographer of religion, I usually operate under the assumption that the terms which people apply to their own world are very useful in understanding those worlds, and tend even to say things like true in the eyes of the believers, though I suspect that this is only padding and I will soon give it up. So I didn't know how to say that I can only understand your anti-religious discourse as religiously motivated. But in the end I realized that the discussion is too valuable to end in silence (yet, at least), and as someone dedicated to philosophy I trust that you will be discursively offended at worst. But I would have the issue resolved if I could, so if you have a definition of religion which would include all of the groups which you would classify as such but which would exclude Objectivists, I would appreciate it if you would send it to me as the basis for further discussion.

For now I have decided to enter the moral and professional gray-area of attempting to contradict what seems to be a religious statement, even a doctrine. My paradoxical and temporary pardon is in the fact that if I were to take you at your word and agree that you were not in fact a member of a particular religious group, I would have no professional obligation to accept your terminology, but I will, of course, explain why I would make such a claim and in doing so I will attempt only to reference a group which I suspect you will agree is a religion: Catholicism.

First of all, I suspect that you will acknowledge that Objectivists form a rather different sort of social group than Hegelians or even Foucaultians (though on that second point I would not be surprised by a refutation which would render myself at least a very lax believer). There are discussion forums for Objectivists both in person and online which return in their discussions to the writings of one writer more than any other, and when they leave these forums, many of their participants use the ideas gained in these closed dialogues to make and understand their decisions. Objectivism is a dialogue around a shared set of terms, themes, and important questions which informs nearly every aspect of many peoples lives.

I am reminded how in previous letters you employed many arguments which began by defining words, for instance "morality," and "art" in terms which, though I am not certain if they were quoted directly from Rand or not, were traceable with relatively arm chair research to fairly insular circles of inter-Objectivist discourse. More importantly, though, your practice of posting press releases from the Ayn Rand institute directly in the shared myspace seems to indicate that you understand these as of general interest and importance, not only valuable for your life, but for life in general. You seem to enter inter-Objectivist dialogue to learn things which help you understand every possible facet of life.

Though you might contend that each of the quotations which you employ has been rigorously evaluated irrespective of your historical fondness for Objectivist thought, and that it is thus not a manifestation of religion, I think any Catholic would assert the same. (If you also reject the term Objectivist as accurately descriptive of your life conducted in dialogue with Rands writings, please tell me. Not knowing better I am only using it as a shorthand here.) A Catholic is not, of course, some one who thinks that every Papal Bull is absolutely correct, but someone who lives a life which these documents and the traditions surrounding them help to orient, someone who has not rejected so many Papal Bulls that they stop caring what the Pope wants. I assume of your tendency to consult Rands writings and those of those who tend to agree with her, just as I assume of any Catholics Catholicism, that it could end gradually or abruptly through a series of disagreements. But it seems that you have located the community of thought by which you orient yourself, and that it is the first place you look when making decisions large (career choices or voting, perhaps) or small (the selection of images for your myspace profile).

I think it is important, as well, that these communities of dialogue motivate bodily action. Though this includes typing and mouse-using, I suspect that it encompass much more in your life, and am certain it does for others. I know you have been reading, defending, and living through Objectivist thought at least intermittently since high school. If your reflections and behaviors regarding sex, art, economics, and politics have been overwhelmingly oriented around the writings which have collected in one group of people, I have a very hard time understanding that as anything but religious behavior, unless we are going to release the Catholics from the category as well.

Of course, I am not suggesting that you stop orienting yourself in this way any more than I would attempt to convince a Catholic not to do as they do. In fact, I am a small to medium sized fan of Objectivism and have had to repeatedly defend Rands writings as coherent, viable, and valuable, though I disagree on several critical points.

By tracing further these sort of indices for life lived in communal dialogue, I tend to disagree with your contention that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were some how counter-religious. Of course, there are those scholars who would claim that no such periods ever took place, or took place to any great effect, but I agree with your assessment of these as periods of great change. As you may have noted, the Renaissance Humanist Johannes Reuchlin is the only hero I listed on my myspace profile. I am personally convinced that both his work and that of the period he exemplified are foundational to the best of our world today. I think Humanism is good. For better or worse, though, it cannot be divorced from the religious worlds of those who participated in it, and in much more overt ways than I have just argued regarding your life.

But I will return to my hero in a moment. I cannot say very much on the Enlightenment because it just isn't my area, though I hope I will have some more to say after this semester. It is well known that there were efforts of Deists and others to remove religion from the sphere of politics (and thus to define a sphere of politics), and even a great outcry in this period against "priestcraft" as a deceiving force, but it is also fairly clear that several of these voices emerge from, and all of them were in constituative dialogue with the religious movements of their time period. There is no Spinoza without his Jewish background, and there is no Jefferson without his blasphemously (and I think brilliantly) chopped Bible. Religion gave these people a set of important questions and a canon of acceptable sorts of evidence, and they gave answers which transformed those religions, and for the most part the major thinkers of that period retained world-views which referenced the super-human in very real ways. That much I could footnote. If you would like me to give more specific data on the subject, though, I heard a fantastic lecture on the topic by David Sorkin while at Emory and would be glad to scan you a copy of the accompanying article, though I would ask that you not distribute it for copyright reasons.

The Renaissance I know a little better. Consider Reuchlin. The very image of the Renaissance scholar, Johannes was one of the most visible exemplars of the trilingual ideal which had so much to do with the emergence of the philologically driven academy, and thus with the philological critiques of the Bible later advanced by Higher Criticism. He was also dedicated, with Erasmus and against Luther, in following the upwelling of interest in Greek philosophy in the Muslim world over the preceding centuries. He argued, in fact, that many facets of the truth once known by the Greeks were now buried under superstition and institutional detritus. Following Pico della Mirandola (who would also make the hero list if I wanted to be a little less conservative), he sought out even those philosophers shunned by the Church in his attempt to find a great Truth, and praised the intellectual and moral capabilities of the human. And progressing far beyond his mentors, Reuchlin vocally and practically opposed attempts by the Church to suppress other religious groups. In 1510 a Dominican monk and convert from Judaism, Pfefferkorn, attempted to have all Jewish books (at least, in conservative attempts, all Talmuds) confiscated and destroyed under trumped up and already worn-out charges of blasphemy. In opposing this injustice, Reuchlin employed fact-driven arguments crafted in rigorous reference to Greek philosophy, and was victorious. This attempt has been well defended as the opening of an Inquisition that never happened. There can be no discussion of Renaissance resistance to religion without reference to this sort Humanist, and I would argue, this one in particular. But it was an effort which he conceived of as an advancement of Christianity, an effort to make the Church better, and not to destroy it: "I have suffered innocently for many years because of my very great wish to strengthen the orthodox faith and my most ardent desire to enlarge the Catholic Church, because I felt that those who were outside the faith, the Jews, Greeks and Saracens would not be attracted to us by insults. I consider it unbecoming of the Church to drive them to holy baptism by tyranny or severity." This is Renaissance Humanism, a movement within a larger, and distinctly religious, discourse, apart from which it is meaningless.

It is possible, of course, that this letter was duplicitous and that he was in fact trying to forward a Humanism which had no need for the Church, but given the date of the letter (1518) one would expect him to at least reject Rome and join the early Protestants if that was his intent, if not proclaim Atheistic Reason.

Sadly, Reuchlin is, for the very religious drives which I have cited, so often denounced as "not a philo-Semite," and not really a Humanist at all. Perhaps not, but he drove the Humanist enterprise forward, and for that I think he deserves praise even beyond that due to more or less decent people. Personally, I refuse to abandon the humanism of the periods which you have rightly praised just because they were not motivated by miraculously objective and non-constituted logics. Whether or not these were rational moments or Enlightenments, these were certainly periods of "rationalism," and good came out of them, but rationalism is a tendency within the sort of insular discourses which I characterize as religious ,and which I think you would also find religious at least in this period.

Also, in reference to your previous letter, there were certainly periods in Muslim history marked by great, if also religiously driven and oriented, rationalism. My personal favorite thinker is al-Farabi, particularly as reflected and refuted in the work of the 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides. But I am biased. I just really love Maimonides.
Again, my premise is that religions are "communities in embodied dialogue on significance," not that it necessarily involves a supernal world (without which many Buddhisms and even a few Judaisms can thrive), or even "the reflections of [humans] in their solitude," and under this heading as well as several others I take seriously I think Objectivism should be classified. And again, if you have a better definition please offer it. (If you give me your non-myspace email address I will happily send you the Leuba article, it is a century old, but it is a fine place to start if only for its perhaps comical cataloging of definitions.) Rand's definition in whatever form you think best, as the resident expert, would certainly be interesting.

To be fair, and to avoid a reductio ad absurdam rejoinder, I think I should also explain that locating religion as I have does not mean that everything whatsoever is a religion. For instance, I would not claim that institutionalized sports, American Football, or even the NFL are religions. Though acted out in people's bodies and though they exist in a constant state of dialogic flux as people come and go and practitioners change, and though the collective tendencies of the group can greatly impact individual participants, these movements do not represent coherent discourses on the significance of life-events. However, in smaller subsections of these, perhaps as strangely constituted as "committed Greenbay Packers fans," I would not be surprised to find a recognizably religious character.

To answer another possible rejoinder in advance, the category of religious is not one in which I classify everyone except myself. I certainly have communities which orient my understandings and way of life, but to be fair, if pressed I may consider everyone except for abandoned babies and the insane religious somehow.

A last note: I agree with you that there is a standard for judging human behavior and beliefs, if I didn't think so I would not engage in these discussions. Personally, I think behavior and belief which facilitates engagement in these sort of discussions may in fact be that standard, but I am not sure yet. I am committed to dialogue beyond the self-referential community, and for that reason I find my heroes among the Humanists, but it seems fair to take care to check carefully before proclaiming that one has corralled the Good and the Right.

Seeing as you sent our previous letters to mutual friends and I sent them to an exclusive friend, I think it may be interesting to post our ongoing discussion to one or both of our blogs. I think people may learn something, or, who knows, everything.
Thanks for the letter and I look forward to your reply,
Vincent

[This next message I sent unheralded and (as you can see) unedited, but I wanted to make sure that he had something to respond to even if my theory was too abstruse. To date I have received a response which promised a further response within a few weeks. The last words in that letter were: Regards, Adam.]

Optional addendum [Aug 31, 2006 1:37 AM]

Adam,

Sorry for the late addition, but in my late night reading I just came across two defininitions of religion which came after the article which I mentioned, and which I thought might be interesting fodder for further discussion, if only because they illustrate (and caricaturize) the diversity of the available definitions.

One of my long time favorites and one which orients a great deal of my thought, is the definition forwarded by Clifford Geertz. Though I have some small but serious issues with it, it is actually close enough to my position that you may choose to address it instead of the one I proposed. I would have, in any case, made approximately the same arguments had I been apply it alone:

"1) a system of symbols that act to 2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men, by 3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence, and 4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality, that 5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."

And on an equally important though less serious note, Henry Fielding (through the satirical voice of Parson Thwackum, a common reference point for the most institutionally bound definitions): "When I mention religion I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England. And when I mean honor, I mean that mode of divine grace which is not only consistent with, but dependent upon, this religion; and is consistent with and dependent upon no other."
Again, I will not attempt to unpack my own definition further, but I thought these may be of interest. Do with them what you might. This was the last out of turn.
-Vince

[To which he replied:]

Sep 16 2006 6:04 PMFlag spam/abuse [ ? ]
Subject: RE: On religion and reason: a request for clarification
Body:
Vince,

Conspicuously absent from your ostensibly thoroughgoing discourse on the the proper definition of religion is any treatment of the most blatant essential that distinguishes all religious ideology--faith.
An epistemology of faith is an essential characteristic of any form of mysticism.

The process of definition is fundamental to the conceptual method, and because a definition is a statement of the *essential* nature of a concept, to ignore the approach to knowledge that is the essence of religion--faith and "revelation" over facts and reason--is worse than inaccurate. It is an exercise in obscurantism.

In disregarding, not only mysticism's distinctive epistemology, but every fundamental area of philosophy, what you offer are definitions by non-essentials. Neither the social habits of their followers nor vague jargon like "ultimate concern" and "communities in embodied dialogue on significance" remotely address the actual content of the ideas you're attempting to define. But religion--all religion--holds specific, definite views on the most basic foundational categories of philosophy.

In metaphysics, religion upholds idealism--the view that reality is ultimately composed of consciousness. This is the meaning of any belief in a spiritual realm that transcends nature, since the "spiritual" simply refers to an aspect of consciousness. It is immaterial whether the particular mythology holds that an omnipotent, disembodied consciousness lords over existence, whether there is a 2nd, magical dimension inhabited by immortal fairies, or whether there are simply demonic spirits infused in the rocks and trees. Every religion denies fundamentally the laws of identity and causality--religion denies that an objective reality exists independently of any consciousness, and that reality consists of specific entities acting according to immutable laws of nature. Simply put, religionists are systematically unable or unwilling to distinguish between reality and their own mental states--between fact and fiction.

The result of this principle in metaphysics, which Ayn Rand called the primacy of consciousness, is an epistemology that holds that knowledge is gained, not by identifying and integrating the facts of reality through sense perception and the method of logic, but by consulting one's inner whims, feelings, and fantasies. In the broadest sense, "faith" means belief on the basis of feelings instead of facts and evidence. It means believing in that for which there is literally no evidence (the arbitrary) and in that which directly contradicts the evidence (the false). This meaning of faith encompasses all forms of mysticism--of the view that man possesses a means of knowledge other than reason, such as divine revelation, ESP, intuition, instinct, innate knowledge, etc.--all these are equivalent to treating ones own subjective whims as the standard of knowledge. This is nothing more than the method of believing it because you want to.

These are the most *essential* elements of every kind of mysticism and hence of every religion--the primacy of consciousness in metaphysics and the method of faith in epistemology. These ideas are the foundation of the entire religious worldview, and any definition of religion must include them at its base. Objectivism is the diametric opposite of religion in these most basic areas of philosophy, and only a completely non-essentialized approach could possibly conflate the two.

Beyond these fundamentals, precisely defining religion in a way that differentiates it from all closely related varieties of mysticism is a comparatively academic and secondary issue. Religion is typically distinguished by its particular source of anti-rational knowledge--divine revelation, spiritual communion, miraculous visions, or the consulting of magical books. This is the meaning of a narrower sense of faith as it relates specifically to religion--not just feelings, but arcane, supernatural, hallucinogenic feelings as the standard of knowledge. Further, it could be argued that religion should refer to the more *systematized* forms of mythology--those that attempt a more structured, integrated view of the universe. This might set it apart from crude, tribal forms of animism, for instance, or from nihilistic Eastern mystery cults that simply preach the annihilation of the mind. Indeed, Ayn Rand gave religion a certain historical credit as a rudimentary form of systematic philosophy--mans primitive, pre-scientific first attempt to grasp an integrated and comprehensible view of his existence. But the point here is that this further precision in sorting religion as such apart from alternative creeds of mystical dogma is completely incidental to *the* critical and necessary step in defining religion--the recognition that all religion is *essentially* a doctrine of mysticism.

But the definitions you offer do not deal in essentials. Clearly, you are merely attempting to replace the concepts of worldview or philosophic system with the word religion. By this scheme, *any* attempt to order ones view of existence into a consistent, intelligible whole--by whatever method, whether it be the unwavering application of mans rational faculty to grasping the nature of existence, or whether it be the systematic evasion and dogmatism of medieval madmen, Middle-Eastern savages, or murderous communists--all these are equivalent. They are equivalent because they all (nominally) represent the hubristic pretense that man can claim to know and make sense of reality, that he can arrogantly presume to impose his concepts on the ineffable noumenal world.
This is just the standard fetish of the skeptics against system-building, whereby the lifting of ones mental functioning above the level of a pre-conceptual infant or postmodern professor is viewed as naïve, impossible, even depraved.

How, except on this view, could you regard such fundamentally opposed philosophies as religion and Objectivism as the same--on the utterly non-essential grounds that their respective adherents each regard their ideas as *important*, as saying something meaningful about reality? How could you propose that if an individual guides his life by a system of ideas, if he actually *acts* with any degree of consistency on some view of existence, that renders his ideas religion--except on the view that *any* claim to knowledge is the equivalent of blind faith, and that any formulation of ethical *principles* must be as arbitrary as divine commandments or intrinsic categorical imperatives.

In true postmodernist fashion, you are dealing with ideas as merely social constructs--as collectively held floating abstractions, disconnected from any meaning in or reference to reality. You offer surface-level sociological analysis of a movements culture *as a substitute* for an understanding of the nature and content of the ideas themselves. It is irrelevant, on this approach, what a philosophy holds about the very nature of existence, the relationship of consciousness to external reality, the means by which human beings can understand the world, and the principles by which an individual should guide his life.
What actually matters is that enough people get together to form a collective, talk about their ideas with each other, and act on them--this is supposed to be the essence of religion. These are your communities in embodied dialogue on significance.

That is absurd.

But it is perfectly consistent with the approach to ideas that dominates academia today. Ideas are regarded as a game of the intellect, with no relevance to practical life on Earth. Concepts are viewed, not as the assessable product of an individual mind, but as collective cultural constructs unsusceptible to objective validation. Philosophy is simply an esoteric pastime the modern scholastics enjoy arguing about. And it serves as the academic fig leaf the subjectivist-altruist-collectivist establishment uses as cover to justify their nihilistic assault on the Enlightenment, on reason, individualism, science, capitalism, America--on human values as such.

Vince, you claim to be looking for a standard by which to judge human behavior and human beliefs, and you offer, as your provisional heuristic, behavior and belief which facilitates engagement in these sort of discussions.
Polemics is not the purpose of philosophy. Ideas are not mere linguistic baubles that serve to fuel the great intersubjective Discourse of your professors.

Philosophy is the indispensable conceptual means by which the human mind grasps existence--it is a power from which no human being can escape, and its consequences are literally life or death. The standard of any ideas validity--its truth or falsehood--is *the facts of reality*, and the method of determining those facts is empirical reason. The moral standard of human action and human thought, the ultimate standard of value, is mans life. Whether any volitional human action objectively promotes or harms the long-range existence of a rational being, as determined by the facts of reality--that is the standard that ties ethics to facts. If we want to live, then because we exist in an objective reality--because of the laws of identity and causality--we must pursue only those actions which will *actually* result in the promotion of our long-term existence.
For a more detailed explanation, I refer you to the Objectivist literature, specifically Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff.

Adam

[His final addendum:]

Sep 16 2006 11:59 PMFlag spam/abuse [ ? ]
Subject: RE: On religion and reason: a request for clarification
Body:
A further point:
Consider a man dying of some terminal brain-atrophying disease, and suppose that advanced medical science is applied to cure the disease. It is in the nature of this treatment that the cure is not effected instantaneously--there is a protracted period of gradual recovery, wherein many of the agonizing symptoms remain despite the presence of the health-promoting drug.

Would you agree that it would be spectacularly fallacious to assert, when the man eventually gets better, that we really need to give a good deal of credit for the cure to the lingering pain, debilitation, and dementia--that the really essential good of the treatment was due to its harmonious mixture of suffering and healing? That in the future, if we want to promote general well-being we should in fact induce those same crippling symptoms in healthy subjects?

The actual state of Western culture before its partial recovery, during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, from the mind-rotting effects of a culture ruled by religion resembled the condition of a deformed invalid reduced to a near-comatose state for a full millennium. The tortuous, halting and circuitous path the West traveled to arrive at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment was only impeded by the continued dominance of religion. To attribute to the antithesis of reason the very success of a period in which the rise of reason stood as a radiant contrast to the unrelieved horror of the Dark Ages that preceded it--that is a fallacy.

The issue here is one of evaluating history in terms of essentials, and of retaining the full historical context. If a period, or an individual in that period, retained the vestiges of faith in a contradictory mixture with reason, that simply means that reason cannot be expected to take hold overnight, given the historical context of a millennium of religion.

I am well aware of the fact that many of the intellectual figures I regard as heroic champions of reason still retained elements of irrationality, even to the point of considering themselves devoutly religious and aiming to advance Christianity. Ayn Rand gave tremendous moral and intellectual credit to Aquinas, for instance, because he was absolutely pivotal in the historic rise of Aristotelian reason that led to the Renaissance. What was *essentially* heroic about Aquinas was his brilliant application of reason. This neither denies nor contradicts any of the context of his thoroughly religious side. A man with mixed premises can accomplish marvelous things when and to the extent that he applies his rational faculty. His irrational ideas, however, remain false, inimical to human life--evil.

The same is true of any other historical periods in which reason established a foothold in a culture. The "Islamic" golden age was an achievement *because* it was distinguished by its application of rational ideas, largely imported from the Greeks. Maimonides and al-Farabi were scholars of Aristotle, the father of reason and the philosophical precursor to Ayn Rand.

It would be nonsense to claim that the achievements of the period were due to the presence of religion. We have seen the cultural devastation that resulted when mysticism regained control and stamped out reason--a devastation which continues unabated to this day.

There is much more that could be said on this issue. I will not even discuss in any detail the revolting phenomenon, popular amongst the religious right, of claiming that the Founding Fathers were essentially religiously motivated, and that America is an essentially Christian nation. America is the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment. In its original founding principles, it is the greatest and most moral country in human history, *because* it is based on a secular philosophy of reason, individualism, and this-worldly happiness.

Adam

[Well friends, that is it for now, but when the next volley and return comes by, I will report again. -Cheers.]

An Objectivist and a Relativist Walk into a Bar [Pt. 1]

2006-10-26T20:12:00.000-05:00

[So, friends, excuse the brackets, but I thought you might find this interesting. I have been in an on going discussion with a fellow named Adam, one I would call a highschool-friend, but whom I suspect would call me an unfortunately recurrent memory. Who can say, we so rarely ask people if they like us now, let alone whether they imagine that they once liked us. But I digress.

The following is a series of emails he and I have been sending back and forth in which we both speak very broadly, but which I think you may find interesting. If anyone thinks I have gone far astray, please post me. Aside, of course, from my spelling, which I think has gone haywire. Of course, if any of you think I am being embarrasingly stupid, please tell me with the same disgression you would apply if my fly were open in public, and I will quietly delete this.

The intial impetus was this, a "Bulletin" post which he sent to his myspace friends, among which I am numbered:]

----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: Spong
Date: Aug 11, 2006 10:05 PM

Ayn Rand Institute Press Release
http://www.aynrand.org/
August 11, 2006

Irvine, CA--Following news of the foiled plot to bomb airlines, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) criticized President Bush for calling the would-be killers "Islamic fascists."

"CAIR is demanding that we evade the actual goal of those trying to kill us," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "Just as the Soviet Communists and the Nazis sought to impose their version of socialism on the world, so the new killers seek to impose their version of Islam on the world. They seek total power to enact the dictates of Islam. Theirs is an Islamic totalitarian movement.

"I wish Bush would take his own rhetoric seriously, because understanding this fact about the killers is crucial to achieving victory in the war. Only when the political aspiration of Islam--the imposition of its religious dogmas by force--has been shown to result in the deaths of Islamists, not their victims, will we be safe. Only when the cause of Islamic totalitarianism has been thoroughly discredited, will victory be achieved.

"CAIR's demand that we evade the role of religion in this conflict is undermining America's self-defense. For this, the group should apologize to all Americans."

...... ...... ......

Copyright Â© 2006 Ayn RandÂ® Institute. All rights reserved.

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This release is copyrighted by the Ayn Rand Institute, and cannot be reprinted without permission except for non-commercial, self-study or educational purposes. We encourage you to forward this release to friends, family, associates or interested parties who would want to receive it for these purposes only. Any reproduction of this release must contain the above copyright notice. Those interested in reprinting or redistributing this release for any other purposes should contact media@aynrand.org. This release may not be forwarded to media for publication.

[And this was my answer:]

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: "The Bible" [Pseudoeponymous]
Date: [Aug 12, 2006 10:38 AM ]

Dear Adam,
I find it rather surprising that you would repost this press release. I presume, of course, that you read it carefully before placing it here, and cannot imagine in what sense you thought it would be helpful. Honestly, I expect more philosophically and historically honest releases from the ARI.

The issue is that President Bush called the terror suspects in Britain "Islamic fascists" and CAIR complained that this phrase "equated the religion of peace with the ugliness of fascism." For this complaint Dr. Brook of the Ayn Rand institute demands an apology. Clearly, CAIR overstated the problem of Mr. Bush's statement. If this action demands an apology, however, none will be brought about by statements like the one you posted here. If anything, this press release illustrates the kind of prejudice against which CAIR was created to protect American citizens.

The first paragraph is fine. Dr. Brook, like Mr. Bush, evokes the commonplace that imperialist totalitarianism must not be tolerated. I, like most readers, agree, and need little further persuasion. Certain Muslim people seek to impose their version of Islam on the world just as "Soviet Communists and the Nazis sought to impose their version of socialism on the world" and Brook and Bush both call these people fascists. I am not quite sure if the descriptor is as precise as it is evocative, but it works. There is a threat from certain types of Muslims and something must be done. Point well taken.

To this point it is notable that both men have allowed that this is a problem with fascist contingents within Islam, those with a particular and particularly dangerous "version" of the religion. There are, of course, other versions. Groups ranging from CAIR itself (to cite only the most spectacularly divergent cases) to the Bahai faith are also promoting versions of Islam, both of which envision democratic inter-religious harmony. CAIR's biggest mistake was ignoring President Bush's syntax. He is clearly indicting only a version of Islam, only the fascist variety, and not the religion as a whole. Whether or not that is consistent with his private opinions and his larger policy decisions is not the issue here. This is an indictment of Fascist Islam and not an equation of Islam and fascism, and the statement is valuable.

Because there are groups, however, which fail to recognize diversity, potential and actual, within Islam, perhaps we can understand why CAIR would overreact. Passages of the Quran and ahadith which call upon Muslims for military action are too often cited by politicians and pundits of varying stripes as proof that the peaceful Muslim is a contradiction in terms. Of course, I will not claim that this literary tradition does not exist. It does. There is unarguably violence in these texts, and at certain points in history it has become quite manifest. However, the only way these passages could demonstrate an inevitable tendency towards violence within Islam would be if religious history tended to show that violence in scripture correlates with violence in reality. Even the most cursory survey of the history of religions makes it clear that this is not the case.

For instance, within in Judaism, there is sufficient Biblical basis for a surprising amount of violence. The leadership tactics of Moses and military record of Joshua alone, as two of the earliest types for the Messiah present models for the Messianic future which are driven by merciless human action. This is the vision of the Messiah to which Jesus was heir, but it was on the way out. When historical circumstances made a vision of violent change through human actors dangerous and inefficient, a new vision emerged. It was in the image of the military Messiah that the Bar Kokhbah revolt rose and fell in the second century. But soon after this monumental failure and the tragic death toll it brought upon the Jews, a new vision for the Messiah emerged. The Mishnahs vision of him tends towards the supernatural and discourages any effort to predict or speed up his reign, tendencies which are still more emphatic in the Talmud. These texts, though they can never have the official status of the Bible, form the official filter for interpreting the Bible within Judaism. The violent vision is now safely trapped behind their exegetical screen. Though scripture had created one image of the future, social change precipitated philosophical, and eventually scriptural, change.

And the case of Christianity is equally instructive. The New Testament is a work which gives quite nearly no defense for military action (even including the quite exceptional cases of Matt. 10:34 and Luke 22:36). Despite this, when historical circumstances have made military action desirable and feasible, Christianity has mustered its scant scriptural justification towards some of the most theologically oriented and wide ranging military campaigns in history. Christianity, like Judaism, has no monolithic version, but rather creates versions which are more or less violent by adapting scripture to make sense of changing historical circumstances. Some readings of any tradition, even CAIR must acknowledge, will be dangerous.

Unfortunately, the article you posted ignores the overwhelming evidence of history. Whereas President Bush (and Dr. Brook's first paragraph) called for action against a certain group within Islam, the end of the press release called for action against Islam as a whole, precisely the sort of unilateralism that CAIR is protesting and which I maintain can only be defended through ignorance (whether willing or not). That this press release would claim that "the imposition of its religious dogmas by force" is "the political aspiration of Islam" is a frightening overstatement which simply does not become the philosophically or historically minded. Islam does not have any aspirations, desires, or tactics. Perhaps Dr. Brook could have spoken on tendencies, historical records, or scriptures of Islam, all measurable phenomena, but as the press release stands, he does not. He is generalizing Islam as a necessarily fascist religion. With these sorts of voices in positions of power (and the head of the ARI is a position of some influence), is it any wonder that CAIR is easily spooked? Clearly, there are those who would eradicate Islam on the (amazingly anachronistic) notion that it is inherently fascist, and CAIR is a group which exists expressly to keep ammunition out of those people's hands.

So, if you are saying that CAIR should apologize for being Muslim, I understand and disagree, and if you are saying they should apologize for misunderstanding Bush's statement, it seems something of an overreaction. Most importantly, though, no such reaction will come about from Mr. Brooks press release. The question is what economic and political realities are contributing towards fascist readings of Islam. Dr. Brooks generalizations will also not lead to an answer to that most critical question.
So, what, if not philosophy or history, orients the press release? Perhaps you know, but I certainly do not, Adam. If the Ayn Rand institute is placing the political ambitions of some of its members before her highest charge of philosophical living, that is to say, if it is being run by conservatives and not Objectivists, then I think you should be careful what you repost. In any case, I look forward to further press releases.
Sincerely,
Vince

[To which he replied:]

RE: U.S. Muslim Group Should Apologize [Aug 14, 2006 3:59 AM]
Vince,

Leaving aside Dr. Brook's comments for the moment, consider the moral status of CAIR's objection to the use of the term "Islamic fascists" to refer to Muslim terrorists. You concede that the term accurately describes the fascist "contingent" within Islam. The fundamental nature of this movement is that it seeks to impose a totalitarian *Islamic* theocracy. "Islamofascism" therefore identifies the essential content of our enemy's ideology--it names a glaringly obvious and urgently important fact of reality. Yet CAIR is outraged that anyone would dare to acknowledge the facts, because they reflect badly on Islam. CAIR wants us to studiously evade the basic nature of an enemy that is systematically killing us--as such, CAIR's craven dishonesty goes far beyond mere political correctness--it is epistemological treason that severely undercuts our ability to defend ourselves and eliminate the threat to our lives.

Sadly, this evasion has been widely complied with in the West. It took Bush *years* to even suggest that Muslim terrorists and the states that support them are an essentially Islamic movement--prior to that he laced every speech, including the one immediately after 9/11, with abject appeasement of Islam, insisting that the terrorists' avowed religious motivation somehow had nothing whatever to do with Islam, and that we admire the great and peaceful Islamic culture (and despite some progress on naming the enemy, Bush's evasions largely continue). These sentiments are ubiquitous in our culture. The religious right wants desperately to avoid the conclusion that religion can lead to so massive and obscene an evil, and the relativist left is opposed on principle to judging any non-Western ideology as inferior, no matter how tyrannical, violent, or primitive.

The standard smokescreen tactic, which CAIR epitomizes, is to smear anyone who condemns Islam (or, if you like, the "influence" of Islam on its militant wing) as guilty of "ethnocentric" prejudice and bigotry, equivalent to racism. Yet this smear tactic is moral relativism at it's worst--its aim and its effect is to whitewash evil and destructive ideas, and to brand the exercise of objective judgment--the recognition of facts--as depraved.

Racism is irrational and brutish because race is objectively irrelevant to a person's character and moral worth--it is *unchosen*, and morality applies only to volition. Ideas, in contrast, are chosen--moreover, ideas have consequences. False ideas--those inconsistent with the facts of reality--are harmful to human life and human values. True ideas--those reached by using reason to identify and integrate the facts of reality--promote human life and values and thus are morally good.

Thus, contrary to your postmodernist literati, an objective standard exists--the standard of human life--by which one ideology, and one culture, can be shown to be inferior to another.

Islam--and religion as such--is demonstrably inimical to human life. The rejection of reason--man's only means of knowledge of reality--in favor of arbitrary mystical fantasy, has always led and will always lead to destruction, misery, and mass death. In politics, religion is incompatible with freedom and individual rights--ideas which only emerged from the rational thought of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, not from the millenium of religious barbarism that preceded them. The attempt to live by religion consistently is the attempt to sever the mind from reality--as such it can only destroy human life--it is therefore morally *evil.*

The many moderate religionists, Muslim or Christian, who are basically decent, who live and function in the modern world, and who reject the primitivism and oppression of religious fundamentalism, survive *in spite of* their religion--they are proof of the value of the Enlightenment ideas that have diluted their religious views. These people accept significant elements of a rational worldview, such as science and secular learning, political freedom, the pursuit of happiness here on earth, the enjoyment of sex, the production of wealth, etc. In the West, Christianity has been largely attenuated in this way. The Islamic world, sadly, never experienced an Enlightenment--with the result that we are confronted today with the obscenity of a medieval religious barbarism intent on returning us to the horrors of our own theocratic past.

So with regard to Dr. Brook's comments--it is entirely appropriate to identify Islam--and religion *as such*--as the essential source of the unreasoning ideology that threatens our freedom and our lives. It is important to distinguish between moderate Muslims and the more consistent fundamentalists. We are in a physical war with *Islamofascist* states, chiefly Iran, and their terrorist proxy groups. This movement, not Islam as such, is the enemy that we urgently need to destroy, militarily or otherwise, if we are to survive.
However, it is ultimately also of life or death importance to recognize that religion *as such* is the deadlly enemy of human life--and that any Muslims or Christians .

Should you want the full philosophic context validating reason as man's indespensible and sole means of achieving knowledge, happiness, and flourishing life on this earth, I refer you to the Objectivist literature, as against a brief press release, no matter how effectively it exposes the moral bankruptcy of the so-called moderates at CAIR .

See also:
America at War
A War against Islam

Regards,
Adam

[The following is a clarification from Adam to me.]

ommission from post [Aug 14, 2006, 4:19 AM]

The second to last paragraph should read:

However, it is ultimately also of life or death importance to recognize that religion *as such* is the deadlly enemy of human life--and that any Muslims or Christians who promote the fundamental ideas of mysticism, while they may stand with us against the literal barbarians, are still essentially promoting a contradiction that will inexorably destroy the achievements of our rational, Enlightenment civilization.

[More to come, friends!]