book review: Roman Britain and Early England (55 B.C.-A.D. 871)

I have been terrible about posting these days, and I’ve even let a few books go by without reviewing them.  I’ll try to make up for it, but I really just don’t feel like I have the energy even to throw together a mediocre review.  but oh well, here’s a lame attempt.

I wrote elsewhere that this is history at its (almost) most boring.  not that the author falls short of covering a certain amount of information or of dissecting a few themes, but this is the kind of book — and his is the kind of narrative — that recapitulates classical historians whenever available, supplementing it with archeological data, recounting the step-by-step process of Roman invasion or the suppression of a national revolt.  my interest in history goes way beyond (and in fact cares little for) the history of military exploits.  the overall reconstruction of conquest from archeological data (from roads to forts, etc.) is very interesting and is a great achievement (the overall discovery, not necessarily is account of it), but it’s the kind of story that really needs to be supplemented with lots of interesting plates and maps (as opposed to one or two, which you constantly have to be flipping back and forth between, and even then it doesn’t really give you a real sense of the process).

I think recapitulation — in terms of the main root of the word — is the best term for his historical account.  it’s as if he, a genuine master of the available material (historical and material), has been forced, at gunpoint, to give us all his information.  it doesn’t come across as the account of someone truly fascinated by this story and inexplicably invested in our comprehension of it.  not that every history book has to play to its audience and write like a novelist, but what the publishing historian should hope to produce is something that doesn’t sound like a Ben Stein Clear Eyes commercial in your head.

OK, with that out of my system, I can still say that the book provides valuable information for anyone wanting to study such a difficult period in British history.  there are a few subject-centered themes (e.g., the conversion to Christianity, pre-Christian religion, Anglo-Saxon society), but they are not nearly as vivid and as interesting as I’d hoped.  and I would have hoped for more excerpts from original sources (in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, etc.) in the text or in an appendix.

an intellectual grandpappy

a few vintage thoughts on religion from a very old Bertrand Russell:

well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true … at least I rule it out as impossible: either the thing is true or it isn’t. if it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. and if you can’t find out whether it is true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment … it seems to be a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.

book review: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality

I am ashamed to say that after a handful of degrees (undergrad and grad), I had never heard of this book.  for shame!

Boswell has a number of goals in this book — all of which are academic and not masked political activism (in fact, he’s often quite reserved in his claims) — and he is most successful in demonstrating, first, how weak and ultimately indefensible the biblical case against homosexuality is, and second, how the origins of unprecedented hostility towards homosexuality in phases of European history (up to the high middle ages) did not grow organically out of Christianity or any specific theology/exegesis, but rather were part of larger political and cultural trends.

one particular goal of the book is to lay out the inconsistent and problematic history of the various “natural” arguments against homosexual relations and how various phases of historical Christianity were unconcerned with them.

as Boswell shows, the biblical, theological, and historical (in terms of Christian teaching) case against usury was much stronger and much more consistent throughout church history — until it became convenient and popular enough to change this view, of course. so why go on painting homosexuality and homosexuals as unnatural and particularly sinful?

the book is also very effective in demonstrating the extent to which homosexuality was part of the sexual landscape in antiquity, and even how gay subcultures and literature reemerged and flourished in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. there was even a place for more “erotic” homosexual literature, even if much of it was technically detailing non-physical love between monks or clergy.  indeed, it makes you wonder which otherwise heterosexual persons in our society — given that sexuality is more of a spectrum of sorts, and knowing how much more common it has been when it has been idealized and hasn’t had to stay underground — would give themselves (exclusively or not) over to homosexual relations.  I’m thinking the dude bros and frat boy hazers.

in the end, one puts the book down amazed at how far in the wrong direction European views strayed (and were kept astray?) until the modern period.  but it also reminds you that things have been, and can be again, different.  for the better.

from lewd idiom to lofty truth

there’s a video making the rounds on the ol’ internets of a pastor named Steven Anderson who rails against men — excuse me, males, certainly not men — who pee sitting down.  every single German, according to his authoritative three-and-a-half-month visit and handful of experiences, pees sitting down.  and that, my friends, is where this country is headed.  people are afraid to tell it like it is (like the KJV is, that is) and pee standing up!  those compromising scholars who have produced alternative, “soft” translations of the Bible, and certainly President Obama (probably) pees sitting down!

he takes this from a few old testament passages that use the fairly crude though entertaining idiom “who piss against the wall,” meaning men, and then expounds on what an essential quality of manliness is: peeing standing up.  he is a treasure.

anyway, I actually looked into it (if you can call a few minutes of internet searching “looking into” something) and found that, indeed, in Germany, as well as in Japan, it is fairly common for men to pee sitting down.  this may be a bit too much of a disclosure, but I decided sometime last spring or summer that I would start doing this in our home.  I mean, I’ve always considered myself a conscientious urinator and all, but when we went to wash our bathroom rungs once, just a few minutes in a closed, small laundry room and it became apparent that there was still a, shall we say, “unwelcome” smell to them.  why shouldn’t I save us the trouble of having to do more washing and cleaning up?  (not that we stopped washing our rugs now and then, but still.)  anyway, I’ll stop there, apart from adding that I wouldn’t do this anywhere — only for friends and family and/or in places where I can trust the overall cleanliness of the toilet.

and there’s this:

anyway, I guess I should be thankful to Pastor Anderson for making explicit what I had been suspecting all along.

before He knocked

I picked up a book of Dylan Thomas’ poetry a few weeks ago, and I’ve slowly been sounding it out and seeing how I like it.  so far, so OK.  often I don’t think I really grasp what he’s trying to convey.  but then again, I don’t think that’s entirely my fault; I just don’t think he’s always that clear.  lots of ornate imagery that, at least I think, deliberately create discords in meaning.  so I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to really understand, as opposed to what is supposed to just impress (on) me.

some of the poems I do “get” are ones involving Christ imagery, esp. the Incarnation narrative, and the overall Christian “myth” (not used pejoratively).  my favorite so far may be the pattern poem “Vision and Prayer,” but that’s way too long to reproduce here.  but this one, “Before I Knocked,” was the first one that allowed me to understand Thomas better.  there’s a bit of pagan mythology thrown in here, which he apparently loved just as much, but it’s mostly Christian, though not necessarily orthodox…

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha’s daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother’s womb.

quite lovely.  even we AASHs (atheist/agnostic secular humanists — fyi, I just made that up) can appreciate myths now and then (again, as in “sacred narrative,” not necessarily “false story”), esp. ones we are familiar with, and ones that are so heavy with images and symbols ripe to be reworked and reinterpreted. I sort of wish I belonged to a culture with a more mixed mythic background, maybe indigenous American or Nordic, so that there would be more out there as cultural capital.  not to mention holiday carols!

the uncaring smear

PZ Myers is not one to pull punches when commenting on religion, so none of this should come as any real shock (if you know him, that is).  it’s not necessarily new, but it’s certainly interesting.  and funny (to me, at least).  today he has written about John Shelby Spong who, Myers writes, is “essentially an atheist who skims off a bit of the moldy skin of the rotten fruit of religion, and tells us how pretty the colors are … thereby making an implicit argument to keep the decaying garbage around.”

but his characterizations about someone like JSS and numerous other super-academic-liberal-not-really-religious-in-any-tangible-way-but-religious-apologists-of-whatever-sort-nonetheless are not only occasionally funny, but also sometimes insightful (and dead on, I would add).  continuing about JSS, he writes,

He’s like Karen Armstrong, so taken with the language of religion that they’re willing to ignore the substance. When you’ve reduced god to the uncaring smear of cosmic background radiation and a collection of psychological quirks in the human brain, you might as well admit it: he’s dead. Get over it and move on. And deceased figments don’t need a weepy wake or much sympathy for the family.

there are a few recently coined clever ideas that hopefully will start making their way into these seemingly endless debates (not that I really care to follow all of it or even participate, apart from on a personal, sincere, give-and-take level).  the first is Daniel Dennett’s phrase “deepity,” which refers to a statement with two meanings, one true but superficial, and the other sounding profound but ultimately meaning nothing.  this relates to his take on people like Karen Armstrong and others who utter all kinds of deliberately confounding and contradictory statements about religion and god, hoping that somehow, in our befuddlement, we’ll just nod and agree.  or at least be impressed.

the second comes from PZ and is called “theological whack-a-mole.”  it has to do with his response to some Christians that atheists should take the religious (biblical) claims of people (they specifically meant Christians like them) more seriously, paying more attention to historical context and broader narratives (e.g. Christological).  his response, while more scathing than anything I would ever dare to offer, is worth pasting in full:

What is “the” Christological narrative? There is none, or rather, there’s a thousand of them. We know the context, too — that the Bible is an evolving mess of over-interpreted poetry and tribal stories and crackpot history. Why you guys choose to selectively declare one interpretation of one subset of the conglomeration to be the absolute truth as dictated by anthropomorphic vapor, while another arbitrary subset is archaic and doesn’t apply anymore, is completely incomprehensible … not just to us, but to you, too.

We atheists actually do address the claims fervently held by millions of people. The sneaky trick the theological wankers pull, though, is that once we’ve smacked them down, they announce, “Oh, no — we didn’t mean those millions of believers. They’re stupid. We meant these other millions of believers.” It’s a big game of whack-a-mole. What you call “obscure Old Testament laws,” someone else will call the core of their faith. What you value as the “Christological narrative,” a member of yet another sect will call pretentious confabulations.

Atheists just cut through all the noise and call it all sewage.

And some of us see no reason to be nice to sewage, and get really cranky at demands to respect your steaming pile of ordure.

ouch.  not the best representative of a fruitful conversation with someone, especially not someone you care about, but I think it’s a decent response to the Spongs and Armstrongs and Eagletons out there.

anyway, here’s PZ with Mr. Deity.

religion & intellectual dishonesty

someone I sort of knew from HDS posted this quote from Terry Eagleton (via Stanley Fish) today and it has been driving me somewhat crazy, esp. since another friend, someone I respect, seems to like it and agree with it:

…we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

I find this to be untrue and intellectual dishonest on a number of fronts.  a rather obvious one is atheism or “scientism” as reflecting and extending capitalism.  schwat?!?  maybe insofar as each thrives on a marketplace of competing ideas, but otherwise I think it can easily be rejected out of hand, or especially on historical grounds.  most progressive socialist (and even anarchist) thinkers in the Western world were quite the atheists.  but even if you select a few individual examples, the comparison doesn’t really make any sense and probably is playing off the current global woes of capitalism.

most troubling, however, is the criticism of “faith in the power of unaided reason” or contentless progress and the valuelessness of a secularist/naturalistic/”scientist” outlook.  as if the history of most religious traditions–especially the one Eagleton winds up defending!–have a respectable record of leading social change.  Fish (and maybe Eagleton) also criticizes these outlooks as being superficial and tending to the perpetuation of the status quo–something that is patently false.

it is quite baffling that someone would want to criticize nonreligious “candidates for guidance” that have often done a far better job in promoting social change in the last century plus for perpetuating the status quo while criticizing their “unaided reason” while ignoring the fact those religious traditions most often opposed so many of the changes in society we now all consider to be essential.  so what has been the “aided reason” of these traditions?  why have they failed spectacularly in the last few centuries?  and how dare they try to usurp the progress made at the expense of those traditions and despite their best efforts and then claim that other “candidates” are valueless and hubristic?

as I posted in the facebook exchange, what I most want is more brutal honesty about all these “candidates” and a critical look at their track records and what they have to say about and contribute to the world today, with a willigness on everyone’s part to disregard what we find disagreeable and preserve what is best.  but I cannot understand how a religious person and adherent of a particular tradition–esp. Christianity–could enage in this activity without being devastated by that track record.  and as much as I don’t want to throw myself headlong into the current religion vs. science and religion/atheism debates today, I really cannot stomach intellectual dishonesty of this sort and efforts to repackage what was won at the expense of a religion as part and parcel of that tradition and as a weapon for winning some new cultural war.