Category: Idolatry

Rogues in Bergoglio’s Footsteps

The truth is too magnificent a thing to be the the property of any one religious institution.  Too magnificent a thing, and too elusive a thing to be owned or housed or patented or reduced to the formulas of a sect or finitized or fought over.

Institutions too often value their own perpetuation over the fulfillment of their legitimate mandates. Examples are legion. This observation occurred to me last year as I watched Representative Chip Roy's grilling of the prevaricating FBI director Christopher Wray.  It is especially pertinent to churches of whatever stripe. 

Idolatry is ubiquitous. Bibliolatry and ecclesiolatry are species thereof, not that 'Romanists' could be accused of the former.

Things are not looking good for the RCC. Jim Bowman reports.

What is Fueling the L. A. Fires?

The obvious answer in terms of tinder-dry flammable materials, the Santa Ana winds, etc. does not cut deep enough. Ideologically, nature idolatry plays a major role in the ferocity, force, and human impact of the L. A. fires.  Their source is in radical environmentalism. Radical environmentalism, as opposed to a wise stewardship of nature, is an anti-humanism. This species of wokery issues in extreme misanthropy.  By radical environmentalism I mean positions like that of David Foreman, founder of Earth First.  His extremism is displayed in the following quotations:

  • “Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.”
  • “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
  • “Humanity is the cancer of nature.”
  • “I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”
  • “The optimum human population of earth is zero.”

This AI-generated list may be verified at AZ Quotes.

Quote-the-optimum-human-population-of-earth-is-zero-david-foreman-78-94-43

Now not every environmentalist on the Left embraces the late Foreman's absurdities. But the mitigated forms of leftist environmentalism are also objectionable.  Here is a paradox worth thinking about. A sane environmentalism cannot be anti-human. It must promote human flourishing. But this will require various violent interventions in nature including drilling, mining, farming, dam-building, tunneling, road-building, and the like.  These are anti-environmental actions. To refuse to manage nature for the sake of human flourishing by engaging in these anti-environmental actions will lead, as it has in the case of the California conflagration, to a worse environmental outcome.

That is the paradox. A sound environmentalism must be in some measure anti-environmental.  But a paradox is not a contradiction, and this is one that must be accepted.

So, even apart from arson, the L. A. inferno is in large part man-made by the likes of Governor Hair-Style and Mayor Dumbass. (Those choice epithets courtesy of Kurt Schlichter.) Wildfires there will always be. Their benighted policies, however,  have made things worse than they had to be.

Idolatry and Atheism

Substack wanted me to re-post this entry from four years ago. 

Share an old post

You originally published "Idolatry and Atheism" 4 years ago. Consider sharing it again with your readers. Sharing relevant old posts is a great way to engage your audience who might not have seen them already without having to create new content.

So I did despite the fact that they miscounted: it was only three years ago. No matter, it still reads well and speaks truth.  See if you don't agree.

Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

Substack latest.

Does causation have a moral dimension?

This upload was 'occasioned' (all puns intended) by my meeting with the amazing Steven Nemes yesterday at Joe's Real BBQ in charming old town Gilbert. Among the topics we discussed were idolatry, desire, and Buddhism.

He strode up, gave me a hug, and handed me three books he has recently published. A veritable writing machine, he's out-Fesering the phenomenal Ed Feser. And it's good stuff. I dove into his  Trinity and Incarnation this morning and will be discussing in future posts the shift in his views from orthodox or what he calls catholic (lower-case 'c') Christianity to a position reminiscent of Advaita Vedanta he calls "Qualified Monism."

The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover

Top of the Stack. It concludes:

You may recall the case of  Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. 

In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or  some other 'icon.'

Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.' 

Simone Weil on False Gods

Weil SimoneDespite her infuriating extremism, Simone Weil may well be the purest incarnation of religious sensibility in the twentieth century. "It's not up to us to believe in God, but only not to grant our love to false gods." As Weil understands, essential to genuine religion, though not exhaustive of it, is the realization that nothing here below can satisfy us, and that the things we zealously pursue as if they could satisfy us are false gods. The following statement of Weil's is exactly right:

First, not to believe that the future is a place capable of fulfilling us. The future is made of the same stuff as the present. We well know that what we have that is good, wealth, power, esteem, knowledge, love of those we love, prosperity of those we love, and so on, does not suffice to satisfy us. But we believe that the day when we will have a little more, we will be satisfied. We believe it because we are lying to ourselves. For if we really think about it for a while we know it's false. Or again if we are suffering affliction, we believe that the day when this suffering will cease, we will be satisfied. There again we know it's untrue; as soon as we have gotten used to the cessation of suffering we want something else.

More here.

A Cure for Infatuation?

DulcineaOne of the very best is marriage. 

Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*

But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.

The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.

It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore. 

Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation.  Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.

But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry?  And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide.  That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols.  What we want is an infinite and eternal love.  This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.

But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.

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*The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.

 

The Idolatry of the Transient

It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it, as if it could substitute for the More that eludes us. And so in some we find an inordinate love of life, a mad clinging to what cannot last and which, from the point of view of eternity, ought not last. I have Susan Sontag and Elias Canetti in mind.

The mature man, at the end of a long life, having drunk to the lees the chalice  of mortal existence, ought to be prepared bravely to shed the mortal coil like a worn-out coat and sally forth into the bosom of nonbeing, or into regions of reality glimpsed but not known from the vista points of the sublunary trail the end of which is in sight.  

Berdyaev: Communism as a Form of Idolatry

David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Touchstone, 1997, p. 55:

After the Russian Revolution of 1905, the philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev analyzed communism as a form of idolatry in a way that proved to be prophetic. Berdyaev traced the origins of what he called the Marxist “heresy” back to the tower of Babel. In that story, people had tried to achieve their own redemption — without a transcendent God — by building a ladder to heaven. Communists had a similar ambition. They had projected onto fallible beings godlike powers that would enable them to overcome their human fate. In do so, Berdyaev warned, the communists had created demons they would not be able to control.

Berdyaev soul history

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

This is another topic that it would have been great to discuss with Dale Tuggy during his visit thereby bringing my supposed 'gnosticism' into collision with his supposed 'spiritual materialism.'  The problems are very difficult and I do not claim to have the answers.  The first thing and the main thing, as it seems to me, is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the issues and their difficulty.

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I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or for another, as in the case of intercessory prayer. In many of its forms petitionary prayer borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the person who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.  When Paul Tibbets, Jr. took off in the Enola Gay on his mission to Hiroshima in August of 1945, a Catholic priest blessed his mission, petitioning God for its success.  I'll leave you to think about that.

Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable.  Some of it simply reflects, excusably,  our misery and indigence.  Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane?  But much of it is objectionable.  What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material  benefits?

The other five petitions in the Pater Noster are either clearly or arguably prayers for spiritual benefits.   In a spiritual petition one asks, not for physical bread and such, but for things like acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold  shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of  cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity, or at least with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others. 

The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural, beyond all sublunary substances, and beyond all creatures. To ask for this heavenly bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive.

For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence.  So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.'  A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread. 

Cassianus_portretBut one morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian.  The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical.  'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30)  What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day.  On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.*

This reading also has the virtue of cohering nicely with Matthew 4:4 according to which man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  Man lives, not by physical bread, but by meta-physical 'bread.'

"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day.  And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it?  Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian.  The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance. 

Addendum on the Literal and the Metaphorical

Here is a question that vexes me.  Are there literal truths that cannot be stated literally but can only stated or gotten at metaphorically?  Can we state literally what a man is if he is more than an animal? Or must we use metaphors?

"Man is spirit."  Isn't 'spirit' a metaphor?  "Man has a higher origin."  'Higher' is metaphorical.  "Man is made by God in his image and likeness."  Aren't 'made,' 'image,' and 'likeness' metaphors?

I once heard a crude and materialistic old man say that if man is made in God's image, then God must have a gastrointestinal tract.  I tried to explain to the man that 'image' is not to be taken in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense.  But I got nowhere as could have been expected:  anyone who doesn't understand right away the spiritual sense of 'made in God's image' displays by that failure to understand an incapacity for instruction.  It is like the student who doesn't get right away what it means to say that one proposition follows from another, and thinks that it refers to a temporal or a spatial relation. 

The question is whether the spiritual sense can be spelled out literally.

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*  For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without  'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the  soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.