Reading Aloud

On reading things aloud as an adult. Recently, I’ve started reading Terry Pratchett aloud to myself. Why, you might ask, is a grown man reading aloud, when he is perfectly capable of reading silently? Allow me to outline my reasons.

First it helps me read Terry Pratchett. Despite my affection for Terry Pratchett, I often find his work challenging to read. It’s not so much that his prose is sophisticated or complex. It’s that his humor often comes from presenting a clever twist of some sort, often in his word choice or his analogy. Pratchett is a master of the “anachronistic yet fitting” descriptions, using an odd word choice or analogy to re-frame the events in his stories in a way that is both completely unexpected and completely appropriate, which is precisely what makes them hilarious. It’s brilliant, yes, but at also it makes one exceptionally conscious of how much of reading is not done by the eyes, but by the brain, which fills in the blanks of what your eyes just cruise over  based on patterns that you are used to reading. You can get away with it more when you’re reading silently—indeed, often your mind won’t even realize that you’ve misread something. Reading aloud forces you to slow down and actually think about the words that you’re saying, and better appreciate the jokes.

Second, it’s good practice. Reading aloud is a lot more difficult than it seems, especially if you’re used to reading silently, because it requires you to slow down and “read ahead” before you speak. If you read too quickly, you will often find yourself starting sentences with incorrect inflections because you began the sentence not knowing how it would end, or you will find yourself misspeaking and stammering because the sentence took an unexpected turn somewhere around the middle. If you have ever done a “cold read” of a theater script you probably know this. Again, the only way to get better at “slow reading” is to practice.

Third, it gives me a chance to practice accents. Accents are great, but you never get a chance to do them ordinary conversation (except when role playing, or when you are in the absolute best of company).

Fourth, as a chance to practice good speaking. A lot of the time, speaking at formal events requires you to modify your speech in a way that makes it more similar to writing. Normal, off-the-cuff speech is quite messy, full of false starts, sentence fragments, stammers, repetition, and other sins that would stick out rather sorely in written text (this is, incidentally, why one of the surest ways to make someone look like a blithering idiot is to exactly transcribe of something they actually said, complete with every “um…”). Reading aloud helps you make your regular speech more articulate and precise, when you want it to be.

Fifth, because one of these days, I anticipate reading aloud to children. It’s never too early to start… again.

Libresco and the Secular Moral Life I

When I was in the seventh grade, I would often debate religion on the internet. It was sort of a pastime for me after school. Between the final bell and the martial arts classes I took later in the evening, I was set up on one of the unused computers at my dad’s office, I would log onto Myspace, and then visit the forums with names like “Atheism vs Religion” and “Creation vs Evolution”.

As anyone who knows me could probably guess, I was among the ranks of the atheists. This was a formative time for me, and valuable in my intellectual development. Although internet debates have a reputation for being scummy, repetitive, and generally unproductive, I found the opportunity to articulate my ideas and engage with people—often intelligent articulate people– who genuinely did not share my world view to be somewhat exhilarating.

I cannot say what has changed about internet debates in the meantime or why I cannot easily return to the state of mind where I found these debates enjoyable. Perhaps the quality of the internet has gone down. Or more likely I have grown more experienced, and arguments that were once novel and interesting have become repetitive.

Regardless, I bring this up because I wanted to talk about particular experience on these forums. It was after I had been in the community for a while, and after I felt like all of the well-arguments had been made, I decided I would try something new. I decided that I would go on the forum and play for the other team for a bit.

So I made a new account (a girl named “Amy”, aged 15, one year older than I was at the time, whose picture I lifted from the internet– sorry!). Amy was a sweet, compassionate, sincere, and intellectually curious liberal Christian, and in the skin of this new alter ego, I started participating in debates.

The point of Amy was not to ape or parody Christian beliefs. Her point was to see if I could adopt the position of a liberal Christian and make compelling the sort of arguments that a liberal Christian could make. I also wanted to try to do Christian apology “correctly”, without arguments that I thought were faulty.

Unfortunately, Amy never got into any serious debates with atheists. I never quite made her views noxious enough for the atheists to take issue with them (though one of the atheist guys was pretty clearly trying to flirt with Amy—that was super classy). In the end, Amy got into more debates with conservative Christians than she did with Atheists.

Here’s the thing about Amy. The other liberal Christians on the forums loved her. Of course, part of it was likely that they were happy to see a young, articulate person engaged and curious about her religious belief. They didn’t always agree with her (for example, when she argued that it didn’t make sense for god to value her above any other person); her theology was a little shoddy. But they believed that her concerns were the sorts of concerns that a legitimate Christian might hold.

Of course, part of the reason why I was able to be Amy so easily is because, deep down, she wasn’t that different from me. Her concerns were largely my concerns. She had simply found answers to them within the intellectual framework of Christianity, whereas I had no such affinity. Truthfully, the reason why I got bored with Amy was because it ultimately wasn’t that different from me going on the forums as me—I would still get into mostly the same arguments with the same people, and (perhaps due to intellectual weakness on my part) I never managed to make Amy’s views noxious enough for the atheists on the forum to pick a fight with her. I didn’t want to make arguments that I knew I could argue against.

Fast forward to the present day when I, though the network of blogs that I read, discovered the blogger/author/radio personality Leah Libresco.

Leah Libresco is a blogger on religion, known initially for her Ideological Turing Test. The Ideological Turing Test challenges her readers to distinguish between a sincere believer (either atheist or Christian) and a fake (a Christian pretending to be an atheist, or visa versa), based on their answers to a personal/philosophical/ethical question? The idea is that this task is often very challenging, and attempting it often reveals prejudices and misconceptions about the outgroup.

On her blog, she seems to have cultivated a very thoughtful approach to religious debates, framing them not as a contest, but as an opportunity for intellectual collaboration between people who do not agree with each other.

The other interesting thing about Leah Libresco is that, in 2012, after blogging as an atheist for several years, she converted to Christianity. The atheism blog became a religious blog, and she has since become an interesting and influential apologist. She also has a book out, which I read pieces of, talking about her experiences as she adopted her new religion, and how the new rituals and practices contributed to her intellectual/spiritual growth.

So basically, Leah Libresco is the person I intended Amy to be.

Reading her story, I felt a personal affinity with her. Like me, she grew up in a relatively non-religious household. Like me, she developed a premature interest in philosophy. Like me, she was pleasantly surprised to encounter Christians whose intellect, curiosity, and conviction in their beliefs matched her own. Like me, she found great value in engaging with these people, taking their ideas seriously, and using debate as a form of intellectual collaboration, rather than a contest.

However, unlike me, she has actually become a Christian.

An important difference to be sure, and one that makes me deeply inclined to read more, if only to understand what the hell is going on there. The  most interesting difference are those that are stand out of a field of similarities. Plus, you don’t often get windows into this sort of personal and intellectual growth, or see them rendered with such clarity.

My primary goal in analyzing her articles is to help clarify and define my own philosophical positions. To quote Lev Vygotsky, one of the fathers of developmental psychology, “Through others, we become ourselves.” I expect that I will find my ideas clarified in her writing. I also expect that I will be moved to articulate ideas more clearly in opposition to hers.

But finally, I think that she offers some important and cogent criticisms of atheism and humanism, which are worth exploring. In her words (from before her conversion)

“Atheists and humanists were hurt by a lack of community or sense of responsibility for other people who shared their beliefs. Although atheism may be a very important political category when dealing with church-state issues and creationism, it is pretty well near useless as a philosophical category.

Atheists belong to some other group, even if that group doesn’t have a well-known name or tradition.  Some atheists are nihilists, some are existentialist, and some are crazy, mixed up proponents of absolute moral law like me, but we all have actual beliefs to defend beyond our lack of belief in God.  If you talk about atheists as having a primary loyalty to the philosophical category of atheism, you’re going to run into trouble.”

This is a criticism of atheism that I take seriously. Taking this criticism seriously is the reason I identify (albeit loosely) as a Unitarian Universalist, which offers something approaching solidarity to people who are skeptical of religious doctrine. It is also why I think it is important to build a solid atheistic tradition– a tradition upon which people can build their houses and return after they have ventured in the world.

For better or for worse, Leah Libresco seems to have found such a tradition within the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, it doesn’t feel good when someone switches away from your team, but I can’t help but feel some joy at seeing someone like me find a place where they fit. It gives me some hope for myself, even if their place would be ill suited for me.

As for myself, well, I think that for the time being my flag has been planted. My atheism is, at this point, almost a product of the way I frame questions about god, about divinity, and especially about humanity. The world, as I have come to understand it, does not have a personal god. This isn’t to say that my confidence in my atheism is unshakable (for confidence should never be truly unshakable). But it is to say that if you were to uproot my atheism, you would take a lot of my worldview with it. It is sewn into my beliefs like thread in a tapestry. To give a thorough account of this tapestry would require more pages than I can write right now, but the short version is this: I think human troubles make more sense if you accept that nobody has a personal relationship with an omnipotent source of truth and goodness.

Once that premise has been accepted, it invites the question: how the hell have people have managed to muddle through all of this time? This question has as many answers as there are people in the world. But, for me, deepening my understanding of these answers is about as high a calling as they come.

Of course, for many people, the answer to this question has been “faith”– Leah Libersco being one of them. But me, my flag is in the faithless tradition. I would see atheism become a strong, philosophically meaningful category for more people. I would show how the philosophy and epistemology of faithlessness has helped me find something that approaches meaning and intellectual fulfillment, and answers to questions of human nature.

In my next post, I plan to talk more about the questions of morality. Morality is  central to Christian theological discussion. Indeed, Leah Libresco claims that her conversion was motivated in part by her repeated failure to reconcile her moral philosophy with an atheistic universe. Other apologetic writers, particularly C.S. Lewis, have argued that the existence of a “moral law” is proof that there exists a God. I want to unpack this argument and reveal some of the assumptions about human moral and intellectual life that I view to be faulty.

Until then, I’m out.

Yad Vashem

When most people think about the Holocaust, the question that comes to the top of mind is “how could good people let this happen?” Personally, I think this is a bad question, as it suggests that there’s a vanguard of “good people” who were somehow negligent, rather than a collection of ordinary people, struggling their own struggles and bound to the communities with which they live and identify. Whether or not you call such people “good” is above my pay grade. But I find, if there’s any one lesson to take from the Holocaust, it’s that, in the right circumstances, communities of “good people” can commit horrible atrocities. The question is not “how could good people let this happen?”; the question is “how close to the surface does the monster lurk?”

This perspective has shaped the way that I think about the study of our history. Students of history will be asked is “how should one treat the Holocaust?” There is a line of argument which says that, when a historian gives an account of the Holocaust, he has a duty to illuminate the lives and stories of the victims.

I am sympathetic to this argument. There’s an unjust stink to a historical record in which the stories of the perpetrators are front and center and the stories of their victims are forgotten. Wouldn’t the innocent victims be the ones who deserve to have their narratives resurrected in our memories?

Additionally, there is a stronger claim that, in emphasizing the humanity of the Nazis, one comes close to justifying or making excuses for their actions. Does it make sense to “humanize” Hitler? The line is thin between understanding and apology, so the argument goes.

As one can imagine, I do not agree with this sentiment on several points. First, I do not believe that we are somehow giving the Nazis more than their due by exploring their humanity. You don’t explore the humanity of Nazis in order to reach the stupefyingly obvious realization that they were, in fact, human; you explore their humanity because you think it will help you better understand humanity. There is no triumph in this sort of history. On the contrary, to find yourself sympathizing with mass murderers ought to be a profoundly humbling experience. Your sympathy does not elevate the perpetrators of mass murder. It prompts you to reflect upon yourself.

My second point of disagreement is more principled. I do not believe that historians’ primary duty is the duty of all scholars: to answer a question. Although the stories of victims are essential to tell and remember, they alone do answer my question: “How close to the surface does the monster lurk?” and “What sets the monster free?”

These were the questions that my mind was churning over after my recent visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, Israel.

I’ve loved World War II history for a very long time. I trace it back when I was 11 or 12 and my mother read me Winston Churchill’s memoirs of the war, which I recommend every child be read, if only so that they are exposed to Winston Churchill’s gift for narrative prose. Once I knew a little of the history, I wanted to learn more. There is something grand about seeing all of the different stories that come together in this colossal period of history. In my 8th grade English class, I was the only one (boy or girl) who chose The Diary of Anne Frank for my elective reading– over options like Lord of the Flies, which should really have been a lot more appealing to someone in my demographic. At my mother’s recommendation, I also read the memoirs of Meip Gies, the Dutch citizen who hid the Frank family in her attic during the Nazi occupation. I spent one summer in high school watching the Winds of War and War and Remembrance miniseries on DVD. When my family visited London, I made sure to visit Churchill’s war bunker. When I learned that Ellie Wiesel’s was speaking at my university, I set aside my course work to read Night. And so on…

The Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum was not simply another piece of World War II history to add to the list. It was different for me– profoundly moving but also deeply harrowing. It was moving because it made the human cost of the Holocaust vivid and perceptible to me than any other history I have encountered. It was harrowing because, more than any other I’ve seen, I could see history being sculpted into a driving, forceful political narrative– and only God knows where that narrative could take us.

It’s hard to exaggerate the power of this museum. The architecture speaks in a way that is almost as powerful as the exhibits. The Museum itself is a massive cement hallway, with wall sloping towards each other to close off at the top. From the outside, it look like this:

The inside is a bleak cement expanse, creating a simultaneous sense of enclosure and of being very, very small.

The ground slopes as you walk past the first few exhibits, creating a sense that you are descending into the mountain. Within a few feet, a barrier blocks off the hallway, directing you off into a side room with the first exhibit.

The first exhibit documents the history of anti-Semitism in Europe. It has appropriately anti-Semitic quotes from Saint Augustine, from popes, from various heads of state, alongside disgusting portrayals of Jews in art and propaganda. The Jew as the devil. The Jew as the fat, greedy banker, covered with the ichor and entrails of his latest meal. The Jews were reviled, it says. Hated and scored across Europe.

The exhibit leads on into another room into another room that contains the little gold stars and white armbands that were used to mark Jews in Nazi occupied territories. Mementos and diaries from the occupation area are displayed, unreadable, as they are written in Italian, Polish, Yiddish, and German, but an unimpeachable testament to the fact that a human hand wrote them. There is a wall of photographs, some with charred and crumpled edges, each containing a perfectly ordinary person doing perfectly ordinary activities– riding a bike or playing croquet.

The museum was filled with people. Several school groups were there, each with over two dozen students. They had probably come specifically on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Later that evening, Yad Vashem was going to host a huge ceremony, and the Museum was going to close early order to prepare. This meant that anyone who wanted to visit that day had to come in the morning. In addition to the students, the museum was packed with tourists, led in groups by guides in Hebrew, English, French, and Spanish.

I personally did not move with any particular tour group. I preferred to read the exhibits at my own pace, though occasionally I stopped to listen when one of the tour guides spoke in English. The exhibits snaked gradually down the hallway, taking me forward in history. In the next exhibits gave an overview of the ghettos, the forced labor in concentration camps, the attempts to hide the truth of the Holocaust from the general public.

There were also exhibits about the Jewish flight from Europe. Jewish refugees often tried to flee Nazi-occupied territories, but were often not permitted to immigrate to other countries. An entire wall was devoted to the voyage of the MS St. Louis, often called the “Voyage of the Damned”. This was a ship that contained nearly 1000 Jewish refugees away from Nazi Germany. Originally bound for Cuba, the voyage was halted when the Cuban government refused to let these people enter the countries. In the map on the wallThe ship meanders around the Caribbean, being refused harbor in Florida and Canada, before ultimately taking its cargo of Jews back to Europe, to territories that were shortly thereafter conquered by Nazis.

You leave this room with the feeling that the Jews had nowhere to go. Those who were not actively trying to exterminate them would give them nothing but indifference. A quote from an Australian official, blown up on the wall of this exhibit, says “We do not have a race problem, and we have no desire to import one”. The narrative comes closer to the surface.

I won’t describe in detail the exhibits on the Holocaust itself. They were interesting, but there was nothing there that I didn’t already know. The exhibits on the concentration camps and gas chambers lead into to exhibits on the discovery and liberation of the camps and the aftermath of the war. There is an exhibit on the camps set up to help children recover from the trauma and be re-united with whatever family was left for them.

The last room in the museum is called the Hall of Names. One enters the room onto a circular balcony overlooking walls of shelves. These shelves hold hundreds of volumes— each listing names and short biographies of people who died during the Holocaust. Above is a glass cone, the inside covered with photographs.

There is a sense that this room could be the center of an entire nation. One room over, there are rows of computers where people can search the archives for their family name. I remember feeling a perverse desire to type my name into the archives, just to see if anything would come up, although my better judgment prevailed. I am not Jewish, and whatever tie I had to the Holocaust would have been extremely distant—perhaps a third cousin’s spouse’s grandmother. To try to claim a stake in this narrative seemed perverse, somehow disrespectful.

I left the Hall of Names, and then I stood before a great triangular window, standing in brilliant contrast to the dull, cement fixtures of the rest of the museum. Just outside these doors there was a balcony hanging off the side of Mt. Herzl, opening onto stunning view. The view is an open valley resting between green hills, covered in parts by a patchwork quilt of houses, the suburbs of Jerusalem, gleaming white in the noontime sun.

The image is not subtle. The view testifies both to the beauty of the land and the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have made their home here. To the Jewish people it says “We have endured hell. For millennia we have made our way through a world where we have been beaten, expelled from our homes, and nearly exterminated. But here, in Israel, we have a home. And that home is beautiful.”

Likewise, the message is not subtle, and it is tied into the Israeli political narrative. This promised land is secured by a Jewish state—a state that is strong, unflinching, and will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the Jewish people can live and prosper, no matter what the world throws at it. The Holocaust History Museum is a monument to “what the world can throw at the Jewish people”. The Museum is nothing short of a manifesto.

I should perhaps step back for a moment. As an American, it has always been a challenge to wrap my head around Israeli political commitments, particularly the commitment to a “Jewish State”. I come from a culture where the wall of separation between religion and government is deeply engrained. I take a secular government for granted.

And yet, I understand how this commitment forms within a world where Jewish State is necessary to shelter the Jewish people from forces bent on their destruction.

This narrative is scary to me because of how easily it can blind people to evils committed by their state.

I remember as I walked through the museum coming across a tour guide who talking about the effort after the war to round up members of the Nazi high command. One the wall, there were pictures of the men who orchestrated the Final Solution. The tour guide was having some fun talking about them. “How many of these people do you think were the blond haired, blue-eyes ubermensch?” she asked her tour group. The answer was that none of them were. She also pointed out that of the 11 masterminds, something like 9 of them were medical doctors “It was the intellectual elite that orchestrated the final solution,” she said. “It was the doctors”.

This is, of course, true. The scientific extermination campaign, with gas chambers and ovens, was the doing of an intellectual elite. Arguably, the Holocaust was the first time in history that a cadre of scientific elite at the head of an industrial nation dedicated themselves to the task of mass murder, which caused it to be uniquely horrible. But the majority of the German people did not know the full extent of the Final Solution; the existence of gas chambers and ovens, even the true purpose of concentration camps, was a well-kept secret. But why keep this a secret?

The answer is simple: the German people did not need to know. If it were known, it would only increase the risk that human sympathies would leak through their nationalistic conviction. They may have hated the Jews, yes. But hate alone doesn’t motivate genocide (if it did the world would have a lot more genocide). Far more than their hatred, Holocaust needed the German people to be distracted. It needed them to look the other way while the elites executed their plan.

Nothing is more distracting than a promise.

Germany elected Hitler because he promised to restore German strength. He promised to conquer lands for the German people. He promised that Germany would never fall under foreign subjugation. Faced with this promise, it is easy to ignore the disappearance of the Jews. It’s easy to stay resolute in one’s conviction that what is done must have been done for a just and noble cause, the good of the German people. It is easy to see the conquest of other land for your people as good and natural. It is easy to ignore the muted suffering of other people.

This is what I fear is happening in Israel. Of course, not gas chambers, nothing on that scale. But a political narrative that blinds the people to the suffering around them, where if one asks “what is my country doing?” the answer is always “what is necessary” and that is that.

What is being done? To describe in detail what has happened and is currently happening to Palestinians in Israel is a job for another post. However, in hearing accounts of friends who have had contact with both Israelis and Palestinians, one thing has become plain to me: whatever injustices are being inflicted upon Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank escape the notice of most Israelis.

Narratives shape the way that we see the world, highlighting some patterns while muting others. Some people may accuse me of dictating how people remember and honor their history. I am not. I am simply pointing out that there are ways to honor one ancestors and remember a profound tragedy that are not tied to a nationalistic narrative. One may sincerely believe that narrative, but one should take into account the potential of such narratives to set free monsters.

Though who am I to say?

I just had a bad taste in my mouth after I walked out of the Children’s Memorial, one of the most powerful pieces of architecture I have seen, and the first thing I saw, immediately in front of me as I walked into the gift shop, was a book on the Israeli Air Force.

Thoughts on the Gospel of Matthew

I figured since I was going to the holy land, I might as well read up on the bible. If I was truly committed to doing my homework, I should also have read the Koran and a more authentic translation of the Torah. But I am also visiting my girlfriend who I very much want to spend time with, so I’m just sticking to the New Testament. Full disclosure—this is the first time I’ve actually read the New Testament cover to cover, and up to this point most of my theological study has been to improve my ability to debate against Christians. So take my first pass at biblical criticism with a massive grain of salt. I also thought that the best approach would be do this piecemeal, book by book, to see how my reactions change over the course of my reading.

So here’s my reaction to the Gospel of Matthew.

This I, I am told, the gospel that was meant to be read by Jews and show that Jesus fulfilled all of the appropriate messiah prophecies. This might be why Jesus in this gospel seemed rather more wrathful than I was expecting, reiterating again and again how the non-righteous will be thrown like weeds into the fire, where there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and so on. But perhaps this is just Jesus putting on a tough face for the Jews, and the other gospels tone it down a little bit.

I was also struck by how important parables are in Jesus’s pedagogy. Of course I’d always know that Jesus taught in parable, but I feel like it would be easier to count the number of times that Jesus didn’t respond with a story of some sort. I also got a kick out of how he teaches in parable specifically to satisfy a prophecy about how his teachings will be indecipherable to most of the people who hear it.

“Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not       have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand’ In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever hearing but never perceiving’” [Matt 13: 11-15]

I always imagined that, with divine pedagogical and rhetorical skills, Jesus would be able to present his teachings in a way that wouldn’t be lost on most people. But eh, I guess you’ve gotta fulfill what was written in Isiah.

Moreover, I think this passage sort of gets at the trouble I’ve always had with Christianity. Christ seems to inhabit a world with zero epistemic uncertainty, where one can conflate belief/comprehension and moral goodness without any awful consequences. It’s a world where, if a good person is exposed encounters Christ’s teachings, they should immediately recognize them as Truth; conversely, if one fails to find the teachings of Christ self-evident, this is damning evidence of a person’s corrupt moral character.

At least, this is the plainest interpretation of the Parable of the Sower I can think of. In the Parable of the Sower, the word of god is compared to seeds falling from a farmer’s pouch as he walks down the road. Some seeds fall on good soil (good people’s hearts), where they grow and produce much good fruit. Other seeds fall on bad soil (bad people’s hearts), where they wither and die.

My issue is that nowhere in this parable do you get the sense that the people are active in this process of fruit bearing. The teachings simply fall where they fall and grow where they grow. Absent is a sense of epistemic struggle– the sense that real people must do actual work to sort out the good teachings from the bad. The word of god simply grows in people who possess an arable constitution.

“Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” (Matt 13:12)

In the gospel, there seems to be only be two sorts of people. The first sort are the good people who immediately fall in among Jesus’s devotees (such as Peter, who becomes a “fisher of men” after exchanging two words with the messiah). The second are the evil, corrupt, hypocrites, who plot Jesus’s murder. There is no liminal zone between disciple and Pharisee. No place where people can have genuine, or sincere conflict. Occasionally the disciples will fail to have complete faith, but this is presented as a moral lapse for which they are chided and ashamed, rather than a valuable stepping stone on the way to understanding. I do not believe that Jesus is condemning the uncertain when he says that “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matt 12:30). It’s more that, in the world painted by Matthew, this psychological state simply doesn’t exist.

This picture, in my view, leaves very little room for individual acts of will or moral judgment. I am not extremely familiar with the theology behind the doctrine of pre-destination, but when the idea is explained to me, it is usually grounded in a particular conception of God’s omnipotence. God alone is the agent of salvation, meaning that no act of human will can possibly sway God one way or another. God saves who he wants to save, and that is that.

To me, this argument had always seemed awfully intellectual– the sort of thing that would be developed by a career theologian, not a person turning to the bible for moral guidance. But given my reading of the gospel of Matthew, I begin to see where this view might be coming from, what with the talk of wheat and weeds, good and bad soil, separating the wheat from the chaff. The idea that the Pharisees simply might not have been among god’s elect seems, well, plausible.

There is one criteria by which Jesus claims to be able to separate good teachings from bad, but it has issues too. “Watch out for false prophets,” he says.

“They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruits you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thorn-bushes, or figs from thistles? […] Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown in the fire. Thus, by their fruit, you will recognize them.” [Matt 7:15-19].

As far as I can tell, this is a non-answer. If I am unable to tell a good prophet from a bad one, what makes Jesus think I’m any better at telling good metaphorical fruit from bad metaphorical fruit? What characteristics make good “fruit”, and how does one go about distinguishing good fruit from the bad?

There is one possible interpretation that resolves the non-answerness of Jesus’s answer, but it has its own set of problems. The best reading I can offer is that is that when Jesus says “fruits”, he is referring to literal, honest to god, miracles. For example, take the passage where Jesus heals the paralyzed man. In this passage, Jesus is approached by a paralyzed man, who asks to have his sins forgiven. Jesus complies. A couple of the Pharisees see this and think that Jesus is committing blasphemy, as only God has the power to forgive sins. To this, Jesus says “which is easier to say: ‘your sins are forgiven,’ or to say ‘get up and walk?’ But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” [Matt 9: 5-6] He then heals the paralyzed man.

The idea seems to be, quite explicitly, that if Jesus has the ability to heal the man’s paralysis, he also has the authority to forgive sins. By healing people, Jesus proves that he is the genuine article, and his words actually carry the authority of divinity.

Throughout the gospel, Jesus’s “authority” is evidenced by his ability to work miracles, heal the sick, expel demons, raise the dead, and so on. It is also explicitly stated that those who have faith in Jesus will share his authority and be able to work miracles of their own (tossing mountains into the ocean, smiting fig trees, and so on).

This seems like a perfectly reasonable way to answer the question “who is a legit prophet”. But it runs into problems with the fact that Christians of (presumably) good faith are not able to actually perform miracles at will. It also flies in the face of the most common explanation I’ve heard for “why god doesn’t demonstrate his existence through flagrant displays of power.”

The typical answer is that, if god did this, it would undermine people’s faith and their ability to choose him freely. However, if this was the case, then why is anyone ever allowed to see miracles? Particularly in the gospels, Jesus and his disciples were preforming dramatic miracles left and right, often (as demonstrated in Jesus’s run-in with a paralyzed man) explicitly to make a point to people who questioned his authority.

The idea that miracles are meant to be taken as evidence—even proof—of Jesus’s divinity is expounded in the events where Jesus drives out demons in the name of the Holy Spirit. The Pharisees see Jesus drive out demons, and they assume that he is doing it by Beelzebul, the prince of demons. Jesus asserts that it would be impossible for demons to be driven out by demons, as that would make the house of Satan “divided against itself” (and a house divided against itself cannot stand), and then says “If it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” [Matt 12:28].

Furthermore, I think the strongest evidence for the interpretation of “Miracles as evidence” comes in the previous chapter, says to a town that failed to repent: “If the Miracles that were performed for you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day.” [Matt 11:20]. I’m not sure how anybody reconciles passages like this with the general principle “performing blatant and obvious miracles undermines faith”. Maybe Paul will explain it later…

This was my major beef with the gospel of Matthew. There are a couple of other incidents that I found funny or random. My favorite was probably the bit in Matt 16 titled “The yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees” when Jesus had to explain (in what I imagine to be a very exasperated voice) to his disciples what a metaphor was [Matt 16: 5-12].

Also, that poor fig tree. What did it ever do to you?

Frats I

When I did Theater in High School, we had some pretty weird rituals. One of those rituals was the “Ritual” (it had another name, but since someone who goes to the program might conceivably read this, I’m going to go with “Ritual”). The exact nature of the “Ritual” was a closely guarded secret. It was spoken about in hushed voices by cast members, and the uninitiated were told that would all partake in the Ritual on opening night.

I still remember my first Ritual. When opening night came, the men in the cast gathered into the men’s dressing room (the chairs had been cleared in order to make room). A small speaker set was plugged into the wall, and one of the upperclassmen was fiddling with his iPod. Another upperclassman stood at the far side of the room, his face solemn. In his hand was a potato wrapped in duct tape.

With much ceremony, he extended his arm, and the potato was held at the center of the circle. The other upperclassmen all put their hands on the potato and indicated for the newbies to do the same. I put my hand atop the pile of hands atop the potato.

Then the speakers began to blast a very particular song by Limp Bizkit.

I won’t describe the rest of the Ritual, except to say that it involved huddling around the potato, tossing the potato from person to person, moshing, and kissing the potato, and ultimately dunking the potato into a tin, where it would say until the following night’s Ritual.

And here’s the thing about the Ritual.

It. Was. Awesome.

Like, seriously awesome. And it felt awesome. After we were done abusing that potato, we were pumped and ready to put on the show. My understanding these rituals are pretty common in theater programs. They passed down through the generations, sometimes modified, evolving as members cycled in and out, and I think they serve a valuable function. No matter how much drama there was leading up to the show, no matter what interpersonal conflicts arose as two dozen hormonal teenagers spent their afternoons and evenings locked in rehearsals, the Ritual pulled us together as a troupe at the moment it counted.

The fact that kissing a potato while moshing to Limp Bizkit can do this, I think, says something profound about human psychology.

My mind has been drawn to this particular experience in High School Theater by recent discussion of fraternities. Fraternities seem to be lightning rods of criticism lately. In the most recent news cycle, it was because some of the brothers at the University of Oklahoma released video of brothers reciting a racist chant. In the past, it’s been sexual assault, underage drinking, and hazing. I think a lot of this criticism is well deserved. I was quite happy to spend my four years of college at a school where frats were very easy to ignore, and I’m content to say that that ignore them was exactly what I did.

That said, there are two things that cause me to pause when I hear criticism of frats.

The first is that, without fail, the overwhelming majority of the brothers I’ve known personally have been pretty decent people. This may be in part because I don’t bother to get to know the assholes. But I do think that it is incorrect to characterize any organization with Greek letters in its name as a den for misogynistic, binge-drinking dudebros.

The second reason is, that I have a very vivid memory of how awesome it was to kiss a potato. Which is another way of saying that I have fond memories of my time participating in the oddball, tight-knit community that surrounded High School Theater, and I see many parallels between that experience and the experience I imagine makes fraternities and sororities and enduring part of our college experience, despite the best efforts by some to have them regulated.

Let me elaborate on that second point. I think that, a lot or the problems you see with frats spring from the same sort of group dynamic that produces potato kissing. The drive to create tight-knit communities explains why there is hazing in fraternities. I think it also explains a lot of the performed racism and at least part of the binge drinking.

There are obvious criticisms to this—if you compare kissing a potato to any number of fraternity initiation rituals, it’s clear which one is “responsible” and which ones aren’t. But my view is that, when you’re in the moment kissing the potato, the fact that it’s a “responsible” ritual is the last thing on your mind. Potato kissing wasn’t chosen because it was “responsible”, it was chosen because it had tradition behind it. It was chosen because it had been passed down through the troupe from class to class, generation to generation, since time immemorial. This is presumably also why frats choose their rituals.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that if our rituals had actually involved risky behavior, I surely believe that our drama teacher would have told us to stop in a heartbeat. Or at least change it to something less risky. Her oversight was what prevented these rituals from getting out of hand.

One might argue that similar levels of oversight are needed for frats. But the oversight of the drama teacher was certainly not the same as the sort of “administrative oversight” that is often demanded for Greek life. We knew our drama teacher; we worked with her on a day-to-day basis, and more importantly, she knew us. We trusted her to make reasonable judgments and intervene in student affairs only when it was necessary. I suspect that this is not the sort of oversight that a University administration would provide.

The second important difference is that we were high school students, not adults. Of course, it is abundantly clear that adult behavior needs some oversight—that is, after all, why we have a police force. But I do think that community life is harmed when outside force intervenes unnecessarily.

What would intervention accomplish?

There are two basic aims in regulating frats—reducing harm to the members of frats and reducing harm to the surrounding community. The first goal seeks to tackle the problem with hazing and (to a lesser extent) binge drinking, while the second seeks to address problems like sexual assault, racism, and this sort of thing.

In general, I think I agree that frats need some regulation¹. If people are falling off of buildings in a drunken stupor and women are routinely being assaulted and raped in Greek houses, this is a serious problem.

But once we have accepted that premise, the challenge is to find a form of regulation that does not somehow undercut the benefits of being part of Greek life. I think that critics of fraternities either dismiss or underestimate the magnitude of this challenge.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s go back to my high school drama club.

One quarter during my senior year, we decided that we wanted to put on the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The troupe was psyched. We got the principle to sign off (what magic our drama teacher used to make that happen I will never know). We had auditions, we even had a cast list. I was contemplating what it would be like to wear fishnets on stage.

But then one parent found out, and that was that. No more Rocky Horror.

The following day, our drama teacher gave a firm, but resigned speech about “picking our battles”.

Basically, my point is that the positions of theater programs in public schools is always precarious . Perhaps this is different at elite private schools where the arts programs are supported by alums and parents. But at public schools, the arts programs are first among “groups that don’t have institutional power”. They sort of have to fold if anyone so much as looks at them sideways.

Frats, with their connection and wealthy alums, clearly don’t have this problem. I sometimes imagine what it might have been like if my theater program was more like fraternities in that respect. That is to say that it was well funded, respected, and had enough clout to operate without oversight.

Some of the problems that happened in the theater program may have been worse. But let’s face it. It also would have been really, really awesome. Imagine, having a theater program that could self-govern and didn’t have to answer to beg and scrape for funding, or have our shows shut down if we tried to do anything remotely ambitious.

So that’s why I feel like frats might have an interest in protecting their autonomy that goes beyond their right to debauchery. There is a lot of value to be gained from being a part of a group that can self-govern. You can do more things, and the things you can do are more interesting. People have more opportunities to learn and grow in these communities if the communities themselves are less-regulated.

One might argue that frats are not a good place for people to learn and grow. But on that count, there are thousands of alums who disagree, and I’m not inclined to argue with them. If I can testify to the value of my theater program (potato-kissing and all), they can testify to the value of their fraternity.

1: Although I will acknowledge that actual claims about the negative impacts of frats are remarkably difficult to substantiate, as there’s no way to compare sexual assault at “universities with frats” to a “universities without frats” without introducing a whole lot of confounders.

Writing 1

Blog post number 1– exciting isn’t it? I sure think so.

It’s also a little terrifying– calling out to the big internet and saying “read me!” as if my thoughts were worthy of that sort of attention! There dozens, if not hundreds of articles that you could be reading right now that are probably better constructed and more thoughtful than this one. So… thanks, for sticking with me this far.

This blog is for my writing. I’m aware, as I write this sentence, that it’s not terribly informative. After all, how could a blog that I write fail to be about my writing? Let’s try again.

What I mean, more precisely, is that the contents of this blog will reflect whatever the hell I feel like writing about. Maybe “what I feel like writing about” will converge on some particular topic on its own accord (it has in the past). But maybe it won’t. My point is that this is a place where there are no assignments, and no demands, and I am the god damn king.

People have a lot of neurosis about writing. I know that I do. For me, writing is an activity with massive expectations. I always want my writing to be insightful, original, brilliant, well crafted, cohesive, simple, clear, and so on, and so forth. And as a result, I spend most of my “writing” time staring at a a few paragraphs in a word document that I can’t seem to get right or figure out how to build upon. This has been a serious problem for me for the better part of my adult life. I don’t want it to be a problem on this blog.

Let me try a third time to say what this blog is for: this blog is a place where I write for fun. It’s not a place to be pretentious (except when it’s fun to be pretentious, and it often is). It’s not a place for serious discussion (except when serious discussion is fun, and it often is). It not a place for strong opinions (except when holding strong opinions is fun, and it often is). And finally, above all else, it’s not a place to try to change the word (except when changing the world is fun).

It may occasionally be a place for awful insinuations and double entendres.

If you are similar to me in this respect, I hope that I can entice you to stay, keep reading. Otherwise adeiu, and may you find happiness on whatever corner of the internet you find most entertaining.

Blog post number 1– the first of many.