Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

Edward Feser quotes Lady Gaga, the reigning queen of pop weirdness, from an article in this month’s Vanity Fair:

Listen, I prayed for a lunacy, and he gave it to me. It’s a bit of a sick thing when a 17-year-old says in her nightly prayers that I would rather die young and a legend than be married with children and die an old lady in my bed.

One of the commenters at Feser’s blog points out that the media-savvy Ms. Gaga seems to treat her interviews as a kind of performance art, so she makes all kind of outrageous statements designed to reinforce her public persona as a wacky pop goddess. I have no idea if Ms. Gaga actually prayed to the Almighty for such a lunacy, but it wouldn’t suprise me if she did. She certainly seems to be pursuing the ideal of living young and famous rather than dying old and responsible.

I am tempted to make a comment here about Ms. Gaga’s prayer being emblematic of modern man’s desire to have fame, fortune, and youth at the expense of traditional human ideals like growing old, marrying, and having children. But then I am reminded that the quest for this kind of worldly immortality isn’t limited to western, 21st century, post-Christian figures like Ms. Gaga. Homer essentially says the same thing of Achilles in The Iliad. The gods offer Achilles the choice of either dying young in glorious battle or living a long, obscure life at home. In the end, Achilles chooses the former, and three thousand years later his name is still heard in Literature departments and sports medicine clinics across the globe.

Achilles’ feats will almost certainly outlast the vapid babble of Gaga and her contemporaries, but they share a common view of human meaningfulness: that the only way to stave off the threat of historical obscurity is to make oneself into a god among men. It’s foolish, of course, but for some it’s certainly appealing in the absence of some more transcendent view of human purpose. I think this view of life represents a total selfishness, an abandonment of those traditional human roles that actually benefit society, such as marrying and raising children, for a me-centered worldview that subordinates other human goods to the personal goal of receiving eternal adoration. It’s odd, but for those whose god is themselves it makes perfect sense.

[I'm reposting this from my old blog since I've had a few discussions with coworkers on this topic recently. It originally appeared at ChristianThinker.net back in May of 2009.]

This video has been very popular on Youtube recently, with over 6 million views:

I’ve blogged about this before, and this is the drum that conservative commentators like Mark Steyn have been beating for years. However, projecting long-term cultural change from current demographic data is always a tricky business. Cultural and demographic changes are often the results of numerous processes and trends. It’s true that fertility rates are a huge factor in projecting these types of cultural changes, maybe even the biggest, but there are other factors to consider. The Network for Strategic Missions has a few quotes up by missions researchers about the video. Hence Jason Mandryk of Operation World:

One element that we cannot possibly accurately estimate (at least I cannot see a mechanism for accurate estimation) is the secularizing effect of European society on immigrants with a religious affiliation and on the children of religion parents . . . Can we have ANY idea about how effective secular materialism will be in converting Muslims, Hindus, non-Western Christians, etc to non-religion? I don’t know, but on an anecdotal basis, the large majority of the Muslims I know in the UK – which would consist of about 40 people, predominantly male and Pakistani and under 35 years old – demonstrate high degrees of nominalism and almost all of the same traits which have seen the exodus of a younger generation from Christianity to non-faith in the last 10-20 years. Many younger Muslims in the UK (and in other Western nations) show the same social values that nominal Christians do – and as great a personal commitment to secular materialism as to their religion – and as such, make for perfectly acceptable and indeed welcomed citizens of a pluralist society.

And Peter Crossing of the World Christian Database questions some of the stats used in the video:

The grain of truth that the Muslim population percentage is increasing in Europe is correct, but WCD projections show Europe overall at 7% by 2050. It may partly be the difference between a straight mathematical extrapolation, and a projection which includes factors that change current growth. (Large growth rates are only sustainable for small populations and inevitably level out as the percentage increases. ie. it’s easy for a population to increase from 20 to 40, but much harder from 20m to 40m).

The base data too, from which the extrapolation is calculated, is very different to WCD:
e.g. Britain Muslims (WCD)
1970: 635,000 1.14%
2010: 1,680,000 2.73%

(as against YouTube’s something like 80,000 in 1970 to 2.5m in 2009–big difference in the extrapolation!)
WCD has 2050: 2,850,000 4.15%

And, by the way, it just seems really unlikely that 1m Muslims in the Netherlands are having the same number of children as 15m non-Muslims. UN says 180,000 births per year, which would mean 90,000 Muslim births. There are 500,000 Muslim females, but say 250,000 at a stretch of child-bearing age–that’s almost every second female giving birth, every year.

If I were a betting man, I’d say the demographic shift described in the video is definitely happening, but not quite at the drastic rates reported. I’ll remain skeptical about any supposed certainties that such demographic numbers can deliver about the future. However, it’s definitely something to think about. If the numbers about European and American birth rates are even close to correct, then it seems clear that the combination of secularism and affluence is poison to a culture’s ability to reproduce itself.

Here is a continuing rumination on a conversation I had the other day with the erudite John Fraiser about the new atheism. For the most part, I abhor the new atheism. I think it is a cheap, irrational, and culturally unhealthy movement marked by the ironic combination of poor argumentation and philosophical triumphalism. The new atheists pair terrible arguments with preening braggadocio and hateful rhetoric, spawning legions of internet fanboys who mimic their poisonous style. If I want my faith challenged, I’d much rather read Hume or Ayer or Mackie. They actually force me into serious reflection on my faith, and I don’t have to suffer continual Dawkinsian-style insults. The new atheist movement is not a good one, and I think it’s a shame that they’ve been able to wield such cultural influence.

Nevertheless, there are things I like about the movement. Or perhaps I should say that the new atheism may have unintended consequences that I like. Here is a review for a new book that apparently makes the argument that at least one way Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al serve Christendom is by holding believers’ feet to the fire in regard to intellectual honesty. This is true and valuable, because I think many Christians tend to be intellectually lazy. From their perspective, they’re already in possession of “truth with a capital T”, and therefore they don’t think they need to think very much about their faith. When the new atheists point out that religious believers don’t have a solid intellectual foundation for their faith, they are partially correct. There are unfortunately very many Christians who are utterly incapable of giving a coherent reason for why they believe in Christianity (a fact that has no bearing on whether Christianity is true or rationally acceptable, however, a point I made to Uncle Skeptic on my old blog).

When an intellectually shallow Christian encounters the arguments of the new atheists, he must either (1) reevaluate the epistemic foundations of his faith and think critically about Christianity in a way he hasn’t done before, (2) stick his head in the sand and ignore their arguments, or (3) accept their arguments, leading to a crisis of faith and possibly unbelief. The new atheists want the results of their efforts to be (3), but I think they miscalculate that many Christians will take option (1). New atheist arguments, febrile as I find them to be, can have a strengthening effect on the church by driving individual Christians to a stronger and more rational intellectual position.

Likewise, although it’s certainly tragic when someone takes option (3) and apostasizes, it’s probably better for the church. Those who leave the faith because they read Richard Dawkins or develop an obsessive fascination with the mountain of atheist polemics online probably never had a very strong faith to begin with. If I read one more “deconversion” story where someone says they were a believer for 20 years but then started reading infidels.org and “realized” God was just a fantasy drilled into their head by pastors and Sunday School teachers, I just might puke. If your faith is this shallow and your cognitive capacities so susceptible to cheap rhetoric passing for logic, you probably have no business being in a church anyway. That’s not to say that there aren’t intelligent Christians who honestly wrestle with their faith and eventually leave it behind for intellectually respectable reasons (see here for a tragic and heartbreaking example), but there are plenty of gullible churchgoers who accept their newfound atheism for reasons that are probably just as unwarranted as the reasons they accepted Christianity to begin with. Hence the new atheism gives the church a bonus by separating the sheep from the goats.

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on April 27, 2006. The original is here.]

“Christianity is a myth,” declared the professor in my college folklore class. “However,” he continued, “that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true.” The word “myth” as it has come to be used in the common vernacular simply means “something that isn’t true.” So in this sense the idea that President Bush was behind the attacks of 9/11 is clearly a myth.

But let’s distinguish for a moment between this common definition of myth and the somewhat different notion of mythology. What is a myth in this second sense? According to the Encyclopedia Mythica, a myth is

a story of forgotten or vague origin, basically religious or supernatural in nature, which seeks to explain or rationalize one or more aspects of the world or a society … Broadly speaking myths and mythologies seek to rationalize and explain the universe and all that is in it. Thus, they have a similar function to science, theology, religion and history in modern societies.

Mythology, then, serves the same function as a worldview, but in narrative form. It is a way in which people understand themselves in relation to reality, what there actually is, and thus it is a way in which people understand their own meaning.

Now back to my question: is Christianity mythology? Well, not in the first sense of being a story that isn’t factually true. But do mythic stories have to be false? To put it another way, does the concept of myth entail falsehood? C. S. Lewis certainly didn’t think so. In his excellent essay, “Myth Became Fact,” he defends the idea that Christianity is the one, true, factual myth. He sees the function of myth as that of taking abstract truths and completing them, and thus completing human knowledge:

In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to the experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction … When we translate we get abstraction – or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis ["In this valley of separation"]. Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.

For Lewis then, mythology may help us better understand those ultimate, metaphysical, and sometimes mysterious truths about the world in which we live. However, Lewis sees the Christian story as the myth, the one that teaches us the ultimate truth about reality itself. But unlike the other mythologies, the Christian story is factually true, and that is what makes it so important:

Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other …

Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied … We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic — and is not the sky itself a myth — shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.

In a world of where rationalism and materialism act as usurpers to the epistemological throne, the declaration of the true myth of Christianity – the story of the world above reaching down to the world below – is essential. The fact is that many people do believe in various mythologies: they literally idolize their favorite sports teams, or musicians, or pop singers, or political theories, and yet none of these can do the job, for they are all unfortunately tied to the finite and temporary realm in which we live. The myth of the dying, atoning God, of eternity’s Messiah who saves mankind, is also fact. It is the one true mythology, the one true story by which faltering humanity may chart its course to eternity.

[Note: "Myth Became Fact" can be found in the excellent anthology of Lewis' essays and articles, God in the Dock.]