26 Questions of epistemology seem to be stirring here: How, after all, is it possible for us to have true knowledge of the world? Depending how one interprets words like "true" and "world," questions of this sort can seem either hopelessly difficult or trivial. As it turns out, a trivial reading will be good enough for our present purposes. Whatever reality is, in ultimate terms, the world of our experience displays undeniable regularities. These regularities are of various kinds, of course, and some of them suggest lawful connections between certain events. There is a difference between mere correlation, and juxtapositions of the sort that we deem to be causal. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume famously noted, this presents an interesting puzzle, because we never encounter causes in the world, only reliable correlations. What, exactly, leads us to attribute causal power to certain events, while withholding it from others, is still a matter of debate. (See M. Wu and P. W. Cheng, "Why Causation Need Not Follow from Statistical Association: Boundary Conditions for the Evaluation of Generative and Preventative Causal Powers," Psychological Science 10 [1999]: 92-97.) And yet, once we have our beliefs about the world in hand, and they are guiding our behavior, there seems to be no mystery worth worrying about. It just so happens that certain regularities (those we deem to be causal), when adopted as guides to action, serve our purposes admirably; others that are equally regular (mere correlations, epiphenomena) do not. Surprises here simply lead to a reevaluation of causal roles and to the formation of new beliefs. We need not wrestle with Hume to know that if it is heat we want, it is better to seek fire than smoke; nor need we know all the criteria we employ in making causal judgments to appreciate the logical and behavioral implications of believing that A is the cause of B, while C is not. Once we find ourselves believing anything (whether for good or bad reasons), our words and actions demand that we rectify inconsistency wherever we find it.
27 See H. Benson, with M. Stark, Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief (New York: Scribner, 1996).
28 The shroud of Turin has been perhaps the most widely venerated relic of Christendom, for it is believed to be the very shroud in which the body of Jesus was wrapped for burial. In 1988 the Vatican allowed small sections of the shroud to be carbon-dated by three independent laboratories (Oxford University, University of Arizona, and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) in a blind study coordinated by the British Museum. All three institutions concluded that the shroud was a medieval forgery dating from between 1260 and 1390.
29 O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982), 122-24.
30 The quoted passage is found in The Profession of Faith of the Roman Catholic Church.
31 This explicit belief has behavioral and neural underpinnings that are implicit, and clearly a matter of our genetic inheritance. Lower animals, it will be noted, are not in the habit of wandering off cliffs.
32 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; reprint, London: Routledge, 1972), and Objective Knowledge (1972; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
33 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970).
34 Popper and Kuhn both had some very interesting and useful things to say about the philosophy of science and about the problems we face in claiming to know how the world is, but one effect of their work, particularly on those who haven't read it, has been to engender the growth of ridiculous ideas across the quad. While there are genuine problems of epistemology to be thought about, there are gradations of reasonableness that can be appreciated by any sane person. Not all knowledge claims are on the same footing.
35 B. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon and Schuster 1957), 35.
36 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), strikes the same note. See also A. N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002).
Chapter 3 In the Shadow of God
1 "As to squassation, it is thus performed: The prisoner hath his hands bound behind his back, and weights tied to his feet, and then is drawn up on high, till his head reaches the pulley. He is kept hanging in this manner for some time, that by the greatness of the weight hanging at his feet, all his joints and limbs may be dreadfully stretched, and on a sudden he is let down with a jerk, by the slackening of the rope, but is kept from coming quite to the ground, by which terrible shake, his arms and legs are disjointed, whereby he is put to the most exquisite pain; the shock which he receives by the sudden stop of his fall, and the weight at his feet stretching his whole body more intensely and cruelly." John Marchant, cited in J. Swain, The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber (New York: Dorset Press, 1931), 169.
2 Ibid., 174-75, 178.
3 See Swain, Pleasures; O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982); and L. George, Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (New York: Paragon House, 1995).
4 For explicit mention of heresy in the New Testament, and of the natural intolerance of the faithful to dissent, see 1 Cor. 11:19; Gal. 5:20; 2 Pet. 2:1; Rom. 16:17; 1 Cor. 1:10, 3:3, 14:33; Phil. 4:2; and Jude 19.
5 We need only recall the fate of William Tyndale, which came as late as 1536, after he published his translation of the New Testament in English:
Then, believing himself safe, he settled in Antwerp. However, he had underestimated the gravity of his offense and the persistence of his sovereign [Henry VIII, in a pious mood]. British agents had never ceased stalking him. Now they arrested him. At Henry's insistence he was imprisoned for sixteen months in the castle of Vilvorde, near Brussels, tried for heresy, and, after his conviction, publicly garrotted. His corpse was burned at the stake, an admonition for any who might have been tempted by his folly.
See W. Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 204.
6 The Bible, however, demands that there be at least two witnesses attesting that the accused has "served other gods," and that they be the first to stone him (Deut. 17:6-7). The Inquisition was forced, for the sake of efficiency, to relax this standard.
7 Matt. 5:18.
8 Friedrich, End of the World, 70.
9 The Franciscans, it is true, shouldered their share of the burden. As Russell wrote in A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 450:
If Satan existed, the future of the order founded by Saint Francis would afford him the most exquisite gratification. The saint's immediate successor as head of the order, Brother Elias, wallowed in luxury, and allowed complete abandonment of poverty. The chief work of the Franciscans in the years immediately following the death of their founder was as recruiting sergeants in the bitter and bloody wars of Guelfs and Ghibellines. The Inquisition, founded seven years after his death, was, in several countries, chiefly conducted by Franciscans. A small minority, called the Spirituals, remained true to his teaching; many of these were burnt by the Inquisition for heresy. These men held that Christ and the Apostles owned no property, not even the clothes they wore; this opinion was condemned as heretical in 1323 by John XXII. The net result of Saint Francis' life was to create yet one more wealthy and corrupt order, to strengthen the hierarchy, and to facilitate the persecution of all who excelled in moral earnestness or freedom of thought. In view of his own aims and character, it is impossible to imagine any more bitterly ironical outcome.
10 Friedrich, End of the World, 74.
11 Ibid., 96.
12 Compare much of what Jesus taught with the above quotation from John 15:6, or with Matt. 10:34-"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." For a remarkably elegant demonstration of the incoherency of the Bible, I recommend Burr's Self-contradictions of the Bible (i860). In it, Burr presents 144 propositions-theological, moral, historical, and speculative-all neatly opposed by their antitheses, in the follow
ing manner: God is seen and heard/God is invisible and cannot be heard; God is everywhere present, sees and knows all things/God is not everywhere present, neither sees nor knows all things; God is the author of evil/God is not the author of evil; Adultery forbidden/adultery allowed; The father of Joseph, Mary's husband, was Jacob/The father of Mary's husband was Heli; The infant Christ was taken into Egypt/The infant Christ was not taken into Egypt; John was in prison when Jesus went into Galilee/John was not in prison when Jesus went into Galilee; Jesus was crucified at the third hour/Jesus was crucified at the sixth hour; Christ is equal with God/Christ is not equal with God; It is impossible to fall from grace/It is possible to fall from grace; etc.-all with supporting quotations from the Old and New Testaments. Many of these passages represent perfect contradictions (that is, one cannot affirm the truth of one without equally asserting the falsity of the other). There is, perhaps, no greater evidence for the imperfection of the Bible as an account of reality, divine or mundane, than such instances of self-refutation. Of course, once faith has begun its reign of folly, even perfect contradictions may be relished as heavenly rebukes to earthly logic. Martin Luther closed the door on reason with a single line: "The Holy Spirit has an eye only to substance and is not bound by words." The Holy Spirit, it seems, is happy to play tennis without the net.
13 It is true that Augustine was not a perfect sadist. He thought that heretics should be examined "not by stretching them on the rack, not by scorching them with flames or furrowing their flesh with iron claws, but by beating them with rods." See P. Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 116-17.
14 Voltaire, "Inquisition," Philosophical Dictionary, ed and trans. T. Bester-man (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 256.
15 From The Percy Anecdotes, cited in Swain, Pleasures, 181.
16 Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, 190-93.
17 W. Durant, The Age of Faith (1950; reprint, Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 1992), 784.
18 The Christians, while they were still a lowly sect, had been accused of the same crime by pagan Romans. There were, in fact, many points of convergence between witches and Jews in the mind of medieval Christians. Jews were regularly accused of sorcery, and magical texts were often attributed (speciously) to Solomon and to a variety of kabbalistic sources.
19 R. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Viking, 1996), 8, has this to say on the subject:
On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than genocide. This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were men.
Such a revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror and injustice of this period. Even to read of the Salem witch trials, which resulted in the hanging of "only" nineteen people, is to be brought face to face with the seemingly boundless evil that is apt to fill the voids in our understanding of the world.
20 C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 529.
21 R. Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 78.
22 There is some doubt as to whether the Fore, or any other people for that matter, ever practiced systematic cannibalism (see the entry "cannibalism" in The Oxford Companion to the Body). If these doubts are borne out, an alternative explanation for the transmission of kuru would have to be found. But it should go without saying that its vector was not sorcery. Scholarly doubts about cannibalism seem somewhat far-fetched, however, given the widespread evidence of it among modern African militias in countries like Congo, Uganda, Liberia, Angola, and elsewhere. In such places, magical beliefs remain widespread-like the notion that eating your enemy's organs can make you immune to bullets. See D. Bergner, "The Most Unconventional Weapon," New York Times Magazine, March 26, 2003, pp. 48-53.
23 Friedrich Spee (1631), cited in Johnson, History of Christianity, 311.
24 Mackay, Delusions, 540-41.
25 B. Russell, Religion and Science (1935; reprint, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 95.
26 Mackay, Delusions, 525-26.
27 "Anti-Semitism," like the term "Aryan," is a misnomer of nineteenth-century German pseudo-science. Semitic (derived from Shem, one of Noah's three sons) "designated a group of cognate languages that included Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Babylonian, Assyrian and Ethiopic, not an ethnic or racial group." See R. S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), xvi. "Anti-Semitism" should therefore denote a hatred of Arabs as well, which it does not. Despite its mistaken roots, "anti-Semitism" has become the only acceptable term for the hatred of Jews.
28 D. J. Wakin, "Anti-Semitic 'Elders of Zion' Gets New Life on Egypt TV," New York Times, Oct. 26, 2002. This spurious document is actually cited in the founding covenant of Hamas. See J. I. Kertzer, "The Modern Use of Ancient Lies," New York Times, May 9, 2002.
29 E. Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
30 This said, Judaism is a far less fertile source of militant extremism. Jews tend not to draw their identity as Jews exclusively from the contents of their beliefs about God. It is possible, for instance, to be a practicing Jew who does not believe in God. The same cannot be said for Christianity and Islam.
31 See B. M. Metzger and M. D. Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 789-90, and A. N. Wilson, Jesus: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 79. Many other uncouth pairings have been pointed out: Matt. 2:3-5 ani Micah 5:2; Matt. 2:16-18 and Jer. 3i:i5/Gen. 35:19; Matt. 8:18 and Isa. 53:4; Matt. 12:18 and Isa. 42:1-4; Matt. 13:35 and Ps. 78:2; Matt. n:i. and Zech. 9:9/Isa. 62:11.
Matt. 27:9-10 claims to fulfill a saying that it erroneously attributes to Jeremiah, which actually appears in Zech. 11:12-providing further evidence of the text's "inerrancy."
32 The stigma attached to illegitimacy among Jews in the first century CE was considerable. See S. Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
33 See ibid., 78, and J. Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 80.
34 B. Pascal, Pensees, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), sec. 189.
35 Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, "The most pitiful example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity" (The Portable Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann [New York: Viking, 1954], 572). It is true that Pascal had what was for him an astonishing contemplative experience on the night of Nov. 23, 1654-one that converted him entirely to Jesus Christ. I do not doubt the power of such experiences, but it seems to me self-evident that they are no more the exclusive property of devout Christians than are tears shed in joy. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, along with animists of every description have had these experiences throughout history. Pascal, being highly intelligent and greatly learned, should have known this; that he did not (or chose to disregard it) testifies to the stultifying effect of orthodoxy.
36 They also avenged themselves against their Roman persecutors: "The Christians threw Maximian's wife into the Orontes, and put to death all his relatives. In Egypt and Palestine they massacred the magistrates who had most strongly opposed Christianity. The widow and daughter of Diocletian, having taken refuge in Thessalonica, were recognized, and their bodies were thrown into the sea." Voltaire, "Christianity," Philosophical Dictionary, 137.
37 Wistrich, Anti-Semitism, 19-20.
38 Augustine (The City of God, XVIII, 46):
Therefore, when they do not believe our Scriptures, their own, which the
y blindly read, are fulfilled in them, lest perchance any one should say that the Christians have forged these prophecies about Christ which are quoted under the name of the sibyl, or of others, if such there be, who do not belong to the Jewish people. For us, indeed, those suffice which are quoted from the book of our enemies, to whom we make our acknowledgment, on account of this testimony which, in spite of themselves, they contribute by their possession of these books, while they themselves are dispersed among all nations, wherever the Church of Christ is spread abroad. For a prophecy about this thing was sent before in the Psalms, which they also read, where it is written, "My God, His mercy shall prevent me. My God hath shown me concerning mine enemies, that Thou shalt not slay them, lest they should at last forget Thy law: disperse them in Thy might" [Ps. 69:10-11]. Therefore God has shown the Church in her enemies the Jews the grace of His compassion, since, as saith the apostle, "their offense is the salvation of the Gentiles" [Rom. 11:11]. And therefore He has not slain them, that is, He has not let the knowledge that they are Jews be lost in them, although they have been conquered by the Romans, lest they should forget the law of God, and their testimony should be of no avail in this matter of which we treat. But it was not enough that he should say, "Slay them not, lest they should at last forget Thy law," unless he has also added, "Disperse them"; because if they had only been in their own land with that testimony of the Scriptures, and everywhere, certainly the Church which is everywhere could not have had them as witnesses among all nations to the prophecies which were sent before concerning Christ.
39 See J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (1943; reprint, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 153.