By Gregory Baum, 178 pages, $21.95, Novalis, ISBN 978-2896-460-793.
“Because the Catholic Church first rejected modernity and then wrestled to find a theological approach that allowed a critical openness to modernity, I have great sympathy for a similar wrestling in Islam.... There is a certain family likeness between the Catholic and the Muslim theological effort to react creatively to the challenge of modernity.”
Baum's above words reflect his attempt to reduce the estrangement or sense of mystery that many Catholics feel towards Islam. The mainstream media caricatures of the religion and the sense of a clash of civilizations have been accepted uncritically by most people, almost subconsciously.
The Theology of Tariq Ramadan relates Catholicism to Islam, and shows how the latter can become a more stable, authentic part of Western Civilization. Many Anglo-American multiculturalists have already imagined how this integration can come about, but they do so with a healthy dose of condescension and belief that the only good Islam is a neutered Islam. This echoes their understanding of Christianity and religion in general – which naturally angers or scares Muslims and invites antagonism.
Baum, a Canadian Catholic theologian, writes as a friend of Islam, paralleling John Paul II's outreach to the Jews. He clearly respects what he believes Ramadan to be saying about European Muslims. When Baum disagrees with the Muslim scholar, he does so in a careful, discrete, and humble manner, showing that the point in hand is his interpretation of Ramadan's thinking.
Ramadan wishes to establish an Islamic theology that distinguishes between the universal and the particular. The universal injunctions of Islam usually revolve around God and human duties to God, whereas cultural issues relate more to the particular, and can change. Baum explains Ramadan's belief that individual Muslims not be allowed to interpret the Quran themselves, in contrast to Protestants, who have always been invited to read and interpret the Bible for themselves.
The Islamic theologian, now based partly at Oxford University, believes that Islamic scholars alone must interpret the Quran, as he follows the footsteps of the nineteenth-century Islamic reformer al-Afghani. Baum is equally clear and patient in explaining how and why Ramadan desires to respect and keep sharia law as the basis of Islamic society. This is not the harsh law the media portrays; Ramadan calls for an Islamic law that reflects God's desire to help people live good, holy lives.
Baum unearths the basic reading that Ramadan and similar Islamic reformers do of the Quran, showing how it parallels the reading of the Bible by some Christian Churches, including Catholics: “The reformist approach, he [Ramadan] explains, reads the Quran by taking into account the context of the verses and the intention implicit in them.”
Ramadan and the reform tradition he follows is actually a conservative movement because it demands that Muslims follow the interpretations of Islamic scholars. Again, Baum walks a theological tightrope to show that it is not fundamentalist interpretation because it seeks the living force of God that created the Quran and the human quest for God. It does not take a fundamentalist legal view of the Quran, in the style of the Taliban or Saudi Wahabi theologians, but believes that Muslims must follow the divine spirit of the Quran and Islam. Baum notes: “Ramadan as a Salafi reformist wants Muslims to transcend the regulations of the Islamic schools of law 'to rediscover the pristine energy of an unmediated reading of the Quran.'”
Muslims must closely follow the core inspiration of Islam, but because it is a universal religion for people of all times and places, cultural and other aspects of the religion can and sometimes must change, including shariah's calls for corporal and capital punishment. This allows his co-religionists to remain fully Muslim yet fully Western; in Ramadan's view, Western Muslims must be full citizens who participate in the political and cultural life of their societies. Rather than isolating themselves, they must use their civic participation as a means to witness their faith to the non-Muslim cultures.
Throughout these discussions, according to Baum, Ramadan remains steadfast in his desire that people follow the Quran. Muslims can reach out to secular, Western societies because Muhammad had relations “of trust and competence” with polytheists and other non-Muslims. Western Muslims should, like Catholics and Jews in these societies, have a dialogical relationship with these societies, avoiding assimilation while participating in civic and cultural life.
The Theology of Tariq Ramadan offers an important step forwards in inter-religious dialogue, an imperative because of the loud voices describing a clash of civilization. Baum hardly sees such a clash, and finds much in common between Ramadan's style of conservative, traditionalist Muslim reform, and the Catholic Church's long, often contentious and painful dialogue with modern, secular liberal societies.
Baum writes from the left-wing, feminist side of the Church that came out swinging from Vatican II, calling for revolutionary sexual moral change, married priests, female ordination, and liberation- and feminist-theology. In The Theology of Tariq Ramadan, at times he risks turning Ramadan into a Muslim version of himself and the Vatican II left-wing. Even with this weakness, the wide-ranging discussion, which refers to many other important Muslim thinkers such as Fethullah Gulen, is well worth the read, and can serve as a Catholic introduction to some currents of contemporary Islamic theology, and their relationship to Catholic thinking.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Dynamics of World History
By Christopher Dawson, ISI Books, 511 pages, $16.95, ISBN 1-882926-78-X.
The late Harvard professor of history, Christopher Dawson, never tried to be impartial or above his culture. Not only did he think it absolutely normal to entrench oneself in one's tradition, he felt that this was vital. Dawson was one of the most authentic thinkers in the humanities at a time – the 1920s until today – when academics have been racing to see who can deconstruct their own tradition the fastest.
His writings therefore offer a unique perspective on history.
Dawson upholds a Catholic view of history without hesitation. He highlights the cultural and spiritual wealth of Catholicism, and ceaselessly points out the shortcomings and falsities of alternatives. Yet he does so without blanket statements and with good reason. He exhibits no Catholic triumphalism.
Thus he notes the near-inevitability of the splintering of Christianity. First, Christian leaders have sometimes been too close to power and politics. When this happened, as in the Eastern countries, vast stretches of ancient Christian lands were lost to Islam, and the Greek and Latin churches split. Then when medieval Latin Christianity became too worldly, the Reformation further fragmented Christianity.
Dynamics of Wold History's sociological insights add greatly to this spiritual and theological sense to history. Dawson sees ethnic and cultural differences as the basis for many theological divisions, as between Greeks and Armenians, and Latin Catholics and Germanic Protestants.
Dawson, however, avoids fatalism. He doesn't believe in the inevitability of these divisions. He stresses that if Christians could only see that a lot of their theological divisions really mask other differences, we could move towards Christian unity. Without an adequate understanding of the sociological fact, we could never get to the theological fact.
Again, regarding the modern spiritual vacuum into which all sorts of monsters have stepped (he was writing in the heyday of European fascism), he also avoids a fatalistic outlook. The Church has a duty, as at all times, to do battle with the world, in the sense of the Augustinian division of the two cities. This same basic spiritual reality for the Christian and the Church has not changed one iota in 2000 years – only the masks change.
He quotes the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz: “Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
Technological and economic progress without spiritual or cultural gain can only lead to emptiness. Here is the Church's vocation in the modern world, then: To give meaning and depth to a world with none. Dawson's words are shockingly up to date because we still have this problem, if not in a bigger dose. We have, he claimed, lost true freedom – the true spiritual freedom of the Middle Ages – in our devotion to equality.
He calls for the same things for which many great spiritual leaders, including Dostoevsky and Pope John Paul II called: “Sooner or later, there must be a revival of culture and reorganization of the spiritual life of Western society.”
But Dawson is such a great read not only because of his range of learning and depth of understanding. He also occasionally lays down the spiritual laws to history. He writes from within Catholic culture and tradition, and sees that vantage point as a great place to be a historian. He thus judges the spiritual direction of the West:
“History has shown that no true solution is to be found in the direction which the eighteenth-century Enlightenment took, i.e., by constructing a purely rational philosophy of religion based on the abstract generalities that are common to all forms of religion. For deism is nothing but the ghost of religion which haunts the grave of dead faith and lost hope.”
Dynamics of World History is a great read because its words are still relevant to the West, which continues to battle the same demons as in Dawson's day.
The late Harvard professor of history, Christopher Dawson, never tried to be impartial or above his culture. Not only did he think it absolutely normal to entrench oneself in one's tradition, he felt that this was vital. Dawson was one of the most authentic thinkers in the humanities at a time – the 1920s until today – when academics have been racing to see who can deconstruct their own tradition the fastest.
His writings therefore offer a unique perspective on history.
Dawson upholds a Catholic view of history without hesitation. He highlights the cultural and spiritual wealth of Catholicism, and ceaselessly points out the shortcomings and falsities of alternatives. Yet he does so without blanket statements and with good reason. He exhibits no Catholic triumphalism.
Thus he notes the near-inevitability of the splintering of Christianity. First, Christian leaders have sometimes been too close to power and politics. When this happened, as in the Eastern countries, vast stretches of ancient Christian lands were lost to Islam, and the Greek and Latin churches split. Then when medieval Latin Christianity became too worldly, the Reformation further fragmented Christianity.
Dynamics of Wold History's sociological insights add greatly to this spiritual and theological sense to history. Dawson sees ethnic and cultural differences as the basis for many theological divisions, as between Greeks and Armenians, and Latin Catholics and Germanic Protestants.
Dawson, however, avoids fatalism. He doesn't believe in the inevitability of these divisions. He stresses that if Christians could only see that a lot of their theological divisions really mask other differences, we could move towards Christian unity. Without an adequate understanding of the sociological fact, we could never get to the theological fact.
Again, regarding the modern spiritual vacuum into which all sorts of monsters have stepped (he was writing in the heyday of European fascism), he also avoids a fatalistic outlook. The Church has a duty, as at all times, to do battle with the world, in the sense of the Augustinian division of the two cities. This same basic spiritual reality for the Christian and the Church has not changed one iota in 2000 years – only the masks change.
He quotes the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz: “Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
Technological and economic progress without spiritual or cultural gain can only lead to emptiness. Here is the Church's vocation in the modern world, then: To give meaning and depth to a world with none. Dawson's words are shockingly up to date because we still have this problem, if not in a bigger dose. We have, he claimed, lost true freedom – the true spiritual freedom of the Middle Ages – in our devotion to equality.
He calls for the same things for which many great spiritual leaders, including Dostoevsky and Pope John Paul II called: “Sooner or later, there must be a revival of culture and reorganization of the spiritual life of Western society.”
But Dawson is such a great read not only because of his range of learning and depth of understanding. He also occasionally lays down the spiritual laws to history. He writes from within Catholic culture and tradition, and sees that vantage point as a great place to be a historian. He thus judges the spiritual direction of the West:
“History has shown that no true solution is to be found in the direction which the eighteenth-century Enlightenment took, i.e., by constructing a purely rational philosophy of religion based on the abstract generalities that are common to all forms of religion. For deism is nothing but the ghost of religion which haunts the grave of dead faith and lost hope.”
Dynamics of World History is a great read because its words are still relevant to the West, which continues to battle the same demons as in Dawson's day.
Ireland's Saint: The Essential Biography of St. Patrick
By J.B. Bury, hardcover 205 pages, $21.95, Paraclete Press, ISBN 978-1-55725-557-0.
In this reprint of the 1905 original, the fabled Irish historian J.B. Bury uses legends and facts to show how St. Patrick didn't introduce the faith to Ireland. Rather, he consolidated and united the faith that already existed, as was the case with countless other Christian missionaries in early medieval Europe. From that foundation, yes, he did evangelize.
Great missionaries like Saints Boniface, Cyril and Methodius, and Patrick, were organizers as much as preachers. For instance, one of St. Patrick's central achievements was making Latin the ecclesiastical language of Irish Christianity.
Latin gave unity to Ireland at a time when the island's various tribes and clans, kings and sub-kings, were disunited and therefore constantly squabbling and warring with each other. The Druids had failed to created a united nation with one leader. The consolidation of Christianity and the use of Latin would have drawn many people and their leaders to the new religion in the hope that this disunity could come to an end.
Latin's prestige was another major reason for its importance. As Bury points out, Ireland never came under Rome's direct rule. Yet, because Ireland was so close to Roman Britain and Gaul, and the Celtic peoples were a skilled seafaring lot, the country had been considerably influenced by the Empire, and like all barbarian folk, they would have looked upon Rome and her language with a certain mystical awe.
Patrick therefore never translated the Bible into one of Ireland's languages. Building a church meant building church culture, and Latin was to be the medium of that.
As an efficient organizer, St. Patrick would have targeted the ruling classes. He needed to build a national church hierarchy, and this demanded well-trained priests and monks who could live off of the land. Bury makes the case that, in Patrick's view, the Irish church would never get off the ground with only peasant converts. It needed the support of the aristocracy so it could build up enough wealth to support church culture and structure.
Ireland's Saint is at times almost magical reading because Bury respects the legends surrounding the saint. Rather than rejecting them or, worse, deconstructing and treating them with condescension, he uses them as sources for history. He recounts with relish the tall-tales surrounding St. Patrick, as when the saint gets into magical combat with local Druids over such things as burning buildings (and the people inside) to the ground as a way to show the power of his God over that of the Druids.
Bury appreciates the theological and historical significance of such stories, as the various legends showed Patrick's charisma, the incipient faith of the Irish, or the Druids' fear of the new creed.
Bury the Irishman understood his people's poetic thinking. He regarded the legends surrounding the saint as the Irish way of assimilating St. Patrick's Christian teaching into their culture. Ireland's Saint shows how the saint and the Christianization of Ireland in no way destroyed Irish culture, but rather complemented it and brought it to its full potential:
“Patrick was as fully convinced as the pagan that the powers of magicians were real, but he knew that those powers were strictly limited, while the power of his own God was limitless....This point of intellectual agreement between the pre-Enlightenment Christian priest and the heathen, their common acceptance of the efficacy of sorcery, even though they put different interpretations on its conditions, was probably a significant aid in the propagation of the Christian religion.”
Ireland's Saint gives us a good understanding of the hows and whys of ancient and early medieval evangelization: “If Christianity had offered to people only its new theological doctrine with the hope of eternal life and its new ethical ideals; if it had come simple and unadorned without an armory of mysteries, miracles, and rites; if it had risen to the height of rejecting magic not because it was wicked but because it was absurd – it could never have won half the world.”
In this reprint of the 1905 original, the fabled Irish historian J.B. Bury uses legends and facts to show how St. Patrick didn't introduce the faith to Ireland. Rather, he consolidated and united the faith that already existed, as was the case with countless other Christian missionaries in early medieval Europe. From that foundation, yes, he did evangelize.
Great missionaries like Saints Boniface, Cyril and Methodius, and Patrick, were organizers as much as preachers. For instance, one of St. Patrick's central achievements was making Latin the ecclesiastical language of Irish Christianity.
Latin gave unity to Ireland at a time when the island's various tribes and clans, kings and sub-kings, were disunited and therefore constantly squabbling and warring with each other. The Druids had failed to created a united nation with one leader. The consolidation of Christianity and the use of Latin would have drawn many people and their leaders to the new religion in the hope that this disunity could come to an end.
Latin's prestige was another major reason for its importance. As Bury points out, Ireland never came under Rome's direct rule. Yet, because Ireland was so close to Roman Britain and Gaul, and the Celtic peoples were a skilled seafaring lot, the country had been considerably influenced by the Empire, and like all barbarian folk, they would have looked upon Rome and her language with a certain mystical awe.
Patrick therefore never translated the Bible into one of Ireland's languages. Building a church meant building church culture, and Latin was to be the medium of that.
As an efficient organizer, St. Patrick would have targeted the ruling classes. He needed to build a national church hierarchy, and this demanded well-trained priests and monks who could live off of the land. Bury makes the case that, in Patrick's view, the Irish church would never get off the ground with only peasant converts. It needed the support of the aristocracy so it could build up enough wealth to support church culture and structure.
Ireland's Saint is at times almost magical reading because Bury respects the legends surrounding the saint. Rather than rejecting them or, worse, deconstructing and treating them with condescension, he uses them as sources for history. He recounts with relish the tall-tales surrounding St. Patrick, as when the saint gets into magical combat with local Druids over such things as burning buildings (and the people inside) to the ground as a way to show the power of his God over that of the Druids.
Bury appreciates the theological and historical significance of such stories, as the various legends showed Patrick's charisma, the incipient faith of the Irish, or the Druids' fear of the new creed.
Bury the Irishman understood his people's poetic thinking. He regarded the legends surrounding the saint as the Irish way of assimilating St. Patrick's Christian teaching into their culture. Ireland's Saint shows how the saint and the Christianization of Ireland in no way destroyed Irish culture, but rather complemented it and brought it to its full potential:
“Patrick was as fully convinced as the pagan that the powers of magicians were real, but he knew that those powers were strictly limited, while the power of his own God was limitless....This point of intellectual agreement between the pre-Enlightenment Christian priest and the heathen, their common acceptance of the efficacy of sorcery, even though they put different interpretations on its conditions, was probably a significant aid in the propagation of the Christian religion.”
Ireland's Saint gives us a good understanding of the hows and whys of ancient and early medieval evangelization: “If Christianity had offered to people only its new theological doctrine with the hope of eternal life and its new ethical ideals; if it had come simple and unadorned without an armory of mysteries, miracles, and rites; if it had risen to the height of rejecting magic not because it was wicked but because it was absurd – it could never have won half the world.”
Friday, June 12, 2009
Words of Light: Inspiration from the letters of Padre Pio
Compiled by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, 206 pages hardcover, Paraclete Press, $23.95.
Saint Padre Pio(1887-1968) lived an intense spiritual life, waging war with Satan yet feeling the hand of God. In his letters, he wrote with exceptional clarity about his mystical experiences.
This book of excerpts of such letters reflects many traditional elements of Catholic spirituality that the faithful can practice in their everyday life.
The Saint had a highly developed critical self-awareness. His heavy thoughts come from a truly humble part of his inner life. He often experienced God's distance and an inner emptiness, but rather than giving in to despair, he wondered where these sentiments came from. Did they indicate some level of resentment on his part, for instance?
This self-awareness led him to accept his sinfulness; in fact, he had a mystic's sense of sin's destructive power over the soul: “The fear of offending God once again makes me shiver, racks me with pain and agonizes me. I fear my heart, which is unfortunately ignorant of what is truly evil.”
He dealt with this potential despair by maintaining a deep personal relationship with Christ, rather than by remaining centred on himself. When praying, he felt a close connection to Jesus, and all sentiments of distance and depression left. When this happened, he feared nothing for himself nor for others.
He never had much doubt over his faith. He questioned his own actions or spiritual state, and blamed himself for the distance that he felt between himself and God. Towards the Lord he usually expressed deep faith, love, and gratitude.
Even when wracked physically, mentally, and spiritually by Satan, sometimes on a daily basis, he avoided blaming God. In fact, he praised and thanked God for delivering him from the powers of the devil. This faith in the Father's protection is one of the most powerful – and sometimes most colorful – parts of the book:
“Bluebeard [Satan] follows, with divine permission, to wage war against me; but God is with me.” And more explicit: “I complained to my Guardian Angel about this, who, after having preached a nice little homily to me, added, 'Give thanks to Jesus, that he treats you as one chosen to follow him closely up the steep slope of Calvary.'”
Perhaps most strongly is the Saint's articulation of his suffering for God. He believed that Jesus was close to those who suffer, and so he too wanted tribulation, writing without bitterness: “My life is becoming a cruel martyrdom.” He saw his trials through Christ's agony, which, the Saint believed, continued up to the present day because of the grievous sins of humans. Saint Pio shared in this pain. Yet for this, he only felt gratitude towards Jesus.
This sense of human sin and the harm that it does to the soul and to one's relationship with God is a constant theme in Saint Pio's letters.
The Saint was so readily capable of sharing in Christ's anguish because of his great, unfailing hope that God would come to his aid: “Do you not see that I have no more strength to fight, that all my vigor is gone?...Oh my God, you who know the extreme bitterness of my spirit, do not delay in coming to my aid. You alone can and must draw me out of this prison of death.”
These innocent, charming, and poetic selections testify to the way that God so deeply touched Saint Padre Pio.
Saint Padre Pio(1887-1968) lived an intense spiritual life, waging war with Satan yet feeling the hand of God. In his letters, he wrote with exceptional clarity about his mystical experiences.
This book of excerpts of such letters reflects many traditional elements of Catholic spirituality that the faithful can practice in their everyday life.
The Saint had a highly developed critical self-awareness. His heavy thoughts come from a truly humble part of his inner life. He often experienced God's distance and an inner emptiness, but rather than giving in to despair, he wondered where these sentiments came from. Did they indicate some level of resentment on his part, for instance?
This self-awareness led him to accept his sinfulness; in fact, he had a mystic's sense of sin's destructive power over the soul: “The fear of offending God once again makes me shiver, racks me with pain and agonizes me. I fear my heart, which is unfortunately ignorant of what is truly evil.”
He dealt with this potential despair by maintaining a deep personal relationship with Christ, rather than by remaining centred on himself. When praying, he felt a close connection to Jesus, and all sentiments of distance and depression left. When this happened, he feared nothing for himself nor for others.
He never had much doubt over his faith. He questioned his own actions or spiritual state, and blamed himself for the distance that he felt between himself and God. Towards the Lord he usually expressed deep faith, love, and gratitude.
Even when wracked physically, mentally, and spiritually by Satan, sometimes on a daily basis, he avoided blaming God. In fact, he praised and thanked God for delivering him from the powers of the devil. This faith in the Father's protection is one of the most powerful – and sometimes most colorful – parts of the book:
“Bluebeard [Satan] follows, with divine permission, to wage war against me; but God is with me.” And more explicit: “I complained to my Guardian Angel about this, who, after having preached a nice little homily to me, added, 'Give thanks to Jesus, that he treats you as one chosen to follow him closely up the steep slope of Calvary.'”
Perhaps most strongly is the Saint's articulation of his suffering for God. He believed that Jesus was close to those who suffer, and so he too wanted tribulation, writing without bitterness: “My life is becoming a cruel martyrdom.” He saw his trials through Christ's agony, which, the Saint believed, continued up to the present day because of the grievous sins of humans. Saint Pio shared in this pain. Yet for this, he only felt gratitude towards Jesus.
This sense of human sin and the harm that it does to the soul and to one's relationship with God is a constant theme in Saint Pio's letters.
The Saint was so readily capable of sharing in Christ's anguish because of his great, unfailing hope that God would come to his aid: “Do you not see that I have no more strength to fight, that all my vigor is gone?...Oh my God, you who know the extreme bitterness of my spirit, do not delay in coming to my aid. You alone can and must draw me out of this prison of death.”
These innocent, charming, and poetic selections testify to the way that God so deeply touched Saint Padre Pio.
This That and the Other Thing: Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival
This That and the Other Thing: Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival
http://brianweltercatholicbooks.blogspot.com/
http://brianweltercatholicbooks.blogspot.com/
Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival
http://brianweltercatholicbooks.blogspot.com/2009/06/promise.html
http://brianweltercatholicbooks.blogspot.com/2009/06/popes-legion-multinational-fighting.html
http://brianweltercatholicbooks.blogspot.com/2009/06/descartes-bones-skeletal-history-of.html
http://brianweltercatholicbooks.blogspot.com/2009/06/popes-legion-multinational-fighting.html
http://brianweltercatholicbooks.blogspot.com/2009/06/descartes-bones-skeletal-history-of.html
The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens
By Vox Day, 305 pages hardcover, Benbella Books, $19.96, ISBN 1-933771-36-4.
Vox Day's book succeeds because he locates the split between science-based atheism and Judeo-Christian belief in meaning. Atheists and believers are ultimately fighting over the meaning of scientific and technological advancement and its proper use.
Rather than getting swallowed up in the endless debates around biotechnology, cloning, and evolution, Day takes a wider view and looks at the basic presuppositions of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and other atheists.
Avoiding a proof for God's existence or some other worn-out way of ending the atheist-believer debate, Day goes on the offensive and plays the game of these atheists, accusing them of being the irrational ones, despite their pride in being rationalist heirs of the Enlightenment.
Rather than building his own theological argument, then, Day deconstructs many atheist arguments, eventually concluding late in the book: “Predicated on an unreliable human attribute that may not even exist [rationalism], rejecting the foundation of Man's most successful civilization, ... and refusing to learn from its past disasters, atheism is not so much the basis for an irrational philosophy as for an insane one.”
In his painstaking criticism, he characterizes atheists as irrational because of their major inconsistencies and wrong assumptions on which their entire arguments stand.
He saves most of his acid for Sam Harris and the latter's Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith. Harris, Day notes, has the most basic facts wrong about the religions he disdains: “Harris repeatedly demonstrates an inability to distinguish between the relative significance of the Old Testament to Christians, while raising issues that have been debated by theologians and philosophers for nearly 2,000 years as if they were new and no one had ever thought of them before.”
He derides Harris for an ignorant, amateurish reflection on the Christian understanding of theodicy, which is the attempt to understand how evil and a good God can exist at the same time.
Day highlights the cracked foundations of the atheist house. He goes so far as to question “St. Darwin” himself, focusing, as he repeatedly does, on the irrational and even emotional origins of basic anti-Christian beliefs. He points out that Darwin came to believe that God had nothing to do with “the operations of the natural laws” of evolution after the death of the scientist's young daughter.
The Irrational Atheist shows that the House of Atheism collapses fairly easily, but not by aggressive evangelism or pious-emotionalism. The book applies to atheists the same standards of consistency and intellectual integrity that atheists pretend they are applying to Christianity.
Day also in a sense protects Christianity against atheist abuse by claiming that we are all irrational: “But the ultimate atheist irrationality us the idea that Man himself is rational.”
The author, an evangelical, briefly develops the wonderful Christian anthropology that mainline churches turned away away from in their socialist-feminist rush to create God's kingdom on earth. Day notes that none of us make sense because of our sinfulness, passions, and mystery: “you are not a robot, you are a human being. Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing one who uses his intellect to construct reasons in post facto defense of his irrational desires.”
Day opens the way to a deeper sense of mystery and, as importantly, to the unavoidable fact that humans as fallen creatures inevitably slip up. He never loses sight of the Christian view of why atheists have gotten so many things wrong.
As a Protestant, Day does not take advantage of the enormous intellectual tradition available at the hands of faithful, practicing Catholics. While many Protestants endeavor to fight back against secularism, without this Catholic strength they often fall somewhat short. The Irrational Atheist would have been enriched with this fuller perspective.
Vox Day's book succeeds because he locates the split between science-based atheism and Judeo-Christian belief in meaning. Atheists and believers are ultimately fighting over the meaning of scientific and technological advancement and its proper use.
Rather than getting swallowed up in the endless debates around biotechnology, cloning, and evolution, Day takes a wider view and looks at the basic presuppositions of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and other atheists.
Avoiding a proof for God's existence or some other worn-out way of ending the atheist-believer debate, Day goes on the offensive and plays the game of these atheists, accusing them of being the irrational ones, despite their pride in being rationalist heirs of the Enlightenment.
Rather than building his own theological argument, then, Day deconstructs many atheist arguments, eventually concluding late in the book: “Predicated on an unreliable human attribute that may not even exist [rationalism], rejecting the foundation of Man's most successful civilization, ... and refusing to learn from its past disasters, atheism is not so much the basis for an irrational philosophy as for an insane one.”
In his painstaking criticism, he characterizes atheists as irrational because of their major inconsistencies and wrong assumptions on which their entire arguments stand.
He saves most of his acid for Sam Harris and the latter's Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith. Harris, Day notes, has the most basic facts wrong about the religions he disdains: “Harris repeatedly demonstrates an inability to distinguish between the relative significance of the Old Testament to Christians, while raising issues that have been debated by theologians and philosophers for nearly 2,000 years as if they were new and no one had ever thought of them before.”
He derides Harris for an ignorant, amateurish reflection on the Christian understanding of theodicy, which is the attempt to understand how evil and a good God can exist at the same time.
Day highlights the cracked foundations of the atheist house. He goes so far as to question “St. Darwin” himself, focusing, as he repeatedly does, on the irrational and even emotional origins of basic anti-Christian beliefs. He points out that Darwin came to believe that God had nothing to do with “the operations of the natural laws” of evolution after the death of the scientist's young daughter.
The Irrational Atheist shows that the House of Atheism collapses fairly easily, but not by aggressive evangelism or pious-emotionalism. The book applies to atheists the same standards of consistency and intellectual integrity that atheists pretend they are applying to Christianity.
Day also in a sense protects Christianity against atheist abuse by claiming that we are all irrational: “But the ultimate atheist irrationality us the idea that Man himself is rational.”
The author, an evangelical, briefly develops the wonderful Christian anthropology that mainline churches turned away away from in their socialist-feminist rush to create God's kingdom on earth. Day notes that none of us make sense because of our sinfulness, passions, and mystery: “you are not a robot, you are a human being. Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing one who uses his intellect to construct reasons in post facto defense of his irrational desires.”
Day opens the way to a deeper sense of mystery and, as importantly, to the unavoidable fact that humans as fallen creatures inevitably slip up. He never loses sight of the Christian view of why atheists have gotten so many things wrong.
As a Protestant, Day does not take advantage of the enormous intellectual tradition available at the hands of faithful, practicing Catholics. While many Protestants endeavor to fight back against secularism, without this Catholic strength they often fall somewhat short. The Irrational Atheist would have been enriched with this fuller perspective.
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