Quotulatiousness

March 6, 2023

Updating Pascal’s Wager

Filed under: History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Friedman discusses moral realism and comes up with an improvement to Blaise Pascal’s famous wager:

Blaise Pascal from Practical Physics (1914), by Macmillan and Company.
Wikimedia Commons.

Blaise Pascal famously argued that one ought to believe in the Catholic faith because the enormous payoff if it was true, heaven instead of hell, made it in your interest to believe even if you thought the probability that it was true was low.

There are three problems with the argument. The first is that belief is not entirely a matter of choice — I cannot make myself believe that two plus two equals five however much I am offered for doing so. The second is that belief motivated not by love of God but by love of self, the desire to end up in Heaven instead of Hell, might not qualify you for admission. The third is that the argument applies to many doctrines other than Catholicism and so gives you no way of choosing among Christian sects or between Christianity and alternative religions, short of somehow estimating the probability that each is true and the associated payoff and choosing the one with the highest expected return.

I, however, have an improved version of the argument free from all of those problems, an argument not for Christianity but for moral realism.

One explanation of our moral feelings is that right and wrong are real and our beliefs about right and wrong at least roughly correct. The other is that morality is a mistake; we have been brainwashed by our culture, or perhaps our genes, into feeling the way we do, but there is really no good reason why one ought to feed the hungry or ought not to torture small children.

If morality is real and you act as if it were not, you will do bad things — and if morality is real you ought not to do bad things. If morality is an illusion and you act as if it were not you may miss the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs but since morality correlates tolerably, although not perfectly, with rational self interest, the cost is unlikely to be large. It follows that if you are uncertain which of the two explanations is correct you ought to act as if the first is.

No god is required for the argument, merely the nature of right and wrong, good and evil, as most human beings intuit them. The fact that you are refraining from evil because of a probabilistic calculation does not negate the value of doing so — you still haven’t stolen, lied, or tortured small children. One of the odd features of our intuitions of right and wrong is that they are not entirely, perhaps not chiefly, judgements about people but judgements about acts.

February 26, 2023

QotD: Scientology versus psychiatry

Filed under: Health, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Scientology has a long-standing feud with psychiatry, with the psychiatrists alleging that Scientology is a malicious cult, and the Scientologists alleging that psychiatry is an evil pseudoscience that denies the truth of dianetics. And that psychiatrists helped inspire Hitler. And that the 9/11 was masterminded by Osama bin Laden’s psychiatrist. And that psychiatrists are plotting to institute a one-world government. And that psychiatrists are malevolent aliens from a planet called Farsec. Really they have a lot of allegations.

Scott Alexander, “The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-05-22.

February 21, 2023

Medieval Mardi Gras

Filed under: Food, Germany, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Feb 2022
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QotD: The Gods as (literal) machines

Filed under: History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So we have the basic rules in place: in order to achieve a concrete, earthly result, we need to offer something to the appropriate god and in exchange, they’ll use their divine power to see that things turn out our way.

But what do we offer? What do we ask for? How do we ask? This isn’t write-your-own-religion, after all: you can’t just offer whatever you feel like (or more correctly, you can, and the god’s silent disapproval will be the response). After all, if your plan is to get me to do something, and you show up at my door with awful, nasty Cherry Pepsi, you are bound to be disappointed; if you show up with some delicious Dr. Pepper, you may have better luck. That’s how people work – why would the gods be any different?

So different gods prefer different things, delivered in different ways, with different words, at different times. There are so many possible details and permutations – but this is important, it matters and you must get it right! So how can you be sure that you are offering the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, to the right god, for the right result?

And that’s where our knowledge from last week comes in. You aren’t left trying to figure this out on your own from scratch, because you can draw on the long history and memory of your community and thus perform a ritual which worked in the past, for the same sort of thing.

The thing to understand about that kind of knowledge is that it’s a form of black box tech; the practitioner doesn’t know why it works, only that it works because – as we discussed – the ritual wasn’t derived from some abstract first-principles understanding of the gods, but by trial and error. Thinking about the ritual as a form of functional, but not understood, technology can help us understand the ancient attitude towards ritual.

Let’s say we discovered a functioning alien spaceship with faster-than-light propulsion, but no aliens and no manual. We don’t understand anything about how it works. What would we do? We might try to copy the ship, but remember: we don’t know what parts are functional and what parts are just cosmetic or what does what. So we’d have to copy the ship exactly, bolt for bolt, to be sure that it would work when we turned it on.

Ritual in ancient polytheistic religions is typically treated the same way: given an unknowable, but functional system, exactitude is prized over understanding. After all, understanding why the ritual works does not help it work any better – only performing it correctly. An error in performance might offend the god, or create confusion about what effect is desired, or for whom. But an error in understanding causes no problems, so long as the ritual was performed exactly anyway. Just as it doesn’t matter what you think is happening when you, say, turn on your TV – it turns on anyway – it doesn’t matter what you think is happening in the ritual. It happens anyway.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-01.

February 15, 2023

Ancient Rome’s Naked Fertility Festival (Lupercalia)

Filed under: Europe, Food, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 8 Feb 2022
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February 13, 2023

QotD: Oaths in pre-modern cultures

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

First, some caveats. This is really a discussion of oath-taking as it existed (and exists) around the Mediterranean and Europe. My understanding is that the basic principles are broadly cross-cultural, but I can’t claim the expertise in practices south of the Sahara or East of the Indus to make that claim with full confidence. I am mostly going to stick to what I know best: Greece, Rome and the European Middle Ages. Oath-taking in the pre-Islamic Near East seems to follow the same set of rules (note Bachvarova’s and Connolly’s articles in Horkos), but that is beyond my expertise, as is the Middle East post-Hijra.

Second, I should note that I’m drawing my definition of an oath from Alan Sommerstein’s excellent introduction in Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (2007), edited by A. Sommerstein and J. Fletcher – one of the real “go-to” works on oath-taking in the ancient Mediterranean world. As I go, I’ll also use some medieval examples to hopefully convince you that the same basic principles apply to medieval oaths, especially the all-important oaths of fealty and homage.

(Pedantry note: now you may be saying, “wait, an introduction? Why use that?” As of when I last checked, there is no monograph (single author, single topic) treatment of oaths. Rather, Alan Sommerstein has co-authored a set of edited collections – Horkos (2007, with J. Fletcher), Oath and State (2013, with A. Bayliss) and Oaths and Swearing (2014, with I. Torrance). This can make Greek oaths a difficult topic to get a basic overview of, as opposed to a laundry list of the 101 ancient works you must read for examples. Discussions of Roman oaths are, if anything, even less welcoming to the beginner, because they intersect with the study of Roman law. I think the expectation has always been that the serious student of the classics would have read so many oaths in the process of learning Latin and Greek to develop a sort of instinct for the cultural institution. Nevertheless, Sommerstein’s introduction in Horkos presents my preferred definition of the structure of an oath.)

Alright – all of the quibbling out of the way: onward!

So what is an Oath? Is it the same as a Vow?

Ok, let’s start with definitions. In modern English, we often use oath and vow interchangeably, but they are not (usually) the same thing. Divine beings figure in both kinds of promises, but in different ways. In a vow, the god or gods in question are the recipients of the promise: you vow something to God (or a god). By contrast, an oath is made typically to a person and the role of the divine being in the whole affair is a bit more complex.

(Etymology digression: the word “oath” comes to us by way of Old English āþ (pronounced “ath” with a long ‘a’) and has close cousins in Dutch “Eed” and German “Eid”. The word vow comes from Latin (via Middle English, via French), from the word votum. A votum is specifically a gift to a god in exchange for some favor – the gift can be in the present tense or something promised in the future. By contrast, the Latin word for oath is ius (it has a few meanings) and to swear an oath is the verb iuro (thus the legal phrase “ius iurandum” – literally “the oath to be sworn”). This Latin distinction is preserved into the English usage, where “vow” retains its Latin meaning, and the word “oath” usurps the place of Latin ius (along with other words for specific kinds of oaths in Latin, e.g. sacramentum)).

In a vow, the participant promises something – either in the present or the future – to a god, typically in exchange for something. This is why we talk of an oath of fealty or homage (promises made to a human), but a monk’s vows. When a monk promises obedience, chastity and poverty, he is offering these things to God in exchange for grace, rather than to any mortal person. Those vows are not to the community (though it may be present), but to God (e.g. Benedict in his Rule notes that the vow “is done in the presence of God and his saints to impress on the novice that if he ever acts otherwise, he will surely be condemned by the one he mocks“. (RB 58.18)). Note that a physical thing given in a vow is called a votive (from that Latin root).

(More digressions: Why do we say “marriage vows” in English? Isn’t this a promise to another human being? I suspect this usage – functionally a “frozen” phrase – derives from the assumption that the vows are, in fact, not a promise to your better half, but to God to maintain. After all, the Latin Church held – and the Catholic Church still holds – that a marriage cannot be dissolved by the consent of both parties (unlike oaths, from which a person may be released with the consent of the recipient). The act of divine ratification makes God a party to the marriage, and thus the promise is to him. Thus a vow, and not an oath.)

So again, a vow is a promise to a divinity or other higher power (you can make vows to heroes and saints, for instance), whereas an oath is a promise to another human, which is somehow enforced, witnessed or guaranteed by that higher power.

An example of this important distinction being handled in a very awkward manner is the “oath” of the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones (delivered in S1E7, but taken, short a few words, verbatim from the books). The recruits call out to … someone … (they never name who, which as we’ll see, is a problem) to “hear my words and bear witness to my vow”. Except it’s not clear to me that this is a vow, so much as an oath. The supernatural being you are vowing something to does not bear witness because they are the primary participant – they don’t witness the gift, they receive it.

I strongly suspect that Martin is riffing off of here are the religious military orders of the Middle Ages (who did frequently take vows), but if this is a vow, it raises serious questions. It is absolutely possible to vow a certain future behavior – to essentially make yourself the gift – but who are they vowing to? The tree? It may well be “the Old Gods” who are supposed to be both nameless and numerous (this is, forgive me, not how ancient paganism worked – am I going to have to write that post too?) and who witness things (such as the Pact, itself definitely an oath, through the trees), but if so, surely you would want to specify that. Societies that do votives – especially when there are many gods – are often quite concerned that gifts might go awry. You want to be very specific as to who, exactly, you are vowing something to.

This is all the more important given that (as in the books) the Night’s Watch oath may be sworn in a sept as well as to a Weirwood tree. It wouldn’t do to vow yourself to the wrong gods! More importantly, the interchangeability of the gods in question points very strongly to this being an oath. Gods tend to be very particular about the votives they will receive; one can imagine saying “swear by whatever gods you have here” but not “vow yourself to whatever gods you have here”. Who is to say the local gods take such gifts?

Moreover, while they pledge their lives, they aren’t receiving anything in return. Here I think the problem may be that we are so used to the theologically obvious request of Christian vows (salvation and the life after death) that it doesn’t occur to us that you would need to specify what you get for a vow. But the Old Gods don’t seem to be in a position to offer salvation. Votives to gods in polytheistic systems almost always follow the do ut des system (lit. “I give, that you might give”). Things are not offered just for the heck of it – something is sought in return. And if you want that thing, you need to say it. Jupiter is not going to try to figure it out on his own. If you are asking the Old Gods to protect you, or the wall, or mankind, you need to ask.

(Pliny the Elder puts it neatly declaring, “of course, either to sacrifice without prayer or to consult the gods without sacrifice is useless” (Nat. Hist. 28.3). Prayer here (Latin: precatio) really means “asking for something” – as in the sense of “I pray thee (or ‘prithee’) tell me what happened?” And to be clear, the connection of Christian religious practice to the do ut des formula of pre-Christian paganism is a complex theological question better addressed to a theologian or church historian.)

The scene makes more sense as an oath – the oath-takers are swearing to the rest of the Night’s Watch to keep these promises, with the Weirwood Trees (and through them, the Old Gods – although again, they should specify) acting as witnesses. As a vow, too much is up in the air and the idea that a military order would permit its members to vow themselves to this or that god at random is nonsense. For a vow, the recipient – the god – is paramount.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Oaths! How do they Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-28.

February 11, 2023

QotD: “The rest of philosophy is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a series of footnotes to Plato … but all secular religions are”

Filed under: Books, Education, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Which is why I’m not going to humbug you about “the Classics.” Commanding you to “read the Classics!” would do you more harm than good at this point, because you have no idea how to read the Classics. Context is key, and nobody gets it anymore. Back when, that’s why they required Western Civ I — since all the Liberal Arts tie together, you needed to study the political and social history of Ancient Greece in order to read Plato (who in turn deepened your understanding of Greek society and politics … and our own, it goes without saying). I can’t even point you to a decent primer on Plato’s world, since all the textbooks since 1985 have been written by ax-grinding diversity hires.

And Plato’s actually pretty clear, as philosophers go. You’d really get into trouble with a muddled writer … or a much clearer one. A thinker like Nietzsche, for example, who’s such a lapidary stylist that you get lost in his prose, not realizing that he’s often saying the exact opposite of what he seems to be saying. To briefly mention the most famous example: “God is dead” isn’t the barbaric yawp of atheism triumphant. The rest of the paragraph is important, too, especially the next few words: “and we have killed him.” Nietzsche, supposedly the greatest nihilist, is raging against nihilism.

[…]

So here’s what I’d do, if I were designing a from-scratch college reading list. I’d go to the “for Dummies” versions, but only after clearly articulating the why of my reading list. I’d assign Plato, for example, as one of the earliest and best examples of one of mankind’s most pernicious traits: Utopianism. The rest of philosophy is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a series of footnotes to Plato … but all secular religions are. The most famous of these being Marxism, of course, and you’d get much further into the Marxist mindset by studying The Republic than you would by actually reading all 50-odd volumes of Marx. “What is Justice?” Plato famously asks in this work; the answer, as it turns out, is pretty much straight Stalinism.

How does he arrive at this extraordinary, counter-intuitive(-seeming) conclusion? The Cliff’s Notes will walk you through it. Check them out, then go back and read the real thing if the spirit moves you.

Articulating the “why” saves you all kinds of other headaches, too. Why should you read Hegel, for example? Because you can’t understand Marx without him … but trust me, if you can read The Republic for Dummies, you sure as hell don’t have to wade through Das Kapital. Marxism was a militantly proselytizing faith; they churned out umpteen thousand catechisms spelling it all out … and because they did, there are equally umpteen many anti-Marxist catechisms. Pick one; you’ll get all the Hegel you’ll ever need just from the context.

Severian, “How to Read ‘The Classics'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-13.

February 8, 2023

The ghastly Thirty Years’ War in Europe

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams outlines the state of Europe four hundred years ago:

A war as long and as complex requires something like this to help keep the narrative somewhat understandable.

Exactly four hundred years ago, a dark shadow was slithering across mainland Europe. It stretched its bleak, cold presence into each hearth and home. Everything it touched turned to ruin. Musket and rapier, smoke and fire, ruled supreme. Nothing was immune. Animals and children starved to death, mothers and adolescent girls were abused and tortured. The lucky ones died, alongside their brothers and fathers, slain in battle. Possessions were looted, crops destroyed, barns and houses burned. There seemed no end to the evil and pestilence. Sixteen generations ago, many believed the end of the world had arrived.

This was not a tale of Middle Earth. The place was central Europe in the early 17th century. In 1618 the future Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand II, a zealous follower of the Jesuits, had attempted to restore the Catholic Church as the only religion in the Empire and exterminate any form of religious dissent. Protestant nobles in Bohemia and Austria rose up in rebellion. The conflict soon widened, fuelled by the political ambitions of adjacent powers. In Europe’s heartland, three denominations fought it out: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism.

The result was an interwoven tangle of diplomatic plot twists, temporary alliances and coalitions, as princes, bishops and potentates beseeched outside powers to help. The struggle, which lasted for thirty years, boiled down to the Roman Catholic and Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire, fighting an incongruous array of Protestant towns and statelets, aided by the anti-Catholic powers of Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus, and the United Netherlands. France and Spain also took advantage of the distractions of war to indulge in their own sub-campaigns. Britain took no formal part but was about to become embroiled in her own civil war.

The principal battleground for this collective contest of arms centred on the towns and principalities of what would become Germany, northern Italy, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. The war devastated many regions on a scale unseen again until 1944–45. For example, at Magdeburg on the River Elbe, 20,000 of 25,000 inhabitants died, with 1,700 of its 1,900 buildings ruined. In Czech Bohemia, 40 per cent of the population perished, with 100 towns and more than a thousand villages laid waste. At Nordlingen in 1634, around 16,000 soldiers were killed in a single day’s battle. The town took three centuries for its population to return to pre-war levels. Refugees from smaller settlements swelled the many walled cities, increasing hunger and spreading disease.

Too diminutive to defend themselves, all states hired mercenaries, of whom a huge number flourished in the era, enticed by the prospect of quick wealth in exchange for proficiency with sword and musket. Employed by every antagonist, but beholden to no one, these armed brigands — regiments would be too grand a term for the uniformed thugs they were — roamed at will. With their pikes and their muskets, they plundered the countryside in search of booty, food and transport. In their wake, they left burning towns, ruined villages, pillaged farms. Lead was stripped from houses and church roofs for ammunition.

Left to right:
The Defenestration of Prague (23 May, 1618), The death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen (16 November, 1632), Dutch warships prior to the Battle of the Downs (21 October, 1639), and The Battle of Rocroi (19 May, 1643).
Collage by David Dijkgraaf via Wikimedia Commons.

When in the winter of 1634 Swedish mercenaries were refused food and wine by the inhabitants of Linden, a tiny Bavarian settlement, they raped and looted their way through the village, leaving it uninhabitable. Across Europe, travellers noted the human and animal carcasses that decorated the meadows, streams polluted by the dead and rotting crops, presided over only by ravens and wolves. No respect was shown for the lifeless. Survivors stripped corpses of clothing and valuables; if lucky, the deceased were tossed into unmarked mass graves, since lost to history.

Having triggered the war, Ferdinand predeceased its end. We can never know how many died in Europe’s last major conflagration triggered by religion. Archives perished in the flames, and survivors were not interested in computations. Historians now put the death toll at between 8 and 12 million. Probably 500,000 perished in battle, with the rest, mostly civilians, expiring through starvation and disease. We think these casualties may equate to as much as 20 per cent of mainland Europe’s population and perhaps one-third of those in modern Germany, bringing the Thirty Years’ War a potency similar to the Black Death or either world war. The region did not recover for at least three generations.

Economic activity, land use and ownership altered terminally. When the exhausted powers finally met in October 1648 at Osnabrück and Münster in the German province of Westphalia to end the directionless slaughter, of whom self-serving militias were the only beneficiaries, Europe’s balance of power had shifted tectonically. Fresh rules of conflict and the legitimacy of a new network of 300 sovereign states, independent from a Holy Roman Emperor or a Pope, marked the struggle as a watershed moment, leading to the Enlightenment and an era that disappeared only with Napoleon.

February 7, 2023

QotD: The misery of certainty

Filed under: Education, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

No one else on this earth, I assure you, is so dogmatically certain of anything as ivory tower types are of everything. What they believe today might be 180 degrees from what they believed yesterday, but they still believe it with a fanatical zeal that would make Torquemada blush. Whatever “it” is, it is the capital-T Truth, and they alone possess it …

So why are they always so fucking miserable?

Let’s stipulate, for instance, that gender really is just a social construction. Even if it’s not, you’re dogmatically certain of this. Crucially, everyone else in your world is equally dogmatically certain, so even if it’s not, it is. Shouldn’t you be much, much, much happier? So you’re really a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin. Cool. Everyone else is 100% on board with this. You should be the happiest wingless golden-skinned dragonkin on earth … but you’re not. You’re miserable, and you do your damnedest to make every single other person you come in contact with miserable, too.

As a wise man once put it, if you run into an asshole in the morning, well, you just ran into an asshole. If you run into nothing but assholes all day, then you’re the asshole.

Same question to atheists. I can understand nonbelievers being tormented by their uncertainty, but an atheist is dogmatically certain there’s no god … so why aren’t y’all happier? Why, exactly, does the kid with cancer make you mad? The universe, you’re sure, is nothing but the random collision of atoms. It sucks for the kid that those atoms collided in that particular way, but why are you mad? More to the point, why are you mad? It’s like getting mad at gravity for that apple bonking you on the head. There’s no cosmic injustice without cosmic justice. I’d expect a zenlike calm, but instead, every time I write something about atheism (which I really don’t very often), I get a whole bunch of sour, bitter, angry atheists dropping in to tell me that I’m the asshole.

Severian, “The Emotion is the Tell”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-24.

January 31, 2023

QotD: Religious rituals

Filed under: History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I want to start with a key observation, without which much of the rest of this will not make much sense: rituals are supposed to be effective. Let me explain what that means.

We tend to have an almost anthropological view of rituals, even ones we still practice: we see them in terms of their social function or psychological impact. Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (the Sci-fi miniseries; I can’t find the quote in the text, but then it’s a lot of text) put it wonderfully, “Ritual is the whip by which men are enlightened.” That is, ritual’s primary effect is the change that takes place in our minds, rather than in the spiritual world. This is the same line of thinking whereby a Church service is justified because it “creates a sense of community” or “brings believers together”. We view rituals often like plays or concerts, experiences without any broader consequences beyond the experience of participation or viewing itself.

This is not how polytheism (ancient or modern) works (indeed, it is not how most modern Christianity works: the sacraments are supposed to be spiritually effective; that is, if properly carried out, they do things beyond just making us feel better. You can see this articulated clearly in some traditional prayers, like the Prayer of Humble Access or Luther’s Flood Prayer).

Instead, religious rituals are meant to have (and will have, so the believer believes, if everything is done properly) real effects in both the spiritual world and the physical world. That is, your ritual will first effect a change in the god (making them better disposed to you) and second that will effect a change in the physical world we inhabit (as the god’s power is deployed in your favor).

But to reiterate, because this is key: the purpose of ritual (in ancient, polytheistic religious systems) is to produce a concrete, earthly result. It is not to improve our mood or morals, but to make crops grow, rain fall, armies win battles, business deals turn out well, ships sail, winds blow. While some rituals in these religions do concern themselves with the afterlife or other seemingly purely spiritual concerns (the lines between earthly and spiritual in those cases are – as we’ll see, somewhat blurrier in these religions than we often think them to be now), the great majority of rituals are squarely focused on what is happening around us, and are performed because they do something.

This is the practical side of practical knowledge; the ritual in polytheistic religion does not (usually) alter you in some way – it alters the world (spiritual and physical) around you in some way. Consequently, ritual is employed as a tool – this problem is solved by a wrench, that problem by a hammer, and this other problem by a ritual. Some rituals are preventative maintenance (say, we regularly observe this ritual so this god is always well disposed to us, so that they do X, Y, and Z on the regular), others are a response to crisis, but they are all tools to shape the world (again, physical and spiritual) around us. If a ritual carries a moral duty, it is only because (we’ll get to this a bit more later) other people in your community are counting on you to do it; it is a moral duty the same way that, as an accountant, not embezzling money is a moral duty. Failure lets other people (not yourself and not even really the gods) down.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-01.

January 29, 2023

QotD: Questions from the Malleus Maleficarum – “Why would a perfectly just God allow witches to exist?”

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Almost half the Malleus is devoted to purely philosophical questions surrounding witchcraft. Paramount among these: why would a perfectly just God allow witches to exist?

The answer probably has something to with the Devil. And you can probably get part of the way by saying that God has a principled commitment to let the Devil meddle in human affairs until the End of Days. But then you get another issue: the Devil was once the brightest of angels. He’s really really powerful. Completely unrestrained, he can probably sink continents and stuff. So why does he futz around helping elderly women kill their neighbors’ cattle?

Put a different way, there’s a very narrow band between “God restrains the Devil so much that witchcraft can’t exist” and “God restrains the Devil so little that witches have already taken over the world”. Prima facie, we wouldn’t expect the amount God restrains the Devil to fall into this little band. But in order to defend the existence of witchcraft, Kramer has to argue that it does.

His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if he’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much.

Meanwhile, the Devil isn’t trying to maximize 21st century utilitarian evil. He’s trying to turn souls away from God. So although he could curse people directly, what he actually wants is for humans to sell their soul to him in exchange for curse powers. So whenever possible he prefers to act through witches.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum“, Astral Codex Ten, 2022-10-27.

January 24, 2023

The Byzantine Empire: Part 9 – The Last Centuries

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 30 Dec 2022

In this, the ninth in the series, Sean Gabb gives an overview of the last years of Byzantium, from the Crusader sack in 1204 to the Turkish capture in 1453.

Between 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.
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January 11, 2023

QotD: “Little” gods in the ancient world

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When we teach ancient religion in school – be it high school or college – we are typically focused on the big gods: the sort of gods who show up in high literature, who create the world, guide heroes, mint kings. These are the sorts of gods – Jupiter, Apollo, Anu, Ishtar – that receive state cult, which is to say that there are rituals to these gods which are funded by the state, performed by magistrates or kings or high priests (or other Very Important People); the common folk are, at best, spectators to the rituals performed on their behalf by their social superiors.

That is not to say that these gods did not receive cult from the common folk. If you are a regular sailor on a merchant ship, some private devotion to Poseidon is in order; if you are a husband wishing for more children, some observance of Ishtar may help; if you are a farmer praying for rain, Jupiter may be your guy. But these are big gods, whose vast powers are unlimited in geographic scope and their right observance is, at least in part, a job for important people who act on behalf of the entire community. Such gods are necessarily somewhat distant and unapproachable; it may be difficult to get their attention for your particular issue.

Fortunately, the world is full up of smaller and more personal gods. The most pervasive of these are household gods – god associated with either the physical home, or the hearth (the fireplace), or the household/family as a social unit. The Romans had several of these, chiefly the Lares and Penates, two sets of gods who presided over the home. The Lares seem to have originally been hearth guardians associated with the family, while the Penates may have begun as the guardians of the house’s storeroom – an important place in an agricultural society! Such figures are common in other polytheisms too – the fantasy tropes of brownies, hobs, kobolds and the like began as similar household spirits, propitiated by the family for the services they provide.

(As an aside, the Lares and Penates provide an excellent example on how practice was valued more than belief or orthodoxy in ancient religion: when I say that they “seem” or “may have originally been”, that is because it was not entirely clear to the Romans, exactly what the distinction between the Lares and Penates were; ancient authors try to reconstruct exactly what the Penates are about from etymologies (e.g. Cic. De Natura Deorum 2.68) and don’t always agree! But of course, the exact origins of the Lares or the Penates didn’t matter so much as the power they held, how they ought to be appeased, and what they might do to you!)

Household gods also illuminate the distinctly communal nature of even smaller religious observances. The rituals in a Roman household for the Lares and Penates were carried out by the heads of the household (mostly the paterfamilias although the matron of the household had a significant role – at some point, we can talk about the hierarchy of Roman households, but now I just want to note that these two positions in the Roman family are not co-equal) on behalf of the entire family unit, which we should remember might well be multi-generational, including adult children with their own children – in just the same way that important magistrates (or in monarchies, the king or his delegates) might carry out rituals on behalf of the community as a whole.

There were other forms of little gods – gods of places, for instance. The distinction between a place and the god of that same place is often not strong – when Achilles enrages the god of the river Scamander (Iliad 20), the river itself rises up against him; both the river and the god share a name. The Romans cover many small gods under the idea of the genius (pronounced gen-e-us, with the “g” hard like the g in gadget); a genius might protect an individual or family […] or even a place (called a genius locus). Water spirits, governing bodies of water great and humble, are particularly common – the fifty Nereids of Greek practice, or the Germanic Nixe or Neck.

Other gods might not be particular to a place, but to a very specific activity, or even moment. Thus (these are all Roman examples) Arculus, the god of strongboxes, or Vagitanus who gives the newborn its first cry or Forculus, god of doors (distinct from Janus and Limentinus who oversaw thresholds and Cardea, who oversaw hinges). All of these are what I tend to call small gods: gods with small powers over small domains, because – just as there are hierarchies of humans, there are hierarchies of gods.

Fortunately for the practitioner, bargaining for the aid of these smaller gods was often quite a lot cheaper than the big ones. A Jupiter or Neptune might demand sacrifices in things like bulls or the dedication of grand temples – prohibitively expensive animals for any common Roman or Greek – but the Lares and Penates might be befriended with only a regular gift of grain or a libation of wine. A small treat, like a bowl of milk, is enough to propitiate a brownie. Many rituals to gods of small places amount to little more than acknowledging them and their authority, and paying the proper respect.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part IV: Little Gods and Big People”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-15.

January 10, 2023

The Early Emperors, Part 9 – Nero: Can We Trust the Sources?

Filed under: Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 25 Dec 2022

This is a video record of a lecture given by Sean Gabb, in which he discusses the reasons for the black reputation possessed by the Emperor Nero.

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from Western Europe.
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January 6, 2023

The Church of England’s latest attempt to become “relevant”

Filed under: Britain, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Gareth Roberts discusses the announcement of Reverend Bingo Allison of themself’s “non-binary” status as the first openly genderqueer individual ordained as a priest in the established church:

Rev. Bingo Allison selfie supplied to the Liverpool Echo.

Many have pinned the beginning of the “Great Awokening” – the transition of the venomous cocktail of extremely niche Tumblr culture and naff identity politics into the mainstream – to 2013. As we move into this 10th anniversary year of raving teenage internet nonsense being taken seriously in the real world by grown adults, perhaps we need a spiritual guide to lead us in our celebrations?

Step forward the Rev Bingo Allison, vicar of a church in a Liverpool suburb, and apparently both “nonbinary” and “genderqueer”. (We do not learn from Bingo’s New Year’s Day interview in the Liverpool Echo if Bingo is actually his – sorry, Them’s – real name-o.)

As ever, working out what the terms nonbinary and genderqueer actually mean is like knitting butter. In the case of the Rev Bingo, it seems from what he says and from the pictorial evidence in the Echo that this has something to do with wearing very, very badly applied cosmetics and regaling anybody silly enough to listen with cut-and-paste boilerplate, like “the history of biblical interpretation is littered with the opinions of rich, white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical men” – basically, ChatGPT with eyeshadow applied à la Black+Decker.

I’ve recently been wondering why so many men with a lady soul are so bad at the application of make-up – both the Rev Bingo and cyclist Emily Bridges seem to have particular difficulty with eyeliner. Applying cosmetics well is not that difficult. In my brief teenage flirtation with the crossover point between New Romantic and Goth, I mastered the art while travelling into London on the very bumpy stretch of the Metropolitan Line between Moor Park and Harrow-on-the-Hill. (It was fatal to even attempt androgyny while still in Hertfordshire, particularly if the end result just made you look like a very camp Herman Munster.) I’m beginning to realise that the wonky slap is an essential part of the non-illusion, of the passive-aggressive, male status display that is at work. It is saying: “I’m not even going to try and you still have to kneel to me.”

“Jesus loves sparkly eyeshadow”, Bingo told his Insta followers recently. I have news for the Rev. Us lads can wear sparkly eyeshadow too with no effect on our bodies or souls. It does not change your sex. It just makes you a man wearing sparkly eyeshadow, like the Sweet doing “Block Buster” on Top of the Pops – although in Bingo’s case there is, owing to a very binary dose of male-pattern baldness, a more marked resemblance to Brian Eno in his Roxy Music days, with a hint of Max Wall in there, too.

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