Dawson’s Englishness gives us a clue to his scholarly temperament, and that temperament, in turn, helps us understand his strange neglect. Landscape meant much to him—the Yorkshire of his growing up, the Winchester and Oxford of his early manhood, the “wild moorland country” he returned to as a fledgling scholar and a family man. For years he was a private scholar and country squire working away from the company of others, seeking solace in the stark beauty of the fell. He could see in that wildness a world of myth and legend, a world “half history and half poetry,” a world fully alive. “No one,” he wrote, “could owe more to childhood impressions than I did. It was then I acquired my love of history, my interest in the differences of cultures and my sense of the importance of religion in human life, as a massive, objective, unquestioned power that entered into everything and impressed its mark on the external as well as the internal world.” Churches and tombs and crosses were his first books. Marks on a landscape marked him for life.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
"childhood impressions"
Dermot Quinn, Professor of History at Seton Hall University, writing in The American Conservative:
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Re Douthat/Dawkins/Dobertson:
It’s true that there are plenty of stories in the Bible — including Sodom and the Flood — that line up more closely with what Dawkins wants to call the “true Christianity” of Pat Robertson’s remarks. But — and this is important — the Christian religion is not identical to the Bible. It’s a faith based on the Bible, as read in the light of reason and (or so Christians believe) under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
However obnoxious or heavyhanded Dawkin's remarks may seem to the pious, he had a point, though I think he's actually trying to say something about the problem of evil--specifically, the Evidential POE, rather than the somewhat trivial logical POE. An omnipotent, monotheistic God would, by definition, have allowed the quake: indeed, arranged it as part of Providence, billions of years ago. And really, the Bible would seem to support that omnipotent, omniscient view (ie maker of heaven and earth, for starters).
And Robertson does offer the typical fundamentalist justification of the quake: it's spiritual punishment of some sort, says the Patster. The people of Haiti must atone for some mysterious historical crimes, and the quake somehow shows that (though the Haitians' crimes seem fairly trivial compared to the crimes of Napoleon and the ancien regime French and spanish): in other words, Robertson, like most loudmouthed, biblethumping WASP clowns, suggests...they deserved it somehow.
Douthat seems to think that's unusual or something. He's dead wrong: that's Orthodoxy, both evangelical and catholic. Assuming He exists for a few nano-seconds, G*d must have ordered the quake and all natural disasters, plagues, disease, wars, poverty, etc. To think otherwise denies his King-Godness.
Of course skeptics and nonbelievers have other explanations, like movement of tectonic plates (and bad city planning: don't use flimsy, wooden structures with no steel reinforcement in a quake zone. Yet that also raises some...political issues).
At any rate, natural disasters would suggest reasons for doubting orthodox monotheism, if not judeo-christianity as a whole. What sort of Being--supposedly loving, per scripture-- would bring about a quake, tidal wave (ie tsunami of 2004), plague, influenzas, STDS, when by definition He could do otherwise? He/it would be indistinguishable from evil, it would seem. So reasonable humans thus argue that natural disasters provide reasons to doubt orthodoxy.
That's of course old news,even bor-eeng, to most bright college people, scientists, or anyone who has read a bit of phil.--Voltaire said as much in Candide--but the baptist-calvinist hordes (and not a few catholics) haven't quite grasped the point. Robertson's jus' preaching to the choir of the Church of Calvinist-thanatos.
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