Chutzpah Ain't Just a Jewish Thang

Egads, Paul. And we had just started to get along so well. Que sera sera, as the Frenchies say. Although I admire the mental gymnastics that allow you to use the devious machinations of an atheist skeptic (Kristol) to discredit genuine religious believers, I can't say it gives me much faith in your superior secularist logic. However, I hear there is an opening for an obfuscating atheist at the White House, what with K-Dawg put to pasture. You really are on the wrong team you know. The four most powerful atheists of the last thirty years have all been wingnut Pubies: Rove, Kristol, Rehnquist, Greenspan. I'm sure they'd love to add another classicist to the honor roll.

Your post is so riddled with strawmen and non sequiturs that I'm perplexed at where to start. Let's go to the heart of the matter: mythos. Religious believers do not generally interpret myth the way you do, as "falsehood." It's not even beyond dispute that Plato interprets it that way, since "noble lie" (pseudos, I believe, but you're the Greekie) is usually rendered "noble fiction," suggesting narrative but not necessarily intended deception. For the religious, myth implies a discourse that is not strictly rational, but not necessarily irrational either. Most Christian theologians have argued that core Christian claims are "superrational," meaning that while true, they cannot be established via unaided empirical observation. Of course, if the world were 100% knowable, such discourse would be unnecessary. But religions posit that it is not. Our lives are bounded by phenomena (the origins and meaning of life, the experience of death, the grounding of ethics, etc.) that are in great measure hidden from our view. To embrace myth is simply to acknowledge that much of what is most essential escapes our immediate grasp.

Where reason runs up against its natural boundaries, imagination floods in. Surely there is much opportunity for abuse and outright illogic here. But religion, at its best, is NOT arbitrary. It deploys the imagination to reveal moral truths and give them a popular narrative form. "Heaven" projects the fundamental goodness of life into the infinite; "hell" instantiates the ideas of justice and reciprocity. Truth. Charity. Equality. Humility. I could go on. It's always possible to pull out specific details and make them look silly (shellfish, beards, magic underwear, etc.). We can all play that game where we pick the worst excesses of religion on one hand or atheism on the other and attribute them to all people in that category. If you notice, in my original post I was very careful not to do that with respect to atheists, a courtesy that has in no way been reciprocated by my atheist responders, who seem incapable of making an argument that takes its opponent seriously rather than as a mental disorder for the corrupt, the retarded, and the conformist.

What then of Strauss & Kristol? Well, first, let me say that, having written my dissertation partly on Strauss and published on him, I'll have to speak from something other than blogosphere cliche. Like you, Strauss was primarily a classicist and incidentally an atheist. Unlike you, however, Strauss was deeply concerned with the fate of political culture in a world where God was dead, truth dissolved, and the only reality was power. He embraced what we might describe as the "philosopher's faith" in the true and the good. And yet he acknowledged that this faith could not be proved against the claims of revealed religion and that it could not sustain a just society. He saw that the philosopher's faith was incompatible with a belief in fundamental human equality and that it was always in danger of promoting "tyranny." So far so good, I'd say. (Also, this suggests that Kristol misread Strauss if the quote you cite accurately reflects the context.)

Strauss's great error (one of many) was to propose--as a solution to this dilemma--a strong separation between philosophy and faith, such that philosophers became creatures of ineffable reason and prudent backstage power while religious believers became orthodox and obedient. Strauss scorned Christianity for seeking to be "rational," looking for truth in public, a pretense he thought made someone like Nietzsche inevitable. Ironically, given the neocons, Strauss preferred Islam. (He also cast his first American vote for Adlai Stevenson, but that's a different kettle of fish.) In short, Strauss's position was much like yours: he wanted the rational to be rational and the religious to be religious, never the twain to meet. Except that, unlike you, he didn't have the Stalinist dream of a world without religion and sought to understand how the two could coexist. His answers weren't very persuasive, and he really, really misunderstood "modernity," but at least he grappled with the problem.

So please, don't blame the neocons on religion. We've got enough of our own messes to clean up without having to solve yours as well.