In the 1980 film The Competition, starring Richard Dreyfus and Amy Irving, there is a scene that has always been a metaphor, for me, for how Christians come to know Jesus Christ. Sounds strange, I know, but bear with me a moment.

In the film, Richard Dreyfus plays a talented but not quite top pier pianist desperate to win a major competition so he can become a professional musician. He does everything right: Practices compulsively, really knows his stuff. Living with his parents, now well in his twenties, he travels all over the country to compete in regional and national competitions… and yet he never quite wins. At one competition, he meets a fellow competitor, played by Amy Irving, and they begin a romance that Irving’s stern teacher, played by Lee Remick, is determined to thwart.

At one point in the film, Remick’s character run downs Amy Irving’s musical pedigree to explain to Dreyfus’s character why he is basically outclassed.

“Ludwig Von Beethoven taught Carl Czerny,” Lee Remick’s characters says slowly, lighting a cigarette. “Who taught Leschetizky… who taught Schnabel… who taught Renaldi… who taught me. And now the sixth pianist in a direct line from Beethoven is standing here staring at me in her Jordan Marsh mix-and-match.”

In other words: The music that Amy Irving plays is handed down in a kind of apostolic succession… from one generation to the next… a living tradition passed on, master to disciple, over centuries.

You can read all the biographies of Beethoven you like…you can study music theory to your heart’s content… and yet, if you stand outside of that direct teaching line, that “hands on” instruction, you probably won’t be able to play the piano as well as Amy Irving’s character does. You won’t really hear the music.

Well, learning Jesus, and discovering the truth of his kingdom, is a lot like learning music: you have to learn it in person, not just from books.

This isn’t a pitch, by the way, for the Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox understanding of Apostolic Succession over and against the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scripture… although there is a tie-in.
Instead, I am simply making an historical and sociological point: that, as the saying goes, Jesus is more “caught than taught.”

For most of Christian history, the followers of Jesus learned his story, absorbed his teaching and committed their lives to his service not through academic study… not because they weighed the historical evidence for the resurrection and decided it was probable… but through a quasi-mystical encounter with Jesus’ outsized, cosmic personality in the communities of believers he left behind. They meditated on the events of his life, heard second-hand, depicted in medieval passion plays and modern rock operas, and decided to say a resounding Yes to his call to be part of his kingdom.

In the earliest age of Christianity, there was no Christian Bible to study. Even if there had been, few people could have read it. The overwhelming majority of people in the ancient world were illiterate.
People learned about Jesus through the preaching and teaching of Jesus’ early followers, almost always oral, and through the sacraments, rites and customs of the early Church, especially the “thanksgiving rite” celebrated every week (known in Greek as the eucharist). “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am.” After encountering the Risen Christ on the road to Emmaus, his disciples realized that they had “recognized him in the breaking of the bread.”

When you think about it, that’s still true today.

Most people who are Christians today are Christians because they were born into Christian families, or because they encounter Christian disciple groups that intrigue them enough to learn more. They learn about Jesus Christ and discover his continuing presence in the world through personal testimony, the example of other people.

Indeed, most of what we know about Jesus and his teaching comes not from academic Bible study, as valuable as it is… but through preaching in churches… medieval passion plays… scenes depicted in stained glass windows or in bas-relief Stations of the Cross… Nativity pageants… and, in our time, televangelists… Vacation Bible School… Campus Crusade for Christ meetings… and films like “Jesus Christ Superstar” or “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

With all due respect to the fine work of Christian apologists, I would argue that very few people convert to Christianity because they’ve studied textual variants in the Gospel of Luke and concluded that, on balance, we have the original text. Instead, they become Christians first… because they encounter the personality of Christ reflected in the lives of his modern-day followers and decide to say Yes to his call to be part of the Kingdom. Only later do they read the Bible in depth… and only later still, if ever, do they engage in an academic study of Biblical origins, sources, and textual variants.

“Jesus is most fully and consistently learned with the context of the believing community of the church…” writes Luke Timothy Johnson, who teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, in his wonderful book, Living Jesus. Johnson is a professional New Testament scholar who spends all his time in academic study of the Bible… yet, he insists, true knowledge of Jesus Christ does not come primarily through such study. For people who have “entered into the energy field that is Jesus’ continuing presence in the world,” that is, believing Christians, knowledge of Jesus comes from other sources than history.

In his book, Jesus, Interrupted, New Testament scholar and scourge of conservative evangelical Christianity, Bart Ehrman, marvels that more Christians in the pews don’t know about the details about contemporary New Testament scholarship, textual criticism and so on. He suspects that it’s a conspiracy among ministers to keep their gullible congregations in the dark. But the real answer is: Ministers and preachers rarely expound on the latest theories of Bible scholars because they’re really not all that helpful…. or relevant to the lives of real people. What’s more, they change frequently and often conflict with one another.

Of course, I am not saying that academic Bible study is not worthwhile. I spent a large chunk of my life engaged in it… and many of my personal heroes are academics, like Bart Ehrman, who master the details of the historical-critical method in search of any new discoveries or insights about Jesus and his kingdom. I think most people could benefit from at least introductory classes on the Bible and the latest research and methods used by Bible scholars.

No, what I am saying is that academic Bible scholarship rarely if ever threatens Christian faith directly… because Christian faith is not based on historical reconstructions of what “really happened” when Jesus walked on earth.

If that were the case, the only true Christians would be Bible scholars and historians… and I don’t think most of them would say that.

This is the basic mistake that fundamentalism makes. It is, at root, a denial of faith as it is actually experienced in the Christian community… which is the experience of the Risen Christ through word and sacrament.

The doctrine of what’s called the verbal or “plenary” inerrancy of scripture leads, almost inevitably, to assertions that the historical truths embedded in the Gospel texts can be “proven” true – when, in fact, they cannot be. If they could be proven, then Christian faith would not be faith at all but history, scientific knowledge. At best, an historian or secular Bible scholar deals in probabilities, guestimates, hunches even. But faith in Jesus is not a judgment of probability: it’s a response to a call from a real human being.

The post Peter Taught Marcus Who Taught Camillus Who Taught Quintus… first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Shortly after my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible came out, I was asked to fly to Ireland to participate in a debate on the existence of God at University College Cork. I had been doing radio interviews for my book and was very comfortable discussing some of the sillier arguments atheists use to attack Christianity or the Bible – for example, that the Bible is full of scientific “errors” and therefore is obviously complete nonsense. Attacks such as these are basic category errors – a comparison of apples and oranges – that are easily refuted.

But despite studying philosophy as an undergraduate, I didn’t really feel qualified to debate the existence of God. Plus, I was super busy with other things and with business projects, about to go on a trip to Rome, and so I politely declined the offer in Ireland.

At the time, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins were supposedly going around doing debates, taking on people like Dinesh D’Souza and the Oxford theologian and former scientist Alister McGrath. The impression I got was that Hitchens was simply demolishing the theists with his allegedly rapier-like wit and vast erudition. Also, I have always looked with awe on Oxbridge philosophy – home of such luminaries as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elisabeth Anscombe and so on – and so I assumed that the UK philosophers would trot out their allegedly superior logical skills, decades of logical analysis, and easily smash the dusty old arguments of theism. (Truth be told, however, Fr. Coppleston more than held his own against Lord Russell in their famous 1948 debate on the BBC.)

It turns out that I was utterly deluded. In recent times, I’ve begun to systematically record and listen to all of the debates on the Existence of God that I can lay my hands on and listen to them at my leisure.

I made a shocking discovery. It turns out that the atheists are really, really good at insults but are actually quite poor debaters.

Thus, since Christians and observant Jews are typically polite, they are usually at an extreme disadvantage when “debating” atheists such as Hitchens and Harris – especially when they discover that the “debate” consists in nothing but a half-hour of put-downs, snide remarks and petty insinuations. The atheists insult Christianity, Judaism and religion generally with a nastiness that is almost breathtaking. They belittle. They demean. They insinuate. But the one thing they don’t do is offer intelligent arguments.

In fact, they don’t actually reason at all.

Reasoning, after all, is a systematic questioning of assumptions… a marshaling of evidence… a critical examination of arguments. It is not, primarily, name-calling. When I first started watching these debates, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I just assumed the atheists would put forward logical arguments that the Theists would be hard pressed to answer. What I wasn’t prepared for was that the atheists didn’t really marshal arguments at all: they merely sneered. The New Atheists were plainly accustomed to standing up in front of large groups of college students, making snide put-downs that got a lot of laughs and applause; and they were quite good at demolishing arguments made by young earth Creationists and snake-handling fundamentalists. But when faced with genuine Christian intellectuals – such as the philosopher William Lane Craig – they failed utterly to even engage the principal arguments that were made.

For example, when Craig debated Sam Harris on the topic of moral values – whether you can establish the existence of objective moral values without recourse to God – and Craig offered three extremely precise reasons why Harris failed to prove the existence of objective moral values in his then-latest book, The Moral Landscape. He offered a detailed, step by step critique for why Harris’s argument in his book is, at bottom, logically incoherent.

When it came time for Harris to respond, he didn’t. He didn’t respond to a single one of Craig’s logical arguments. Instead, he simply changed the subject – and fell back on his snide one-liner attacks on the Bible and how stupid Christians are.

I actually felt sorry for Harris because he was so clearly out of his depth. Harris studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford, but his Ph.D. is in the new pseudo-science of “neuroscience,” a new inter-disciplinary degree that brings together neurology, psychology and a little philosophy in order to discuss Big Ideas without the burden of actually having to think clearly.

In contrast, Craig earned two master’s degrees in theology, a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Birmingham in the UK, a doctorate in theology under Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich, and then, after all that, spent six years doing post-graduate research at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. What’s more, Craig is a professional philosopher in the analytic mode – meaning, he breaks down philosophical subjects into the various possible options, uncovers the logical assumptions in each of the possible options, and then demonstrates how the hidden assumptions in philosophical arguments or claims undermine the point being made or, in some instances, provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the argument to make sense. As an analytic philosopher, Craig is quite comfortable with rigorous logic, sufficient reason, proof, demonstrations and so on – and so, when doing battle on the field of pure reason and logic, he is able to expose the arguments of the New Atheists (such as they are) as little more than empty rhetoric. Here is how a typical debate between a New Atheist and someone like Craig goes:

Craig: But secondly, the problem that’s even worse is the “ought implies can” problem. In the absence of the ability to do otherwise, there is no moral responsibility. In the absence of freedom of the will, we are just puppets or electro-chemical machines. And puppets do not have moral responsibilities. Machines are not moral agents. But on Dr. Harris’s view, there is no freedom of the will, either in a libertarian or a compatibilistic sense, and therefore, there is no moral responsibility. So there isn’t even the possibility of moral duty on his view. So while I can affirm and applaud Dr. Harris’s affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and moral duties, at the end of the day his philosophical worldview just doesn’t ground these entities that we both want to affirm. If God exists, then we clearly have a sound foundation for objective moral values and moral duties. But if God does not exist, that is, if atheism is true, then there is no basis for the affirmation of objective moral values; and there is no ground for objective moral duties because there is no moral lawgiver and there is no freedom of the will. And therefore it seems to me that atheism is simply bereft of the adequate ontological foundations to establish the moral life .

Now, those were fighting words. Craig just demolished most of the argument in Harris’s most recent book in front of a large audience at the University of Notre Dame. You might think that Harris would be called upon to actually defend his position, to offer reasonable counter-arguments to show why Craig’s attacks were unfair or were missing the point.

But he doesn’t!

Much to my astonishment and disappointment, Harris just reverts to what Atheists do best – which is to change the subject and begin name calling!

Harris: Well, that was all very interesting. Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell? Well, I, I’m told it’s rather hot there, for one. Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality. Ok, the whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls. Now, happily, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Christian Hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework, this theistic framework, in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.

Alright, nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five. ok, picture, picture a, a a Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004, that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those, every ten days, killing children only under five. Ok, that’s 20, 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Ok,, think of, think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered. Ok, but according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of God’s plan. Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn’t care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil.

This is what passes for reasoned argument among the New Atheists.

Well, I thought, perhaps this is unfair. After all, Dr. Craig is a trained professional philosopher with two doctorates and a lifetime of training as an analytic philosopher. Sam Harris studies “neuro-science.” It’s hardly a fair contest. Dr. Craig is trained in mathematical logic; Sam Harris is trained in school yard insults.

So, it seems fair that we compare apples to apples – in this case, an Atheist philosopher versus a Theistic philosopher.

As a result, I started looking for debates between Dr. Craig and some famous atheist philosophers. Much to my delight, I found some! In 2005, it turns out, Dr. Craig debated the British philosopher A.C. Grayling at the Oxford Union on the topic of, “Belief in God Makes Sense in Light of Tsunamis.”

Perfect. Surely, I thought, an atheist philosopher of Grayling’s stature would mount scary, logically airtight arguments against the existence of God and would demolish Dr. Craig – at least teach him a lesson he wouldn’t quickly forget. I was actually rooting for the atheist side! Dr. Craig reminds me of Thomas Aquinas: His logic is so impeccable you have to attack his premises. He is so relentlessly rationalistic you start to root for the underdog.

But, again, I was quickly disappointed. Dr. Craig made his case in his characteristic analytic style: step by step, premise by premise, pointing out the possible weaknesses in his own argument and helpfully suggesting ways his Atheist opponents could possibly prove him wrong.

He began to remind me of Chess Masters who are so confident of their abilities that they actually point out to you, in advance, why you probably don’t want to make that move… because in ten steps it will result in Checkmate. Alas, Craig’s debate with Grayling was as one-sided as was his debate with Sam “I’m Just So Darn Smarter Than Everyone Else” Harris. Grayling was reduced to stammering… and fell back, as Atheists almost always do, on insults. Dr. Craig started off by explaining the underlying presuppositions of the classic logical argument against God from the existence of evil:

Craig: Traditionally, atheists have claimed that the co-existence of God and evil is logically impossible. That is to say, there is no possible world in which God and evil both exist. Since we know that evil exists, the argument goes, it follows logically that God does not exist. It is this version of the problem of evil that professor Grayling recently defended in his debate with Keith Ward in The Prospect.

So, according to the logical version of the problem of evil, (the two statements on your hand-out):

“(A) an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God exists”

and,

“(B) evil exists”

…are logically incompatible.

The difficulty for the atheist, however, is that statements (A) and (B) are not, at face value, logically inconsistent. There’s no explicit contradiction between them. If the atheist thinks they are implicitly contradictory then he must be som – uh – assuming some hidden premises that would serve to bring out the contradiction and make it explicit.

But, what are those premises? Well, the atheist seems to be assuming two things:

“(1) If God is omnipotent then he can create any world that he desires”

and

“(2) If God is omnibenevolent then he prefers a world without evil over a world with evil”

The atheist reasons that: since God is omnipotent he could create a world without evil, and since he is omnibenevolent he would prefer a world without evil, therefore if God exists, evil cannot exist.

Dr. Craig goes on to explain that this version of the problem of evil, based on logical incoherence, has been “seriously undermined” by the incisive critique of the philosopher Alvin Plantinga and has fallen out of disfavor among academic philosophers. He points out that Plantinga has demonstrated that the atheist must show that both of the critical assumptions (1) and (2) are necessarily true in order for the argument to be logically valid. But, Plantinga argues, if it is even possible that human beings have free will then (1) and (2) are not necessarily true.

This is what Analytic Philosophy does best: Break down arguments into their underlying premises… and then demonstrates what must or must not be true in order for an argument to be logically valid.

Okay, I thought, pretty slick. But now the Atheist team is going to bring in one of their Big Guns – an Oxford philosopher, trained in the same logical jujitsu as Dr. Craig. Surely he’s about to meet his match. Then Grayling spoke. If possible, he was even more meandering and non sequitur than Sam Harris, albeit with slightly better manners.

GRALYING: Um, let me just begin with a remark about the tsunami which, as you know, killed several hundred thousand people – among them small children and elderly people – a great majority of them were not Christians – they were people of other faiths and all faiths – I suppose – and of no faith. So I suppose one would need an assumption to the effect that the deity, if, he/she or it caused it or countenanced it or wasn’t able to stop it, nevertheless it would have – in some sense – to be the same deity for all those people, and if there is a greater good envisaged in the event then it would have to be one that, um, is somehow captured in very different forms in these different faiths. And I leave that point hanging in the air because I think it’s something that we need to bring up a bit later on – remembering that there was a competition between the faiths! After all, a Christian will tell you that that the founder of that religion said “I am the way, the truth and the life, no-one comes to the Father but by me”, which seems rather bad news for very many of the people who were swept away by that grave wave .

Once again, the Atheist declines to actually address the topic at hand and simply and quickly changes the subject – in this case, to the multiplicity of religions on earth.

I can’t tell you how disappointed I was by this whole performance.

That’s because there is a part of me that finds airtight logical arguments inherently unpersuasive. Faith, to me, is bigger than logic, bigger than reason. Proving the existence of God from logical arguments seems to me a lot like proving that I love my wife from logical arguments: the very exercise seems a bit inappropriate or even somewhat demeaning. I can imagine approaching my wife and, instead of giving her roses and a box of chocolates on St. Valentine’s Day, proposing the following argument:

A. All men who give their wives presents love them.

B. I give you presents.

C. Therefore, I love you.

If that was how I proved my love for my wife, offering her airtight logical demonstrations, I don’t think I would have been married for very long.

The same is true of God. Authentic religion of any kind has a mystical component that bypasses logic or, rather, that makes logic almost unnecessary. In a very real sense, we have an experience of the grandeur of God – an experience of what mystics call the Numinous – that is above and beyond the rational arguments of the human mind. These experiences don’t preclude logic; they just make logic irrelevant. My felt sense of the awesomeness and holiness of Being – of the transcendent power that maintains in existence galaxies as well as my own beating heart – makes me want to fall to my knees. To try to conjure up a logical premise from such an experience to use in an argument seems almost as absurd as trying to do the same thing after a date with my wife.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not belittling logic and reason, or even debates on the existence of God. I just see their limitations. They say that at the end of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas, Christendom’s foremost logician, had a mystical experience and, after that point, he refused to write another word. “All of my writings are as straw,” he supposedly said. The same thing was true of Blaise Pascal, the brilliant French mathematician, scientist and mystic. When he was young, he had a mystical experience of some kind that changed his life. In a frenzy, he scrawled out a description of what had happened to him:

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

Pascal sewed this inscription into his coat and wore it every day of his life.

All this explains why I am not particularly threatened by logical arguments against the existence of God… and why I can even root for the Atheist team a little. If I were to debate myself, I would never use mystical experience as an argument for God’s existence because it is non-falsifiable, it is an unfair trump card that avoids logical reasoning. But just as my love for my wife is not the result of a logical demonstration, so, too, my faith in God is not the result of a chain of deduction. Reason can perhaps confirm what we know already by faith, but faith is rarely the result of reason. What’s more, I have this sense that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not the Prime Mover of Aristotelian logic… and that to argue for his existence, using the paltry weapons of the human mind, seems almost presumptuous. So, that is why I came to the Atheist debates with a relatively open mind.

Although the existence of God is as self-evident to me as the existence of air, I am perfectly comfortable with the notion that his existence may not be provable logically. The Catholic Church holds as a religious dogma that his existence can be proven, but I was and am willing to entertain the possibility that, with the development of new tools of logical analysis, the traditional Theistic arguments for his existence may be found wanting. For example, I have long been persuaded that the modern argument from design, at least as presented by the Intelligent Design movement, can be persuasively overcome. The concept of “irreducible complexity,” used by Intelligent Design theorists such as Dembski and Behe, has been effectively questioned by scientists and philosophers. As a result, not all Theist arguments hold water… and I came to the New Atheist debates with an open mind concerning which arguments were solid and which could be undermined.

What I was wholly unprepared for, however, was the way in which the Atheist team completely abandoned the effort to present logical arguments at all and simply reverted to name calling. As I said, when faced with worthy opponents, such as Dr. Craig or even Dinesh D’Souza, many of the atheist debaters gave up any effort to mount rational arguments and just started making snide remarks. These remarks sometimes got a laugh – even I chuckled at some of them – but what they didn’t do was make any sort of rational case. It’s gotten so bad that the enfant terrible of the New Atheists, the popular science writer Richard Dawkins, has refused to debate William Lane Craig at all. In typical New Atheist fashion, he doesn’t offer reasons but only insults: He asked colleagues in the philosophy department at Oxford and “no one” had heard of Dr. Craig. Thus, Dr. Craig is too small of a fish to face such an intellectual giant as himself. Even many atheists are now embarrassed by Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig.

The post Why I Secretly Root for the Atheists in Debates first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy.

When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job.

Today, however, all that has changed.

There are three or four excellent “magazines” about philosophy – such as Philosophy Now and The Philospher’s Magazine – that are filled with funny, off-beat, irreverent articles about philosophical topics. A number of top-rate publishing houses, mostly in the UK, such as Routledge and Blackwell Publishing, produce books aimed at a general philosophical readership.

There are philosophy radio programs such as Philosophy Talk… coffee houses… salons… adult education classes… and literally hundreds of websites for the interested reader. There are even philosophy comic books, such as LogiComix about the life of British logician Bertrand Russell. It’s simply amazing. It’s a golden age of philosophy, I think.

The irony, however, is that there is still no solid consensus on what, precisely, philosophy actually is. In its historical and etymological sense, philosophy is literally “love (philia) of wisdom (Sophia),” and that is always how I have looked upon it. Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to reflect upon experience in order to understand more about life and how we are to live. My aims, like those of Socrates, are primarily practical: I want to understand the world and myself to live better.

Today, there are three, perhaps four major “schools” or approaches to philosophy, each with their own journals, intellectual heroes and methodologies. It is one of the scandals of contemporary philosophy that these schools are somewhat incommensurable, meaning they are so different in their approaches and ideals they are almost incapable of speaking to one another. It’s as though organic chemistry and 17th century French literature are forced to share the same offices and pretend they are the same discipline (I exaggerate but you get the point).

The first approach may be called, for lack of a better word, Traditional Philosophy: this is the approach now largely taught only in Catholic universities. It is primarily historical in orientation, a “history of philosophy” style in which students study the thought of, say, the ancient Greeks, and Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel and so on. There is very little attempt to think through how the thought of these philosophical greats can be reconciled. The idea appears to be that by working through all of these great thinkers, eventually the student will come to his or her own philosophical conclusions — although there is really no fixed “method” or approach given for doing so. I always think of this as the University of Chicago or Great Books approach. A variation of this approach is Catholic philosophy, including various schools of Thomism (such as the Transcendental Thomism of Joseph Maréchal, Karl Rahner and, my own guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan)

The second major approach to philosophy today is what is known as Continental Philosophy. This is the philosophy that is most commonly taught in Europe and, again, in some Catholic universities in the U.S. In practice, it means primarily the philosophical systems of phenomenology, existentialism, so-called “critical theory” and their postmodern descendants. When I was in college, this is what I studied (in addition to traditional philosophy). We read the classic texts of phenomenology as well as such trendy philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and others. Today, those names have largely been replaced by those of postmodern French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard. While classical Husserlian phenomenology does attempt to “solve” major philosophical problems and actually be a descriptive science, in practice students of Continental Philosophy, like their Traditional Philosophy counterparts, spend much of their time studying the works of individual thinkers and writing papers on aspects of their thought. (There is a greater interest in Continental Philosophy in social and political questions, however.)

The third and allegedly dominant approach to philosophy today is Analytic Philosophy. This is the philosophy most commonly taught in the UK and in major U.S. universities. Built upon the infrastructure of British empiricists such as David Hume, Analytic Philosophy appeared in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I was in college, I found Analytic Philosophy to be mostly unintelligible gibberish. The emphasis on symbolic logic and the solving of trivial intellectual “puzzles” was, to me, an absurd waste of time.

In the past few years, however, I’ve been reading more about Analytic Philosophy and I am now much more impressed. Analytic Philosophy has matured over the past few decades and is now more of a philosophical “style” than it is a collection of doctrines. The style is more like that of my hero, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, in that Analytic Philosophy is much more interested in actually solving philosophical problems than it is in clarifying the thought of past philosophers. Thus, Analytic Philosophy is characterized by a thematic, rather than a “history of philosophy,” approach. It uses or creates a specialized technical vocabulary to elucidate the various “options” available in any given philosophical issue… marshals the evidence in favor or against those options… and then attempts to actually “settle” the issue. It’s actually quite refreshing.

The only problem with Analytic Philosophy from the perspective of a traditional philosopher or “lover of wisdom” is that it’s still focused primarily on trivial problems or mere puzzles (perhaps because those are the easiest ones to “solve”).  The cure for this tedium has been, over the past several years, the appearance of those popular philosophy journals and publishing houses I mentioned earlier. Precisely because they are aiming at a wider audience, the popular philosophy authors have to turn their attention to the Big Issues that interest real people – and thus are forced by the market to abandon the tedium beloved by academics and use their philosophical skills to address topics people actually care about. An example of how wonderful this can be is a book I am reading right now, Michael Sandel’s magisterial Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? It’s clear, concise, lays open the various options available on contentious issues, concerns serious subjects (what is justice?) and doesn’t resort to pretentious displays of symbolic logic to make its points.

These days, I mostly read good Catholic philosophy (such as can be found in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly or Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies) and “popular” analytic books such as Justice or those produced by Routledge.  I still can’t read academic analytic philosophy journals.  I tried subscribing to Faith and Philosophy, the (mostly analytic) journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, but found it deadly dull and exhibiting the worst aspects of analytic pretentiousness.  Here’s a sample, taken from John Turri’s essay, “Practical and Epistemic Justification in Alston’s Perceiving God” (July 2008, p. 290):

“Alston’s thesis is that putative perceptions of God often justify beliefs about God.  A subject S has a putative perception of God when S has an experience e in which it seems to S that God appears to S as P.  If, based on e, S forms the “M-belief” that God is P, then S has a justified belief that God is P.  An M-belief is a belief that God is P, which is based on a putative perception of God.  (I will often substitute ‘q’ for the proposition that God is P.)

My reaction to writing like that is the same as George Will’s: Just because life is absurd that doesn’t mean philosophy should be as well.

I don’t mean to pick on John Turri, whom I am sure is a great guy and a lot smarter than I am. But this sort of stuff is meant solely for professional philosophers in universities… and is largely what turns people off to philosophy as an academic discipline.  If Socrates had spoken like that, they probably would have forced him to drink hemlock much earlier and philosophy would never have gotten off the ground.

The post Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

What’s a peaceful, freedom-loving, family-oriented, hard-working Catholic guy to do with the current state of U.S. politics? For decades, now, it’s been obvious that even a moderately faithful Catholic cannot feel at home in any of the major, or even the minor, U.S. political parties. We are given the choice between an increasingly militaristic, even bellicose Republican Party that goes out of its way to sneer at civil liberties and enthusiastically endorses torture, illegal surveillance of ordinary citizens and the death penalty… and the morally tone-deaf party of slavery (both literally and figuratively), the Democrats, who have never seen an authoritarian Big Government program they didn’t like and whose only economic policy prescription is to “Tax the Rich” (the “rich” being defined as anyone who holds a job) and whose embrace of “abortion rights” is so extreme that it even includes outright infanticide.

Not a very appealing choice. The Party of Death versus, well, the Party of More Death.

The truth is, Catholics are odd ducks in American politics. The ones who actually go to church and believe the central tenets of their Faith (as opposed to the “I was raised” Catholic variety who skew polling data) are, by and large, fairly conservative on social issues (abortion, marriage and embryo research), moderate on economic issues and occasionally downright liberal on environmental, peace and justice issues. (Most church-going Catholics, for example, accept Pope John Paul II’s teaching that the death penalty is illegitimate in most modern societies.) Part of this odd political schizophrenia stems directly from Catholic social teaching as enunciated in papal encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum (1891), Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Mater et Magistra (1961), Populorum Progressio (1967) and Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and Centesimus Annus (1991). As the popes have explained for the past 200 years, the dominant principles underlying Christian teaching on both social and economic issues are what’s called the Principle of Subsidiarity and the Principle of Solidarity.

The Principle of Subsidiarity means that, for both practical and philosophical reasons, matters ought to be handled by “the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.” That means that Catholics believe in local, de-centralized, “small is better” forms of government. You don’t have the Federal government setting education policy, for example, when education is done on a local neighborhood level. In practical terms, the principle of subsidiarity favors regional solutions to problems over dictats from distant and unaccountable authority. On this score, Catholics would gravitate more towards a free market or Republican approach to economic matters. The Catholic political sensibility favors federalism, states’ rights, regionalism, non-empire building. Small is beautiful indeed.

But the principle of subsidiarity must also be balanced by the Principle of Solidarity or a commitment to the common good. As Pope John Paul II explained it in his encyclical Solicitudo Rei Socialis, “Solidarity… is a virtue directed par excellence to the common good, and is found in ‘a commitment to the good of one’s neighbor with the readiness, in the Gospel sense, to ‘ lose oneself’ for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to ‘serve him’ instead of oppressing him for one’s own advantage (Mt 10:40-42, 20-25;Mk 10:42-45; Lk 22:25-27) ( Sollicitudo Rei Socialis ). Thus, while Catholics believe in the liberty-based ideals of a free market and de-centralized authority, these ideals are not absolute: They must be balanced with a “commitment to the good of one’s neighbor.” For that reason, most faithful Catholics do not object to, say, zoning regulations that prohibit strip clubs from opening near schools… or environmental protection laws that forbid dumping toxic waste directly in the ocean. The principle of solidarity is also why Catholics oppose abortion on principle: A woman’s freedom of choice ends precisely where another human life is involved.

For me personally, the only politician who comes close to living up to these ideals is the “unelectable” and “crazy” Dr. Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a libertarian on economic matters (more libertarian than Church teaching), opposed to the death penalty, opposed to America waging undeclared and unending wars overseas, opposed to the illegal and immoral use of torture, opposed to violations of civil liberties through the U.S. Patriot Act. Because he was a true physician and O.B. and delivered thousands of babies, Dr. Paul is also prolife, which, to me, shows a willingness to concede that his libertarian principles are not absolute. I thus voted for Dr. Paul in 2008 and will vote for him again in 2012. He is the only Republican candidate who even pretends to adhere to any fixed principles.

For a while, I was tempted by some of what the Green Parties say. I am, after all, prolife. I was raised in a vast forest. I’ve always liked the Greens and agree with a lot of the Global Greens Charter adopted in Canberra in 2001. The global Green Platform includes many very Catholic statements of principle in regards to nonviolence, social justice, participatory democracy, economic and ecological sustainability, de-centralized decision-making, human rights, and so on. Were it not for abortion, I would probably even sign up! The Greens oppose capital punishment and torture, as do I. They support regional farming and small business, as do I. Their champion for a long time was Ralph Nader, whom I have always liked even when I disagree with him on some economic questions and despite the fact that he is a lawyer.

Unfortunately, however, in the U.S. the Greens, like Amnesty International, have been taken over by extremist pro-abortion fanatics for whom the right to kill infants in the womb is “non-negotiable.” In Europe, most of the Green Parties insist that “questions implying life and death are sensitive ones indeed and let it be clear that the European Green Party has never advocated unrestricted abortion rights.” The European Greens, especially in Germany, have had painful experience with what happens when societies endorse medical killing…. and are thus much less enthusiastic when it comes to abortion and euthanasia than are liberals in the U.S. But for U.S. liberals, abortion trumps all else. How a party that claims to be “green” can celebrate the surgical dismemberment of an infant in the womb… or think that chemically poisoning such a child through saline solution or RU486 is somehow a “life-enhancing” act… is beyond me. Here is what the platform of the Green Party in the USA states on abortion:

Women’s right to control their bodies is non-negotiable. It is essential that the option of a safe, legal abortion remains available. The “morning-after” pill must be affordable and easily accessible without a prescription, together with a government-sponsored public relations campaign to educate women about this form of contraception. Clinics must be accessible & must offer advice on contraception; consultation about abortion and the performance of abortions. — Source: 2008 Green Party Platform from 2008 Chicago Convention Jul 13, 2008

Well, that crosses the Greens off of the list for Catholics, at least the Greens in the U.S.!

What about the Phillip Blond’s Red Tories? They are consciously drawing upon Distributist ideals. Distributism is the name given to the political aspirations of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Fr. Vincent McNabb, OP, in the early 20th century. Opposed to both Big Government liberals and Big Business conservatives, the Distributists favored small, locally owned farms and businesses and sought to put into practice the Corporal Works of Mercy. Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement were an example of early Distributist thought. Certainly, neo-Distributism has many attractions for Catholics… and much of what the Red Tories say appeal to us. Yet among their many attractions, numbers isn’t one of them – meaning, both Distributism and the Red Tories are more of a philosophical objection than a real-life movement.

If I was really pressed, however, I would have to say that the political movement that comes closest to authentic Catholic ideals and my own temperament would have to be The Idler movement founded by UK writer and general layabout Tom Hodgkinson. IN a very real way, Tom comes far closer to living out the ideals of Distributism, and thus of Catholic social teaching, than any of the more “serious” political parties we’ve been discussing. In a very real sense, The Idler movement is apolitical. Like G.K. Chesterton and the Distributists, Tom thinks that the most important things in life have nothing whatsoever to do with politics — things like raising children, dancing with your wife, river racing, drinking with friends — and that we should, by and large, ignore both politics and politicians. For example, Tom does not vote… and, the more I see of U.S. politics, the more I understand why he takes this stance. How can a person with principles stand with either the Party of Slavery (the Democrats) or with the Party of Torture (the Republicans)?

The post Can a Faithful Christian be a Democrat, Republican or Green? first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Ready or not, Obamacare is finally here. Polls show that most Americans remain highly skeptical of the law’s benefits. According to a new CNN/ORC International survey released October 1, less than one in five Americans say their families will be better off under the new health care law.

Nevertheless, the controversial law’s passionate defenders insist it represents an historic event.

It extends health care coverage to between 10 and 35 million Americans, depending upon how many will actually choose to sign up, and represents the single biggest change in health care financing since the advent of Medicare in the mid-1960s.

More controversial is the claim that Obamacare will reduce costs for most Americans.

Republicans insist that the costs of Obamacare will be enormous and that they will be borne by middle class families who can ill afford them, especially in the current economy.

Democrats, like the president himself, claim that most families will actually save money with Obamacare. Obama himself claimed that the new law would reduce premium costs for the average family by $2,500 a year.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) insists that Republicans are “desperate” to stop the law before it goes into effect so ordinary people can’t learn more about the law’s many benefits.

“That’s why Republicans want to stop Obamacare,” the Illinois liberal said. “They don’t want these exchanges to be announced. They don’t want people to see these options. They know what’s going to happen.”

Well, like many Americans, I decided to run the numbers for our family.

As a self-employed writer, I’ve bought my family’s health insurance for the past 25 years. We’ve been with Blue Cross ever since my wife and I were married. At first, we had fairly low deductibles… but as premium costs escalated over the past 10 years, we, like most business folk, have gradually raised our deductibles and paid more of our health costs out of pocket. I remember paying about $5,000 for every birth, for example.

Our current Blue Cross plan currently costs us $650 a month or $7,800 a year with a $5,000 per person deductible with a maximum out-of-pocket family limit of $15,000. This is the type of plan that the Democrats ridicule as little more than “catastrophe insurance” and “not really health insurance at all.”

And I must admit, when compared to the taxpayer-provided Cadillac plans government workers and teachers get, I suppose that characterization is fair.

The chief advantage of our current insurance, for us, is that it limits the outrageous fees that hospitals and doctors can charge.

For example, a typical visit to a hospital emergency room two years ago – when one of my sons had severe stomach pains and we suspected appendicitis – was billed at around $10,000. Blue Cross disallowed 90% of that as absurd over-billing and we ended up paying $1,000 out of pocket – still a lot for a 3-hour visit, but a lot less than we would have paid.

Nevertheless, we pay enough in out-of-pocket fees each year that I was willing to give Obamacare the benefit of the doubt.

I spend a lot of time in British Columbia and look longingly at BC Medical Services Plan (MSP)’s monthly premium of $128 per family of three or more — with all primary care (excluding dental) covered. My eldest son’s new British wife extols the virtues of the National Health Service (NHS) which will pay 100% of the costs associated with the delivery of their expected first child – albeit delivered by a China-trained midwife and without the benefit of the epidural American women say is a necessity.

So, using MSNBC’s nifty Obamacare calculator, I decided to take a hard look at the numbers. (You can use the calculator yourself by clicking here.)

We are a solidly middle class family – yet, with so many children, we qualify for a substantial tax credit.

Under Obamacare’s Silver Plan (comparable to our current Blue Cross plan) our annual premiums would cost $18,190 – or $1,515 a month.

That’s $865 more than we’re currently paying – an increase of 133%.

With a projected tax credit of $4,890, however, that would lower our annual premiums to $13,300 ($1,108 per month). That’s still $458 more per month (or 70% more) than we currently pay—and we have to, in effect, loan the government money because we actually have to pay the $1,515 per month and only get a tax credit at the end of the year.

But that’s not all.

All this might be worth it if the Obamacare plan provided better benefits or a lower deductible – but it doesn’t!

The law’s defenders ridicule our current plan as mere “catastrophe insurance” because of the high deductibles and out of pocket costs, but the Obamacare plan for our family has an annual cap on out of pocket expenses of $12,700 – or just a little less than the Blue Cross limit of $15,000.

In other words: Obamacare is just as much “catastrophe insurance” as most high-deductible private plans.

As a result, I calculated the costs of three scenarios: (1) we spend 100% of our out-of-pocket limits; (2) we spend 50% of our annual out of pocket limits; and(3) we spend 0% of our annual out-of-pocket limits (basically, never visit a doctor all year).

Under all three scenarios, Obamacare represents a real increase of $3,200 to $5,500 a year for our family.

Finally, the worst aspect of the new law is that, while you pay substantially more for the same coverage you can get privately, your choice of doctors and providers is more limited under Obamacare. Our Blue Cross PPO plan covers pretty much every doctor and clinic in our area. Obamacare is more like a HMO in that limits the doctors and hospitals to which you have access – in some areas, severely so. (See the Heritage Foundation’s analysis here.)

My conclusion: Obamacare doesn’t make any financial sense whatsoever for our family…and is a lousy deal. We will stick with our Blue Cross plan, which I don’t particularly like, because government provided health care costs more and offers less choice, not more.

By the way, on October 1, the U.S. Senate voted to provide massive subsidies to itself and its staff – so the politicians who voted for Obamacare would not themselves have to pay any of the new costs associated with it.

One final note: As a self-employed business person, I’m pragmatic. I think the U.S. is rich enough that it actually could provide a generous, single-payer health care system that eliminates the over-priced and wasteful system we have now. Medicare really is proof of that.

To fund such a system, I propose we eliminate 30% of the do-nothing government jobs we currently pay for – along with the six-figure, retire-at-50 pensions we also pay for – and use that money to fund the single-payer healthcare system the Democrats want so badly.

Let’s make a deal: In exchange for a single payer system, Democrats will agree to eliminate 30% of all government worker jobs (the assistant sub-deputy undersecretary for the Department of Public Money Wasting) along with their fat pensions – to shrink the government back to what it was in, say, 1990.

That would be a deal the country would support, could afford, and which might actually fix the long-term health care crisis.

The post Crunching the Obamacare Numbers: A Lot More Money for A Lot Less Care first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

You know what they say:  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

The American people have learned the hard way that US politicians in both political parties tend to passively defer to what the “experts” in the defense and intelligence sectors advise doing, often to the detriment of the country and of our standing in the world.

The prime example of this is the reckless way the politicians accepted, without sufficient questioning, the assertion by military and intelligence experts that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq – and that this justified launching a full-blown war against that country that lasted nearly a decade, cost an estimated $1.7 trillion and the lives of 4,500 U.S. soldiers. 

If there is a sense of déjà vu overwhelming the country at the moment, it’s because the drum beats of war against Syria sound eerily similar to the drum beats of war against Iraq.

The big difference, however, is that Saddam Hussein was likely a far greater mass murderer than Assad… and George Bush actually went out of his way to secure the legal authority for an attack from both the U.S. Congress (including virtually all Democrats), most of our allies and the entire United Nations Security Council (unanimous Resolution 1441).

The one government he couldn’t persuade was the Vatican:  Pope John Paul II remained steadfastly opposed to the attack on Saddam Hussein… just as Pope Francis today is steadfastly opposed to escalating a civil war into a wider regional conflict that could engulf the entire Middle East.

The reason is simple:  Under international law and the principles of just war theory, there is little justification for the U.S. government to attack a sovereign country in the midst of a civil war… especially when both sides in the conflict have been accused of horrendous atrocities. 

1.  It is not an act of self-defense:  Syria has not launched a military attack against any U.S. forces.  It is engaged in a bloody civil war, as the U.S. has been in its past;  and the U.S. has no mutual defense treaties with Syrian rebels… some of whom are Islamic fundamentalists, affiliated with Al-Qaeda, who are accused of such war crimes as torture, summary executions and even cannibalism.       

2.  The U.S. does not have the legal authority to wage war against Syria unilaterally:  No less an constitutional scholar than Barrack Obama said, in a 2007 interview with the Boston Globe, that “the President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”  On September 4, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that any military strikes against Syria would be illegal unless done in self-defense under the UN charter or unless approved by the UN Security Council.

3.  There is some doubt about a reasonable expectation of success:  The Daily Mail reported recently that the Pentagon, in a secret memorandum prepared for Obama in early 2012, estimated it would require 75,000 ground troops to secure Syrian chemical weapons and that air strikes alone would not do the job. 

4.  Military strikes should always be the last, not the first, resort:  Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, insists that there are numerous diplomatic and humanitarian initiatives that have yet to be even considered, let alone attempted.     

5.   The American people are overwhelmingly opposed to a new war in the Middle East:  A Washington Post/ABC News poll released September 2 found nearly 60% of Americans opposed to military strikes against Syria… while a Pew Research Center poll, released the same day, found that 48% of adults are against military strikes while only 29% are in favor.   

6.  There is a very strong likelihood that an attack against Syria will produce evils graver than the evil to be eliminated.  Even the “pro-war” Wall Street Journal admits that an attack against Syria risks “triggering a bloody escalation”:  “If the regime digs in and uses chemical weapons again, or launches retaliatory attacks against the U.S. and its allies in the region, Mr. Obama will come under fierce pressure to respond more forcefully, increasing the chances of full-scale war…”  A worse-case scenario would be the involvement of Iran, Israel and other Middle Eastern states that could even, under certain conditions, involve nuclear weapons. 

Concerning the last criterion, proportionality, Pope John Paul was surely prescient.  While advocates for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003 said it would be a “cake walk,” over in 24 hours with minimal loss of human life, the reality was quite different.

Observers disagree about the numbers, but the number of Iraqis killed in the Iraq War ranges from 110,000 (Associated Press) to as high as 600,000 (the Lancet).  The Iraq Body Count Project estimates between 110,937and 121,227 civilian deaths. 

That’s an awful lot of “collateral damage,” as the generals like to call children blown to bits by their cruise missiles and drones.

On a purely practical level, moreover, lobbing a few cruise missiles at Syrian targets won’t have any significant impact on the civil war itself.  If anything, it could well only strengthen Assad’s position.  It’s purely political theatre, an act designed for Obama to “save face” after he imprudently declared a “line in the sand.”

That’s why critics rightly suspect that the cruise missiles will be only the first stage… and that, despite Obama’s promises to the contrary, the cruise missiles will inevitably be followed by American “boots on the ground.”

The bottom line:  The American public is sick of war.  No more U.S. teenagers should die so Obama can “save face.” 

As Time Magazine put it, Obama was elected, in part, to put an end to the era of perpetual warfare that George Bush and the neo-cons foisted upon the American people.

Yet now Obama has morphed into the Assassin-in-Chief who believes that his status as commander of U.S. forces gives him the right to execute without trial anyone, anywhere in the world, including U.S. citizens, the CIA deems maybe a possible terrorist.

No, the American people are finally waking up.

Just as they have been outraged to discover the almost pathological spying the U.S. government conducts on its own citizens, so, too, they are no longer willing to give the politicians and generals the benefit of the doubt when it comes to war.

They are asking hard questions this time… and the politicians and generals don’t have ready answers.

The post The American People Say: You Fooled Us Once with Iraq… first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

The “French Spring” movement (le Printemps Français) has rattled the French political establishment – and even gay marriage advocates in faraway California. That’s because it calls into question the claim that same sex marriage is “inevitable” and opposition to it mere bigotry.

In recent months, between 400,000 and a million demonstrators of all ages have crowded the streets of Paris and other large cities in France, loudly objecting to a gay marriage law that, the demonstrators insist, enshrines the notion that mothers and fathers are “optional” for children.

The demonstrators carry signs with a striking logo: a red fist and a blue fist, signifying a man and a woman in revolt, with the tiny white hand of a child between them. Their motto, On ne lâche rien, can be roughly translated, “never give in” or “give nothing up.”

“This is not simply a law to give homosexuals the right to marry,” Philippe Brillault, the mayor of Le Chesnay, a small town near Versailles, told the Los Angeles Times July 16th. “It’s a new concept of the family.”

As in the United States, New Zealand and, soon, Great Britain, political elites in France attempted to rush through a gay marriage law in early 2013 and hoped that the population would respond, in essence, with a shrug.

It was a realistic hope. The French are famously tolerant of sexual liberties and unconventional lifestyles.

The funeral of former French president François Mitterrand was attended by both his wife and his longtime mistress. The current French president, the increasingly unpopular Socialist François Hollande, left the mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, whom he never married, to live with another woman, the French journalist Valérie Trierweiler.
But something about the gay marriage law has struck millions of ordinary French people as one step too far.

For one thing, the French law, like those in Anglo countries, constitutes a radical redefinition of marriage being imposed upon a large segment of the populace without their consent.
In June 2011, the French National Assembly voted 293 to 222 against legalizing same-sex marriage. But a year later, Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party won a majority in the National Assembly and announced that legalizing gay marriage was a top priority.

In February 2013, a new gay marriage law – dubbed “Marriage for All” by the government but widely nicknamed “Taubira” after the 61-year-old French Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira, who pushed it through the Assembly – passed by a vote of 335 to 221.

Despite the government’s claim that the law enjoyed widespread support, it quickly gave birth to “Demonstrations for All” as hundreds of thousands of people flooded into the streets of Paris to protest.

In a society that gave birth to the motto, Vive la différenc e – celebrating the differences and frisson between the sexes – there is a certain discomfort with the campaign to make those differences largely irrelevant.

“This project [gay marriage] wants to eliminate sexual distinction and with it the foundations of human identity,” the demonstrators wrote on their website .
One of the leaders of the large public demonstrations against the new law that erupted in April and May, the flamboyant French comedienne Virginie Tellenne (stage name Frigide Barjot), explained that she is not “anti-gay” but rather “pro-family.” Or, as the posters put it, “pas homophobe” but “mariageophile.”

“I wanted to give a voice to the thousands of ordinary people, not all of them people of the right, who believe that gay marriage, in the way that it has been imposed in France, is an attack on the family and foundations on which our society is built,” Tellenne told Britain’s The Independent newspaper in late May.

As in other countries, French public opinion appears to be heavily divided.

Opinion polls in 2012 ranged from between 60% and 65% of French supporting the same sex marriage law… but support appears to have plummeted dramatically in 2013, as the debate raged in the streets. A May 2013 Ifop poll for Antlantico found only 53% of respondents in favor of same-sex marriage and adoption rights for same-sex couples.

“Weeks after it was passed by the Socialist government in May, France’s ‘marriage for all’ law continues to divide the country, fueling a debate that is far more polarizing and vituperative than many had expected,” the Los Angeles Times concluded . “Once the protests gathered steam, they became an outlet for a more generalized disgust with Hollande’s year-old administration. Its lackluster economic performance and embarrassing scandals have earned Hollande the lowest approval ratings of any president since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.”

Indeed, it’s difficult not to see the protests against France’s gay marriage law as a galvanizing event, bringing into relief the same deep divisions in French society that exist in the United States.

On the one side is an urban elite intent on refashioning society into its own image… and on the other is a far larger, more suburban majority that sees its most fundamental beliefs and values under assault. Both sides believe that the gay marriage law has sparked a backlash among a large segment of the French public.

Complicating this primordial culture war is France’s violent political history – with France’s left-wing political parties, once shameless apologists for Stalinist tyranny, squared off against right-wing political groups associated with racism, fascism and even, in the case of the 1962 Algeria War, an attempted political coup.

What has truly alarmed the French political establishment, however, is how the largely spontaneous “Demonstrations for All” (Manif pour tous) against gay marriage have morphed into a larger, more organized political movement, Le Printemps Français, drawing together family, Catholic, traditionalist and some anti-immigrant right-wing groups.

The spokespeople for Le Printemps Français insist their movement is populist, largely apolitical, non-violent, and made up of young people and families intent on preserving the traditional French family.

One of its most public spokeswomen, Béatrice Bourges, says she is hardly the traditionalist Catholic portrayed in the media. She is divorced and remarried, she says, and never votes for the right-wing, anti-immigrant National Front. “How can I be a Catholic extremist?” the plainly exasperated Bourges asked Britains’s Independent newspaper in May. “I have never voted for the far right. I am passionately opposed to violence of any kind. Printemps Français is more a state of mind than a movement. We urge transgressive, but non-violent, resistance. That is to say that we intend to defy a state which has imposed a law which will distort and corrupt the true foundations of human society and civilisation.”

Nevertheless, clashes between police and Le Printemps Français demonstrators reached a dangerous level in May and June. Both sides have martyrs to their causes. Gay groups point to Dutch-born Wilfred de Bruijn, beaten up while walking arm in arm with his gay partner in Paris in April.

For Printemps Français, there is the case of “political prisoner” Nicolas Bernard-Busse , a 23-year old French university student arrested and beaten up June 16 at a demonstration outside the studios of a Paris TV station, where President François Hollande was appearing.

French courts sentenced Bernard-Busse to four months in solitary confinement for the crime of “lying to police” about his name (he gave his game as “Bernard Busse” instead of “Nicolas Bernard-Busse”).

The treatment of Bernard-Busse has been sufficiently egregious that the Council of Europe has sent human rights investigators to France to look into government violence against people protesting the same-sex marriage .

Clearly, things are not going as planned.

France’s socialist government is so alarmed by what Le Printemps Français represents that it took the unusual step of threatening to “ban” it in late May as an illegal, possibly violent organization.

Critics insist that the real threat from Printemps Français lies in its intelligent opposition to gay marriage. Unlike in the United States, the French opposition to gay marriage has focused like a laser beam on its impact on children. Indeed, it is the calm reasonableness of Bourges that seems to unnerve French politicians the most.

“Homosexuals are just people who are trying to make sense of what they are, just like the rest of us,” she told The Independent. “I can understand why they should want to get married. But this law, as it has been framed in France, goes far beyond that. It gives the right to homosexual couples to adopt, which will fundamentally change the conception of family and destroy children’s sense of where they come from.”

But what’s the difference between a heterosexual couple adopting children and a gay couple?
“When a heterosexual couple adopts, they are fulfilling, or replicating, the roles of the biological parents,” Bourges responded. “If a homosexual couple adopts, they are denying the natural origins of humanity. They are saying that children do not come from a relationship between a man and a woman. They are a possession, an accoutrement, something that you can choose to acquire like a car or a necklace.”
Bourges is articulate, friendly and performs well on TV, even against hostile interviwers. Whether her movement can remain focused on family issues – or will be coopted and taken over by more violent fringe groups on the political right – remains to be seen.

Like most of Europe, France is seething with racial tension brought on by large-scale, largely Muslim immigration and record unemployment. The anti-immigrant National Front, with a new generation of young French politicians, won 13.6% of the 2012 National Assembly elections, triple what they received in 2007. Even more radical groups, such as Bloc Identitaire, violently opposed to Muslims in France, are also growing in size and influence.

Thus, like all political movements, Printemps Français has many enemies… but its friends may be even more dangerous.

The post French Politicians Alarmed by “French Spring” Movement first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

I never really expected to actually see the Loch Ness Monster. As a result, when I looked through the tour boat window out at the frigid waters of the loch and happened to spot “Nessie” cruising alongside with a little monster in tow, it was a startling moment.

Actual photo of Loch Ness monster and child seen through the glass window of the tour boat cruising the loch. Photo by Robert Hutchinson

What made it more amazing was that I was gazing at the time at the radar scanner that the boat has in its main cabin. As it moves up and down the loch, this boat, and the other boats as well, are constantly scanning every nook and cranny of this 23-mile-long inland lake in the Highlands of Scotland. Loch Ness is the second largest lake in Scotland (after Loch Lomand, where the popular BBC series, Monarch of the Glen, was filmed). But there she was, right before my eyes, right out the starboard window (see nearby photo).

I was in the UK on personal business and decided, after visiting St. Andrews and its famous golf course and university, to take a trip up north and see Nessie for myself. I’ve always been willing to believe in most legendary creatures now derided by science, including the yeti of the Himalayas, the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest, fire-breathing dragons, at least some elves, trolls for sure (I’ve met some myself!), and giants. I haven’t made up my mind about vampires and werewolves, though, and am an unreconstructed skeptic when it comes to space aliens. But Nessie? A race of prehistoric plesiosaurs that somehow survived in the isolated lochs of northern Scotland and falsely believed, like the famous coelacanth, to be extinct? Sure, no problem!

The Loch Ness monster was first mentioned, as far as we can tell, in the 7th century. According to Adomnán, the ninth Abbot of the monastery of Iona, who wrote The Life of St. Columba, the great Celtic saint saw the monster himself around the year A.D. 565:

Also at another time, when the blessed man was for a lumber of days in the province of the Picts, he had to cross the river Nes [Ness]. When lie reached its bank, he saw a poor fellow being buried by other inhabitants; and the buriers said that, while swimming not long before, he had been seized and most savagely bitten by a water beast. Some men, going to his rescue in a wooden boat, though too late, had put out hooks and caught hold of his wretched corpse. When the blessed man heard this, he ordered notwithstanding that one of his companions should swim out and bring back to him, by sailing, a boat that stood on the opposite bank.

Hearing this order of the holy and memorable man, Lugne mocu obeyed without delay, and putting off his clothes, excepting his tunic, plunged into the water. But the monster, whose appetite had earlier been not so much sated as whetted for prey, lurked in the depth of the river. Feeling the water above disturbed by Lugne’s swimming, it suddenly swam up to the surface, and with gaping mouth and with great roaring rushed towards the man swimming in the middle of the stream. While all that were there, barbarians and even the brothers, were struck down with extreme terror, the blessed man, who was watching, raised his holy hand and drew the saving sign of the cross in the empty air; and then, invoking the name of God, he commanded the savage beast, and said: “You will go no further. Do not touch the man; turn back speedily”. Then, hearing this command of the saint, the beast, as if pulled back with ropes, fled terrified in swift retreat; although it had before approached so close to Lugne as he swam that there was no more than the length of one short pole between man and beast.Then seeing that the beast had withdrawn and that their fellow- soldier Lugne had returned to them unharmed and safe, in the boat, the brothers with great amazement glorified God in the blessed man. And also the pagan barbarians who were there at the time, impelled by the magnitude of this miracle that they themselves had seen, magnified the God of the Christians.”

Things were pretty quiet, though, for the next 1,400 years. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Nessie sightings really picked up… and led skeptics to charge that the whole thing was an elaborate publicity stunt for the money-grubbing Scots! In 1933, a man named George Spicer and his wife reported seeing a large creature crossing the road with a 25-foot-long body and a long, very narrow neck. Nessie gained a lot more publicity, though, when a famous photograph was taken of her the next year, in 1934, supposedly by a London gynecologist named Robert Wilson. That photo remains the iconic evidence for Nessie. Alas, it turns out the photo was almost certainly a fake. In 1993, Christian Spurling, stepson of a movie maker named Duke Wetherell and then age 90, confessed to two Loch Ness researchers that he had fashioned the “monster” in the photograph out of a toy submarine and plastic.

Yet sightings, photographs and films and videos have continued over the decades. What’s more, sonar scannings of the loch, far from disproving Nessie’s existence, have actually fueled the belief that she could be real. A series of acoustic scans in the late 1960s revealed tantalizing evidence that something was down there in the loch — something big and something fast! The Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, England, set up an acoustic “net” in 1967-68 through which no creature could pass without detection. In August 1968, the sonar system detected multiple moving objects, 20 feet in length and moving at speeds of up to 10 knots, ascending and descending to the loch bottom. “The high rate of ascent and descent makes it seem very unlikely that they could be fish, and fishery biologists we have consulted cannot suggest what fish they might be,” the lead scientist concluded. The next year, 1969, another scientific group, this one from the New York Aquarium, also spotted a large creature (at least 20 feet long) with its sonar equipment. A small submarine in 1969, launched to film a movie and dragging a fake Nessie behind her, picked up a large moving object on sonor just 50 feet from the bottom. In the 1970s and then again in the 2000s, an MIT scientist named Robert Rines, using a variety of photographic and sonar equipment, collected evidence of what did indeed appear to be some kind of underwater dinosaur-like creature — including a famous underwater photograph. In 1972, Rines’s sonar equipment also detected an underwater object, 20 to 30 feet in length, moving about 35 feet off the bottom. By the 2000s, Rines concluded that the family of underwater Nessies did, in fact, exist up until the late 1990s, when global warming finally finished off the last of the species.

In 1987, Operation Deep Scan, one of the most ambitious searches to date, deployed 24 boats throughout the entire width of the loch… and detected “a large moving object near Urquhart Bay at a depth of 600 feet.” One of the scientists involved in Operation Deep Scan, concluded “There’s something here that we don’t understand, and there’s something here that’s larger than a fish, maybe some species that hasn’t been detected before. I don’t know.” Yet more searches conducted in 1993 and again in 2003 for TV documentaries failed to detect anything significant.

Skeptics say there never was a Nessie, that all the sonar detected was large pieces of debris moving through the water due to the unusual currents of the loch; believers say that there may well have been a Nessie, or a family of Nessies, until perhaps the late 1990s.

All was quiet until 2007. That’s when a man named Gordon Holmes took some home video of what he and other Nessie supporters believe was or at least could have been the monster (see video). You can see for yourself below.

For my part, I kept my eye on the sonar all during the cruise down Loch Ness (see photo above). The scanner reached all the way down to the bottom of the loch, 650 feet deep. You would think that, with these boats moving up and down the loch, day after day, week after week, they would be able to detect something. But alas, no, not until I took my photo of Nessie out the window.

The post How I Saw the Loch Ness Monster first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange practice in traditional Aikido dojos of doing techniques, samurai-style, on your knees. Last week, the sensei spent almost the entire class doing suwari-waza and, when I stood up, the skin on my knees was entirely rubbed off. Ouch!

And yet here it is, the following week, and I am showing up again.

I took up Aikido ten years ago, at the ripe old age of forty, and have been struggling to learn it ever since. The kids wanted to take a martial art and I thought judo might be nice. Something difficult, real fighting, like wrestling.  I looked around for a judo dojo but couldn’t find any near our home. But I did find some Aikido dojos that taught kids and that intrigued me. At the time, Steven Seagal wasn’t yet an incarnate lama, just a Hollywood action star, and I was intrigued by those flashy moves he did. It seemed elegant and different, not like the typical side kicks you saw at the local tae kwon do school.

So, my three sons and I started Aikido together. Week after week, year after year, we drove 30 minutes each way for Aikido classes two or three times a week. One by one, though, the kids lost interest and quit… but I was hooked.

My first teacher was a former ambulance driver who trained at the New York Aikikai and was the apprentice (uchi deschi) of Seiichi Sugano Shihan.  He teaches the traditional “Aikikai” style of Aikido that is taught at Hombu Dojo in Japan and he is affiliated with the U.S. Aikido Federation (East), run by Yoshimitsu Yamada Shihan.

I also trained for a time with Huruo Matsuoka, Steven Seagal’s oldest student and uke, whom you see getting slammed to the mat (hard!) in Seagal’s first movies and in Seagal’s Aikido documentary, The Path Beyond Thought. Matsuoka Sensei is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, a truly gentle and wise man, a devotee of macrobiotics, and he teaches Seagal’s somewhat unusual style of Aikido that is called “tenshin” Aikido. Around the time Seagal discovered that he is an incarnate Tibetan lama or tulku, Matsuoka had some falling out with the pony-tailed Hollywood star, returned to Japan and studied with Abe Sensei, the founder of Aikido (O Sensei’s) calligraphy teacher. Matsuoka came back to America in the early 2000s and started some new dojos where some of my old sensei’s students and my friends came to study. Matsuoka’s Aikido is very advanced and technical – too advanced for someone like me. But I learned a lot from him and heartily recommend his dojo to anyone who lives close enough to study with him.

I now study with students of the legendary Kazuo Chiba Shihan, spread out in locations all over the world. Chiba Sensei is a fairly scary figure in Aikido circles, someone who doesn’t tolerate fools lightly and who is more than willing to make believers out of skeptics. From what I can tell, Chiba’s approach to Aikido is practical and very direct – “we like to make sure a certain amount of pain is involved,” my current teacher says with a smile. What Chiba Sensei’s students are trying to teach me is how to take someone’s balance first before you try any technique — a basic concept in judo (called kuzushi) but which many Aikido schools neglect.  Chiba-affiliated dojos (part of the Birankai federation) in British Columbia include Still Waters Aikikai in Sidney and Mountain Coast Aikikai in Richmond.

So, I’ve been at it for ten years now… and have only scratched the surface. I have to say, I’m really lousy at Aikido. I’m stiff as a board… clumsy… my knees hurt… my ukemi (falling) sucks… and I am still struggling with moves that any beginner knows how to do. But I feel at this point I can at least describe why Aikido captivates so many of its adherents and yet, to outsiders, seems so strange. My wife considers it a bizarre “cult,” akin to people who are in telepathic contact with aliens.

First, Aikido, at least in the mainstream Aikikai style, is the best workout you could ever have. It manages to combine a lot of stretching with tumbling and falling… a serious cardiovascular workout… and the kind of muscular training you’d get with, say, wrestling…. and a little self-defense. After an hour of Aikido, my gi is soaking wet, every muscle in my body hurts and I feel like I’ve been doing yoga for a week. I’ve been tossed around like a sack of potatoes by experts and have had my wrists and shoulder joints twisted out of their sockets. It’s great!

Second, Aikido teaches you weird stuff you don’t learn in a typical rock-‘em, sock-‘em kicking and punching martial art. Whether you’ll ever use this weird, esoteric stuff is another question entirely – but you definitely feel like you’re learning strange Shaolin voodoo, not just how to kick someone in the balls.  I studied Shito-Ryu Karate as a kid with a wonderful hippie carpenter and nidan and love traditional Japanese karate… but Aikido is from an entirely different planet.

The hard part for me is learning how not to use my muscles.  The tendency of every beginner is to try to muscle through the techniques, forcing someone to the mat, for example, or really cranking on a wrist lock.  But the people who really know Aikido use very little muscular force.  They use the weight of their whole bodies… and the ability to move their opponent off balance… so the techniques seem almost effortless.  That is why Aikido is great for women because women are generally not as strong as men and so must learn how to do the techniques correctly.  It’s also why Aikido is a great martial art for people as they get older.  It’s one of the few where technique really can overcome brawn… providing, of course, you actually learn how to do it right.  And that’s the trick!

The post My First Decade of Aikido first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

What I love most about Rob Bell’s controversial book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011), is the way it has triggered a new debate about what is really at stake in Christianity.

The odd thing about Christianity, at least in the United States, is that tens, even hundreds of millions of its adherents can’t really articulate its core beliefs beyond the most superficial, kindergarten level.

That is not a snobbish slam on Americans but simply a fact of life.

Like most religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism), Christianity is not so much a philosophical system as it is a subliminal, pre-conscious worldview that is passed on from generation to generation through rituals, symbols, readings from canonical texts, stories, proverbs, finger painting and occasional catechetical classes. This cultural inheritance carries, of course, philosophical ideas and historical claims, but it is the rare adult Christian these days who has taken the time to examine systematically any of that inheritance.

It is the rare Christian indeed who gets a systematic presentation of the key ideas and philosophical presuppositions of his or her religion – perhaps in a parochial school religion class or in a Christian high school senior seminar.

Some Christian denominations do a better or worse job at this than others, but even those denominations that try to give a systematic overview of what Christianity is all about rarely rise above the most simplistic, elementary teaching. Most children today inherit so little of the “basics” of Christianity – the who, what, when and where – that few denominations or schools can spend much time on the “why.” When people are not all that clear precisely who the Apostle Paul was… or what the Exodus was all about… you don’t have much time to discuss what it means precisely to be “saved” or the Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s universalism.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had discussions with highly educated people – engineers, doctors, judges, movie directors – who will, when discussing ethics or religion, revert to what they learned from Sister Mary So-and-So in Eighth Grade or a class they took in Vacation Bible School.

It is a jarring shock to many naïve young people when they get to high school and college and start to actually think about the ideas and beliefs they inherited from their parents. The mere discovery that Christianity didn’t pop full-blown into the universe but evolved slowly over hundreds of years is unsettling to quite a few.

Some reject Christianity outright as soon as they make the startling discovery that the Gospels don’t agree on all the details of Jesus’s life… or that Genesis was written in a pre-scientific age and wasn’t supposed to be a treatise on astrophysics… or that the Gospel writers made use of Jewish scriptures in ways that, to modern sensibilities, seem a bit unusual.

So, that is why Rob Bell is such a bracing blast of cold air that should be welcomed by all.

His book, Love Wins, asks fundamental, Big Picture questions about what Christianity actually teaches. Even if you disagree with his answers – and judging from the firestorm in Protestant evangelical circles, many people do vociferously – you have to concede that his questions have rekindled thought. It is making thousands of adult Christians confront, often for the first time, what is really at stake in Christianity:

> How exactly did Jesus’s death save us from anything?

>> Who or what is Jesus saving us from?

>> Is the point of Christianity that Jesus came to save us… from God? If so, if he saved us from God, then how is that good news? Doesn’t that make God a deity from which we should, well, hide?

Of course, Christians have been debating these issues for centuries… but these debates rarely filter down to the masses in the pews. Pastor Bell’s book, precisely through its deliberately provocative questions and chapter headings, is forcing the issue upon a reluctant (mostly Protestant) Christian community – although I would say that the debate has profound implications for Catholics and Anglicans as well and even for non-Christians.

That’s because what is at stake in the “Love Wins debate” is what kind of a world we live in, what kind of a God we worship (if we worship a God), what we can expect from life, what we are here to do, the kind of people we should aspire to become, and so on.

These are questions that transcend denominational and even religious boundaries.

One tip: Buy the audio recording of Love Wins in iTunes or on CDs. Pastor Bell reads his book himself, and he is a marvelous narrator. He doesn’t merely read the text but interjects little comments so you have the feeling of attending a kind of small group seminar with him as the facilitator. It’s a great book for commuters, one that I am mischievously giving to all my Calvinist friends and relatives. (Rob Bell is the bête noire to all the followers of hyper-Calvinist preacher and bestselling author John Piper.)

The post Rob Bell Asks the Big Questions Ignored by Many Churches first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.