Author: Jimmy Akin

STATEMENT HERE.

I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow, after he reveals the details of what happened.

I can’t respond to everything that the reader writes (for space reasons; the post would get way too long for its own good), but a reader in the combox down yonder writes:

Since I would probably be the only one to speak in the man’s [PZ Myer’s] defense, I feel I must do so. I would like to inquire if when a blog post critical of another individual is made, if that individual is first or opportunely informed so that he is able to defend himself if he so chooses or to write the blogger with a defense.

After putting up the post I considered e-mailing PZ Myers, but decided to wait an think about whether it would be the most constructive thing. I’m also open to taking down the post if that’s the most constructive thing. I’m just trying to figure out what the best thing to do is, which isn’t always easy with the limited intellectual resources we mortals have.

In any event, PZ Myers is welcome to defend himself, either on his own blog or here. Like anybody else, he’s certainly free to post in the combox (as long as he obeys DA RULZ). I’d also be happy to post e-mail (without headers) that he might send and then respond in a follow-up post (I’m not sure if he’d want to do that since he has his own blog, but the offer is there)

I do not deny that Myers is not perfect in charity, but neither is anyone here. I don’t think it can be said that his charity seems lesser than the charity of those who have written him hatefully.

This may be true, but it does not excuse Myers’ conduct. Just because Myers has encountered Catholics gravely lacking in charity does not excuse Myers from acting with a gravely lack of charity.

I do not see any evidence that would reliably indicate that Myers purpose is to offend. It seems rather by his statements his purpose is to make an artistic demonstration of the powerlessness of the consecrated bread. He is hoping, it would seem, that this would spur Catholics to realize its powerlessness and in turn to question their belief in transubstantiation.

I think that there is abundant evidence of Myers purpose including the desire to offend. The man heaps scorn and abuse on those who disagree with him. Consider the following (in blue, to keep the text distinct from the comboxer) excerpt from his original post:

There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion.

<SNIP>

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart.

These remarks are by their nature intended to be offensive to Catholics, and the statement that he would desecrate the Eucharist "joyfully and with laughter in my heart" unambiguously indicates that this is not a dispassionate scientific demonstration of the falsity of Catholic belief regarding the Eucharist.

However, let’s suppose that that was his aim. He’s a scientist. How good would the science of the proposed experiment be?

Rotten.

In order to have a scientific demonstration of the falsity of Catholic belief regarding the Eucharist, you would need to have a proposition of Catholic theology regarding the Eucharist that could be falsified by his experiment.

But the Catholic Church does not claim that anything special will happen in the empirical realm if you desecrate a host. Lots of hosts have been desecrated in history, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, nothing special happens in the empirical realm.

Catholics would say that this is because Christ has chosen to make himself vulnerable in body to such disrespect, just as he made himself vulnerable to death on the Cross, though he informed his disciples that all he needed to do was ask and his Father would put twelve legions of angels at his disposal to defend him. The voluntary vulnerability of Christ as the Lamb of God is a central theme in Christian theology.

Whatever the Christian explanation for the fact that nothing unusual normally happens in the empirical realm when a host is desecrated, the fact is that the Church does not maintain that anything is supposed to happen.

PZ Myers and the Catholic Church thus agree that nothing unusual should be expected to happen if he desecrates a host.

His act of desecration therefore would not do anything to evidentially distinguish between the two belief systems (his and the Catholic Church’s).

That makes any proposed experiment along these lines Bad Science.

Such an experiment is no more a disconfirmation of Eucharistic theology than the legendary Russian astronaut who, while in space, looked around and declared that he didn’t see God. That’s no disconfirmation because nobody claimed he would see God.

In both cases, it’s a snide jab at religious belief based on an overly simplistic understanding of that belief.

In Myers’ case it is also a deliberate and cruel violation of the most deeply felt religious sensibilities of other human beings. He’s not just saying he doesn’t see evidence for God. He’s proposing to deliberately desecrate what other humans hold most sacred, which is bound to stir passionate feelings and cause profound personal pain to every faithful Catholic who hears of it, including those who are not sending him hate mail and who have caused no harm and done nothing to bring about this situation.

Even if PZ Myers does not respect the Eucharist, he should respect those people, who far outnumber the others.

The commenter also writes:

BTW, I’ve noticed some arguments against sacrality of the bread made by some in the comments thread over there which have adequate (internal to Catholicism, at least) theological explanation but which went unanswered. Some crude commends were made about the digestive process to which can be answered that that is far past the point where Jesus is no longer present in that fashion (that he or God is still present in another generalized fashion is problematic for theism in general). If Catholics were to answer in such manner I think that would be more impressive (that is liable to make a good a impression), than the personal back and forth a few have engaged in.

I agree. I think a display of reason in the face of vile abuse is more constructive than adding more vile abuse to the discussion.

On Thursday’s show I fielded a question about Prof. P. Z. Myers, the Minnesota professor who has threatened to desecrate the Eucharist and post the results on the Internet.

Here is an mp3 of the exchange.

LISTEN

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Longtime readers of this blog may know that I don’t like the word "cult," at least as it is commonly used (i.e., bad religious group). The reason that I don’t like it is that, although every "cult researcher" will try to formulate a definition of what a cult is, these definitions invariably include elements that are (a) arbitrary (e.g., if you don’t believe in sola fide, you’re a cult), (b) objectively unverifiable (e.g., saying that a group is "too" this or "too" that, which makes it a matter of opinion), or (c) applied selectively to groups that the user doesn’t like but not to groups that he does (e.g., did you know that those Christians are supposed to be willing to give up their lives rather than deny the founder of their group? and that they’re supposed to believe all of his teachings? and that he’s God? How cultlike!).

In the end, I find that using the term "cult" (in the "bad religious group") sense adds more heat than light. It just starts arguments over who is or is not a cult, stirs up bad feelings, and in general distracts from a discussion of the merits or demerits of whatever religion is under consideration.

As far as I can tell, the word "cult" in its colloquial sense is just a term of contempt used to refer to religions that one doesn’t like. "Cult" = "religious group I don’t like," esp. "smaller, newer religious group I don’t like."

(BTW, yes, I know all about its other, historical, positive use, but that’s not the usage I’m concerned with here.)

Another term I don’t like–but that is often used in "cult studies" is "mind control." This is a scare word introduced by "cult researchers" to refer to what historically has been referred to by the word "persuasion."

But we can go into those topics in more detail another time.

I’m writing today to talk about another word that is commonly misused: "Gnosticism."

Today I was reading the excellent publication Catholic World Report, which is very much worth reading, and I recommend that you subscribe if you haven’t (SUBSCRIBE HERE).

As readers may know, I get almost all of my information electronically these days, and so for me to actually read a print publication says something very special about it. Catholic World Report is one of a handfull that I even bother with, so it’s quite special indeed.

And the July 2008 issue has a very nice article on Reiki by Anna Abbott (whose name has the interesting quality of having all of the consonants doubled, making it very easy to spell; kudos to her parents and ancestors!).

The article is quite well done, and I especially like the way Anna uses a particular passage from the Catechism of the Catholic Church to show the incompatibility of Reiki with Catholic practice (it’s paragraph 2117, in case you’re wondering), and I’d highly encourage you to get the July issue just to read this article.

But it does have one part about which I have concerns. That comes when the article states:

Reiki appears to be a form of Gnosticism. Its practitioners assert "secret" knowledge, despite the fact one can find the symbols of it on the Internet with a few clicks. A Reiki practitioner in Calistoga, California reported to me that when she looked at one of the "power symbols"–which bears an uncanny resemblance to the musical treble clef–she perceived it differently than I did because she’s initiated.

After the first sentence, my spidey sense was going off, because, unfortunately, it is very common for writers in the religious press to label things as being "Gnostic" or as "Gnosticism" when, in fact, they are totally unrelated to the historical heresy of that name. As soon as someone claims something modern to be Gnosticism, I cringe, because it’s usually wrong.

The second sentence doesn’t improve my confidence level. It appears to be justifying the claim that Reiki is Gnosticism based on the fact that "its practitioners assert ‘secret’ knowledge."

This is not enough. All kinds of people claim secret knowledge–or at least knowledge that other people don’t have. That doesn’t make them Gnostics.

I think the root of the problem may be that historical Gnosticism was a pluriform heresy that didn’t have just a single set of beliefs. As a result, it is difficult to say "This is what a Gnostic believed" in the same way that it is hard to say "This is what a New Ager believes" or even "This is what a Protestant believes." There was no single, official statement of Gnostic belief–no Catechism of the Gnostic Church–any more than there is an official Catechism of the New Age Movement or an official Catechism of the Protestant Church.

To really say what Gnostics taught, you have to note that certain ideas were characteristic of different Gnostic groups but that not all Gnostic groups shared them. You have to do the same thing with the New Age Movement and Protestantism, too, since they also are doctrinally diverse groups that have certain common characteristics among their different branches but do not have a single, official position on their distinctives (e.g., not all New Agers believe in reincarnation, and not all Protestants understand sola fide or sola scriptura the same way).

Talking about what makes someone a Gnostic thus involves a decent bit of hard work and historical research, and many authors trying to do that work encounter oversimplifications of what Gnosticism was.

Often, rather than describing in detail the content of Gnostic thought, authors will oversimplify and try to explain what a Gnostic was by focusing on the name "Gnostic."

It’s easy to point out that the name is based on "gnosis," which was one of the Greek words for knowledge–which, back then wasn’t really secret either because the Gnostics talked and wrote all about it–and the Church Fathers critiqued it! (What was secret was not the content of the knowledge but more the way it had allegedly been preserved from Jesus’ time.)

Merely claiming to have knowledge that other people don’t have doesn’t make you a Gnostic. Christians claim that. We call that knowledge "revelation."

Even claiming that you should act on this knowledge that other people don’t have in order to be saved isn’t Gnosticism. Christians claim that, too.

You can even have knowledge that you don’t share with outsiders. That doesn’t make you a Gnostic. That just makes you secretive.

What was distinctive about the Ghostics was not that they claimed to have knowledge that others didn’t, it was not that they thought you should act on their knowledge in order for things to go well for you, and it wasn’t that they were in some measure secretive.

That describes every organized group of humans in world history!

Every group thinks that it has, if not the master key to the universe, at least a piece of knowledge that is true and that not everybody shares. Every group thinks that this knowledge should be acted upon in some way (even if it is by sitting passively by while Cthulhu eats up the world, in hopes of being eaten last). And every group has privileged or proprietary information that it doesn’t share with just anybody (like what the local pastor’s credit card number is, for example).

What made the Gnostics Gnostics was the content of their belief system–their views about God and the world and death and life and how to be saved and what salvation means.

READ ABOUT IT HERE.

If a modern author wants to declare a modern thing to be "Gnosticism," he needs to show more than that a movement claims to have some sort of privileged information that should be acted upon. Every diet book salesman claims that.

Instead, one must be prepared to show that the modern thing–whatever it is–has multiple (not just one or a few) points of contact with the content of the beliefs of the historical Gnostics.

And the article on Reiki doesn’t provide that.

Neither does the fact that a particular Reiki practitioner may say that a symbol means something different to her than to a noninitiate. Christians have had their own symbols historically, like the Chi-Rho and the Ichthus and, most of all, the Cross, that mean something different to them than to outsiders. In fact, during the age of persecutions, some of these symbols were used precisely because outsiders didn’t know or didn’t always know what they meant.

As part of my apologetic discipline, whenever I read claims about another religion, I try to turn it around and see if the same claims could be made about my own religion. It’s a way of being fair to other religions and weeding out unjust arguments against them (and it’s one of the reasons I don’t like the terms "cult" and "mind control" in their contemporary senses, because the definitions offered for them frequently are so vague that they can be turned around and applied to Christianity, evangelization, and apologetics).

So let’s take a look at how the paragraph quoted above might be rephrased:

Christianity appears to be a form of Gnosticism. Its practitioners assert "secret" knowledge that other religions don’t have, despite the fact one can find the symbols of it on the Internet with a few clicks. A Christian in Calistoga, California reported to me that when she looked at the Cross–one of the Christian "power symbols"–which bears an uncanny resemblance to the letter "t"–she perceived it differently than I did because she’s a Christian.

I wouldn’t think that this establishes that Christianity is Gnosticism, and so I don’t think that the paragraph as originally quoted establishes Reiki as Gnosticism.

I’m no expert in Reiki, but from what I have read about it, it doesn’t seem that Reiki practitioners have an elaborate cosmogony or message of how to have things go right for you after death that reads like the Nag Hammadi manuscripts with the names changed.

So I don’t, from my own knowledge, see Reiki as Gnosticism. Instead, I see it as a bunch of New Age snake oil that engenders superstitious beliefs about a mystical life/energy field for which there is no scientific evidence and that in its healing efforts combines the placebo effect with the facts that it is pleasant to relax and be touched by another person.

To conclude, the article on Reiki in the July issue of Catholic World Report is a good article, and I’d encourage you to read it. It’s only the three sentences dealing with Gnosticism that I find unpersuasive.

My compliments to the author!