Tag: faith

A Modern Retelling of The Parable of The Good Samaritan

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The parable of the Good Samaritan is well known, but I think that it is common, these days, to miss a large fraction of what it’s about. The most common interpretation, in my experience, focuses entirely on the aspect of seeing people outside of one’s group as human. In particular, that the “good guy” in the story is a Samaritan, which is the last person a Jew in Jesus time would expect to be the “good guy.” This is certainly true, and no true interpretation of scripture is invalid because every true interpretation of scripture was intended, since God, in His eternity, as he inspires it sees every moment of everyone interpreting scripture simultaneously with the moment of its writing. But there’s a great deal more to it than just that (now trite) truth, and I want to present a more modern retelling which I think will help us to notice some of these other truths in it.

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start with the original (including the context of why it was told).

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

The key word, neighbor, in the original Greek.

The first problem most of us encounter is: what on earth is a Samaritan? Most of the time we’re only told that they are people that the Jews looked down on, but we’re never told why. The thing is, it was for a good reason: the Samaritans were descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who intermarried with pagans and took up the worship of pagan gods alongside the God of Israel. They weren’t just a different ethnicity—in fact, they weren’t really a different ethnicity. They were idolaters who flagrantly broke God’s commandment to have no other gods before him and taught their children to do so. And the pagans of the time had some pretty awful practices—this was not all theoretical.

Also important to know is that the Samaritans were not an oppressed minority. Samaria was, for many hundreds of years, a separate kingdom from Judea and the two often warred with each other. By the time of Jesus the two had only recently been both brought under a unified rule, but (oversimplifying) this was only because of Roman domination, not because of any unity between the two. They were still separate places, with Jews rarely going to Samaria and Samaritans rarely going to Judea. Yes, the Jews didn’t like the Samaritans, but equally importantly, the Samaritans didn’t like the Jews.

In not mentioning that last part, we miss a great deal of what this parable is about.

So I’d like to offer a modern retelling, which captures the relationships as first centuries Jews would have understood them when listening to this parable:

Back in the 1960s, in Michigan, a black man was walking in a bad part of Detroit when some robbers caught him, beat him, and took everything he had, leaving him half dead in the street. By chance, a civil rights leader walked by and, seeing the man, moved to the other side of the road and walked by. Similarly, a baptist minister happened to be there and saw the man, switched to the other side of the road and walked past. But a KKK member who was driving by saw the man and was deeply moved. He pulled his car over, treated the man as best he could with the first aid kit he had, gently moved him into his car and drove him to the hospital. At the hospital he told them that if the man didn’t have insurance he himself would pay the bill.

Who, of the three, was the neighbor of the beaten man? If you answer, the one who took him to the hospital and paid his bills, go and do likewise.

The way Jesus’ question is often translated, “who proved neighbor” or “who was neighbor” doesn’t, it seems to me, capture all of the meaning of the Greek verb which is used. It’s more literally “who came to be neighbor”—the verb is the same verb used in the prologue of the Gospel of John where it says “all things came to be through him and not one thing came to be except through him.”

This also seems related to how the context is often forgotten about. The context is the lawyer saying that the way to eternal life is (secondarily) to love his neighbor as himself, and asking the clarificational question, “who is my neighbor?” That is, he’s asking who it is that he should love in the same manner that he loves himself. And I think it’s important to take note of the fact that Jesus never (directly) answers this question.

If you examine the parable with an eye towards the question of who had the obligation to love another in the manner he loved himself, the most direct answer that you get is that the man who was beaten by the robbers—the Samaritan became his neighbor. But that’s not what Jesus says; he does not say who anyone owes anything to. He only says to go and do like the Samaritan did.

There’s an interesting aspect to this if you look at the original Greek. The word always translated as “neighbor” is “plesion” which is actually an adverb being used as a noun. As an adverb, it means “near” or “close.” In the parable, the priest and the Levite both stayed away from the man who was beaten. Upon seeing him, they walked on the other side of the road. Only the Samaritan, upon seeing him, came close enough to touch him.

And a final thing about the parable worth considering when this happened: why was the Samaritan there? It’s actually quite strange, since Jerusalem, Jericho, and the path between them are all in Judea and not close to Samaria. The Samaritans worshiped on their own mountain, they didn’t go to Jerusalem. So it’s really rather strange that he was there. All we are told was that he was journeying—he was on his way to somewhere. That is, he was going about his own business. He was not a do-gooder who scoured the countryside looking for Jews who had been beaten up. He also wasn’t at home with a sign up that any beaten Jews should stop by. And, furthermore, he also kept going about his own business, whatever that was. He didn’t give up his journey, he only gave the innkeeper money and told him that he would repay him any further expenses on his return.

A final thought about the passage worth considering is Jesus’ final instruction: go and do likewise. He didn’t say that the Samaritan was righteous, or that the Samaritan’s idolatry was less important than his good works, or even that the Samaritan did a single other decent thing in his entire life. All Jesus said was that the lawyer should do as the Samaritan did in this particular case.

That is, he told him: show mercy to someone in your path who needs it.

World War 2 And the Religion of the State

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized6 Comments

I was recently reminded of how much of western culture, in the 1970s, was about World War 2. In that period, the second world war was only thirty years before and the people of responsible age (that is, those in their forties through their sixties) had spent many of their formative years in it. And World War 2, which was in many ways only the second great industrial war, had been a total war in a way the world had not really seen before. And I think that this total war had the effect, as few other things besides Communism have had, of turning the state into a religion. And I think that this may have had some strange effects afterwards.

When I say that the second World War turned the state into a religion, I mean that the war, and by extension the state, became the primary purpose of its citizens’ lives. (I’m going to confine my remarks to America, since I know its history best, but from what I’ve read this was largely true of many other countries as well.) This was not absolute, of course, and individuals might have maintained a better set of priorities. Still, the state tried very hard to make itself the purpose of its citizens lives. You can see this in the way that people were encouraged to do everything “for the war effort”. You can find all sorts of examples of magazine ads by companies who aren’t selling products because their factories are now making weapons, but that they will one day resume, so don’t forget them! There was also an enormous amount of propaganda produced, which covered almost everything, since the war touched on almost everything. There were ads which encouraged people to accept rationing of food. There were ads encouraging people to put all their spare money into government bonds rather than buy things for themselves. There were ads that encouraged young women to get a job in the war effort to help bring their sweethearts and husbands home sooner. And from what I recall talking to relatives to had lived through it, much of it worked. As much as people might grumble and there was a thriving black market, people did take up the spirit of the thing and often think about the war effort whose nearest land battles were many thousands of miles away.

And the thing is, while all this can be done as a matter of secondary loyalty, fallen human beings are weak and this kind of total subservience to the state had the effect, I am beginning to suspect, of supplanting God with the state in the hearts of many people. I’ve heard the explanation that many people fell away from Christianity after WW2 because Christian churches were too compliant with the governments that brought us to such an awful war. The horrors of World War 2 broke people. Christianity’s old tired answers were no longer good enough. I’ve heard many such things. And, truth be told, they’ve never sounded very convincing. Christianity made sense under the horrors of the Roman empire and Germanic barbarism but didn’t make sense after the horrors of World War 2? The secular governments of the world plunged people into war and starvation, and Christianity didn’t stand against them enough, so let’s abandon Christianity and become completely secular? These aren’t serious explanations.

The explanation that the people started worshiping an idol—the State—and as idol worship does, this caused the people to turn away from God? That does, at least, explain.

I don’t want to overstate this idea. I’m just beginning to turn it over in my mind. But it does explain a bunch of things which had always not-quite-fit.

Mary Harrington on Lily Phillips and Possession

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mary Harrington wrote about our modern day Messalina, Lily Phillips, who recently and famously fornicated with 100 men in a day as a PR stunt for her pornographic OnlyFans channel. This event would be fairly unremarkable, given what society is presently like, except that a documentary film was being made of it and her immediate reaction upon finishing was deep distress, which has spawned a great deal of commentary. In the face of most people arguing about individual responsibility vs. responsibility to others, Ms. Harrington’s piece suggests an unusual framing: that of possession. (Demonic if you are tough enough for solid food, symbolic if you haven’t yet been weaned, though of course she doesn’t put it that way and for all I know doesn’t think of it that way.) This is a very interesting framing, and I’d like to explore it a bit.

Before I get into the main part, I do want to make some notes about demons, possession, and demonic influence which I think will be helpful to ensure that we’re all on the same page because popular culture tends to depict demons in egregiously stupid ways.

The first thing that I want to note is that within Catholic philosophy, the symbolic interpretation of things like demonic possession is not exclusive of the literal interpretation of them. They can be both at the same time, just in the way that a father can feed his child when the child is hungry as a simple physical act but, at the same time, this also archetypally represents all manner of things from God’s act of creation to a teacher teaching a student. None of these is wrong or one real while the others are fake. They’re different, but all legitimate as themselves.

The second thing is that full-on possession2 is not the same thing as a person being influenced by a demon; demons are capable of subtlety. Demons are simply angels who reject the good; they are beings of pure spirit and greater intelligence than humans, so they’re capable of more subtlety and cunning than human beings are. They can make bad ideas seem good and let us do the rest. If you are taking the symbolic interpretation alone, the complexities of social interactions are more complex than an individual, and can mislead us without completely overwhelming us.

The third thing to note is that demonic possession is not necessarily adversarial with the person possessed. A human being is capable of cooperating with a demon, in whole or in part. Demons make promises, which are usually empty, and people may well cooperate with the demon because of them. In the purely symbolic interpretation, you can see this in something like a person who takes foolish risks or a reality show contestant.

The fourth and perhaps most important thing to note is that demonic possession is not exclusive of things like psychological or social pressures. A person can be possessed by a demon and also worry about what his neighbor will think of him and be anxious about how to pay his bills.

OK, so that common ground established, I’d like to consider Ms. Harrington’s framing of Lily Phillips’ stunt as possession, or the alternative phrase she offers, an “egregore”. (An egregore is “a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals”.) Put very abstractly, the question which arises when one hears of Lily Phillips’ stunt and how predictably bad she felt afterwards is: how could anyone choose to do something so foolish? And the answer of possession or an egregore is, basically, that she didn’t choose this, she is a slave to a wicked master, and that master chose it for her.

To modern ears this can sound like trying to shift blame. And indeed, some people are trying to do that; to some degree that’s what Louise Perry’s article, The Myth of Female Agency, is about (though it is more complex than that). Properly understood, though, demonic possession is not about shifting blame. It’s about understanding that we are not gods. We must serve something; the most important choice in our lives is who or what we will serve.

Ms. Harrington quotes the story from the gospel of Luke where Jesus asks a demon its name and it replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” More illustrative is when Jesus describes what happens when an unclean spirit is driven out:

When an unclean spirit goes out of someone it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest, and not finding one it says, “I will go back to the home I came from.” But on arrival, finding it wept and tidied, it then goes off and brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and set up house there, and so that person ends up worse off than before.

If you merely reject a spirit because you don’t like it—even if you just want to think of it as the zeitgeist or spirit of the age or an egregore—if you do not replace it with something, you will remain empty until it comes back. But nature abhors a vacuum, and your emptiness will pull in more than just what you drove off, because you will take in several things hoping they’ll fill the emptiness. You’ll probably think that you’re just trying them or considering them, but you’ll take them in.

On a technical level, this is because your life must have some kind of purpose for you to do anything at all. People who have merely absorbed their purpose from the zeitgeist will often doubt this because they’ve never paused to consider what the purpose of their life is and so can foolishly believe they don’t have a purpose, but they eventually tend to notice this as they get older and especially if they’re successful at the purpose they absorbed. “I’ve gone to school and gotten a job and paid for therapy so I can be better at my job so I can afford more therapy so I can be better at my job—but what’s it all for? Is this it?”

The only people who make their own purpose are madmen—this is necessarily so on the technical level since people who make their own purpose cannot work toward the same goals as others except accidentally and cannot be intelligible to others who do not share their purpose. Moreover, we find ourselves in a physical world we did not create with physical properties we did not create that requires us to do things we do not choose in order to stay alive. Whatever purpose we create for ourselves must necessarily include these things that we did not choose, which is a simple contradiction. You can’t create something you didn’t choose. If you are to survive, you must discover a purpose, not create it. And our purpose is just another way of saying who or what we serve. Which brings us back to Lily Phillips and possession.

Lily claimed, in the weeks leading up to her stunt, that she was serving herself. She wanted to bang 100 men in a day, was excited for it and looking forward to it, etc. etc. etc. Then when it happened, she was devastated. There’s a good reason why my favorite part of the Catholic baptismal promises are “Do you reject Satan? And all his empty promises?” Lilly Phillips was not serving herself, since that’s not really possible, and, critically, she was not serving anyone she held to be worth serving. Feminism told women that it was there for them, that if they just gave it their souls, they would not die, but would be gods. It turns out that’s an old story. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun3.

So, ultimately, I think that Ms. Harrington is right to frame this in terms of possession, though it is important to understand that this is a voluntary possession. Lily became an OnlyFans prostitute because of the spirit of the age meeting her particular circumstances; she came up with this stunt for some reason then felt an obligation to her fans to go through with it and to not let them down—she served many masters, and none of them were good. And there is only one outcome to serving a bad master.

1 . Wife of Emperor Claudius, who famously held a contest with a prostitute to see who could copulate with the largest number of men in a day. (Messalina won.)

2. Technically, there is a form of possession where there is no cooperation and the demon literally possesses the body of the person against their will. Philosophically speaking, this is very akin to a viral infection and, from reports by exorcists, is incredibly rare and far more akin to the kind of thing you see in a movie like The Exorcist. An unfortunate person in this state may be confusable with someone in the throws of deep mental illness, but not with a normal person making bad choices, so this kind of thing is irrelevant. I will be using the term “possession” in the sense of persistent influence or cooperative possession, rather than this sense, because Ms. Harrington does and because this sense is so sui generis that no reasonable person will mistake the two.

3. Except Christianity. True or false, before Christianity no one had the idea of God taking on flesh and becoming his own creature in order to offer himself as an innocent blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of his creatures and so make them fit to become incorporated into the divine life.

Useful Mistakes, or The Three Principle Virtues of a Perl Programmer

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a great meme that goes around on occasion, which is a motivational poster of some kind with the words:

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

If you’re not familiar, it’s a reference to a line from JFK’s famous speech, justifying the moon program:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

There is truth in Kennedy’s approach—it is the basic foundation of how we teach children—but it is extremely rarely done by adults for the simple reason that adults usually have better things to do. The truth is that the moon shot program wasn’t really about human advancement. It was a massive game of capture-the-flag played with the Soviets as a PR stunt, which is why we and they both stopped shortly after the US captured the flag (by which I mean, planted a flag on the moon).

Which gets us back to the original quote: there are a lot of times when somebody does something useful because he thought it was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be, but by the time he put a lot of time into it he found that the harder version was actually worth doing, especially because he was now in a place to do it with a lot less work than if he was starting from scratch. And this is an example of what I would call a useful mistake. Another example would be what Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl programming language, famously called the three principle virtues of a Perl programmer.

Those virtues were: laziness, impatience, and hubris. These are, of course, rhetorical, since laziness, impatience, and hubris are actually vices. What Larry meant (and explained in his own words) was that there are things that look like these things, but are actually good habits. What he called laziness is really foresight; good design so as to avoid having to do excess work in the future. What he called impatience is really ambition, or the desire to solve problems—to not be willing to sit through endless drudge-work when it was possible to write a program to do the drudge-work instead. And what he called hubris was really faith—the faith that one could see the task through to its conclusion. “I can do this,” in spite of not (yet) being able to point to conclusive evidence that you can.

The ideal would be, of course, to have a perfectly accurate estimation of both the amount and difficulty of the work to be done, and also of one’s ability to get it done. We very rarely achieve perfection, though, and so choosing the kind of failure mode we want is important. Would we prefer to fail at our estimations in a way that makes us start more projects, or start fewer projects? That is, is it better to waste time when we make imperfect estimations of difficulty and our ability, or to leave undone things we could have accomplished? I think that there is much to be said for the former, because we can always give up when it turns out that something was too difficult for us, and this will help to refine our skill at estimating difficulty. If we bias our failures towards leaving things undone, there’s no reason we’d ever decide to start up, and there will be nothing giving us feedback about our accuracy of estimating difficulty.

So I think that there’s a lot to be said for slightly under-estimating how hard things will be; your life will tend to be better off for it. And to counter-balance people saying that you should be humble about your abilities, this is just being humble about your ability to estimate how difficult something is. Ultimately, when it comes to worthwhile things, we never know what we’re getting ourselves into, so we have to live by the faith that something good will come of our efforts. This is really just making the decision to have some faith.

Naturalistic Superstition

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there are four species of superstition:

  • improper worship of the true God (indebitus veri Dei cultus);
  • idolatry;
  • divination;
  • vain observances, which include magic and occult arts.

What most, or possibly all, of these have is the desire to control things beyond one’s power. Creating idols, for example, is the attempt to localize God (or some minor power) into a place where one can interact with it on one’s own terms, so one can convince it to do what one wants through worship. (Interestingly; this is the purpose of the golden calf—it is not supposed to be a strange god. Once it is cast the people said, “This is your God1, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt.” The whole point is that they want to be able to worship it directly, rather than having to wait for Moses to come back down from the mountain.)

I will not waste your time, dear reader, pointing out how divination and vain observances are attempts to go beyond one’s power.

The exact same thing—the vain attempt to go beyond one’s own power—can be done in entirely naturalistic ways. From my observations, it behaves in exactly the same ways superstition. But we don’t have a word for it.

I suspect that we’ve all seen this sort of thing. Vitamins and other supplements are a very common form of it. Vitamins are real, of course, as are all manner of nutrients. But people attribute all sorts of powers to these things which they have no reason to believe that the things have, and with no curiosity whatever to find out what their real powers are.

People go from the fact that vitamins are miracle cures for vitamin deficiency diseases to holding that the vitamins have unlimited powers to confer their effects. They ignore that the vitamins work by doing something, and that the body does not need an unlimited amount of that thing. For example, vitamin C is used by the body in the process of making collagen (it’s just one of many things, but it’s noticeable here for our body not being able to make it). If you have no vitamin C, you stop being able to make collagen, and the parts of your body that need to make new collagen start to greatly suffer from not being able to make it. But contained in this is the natural limit to the effects of vitamin C: once your body has made all of the collagen it wants to make, more vitamin C does no good. (I’m oversimplifying, of course, because vitamin C is used elsewhere in the body, too, but to the best of human knowledge it’s the same story all over—once you have enough, your body can do what it needs to and more does nothing.) It’s like building a house. If you don’t have enough wood, you will build a rickety and drafty house. If you have twice as much wood as you need, you will have a well built house and a big pile of wood. If you have three times as much wood as you need, you will have an equally well built house and a pile of wood that’s twice as big.

Taking large amounts of vitamins as if their effect scales with their dose is directly analogous to superstition, especially to the improper worship of God (such as holding that if one says a prayer in a particular way it will automatically be granted exactly the way you ask for it). Then we come to other ways which are more analogous to divination and vain observances: attributing vague positive benefits to things.

Example of this sort of thing are saying that garlic is “anti-cancer” or that 5G makes chickens lay fewer eggs. Cancer isn’t even one thing, and there’s no reason to suppose that a somewhat improved packetization scheme for data in the radio transmissions used to transmit data to and from cellular phones could have any effect whatever on the way that chickens lay eggs. (I suspect that the fear of 5G was actually about millimeter-wave cell bands, but those are deployed in very few places because they’re so high frequency that they penetrate approximately nothing; on millimeter-wave bands standing in front of your cell phone is enough to have no reception. So far as I’m aware they’ve only been deployed in a few cities and in a few sports stadiums. Most phones don’t even bother incurring the expense of supporting millimeter-wave radio.)

The world is a strange place, we know very little about it, and all sorts of things have effects that we do not know that they have. The problem is not the supposition that effects we do not understand are occurring. The problem is the wild mismatch of certainty to evidence. This is selectively believing in our ignorance; it is believing in it only where one wants to. Is it possible that despite us having no idea how, garlic can cure all forms of cancer? Yes. But there’s just as much reason to believe that garlic causes cancer, or that garlic causes cancer if you take more than twice as much garlic as you eat olive oil, or that garlic causes strokes if you eat more of it than you eat oregano. Lots of things are possible. When one has moved from possible to probable or certain only out of the desire to achieve the effect, this is the naturalistic analog to superstition.

And I really wish we had a word for it.

1. Technically the Greek is plural and many English translations render it as “These are your gods,” but I suspect the translations which take this to be a plural of respect are the more likely to be correct. (An example of the plural of respect is a king saying “we” instead of “I”.) The Jews were certainly not monotheistic at this point, but it makes no sense for them to attribute the bringing them out of Egypt to multiple gods, and still less sense to call one calf multiple gods. No matter how you take it with respect to “theoi”, you certainly have the problem of the plural being used to refer to one thing in the calf.