Fear of Suffering

January 16, 2024 By Gene Veith

Behind many of our most contentious issues today is an extreme, pathological fear of suffering.

I owe that epiphany to National Review‘s Wesley J. Smith, who writes,

The fear of suffering (or deprivation of personal desires) is causing untold moral harm in the West — from ever-expanding euthanasia laws to the march of increasingly radical reproductive technologies, to transitioning children with gender dysphoria with harmful puberty blockers and mastectomies on teenage girls, to transhumanistic advocacy that threatens to unleash new eugenics, etc.

I would add the demand for abortion, our dependency on technology to make our lives easier, the dumbing down of our schools, the divorce rate, and the world’s unhinged response to COVID. We cannot handle suffering in any way, ours or someone else’s, and we will do anything–break up our marriage, abort our offspring, let our children be mutilated, shut down the economy, kill the sick–to avoid it.

But some people are going further, thinking that the inevitability of suffering at some level means that life is not worth living at all. Now some are taking this mindset to its logical conclusion.

Smith cites the Finnish bioethicist Matti Häyry, who has published an article entitled Confessions of an Antinatalist in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. As an “antinatalist”–that is, someone opposed to having children–Häyry repeats the reasoning given by many non-philosopher couples for why they do not want to have children. Namely, that they might suffer. He writes,

I would be pleased to see no one to have children, because that would be a rational thing to do. Reproduction carries risks to the possible future individuals. All lives are occasionally miserable, some lives are predominantly miserable, and individuals may think, justifiably, that their lives have no meaning. My reason suggests that it would be unwise and unkind to bring new people into existence and thereby expose them to these risks.

He does not stop there. He also advocates human extinction. Humans suffer. Therefore, letting human beings go extinct–which, of course, would happen if no one had children anymore–would be a way of eliminating suffering.

He does not stop there. He also advocates letting animals go extinct. That way they will not suffer. He specifically refers to farm animals, which would have to go extinct if human beings no longer ate them or went extinct themselves. He writes,

I am an anti-pronatalist, or strict antinatalist and I support stopping human reproduction and animal production, including but not limited to factory farming. I would be pleased to see no more suffering-prone beings created by people. Voluntary human extinction and factory animal extinction would follow from these and I would have no qualms about them. If homo sapiens can find the kindness and the courage to break the cycle of sentience that currently holds the species in its grip, excellent. And even barring that, or if a palatably phased human demise takes its time, liberating factory animals from their suffering would be a welcome advance action.

So he would be glad to have farm animals go extinct before human beings do. He goes on to make an exception for wild animals, but, as Smith points out, “Animals in the wild suffer far more than most humans and many domesticated animals–’red in tooth and claw,’ and all that — so why not eliminate all organisms capable of feeling pain if the point is to end the evil of suffering?”

Actually, Häyry hints at that conclusion when he expresses the hope that human beings would “find the kindness and the courage to break the cycle of sentience.” “Sentient” beings are those that are capable of sensing or feeling, referring on some level to the entire animal kingdom. Eliminate all sentient life and you’ve eliminated suffering. There is no suffering on the surface of the moon.

While there is a moral obligation to alleviate suffering, it does not “alleviate” suffering to get rid of the sufferer. The moral obligation is to help the sufferer. Not to eliminate an abstraction at the expense of the sufferer.

By Häyry’s logic, we should fight poverty by exterminating poor people. Putting ourselves out of our misery with the co-ordinated use of nuclear weapons would be a way to achieve world peace.

Today’s phobia against suffering is in stark contrast to previous generations, which on the whole suffered much more than we do, especially in the days before modern medicine. They didn’t like to suffer any more than we do, but when you read the writings of those times, there is usually not nearly so much angst over it. Rather, they endured it with a far greater level of courage, fortitude, and–crucially, in what is most missing today–faith.

Photo: Lunar Surface, Apollo 11 via Picryl, Public Domain

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A New Year’s Miscellany, 2024 A.D.

January 1, 2024 By Gene Veith

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A year in which the worst didn’t happen (but might in 2024); the lessons of 2023; and the year in review. Plus some Christmas Leftovers.

A Year in Which the Worst Didn’t Happen (but Might in 2024)

CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh says 2023 was the “Year of the Brink.” Many bad situations emerged, but somehow the worst didn’t happen, though they are teetering on the brink, so that the worst might happen in 2024.

He cites the war between Hamas and Israel. The fear was that it would precipitate an even bigger war throughout the Middle East. That hasn’t happened. Yet. (Actually, Israel is already fighting on seven fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Iraq, Yemen and Iran.)

In the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Ukrainians weren’t able to recapture their occupied land from Russia (which would have been the worst outcome for Russia). Then again, Putin didn’t resort to nuclear weapons. Right now, both sides are locked in the stalemate of trench warfare. But Ukraine is stretched thin and outnumbered. Both sides are on the brink of either victory or defeat, and the winter of 2024 will be crucial.

Walsh also mentioned China building up its military threat, but not attacking Taiwan. Yet.

We could apply his analysis to the U.S. domestic and political scene. The economy seemed to be in the doldrums with lots of problems, but the worst didn’t happen: inflation slowed, the stock market came back, employment is up, and the Fed may have achieved the elusive “soft landing”–stopping inflation without a recession–that may economists assumed was impossible. But great challenges, including an unfathomable federal debt, are ahead and may show themselves in 2024.

Donald Trump had what would seem to be a bad year, with numerous criminal indictments, but his popularity is higher than ever. Joe Biden’s popularity plunged to its lowest point, but the improved economy has Democrats feeling optimistic. Again, 2024 will sort it all out.

The Lessons of 2023

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has drawn five lessons that we can learn from 2023:

No. 1: Lots of people do not think like we do. [“When Hamas slaughters infants in their cribs, rapes women in front of their husbands and takes them captive back to Gaza, and tortures and murders civilians, that isn’t because of some outsized grievance. It’s because they do not have the same values as Westerners. Pretending that members of Hamas are simply freedom-loving people who seek material prosperity, quiet family lives and tolerance for those who think differently isn’t just wrong; it’s catastrophically wrong. . . .]

No. 2: The next generation is in serious moral peril. [Shapiro cites the statistics that 79% of young Americans (18-24) believe that white people are oppressors, with two-thirds believing that Jews “should be treated as oppressors.”]

No. 3: Weakness breeds aggression. [He blames the perception of Western–specifically, American–weakness for Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and Hamas’s aggression in Israel.]

No. 4: What goes around comes around. [Democrats have been weaponizing the rules of Congress, executive orders, and the justice department against Trump and Republicans. They can only expect the same treatment once Republicans come into power.]

No. 5: Incompetence has consequences. [“Eventually, the people tire of the incompetence of their leaders — and when they tire of the incompetence of leaders from all sides, they seek radical change to the systems themselves. Often, such changes are more perilous than the incompetence they seek to rectify.”]

Can you think of other lessons?

The Year in Review

One of my New Year’s rituals is to review the events of the preceding year, recalling them month-by-month in my memory and thinking about what has just happened. That can be a somber task, so I do with a shot of hilarious satire by reading Dave Barry’s Year in Review. (Behind the Miami Herald‘s paywall, but if you answer a question, they’ll let you read an article for free.)

The Associated Press used to poll newsroom editors to compile a list of the top stories of the year. I couldn’t find that this year. Maybe there aren’t enough newsroom editors, thanks to all of the newspaper cutbacks. Instead, they break down the top stories by categories. Here is the site for The AP Year in Review.

Here, AP condenses a year into 42 seconds of their photography:

Also, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

TOMORROW: Make your predictions for 2024.

Illustration by Marco Verch, via Flickr, CC by 2.0,

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From Islam, to New Atheism, to Christianity

November 17, 2023 By Gene Veith

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somali-Dutch activist and writer who, a cradle Muslim, has become one of the major critics of radical Islam. With multiple fatwas calling for her death, Ayaan became an atheist. But now she has become a Christian.

She tells her compelling story in an article in Unherd entitled Why I am now a Christian.

Ayaan tells about growing up under Islam, which had mostly been about prayers, fastings, and other observances. But then as a teenager she fell under the spell of the Muslim Brotherhood, which taught a strict, black-and-white, obey-or-be-damned version of Islam that is at the root of today’s Islamic radicalism.

Then came the rise of Islamic terrorism and the 9/11 attacks. She strongly and publicly condemned them, making a name for herself as a critic of radical Islam.

A year later, Ayaan read Bertrand Russell’s 1927 essay “Why I am Not a Christian.” “It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed,” she writes. “Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.”

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

She became an atheist. She became friends with the “New Atheists” Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. In fact, she was sometimes mentioned with them as one of the “horsemen” of that movement.

So what changed for her, directing her to Christianity? She writes,

Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

Ayaan says that the “secular tools” we have been trying to use–“military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil”–are not working.

The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

I’m thinking that Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is shaping up to be one of the most effective apologetics books of our time. It decisively refutes the New Atheists’ insistence that, in the words of the subtitle of one of Hitchen’s books, “religion poisons everything.” To the contrary, Holland, a respected historian, shows that Christianity–and only Christianity–is the source of the benevolent values that the New Atheists holds dear. Read this post and this post about the book.

But Ayaan was drawn to Christianity for more than just cultural reasons:

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life? . . . .

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

Pray for her.

Photo: Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47476351

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A Defense of Denominations

November 16, 2023 By Gene Veith

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The largest group of Protestants in the United States is now the non-denominationals. As of 2020, there were 44,319 non-denominational congregations with 21 million people attending them. Being non-denominational is so popular that many congregations that are affiliated with a denomination play that down, repainting signs that used to read something like “Community Baptist Church” to “Community Church.”

The ecumenical movement of the mainline liberal Protestant churches of the 1950s, which sought to unite all the denominations into one generic mega-denomination has mostly failed. But their opposite pole–conservative evangelicals–have mostly succeeded with the opposite strategy: establishing countless independent congregations that hold to a generic evangelicalism.

Historian Lisa Clark Diller has written a defense of denominations at Anxious Bench. She is an Adventist, which is a very distinctive brand of Christianity, but even some Adventists want to be non-denominational. In her post, Still Adventist? Why Retain Denominational Identities, she raises some excellent points about why particular denominations are helpful. Read it all, but I want to highlight a few of her points and comment on them, Lutheran that I am.

Whatever books you’re reading or sermons you’re listening to or songs you’re singing, they don’t come out of nowhere. The people who lead non-denominational congregations all have theological training that reflects specific commitments within the Christian faith.

True! Non-denominational churches still have their own implicit, if not explicit, beliefs and practices that align them with specific “denominational” traditions. Does the local non-denominational megachurch baptize infants? Does it urge people to “make a decision for Christ”? What does it teach about the Lord’s Supper? I bet I can guess. Nearly all non-denominational churches are Baptist in their theology. Some are Pentecostal, adding speaking in tongues. Some are Reformed. I’ve even heard of one that is Lutheran. But the non-denominationals don’t fully escape what caused denominations.

To be sure, there are some that purposefully avoid taking a position on the contentious theological issues that divide Christians. Members–well, some non-denominational churches don’t have membership, but you know what I mean– can have their own opinions on many doctrinal matters. That means, though, that church teachings have to be restricted to just the basics, with a bigger focus on moralism, therapy, and “successful Christian living.” These congregations try to present a generic Christianity, but sometimes that is not enough.

There’s a seduction to the idea of being spiritual but not religious, or to saying we don’t like organized religion. It’s the desire to be pure, the desire to not have other people who are messed up ruining our experience.

This point refers mainly to the “Nones,” but it does speak to church-hopping and the never-ending search for the perfect congregation. Such perfectionism is the bane of Christianity, grounded as it is in a spirituality of good works rather than the gospel of sinners finding forgiveness. But perfect congregations don’t exist, nor do perfect perfectionists.

God’s sheep know who Jesus is and Jesus knows them. And there’s the assumption they will be gathered around that relationship. Whatever we call that gathering, it requires organization.

Hence, organized religion. Even non-denominational churches organize themselves, certainly internally, but often externally, with other congregations. They start “satellite campuses.” Or form “networks” of like-minded non-denominational congregations. Or form “associations” to support each other in common enterprises. These are not that different from denominations!

I have heard one Christian writer quoted this way: “Saying you’re going to teach your children to be spiritual but not religious is like saying you’re going to raise them to be lingual, but not give them a particular language.”

Great quote! Of course it refers mainly to the parental mindset of not raising children in a particular religion so that they can make their own decision later on. (Notice the secularized Baptist assumptions even here: Children can’t have faith of their own; faith is a decision.) But it can also speak to the assumption that we don’t need a particular theology. “I want to be Christian, but I don’t want particular beliefs.”

As soon as we start sharing resources, asking someone to get out the spreadsheets, voting on mission statements, having membership ceremonies (such as confirmations or baptisms), putting people in charge of branding or communication, passing along institutions to future generations–we have something that starts looking like a denomination.

The practices of non-denominational congregations–as well as the denominational congregations that pretend not to be denominational–are actually quite similar to each other: they typically employ contemporary Christian worship, contemporary Christian music, and the latest tactics recommended by the church growth movement. They are often megachurches or aspire to be. Thus, they have their own liturgy and their own polity.

In not being governed by a larger church organization or hierarchy, their polity is “congregational.” But that is the way that many “denominations” operate.

All of this is to say that non-denominational churches are a denomination, a word which originally just meant a “naming.” “Non-denominational” is the name of a kind of church in the same way that “Presbyterian” or “Lutheran” is. And there is nothing wrong with being in a denomination, with having a name for what you believe and the theological tradition you are a part of.

Photo at “Nondenominational Christianity,” Wikipedia by Ramon FVelasquez, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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The End of Being Informed

November 9, 2023 By Gene Veith

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Newspaper readership has declined dramatically. People began getting their news online instead. But now, as we blogged about, social media and Big Tech platforms like Google are trying to get out of the news business.

But the woes of journalism are not just matters of information technology, economic factors, or website algorithms. Journalist Charlie Warzel sees a deeper problem. As he says in his Atlantic article The Great Social Media–News Collapse, “It’s not just the platforms: Readers are breaking up with traditional news, too.”

He cites a report from a Pew Center study with the summary title Americans are following the news less closely than they used to. In 2016, more than half of American adults, 51%, said that they followed the news “all or most of the time.” In 2022, that percentage fell to 38%.

In 2016, 12% of American adults said they follow the news “only now and then.” Six years later in 2022, that number rose to 19%. In 2016, only 5% of adults said that they “hardly ever” follow the news, that number has risen to 9% in 2022.

Among adults 30-49 years of age in 2016, 46% said they followed the news all or most of the time. In 2022, the percentage is only 27%. Among Americans 18-29, an already small 27% said they followed the news in 2016, but that has declined as of last year to only 19%.

As the study report comments, “The recent decline in Americans’ attention to the news has occurred across demographic lines, including education, gender, race, ethnicity and political party affiliation.”

Why has this happened? According to Warzel,

Trust in the media has fallen sharply in the past two decades, and especially the past several years, though much more so among Republicans. Some of this is self-inflicted, the result of news organizations getting stories wrong and the fact that these mistakes are more visible, and therefore subject to both legitimate and bad-faith criticism, than ever before. A great deal of the blame also comes from efforts on the right to delegitimize mainstream media. Local-news outlets have died a slow death at the hands of hedge funds. A generational shift is at play as well: Millions of younger people look to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok, along with podcast hosts, as trusted sources of news. In these contexts, consumer trust is not necessarily based on the quality of reporting or the prestige and history of the brand, but on strong parasocial relationships.

But I suspect another factor is an increasing number of people who just don’t care anymore! When they go online, they are preoccupied with games, entertainment, and socializing. Paying attention to the news is just too depressing.

Now I see the most serious threat to liberal democracy. It isn’t just intellectuals from both the left and the right questioning it. Nor is it just the large percentages from both parties that believe that “democracy is no longer viable.” Freedom and self-government end when “the people”–the ultimate rulers in a democracy–no longer want to bother with it and no longer equip themselves to handle it.

Can a democratic republic exist if the people, who are responsible for their self-government, no longer inform themselves about what is going on in their country? I don’t see how. They would rather sub-contract their governance to someone else–like hiring someone to take care of their lawn–so they don’t have to worry about it.

Image from rawpixel, Public Domain

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On Trying to Make the Sexes Indistinguishable

October 25, 2023 By Gene Veith

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The Vatican is hosting a “Synod on Synodality.” No, it has nothing to do with the Missouri Synod and its relationship with the Wisconsin Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod. It is the latest version of the Synod of Bishops (“synod” meaning an assembly or council of church delegates, deriving from the Greek word for “on the road together”). But, unlike other Synods of Bishops, in this one 21% of the voting delegates are not bishops, but is including laymen and laywomen.

The gathering was preceded by local “listening” meetings designed to give grass-roots input into the council, whose purpose is to discern “What steps does the Spirit invite us to take in order to grow in our ‘journeying together?’” What that means specifically is a reconsideration of Catholic teachings, regarding authority and structure, but also regarding the role of women in the church (including ordination, if not to the priesthood to the diaconate), LGBTQ issues, communion for divorced Catholics, and other contentious issues, mostly regarding sex and gender). Conservative Catholics see it as a conclave orchestrated to support liberal Catholicism.

The Synod on Synodality has provoked one such conservative Catholic, the great Anthony Esolen (see this and this and this), to weigh in on the topic of sex and gender. He has written a powerful article in the conservative Catholic periodical Crisis Magazine entitled Male and Female He Made Them.

You don’t have to be a Catholic to appreciate what Esolen says. Here is an excerpt (my bolds):

In my lifetime, almost all of the controversy regarding the relations of men and women to one another can be summed up in a sentence or two. It is held that there are not supposed to be any special relations between men and women, that men and women are interchangeable, that each sex owes no peculiar duty to the other, and that their spheres of characteristic action in the home, at work, in the neighborhood, in the larger society, and in the Church are exactly the same. Anything else is held to be but the residue of old and unjust ways, the mulish bigotry of the past.

Anyone who says that there are distinctions between the sexes that are profound and important, and that each sex is made for the other in a relationship characterized by interdependence, hierarchy, and equality all at once, is to be scorned or ignored or accused of being hateful (if male) or stupid (if female).

And, of course, this insistence not so much on equality as on indistinguishability, not so much on each sex’s assuming its rightful place as on neither sex’s having any rightful place at all, not so much on the beauty and wonder of male and female but on their meaninglessness, has played the devil with the Church, too. It is no surprise that the call to ordain (or to pretend to ordain) women as priests comes mainly from people who wish to marry (or to pretend to marry) a man with a man or a woman with a woman, or from people who seem to believe that a man can become a woman by asserting it, perhaps assisted by a mink coat and a full-length mirror.

Esolen then gives a stunning bit of evidence on how nature–that is, human nature–reasserts itself:

Yet, even now, I notice that nature reasserts herself when people are distracted by emergency. For example, in the accusations hurled back and forth between the supporters of Israel in the current war and the supporters of the Palestinians, regardless of the sexual politics of the accusers, the targeting of women and children is marked as peculiarly abhorrent and criminal. Imagine the officers on the Titanic keeping women and children at bay at gunpoint, crying out, “Men first!” And imagine a woman gently pushing her husband away from her, as her husband weeps freely, and she says, “Dear, you must go now. Get into the lifeboat. It’s my duty to stay.”

No, we acknowledge that women and children are to be protected because they are physically vulnerable and because they are the hope of the rising generation.

[Keep reading. . . .]

Image by FreePik.com

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