. . . dreamt of in your philosophy

By Eric Von Salzen

I recently saw a story about Keith Parsons, a college professor who announced that he will no longer teach his course on the philosophy of religion, because he “cannot take . . . arguments [in favor of theism] seriously any more.”

Boy, was this a shock!

I had no idea that there was such a thing as “philosophy of religion”, or that you could actually get paid to teach it.

OK, OK, I’m being facetious. I have great respect for philosophy (and for religion, too, or at least for some religions). I took a whole course in philosophy my freshman year of college: Phil I, Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius. What I most remember is how Plato wrote his Socratic dialogues so that Socrates always won the argument. I don’t mean just that we the reader ended up being persuaded. Even the guy Socrates was arguing with ended up agreeing with him. As you read along you came to a point where Socrates would say: Alcibiades (or whoever was Socrates’s victim in that particular dialogue), don’t you agree that . . . ? And as the reader I wanted to call out to poor Alcibiades, No, No, it’s a trick question, don’t agree with him! But feckless Alcibiades would agree, and then, sure enough, a few pages later, Socrates would show that if you accepted that assertion, you logically had to agree with Socrates’s conclusion. So old Alcibiades would sigh and agree that Socrates was right. Yes, Socrates, of course you’re right, how could it be otherwise?

This became a standing joke for a while in my crowd. Whenever some classmate would go overboard pontificating about something or other (and believe me, Harvard freshmen pontificated a lot – probably still do), someone would say, Yes, Socrates, of course you’re right, how could it be otherwise? It didn’t shut the pontificator up for long, but even a few minutes were a gift. So, I found that philosophy could be useful.

Later (much later), when I began to discover what my religion was all about, I started to read, or read about, philosophers who dealt with religious issues (or theologians who dealt with philosophical issues): Barth, Buber, William James, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Tillich, etc. So, when I discovered from the article I just mentioned that there was an academic discipline called philosophy of religion, I thought it would involve in-depth consideration of the kinds of issues that these philosophers raised. “Fear and Loathing Revisited”? “I and Thou in the 21st Century”? Terrific!

But I found it was not so. According to the article about Professor Parson’s resignation, “much of philosophy of religion consists in working out the logical implications of arguments”, such as “the argument from evil”. And what is that “argument”? It’s the old chestnut about whether the existence of evil in the world proves that there cannot be a loving and omnipotent god.

Please don’t get me wrong: I don’t for a moment mean to minimize the agony of the person who cries from the heart, How can a loving God permit this terrible thing to happen, my child to die, my home to be destroyed by a hurricane, or whatever tragedy it is. There is evil in the world and it does challenge our faith.

But the “argument from evil” is not a cri de coeur by someone whose faith is being challenged, it’s an intellectual exercise by philosophers who like to play games with ideas. The article tells us:

In the 1970’s, several leading philosophers of religion broke the argument [from evil] down into a “logical” version (that any amount of evil is logically incompatible with such a god) which most philosophers consider defeated, and an “evidential” version (that certain amounts or types of evil we observe in our world are evidence against such a god) which remains a thorny problem.

This seems like a waste of intellect. Do these philosophers ask themselves whether perhaps God could have a different definition of, or perspective on, evil than they do? Have they considered Genesis 1-3 and tried to understand how a religious tradition reconciles the reality of evil in the world with the existence of a loving God? Have they even read and attempted to understand “Fear and Loathing”?

These are rhetorical questions. Perhaps the philosophers of religion have considered all these things and satisfied themselves that their own approach is right. But I doubt it. We are told in this article that 73% of philosophers are atheists, and I suspect that even those who are believers in their hearts know whose game they have to play.

I find this all depressing. It’s like learning that your professor of music is tone deaf. There may be certain things that you can learn from such a teacher, but it can only go so far,

I was thinking about this stuff the other day when I saw that Turner Classic Movies was showing Glory on Martin Luther King Day. I’ve seen this great movie two or three times before, and it is painful each time, but worth the pain. It tells the story of a regiment of Black soldiers, recruited by the Union in the Civil War. Near the end of the movie, the night before the great battle in which most of them will die, the soldiers gather around the camp fires and sing hymns, pray, and testify. Their faith in God gives them the ability to face the coming day.

I don’t have words that can evoke what I felt when I saw that scene. You can see most of the scene here.

This scene says more about the Christian religion than any philosophical exercise can do. Our faith is a peculiar mixture of heart and head, emotion and intellect. On the one hand, it has a mystical power that seems to plumb depths far more profound than mere intellect can reach. On the other hand, it is not a blind and foolish tooth-fairy faith; it depends on a confident knowledge of the fact that God so loved this real material world, and us its real material inhabitants, that he sent his only begotten son so that we could have eternal life. Isn’t that more important that any philosopher’s word games?

For We Have Seen His Star In The East . . .

By Eric Von Salzen

Some call it Little Christmas, or Twelfth Night, or Epiphany: The end of the Christmas season. Traditionally, it’s the time when the Three Kings visited the Christ child

Everyone who reads this blog probably knows that scripture doesn’t call them kings, doesn’t even say there were three of them. Matthew’s Gospel, the only one that mentions them, says that “wise men [magi] from the east” came looking for the new-born King of the Jews. The notes in the New Oxford Annotated Bible say that the Magi were “a learned class in ancient Persia”, and that they might be called “astrologers”.

The wise men told King Herod that they had seen a “star” that signified the birth of a new king of the Jews. It’s uncertain what the “star” might have been; some have suggested that it might have been a comet, or a nova or supernova. I recently read that the “star” may have been the planet Jupiter, which passed close to the bright star Regulus three times between September of 3 BCE and May of 2 BCE, and for about three months during that period moved in a westerly (“retrograde”) direction – i.e., toward Judea from the perspective of observers in Persia. In June of 2 BCE Jupiter and Venus, the two brightest planets, overlapped, to appear as a single object. Astrologers might well have interpreted this unusual conjunction of stars as a sign of a portentous event.

If that’s the correct explanation, it solves one puzzle in Matthew’s gospel: Why nobody other than the wise men seems to have seen the “star”. When the Magi come to King Herod’s court with their story about the star, this was apparently the first time that anyone there had heard about the phenomenon. In fact, Herod asks the wise men when the star first appeared. If the “star” was a comet, everyone would have noticed it; even a nova or supernova would have been widely remarked, certainly by Herod’s chief priests and scribes (by the way, a 10-year old Canadian girl recently became the youngest person to discover a supernova ). But an unusual conjunction of Jupiter, Regulus, and Venus might have been noticed only by astrologers.

In most of the Christmas pageants I’ve seen (or been in, as I wrote here a couple of years ago), you have Mary and Joseph and the Babe; the three kings and the star; and shepherds, their sheep, and the angels who brought the tidings of great joy. But there’s no gospel that has both kings and shepherds. Matthew has the wise men, Luke has the shepherds. I assume that the new-born savior was visited by both wise men and shepherds (perhaps not at the same time – that could have made the stable awfully crowded), so why did Matthew choose to feature the wise men in his story of the savior’s birth, while Luke chose to go with the shepherds?

On the face of it, it would seem to make more sense for Matthew to tell about the shepherds, and for Luke to tell about the Persian astrologers. Matthew’s is regarded as the most “Jewish” of the gospels, whereas Luke, who had been the companion of Paul in bringing the message of Christ to non-Jewish foreigners, seems to be writing for Greek Christians. So you might expect Matthew to emphasize Christianity’s Jewish background in telling the story of the birth of Christ, and Luke to emphasize its universality.

But what does Luke give us? Shepherds. It would be hard to imagine a more obvious Jewish symbol. The ancestors of the Jewish people, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the twelve sons of Jacob for whom the twelve tribes of Israel were named, were all shepherds (so was Abel, the second son of Adam and Eve, who was murdered by his brother Cain, the farmer). After the Israelites were freed from Egyptian slavery, they became farmers in the land that God had promised them, but they seem to have regarded that as a demotion from their ancestral occupation: Their great king, David, was a shepherd, and shepherds and sheep appear throughout the Hebrew Scriptures (“The Lord is my shepherd”, “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel”, “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd”, “And I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them”, etc.). Thus, if you wanted your gospel to emphasize Christianity’s Jewish background, it would be entirely appropriate to have the birth of the Messiah of the Jews announced to shepherds abiding in the fields, and to show them – representatives of the Israelite ideal – as the first people called to worship him.

So if shepherds are an obvious Jewish symbol, why didn’t Matthew, the gospeler to the Jews, have shepherds in his story? Why, instead, did he give us foreign astronomers?

The answer, I think, is that the wise men were just as much a symbol of an idealized Israel as Luke’s shepherds were, just a symbol of a different aspect of the ideal. Wise men coming from afar to adore the new-born King of the Jews is something that the Jewish scriptures had been expecting for centuries before the birth of Jesus.

The Psalmist said of the King of Israel:

May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles
Render him tribute,
May the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts.
May all kings fall down before him,
And all nations give him service.
[Psalm 72:10-11]

The wise men weren’t kings, but it would have been appropriate if they were.

But it wasn’t just the King of Israel that foreigners were to honor, but the Lord who the king represented:

All the ends of the earth shall remember
And turn to the Lord;
And all the families of the nations
Shall worship before him.
[Psalm 22:27]

All the nations you have made shall come
And bow down before you, O Lord,
And shall glorify thy name.
[Psalm 86:9]

Isaiah (and Micah, too) prophesied:

Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
To the house of the God of Jacob;
That he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
[Isaiah 2:3; Micah 4:2]

Over and over again in the Old Testament we see the same prophecy, that the gentiles will in time come to understand that the God of Israel is the God of all the world. Thus, Israel, by being God’s special people, would become the means of bringing the rest of the world to God.

Matthew’s story about eastern sages coming across the trackless wastes to do homage to the new born king is therefore just as “Jewish” a story as Luke’s story about shepherds. Luke’s shepherds remind us of the ancient, unspoiled, ideal Israel; Matthew’s story reminds us of the Hebrew tradition that the nations will come to Zion for instruction, that Israel will be a beacon to the entire world, “a light to enlighten the gentiles”.

For us today, or for me at least, the story of the wise men has more resonance than the story of the shepherds. Shepherds aren’t part of the world that I live in, but wise men are – that is, men and women who think that their learning enables them to understand how the world works. There are times when I find myself thinking that I’m one of them. So it’s good to be reminded that the wise men in Matthew’s story got it wrong. Their wisdom, their science, told them that what they were seeking was an earthly king, a king of the Jews like Herod; certainly that’s what Herod feared that the star foretold. When they got to Bethlehem, the child that they found would not grow up to be an earthly king. He would never issue an edict, or call forth an army, or impose a tax, or execute a rival, or do any of the things that kings did, and do. But when he died, three decades later, under a sign that mockingly called him “King of the Jews”, the Roman centurion in charge of his execution said, “Truly this man was God’s son.” That’s who the wise men had found, not the king they were looking for.

That’s quite an epiphany.

Fear Not: For, Behold, . . .

I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.



And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.



Merry Christmas from the Godfather!

A Mug’s Game

By Eric Von Salzen

Have you heard? A debate was held the other day between religion and atheism.

Religion lost.

Although this debate is hardly in the same class as the infamous Oxford Union debate in 1933 (the one where the winning side affirmed that “this house will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”), it is nevertheless instructive.

The debate was held on November 26, 2010 in Toronto, Canada (no, really, please don’t stop reading this just because it happened in Canada). The proposition under consideration was:

Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world.

For the affirmative was Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister. Blair is a recent convert to Roman Catholicism. For the negative was Christopher Hitchens, a prominent polemicist for atheism, the author of God Is Not Great, among other writings. (Hitchens is dying of cancer, which has not softened his position on God, and which, to his credit, he did not exploit in the course of the debate.)

The transcript of the debate, and a link to the video, can he found here.

The religion side, as I said, lost. The vote was 68% against to 32% for the proposition. To be fair to Tony, the deck was stacked against him: Before the debate, the audience was 57% against and 22% for.

There are two lessons I suggest we can draw from this debate. The first is that a good polemicist will beat a good politician in debate any time. That shouldn’t be surprising. A polemicist’s role is to argue and score points, to make the other side look foolish, stupid, evil, uninformed, or whatever it takes to win. But a politician’s role is to solve problems, and (at least in a democracy) that means working with opponents, compromising, and downplaying differences of principle. Blair, who was able to lead his country through an unpopular but necssary war, never really had a chance in this debate.

Time and again, Hitchens slammed religion in general and every specific religion that came to mind, not fairly, of course, but effectively:

In the religious view, human beings are “objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well”.

God is “swift to punish [us for] the original sins with which [he] so tenderly gifted us in the very first place.”

“Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal?"

Circumcision is genital mutilation.

The Old Testament is responsible for the inability to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Roman Catholic church has “preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms”.

To none of these slanders did Mr. Blair offer a rebuttal. He eschewed (as a politician should) theological issues, and talked instead about all the good things that religious people do for the poor and down trodden of the world.

“[I]t is undoubtedly true that people commit horrific acts of evil in the name of religion. It is also undoubtedly true that people do acts of extraordinary common good inspired by religion.”

“My claim is just very simple, there are nonetheless people who are inspired by their faith to do good.”

But, as a politician who wants to build and maintain relationships with any group that can be helpful in solving problems, he has to say that good works are not exclusively the province of religion, that non-religious people can do the same wonderful things that religious people do. He describes work done by religious people in Africa with children infected by AIDS, and says:

Is it possible for them to have done that without their religious faith? Of course it's possible for them to have done it.

Later he concedes that:

Yes, of course, it is absolutely true, they might decide to do this, irrespective of the fact that they have religious faith.

And again:

So when we say, well, that could be done by humanism, yes, it could.

Well, if there are bad things that could be ascribed, at least in part, to religion – the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Ireland – and if the good things done by religious people can also be done by humanists, how do you conclude that, net, religion is good for the world?

The second lesson from this debate is more important, and it is this: It is folly to try to defend or promote “religion” as a generic concept. “Religion” is not a faith, it’s a category. Talking about “religion” in general is like talking about “husbands” or “wives” in general: The differences within the category render generalizations meaningless – unless you want to do stand-up, like Henny Youngman or Phyllis Diller.

If you try to defend or promote “religion”, you drain all the life out of the particular faiths that people embrace and end up with mush like this:

There is a basic belief common to all faiths, in serving and loving God, through serving and loving your fellow human beings.

It’s not that this Esperanto of “religion” is wrong, it’s just that it’s so weak, compared to, say:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good:
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, and to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?

Or to:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Besides, beyond the “basic belief” that Mr. Blair says is “common to all faiths”, there are specific beliefs of specific religions, and, truth be told, some of them are hard enough for members of the religion to defend; so how much harder you make it for yourself if you set about to defend all “religion”. Mr. Blair was challenged not only regarding his own church’s positions on birth control and original sin, but also on the Jewish rite of circumcision and the supposed Old Testament warrant for Israeli expansionism, on the Biblical literalism of some fundamentalist Christians, on faith healing, and so forth. There was little he was able or willing to say in response.

The fact is, if you are a faithful believer in a particular religion, there are all sorts of beliefs of other religions that you think are unreasonable, repellant, ridiculous, or just plain crazy. Why should you set yourself up to be beaten over the head about them by becoming an advocate for “religion”?

The defender of “religion” also has to deal with the inconvenient fact that a great deal of the conflict in the world arises out of disputes between members of different religions: Israeli Jews v. Arab Muslims, Roman Catholic Irish v. Protestant Irish, Hindu Indians v. Muslim Pakistanis, and so on. Tom Lehrer put it so well, years ago:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews.

Mr. Blair argued that some religious leaders struggle hard to bring peace to places rent by sectarian conflict, like Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Undoubtedly he is right. But if the question is whether “religion” is a force for good in the world, you don’t prove it that it is by showing that some religious people try to repair damage caused by religious differences. If you do, John Lennon answers you:

Imagine. . . no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

If you are out to defend “religion”, every religious conflict rebuts your argument. It’s different if you defend a particular religion. Your particular religion may be blameless with respect to, say, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and indeed may be playing a role in bringing about peace and tolerance. Even if your religion is involved in a particular conflict, the option is open to you, as a member of that faith, to defend your religion’s position (“we got here first”, or “they keep attacking us”, or whatever), or even to confess that your religion is in the wrong and you join with some of your co-religionists who are trying to right the wrong. You can’t do that if you are trying to defend “religion” in general.

You may devote yourself to Buddhism, or Judaism, or Hinduism, your life may have been changed by Islam, or Christianity, or Zoroastrianism, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who has devoted his life to “religion”.

None of this means that members of different faiths can’t or don’t cooperate to accomplish common goals and to make this world a better place. They do so all the time, as Mr. Blair testified. But they do so as Jews, or Christians, or Muslims, as Roman Catholics, or Presbyterians, or Anglicans. There’s no need to submerge these powerful religious impulses in some amorphous thing called “religion”.

The Rich Man and Lazarus -- Updated

There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in fine Italian suits and custom-made shirts, and fared sumptuously every day at the finest restaurants in the city and also at home for verily he employed a cordon bleu chef.

And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at the door of the rich man’s Fifth Avenue coop, full of sores, although not for long because the door man drove him off,

And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table, or with the garbage from the finest restaurants in the city, or even from the worst ones; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom; the rich man also died, and was buried.

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, it doesn’t have to be Evian, even tap water will do, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou are tormented.

And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, very much like the door man of your Fifth Avenue coop; so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

Then he said, but Father Abraham, although I didn’t feed Lazarus the crumbs from my table, all my life I paid very high taxes, you wouldn’t believe how high my taxes were, which supported homeless shelters and soup kitchens and other good things for people like Lazarus. You ought to give me some credit for that.

But Abraham said, Son, you were required to pay your taxes. If you had not done so, the soldiers would have come and thrown you in prison. This shows no love, no charity, for Lazarus.

Then the rich man said, but Father Abraham, that’s not all I did. I voted, and I always voted for the Party of Compassion, and gave the candidates of that Party many silver talents of political contributions through several different PACs, and the candidates of the Party of Compassion promised to raise the taxes on all the rich men in the land, to pay for more homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and many other good things; so if you give me no credit for paying my own taxes, you should give me credit for making other rich men pay more taxes.

But Abraham said, Son, I have said that paying taxes that you are required to pay shows no love or charity for Lazarus. How then can you imagine that making other men pay taxes shows love or charity for Lazarus?

Then the rich man said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldnst send Lazarus to my father’s house;

For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, and tell them they can stop supporting the Party of Compassion, because it won’t keep them from coming into this place of torment; let them support the Party of Frugality, which will lower their taxes and they can eat and drink even more sumptuously before they die.

And Abraham saith unto him, Thou still getteth not the point.

By Eric Von Salzen

Ignorance In The Pew[s]

By Eric Von Salzen


Are religious people more ignorant and less educated than non-religious people? Non-religious people often think so, and may find aid and comfort for that opinion in a survey of “U.S. Religious Knowledge” recently released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Pew concludes that, although “America is one of the most religious of the world’s developed nations”,

[L]arge numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions – including their own.

Indeed, Pew says:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

On average, Americans answered only half of the 32 “religious knowledge” questions correctly, but atheists, agnostics, Jews, and Mormons got 20-21 right. Protestants got an average score of 16, and Roman Catholics just under 15.

The specific examples of religious ignorance that Pew highlights are:

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

I was surprised by these results, because I haven’t found that the religious people I know are ignorant about religion. Besides, I'm a religious person, and I'm not dumb (at least I don't think so). Also, I hate to see more ammunition being provided to the anti-religious zealots.

So I wanted to take a look at the actual questions and answers that led Pew to these conclusions. It wasn’t easy to find them; they aren’t highlighted on the Pew website. But after combing through the text, I found them in Appendix B. On closer examination, they undermine Pew’s facile conclusions that I quoted above.

Let's start with the question about transubstantiation, which 45% of Catholics got wrong. The question reads: “Which of the following best describes Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for Communion?” The two choices are: They “actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ” or they “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” The first is the “correct” answer to Pew, but it’s incomplete. The Roman Catholic Church, as I understand it, teaches that the bread and wine do become in truth the body and blood of Christ, but also that there is no change in the empirical appearances of the bread and wine; that is, the “substance” of the bread and wine are changed, but their “accidents” are not. Now, I would assume that most Catholics are well-enough indoctrinated to pick the first answer, whether they understand all the details or not – and 55% did get it right – but I can’t get all worked up that a minority picked the other answer. Transubstantiation is a complex theological issue that doesn’t lend itself to a multiple-choice test.

Then there’s Martin Luther, who, Pew says, most (53%) Protestants “cannot correctly identify . . . as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion [sic] a separate branch of Christianity”. The question Pew asked was, “What was the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation?”, and the choices were Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, and John Wesley. Again, this is a badly worded question. I suspect that a number of respondents who gave the “wrong” answer knew who Martin Luther was, but they didn’t know what the phrase “the Protestant Reformation” meant. Of course this phrase is part of the vocabulary of theologians, historians, and history junkies like me, but if you aren’t familiar with the term, its meaning isn’t self-evident. Just from the words, it could refer to a reform of Protestantism, not a revolt against the Roman Catholic Church (perhaps that’s what the 12% of respondents were thinking when they named John Wesley as “the inspiration of the Protestant Reformation”). The dead giveaway that this was a bad question is that Pew, in describing the results, and wanting to emphasize for readers the degree of ignorance the answers to this question represented, felt it necessary to explain what the Protestant Reformation was (“the Protestant Reformation . . . made their [Protestants’] religion [sic, again] a separate branch of Christianity”). If the respondents had been given the benefit of that hint, I think it likely that more than 47% would have gotten the answer right.

And then there’s Maimonides. The question was, “Maimonides was ___”, and the possible answers were, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Mormon, or Hindu. Only 8% of all respondents knew that he was Jewish, but 57% of Jewish respondents did. Again, it’s a bad question. A non-Jew is very unlikely to have heard of Maimonides, unless he/she has studied comparative religion (I don’t even think he’s mentioned in EFM). It seems to me peculiar to ask about Maimonides, but not an equivalent Christian figure, like Thomas Aquinas for example. Of course, the reason Pew picked Maimonides was undoubtedly because his name doesn’t sound Jewish. If the question had been, “What religion was Hillel ben Samuel?” you’d probably have 90% correct answers, even though hardly any respondent would know who he was.

Thus, the three questions that Pew chose to highlight do not, in my view, prove as much about Americans’ "ignorance" about religion as Pew seems to think they do. In fact, the survey as a whole shows that Americans know a lot about religions, their own and others’. Almost three-quarters of respondents knew that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (not Nazareth or Jerusalem, two of the other choices), and a similar number knew that Moses led the exodus from Egypt; more than half knew that the Golden Rule isn’t one of the Ten Commandments, and a like number knew that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son for God. Fully 82% knew that Mother Teresa was Catholic.

Other answers, though, do show surprising ignorance. I was shocked that fewer than half of respondents were able to name the four Gospels correctly. (A few years ago some might have mistakenly named the Gospel of Judas, which for a time received a disproportionate amount of attention in the media, but that’s old news now, I think.) In a survey in which more than three-quarters of respondents identify themselves as Christians, it’s hard to understand this result.

About 2/3 of respondents knew that Zeus was the king of the gods in Greek mythology, but only about a third knew that Vishnu and Shiva are Hindu deities (actually, the question refers to them as “central figures” in a religion). Given the relative number of adherents to these religious traditions, one might infer a shortcoming in our educational systems.

Certainly, those whose job it is to teach religion to children, youth, and adults should see the results of the Pew survey as a challenge, but there’s no reason to despair.

CALLING ALL BIBLE SCHOLARS

Ingrid Betancourt, a Columbian politician, was kidnapped by FARC guerillas and held captive for six years. She and other hostages were finally freed by Columbian army forces.

Ms. Betancourt has written a book about her experiences, Even Silence Has An End , which I haven’t read and won’t discuss. What I want to call to your attention is a statement from an interview in which Ms. Betancourt talks about her captivity. She said that one of the few books she had access to was the Bible, and she read it over and over again. She described a passage that stuck out:

“It says that when you cross the valley of tears, and you arrive to the oasis, the reward of God is not success, it’s not money, it’s not admiration or fame, it’s not power. His reward is rest. So that’s what I want for me now.”

I think that’s very powerful, particularly given the circumstances in which she read it. But I can’t figure out what Bible passage she’s referring to.

Can you? Please comment.