The hidden origins of mankind

There is a movie that came out decades ago. I saw it in a theater in Paris as part of a Robert Mitchum festival, which, as luck had it, was playing in a small theater across the street from my small hotel at the end of a small street during a small, lonely season of my life. Instead of going to museums, I passed the days in the dark watching Cape Fear, The Night of the Hunter, Out of the Past, and Pursued, an obscure movie directed by Raoul Walsh. Martin Scorsese once described it to me as the only Freudian Western. It deals with repressed memory, signs and symbols, dreams and fantasies of uncovering the hidden origins of your existence. It’s about a cowboy. He lives in New Mexico with his mother, whom he loves; with his sister, whom he loves in a different way; and with his brother, whom he hates, though he doesn’t understand why. At night, he is haunted by a strange dream—in it, he sees dancing boots and spurs, and there is always laughter. In the last act, we learn the meaning of the boots and the laughter, a secret that explains the cowboy’s fear and distrust. The dream is more than a dream. It’s a memory of the day the man who’d been posing as Mitchum’s uncle killed Mitchum’s father, then danced over the body in spurred boots laughing as the woman Mitchum would accept as his mother scooped up the terrified child to be raised as her own.

That movie has haunted me ever since. Its dancing spurs have become my dancing spurs, its story less a plot than a parable. It’s mankind reduced to symbols. It’s a secret encoded. It’s telling us that the truth about our past—as a species—has been hidden. It’s about the effort to keep it hidden, which constitutes a conspiracy. It’s a secret that remains just out of reach, though the existence of the secret is hinted at in all the ancient books. It’s in the Bible (Old Testament) and in its sequel (New Testament). It’s in Exodus when Moses climbs the trail to the peak of Sinai, the holy mountain, the Lord’s abode in the upside-down. God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, then something else, a secret teaching, whispered in the left ear. Moses shared it with his nephews, who either passed it on or were not listening. Some of it may have been recorded in Jubilees, a noncanonical book of the Bible. It’s in the Gospels, too, most clearly in Mark, when Jesus, explaining why much of his teaching is given in the form of parables (in ancient Israel, a parable was like a riddle) says he does it to obscure as much as to reveal:

You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables, for they look, but they don’t really see. They hear, but they don’t really listen or understand.

For Jews, this method—teaching via seemingly pointless stories—will be familiar. All our old-timers prefer anecdotes to instructions, questions to answers. Think of the Bob Dylan lyric: “I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain.” Or think of my pop who, when asked why he answered every question with another question, responded, “Why do you ask?”


So in Mark, you again have the existence of the secret but not the secret itself, which is reserved for a handful of disciples who will pass it on to a chosen few, protecting the masses from a truth that would only confuse them.

You find mention of the secret all through art and literature—once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. It’s in every book that’s really knocked me out. Start with Walker Percy, whose novels I came across by accident—of course, there are no accidents—freshman year in college, when I was hungry for the secret. The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming—these books gripped me and disappointed me. Gripped me because the protagonist was always on the verge of discovering the secret; disappointed me because he never did. I always closed the book hungry, yet not knowing why. This not knowing drives Percy’s protagonists toward suicide. Better not to know you don’t know than to know you don’t know and never will. It’s a realization his characters experience as a fall from Eden, a move from blissful ignorance to tortured knowledge. Once again, and just like that, the bleak nature of their predicament comes back to them.

This can happen anywhere, even on a golf course:

Another time, he sliced out-of-bounds, something he seldom did. As he searched for the ball deep in the woods, another odd thing happened to him. He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that happened a long time ago. It was the most important event in his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it.

Shortly afterward, he became even more depressed. People seemed more farcical than ever. More than once he shook his head, and smiling ironically, said to himself: This is not for me.

Then it was that it occurred to him that he might shoot himself.
First, it was only a thought that popped into his head.
Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically.
Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out.

The books satisfy but not fully: you want the answer Percy himself seeks but never finds. You are left with the same questions you had at the beginning: Is there a secret? Who keeps it and how? And, most importantly, what is it?

That’s where secret societies, and the hatred of secret societies, comes in. Because these groups, real or imagined—Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Jews, always Jews—are thought to be in possession of the secret, which they use to manipulate the multitudes. If not, then why the codes, the symbols, the strange languages and signs? Why the two-headed eagle, the pentagram, and the all seeing eye? What are these things if not a wink to the hidden elite, those who know but are not telling. And what about the secret books—the Book of Enoch and the Gospel of Judas, or the occult writings of Theosophist Madame Blavatsky? And what about the rituals? The goat loaded with sin and driven into the wilderness, the horned helmet worn only in the inner sanctum, the staff and the flowing robes?

*

A fixation on such questions can drive people mad; they stand before the world like a person standing before a 3-D poster, hunting for the pattern. The answer is so close they can almost touch it. It shimmers like a heat mirage up the highway, forever receding. If they knew this, maybe they’d know everything. A man in my town told me that he gets goose bumps whenever he walks past the synagogue, wondering what’s being said in there. I can assure you, I told him (it’s my synagogue), nothing is being said. Or, if we are talking, it’s not about you. We know nothing you don’t know, which is why I have trouble connecting with the services. I am searching for the same thing as you, I tell him. In fact, the core of Judaism, as far as I’m concerned, is not knowing. We had the secret, then lost it. That’s the worldview. That’s the humor. That’s the food. That’s the sad old men. That’s the klezmer. That’s why people pray to a wall in the desert. Because the wall used to support a temple, in which there was a room where the secret was spoken once a year, but the room and the building have been destroyed.

People join secret societies for the business contacts, the companionship, to pass time and, of course, for the answers. But are these answers, if they do exist, anything other than ludicrous? The Nation of Islam believes the white race was made in a lab by a black scientist named Yakub. Scientologists believe human history was warped by an intergalactic overlord named Xenu who, in an effort to deal with overpopulation, killed millions of beings, stashed their frozen souls—“thetans”—beside volcanoes on earth—Hey, I’m doing the best I can here!—which he then nuked, scattering alien souls that adhere to modern humans in the way of burrs picked up in the forest. You pay, they are removed, and you become “clear.”

Every religion has a creation story, and the story, whether told in school or church, is always basically the same. The lyrics change, but the melody is the melody. It is always order arising from chaos: a big bang, an explosion of life, the creation of man and the fall from the paradise of not knowing. In the Bible, Cain kills Abel and is cast out. In Darwin, Homo sapiens plunge the Neanderthals into nonexistence. In both stories, the bad brother survives. In the Bible, the snake tempts Eve in the Garden, she eats from the tree of knowledge, and brings suffering into the world. To Gnostics, God is really a demigod who means to imprison us, to keep us from learning the secret: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat; But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, though shall not eat of it; for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” In this reading, the spirit we have accepted as almighty is more like a prison warden, hiding the truth, which the snake, who enters the Garden as if entering our dream, tires to reveal. Having eaten from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve must be cast out before they eat from the tree of life, at which point they will become the equal of their jailer. “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:  Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”

And who is this “us,” anyway?

And what about the modern sects, dozens of them, who’ve picked up and reassembled the pieces of the puzzle into ever wilder patterns. Take, for example, members of the Raëlian Movement, who believe mankind was created by ancient aliens—a genetically engineered hybrid designed to mine the gold needed to save the alien atmosphere. It’s a story they say can be read in the tablets found in the ruins of ancient Sumer, the world’s first civilization, which show reptile men, spaceships, thrones, little people worshipping giant lizards—the snake that crept into the Garden? These were the old-world gods, the immortals of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Greece and Rome. People with the right kind of eyes can find these intergalactic overlords even in our canonical texts. There they are, above the wine-dark seas of Homer. There they are, in the first pages of Genesis, where they are called the Nephilim. “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.” It’s a secret known to the Masons and Illuminati, though it has been kept from the people, who, to this day, are ruled by the descendants of half alien/half human hybrids. (This is what conspiracy theorists like David Icke believe; it’s what people mean when they speak of the reptilians.) Some think we are not even free-range hybrids, but live in a vast zoo, where we are gawked at by schools of field-tripping aliens. Some think we are on a reality TV show—that we’re famous on a distant planet. Some think this is all a computer simulation, that this world is not the real world but a reflection or echo of the real world, that we are living in a mainframe, our lives the playthings of adolescent boys who really should be doing their homework.

So what does it all mean?

It means that no book, no teacher, no religion, no philosophy, no scientific discovery will ever satisfy. You are looking for something you will never find, which they used to call God.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Kabir in his time, and ours

The notion that God is one entity with different names in India is Kabir's singular legacy – one the Hindutva camp is now trying to demolish.

Long before Kabir’s time (c. 1440-c.1518), with Islam’s arrival in India, two religions with contrary concepts of God and forms of prayer stood face to face. If Islam stood for the singularity of God, tauhid, Hinduism was teeming with legends of 330 million gods and goddesses even as the population practicing it would probably be under a hundred million.

Hinduism, in fact, comprised several strands, including monotheism as well as a very strong strand of atheism, unthinkable in Christianity or Islam as doctrines. The forms of worship for Muslims was a single one; these abounded in Hinduism. Islam came in through various doors: through the battlefields, Sufi dargahs and at the hands of traders. If its arrival at the point of the sword clearly created divisive tensions at the social level, the Sufis tended to soften these tensions through an alternate version of their faith.

However, even as interactions and some give-and-take of ideas, especially between the Sufis and the Nathpanthis did occur, the two competing identities of God – Allah and Ishwar – remained intact with this rivalry percolating down to their followers. It was Kabir’s genius that sought a resolution of this conflict. If the problem was extremely complex, Kabir’s solution was marked by a matching simplicity. He gave tauhid a very simple Indian version.

Kabir wearing a turban adorned with a peacock feather. YouTube screen grab

Tauhid, the Arabic term for the singularity of God or monotheism, the basic premise of Islam, had led to extensive discussions within the Muslim community. No one questioned either the existence or the singularity of God, but discussion followed on whether human beings can be held answerable for their deeds if all they do is pre-ordained for them by God; or whether Time had been created by God or was eternal; even the legitimacy of prophethood was questioned.

Al-Ghazzali, however, with enormous erudition at his command, closed all doors to dissent and firmly placed the faith beyond all manner of discussion. But then, some doors were opened again with Ibn al-Arabi proposing that while God’s singularity is given, He can be perceived and approached in multiple forms: wahdat al-wujud, the unity in multiplicity formula that we in India are so fond of repeating. In the 12th century a group in Morocco calling itself al-Muwahiddun (believers in tauhid) created a movement to purify Islam of its pre- and anti-Islamic elements and led to the establishment of a state which lasted over a century.

However, all these discussions, elaborations and movements were confined within the fold of Islam. Kabir broke out of this fold and took tauhid beyond the boundaries of denominational religions. But first, what are Kabir’s bona fides as an interpreter of tauhid?

Abu’l Fazl, medieval India’s tallest historian and intellectual mentions Kabir as a Muwahidd, says that he had unfolded life’s hidden “meaning” – a Sufi trope referring to life’s real spiritual meaning above the daily routine – and had given up the worldly rituals. Abu’l Fazl’s junior contemporary, Abdul Haqq Muhaddis, an orthodox scholar, tells a delightful story: his father asked his own father whether this renowned Kabir was a Hindu or a Muslim. His father said Kabir was neither a Hindu nor a Muslim but a Muwahidd. The son asked him what is a Muwahidd? The father replied “You are too young to understand; you will when you grow up”.

Noticeable is the fact that Kabir was recognised as a Muwahidd both in the liberal Muslim circles in medieval India, of which Abu’l Fazl is the most shining symbol as well as in orthodox circles and both emphasised that Kabir’s Muwahidd status went beyond the bounds of Islam and Hinduism. What did Kabir do to earn this distinction?

He questioned two prevailing orthodoxies: the concept of rival Gods and the need for religious rituals for worshipping Him. In place of Allah and Ishwar he conceptualised a single universal God; in place of denominational religions, he conceptualised a universal religiosity. “Bhai re do jagdis kahan se aaya; kahu kaune bauraya (Brother, where have two gods come from, who has misled you into believing it?),” he asserted. “Alla, Ram, Karima, Kesav Hari Hajrat naam dharaya (Allah, Ram, Karim, Kesav, Hari, Hajrat – they are all the same identity).” His entire collection of poetry is teeming with this single theme. He also ridiculed the rituals of going to temples or masjids to worship God, the rituals that Abu’l Fazl refers to and himself endorses giving these up.

Kabir was thus displacing the age-old dichotomy between denominational religions with a remarkably innovative concept, i.e. dichotomy between universal religiosity and denominational religions. One God for him no longer stood for one community, but for all of humanity. It eliminated rivalry between gods and included them all in a single fold. This was a specifically Indian solution to religious disputes. I believe one consequence of this displacement was that even as medieval Europe was engulfed in intra-religious bloodshed on a massive scale, social peace in medieval India remained intact, though there was widespread inter- and intra-religious violence on the battlefields.

Isn’t it significant that over the nearly 550 years of the “Muslim” rule in India (James Mill’s term), in the midst of a lot of political violence, communities lived in peace, for the first occurrence of real communal violence is recorded in 1714 in Modi ji’s Ahmedabad seven years after Aurangzeb’s death. There is no record of any other instance of this nature prior to that. During the 18th-century five such incidents are recorded. Compare this with almost five hundred incidents every year under the aegis the secular Indian state!

The influence and durability of Kabir’s conceptual innovation of tauhidis almost astounding. Abu’l Fazl’s endorsement of Kabir has already been noted; indeed, the concept of sulh-i kull (absolute or universal peace) for which both Abu’l Fazl and Akbar have earned acclaim derives its premise from Kabir. Bulleh Shah speaks Kabir’s language when he holds that salvation lies in giving up all rituals and shedding one’s religious ego; and the greatest Urdu poet, Ghalib, in a remarkable verse (sh’er) virtually reproduces Kabir whether regarding rituals or the ego of denominational religions to arrive at the true imānor religiosity.

Remember that Gandhi Ji’s favourite bhajan was ‘Ishwar Allah tero naam’. After all, the notion that God is one entity with different names and different paths of approaching Him is commonplace in India; this is the singular legacy of Kabir. This is the legacy that the Hindutva camp finds so irksome and are seeking to demolish in the name of Ram.

(Source: The Wire)

Albert Einstein's 'God letter' sells for $2.9m

A handwritten letter by Albert Einstein in which he grapples with the concept of religion has smashed predictions and sold for nearly $2.9m (£2.3m).

The so-called "God letter" was written in 1954 and was expected to fetch $1.5m (£1.2m) at auction in New York.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist, then 74, wrote the one-and-a-half page note to German philosopher Eric Gutkind in response to one of his works.

The letter is regarded as a clear statement of Einstein's religious beliefs

It is seen as a key statement in the debate between science and religion.

"This remarkably candid, private letter was written a year before Einstein's death and remains the most fully articulated expression of his religious and philosophical views," a statement from Christie's says.

It fetched almost double the auction house's predicted price of between $1m-1.5m.

In the letter, written in his native German, Einstein takes issue with the belief in God.

"The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses," he writes. "The Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends."

It continues: "No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can [for me] change anything about this."

Albert Einstein pictured around the time he wrote the so-called "God letter"

The physicist also muses on his own Jewish identity, writing that it is "like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition".

"The Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other peoples," he writes.

It is not the first time Einstein's letters have been put up for auction.

Last year, a note written to an Italian chemistry student who had refused to meet him sold for $6,100.

It was sold alongside a number of other letters from Einstein, including a 1928 note that went for $103,000, in which he set out his thoughts for his third stage of the theory of relativity.

In 2017, a note in which he gave advice on happy living sold for $1.56m in Jerusalem.

A single sentence, it reads: "A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it."

(Source: BBC)

Atheists are less open-minded than religious people, study claims

Researchers at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium suggest religious believers 'seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives'

Religious people are more tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists, according to researchers at a Catholic university.

A study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics think of themselves as more open-minded than those with faith, but are are actually less tolerant to differing opinions and ideas.

Religious believers "seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives", according to psychology researchers at the private Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium's largest French-speaking university.

Filip Uzarevic, who co-wrote the paper, said his message was that "closed-mindedness is not necessarily found only among the religious".

Religious people are more tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists, according to researchers at a Catholic university.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

He told Psypost: "“In our study, the relationship between religion and closed-mindedness depended on the specific aspect of closed-mindedness.

“Somewhat surprisingly, when it came to subtly measured inclination to integrate views that were diverging and contrary to one’s own perspectives, it was the religious who showed more openness."

Dr Uzarevic's paper, called "are atheists undogmatic?", states that "irreligion has become normative" in some Western countries.

He inspected three aspects of mental rigidity in 445 atheists and agnostics, 255 Christians, and a group of 37 Bhuddists, Muslims, and Jews.

The study claims that non-believers measured lower than religious people in "self-reported dogmatism", but were higher in "subtly-measured intolerance".

Dr Uzarevic said: "“The idea started through noticing that, in public discourse, despite both the conservative/religious groups and liberal/secular groups showing strong animosity towards the opposite ideological side, somehow it was mostly the former who were often labeled as ‘closed-minded’.

“Moreover, such view of the secular being more tolerant and open seemed to be dominant in the psychological literature.”

The findings also said that the strength of a person's belief in either atheism or religion is directly correlated to how intolerant they are.

(Source: The Independent)

A most unlikely saint

The case for canonizing G. K. Chesterton, the bombastic man of letters and paradoxical militant for God, writes James Parker in The Atlantic. Read on:

If the catholic church makes G. K. Chesterton a saint—as an influential group of Catholics is proposing it should—the story of his enormous coffin may become rather significant. Symbolic, even parabolic. Chesterton’s coffin was too huge, you see, to be carried down the stairs of his house in Beaconsfield, its occupant being legendarily overweight at the time of his death, in 1936. So it went out a second-floor window. Very Chestertonian: gravity, meet levity. Hagiographers might pursue the biblical resonance here, citing the Gospel passages in which a paralyzed man, unable to penetrate the crowds surrounding the house in Capernaum where Jesus was staying, is lowered in through a hole in the roof. Or they might simply declare that Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s was a spirit too large to go out through the conventional narrow door of death—that it had to be received, as it were, directly into the sky.

In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debate—the phenomenon known to early-20th-century newspaper readers as “GKC” was half cornucopia, half content mill. If you’ve got a couple of days, read his impish, ageless, inside-out terrorist thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. If you’ve got an afternoon, read his masterpiece of Christian apologetics Orthodoxy: ontological basics retailed with a blissful, zooming frivolity, Thomas Aquinas meets Eddie Van Halen. If you’ve got half an hour, read “The Blue Cross,” the first and most glitteringly perfect of his stories featuring the crime-busting village priest Father Brown. If you’ve got only 10 minutes, read his essay “A Much Repeated Repetition.” (“Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.”)

Chesterton did not so much fall into verbalism as somersault out of it, chucking one-liners like ninja stars.
Chesterton was a journalist; he was a metaphysician. He was a reactionary; he was a radical. He was a modernist, acutely alive to the rupture in consciousness that produced Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”; he was an anti-modernist (he hated Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”). He was a parochial Englishman and a post-Victorian gasbag; he was a mystic wedded to eternity. All of these cheerfully contradictory things are true, and none of them would matter in the slightest were it not for the final, resolving fact that he was a genius. Touched once by the live wire of his thought, you don’t forget it. And what is genius? Genius is Hammy the squirrel, in DreamWorks Animation’s 2006 classic Over the Hedge, five seconds after he gulps down an energy drink. The Earth stutters on its axis and then stops turning, the soundtrack comes to a soupy halt, and Hammy saunters through a sudden, humming immobility, past the transfixed pest-control guy and around the frozen laser beams of the lawn-alarm system. He is, of course, moving at incredible speed—but with supernatural nonchalance. His ecstatic velocity has put everything around him into the slowness and vagueness of a dream. That’s what geniuses do.



“It would have been better perhaps,” Chesterton’s friend Hilaire Belloc wrote, “had he never fallen into verbalism (wherein he tended to exceed).” But he did not so much fall into verbalism as come somersaulting out of it, chucking one-liners like ninja stars. His prose, if you don’t like it, is an unnerving zigzag between flippancy and bombast—and somewhere behind that, even more unnerving, is the intimation that these might be two sides of the same thing. If you do like it, it’s supremely entertaining, the stately outlines of an older, heavier rhetoric punctually convulsed by what he once called (in reference to the Book of Job) “earthquake irony.” He fulminates wittily; he cracks jokes like thunder. His message, a steady illumination beaming and clanging through every lens and facet of his creativity, was really very straightforward: get on your knees, modern man, and praise God.

In his use of paradox it could be said, per Belloc, that he tended to excess. “One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.” “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” And so on. But Chesterton—born under Gemini, the sign of doubleness—is paradoxical because the world is paradoxical. I recently watched an episode of National Geographic Channel’s Outlaw Bikers in which was recounted the strange tale of the Fort Lauderdale Warlocks, a motorcycle gang consisting of undercover ATF agents. Swap the biker gang for a group of fin de siècle anarchists, and the ATF agents for English secret policemen, and you have, basically, the plot of The Man Who Was Thursday (except that in the novel the secret policemen are secret even to one another, each thinking that he alone has infiltrated the anarchist cell).


Besides, Jesus loved a paradox: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” The Chestertonian paradox, in fact, was a kind of ideogram of the foundational paradox of the Incarnation, of God being born as Man, when “the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle,” as he wrote in another book of Christian apologetics, The Everlasting Man. And has anyone gone further than Chesterton into the agonizing paradox of the Crucifixion—Jesus’s cry of abandonment from the cross, when “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist”?

which brings us to the Catholic Church. Why should it want to make him a saint? Why Chesterton and not—if you’re talking about great Catholic writers—Gerard Manley Hopkins? Or Walker Percy? Or Flannery O’Connor? Because Chesterton, in his jolly way, was a militant. A blaster of the superstitions of modernity, a toppler of the idols of materialism. He inveighed ceaselessly, at great length, and without ever once repeating himself, against “the thought-destroying forces of our time”: pessimism and determinism and pragmatism and impressionism. Wait—impressionism? The nice paintings? Oh, indeed. Impressionism was a terrible heresy, a kind of manifesto for self-absorption. “It means believing one’s immediate impressions at the expense of one’s more permanent and positive generalisations,” Chesterton argued in his study of William Blake. “It puts what one notices above what one knows.” He wasn’t always right, in other words. The chief obstacle to his sanctity will no doubt be his indefensible heap of writings on “the Jewish problem,” which brought out the worst in him—and continues to bring out the worst in his defenders.

But when he was right, he was prophetically right. Fearing and detesting the centripetal, black-hole suck of the almighty modern Self, he faced the other way: into the fact of Creation. There is a reality outside the mind, Chesterton insisted—and part of his energy was his innocent, unflagging astonishment that he had to keep on making the point. To us, the great solipsists, for whom the recognition of another human being requires a galvanic imaginative act, he speaks very directly.

The campaign for the beatification of G. K. Chesterton has now reached the prayer-cards stage. Late last year, I walked into a Catholic church in Stowe, Vermont, and found on a table near the entrance a stack of cards inviting me to pray for Chesterton’s intercession “so that his holiness may be recognized by all and the Church may proclaim him Blessed.” In other words, I should ask him for a miracle. All right then, Gilbert, here it is: grant me a flash, just a flash, of your double-natured vision, the intuition that I, James Parker, have been summoned out of an “almost nihilistic abyss” into a world of radiant ordinariness, that my existence depends second by second upon the creative gesture of a loving God, continually renewed, and that I should be astounded and grateful. Make that happen, you rocketing squirrel in a fat man’s body, and I’m down for the cause.

Atheists are more intelligent than religious people: Study

New paper sets out to explain negative correlation between faith and intellect found in dozens of past studies

Religious people are less intelligent on average than atheists because faith is an instinct and clever people are better at rising above their instincts, researchers have claimed.

The theory — called the 'Intelligence-Mismatch Association Model' — was proposed by a pair of authors who set out to explain why numerous studies over past decades have found religious people to have lower average intelligence than people who do not believe in a god.

A 2013 analysis by University of Rochester found “a reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity” in 53 out of 63 historic studies.

A negative correlation between intelligence and religion makes sense if religion is considered an instinct, and intelligence the ability to rise above one's instincts, say researchers Edward Dutton and Dimitri van der Linden in their new paper published today.

Writing for Springer’s journal of Evolutionary Psychological Science, the authors – who are based at the Ulster Institute for Social Research and Rotterdam University respectively – explained their model is based on the ideas of evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa.

Mr Kanazawa's 'Savanna-IQ Principles' suggest human behaviour will always be guided by the environment in which their ancestors developed.

Mr Dutton and Mr van der Linden argue in keeping with this that religion should be considered an 'evolved domain' — or instinct.

Rising above instincts is advantageous, they said in a statement, because it helps people to solve problems.

“If religion is an evolved domain then it is an instinct, and intelligence — in rationally solving problems — can be understood as involving overcoming instinct and being intellectually curious and thus open to non-instinctive possibilities,” explained Mr Dutton.

According to the 2013 review, the more intelligent a child is —  even during early years — the more likely it is to turn away from religion.

In old age, above-average-intelligence people are less likely to believe in a god.

Mr Dutton and Mr van der Linden also investigated the link between instinct and stress, and the instinctiveness with which people tend to operate during stressful periods.

They argue that being intelligent helps people during stressful times to weigh up their options and act rationally rather than give in to knee-jerk responses.

“If religion is indeed an evolved domain — an instinct — then it will become heightened at times of stress, when people are inclined to act instinctively, and there is clear evidence for this,” said Mr Dutton.

“It also means that intelligence allows us to able to pause and reason through the situation and the possible consequences of our actions.”

The researchers believe that people who are attracted to the non-instinctive are potentially better problem solvers.

“This is important, because in a changing ecology, the ability to solve problems will become associated with rising above our instincts, rendering us attracted to evolutionary mismatches,” said Mr van der Linden.

(Source: Independent)

The Church of Sweden is going to stop referring to God as a man

High-ranking Swedish clergy have expanded on the Church of Sweden's recent announcement that it plans to stop referring to God as a man, instead opting to use gender-neutral terms.

Lena Sjostrand, the chaplain of Lund Cathedral, said the changes are going to take place in order to keep up with the more inclusive nature of contemporary society.

“We have consciousness about gender questions, which is stronger in our time than it has been before,” she said in an interview with PBS NewsHour . “Of course, this has had an impact on theology and on church life and pastoral reflection.”

Uppsala, situated in the north of Stockholm, is the location of the seat of the Swedish church. Antje Jackelen is the Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala and leader of over six million registered Lutherans.

She will be overseeing the replacement of masculine terms in the Swedish church over the next six months.

While these changes may seem radical, Ms Jackelen explained how the church has always perceived God as displaying both male and female attributes. “Like Julian of Norwich in the 14th century said, as sure as God is our father, God is our mother,” she said. “So, I mean, this is not something that’s newly invented. It’s part of our tradition.”

Expressions such as: “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit” will be altered to gender-neutral phrases such as: “In God the Trinity’s name."

While Sweden is widely regarded as a forward-thinking country, these proposed changes have inevitably been met with some opposition.

Pastor Mikael Lowegren, for instance, does not agree with the notion that God be referred to in gender-neutral terms.  “You don’t play lightly with the creed,” he said. “You don’t play lightly with the liturgy of the church.”

Priests won’t be forced to change their use of language in church. However, the Primate in Sweden will strongly encourage them to do so.

(Source: Independent)