Bag of Worms Yet Words

Old Testament in Written Form Might Date 400 Years Earlier Than Previously Believed

Writing on a recovered shard of pottery from King David's time has been identified as an ancient form of Hebrew and contains maxims of social morality similar to Isaiah. This discovery provides indirect evidence against the widely held historical interpretation that the first five books of the Old Testament were mostly written in the 6th century and contained much fictitious history  intended to legitimate the Israelite ruler of the time.

Can There Be A False Religion (4)

In previous articles, I have proposed that truth appears first in the presentation,  later in the proposition; that is, a person first experiences the truth of an idea, being presented in an encounter by another person, in the qualities of the presentation, rather than by consideration of the idea in a language-based proposition. In the conversion encounter, there are presentational qualities involved in the situation of the missionary and the nonbeliever that set up an expectation (or intuition?) of truth, falsehood, or false religion.

My proposal needs discussion to be credible. I need to identify the ontological status of the qualities of the presentation to which the nonbeliever responds. Are the qualities of the presentation simply subjective qualities in the nonbeliever, or do they have objective existence in the presentation-in-its-situation? I also need to identify the structure or process in the nonbeliever that takes in the presentation and can arrive at the preliminary assessment of truth.

To answer these questions, I shall draw on my theory of values discussed in another blog article. I shall here only summarize what I have tried to explain in detail there. I have argued that values are real, objective constituents of the world in which we live. We perceive values; that is, we know values as a result of precognitive perception. Just as we see an object, e.g., a car parked in the driveway, we "see" (that is, perceive) values. Values are not subjective figments of our imaginations, not simply projections of emotions, such as desire and fear, and not learned social constructions of our experience.

I have argued that there are four kinds of primordial values: frame, metric, path, and transaction. These values may exist and be perceived by themselves, or they may be combined as constituents in composite values, also perceived by precognitive perception.

Frame values are boundaries and divide our perceived world into sections and locations. Metric values give distance and density to the geographical parts (so to speak) of our world. Path values provide continuity to our own movement in and through our world and continuity to the movements of other beings and objects moving in our world. Transaction values are exchange values involved in social interaction (e.g., gift giving).

We can see these fundamental values involved in the conversion encounter. Frame and metric values, as they are perceived by nonbeliever and by the missionary, provide the perceived structure of approach in the encounter. Frames are the boundaries dividing my private space as a nonbeliever from the public space out of which the missionary comes to me. If someone runs rapidly toward us, we perceive them approach in a certain way; similarly. If someone insists quickly that we agree to something, we perceive them as intellectually approaching us in a certain way. Metric values are rate and intensity of approach. If the approach is rapid, we perceive them as "closing in on us".  We respond negatively to approaches that do not provide sufficient interval for us to organize ourselves to respond. Whether we say the approach is dangerous or is "wrong" is, at this point in the encounter, a matter of indifference.   

Path values track the movement of both the nonbeliever and the missionary. Whether the encounter can be avoided or must be consummated, whether one or several persons are approaching, and what are our possible exit routes if we would need one are path variables. Transaction values concern what interchange and exchange are possible and/or required in the presentation.

The values do not distinguish, but rather unify together the physical, bodily, emotional, and intellectual components of the presentation in the encounter. It is artificial to distinguish between them; they are one and the same. We would distinguish between them perhaps only after the encounter is over as we reflect upon our memory of the encounter. In the several minutes, or even seconds, in which the presentation first appears to us in the encounter, our fundamental values are defined, as, in analogy, variables are defined to specific values (variable X takes value 30; frame value is a thirty-foot diameter circle around me at the center).

I call these fundamental types of values, primordial, because they arose (I suggest) at the very earliest stage of human social evolution and because they are related to biological (sensory, neurological) perception. They pre-exist experience and knowledge. We perceive them as real--"out there" in the objective world. They are the perceived structure of the presentation of ideas, setting up the presentation as true or false.

Religious ideas, religious experience, and religion as a social phenomenon would be perceived within the same structure of primordial values as all other constituents of our experience and knowledge. At its presentation stage, the conversion encounter is perceived in terms of them. In the last article, I identified several qualities of the presentation as setting up the truth of the religious propositions that would eventually be brought forward--whether initiation of the encounter was voluntary, whether the termination would be voluntary, whether the state was involved, whether nonreligious issues are involved. We can now see that these qualities are simply primordial values as they are experienced. Voluntariness is a complicated perception of location, crossing of boundaries, and the social interactions they involve. How skittish the nonbeliever is at the initiation of the conversion encounter has much to do with the presentation's metric values--how rapid and how intense it is,  for instance.

Whether we like the proposition or not, whether a religion is a true religion, will be a structural perception of the nonbeliever at the outset of the conversion experience. There can be a false religion, in other words, because that is how the world in which we live is necessarily perceived by us.

Can There Be A False Religion (3)

Whenever we encounter a claim of truth, we evaluate it from two nested perspectives, that of our culture and that of the immediate situation, in a multi-stage process with a variety of procedures. Empirical truth testing comes toward the end of our encounter (if we ever get to it), not at its beginning. We never at first simply hold up the claim in propositional form, examine what it means, them test it against an appropriate criterion.

Imagine we are walking down a public street and someone runs toward us, shouting, "They're shooting people at the bank." How do we greet this statement? (We are going to set aside the issue of the cultural context as well-known, for the moment.) First, we receive it as a claim of truth, rather than a self-evident truth report. Then, we quickly engage a variety of procedures to determine whether it is credible that such a claim could be truthfully made at this time and place and circumstance; that is, we evaluate the immediate situation in which we receive the claim. If the time is midday, and we are (we know) in a small village without a bank; then we would be incredulous of the claim. On the other hand, if we are in a large city in a high-crime neighborhood, and we know a bank is in the next block, then we might not immediately dismiss the claim. We would, in other words, assess the claim for truth by examining the circumstances of its presentation, before we try to verify the claim itself.

We would greet claims of religious truth no differently than any other truth claims. As in the example, above, we would assess the situational circumstances and character of the claim's presentation before trying to verify the claim itself. Since some religious truth-statements cannot be scientifically tested, in a conventional sense, it might well be that the only procedures we have available to assess the truth claim are those that assess the presentation of the claim, rather than the claim itself.

Let's start by looking at the qualities of presentation in a conversion encounter.

We would start by distinguishing between religious falsehoods and a false religion. If the nonbeliever does not believe in any religion, were an secular humanist, for instance, the suspicion that the missionaries represent a false religion would probably not immediately arise. For the secular humanist, all religions are false, so the distinction between a true religion and a false religion would not arise.

Missionaries, teachers, religious clerics, and other advocates of any religion engaged in missionary work are aware that, in approaching nonbelievers, they must be concerned with setting up the conversion encounter with the nonbeliever. They must concern themselves with their sincerity to ensure that the audience does not suspect they are offering religious falsehoods (or even have a nonreligious purpose--selling insurance or cookies or magazine subscriptions). Let's assume that the missionary gets past this point; the audience believes the person(s) in front of her are genuinely religious, believe their religion to be true, and are sincerely interested in converting the nonbeliever to their faith.

In this conversion encounter, the missionary's effort to persuade the nonbeliever of a claim to truth will include by implicit reference the possibility of a finding of false religion. The nonbeliever has the option of thinking that the missionaries, though genuine believers, believe in a non-religion, that the missionaries are, in other words, dupes of a false religion. An experienced missionary will surely have encountered believers who slammed the door in their face, shouting that they are deluded. How would the missionary forestall such a reaction?

Both the nonbeliever, who is the target of conversion effort, and the missionaries expect that an encounter will be initially assessed in terms of presentation. The presentation must proceed so that the issue of false religion and delusion does not occur to the nonbeliever. How can the missionary accomplish this feat? The missionary will employ a repertoire of procedures, including rituals, costumes, props, and skits to enframe the presentation. The presentation will not decide the claim to truth, but if the missionary is successful, the presentation will advance the claim to the status of candidate for a claim to truth.

We should not assume the nonbeliever will automatically be skeptical of the presentation; but the nonbeliever will certainly assess it. What circumstances and what character of presentation for conversion will be taken into consideration when the nonbeliever assesses the presentation? I think the following issues of presentation would be crucial.

1/ Is initiation of the encounter between the nonbeliever and the missionary voluntary or involuntary?

A forced encounter would taint the missionary's sincerity.

2/ Is the encounter presented as having a voluntary or involuntary outcome; in other words, is the nonbeliever presented with a demand that a decision must be made and by a certain time?

Wouldn't a nonbeliever expect that a genuine conversion effort would be tailored to the nonbeliever's unique qualities, knowledge, and readiness? If so, a missionary genuinely interested in conversion would not be able to say, ahead of time, when a conversion should occur. The missionary would not say, make up your mind, I've only got a couple of hours. A deadline would constitute a threat, making the conversion involuntary.

3/ Does the encounter take place within the auspices of the state?

If the state is involved in the conversion encounter, it would immediately complicate the encounter with issues that would distract the audience from the religious message.

4/ Are any issues, other than the claim to truth, at stake, such as status of citizenship?

State issues in a conversion encounter would implicitly present a threat; do this, or else.

A nonbeliever would expect that a true religion does not need the assistance of force or the state or threats to have the truth of the religion appear to the nonbeliever. I do not think this assumption is simply Reformation culture on my part. No doubt, from the point of view of the missionary, who believes in the truth of her religion, any reluctance of the nonbeliever to proceed with the encounter or any nonbeliever skepticism would be assigned to sinful resistance on the nonbeliever's part. But we have ruled out this perspective, from inside religious belief, in our effort to determine the possibility of false religion. A true religion would approach the conversion encounter in a different way than the false religion. Open discussion and free assent should be part of the way a true religion appears to the potential convert.

(Revised. January 7, 2007.)

Can There Be A False Religion (2)

Given the framework for my question (see part 1), we must answer it by examining the encounter between religion and nonbelievers outside the religion. I identify three perspectives on this encounter we need to study: the perspective of the religion, that of the outsider, and that of the person who observes this encounter.

In terms of the religious perspective, we should examine doctrine toward nonbelievers, institutional arrangements for encounters with nonbelievers, normal intentions of believers toward nonbelievers, and historical accounts of contact between religious believers and nonbelievers. In this examination, it would be appropriate to distinguish between the formal relations of religion as an institution to outsiders, and private, personal encounters of believers and nonbelievers.

Regarding the outsider, we should examine what appearance the religion presents to the outsider-nonbeliever, as well as the nonbeliever's expectations. We cannot practically examine nonbelievers' private expectations, of course, since there would be as many of these as there are persons; but we can research how these expectations are socially organized and institutionally expressed.

Finally, we need to examine the observer of the encounter. This sounds like an unnecessary complication; but it is easy to understand its importance. The law and norms of society constitute observers. Not only do they "observe" the encounter, but they also provide contexts of action and remedy to deal with the progress and difficulties of the encounter between a religion and the nonbeliever.

Law and norms are defined as disinterested or neutral observers of the encounter only in special circumstances in some modern societies. Historically, in societies with official religions, the law and norms were not disinterested in the contact between believers and nonbelievers. As observers, even in societies without state religion, law and norms address the issue of false religion. In the United States, for instance, constitutional protections of religion presume a distinction between religion deserving of protection and "religions", ideologies, philosophies and other belief-systems not so deserving. Voodoo is not given the same protection as Methodism; this difference constitutes presumption that false religion can exist and indirectly a legal definition of it. I am not going to develop this component in my essay, since it can be investigated separately in the history of constitutional law.

What kinds of encounters between religion and outsiders are widely experienced around the world today and in history? I can think of several kinds: commercial, conquest with forced conversion, emigration, marriage, proselytizing with voluntary conversion, and urban social interaction. These encounters, listed alphabetically, express different kinds of social processes; but we should  not assume, at the outset, that one is necessarily more important or helpful than the others in answering our question.

Commercial--Trading goods was historically one of the earliest means of interaction between different societies, bringing different religions into contact. Surely, it remains so.

Conquest with forced conversion--Wars brings acquisition of foreign territory raise numerous issues of assimilation of foreign cultures, social practices, and religions. Historically, conquest often brought forced conversion to the religion of the conqueror.

Marriage--In modern Western societies, many persons involved in interfaith marriage do not confront the differences in their faiths or the relation between belief and nonbelief until they are compelled to do so by their families or by churches or other religious institutions, when they desire to marry with consecration.

Proselytizing with voluntary conversion--Forced or voluntary conversion often comes after other social processes have brought different people into contact, such as trading and conquest. By referencing proselytizing, I mean to refer to voluntary conversion that follows a missionary effort toward the nonbeliever by persons officially representing a religion.

Urban social interaction--Cities have traditionally been places where persons of different beliefs and social practices have come into contact with each other as a result of gathering in public spaces or participating in urban social institutions, such as schools. (The New York Times, Saturday, March 4, 2006 has an interesting article on the compromises a Muslim Imam must make to live in Brooklyn.)

If a religion is to be judged false by outsiders, these (and undoubtedly other) kinds of settings are the locations where the contest of truth and falsity in religion will be engaged. For us, this is not an anthropological issue. Scientists have studied contact between cultures and religions at great length, but usually without trying to distinguish between true and false religions in the encounters, though they might report whether the subjects of their study thought a religion involved in the encounter was a false religion. Our concern is different.  We need to examine how a religion would defend itself against the accusation of being a false religion in such settings. Would encounters of different faiths or between faith and disbelief in such settings helps us discover a methodology that allows us to identify false religion.

Can There Be A False Religion (1)

In America's struggle with radical Islamists, who believe in Mohammedan supremacy to all other religions, few issues are as important as the issue of evaluating Islam as a religion. Whether we look at the martyrdom motivation of individual Islamist suicide bombers or at the cultural values of violence and peace in Islam broadly, we must accurately assess the nature of our enemies to craft our own policy. We are limited in our capability to undertake this evaluation, however, by a generation of post-modernism and the interfaith movement. Their intellectual positions of complete cultural relativism, moral equivalence, and apology for the history of Christianity have become deeply engrained in the European-American political class and secular elites. Most of the West's leaders have been left without the values, philosophy, analytical tools, and will needed to revise the Western world view for the "long war".

Any evaluation of Islam, as with any evaluation of religion* in a conflict situation, should include an assessment of whether the religion is false. While we can choose to respect individual religious commitments on the basis of our respect for the existential needs of individual human lives, we cannot solve the larger problems of religious conflict between religions collectively organized as societies and cultures without deciding whether the religions--our own and those of our enemies--are worthy of preservation and encouragement, or containment, or reformation, or suppression. We do not have to conceive of our present struggle as a war of cultures or civilizations to realize that we might well face decisions about what to do with Islamism wherever it exists as a state-affiliated religion. We do not want to be in the situation of defeating Islamist terrorists and semi-organized armies, only to face resurgent Islamist conflict a decade or generation later, because we did not deal with its underlying religious qualities. Surely, our policies would be different if we respected Islam as a true religon (for want of a better term, for the moment) or if we were compelled to understand it as a violent perversion of human religious needs.

I do not pretend to have any solution to the issue I raise. I know little about the history and sociology of religions, and nearly nothing about the history and doctrine of Islam, and little about the Middle East. I have some sense of the intellectual landmines surrounding the issue. Someone must, however, put the issue on the table for discussion; since this issue worries me, I shall try.

Let's start by seeing what kind of a question we are asking and what vocabulary we must use to discuss it. First, of all, when we ask whether a particular religion is a true or false religion, we are not asking a scientific question. A religion cannot be a true or false religion in the same sense that a scientific theory can be true or false, or that a science can be a true or false science. Scientific truth involves controlled experiment and empirical testability, which religion cannot. All religions recognized today as such involve faith in a way that ultimately denies scientific knowledge.

We are not, second, asking whether a religion is different from an ideology or a philosophy. A false religion is not necessarily a ideology or a philosophy. If a true religion is to be establishe as an independent human phenomenon, not reducible (but not unrelated) to "philosophy" or "ideology", a false religion should be, simply, a false religion, not a disguised philosophy or ideology.

Third, whether a religion is a true or false religion cannot be established solely by reference to the phenomenology of religious experience (think of Heidegger's ambiguities in _Being and Time_ regarding authenticity; or James in _Varieties of Religious Experience_). Religious experiences have much in common across all recognized religions, as comparative studies have long shown (a premiss of the interfaith movement). They also have much in common with non-religious experiences, including those described in ancient non-religious mythologies and those reported in contemporary accounts of extra-terrestrial abductions.

Fourth, a true religion or false religion cannot be established simply by self-attestation, as in its theological doctrine and apologetics. All religions claims to be true; those claims by themselves are not necessarily persuasive. Assessment involves evaluation that is convincing to someone else, to third parties, and to disbelievers. It involves demonstration, in the sense of persuasion, though not scientific proof.(1)

A true or false religion cannot be identified be examining its doctrines or central beliefs alone. Most secular observers would probably argue that any religion must express belief in a supernatural deity (or deities or demiurge or creative principle). Other persons would argue that any religion must embody an ethical philosophy. Still others would say that a religion, to be considered a true religion, must involve spiritualism. Sensible as these requirements seem, some observers, Darwin in _Expression of Emotions_, for instance, think that religion can involve emotional postures alone, such as awe or wonder in the face of the universe, or a emotion of dependency upon a higher power. Here we would have religion without intellectual content.(2)

Eliminating assessment of religion scientifically, experientially, and doctrinally would seem to leave litte basis for evaluation; but there are other ways of approaching the issue. We could look at religion behaviorially (or pragmatically). We might ask whether a true religion behaves (so to speak) differently from a false religion. For instance, how do religions conceptualize and treat nonbelievers and believers of different religions? Could we expect a true religion to think of and treat infidels differently from a false religion?

We could examine a religion's intellectual relationships with non-religious knowledge. Would a true religion relate to non-religious knowledge differently from a false religion?

We could also look at the intellectual function of religion. Does religion have ideational functions particular to itself, or perhaps that originated with itself before being shared by other systems of thought? For instance, all religions situate human activity within a universe by defining boundaries and dividing up the universe into regions (man's home, places inhospitable to humanity, god's domain, etc.). Religion thereby provides foundational values. Some thinkers think the basic function of religion is to provide a foundational narrative about humanity. Would a false religion lack such intellectual functions?

In closing this introduction to the issue, we should also look at the vocabulary we are using. Discussing true religion and false religion, on the surface, implies an essentialist approach to religion. When we mention "true" religion, we seem to be implying that there a set of essential characteristics that must be present at all times, throughout history, for all religion that are true religions. If we reject truth as essence, we are thrown upon the notion of truth as used in the sciences; we have already decided this useage is not completely helpful.

We could avoid the vocabulary of truth by using a vocabulary of authenticity or genuineness. We might say that the issue is one of establishing the qualities that point to an authentic or genuine religion. The term, authentic, would not take us far in solving our issue, however. Either we would define religion phenomenologically, or we would require an ideal type of religion by comparison to which authenticity could be determined, or we would be unable to distinguish religion from a political ideology that confers authenticity on its followers (e.g.,Marxism).

We might adopt a utilitarian vocabulary. We could say that any religion must be effective by bringing benefits to many people. A religion is a social phenomenon, whatever else it is. It has its existence in the social life of human groups; consequently, religion could be identifed in terms of its social organization. This tactic seems unsatisfying, however, because it seems to remove all criteria that would distinguish religion from, again, political ideology. Many thinkers have reduced religion to political ideology, thereby (often intentionally) denying religion any independent basis to be discussed as true or authentic. This approach would solve the issue by eliminating it.

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* I will use the term, religion, to refer indifferently to collectively organized believers as an institution and as individual believers. The context should distinguish these two subjects if the need arises.

1. The Bereans define a cult as promoting false religion; Cults 101.

2. Cf. how the US Supreme Court treats religion; "Religion," Answers.com.

The Insidiousness of Sociological Explanation

I am reading Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven (1995), an account and explanation of the Pentecostal movement that began in the Azusa Street church revival of Black preacher, William Seymour, in 1906, in Los Angeles. Pentecostalism is considered today (Cox reports in 1995) the fastest growing religious affiliation around the world, numbering between 500 million and one billion members. Harvey Cox is Professor of Religion at the Harvard Divinity School. He is an esteemed member of the Judeo-Christian-Northeastern interfaith elite that the acts as the intelligentsia for the Blue States. He is the author of several influential studies of the place of religion in contemporary society. He considers himself a student of the great existentialist Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich (a man whose ideas I also greatly respect). I think that Cox fits into the category of a postmodern religious thinker.

Cox did not study Pentecostalism from the inside or as a believer. He developed out of a Quaker family background, with apostasy on one side--an uncle slipped into the Baptist Church and occasionally brought young Harvey Cox along with him. From the quietist perspective of the Quakers, reinforced by the solitary intellectual life of the academic scholar, Cox was unsympathetic to the vivid expressionism and primitive qualities of Pentecostal worship and prayer. His study of the movement did not convince him of Pentecostalism, but it begrudgingly earned his judgment that something was going on in Pentecostalism.

The question is, what was (is) going on in Pentecostalism? I knew, after reading the first few chapters, that Cox was going to have a hard time understanding what was going on because of the approaches he takes to the phenomenon. First, Cox is intrigued by the sociological characteristics of the early members of the Pentecostal movement. Men and women, Black and white, Pentecostals are from the lowest rungs of American society. They are, to use a word that Cox does not use, members of the proletariat. From the start, Cox explains the Pentecostals, as much as he describes them.  Explanation is a distancing maneuver typical of social science. It turns the subjects into objects, though it does not dehumanize them. So Cox sees membership in Pentecostalism as a product of working class alienation from the insecurities of modern capitalist society. Capitalism has alienated the workers from society; it has alienated them from  themselves. To overcome this alienation, workers join the Pentecostal movement, because Pentecostalism is a religion of experience (rather than creed or doctrine). It is primitive. It emphasizes wholeness of emotion.

This kind of explanation of social commitment was developed by the Frankfurt School, an influential band of German scholars in the 1920s and 1930s, who fused Marxism and Freudian analysis in an effort to understand the rise of the Nazi movement. Cox is intimating that Pentecostalism is a kind of fascism.

Second, Cox uses a Marxist scheme of categories to describe the Pentecostals. Not only are the members proletarians; proletarianism is a fundamental unitary category. It is more basic, as a unit of society and as a category of sociological analysis, than race or gender. Indeed, race and gender would be (from a Marxist/postmodern perspective) socially constructed categories imposed onto proletarianism. Cox sees something admirable in this characteristic of Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism has been an inter-racial movement with integrated congregations. Pentecostalism had the potential to overcome the division (and opposition) between Black and white that capitalism has created.

This sociological analysis is a kind of naturalism; it is a naturalistic description and explains Pentecostalism in debunking way. For Harvey, Pentecostalism is not necessarily false religion. He sees it as "primal" or "primitive" religious expression. This description of "primal" in connection with Pentecostalism's African American origin is, unintentionally perhaps, an embarrassing racialism. Whatever it is, Pentecostalism is not "true". Whatever the writhings, weeping, singing, ecstatic emotionalism of a Pentecostal prayer might be, it is not genuinely the result of God's spirit pouring into the congregation.  Indeed, given the naturalist approach Harvey uses, he could arrive at no other conclusion. Conveniently, to discover that Pentecostalism is not true protects as true Cox's elite brand of Christianity.

There are different approaches to understanding Pentecostalism that Cox might have taken, but did not. He  might have taken a phenomenological approach. I think that phenomenology can be a dangerous technique, especially as, for instance, Heidegger used it; but it is useful for recovering the reality of religious experience.

A phenomenological approach would have given Cox the means to appreciate what was genuine and real in the Pentecostal experience. We might say, for instance, that the working class origins of Pentecostals did not alienate them or push them, in the sense of cause them, to become members of Pentecostalism, where they had their interesting primal  experiences. Rather, being of the working class created an opening in their lives in which genuinely novel experience could happen (the Pentecostal person is authentic, to use the existential language). As working class persons, they were not encumbered with the learned naturalistic ideology that prohibits Cox, for instance, from experiencing God's Holy Spirit. Within this opening, they are receptive to the Holy Spirit. I suppose this way of expressing the Pentecostal situation might be parallel to the doctrine of Grace. The sinner cannot receive God's Grace until she has situated herself and disowned the pride that blocks Grace.

What Cox's approach prevents him from seeing and from saying is, the Pentecostals really are experiencing God. God is not what they think they are experiencing. God is actually what, in the Pentecostals' experiences, the Pentecostals are experiencing. It is Cox, not the Pentecostal, who is alienated.

Values (3) Popular Definition

Popular Definition As Reference Definition

I will be defining "values" in at least three ways: as the term is used popularly in America, how the term is used by social scientists, and how secular, Western philosophers define the term. I will also muck about with the definitions as we go along, in this series of articles; but we need a starting point.

To discuss values in general, we need a reference definition that points to what values are for the people who talk about them and who say values are important in their lives. To provide a reference definition, therefore, I need to define the term without explaining how people come to have values, without a theory of  values, and without providing a history of values. (I must, in other words, avoid a post-modern approach to values.) My definition will be in stilted language, so we can identify precisely the parts of the definition. We will deal later with secondary meanings of values; here is primarily what people think "values" are:

Values are ethical laws that are independent existents in the universe.

What the Definition Says

"Ethical": Values concern the obligations people have to each other.

"Laws": Values are imposed on persons. Persons are obligated to follow them. We are obligated to fulfill our obligations - no weaseling allowed.  The laws are stated in language, that is, words, but the essence of values as ethical laws is not the words and their taxonomic construction. Values, as ethical laws, are not codes, though they can be stated as codes. To have a lawyerly argument about what the words say misses the point. The essence of values is the injunction to behave in prescribed ways and not to engage in proscribed behavior. To put the issue as a familiar cliche, values are the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. We are supposed to know how to adapt to the spirit of the law in novel situations and not use the letter of the law to engage in behaviors that are not explicitly disallowed.

"Independent existents": Values exist somehow as a fundamental class of things in the universe. I am using the term "existent" to avoid using terms that would imply that values are material objects, or extraterrestrial entities, or immaterial  spirits, or conscious ideas (to use familiar categories in popular literature). Values are existents with their own way of existing.

Values are not the properties of other things. They are not characteristics of atoms. They are not properties of physical objects. They are not states of mind or emotions. They are not psychological projections of our mind out onto the world.

"In the universe": The universe is the total collection of things that exist and can be known by human beings, that is, that may have objective existence.

To put it in popular parlance, values are real.

What the Definition Implies

What does it mean to state that values have their own existence in the universe? Imagine that we are going to categorize all the contents of the universe. We are going to take every thing that manifests itself as existing, no matter what in what form or manner it exists, and assign it to a category of similar existing things.

Doing that, we would, for example, have a category of physical objects that have the characteristics of the things studied by physicists - bullets, chairs, mountains, galaxies, electrons, magnetic fields, and so on. Another category of things would contain consciousnesses - my awareness and self-awareness, your awareness, the awarenesses of other persons. We would have a third category of biological organisms to contain plants, animals, viruses, and our biological selves too. We might have a category for social arrangements and events, such as political parties and baseball games. Clearly this categorizing game can be played in many ways and go on for a long time; there might be many categories.

What the popular definition of values, given above, says is that, when we categorize things in the world, no matter how we do the categorizing, values as ethical laws will be a separate category of their own as things that exist.

Values are not products of our human minds or human culture, though they are manifested in our minds and in culture. They are not the results of social processes. While we can be conscious of values and can think about them, their existence as existents does not depend on our being aware of them and thinking about them. Also, values are not social or behavioral patterns. They are not some artificial aggregate or collective property of social groups.

Everything else, except values, could be removed from the universe and values would still exist, even though there would be no persons around to perceive them and to express them.

Values are - there is no other way to say it - existents.

Why Haven't I Given Examples?

I have not given examples, because examples would lead away from the issue of definition. We need to start by seeing that values have intellectual integrity in a general way, which is how people think of them. Values have reality independent of their manifestation in instances in our daily lives. Values are not invalidated by counter-examples.

If you insist on examples, ask some persons, your neighbors maybe, to state, or define, their values; then determine whether their statements fit in the definition above. If you ask people for specific examples of their values, most of them would cite the Ten Commandments, or some platitude that sounds like they are recalling from childhood. I don't think this is a productive way to proceed. As popular concepts and as lived commitments, values have been resilient in the face of a century of attempted secular debunking and trivialization by social science and academic philosophy. Their resilience is based, I believe, on intellectual sophistication, as well as usefulness. The resilence is not simply the result of the persistence of religious institutions or lack of education among ordinary folk. We need to avoid exampling values in a way that creates weak, discreditable versions of what are, as observable fact, strong positions.

Am I Completely Satisfied With This Definition?

No. I am not completely satisfied with the word "law". It sounds too formal, too much like a code, and that would be misleading. I use the word, because I want a word that does not immediately make people think of anthropology or psychology or philosophy. Law at least conveys the sense of an intellectual order that exists independently of us and has logical and intellectual sophistication. The word, principle (as in moral principle), for instance, does not convey the same sense of an intellectually connected system of ethical injunctions. Perhaps later we will be able to work out a better term.

What Critics Would Say

Critics of popular culture would say that the popular conception of values is religious mythology. All the definition above does is define values in terms of Biblical stories about God telling Adam and Eve not to do something and God giving laws to Moses. The definition is just the Old Testament with God and God-language stripped out. Social scientists would say that the popular conception of values is an illusion (or a delusion). Marxists would say that the definition simply reifies social and economic power. Philosophers would say that the popular conception is really bad philosophy and Platonist and Medieval to boot.

Okay, so critics would say these things. So what? I'm not impressed; we'll deal with them later. All we are trying to do here, in this brief article, is to identify what people primarily mean when they talk about "values".

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

Updated. July 29, 2007.

Values (1) Introduction

I recall a conversation with a young mother some years ago. I did not know her well; we ran into each other when walking our young children to elementary school. We talked about how we were raising our children.  She said she was going to take her daughter out of public school and send her to private school. I was surprised. I was then committed to public schools. Why? I asked. Because I want, she answered without any hesitation, my child to have values.

I did not initially understand what she meant. I thought - in social scientist mode - that she had no alternative but to raise her daughter according to her values. Later, I thought I figured out what she meant. She wanted her daughter raised according to her Christian beliefs. That realization raised further questions in my mind. Did she think that she would have no values if she were a secular humanist?

I never had the opportunity to discuss my acquaintance's views on values. She soon enrolled her child in private school. Our routes to school were different. Years later, my sympathy for the concerns of that young woman has grown. I became more conservative. Moving closer to the world she occupied, I obtained a new understanding of her values and her philosophy of values. I think now that what she wanted for her daughter was an education in absolute, universalistic values about right and wrong and what is valuable and what is worthless. She wanted her child to grow up in a school that offered what her home offered; that is, a structured world of absolute values.

The young woman's concern about the values in our society was a response to the great shift in values that America and Western society in general have undergone in the past 150 years. In an earlier era, our values were (and we thought they were) absolute and universalistic. We assumed that, for instance, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, and worthiness and worthlessness were objective features of the world that did not change over time, were shared by - or were at least true of and appropriate to - all societies, and were understandable by everyone.

What a revolution we have gone through! Today, throughout secular Western society, values are understood to be culturally relative. What is right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, valuable and worthless in one society will be different in another society. We think it is right and justified for the state to execute serial killers; other societies do not. We think (or at least we used to think) that physical mutilation of the body by scarring was ugly and unhealthful; in other societies, men and women adorn themselves with intricate scarrings and think themselves beautiful.

For us today, all decisions to do right or wrong are made in social situations. Right is right and wrong is wrong relative to the situation. We believe that different societies with contradictory values are both right and justified each in their values. We have made cultural relativity central to emancipatory liberalism, justifying in turn racial integration, sexual liberation, feminism, and homosexual life style.

The shift of official culture from universal, absolute values to cultural relativity is, I submit, the most important, fundamental shift Western society has undergone. The shift relegated value absolutism to the social niches of religious minorities. It trivialized the importance of values in social beliefs and social cohesion, in favor of raw utilitarianism. It undermined Western self-assurance. Western cultural self-confidence is so weak today that official elites are unable to voice a vigorous defense of the West against the vicious, totalitarian threat of radical Islam.

In this series of articles, I shall examine values - what they are, where they come from, how they work, how we might change them. I cannot promise that my presentation of this theme will be linear and predictable. While I am looking at some ideas I already know, I am mostly exploring. I start out with a conservative orientation of which I am aware, but I do not know what conclusions I will reach. My postings might not be regular, because I will be reading as I go along. "Values" are a large, involved topic, of interest to all social science disciplines, as well as religious culture and popular culture. (There is even a philosophical specialty that studies values in general, called axiology.) We will start, of course, by making definitions.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions Not Used
• 3. Popular Definition
• 4. Social Science Definitions
• 5. Philosophical Definition: Existentialism
• 6. Cultural Relativism
• 7. The Fact-Value Distinction
• 8. Collapsing the Fact-Value Distinction

Religion and Social Science

The Midcentury White House Conference report*, that provided essential social science support for the Brown decision of 1954, emphasized the importance of religion for the formation of the healthy child's personality. The report's discussion is so forthright that, from today's perspective, it is surprising; it provides a measure of the secularization the social sciences have undergone in the past fifty years.

"Children's well-being is dependent in large part upon their parents' sense of self-worth and ... that sense is intimately related to the values and workings of the society in which they live. The ethical and moral affirmations of religion constitute the base on which all this rests and from which social malfunctioning can be criticized. In this widest sense, then, religion is basic to healthy personality."(P. 160.)

The role of religion, the report said, was to provide ideas of the meaningfulness of life that the child requires. The healthy child has an inner assurance of her importance to the world. She believes that the world is set up so that she can make sense of her life.

"The individual must have some conception of the universe as meaningful and benevolent, and of his place in it. He must integrate his life around some ethical or religious concepts. Honor, grace, faith, courage: some integrating idea or idea must replace his parents as the objects of dependency and trust."(P. 159.)

The Judaeo-Christian tradition makes the individual responsible for what she does with her life. It provides a framework for a realistic understanding of human agency. Each person has both strengths and weaknesses. No situation is ordained; no situation is hopeless. No weakness or fault makes a person utterly worthless. Persons have the opportunity to transcend their weaknesses and faults and thereby to activate their strengths.

Religious education is an important part of child rearing. The spiritual qualities of each child must be cultivated and strengthened. They bind together the material circumstances of life and our psychological attitudes toward those material circumstances. Spiritual education helps create a total personality - whole and balanced.

Religion also provides ideals. Ideals are important as goals toward which the growing child should strive. During adolescence, the child learns of the sordid aspects of life and about failure of society to live up to its ideals; religion teaches the child not to accept failings with dismay, but to have hope in the child's and humankind's ultimate ability to overcome those failings.

"To be able to look squarely at the life that is before them without blinders or rosy glasses and to deal with it without either false stimulation or an opiate, children and youth need faith in God."(P. 222.)

The report does not blink before the issue of teaching the child about the existence of God. The healthy child learns to believe in God and to have faith in God as the source of ultimate meaning and hope for human ventures.

The belief in God is important, finally, in teaching the child to live in harmony with other peoples. God is God of all peoples. God is the source of meaning of everyone's experiences.

At a distance of fifty years, we can stand back from this report and evaluate its position on religion. We can see that religious faith was an important part of the lives of African Americans, strengthening them to cope with segregation and to fight against it. We can also see that religion was an important ingredient in making African American culture healthy (in contradistinction to the conclusions of the Myrdal report, American Dilemma).

Why did this acknowledgment of the importance of religious faith to American life  disappear from American social science? Here we can only suggest answers. The allegiance of many social scientists to Marxism and co-existence with communism during the Cold War would have led them diminish the importance of religion to American life. The influence of European secular humanist philosophies - especially existentialism and post-modernism - helped to deprive religion of intellectual legitimacy. Radical feminism spurned religion, viewing religion as conservative and opposed to the complete social emancipation of women.

Public schools, too, played a role, because of the total school program. The total school program, impelled by the Brown decision, turned over the emotional development of children to the state through the public schools. With much of the child's growth controlled by schools, religion would have to be removed from children's lives, because of constitutional prohibition of state sponsorship of religion.

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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.). Esp. chapter VII, "Religion as an Aid to Healthy Personality Development," and chapter X, "The Church and the Synagogue."

Bishop Robinson

The ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson to the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire reveals much about how political ideology empties words of meaning. Political innovation justifies itself by claiming the legacy of already accepted values and ideals. To associate traditional values to itself, when its goal is manifestly contrary to those values, political ideology empties traditional values and ideals, as they are symbolized in words, phrases, and liturgy, of conventional meaning. Once the words are empty of meaning, they can be spread to cover any new institution, any creative behavior. They become stealth vocabulary, sneaking in the very enemy that would destroy the values they nominally perpetuate.

I do not understand how a serious reading of the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the religious books associated with Judaism, such as the Torah, and Christianity could come to any other conclusion than the following regarding sexuality and the family. In religious vocabulary, we should say, God has consecrated the natural family in marriage as His preferred means of human association for reproduction and sexual love. The Book of Common Prayer states that, regarding "the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony," "the bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation." The natural family in marriage is the basis for the historical perseverance of Judaism. Paul's letters emphasize the importance of the consecrated family as a foundation for Christianity. Two thousand years of doctrinal interpretation of these precepts has not changed their meaning, but only reinforced their importance.

The Episcopal Church justified its ordination of Bishop Robinson in terms of the doctrine of works - contemporary political libertarianism and utilitarianism (listen to Church voices). It assuredly could not justify the ordination in terms of traditional Church teachings. The words - love, family, and marriage - had to be emptied of their sacred meaning and puffed up by the ideology of today's radical gay chic. This was dishonest. The Church realizes that it is dishonest and tries to hide what it has done. Read Robinson's official biography at the website of the Diocese of New Hampshire. Regarding his marital relations, the biography states, "The father of two grown daughters, Jamee and Ella, he lives with his partner Mark Andrew..." What does the biography hide? That Bishop Robinson married a woman in Christian matrimony, a bond he swore forever; that with this woman he had his two daughters; that he was an adulterer; that he abandoned his family and divorced his wife; that he lives in homosexual union.

What can the words of Church doctrine possibly mean in view of this biography? The answer is, of course, nothing. The ordination empties them of meaning. When religious words mean nothing, persons to whom observance and faith are important will leave their Church. In their absence, the Episcopal Church becomes simply a politically correct fellowship that meets occasionally for a pleasant dinner, praising itself for the diversity of party guests and discoursing eloquently about the qualities of bread and wine.