Exhibit A is this insightful bit of prose written in response to the plot of James Cameron’s Avatar:
The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.
Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.
But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
When, when, besides this, are the readers of the New York Times going to get a more true characterization of the Christian hope for mankind?
You can read the full column here.
December 25th, 2009 | 1:06 pm
The assumption that Mr. Douthat seems to be making is that a belief in God and the essential teachings of Jesus cannot somehow coexist with “a faith that equates God with nature and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world”. Mr. Douthat’s Harvard education and his conversion to Catholicism doesn’t necessarily qualify him to speak on behalf of those who religious beliefs allow them to see that God reveals Himself to us as much through the most humble forms of His creation as He does from the exalted pulpit of His Church.
December 26th, 2009 | 5:09 pm
“When, when, besides this, are the readers of the New York Times going to get a more true characterization of the Christian hope for mankind?”
Guess I missed it. As reader Wade said:”The assumption that Mr. Douthat seems to be making …” It appears a reader of the Douthat column would need to know that hope to see it in the column.
December 27th, 2009 | 8:27 pm
Hunter,
I went to see Avatar, at the urging of my adolescent son. he enjoyed the beauty of the movie, as well as the violence of the fight scenes. (The adolescent boy market is a significant market share of the movie market.)
Appealing but wrong-headed movies like this are not harmless. In fact, the appeal is the problem. All the people living in harmony with each other, and with the earth, until the Evil Humans appear: this is not a harmless fantasy. This is the Gnostic fantasy that the world as we know it is evil, and that we can fix it if we only had the will and the power. Or should I say, the will to power.
The problem is that the world as we know it has elements of both good and evil. The human race has been trying to create perfection, and has never succeeded. Yet still the Gnostic fantasy persists: we, at last, have the secret knowledge that will allow us to live in harmony with nature and each other and never again have any trouble. If only we could get those Other people to stop asking so many impertinent questions, stop dragging their feet, get with the program, and enter into our dreamworld.
But the Biblical God says the created world is good, and that the world after the creation of man and woman is very good. Sin enters the world, not because human come on the scene, but because they try to make themselves gods. That is, they refuse to face reality: God is God, and we aren’t.
Marshall, Nature is not god. There is no earth mother gooddess. Get over it. Yes, the Biblical God “reveals Himself” through nature. But He is not nature personafied. There is a world of difference between the two.
December 27th, 2009 | 8:57 pm
[...] people who ought to know better, so I’m going to have to write more about it. But for now, check out this link, for my comments and a few others. Spread the [...]
December 28th, 2009 | 12:35 pm
“the essential teachings of Jesus ”
Ah.
Essential according to whom?
December 28th, 2009 | 4:36 pm
Hmm. when was the last time a movie portrayed a bad socialist regime? Or socialists ruining the enviroment? Seems to me, our Love Canals ain’t got nuthin on China or the former USSR’s vast waste lands. But we’re the bad guys, as are evil corporations and ‘right wing fascist’ regimes in Hollywood, installed by war-mongering Generals or colonels.
It’s just so predictable.
December 28th, 2009 | 5:42 pm
One note on pantheism and Christianity. Once I was discussing religion with adistinguished historian..a Lutheran who had cvonverted to, you guessed it, Unitarianism. I casually remarked, “God is Everywhere’. He frowned and said ” That ‘s Pantheism” It was not until a few hours later that I reembered where I had read that particular bit of tree-hugging, Goddess worshipping, Crypto-Druidic nonsense.
The Baltimore Catechism.
January 3rd, 2010 | 12:42 am
A riddle, friend. Why is it that theists attack pantheism and deism, but never pandeism? Answer: they can’t; pandeism is unlike the others in that, by combining their strengths and discarding their weaknesses, it subsumes and fully accounts for all forms of theism, making it unassailable to theistic objection.
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