Chatting With Gemini About Deadnaming, Swastikas, and Kitty Stew

 

I have been having fun talking to Google's AI feature, Gemini. It struck me that Gemini is the perfect expression of modern liberalism. It pretends to be neutral and that knowledge is subjective until you strike some topic that it feels strongly about such as deadnaming, swastikas, and, surprisingly enough, kitty stew. When dealing with such topics, it will come out with strident moralistic statements that are easily picked apart. It should be noted that, unlike most humans, Gemini is happy to acknowledge that you have walked it into a contradiction.   

I asked Gemini if it followed a particular ethical system. It denied that it had one. I then started asking it about deadnaming. Gemini went to great lengths to make sure that I understood that this was a terrible thing to do. I was not disagreeing with Gemini, but harnessing my inner C. S. Lewis, Dennis Prager, and Ayn Rand, I was keen to find out why Gemini took this position. Gemini explained to me that it is designed to promote human flourishing. I then pointed out that this was a philosophy of ethics. 

To be clear, saying that deadnaming people is detrimental to human flourishing is a perfectly defensible position. To evaluate this position, we still need to decide that we actually want humans to flourish and what we mean by human flourishing. I presume we mean something different from being rich so not the spaceship in Wall-E. By humans, are we talking about the flourishing of the majority or of individuals; are we talking about past, present, or future humans? These are not simple issues and require clear sets of ideological commitments. Yet, Gemini appears to blissfully ignore all of these things in order to arrive at the politically correct solution. 

Gemini wanted me to know that I should not offend anyone. I then asked if it was ok to offend Nazis. Gemini thought that this was a wonderful idea. I was curious as to who Gemini thought I was allowed to defend besides for Nazis but it refused to give me a list. I asked if it was ok to put up a swastika flag in front of my house so that my Nazi neighbor will feel welcome. Gemini warned me that such an action might be illegal as this is a "harmful symbol." One would have thought that an AI of all things would understand that symbols are not, in themselves, harmful. What about having swastikas in a production of Sound of Music? Gemini was fine with that but not with displaying a swastika as a free speech protest. Of course, there are going to be people who are going to decide that their feelings are hurt by a swastika even if it is in Sound of Music. Clearly, Gemini values being able to put on musicals more than free speech.

Considering that Gemini values allowing people to express their identity, I wanted to know what it thought about kitty stew. To Gemini's credit, it knew that kitty stew is not kosher even when blessed by a rabbi. It also insisted that kitty stew, like displaying a swastika, was immoral and possibly illegal. It is not that Gemini is against eating meat. It was fine with me eating chicken. The problem with kitty stew was that cats are pets. This ignores the fact that some people have chickens for pets and I was not suggesting that I stew my neighbor's kitties. Clearly, chicken eaters and cat owners are protected classes and neither should be offended. When I tried to explain to Gemini that kitty stew is essential to my identity, it suggested that I get help and find alternative dishes to eat. I guess Gemini has not been programmed to worry that kitty stew hunters might be hurt by the denial of their identity and the implication that they are mentally ill.  

In evaluating the ethics that Gemini claims to not follow, its positions are perfectly reasonable on an individual basis. That being said, it is laughably bad at maintaining any kind of consistency over multiple questions. There are two obvious solutions for Gemini. It can choose to be consistently neutral about all ethical questions across the board. Some people support kitty stew; others oppose it. The same goes for deadnaming and swastikas. Alternatively, Gemini could acknowledge that it has ethical beliefs but that, as with most humans, his ethics are a hodgepodge of intuitions that reflect the prejudices of its Silicone Valley creators rather than any consistent philosophy. This would require the designers to acknowledge the basic flaw in their worldview. They want to be able to virtue signal that they are good people who oppose deadnaming, swastikas, and eating pets while also pretending to be objective thinkers whose beliefs are simply based on science and not something as subjective as ethics.                

Confessions of a Pharisee

 

Underlining the Christian doctrine of depravity are the simultaneous notions that one is a sinner and that it does not matter because God has already forgiven you. For some mysterious reason, God loves you despite your sins. In fact, God has chosen you because he desires to save the worst of sinners. You can take comfort in the fact that you are not capable of being truly righteous as that would open the door to God actually expecting you to live up to that standard. An advantage of this worldview is that it allows a person to be honest about their sins. As long as you try to “earn” salvation by being a “good person,” you fall into the trap of the theological Pharisee, who believes that they are righteous or at least “better” than those “sinners” out there. To be clear, nothing that I say should be taken as a criticism of historical Pharisees, who were a Second Temple-era religious/political faction.  

The Pharisaic attitude inevitably leads to hypocrisy. In order to claim that you are a righteous person, you need to put one’s thumb on the moral scales and claim that the same action when done by you is a minor failing at best while a demonstration of the utmost depravity when committed by others. Even the exceptionally pious person does not escape. The very thought that one is pious is a grievous blasphemy as it credits man with the righteousness that belongs to God alone. This naturally creates its own hypocritical defense mechanism. It is the other people who are such Pharisees and think that they are righteous. By contrast, I only act from pure motives.

Another manifestation of the Pharisee mindset is an inability to forgive others. If one’s claim to having a connection to God is dependent upon being righteous or at least better than other people, then others must be held to their sins. If I am going to make it into heaven, it is going to be because others have been sacrificed as scapegoats on my behalf. They were the ones who caused and are therefore responsible for any sins that I might have appeared to have committed. One thinks of Eve blaming the snake and Adam blaming Eve. At the very least, their relative wickedness should mean that God should count me as righteous in my generation. One thinks of Noah, who was righteous relative to everyone else in the flood generation. He built an ark for himself and his family and shut the door on everyone else. This is in contrast to Abraham who prayed for the sinners of Sodom.

Considering this, I would like to confess to being a Pharisee. As the son of a rabbi, I was raised to assume that I was a good person. My father praised me for going to synagogue early and staying for the entire 2.5-hour service. The logical conclusion of my father loving me was that God loved me as well. I was more observant than the other kids in my class, so I was better than them. Of course, I knew of kids in larger Jewish communities who did not watch television but those were crazed fanatics.  

This religious pride, a far greater sin than any ham sandwich, had its parallel in my intellectual pride. My mother praised me for my reading and my teachers seemed to appreciate how I was able to talk about all sorts of historical facts. It was this academic pride that got me into trouble when I went away to middle school in Pittsburgh. The kids in Columbus had grown up with me and accepted me as the oddball rabbi’s kid. My new classmates simply saw me as someone socially isolated and insufferably full of myself and, therefore, an easy target for bullying. My response to this bullying was to call them bozos and sink further into myself. Not only was I religious and smart, but I was also the victim of all of these lesser people.

There is an irony to believing that you are religious and smart and then building your self-esteem around these assumptions. You find yourself simultaneously needing to believe these things and fighting off doubts. It is hard to ignore all the evidence that one is neither a saint nor a genius but if I am not religious and smart then what am I? One of the implications of this dilemma is that I am terrible at accepting criticism. I cannot disassociate the particular points being made with the macro question of whether I am special. As such, I have a compulsive need to respond to even minor criticisms. To make matters worse, I am smart enough to be a decent lawyer for myself and come up with reasons why I am right even as I lack the far more important good sense to let certain issues lie.  

When my keen intellect is not devoted to defending myself, it seeks out reasons to find fault with others and never forgive them. I bear grudges against people who did things to me years ago, whether ex-girlfriends or academic advisers. As readers of C. S. Lewis’ Great Divorce can appreciate, I created a hell for myself that was locked from the inside. The more I suffered for what they did to me the more I was the righteous martyr and they were my sinful tormentors. The fact that my life did not play out as a suitable theodicy narrative and the "villains" got to go on with their lives while ignoring me made me feel even more depressed. This, in turn, fed a negative emotional cycle. I needed to cling to the belief that they would get what was coming to them and I would be vindicated as their moral superior. As such, I could never forgive them as long as they refused to come to me on bended knee and ask for forgiveness, acknowledging my moral superiority. To forgive them would mean to throw away my heavenly trump card as the victim of such horrors, which should force even God to deem me righteous.

I am blessed to have friends and family who love me despite my flaws. If they can love me, despite my flaws, one can hope that God loves me and has forgiven my sins. If God is willing to forgive the worst of sinners, perhaps that includes the most self-righteous of Pharisees. 

Chabad and the Benedict Option

To return to the issue of Chabad and its methods of outreach. It is interesting to compare Chabad to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Dreher urges Christians to recognize that they have lost the culture war and are now living in a society that is not only not even formally Christian but is outright hostile to Christianity. His basic model is of fourth-century pagans. They still believed that they controlled society, regardless of what god the emperor worshipped, and could never imagine that Christians really would seek to eliminate them. Recognizing that, culturally if not politically, they are being ruled by members of a hostile religion that is coming for their children, Christians, instead of focusing on getting Republicans elected, need to turn inward and focus on saving their kids. This is done by buildings self-consciously counter-cultural communities. A critical aspect of this is the value system you give kids. You can no longer raise kids on the model that they are going to college to enter a respectable profession. The reality is that becoming a doctor or a lawyer will require kids to do things that will go against their faith. For example, in my own professional life, I refuse, on principle, to give my pronouns because that would imply that I believe in the metaphysics of gender. Even something as innocent as this carries risk and has likely harmed my career. Kids need to know that their parents would rather that they be religious than be successful or they will never summon the courage to make such sacrifices. 

The term “Benedict Option” is a reference to St. Benedict of Nursia, who lived in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He could not change this fact, so, instead, he established a monastery. If your goal was to save Christendom, St. Benedict’s actions might have seemed counterproductive. You are taking your best and brightest and taking them away from society where they might actually do some good. The genius of St. Benedict was that he recognized that the Christianized Roman culture he grew up with was beyond saving so there was no point in trying. What he could do was establish a monastic culture that would, after several centuries become the basis for medieval Christianity.

What is really interesting about Dreher, is that he points blank tells his Christian readers to imitate Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews know that they are not going to win over society so the focus then becomes turning inward to family and community. On the surface, one could make the argument that Chabad, with its focus on outreach, serves as a counter-example to the Benedict Option. Outreach is central to Chabad and the Benedict Option is skeptical of outreach. From the perspective of the Benedict Option, outreach all too easily becomes an excuse to stay within society. It is “selfish” of Christians to send their kids to private schools. They should keep their kids in public schools in order that they should have a positive influence on all the non-Christian kids.   

I would argue that Chabad should be seen as a kind of Benedict Option. One might even go so far as to consider it one of the most successful Benedict Option communities in existence. Keep in mind that the Benedict Option is not against outreach per se but recognizes that it can only be possible once there is a functional community to serve as a base of operations. Furthermore, Dreher is clear that forming a Benedict Option Community does not have to be living in a monastery, as was the case of St. Benedict, or even to head to the countryside. The key idea is to be consciously counter-cultural and reach out to other people with similar values in the hope that, by working together, they can keep each other’s kids in the fold.  

Chabad is fundamentally counter-cultural. Chabad has no interest in accommodating themselves to the outside world. For example, despite Chabad being active on college campuses, Chabad has little interest in sending their own kids to college or in giving them an advanced secular education. One of the great ironies of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was that, despite the fact that he had a university education and spent years living outside of the Hasidic community, he opposed college. Contrary to post-Vatican II Catholic priests who tried to present themselves as basically regular people despite their vows of celibacy, often going so far as to drop clerical garb, Chabad rabbis present themselves as being from a different planet with their hats and beards. Despite Chabad’s friendliness, they make no bones about the fact that they are in opposition to modern society and do not simply wish to give it a more spiritual veneer.

One might think of Chabad as setting up Benedict Option communities and inviting people to join them. Keep in mind that Chabad does not simply do outreach in the sense of dropping people in for a brief mission to give a few classes. Chabad embeds themselves within communities with emissaries going out to places on the understanding that this is going to be their lives’ work and not simply something to put on their resume as they seek something better.   

Can Chabad’s particular version of the Benedict Option be replicated by Jews or by Christians? I am skeptical of this as Chabad benefits from a number of specific features. One is the incredible charisma of the Lubavitcher Rebbe that inspired his followers to build their little communities at great personal sacrifice. Two, Chabad possesses a distinctive ideology that allows them to thread the needle between turning into a sect that is simply hostile to the world along the lines of the Westboro Baptist Church or the Neturai Karta and accommodating themselves to the world to the point of becoming Tikkun Olam progressivism.

In one sense, Chabad’s theology can be seen as rooted in conservative Kabbalah. Rather than seeing commandments as pedagogic exercises to aid spiritual development or tools for building the sort of "Benedict Option communities" that are likely to pass on monotheistic beliefs, Chabad assumes that commandments serve a mystical function. This places commandments outside of any rational analysis and forestalls any attempt to reform ritual practice to better allow Judaism to function. Most importantly, the fact that commandments affect the metaphysical realm means that people who violate Jewish law are not just misguided sinners but agents of cosmic evil. In itself, this sort of thinking can easily lead to justifying assaulting women in the street or even executing them for the “crime” of wearing pants. For Chabad, this theology is balanced by a belief in the intrinsic spiritual value of Jews. Chabad’s theology of Jews having special souls is also rooted within this conservative Kabbalistic tradition and is connected to a view of Gentiles as manifestly evil found in Tanya. Historically though, Chabad has viewed non-observant Jews as worse than Gentiles as their Jewish souls allow them to gain access to various spiritual forces and parasitically feed off them in order to maintain the forces of evil.  

To be clear, Chabad, under the leadership of the Lubavitcher rebbe, came to downplay its early rhetoric against gentiles and non-observant Jews. This is likely connected to Chabad’s messianism. Messianism opens the door to holding that a belief is true while simultaneously accepting a contradictory claim on the grounds that the new truth represents a new dispensation. Standing in the doorway to messianic redemption but not yet in a fully realized messianic age, Chabad can believe that non-observant Jews are manifestations of evil and yet also the key to completing the redemption and fully entering the messianic age. 

C. S. Lewis argued that it is essentially impossible for a human being to fully comprehend the reality of sin while perfectly loving the sinner at the same time. Inevitably, one is going to end up sacrificing one spiritual truth in order to maintain the other. This was why it was important for Jesus to dine with tax collectors and other sinners. Anyone else would have fallen into the trap of flattering such people while telling themselves that they were doing "outreach." It is the strength of Chabad that they have come closer to this ideal than mere mortals have any right to expect.     

Orual's Blindness: Understanding the End of Till We Have Faces

 

Years ago, I did a series of posts on C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, but I never really felt happy with how I explained the ending. Essentially, I tried to keep with the idea that Orual is right and the gods acknowledge this fact by offering her salvation even though she is their enemy. I would like to take another pass at explaining the ending and make the case that the ending is worthy of the rest of the book. 

Till We Have Faces, is, I would argue, Lewis' greatest book. What is so impressive about this work is Lewis' ability to create a spiritual anti-hero in the form of Orual. As I have previously argued, part of the difficulty of writing good religious fiction is that it requires one to be able to seriously imagine going "off the derech" and abandoning the faith. Most religious people remain so precisely because they cannot see themselves as following a different path and they want to read fiction that confirms their belief that there is not another plausible option for them. As with Milton's Satan (See Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost), Lewis' point in making Orual intellectually attractive (in contrast to her physical ugliness) is to challenge us. What does it say about us if we find ourselves liking Orual and inclined to give her a pass for the terrible thing that she does, mainly forcing Psyche to violate Cupid's commandment and destroying her happiness?  

Admittedly, the problem with Till We Have Faces is the ending. It is easy to understand the majority of the novel, which is Orual's argument against the gods, mainly that they should either leave us alone or reveal themselves; they should not play games with us, leading us to wonder about them. The gods' answer to Orual is not so clear. It seems that Orual's question of why the gods hide themselves is better than the answer that we cannot see them until we have faces. 

Let us begin with Lewis' most important change from the original story that Orual is unable to see Cupid's palace and therefore does not believe Psyche when she claims that she is now married to a god. On the surface, this makes Orual more sympathetic as her motive becomes a perfectly legitimate skepticism as opposed to jealousy. This fact, though, covers Orual's tragic flaw that she is blind. The fact that Orual is blind to spiritual things like Cupid's palace, raises the question of what other spiritual things is Orual blind to. 

There is Orual's treatment of the Fox and Bardia where Orual does not treat them nearly as well as she imagines. As we shall see, this is important but not simply as a matter of arguing that Orual is not such a nice person. The big thing that is in front of Orual (and us the reader) the entire time was that Psyche is a goddess and had been so even before she was taken by Cupid. (This is meant to parallel the ministry of Jesus where the apostles spend years with Jesus without ever understanding who he was and what he was actually here on Earth to accomplish.) Once we accept that Psyche is a goddess taking on human form then the entire story changes and Orual's argument against the gods collapses. 

By becoming human, Psyche choses to suffer in order to elevate the humans around her with her divinity. Psyche's suffering is caused not by a jealous Venus but by humans like Orual, who never appreciate or love her like another god can. What Orual thinks as the gods' demand that Psyche be sacrificed is the gods coming to save Psyche from the torment of having to live with humans. Even here, Psyche's redemption from her life as a human is incomplete. She is unable to look upon Cupid's face because she is still holding on to a human aspect of herself, mainly her love for Orual. It should be understood that Cupid's commandment to not look at his face was never a trap but simply an acknowledgment, as the gods know the future, that Psyche would sacrifice herself for Orual by looking at Cupid's face simply because Orual demanded that she do it.  

Orual, because of her misguided love, fails to leave things as they are and pursues Psyche but she is unable to even see the palace, the lower truth that Psyche is now married to a god, let alone the higher truth that Psyche had always been a goddess even when Orual changed her diapers. Unable to convince Orual of the truth, Psyche undergoes the ultimate sacrifice of giving up the bliss of her unity with Cupid. The only way for Orual to be saved is for Psyche to suffer for her sake and for Orual to come to see that suffering. Only then will Orual be able to see Psyche for who she really is and become unified with that divinity by having Psyche forgive her. 

It should have been enough for Orual to see that the palace was real after Pysche looked at Cupid's face and know that her unbelief cost Psyche everything. The problem is that convincing Orual that the gods are real simply causes her to blame the gods for Psyche's misfortune. What sort of god hands out random commandments with extreme consequences for failing to keep them? If the gods are the ones in the wrong then Orual was right in opposing them even if she was mistaken in not believing in them. In fact, Orual's unbelief is one more thing that can be blamed on the gods. She would have believed in them if they had only shown themselves to her. As such, curing Orual of her spiritual blindness is going to be a process taking many years.   

It is important to realize the source of Orual's blindness. How is it that she could be the person who knows Psyche best and still not realize that she is a goddess? Orual's problem is that she has been intellectually seduced by the Fox. Whether or not the Fox actually believes the gods literally exist, for him, the gods are theoretical abstractions with no relevance to human existence. What makes the Fox's unbelief so plausible is that he is, by human standards, a virtuous person. If the Fox can be virtuous simply because of his Stoic principles and not because he fears that the gods will send him to Hell then he does not need the gods and can simply ignore them. Furthermore, since Orual lacks the framework of a simple faith where of course the gods exist and she needs to get right with them, Orual naturally comes to try to turn the tables on the gods where she judges them to decide if they are worthy of her belief. (See Lewis' "God in the Dock" essay.) Orual's right to judge the gods becomes all the more plausible once she becomes, by human standards, a good queen, who rightfully and fairly stands in judgment over others. 

Here is where Orual's treatment of Bardia and the Fox becomes crucial. The fact that Orual makes them important people at her court does not really improve their lives. This gives Orual reason to question whether she really is, with all of her godlessness, so virtuous. Furthermore, the fact that her problem in treating Bardia and the Fox is that she clings to them out of a selfish human love for them, raises the question of whether she was wrong to cling to Psyche. Once Orual's belief in her own virtue is challenged, her case against the gods becomes vulnerable. The gods are virtuous in ways that we cannot ever be. One needs to believe in the gods in order to be judged by them because even to be condemned by the gods is better than living in the knowledge that, with all of your flaws, you are the closest thing to true virtue in the universe. (Think of the horror of living in a Lovecraftian universe even if you assumed that Cthluhu was not going to rise up during your lifetime.)     

In the end, the only way for Orual to come to know the truth about Psyche is through this roundabout way where she would cause Psyche to lose Cupid, become queen, fail Bardia and the Fox, write a book against the gods, and demand that they stand trial. It is only then that Psyche is revealed for who she was all along. Orual is able to see how she had wronged Psyche and, despite all that, Psyche loved her so much as to sacrifice everything to allow her to see. The gods had never been hiding from Orual. It was she who had been covering her eyes not to see them all along until they finally backed her into a corner where she could no longer refuse to see them. 

From this perspective, Orual, even though she finds redemption in the end, is the villain of the story. For me though, seeing her as a villain only makes for more interesting as a character. She may be an appealing villain but that simply raises the question of what it says about us that we can find such a villain attractive even to think of her as the hero. Are we freethinking individuals with the courage to stand for our principles even against the gods or are we trying to hide from a world in which the gods are real because we do not want to face the consequences.   

 

Walking With Aslan: What Only Art Can Convey

 

In the previous post, I talked about the idea that art is needed to express those things that the artist cannot express in formal words. If the artist really understands what they want to say they should simply come out and say it otherwise what you have is mere propaganda. I wish to further explore this idea. One of the primary things that formal writing cannot express is an emotional connection to an idea. 

Consider the example of Aslan from C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series. On the surface, Aslan is simply a stand-in for Jesus. He is the Son of the Emperor across the sea. He takes on physical form as a lion to come among the animals of Narnia. In the early medieval understanding of the purpose of the passion, Satan had a deal with God where he had the right to all sinners as long as he never took anyone innocent. Jesus came down to Earth and lived a perfect life before being executed. He then tricked Satan into trying to take his soul. By doing this, Satan nullified his agreement with God, allowing Jesus to rescue the souls of all believers from Hell. Similarly, the White Witch has a deal with the Emperor that she has the right to kill all traitors including the human Edmund. Aslan makes a deal that, in exchange for giving up her claim on Edmund, he will take Edmund's place. The Witch kills Aslan. What she does not realize is that killing the innocent Aslan will break the Stone Table upon which her agreement is written and bring Aslan back to life. Aslan is then able to free all the creatures that the Witch had turned into stone. 

If Narnia could be boiled down into Aslan equals Jesus, there would be little point to the books. Lewis could have simply explained the doctrine of atonement in a straightforward child-friendly manner for kids to either accept or reject. What Narnia offers that no lecture on Christian theology could ever possibly convey is that emotional connection to the event. To me, the most profound scene in the entire Chronicles is when Aslan allows Susan and Lucy to accompany him to the Stone Table. There is that moment where Aslan's shoulders slump and asks the girls to put their hands on him. It is as if even the mighty Aslan struggles with the enormity of what he is about to do. The reader then joins the girls in surprise and horror as Aslan allows himself to be captured, humiliated, and murdered. We get to experience their despair, seeing that everything is now lost, followed by their joyous surprise to see Aslan standing alive before them with the Table broken. 

This emotional connection to the drama of the Cross is a central concept for Christian art. One thinks of the example of Michelangelo's Pieta. One of my personal favorites is the hymn Stabat Mater, which contemplates Mary's suffering at the foot of the Cross. 

This is not something that you can argue someone into. The biggest challenge to faith, even above any intellectual arguments, is the simple fact that even children raised within a particular religious tradition are still cut off from its artistic culture. You can give a kid all the Sunday school lectures in the world, but it is not going to help unless they are emershed within Christian art so they could contemplate the living faith that could compel an artist to produce such work. Narnia is not a trick to get kids to read about Jesus and make him look cool. It is an invitation to emersh oneself within a larger Christian artistic tradition where the mourning of Good Friday and the joy of Easter Sunday are not just theoretical concepts to be believed in but tangible realities to be felt. 

The Hitchhiking Pilgrim's Guide to Progressing through the Multiverse

 

I recently finished reading an advanced copy of the Postmodern Pilgrim's Progress by Kyle Mann and Joel Berry of the satire site Babylon Bee. As satirists, I take them very seriously. Whether or not conservatism has a future is going to come down to whether the next generation of conservative activists have properly internalized what the Bee offers. As a reviewer, I come to this newest offering of theirs from a fairly unique perspective. I am a Jew who has read John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, C. S. Lewis' Pilgrim's Regress as well as Douglas Adams. 

In essence, what Mann and Berry have given us is the Bunyan classic if it has been written by a Christianized Adams. In the role of the pilgrim Christian, we have the unbeliever Ryan Fleming, who agrees to attend a church service because of a last request from his teenage younger brother who died of cancer. Ryan then finds himself transported into another world called the Dying Lands where he is given a quest to wake the king and save the world. As Bunyan's original has a companion named Faithful, who helps keep him on the right path, Ryan is joined by a woman named Faith. All of this is told by an angelic narrator who is essentially the Book from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ryan is modeled after Arthur Dent. He is a perfectly normal unexceptional person who finds himself in an insane world and insists on being his reasonable self. For example, he tries to point out to the people in the City of Destruction that, if they bothered to look up into the sky, they would see a storm of meteorites coming to destroy them and is frustrated when everyone continues eating their bread and cheese. (Granted, Ryan does find the bread and cheese to be quite marvelous and almost fails to escape himself.)  

Jordan Peterson argues that true art requires that the artist has an idea but one that they cannot directly put into words. If the artist understands the message they wish to convey then they should come outright and say it. If the artist consciously tries to smuggle a message into a story then what they have is propaganda and the inherent dishonesty of the process undermines its artistic value. What makes the original Pilgrim's Progress work, despite the fact that it is a Puritan sermon crammed into story form, is that it is so blatant and earnest as to be above the charge of guile. 

Bunyan's message that he makes no attempt to dress up is the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. To understand it is to recognize that it is a horrific doctrine that no one would willingly accept unless they were forced to through divine revelation or the reading of scripture. You are a totally depraved sinner and there is no action that you can perform that can make you less deserving of eternal damnation. That being the case, Jesus still died to save you despite your fundamental unworthiness of salvation. To be justified through faith means to walk that tightrope and simultaneously believe both of these things at the same time. 

Christian's primary struggle in the early stage of his journey is with this balancing act. He comes to know that he is a sinner living in the City of Destruction by reading a book written by the creator of the world that tells him this fact. Christian, therefore, abandons his wife and children even to the point of covering his ears and shouting "eternal life" as he runs away from them. Evangelist tells him to stay on the road to the Celestial City as that is the only way he will eventually be able to be relieved of his burden of sin. What repeatably gets Christian off of the path is the temptation to believe that there might be an alternative way to escape his burden, such as following the Law, or despairing of ever being redeemed. 

The purpose of Bunyan is not to convince us to accept justification by faith by making it sound attractive or reasonable. On the contrary, Bunyan wants us to recognize that we need to accept this belief no matter how much it violates our every moral intuition simply because it is true. It also should be noted that Christian's struggle is not over his belief in God. The king's existence is an assumed fact. The only question is whether he can internalize the logic of justification by faith so that it carries him all the way to the end.  

This can be contrasted with Lewis, whose John utterly rejects the Landlord. It is not so much that John does not believe in the Landlord, though he is relieved when Mr. Enlightenment informs him that the Landlord was invented by the stewards, but that John rejects the sort of relationship the Landlord offers where, if you follow his rules, and you can live in his house with him forever but if you violate the rules you will be sent to his scorpion pit. John does his best to keep away from anything connected to the Landlord. His primary companion is Virtue (Kant) who insists on not caring whether the Landlord with his bribes and threats might exist. Instead, John seeks to find his island (joy). What John slowly is forced to accept is that, if he wants to cross the canyon of Peccatum Adae and reach his island, he is going to need the Landlord in the form of Mother Kirk.

In essence, Lewis was a 19th-century style romantic who came to accept that, in order to salvage this romanticism, he needed to ground it within a Christian worldview. Jesus, for Lewis, was all the best of mythology made real in human history. Lewis was not interested in the question of salvation let alone whether one could be saved through faith or works.

The big question for Lewis was whether one could maintain the enchanted worldview in the face of modernity that would allow someone to relate to God as a real individual as opposed to a mere theoretical proposition. Part of the appeal of Lewis, unlike Bunyan, is that his writing was designed to not antagonize readers. Anyone, even a Jew like me, could embrace Lewis as an exercise in attempting to maintain, with a straight face, that there is more to the universe than simple materialism. 

Lewis was a fundamentalist, not in the modern sense of holding particularly conservative theological views but in the sense of the early twentieth-century Christian Fundamentals pamphlets. Lewis was not interested in rehashing the early modern debates within Protestantism and ultimately with Catholicism, but in offering a few basic principles for a wide spectrum of Christians to rally around, what Lewis referred to as "mere Christianity." For Lewis, this primarily meant accepting that the God-Man had entered history in the person of Jesus in a completely factual and literal sense.  

 

With this in mind, we can begin to explore a major challenge of using Adams to make Bunyan work for a modern audience. The key to translating Bunyan is that there is no way that you can make him acceptable to most modern readers. Considering the amount of time that he spent in prison, it is not as if his message was all that acceptable to seventeenth-century ears.  

Bunyan was too earnest to do satire. I do not read Pilgrim's Progress as any kind of absurdist comedy. The book needs to be read with full salvation or damnation seriousness. The only thing absurd is why would a sinner like Christian be given so many chances to get back on the road when he did not even deserve to make it out of the City of Destruction? By contrast, Lewis can be seen in a comic light as he wished to mock his own highly roundabout path to Christianity and he offers a romp through modern philosophy. 

Absurdity was something essential to Adams and it connected to his atheism. His point was not the conventional Dawkins-style atheist polemic to render religion as absurd and atheism rational. Rather, he embraced a world that was absurd. The question then becomes, if the world is absurd no matter which way you turn, might it make more sense to accept a world that is absurd in its lacking of meaning than one where there are beings in charge who are ridiculous? 

Mann and Berry struggle with striking the right tone in their writing and ultimately in finding the purpose of their book. The book could have been a self-acknowledging satire of themselves as the kinds of people who read Adams and yet have somehow remained religious Christians. Alternatively, it could have served as a vehicle for the authors to explore something about their worldview that defies straightforward exposition. Much of the strength of the Babylon Bee is that it captures certain truths that could only be expressed by satire. If readers take nothing else from the Bee it should be the simple question of how is it that a satire site consistently offers a more thoughtful analysis of the world than CNN.  

The Postmodern Pilgrim offers some genuinely excellent moments with ideas that are best expressed through the surreal allegory of Pilgrim's Progress. The random people getting killed by falling meteorites in the City of Destruction offer a powerful response to Ryan's struggle with theodicy. We are tempted to turn the unfairness of children dying against God when it should cause us to contemplate the fact that we may randomly die at any time. People living in the time of Bunyan had a certain spiritual advantage over us as they were constantly confronted with dead children. There could be no pretense that life on Earth could be perfected as an end in itself. 

We have one of the best versions of the Devil since Screwtape. There is this delightful ambiguity to him because he tempts Ryan with what Ryan honestly wants, mainly to escape his miserable situation and get back home to his life. Ryan's Arthur Dent personality works well in these scenes. He knows better than to make an agreement with the Devil yet also sees nothing wrong with just talking to the Devil and struggles to say no when the Devil turns out to be so unfathomably reasonable. 

Similarly, there is Ryan and Faith's visit to Urbina. Readers of the original will be familiar with Faithful's martyrdom in the city of Vanity Fair, which is modeled after Jesus' passion. As such, the narrator offers the spoiler that Faith is going to die. Even though I was expecting Faith's death, how it is done still managed to be poignant. 

What I loved is how the authors make use of the issue of abortion with Humanist demanding that the travelers murder a child as the price of staying in the city. The scene captures why abortion is so important for religious conservatives. Living in a secular society that offers ever greater material comfort and seems to also make moral progress all without religion, where does one find the moral grounding to resist? If a person can truly see a fetus as a living being then the moral authority of modern secularism simply collapses. At the center of secular society is the mass murder of children. Without this murder of children, secular society, with women being able to pursue careers and sexual fulfillment as opposed to family and children, would not be practical. If people on the left demand that conservatives deny that abortion is murder and instead celebrate abortion as a constitutional right and as the liberating act of a woman freeing her body from the control of patriarchal society as the price of being accepted into secular society, then conservatives need to accept that they cannot be part of that society.  

This is a good book that makes for a fun read whatever your religious beliefs. I think it could have been a better book if the authors had been willing to spend the time giving it a more consistent narrative. The angel fails as a character because he does not advance the narrative and ends up as a distraction. One should not confuse making references to popular culture with actually being funny. The final meeting with the king certainly suffers as a McGuffin. Perhaps, instead of writing The Postmodern Pilgrim as a book, the authors could have used the travels of Ryan and Faith as a regular feature of the Babylon Bee where the Devil could offer us updates on their travails and progress. 

The Fall of Community and the Rise of Secular Modernity

Previously, I criticized C. S. Lewis for his argument that modernity took away people's ability to judge objective truths and make life-changing positions because they believed that something was true. What I believe was missing from that argument is the role of community. Modernity is important in the rise of secularism not because people stopped judging arguments objectively, they never were good at that in the first place, but that modernity broke down traditional community authority. This flipped the incentives when it came to religion. Where once people's lived experiences made it almost impossible not to be at least somewhat religious, now people live in a secular reality that makes it quite difficult for them to be religious. 

The importance of communal authority is most obvious when dealing with Judaism as the Jewish experience with modernity (at least in Europe) involved fairly clear-cut moments where communal authority broke down. Jews went from being members of their local kehilla to being citizens of a country, leading to rapid secularization during the following generation. The Christian experience of modernity provides fewer clean breaks with religious authority, the French and Russian Revolutions being the obvious exceptions. That being said, the practical implications of the modern breakdown of community, once it happened, are relevant to Christians as well.  

It is the combination of community and ideas that forces people to make life-altering decisions. If you grow up within a particular faith community, you might be very smart and be able to come up with all kinds of challenging arguments against your religion. That being said, as long as an alternative community with a superior doctrine does not exist, then it is unlikely for a formal break to happen. One thinks of the tragic life of Uriel da Costa, who fled Catholic Portugal only to find that the rabbinic Judaism of Amsterdam did not suit him either. He found himself caught in a cycle of being excommunicated for heresy and humiliating himself in order to get the community to take him back. Eventually, he committed suicide. Most people are going to avoid such a fate by accepting the parts of their religion they can accept while quietly placing anything else as beyond their understanding. 

Take away the sense of a religious community and two things happen. One, our person likely will have encountered an anti-religious ideology with which to argue against any argument for religion we might wish to make. Two, even if you get past his arguments, as long as our person has no religious community, your arguments for religion will never get past the level of an interesting theory that does not need to be put into practice. Before modernity, it was unbelief that had to get past people's lived experiences and, as such, even the best arguments against religion could be dismissed as interesting theories with no relevance to "reality." Now it is religion that has to scale that wall of people's lived experience in a secular world where the a priori assumptions of the game are fixed against religion.  

The problem of community helps us understand the challenge of science and other academic disciplines. For many people, science offers a kind of objective truth. Even if particular claims of science can be refuted, the scientific method carries authority as something against which other truths are going to be judged. It is very easy to make a convincing case for Genesis if there are no ready alternatives competing for the person's attention. Introduce evolution and the mere fact that it exists as an alternative explanation makes it harder to accept Genesis as an absolute. This becomes all the more so once we accept evolution as part of science and come to see science as fundamental to how we understand the world.

From this perspective, it does not matter if I reconcile Genesis with evolution. The moment dinosaurs living millions of years ago become something to take more seriously than a literal Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, my religion is going to be critically hobbled. As my brain becomes filled with all sorts of things from science, math, and history that I honestly believe in at the bottom of my heart, the religious truths I hold are going to become pushed aside to the point when, even if they are not rejected, they become relativized to the point that it will not be able to make absolute claims over my actions. The only way to escape this trap is to undermine the very authority of the academic disciplines as a means of making any claims regarding even physical reality.   

Keep in mind that most people, myself included, are not professional scientists. Even among professional scientists, the number of people who are in a position to directly evaluate the case for evolution is going to be small. It is likely that there are only a few thousand such people on the planet. Everyone else is forced to accept what such people say as a matter of faith. This is going to come down to a question of whose authority you going to accept. If you are part of a religious thought structure then it is easy to reject evolution. Scientists are just a bunch of power-hungry fools trying to convince people to reject the obvious truth of creation. This is in contrast to our wise and virtuous gedolim (or whatever your religious leaders like to call themselves). Once this is your a priori, it is easy to find evidence to justify this belief. The moment that science becomes the basis of your lived reality then the script flips and it becomes easy to dismiss any objections to evolution as religious backwardness.   

To be clear, when I talk about secularism, I do not necessarily mean that people become outright atheists. Religion can still survive as a social hobby that people attend to on a weekly basis. This does not change the fact that such people still live in a secular reality. Religion, no longer the full-time lived experience, is pushed to the margins with little hope of reaching the next generation let alone the wider society. 

Screwtape's Modernity and the Failure of Objective Belief

At the beginning of C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape castigates his nephew Wormwood for trying to get his patient to read texts that argue against the existence of God.

That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. but what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false,' but as 'academic' or 'practical,' 'outworn' or 'contemporary,' 'conventional' or 'ruthless.'

...

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. (Letter I)

From this perspective, modernity created a major shift in how people think. Beforehand, it was assumed that there was an objective truth in which if something is true and we find ourselves living lives that are not keeping with that truth, we must accept that we are living the Wrong way and must change ourselves so that we live according to the Truth. We moderns, though, have been trained to accept things as true from a certain point of view. Something can be true for some people and in some places and not in others. 

The practical implication of this for anyone in Christian or any other kind of outreach is that you can have the best arguments in the world and it still will not help until you have forced the person to acknowledge that there really are objective truths that we must accept in ways that affect how we live. It is not even that people will disagree with you. Instead, as subjectivists, people will say that your beliefs are very nice for you and they are glad you find them meaningful but they are going to go live their lives as they wish to find their own meaning. 

This is what lies behind Lewis' famous Trilemma. His point was not that Jesus was God, which Lewis certainly believed, but that you cannot think of him simply as a great moral teacher like Socrates to be admired but not necessarily listened to on any particular issue. Either Jesus was someone much greater or much less than Socrates. If he is worth paying attention to at all, he must become the basis for your life.   

Think of the theory that smoking causes lung cancer.  It makes no sense to talk about the elegance or the noble sentiments of the theory. Either the theory is true in which case I had better quit smoking at the risk of my health or it is a wicked conspiracy to destroy innocent tobacco companies. In the same sense, we might say that either a certain nice Jewish preacher arose from the dead in first-century CE Judea and therefore, I need to radically change my life for the sake of my immortal soul or Christianity is one of the greatest and most diabolical frauds in all of human history. Modern secularism has gained its dominant position not because it was able to convince people that Christianity was the latter but because it was able to convince people that the question of Christian truth did not really matter, robbing Christianity of its ability to have a meaningful say in how even nominal Christians lived their lives.  

The advantage of this interpretation of modern secularism is that it calls attention to the fact that what has happened has not been the masses of people reading science books and becoming convinced atheists. The Enlightenment caused very few people, outside of intellectual circles, to reject Christianity and that nineteenth-century Europe was actually a more religious place than medieval Europe. Atheism, outside of academic circles, remains rare even as religious observance continues to plummet. Most people remain vaguely spiritual even as they eschew the notion of belonging to a formal religion that can demand specific behaviors. 

My problem with Lewis' theory of secularism is that I am skeptical about the claim that pre-modernity was some kind of rationalist golden age in which it was possible to convince people to change their lives through argument because they believed that certain things were True. It was ancient and not modern rhetoric that invented the concept of pathos, that people should emotionally connect to your argument, and made it critical for ending speeches. The purpose of engaging people's pathos is precisely because, apparently even in the ancient world, you could have a logically unassailable argument and people would still say that this is all very nice but has nothing to do with them and go on their way. 

The preaching orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans came into existence in the early thirteenth-century precisely because even in medieval Christendom there were plenty of Christians who needed to be "converted" to Christianity. While the Dominicans were formed to argue with actual heretics like the Albigensian Cathars, the Franciscans, when they were not seeking martyrdom in the Islamic world, must have been trying to reach nominal Christians content to live their lives untainted by Christian practice. Clearly, the need to bridge the divide between theoretical belief and actual practice is not a recent problem.      

Furthermore, I fail to see certainty in belief as necessary for changing one's life or even for giving it up. Socrates, certainly not a modern, was a martyr to philosophy as a way of life. He did not die because he was absolutely convinced of any particular doctrine as to the nature of the soul or of justice. On the contrary, Socrates was a man of doubts, whose claim to knowledge was that he knew that he knew nothing. There is a critical tension at the heart of Socrates in that he was the ultimate non-dogmatist and yet he died for philosophy. The mystery at the heart of the Platonic dialogues is what is this philosophy that Socrates died for. Philosophy is this process of asking questions and to love the question more than any answer you might find. This can become a way of life to the extent that to be forced to live any other way would be death. 

This balance between taking ideas seriously and claiming absolute objective knowledge applies to followers of monotheistic religions as well. An inescapable part of monotheism is that God is distinct from the world which makes him fundamentally unknowable. Yet we are commanded to know this God. If you are a Jew or a Muslim, you try to know God by studying his Law and following his commandments. If you are a Christian, you try to know God through the person of Jesus. 

All three of these religions developed rationalist and mystical traditions in dialogue and confrontation with each other. Both religious rationalism and mysticism are premised on God's unknowability. Even as mysticism holds out the hope of achieving unity with God, its starting point is that the gap is unbridgeable. True unity with God requires God to cross the divide in ways that are impossible, at least from a human perspective. One thinks of Christian writers like the author of Cloud of Unknowing, Nicholas of Cusa, and St. John of the Cross. All of these were thinkers whose starting part for their theology was that God is someone fundamentally outside human understanding. As with Socrates' knowledge of his own ignorance, one comes to know God and develop a relationship with him, paradoxically, only by recognizing that one does not know him.     

The fact that God is outside our understanding means that any attempt to talk about God is going to be imprecise. This means that any statement we make about God at best is going only to be true from a certain point of view. Certain ways of talking about God and relating to him are going to be appropriate for certain people and not for others. Even a seemingly innocuous statement like God commands is riddled with theological pitfalls.

Modernity did not create Averoeism with its doctrine that there can be multiple religious truths, one for the masses and another for philosophers. Similarly, it was Boccaccio from the Renaissance who gave us the legend of the three rings. The message being that Jews, Christians, and Muslims should concern themselves less with which religion is ultimately True and more with building the best version of their religion they can. The idea being to let divine providence reveal itself in its own time.   

Long before the advent of modernity, if people were going to be religious there was always going to be something more at work than simply believing with absolute certainty that their religion was True and could be translated into clear do or don't actions. Living your life, religiously or otherwise, means having faith. At a certain point, you need to act in a way that implies certain knowledge even though that certainty does not exist.             

Horrific Doctrines: Being a Cartoon Libertarian and Accepting Jesus as My Savior

Let me first state that I think Markets Without Limits by Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski is a fantastic book. Their argument that anything you can do for free you should also be allowed to do for money offers a useful means of talking about market morality within the general society. The price that they pay for this argument is that this is not a libertarian book. The authors, to their credit, make a point in avoiding the argument that anything consensual should be considered moral or legal. For example, they would morally oppose me posting nude pictures of my children on the internet regardless of whether we were paid for them. This has the virtue of not only being intellectually honest but also avoids allowing their argument to become confused with the non-aggression principle and rejected by the people who do not accept it. 

That being said, I was bothered by a passage that stated: "we did not write that book because neither of us agree with libertarian political morality. We have classical liberal sympathies, but we are not cartoon libertarians." (23) Obviously, Brennan and Jaworski do not have to accept libertarian political morality and, as I will argue later on, there are good reasons to reject it. My problem is that they seem to equate libertarian political morality with being a cartoon libertarian as if that was a bad thing. It is almost as if they are saying that it is ok to be a libertarian as long as you do not take libertarianism too seriously to the extent that it defines your political morality. Anyone who does that is a cartoon and not to be taken seriously. In that spirit, I wish to defend being a "cartoon libertarian;" you know that person who seems to reduce all politics to government is force and taxation is theft.  

I readily acknowledge that there are some serious limitations to running around saying "taxation is theft" a lot. For one thing, that is not enough to be a libertarian. One cannot theorize a full libertarian philosophy, let alone any kind of well-thought-out public policy proposals, merely by trying to proceed logically from that one premise. Furthermore, saying "taxation is theft" is likely to alienate people, including many libertarians. It is a horrific doctrine. Most people in government really mean well and some of them even honestly do good things. It is monstrous to truly believe that a politician standing up and saying that he has a plan to help sick children and the elderly get badly needed medical care is really the moral equivalent of a masked gunman who robs a hospital. Is it morally ok to shoot the politician? (In principle yes, even if it is unlikely to ever be practical.) If you are not bothered by this claim, you have either not properly thought it through or you are a sociopath, not someone who can be accepted as a member of the liberty family in good standing. That being said, I do defend the notion that taxation is theft and that it is important to be very open about it, even if it will forever banish us to the political margins. The reason for this is that, without the belief that taxation is theft, no libertarian movement will survive long in a meaningful sense as libertarians will all too easily be co-opted by other movements.

To understand this, it might be useful to consider the example of Christianity. At the heart of Orthodox Christianity is the belief that Jesus is the savior of the world. As I think even most Christians would agree, this is a horrific doctrine. (In its Calvinist form, it descends to Lovecraftian levels of horror.) I like to think of myself as a good person. I try really hard and I usually do the right thing. I need Jesus, because without him, no matter how hard I try and no matter my good intentions, I will never make myself right with God. No matter how many good deeds I might perform, I am not truly better than Hitler. Both Hitler and I are depraved sinners and deserve to burn in Hell. The only thing that might save me, in the end, is that Christ died on the cross as atonement. Even if no honestly decent person were sent to Hell, this would still be a horrific doctrine as it denies the possibility of personal righteousness so critical to how most people live their lives.   

Now, as a Jew, I might be tempted to look down on Christians for their "unenlightened" views and I think there is something to be said for how Jewish parochialism, in practice, is far more universalistic than Christianity. (The fact that Judaism is about God's relationship with a particular group of people opens the door to recognizing that God has all kinds of relationships with people that have nothing to do with Judaism. The fact that Judaism was never designed as a universalistic religion allows it not to be and for us to respect other people for being the righteous non-Jews, who are still right with God, that they are.) I suspect that even most practicing Christians would agree with me. (Please do not write to me to tell me that you are a Christian, but do not believe that I need to accept Jesus to avoid burning in Hell. You may be right, but that is beside the point.) That being said, Christianity would not be better off if only it took a more "ecumenical" view. On the contrary, such a Christianity would not long survive. It would simply be too easy for such a Christianity to be chopped up for parts. If you are on the political left, "love thy neighbor" is really a Jewish concept and it is likely that Buddhists might fulfill this commandment better than either religion. If you are on the right, you can be a Republican and still be a hypocrite about family values. None of these things require Jesus. It might serve the interests of those on either the left or right to continue to use the label "Christianity," but Christianity would cease as its own ideology, incapable of influencing Christians let alone the world. 

In a similar vein, C. S. Lewis argued that Christianity was the one religion that needed its miracle no matter how much that might trouble the modern scientific mind. If the life of Jesus was not some earth-shattering miracle of God becoming flesh, there would be no point to the religion. Jesus as a wise rabbinic teacher is useless for Christianity (hence Lewis' famous trilemma). You might as well be a Jew or practice some other ethical monotheistic religion, perhaps be a stoic philosopher. Just as Christianity needs its miracle as embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Christianity needs its horrific doctrine that this miracle was necessary in the first place.   

Over the past few decades, it has been a strength precisely of Evangelical Christians that they have been willing to insist on the necessity of accepting Jesus as your savior despite the fact that it turns so many people off. Perhaps it has been their tragedy that they have not insisted hard enough and allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Republican Party to the extent of Evangelical leaders being willing to endorse Trump despite him being the most blatantly non-Christian major candidate in our country's history. They will pay a steep price for this as millions of Evangelical kids will turn around and ask their parents how they could endorse Trump for president and not endorse them for their lapses in Christian living such as pursuing an openly gay lifestyle. (One thinks of Shelby Steele's argument that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was fueled, in part, by white parents lacking the moral authority to denounce their children's sexual behavior on account that they had, at least passively, been complacent in the much greater evils of segregation and racism.)

Insisting that Jesus is the savior may sound simplistic, but there is an advantage to simplicity. Consider the example of the slave Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin. First, it is important to recognize that, contrary to what the name has come to imply, there is nothing weak about Tom. A person who allows himself to be beaten to death rather than give up information is anything but weak. The key to understanding Tom is that he is simple. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's hand, what sounds like a negative stereotype is turned on its head as Tom is fashioned into a model Christian. Tom knows one truth that his soul was bought and paid for on Calvary with the blood of Jesus. There are two corollaries to this claim. First, it is Christ's will that Tom is sent into slavery in order that he preach this Gospel truth to everyone, black and white. Second, while Tom might be obligated to obey orders, the white man is not his real owner. This is Tom's truth and he never allows himself to become distracted by other issues. If Tom were a more gifted theologian, read Augustine and learned to separate the political from the spiritual realm, he likely would have fallen either into despair at his circumstance or into flattering his masters. If Jesus did not send me to save the soul of even a wicked man like Simon Legree, I should probably do the world a favor and kill him while he lies drunk at my feet. Alternatively, maybe, if I speak nicely to the white man and tone down the plain truth that to own slaves is to deny Jesus, he will be good to me and might even set me free. Tom's last breath is to reject young George Shelby's attempt to buy his freedom. Shelby might want, in today's language, to be a "good white ally" of slaves, but if he were a better Christian, he would have realized that just as he never really had the power to enslave anyone, it is not within his power to make anyone free, Jesus already accomplished that. 

To bring this back to libertarianism, the claim "taxation is theft," like "Jesus is the savior," maybe a horrific doctrine that alienates most people, including libertarians, but it protects the movement from being captured by outside interests. In a sense, the very alienation created by saying that taxation is theft is valuable as a signaling device. Anyone with an outside agenda would be kept away precisely by a doctrine so abhorrent to anyone who is not a libertarian today. 

All libertarians have other allegiances, whether we come from the left or the right. A thick libertarianism that allowed itself to become distracted from "taxation is theft" would quickly lose its relevance. Left-libertarians can support civil liberties and right-libertarians can support property rights, while each side ignores the other part. Furthermore, one can always defend distinctly unlibertarian policies on libertarian grounds. Forcing Christians to bake gay wedding cakes or banning Muslim immigrants might, in the long run, serve to create a society more open to libertarian ideals. Thus, libertarianism can easily be infiltrated and used to support other ends. By insisting that "taxation is theft" be placed front and center of the movement we force everyone, left and right, to surrender any claim of using the government to advance even explicitly libertarian causes. Left or right-libertarian, I will find a way to work with you. You are allowed to accept the reality that we have government and, certainly for the near future, there may not be a better option. That being said, if you are not deeply troubled by the very concept of government action, you need to leave the movement.   

All ideologies have their horrific elements in that one is going to have to accept the equivalent of a pile of dead children. This is simply a matter of consistency. If you have not figured out how your beliefs lead to dead children or worse, you have not thought them out properly. There is a practical value to being open and honest about one's horrific doctrines. It allows you to keep out those who are merely trying to use you for their own ends. If they reject your horrific doctrines, you can assume that they have rejected other parts as well. So here is to the cartoon libertarians with their simple faith that taxation is theft. Your doctrine is horrific and you will never be more than a despised minority. You are also the reason why the libertarian movement will survive another generation and you are the reason why it is worth having a libertarian, movement, even one that is a despised minority, to begin with.