"... and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable ('The Lord is my shepherd'), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside. Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer...."
Writes Jonathan Franzen in
"The Problem of Nature Writing/To succeed—to get people to care about preserving the world—it can’t be only about nature" (The New Yorker).
"There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature, to push them toward caring about what’s left of the nonhuman world, and I can’t help suspecting that they share my allergy to hymns of devotion. The power of the Bible, as a text, derives from its stories. If I were an evangelist, going door to door, I’d steer well clear of the Psalms. I would start with the facts as I saw them: God created the universe, we humans sin against His laws, and Jesus was dispatched to redeem us, with momentous consequences. Everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, enjoys a good story. And so it seems to me that the first rule of evangelical nature writing should be: Tell one...."
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38 comments:
"There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature, to push them toward caring about what’s left of the nonhuman world..
yep! take them out, and SHOW them nature!
Show them the windmill farms, stretching across the entire state of iowa..
Show them the solar farms, stretching across EVERYWHERE..
Show them how the "green" movement has f*cked the world!!
Whatever you do, DON'T let them see Copper Harbor, or they'll get the wrong impression
In Islam, a person who has memorized the entire Koran is known as a 'Hafiz'. Being a Hafiz is a great honor. But peak into any madrassa for any length of time and you'll quickly realize the goal isn't memorizing the Koran, the goal is becoming a Hafiz. This applies to almost all religions. Food for thought.
It seems a difficult task, to start from a worldview in which the universe all came about by random collisions, mutations and pure chance, and have it swell in the heart of the reader that it all has some grand majesty and meaning.
The world view that the bird was the product of a loving creator, embodying an intelligence (the soul of the bird) in a physical frame, and placing it in a world created also for us (also embodied independent, intelligent souls, placed here in a school) - this worldview seems a more natural foundation to experience what in (from my best moments in life) I can attest to being a unified field of love that encompasses both the creator and the created.
My Dad's Lenten Vow was always to read the Bible. I haven't followed in his footsteps in that regard, but it always struck me as a worthy thing to do.
If you say all the prayers in this book you will eventually pray all the psalms. https://www.amazon.com/Liturgy-Hours-Catholic-Book-Publishing/dp/0899424090?ref_=ast_author_mpb
I have my doubts that any of the New Atheists (or for that matter the - um, cryptoatheists?) who feel awe about nature are not actually deifying it.
Just be a Deist and call it good.
"There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature, to push them toward caring about what’s left of the nonhuman world, and I can’t help suspecting that they share my allergy to hymns of devotion."
This is stupid.
The "nonhuman" world has no intrinsic value, only what we attribute to it. It just is, creature destroying creature, fire and water and moving earth and rocks from outer space and changes in solar energy destroying entire habitats, sometimes covering them in thick layers of ice, in endless cycles.
What does it mean to be a "believer" in nature? By contrast with Franzen's psalm case, everyone "believes" it exists. Everyone "believes" we are part of "nature" and need it for sustenance. So the statement's meaning depends on a particular meaning of "care" for the "nonhuman" world. But that's a political, not a romantic-esthetic issue. Example: do we "care" more about non-human nature by preventing or suppressing fires in California or by letting CA burn as it used to? Do we "care" more about pristine desert environments by letting them be or by covering them with bird-killing solar panels?
Of course, many non-environmentalists are not simply allergic to "hymns," but to the prog faith they symbolize and promote. Behind prog hymns lurk guns. Sing this, believe this, or else.
What he's feeling- that joy that comes over him taking the time to notice nature- is what some people think of as God's gifts to us. And so, they feel the same joy as Jonathan Franzen, though they give credit for that joy to something specific, something larger than words. Franzen just calls it 'nature'.
I'm a lover of nature myself, but...I see no point in dragging people who don't think about it to demand they do. They will. Eventually. Most everyone does, eventually. But they have to come to it on their own.
Some people live in the concrete world and are more taken by tall buildings, bustling cars and people, and a lot of noise. And they are completely uncomfortable in the peace and solitude of natural settings. They cannot sleep in the quiet. The quiet is disquieting to them. We call those people "New Yorkers".
He had me until the Everclear and Coors Light metaphors, at which point he lost the silver thread and golden needle and went off the rail into Knob Creek. (Sidebar: You can almost picture the ratiocination of his weighing Bud Light v. Coors Light.)
I’ll take “things that never happened” for $500 Alex.
This whole story is BS. He needs something compelling to which to analogies “nature” and the “joy” it can produce, so he concocts this Bible thing.
Don’t believe a word of it.
Besides, if you want to understand the believers, start in the NT. Read the Gospels and Acts. Understand Christ by the writings of those who literally walked the earth with him. and what his earliest followers did after the death and resurrection. Then maybe you’ll have a drive to read the OT and understand the prequel so you better understand the sequel.
So then, if there is an intelligence or some non-randomness to what we see around us in this world and our understanding of it, how would we describe our relationship to this force? How can we use this understanding to cope with what we face from day to day?
If there is no force that some call divine, then it is all chance. Does that sound plausible?
Does that feel right? Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.
Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God.
I suppose he's never felt that joy as kingfishers catch fire and dragonflies draw flame?
When I went looking for that poem I discovered that in the long lapse of years since my schoolboy days, I had mixed it up with lines from another of Hopkins' poems: "God's Grandeur." I had thought they were different verses in the same poem.
Reading 5 chapters a night takes 20-30 minutes. Not hard to do at all.
It takes less than 9 months to read the whole thing through. OT & NT
For the past 8 years or so I've been spending 20-30 minutes a night writing out the Bible 4 handwritten pages every night. I wish I could say it has given me some deep understanding but I don't think it has. Perhaps more questions than answers.
But it does give me a little structure in my otherwise unstructured life. I find my time doing this very peaceful and relaxing.
I think it helps on several levels.
Just finished the complete ot/nt after about 6 years. Started again on genesis last week.
John Henry
>Quayle said...
It seems a difficult task, to start from a worldview in which the universe all came about by random collisions, mutations and pure chance, and have it swell in the heart of the reader that it all has some grand majesty and meaning.
The world view that the bird was the product of a loving creator, embodying an intelligence (the soul of the bird) in a physical frame, and placing it in a world created also for us (also embodied independent, intelligent souls, placed here in a school) - this worldview seems a more natural foundation to experience what in (from my best moments in life) I can attest to being a unified field of love that encompasses both the creator and the created.<
Lovely, poetically stated thoughts on the "Creator" and wonder of the nature "it" created.
Those aside, when creation of the universe by random collisions, mutations and pure chance occurring over infinite eons is declared to be less likely than the notion of a magical being of inexplicable provenance magically creating it all, rational discussion of the subject of creation abruptly ends.
Darkisland said...
For the past 8 years or so I've been spending 20-30 minutes a night writing out the Bible..
I think it helps on several levels.
Just finished the complete ot/nt after about 6 years. Started again on genesis last week.
cool! in ballpoint, or pencil? May i suggest fountain pen or better yet, inkwell?
If you had to concentrate of each letter..
if you had to concentrate on each letter, you MIGHT get less typos : )
I'm an agnostic atheist and I call B.S. for the writers thoughts.
I wonder if Franzen finds the lists of the dead on war memorials throughout the world “no more necessary to read than a phonebook”. Much of the Old Testament was written by people memorializing a time before their exile from their beloved homeland, as I understand it, and trying to preserve their culture in a foreign conqueror’s nation (“By the waters of Babylon…”). Franzen’s transactional relationship to the Bible and his apparent ignorance about (or dismissal of) the sections he finds dull is surprisingly immature for a writer of his talents and repute. I have students who hate Moby-Dick for the same reasons, and especially Ch 32 (cetology). No more necessary to read than a phonebook? Only if you believe its purpose is purely informational.
I guess the scientific consensus is that life on earth was a chance by-product of primeval slime. This is a fairly recent consensus, and has been more likely to inspire something like Lenin's Mausoleum and the Holodomor than the Pyramids or the Chartres Cathedral. As fundamental beliefs go, it's not suitable for transcendence.....Like a lot of people, I tried to get through the Bible but gave up. Probably offers a better guide to rational living than the Iliad and Odyssey though. The Iliad is more likely to inspire something like the Nuremberg Rallies and the Holocaust than Thermopylae or The Charge of the Light Brigade... Ecclesiastes tops anything Homer ever wrote. Homer, however, never wrote anything as wicked as the Book of Job. Talk about conspiracy theories: God and Satan enter into a conspiracy to fuck over an honorable man. I guess that's how life works out for most people, but it's a pretty dour story.
My wife has read through the entire Bible each year for the past 10 or more years. The Psalms are Hebrew poetry, which, unlike poetry of many cultures, rhymes ideas rather than sounds. That allows the Psalms, Proverbs, and other bits of OT Hebrew poetry to be able to be translated into any other language.
Blogger gilbar said...
cool! in ballpoint, or pencil? May i suggest fountain pen or better yet, inkwell?
If you had to concentrate of each letter..
It took me a few months to work out a system. I use composition books and Pilot extra fine rolling ball pens.
My cursive writing has never been very good and has not improved with age so from the very first I've been writing non-cursive. That also slows me down a bit. I had not thought of considering each letter but I suppose I do to some extent. I do make a conscious effort to write legibly.
I now use non-cursive for all my handwriting, though I try to use a keyboard (phone, tablet, laptop etc) wherever I can.
I think Neal Stephenson said that he writes his novels with a quill pen because it gets him closer to the writing.
I need a keyboard and bang out yards and yards of verbiage for books and articles. Then I edit it by hand with a red pilot pen. I usually wind up with about 50% of what I started with and much of that rewritten. I just cannot edit on a screen.
John Henry
When I was younger I had the ambition to read [the Federal Register] cover to cover. After breezing through the Constitution and slogging through the Amendments, both of which were at least of historical interest, I made it to the end of the Jobs Act. But then came Expenditures, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Expenditures are memorable ('Defend the coasts and deliver the mail'), in the main they’re incredibly repressive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but Government is good... To enjoy Expenditures, you had to be a believer; you had to love Government, which I didn’t. Only later, when I came to love roads, did I see that my problem with Expenditures hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the Amazon delivery trucks drive by, or in hearing an agitated road rage incident behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in Government. Joy can be as strong as Democrats or as mild as GOPe, but it’s never not joy.... There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in Government, to push them toward controlling what’s left of the non-regulated world. If I were a politician going photo op to photo op, I’d steer well clear of Expenditures. I would start with the facts as I saw them: Government created the universe we live in, we humans sin against Its laws, and politicians were dispatched to redeem us, with momentous consequences.... Everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, enjoys a good story. And so it seems to me that the first rule of evangelical Government writing should be: Tell one!
So, he was surprised by joy?
Maybe he needs some help reflecting on the Psalms by a literary master and scholar?
Franzen sounds here like the high schooler who tried reading Shakespeare once and thought the old fashioned language really made bad stories and weak characters seem more impressive than they are, and assumed anyone who disagreed was stupid.
Dude says "there's an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature." That inspires in this nonbeliever an urgent need to piss on a Jonathan Franzen book--out in the fresh air, while admiring the empyrean.
FWIW, if you find Christian scriptures hard going, don't even start with the pissworthy Muslim alternative.
YouTube: or, the problem of writing about God without bringing Him into the conversation
There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature
This is a very off-putting belief, because it brings to mind someone, who thinks they know better than you, hectoring you about what you're doing wrong.
Lead by example, Mr. Franzen, and report simply on what you are doing, but not why.
Jamie:
"I have my doubts that any of the New Atheists (or for that matter the - um, cryptoatheists?) who feel awe about nature are not actually deifying it."
Then cast your doubts aside. I am blown away by nature but, as there are undoubtedly many millions of other worlds with teeming life in the teeming galaxies, I don't subject it to deification.
Not really that "new" as I've been atheist for 60+ years now.
I've read the Bible front to back, including all the little fine print in the edition I had.
Mostly, I found it tedious writing with a very heavy slant. As I've also read a plethora of other cultures' ancient works, I also noticed all the literary lifting it contains.
Oligonicella said...
As I've also read a plethora of other cultures' ancient works
hmmm
plethora
plÄ•th′É™r-É™
noun
An abundance or excess of something.
Oligonicella? I'm certainly NOT questioning your veracity.. But, i'm curious..
Of this "plethora" of ancient works that you've read.. Could you list the top 20?
Maybe give us a short synopsis of each?
I'm NOT saying that you are full of it; Far From IT! But, i doubt that i've read 5.
So, i guess i AM kinda wondering about your 'excess of something'
OK, birds are cool. Though I find I appreciate them most when they take the form of nuggets.
As for reading the Bible, better be careful:
“The Council of Trent (1545-1564) placed the Bible on its list of prohibited books, and forbade any person to read the Bible without a license from a Roman Catholic bishop or inquisitor. The Council added these words: "That if any one shall dare to read or keep in his possession that book, without such a license, he shall not receive absolution till he has given it up to his ordinary."
Rome's attempt to keep the Bible from men has continued to recent times. Pope Pius VII (1800-1823) denounced the Bible Society and expressed shock at the circulation of the Scriptures. Pius VII said, "It is evidence from experience, that the holy Scriptures, when circulated in the vulgar tongue, have, through the temerity of men, produced more harm than benefit." Pope Leo XII called the Protestant Bible the "Gospel of the Devil" in an encyclical letter of 1824. Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846) railed "against the publication, distribution, reading, and possession of books of the holy Scriptures translated into the vulgar tongue." Pope Leo XII, in January 1850, condemned the Bible Societies and admitted the fact that the distribution of Scripture has "long been condemned by the holy chair."
You’re probably safe nowadays, but remember: no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
oh! also, a short list of the languages that you're fluent in would help too!
ancient languages, that is
"The 'nonhuman' world has no intrinsic value, only what we attribute to it. It just is, creature destroying creature, fire and water and moving earth and rocks from outer space and changes in solar energy destroying entire habitats, sometimes covering them in thick layers of ice, in endless cycles."
The human world, too.
Darkisland said...
I use composition books and Pilot extra fine rolling ball pens.
that sounds like it'd work! I just had this vision of you as a scribe!
Let me strongly recommend "3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated" by Don Knuth
https://www.amazon.com/3-16-Bible-Texts-Illuminated/dp/0895792524
And online in various places. Though make sure you get a version with good graphics.
Known around Adobe as "What I did on my summer vacation", speaking of artists in residence.
I highly recommend the “Bible in a Year” podcast with Father Mike Schmitz. You’ll do the whole bible in one year. Most podcasts are about 20 to 25 minutes long. Usually about 15 mins of reading and 10 minutes of context by Father Mike. Most of the Old Testament is done chronologically, but usually you’ll read some Psalms or Proverbs as well, and he mixes in New Testament breakpoints as well. I struggled to read on my own, because we don’t understand all of the ancient illusions and traditions, and due to repetitive nature of some text. It really strengthened my faith. Hope this is helpful to someone!
Anyone who finds Saul and David, Solomon, Elijah, Ahab and Jezebel boring doesn't know a good story when he reads one.
So I'm a professional Christian, professional Evangelical even, and I love nature, I find deep reflection and renewal there in a way that being in church does come close to bringing. Indeed nature language like that is all through Scripture. But a person has to actually read it with an open mind
The Song of Songs was boring?
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