"When a man does a piece of work which is admired by all, we say that it is wonderful; but when we see the changes of day and night, the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky, and the changing seasons upon the earth, with their ripening fruits, anyone must realize that it is the work of someone more powerful than man." ~Santee-Yanktonai Sioux, AKA Chased-by-Bears
"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity . . . and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself." ~William Blake
"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner." ~General Omar Bradley
"Some people have been saying that the Bible gives humans the right to use the earth in any way they wish. This is not true. In fact, the Bible says that the earth is a divine creation, and all creatures therefore participate in sanctity and are pleasing to God. The earth, moreover, is not given to humans. Humans are given the use of the fruits of the earth on the condition that they remain grateful for this gift and worthy of it. We have nothing to use that is not holy. This is more fearful and wonderful than most modern Christians suspect." ~Wendell Berry
"Nature and revelation are alike God's books." ~Tryon Edwards
"If we are children of God, we have a tremendous treasure in nature and will realize that it is holy and sacred. We will see God reaching out to us in every wind that blows, every sunrise and sunset, every cloud in the sky, every flower that blooms and every leaf that fades." ~Oswald Chambers
"Human learning, with the blessing of God upon it, introduces us to divine wisdom, and while we study the works of nature, the God of nature will manifest himself to us." ~Bishop Horne
"The most real fact in the universe is God. The whole creation bears witness to His presence. The sunlight that floods the earth, the glories of the firmament, night and day, winter and spring, all declare that the Creator is everywhere in His world. The rose that was blooming one morning in my garden, with colors more delicate than the brush of a Turner could paint, told me that the great Artist was there." ~unknown
"Doth not all nature around me praise God? If I were silent, I should be an exception to the universe. Doth not the thunder praise Him as it rolls like drums in the march of the God of armies? Do not the mountains praise Him when the woods upon their summits wave in adoration? Does not the lightning write His name in letters of fire? Hath not the whole earth a voice? And shall I, can I, silent be?" ~Charles H. Spurgeon
"I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something manmade and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth." ~Rachel Carson
"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." ~Romans 1:20 NIV
Note (posted 7/1/03): The following is basically a set of responses (positive, negative, and mixed) provoked by specific passages in Quinn's book. I wrote this commentary a couple of years ago; first very disjointedly in a notebook as I was reading the book, and subsequently on this website in a somewhat more organized fashion. As my worldview has not remained exactly the same since that time, I find myself tempted to sweep through my commentary, after several months without touching it, and make some alterations. Undoubtedly there are a few points that I would not assert quite so boldly, a few that I would underscore with greater vehemence, a few that I would scrap altogether, and a few new ones that I would add. I have, however, come to the conclusion that to make such alterations now would somehow detract from my original purposes in posting this commentary; which as I understand them were to show my struggle in wrestling with my immediate reactions to the book, to assist and encourage critical thinking (as well as the avoidance of knee-jerk reactions, to which I make no claim of immunity), and to extract and bring to light the implications that Quinn makes, allowing them to be more easily examined. I have therefore decided, upon returning to this site, to leave it as is, with the addition of the above disclaimer. I hope this commentary helps those who read it to sort through some of the questions and issues that Quinn so unflinchingly forces one to face.
P. 8: "When this 'final hour' failed to arrive during the lifetime of John's contemporaries, [seems to want one to conclude that John was wrong] Christians of each succeeding generation looked for signs of the Antichrist in their own era." [because they still wanted to believe that John had been right?] A simple statement of fact, such as the above, can manage to present itself in a negative connotation when written by Daniel Quinn. This happens not through what the statement says in itself, but through what one would be inclined to read into it subconsciously. So in order to examine these statements for what they are, we must bring the subconscious implications (which, for the sake of efficiency, I will refer to as SI's) into the conscious.
"Numerous examples of this occur in the New Testament, where events in the life of Jesus are described as fulfilling ancient prophecies that were not necessarily understood as prophecies by those who enunciated them." Note that Quinn deliberately stops short of saying that the events DID fulfill prophecies, because that would be an admission that Jesus was who he said he was, and there goes the entire religious aspect of Quinn's case.
P. 8-9: "In other words, we can't really know what John was talking about until it actually happens, so the Antichrist is almost certain to be different from whatever we imagine him to be. If someone tells you that Saddam Hussein is the Antichrist (and he has in fact been nominated for that honor), you're absolutely right to laugh. The Antichrist isn't going to be a worse sort of Hitler or Stalin, because worse than them will just be more of the same in a higher degree - sixty million murdered instead if six million. If you're going to be on guard against the Antichrist and not just some ordinary villain, you have to be on guard against someone of an entirely new order of dangerousness." Right on! This makes perfect sense! It is even possible that the Antichrist may not be a literal person. [(Click here for an interesting article about all the Antichrist hype.)]
P. 9: "[B's following] included young and old and everything in between, both sexes in roughly equal numbers, mainstream Christians and Jews, clergy of a dozen different denominations (including the Roman Catholic), atheists, humanists, rabbis, Buddhists, environmentalist radicals, capitalists and socialists, lawyers and anarchists, liberals and conservatives." What are the implications of this if one compares it to the followings of the major religious leaders? After having pondered this, the only real conclusion that I can draw is that anyone with genuinely new ideas (a much rarer occurrence than one might think)cannot be put into a box or given a label. This is true of all those that we remember as great thinkers and religious leaders, which is why they are remembered as such.
P. 10: "Anyone who thinks the Church is open to new ideas is living in a dreamworld." In this day and age, the connotation here is obvious. Being "closed-minded" is a cultural taboo. However, one's mind should be both open and closed to a reasonable degree, despite what the cultural standards are. Now, is this true of the Church? Sometimes. But often, unfortunately, it's one extreme or the other. This is not Christ. It is Ianity: strings attached to Christ.
P. 239-40 (Public Teaching #1): Statement: We are exposed once in our lives to intellectual thinkers, but constantly to spiritual leaders. Well, it only makes sense. Religion is the worship of a deity. Intellectualism is just that - appealing to the intellect. Religion, by nature, must occupy every facet of one's life. Intellectualism IS a facet. Quinn here is trying to get the reader to think about the truth in the above statement without thinking about the reason. This would lead one to conclude that the above is a strange ideosyncracy of "Taker Culture," when it is actually the nature of religion. "Why do the pious (who already know every word of whatever text they find holy) need to have it repeated to them week after week after week, and even day after day after day?" This question gets the idea in one's mind that when people study sacred text, it involves nothing more than repetition of the same thing over and over. But the wonderful thing about sacred text - the reason it's studied so thoroughly - is that there's always something more, something new to discover! It's not constant repetition; it's an exegetical treasure hunt! Now according to Quinn, "the pious" go to church out of a dependency of being reminded that Jesus loves them; a perceived need for "hearing the laws of their gods ten thousand times." But the reason for going to church regularly is the same as the reason for reading the Bible regularly: a religion is a way of life. Quinn himself has said it: "And we know that the pious don't go to church every Sunday because they've forgotten that Jesus loves them but rather because they've not forgotten that Jesus loves them." Exactly. They have not forgotten their allegiance.
P. 241: "Anywhere in the world, East or West, you can walk up to a stranger and say, 'Let me show you how to be saved,' and you'll be understood." This is probably true. Is it not possible that it arises out of a genuine need for salvation?
P. 242ff: The Agricultural Revolution gave birth to a culture that is destroying itself, and the rest of the earth along with it. All too true.
P. 244: Quinn neatly boxes in the great teachers and thinkers (and consequently their followers) with a series of and's. Between some of these groups he inserts "and these were the teachers of," but the only reasoning for this is chronological order. This is a fallacy known as Non Sequitur - it does not follow. Indeed, what makes these people great teachers and thinkers is that they weren't just parrotting something they had learned; their ideas were genuinely new. But Quinn tries to lead one to believe the contrary by accusing them of having "unwittingly ratified the Great Forgetting in their works, so that every text in history, philosophy, and theology from the origins of literacy to almost the present moment incorporated it as and integral and unquestioned assumption." If they hadn't been guilty of the above accusation, Quinn claims, "the entire course of our intellectual history would have been unthinkably different from what we find in our libraries today." This strongly implies that Daniel Quinn is the only person who has ever had new ideas. The absurdity of this notion speaks for itself.
P. 245-6: Well now, to hear Quinn tell it, historians freaked out at the discovery that humanity had been around long before agriculture and tried to cover it up so that no one would really notice. Quinn states this as fact, but I don't see any basis for it. It seems more likely to me that we've just never really realized how harmful and dangerous the rise of Taker Culture was and continues to be.
P. 249: Now Quinn's great clumping is really getting down to business. First of all, it's worth noting that he has now presented a reason for the perceived need of salvation: "the laboriousness of their lifestyle," they being the people of our Taker Culture. Now this is the point at which I had a sudden moment of revelation: It all fits! Our need for salvation came from the Fall, which is just what Quinn has been talking about using different terms: the Agricultural Revolution; the Great Forgetting. (Again for the sake of efficiency, I will refer to this as the ARFOM: Agricultural Revolution/Fall Of Man.) We now need to be saved from our very selves, which is basically what Quinn has been saying all along. And yet he still insists that the idea that we need to be saved is "strange."
P. 250ff: Quinn keeps insisting that "the foundation thinkers of our culture imagined that Man had been born an agriculturalist and a civilization builder." I think, rather, that what he sees is a basis on the way people of our culture live because that's what people would understand, but not necessarily a basis on the assumption that we had always lived this way or were meant to. (But when one states something with enough authority, people will believe it.)
P. 253: Leavers: leave the rule of the world in the hands of the gods (The God); Takers: take the rule of the world into their own hands. Exactly!
P. 255: "Man was NOT born a few thousand years ago and he was NOT born a scourge." Exactly!
P. 257: "To say that agriculture was developed as a response to famine is like saying that cigarette smoking was developed as a response to lung cancer. Agriculture doesn't cure famine, it promotes famine - it creates the conditions in which famines occur. For example, agriculture made it possible for many populations of Africa to outstrip their homelands' resources - and that's why these populations are now starving." Exactly!
P. 23: "There would have been nothing to it if Billy Graham had been out there touring . . ." Is he saying here that someone like Billy Graham represents popular ideas? But that is irrelevant. The popularity of an idea, or lack thereof, has no bearing on whether or not it is true.
P. 258ff (Public Teaching #2): The Boiling Frog - sadly, a fitting analogy.
P. 259: "What shall we look for, as signs of distress? Mass suicides? Revolution? Terrorism? No, of course not. These come much later, when the water is scalding hot." Of course! If people before the rise of "civilization" suddenly found themselves in the condition that we're in today, they would have quickly gone back to they way they had been; the frog would have jumped out of the water. Perhaps if they had foreseen the slippery slope we would take, this tragedy may not have happened.
P. 261-2: The mice in a cage - what a true analogy! In fact, it's almost literal. It is worth noting that Quinn uses the "enlightened" BCE and CE rather than the original BC and AD, because to use the latter would be in itself an admission that a certain man did in fact split time in half.
P. 263: The beginning of war - yes! War as we know it is an inevitable part of Taker Culture. Many say that man is cyclical, that history repeats itself. According to Quinn, we are not cyclical but progressive (not necessarily a good thing). But I think both are correct. It's more like we're going around in a spiral.
P. 267: Now Quinn is stating as fact that all "salvationist religions" originated around the same time, between 1400 and 0 BC. This is in itself a blatant historical falsehood, but the point he is making is that salvationism arose out of the ARFOM. Well of course it did. Before the ARFOM we didn't NEED salvation. "Judaism, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Buddhism all came into being during this period and had no existence before it." What of the religious historical documents then? Are they suddenly all bunk, or "mythology," just because Daniel Quinn said so?
P. 268: "It was easy for them to envision humankind as innately flawed and to envision themselves as sinners in need of rescue from eternal damnation." That's just the point - humanity was NOT born flawed! These salvationists that Quinn rallies against may agree with his view of human nature more than he understands. "They were eager to despise the world and to dream of a blissful afterlife in which the poor and the humble of this world would be exalted over the proud and the powerful." There is much that must be said about this statement. First of all, even if Quinn's presumptions about religious beliefs were true, his argument against them seems to be that they were eagerly accepted. So what? That this inherently makes them either true or false is an SI that has no basis in reality. "They were eager to despise the world." The Bible does say not to love the world, but this does not mean that we are not to love the trees, or the mountains, or the birds and the bees and whatnot. The reference is to the world of secularism. We most certainly should have a love for what is divinely created. Quinn here is changing the meaning of the term, "the world." The rest of the sentence cheapens the idea of anything beyond this world, and makes it sound like escapist pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Forget the idea of wonders beyond human comprehension! As C.S. Lewis (whom Quinn respects and admires, by the way) said, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
"Adherents tend to concentrate on the differences between these religions." There is definitely some truth to this. What people often do is concentrate on the differences between their own religion and everyone else's, which is basically the whole purpose of THE STORY OF B. Quinn himself even says, in PROVIDENCE, "Animism is the only world religion that . . ." But no matter who makes these claims; whether they are animist, Christian, Buddhist, atheist, or whatever; whether the claims are true or false; the claims may make some religions sound nicer than others but they are useless in proving whether or not something is true. Quinn now goes on to sum up what, allegedly, the agreements are. To see how much consistency these "agreements" had among religions, I took a small survey by finding e-mail addresses from beliefnet.com. What I found was varying degrees of agreement and disagreement. So yes, it is possible to point out similarities among religions, but one can't just clump them all in one box, as Quinn tries to do.
P. 268-9: "As far as these religions have worked it out, if you fail of salvation, then your failure is complete, whether others succeed or not. On the other hand, if you find salvation, then your success is complete - again, whether others succeed or not. Ultimately, as these religions have it, if you're saved, then literally nothing else in the entire universe matters. Your salvation is what matters. Nothing else - not even my salvation (except of course, to me). This was a new vision of what counts in the world. Forget the boiling, forget the pain. Nothing matters but you and your salvation." Not true! First of all, the Christian and Baha'i faiths teach that you are to some extent held accountable for others if you do not try to "share it (268)." And although this world (as in the biosphere) is not our ultimate goal, it is important. We have been given a charge to care for the earth. It matters!
P. 270: "Christianity becomes the first global salvationist religion, penetrating the Far East and the New World. At the same time it fractures. The first fracture is resisted hard, but after that, disintegration becomes commonplace." This is true; one just needs to keep in mind what it is describing. What Quinn sees here is Ianity in every sense. This is not Christ or what he taught, but our own twisted versions thereof. "I'm not collecting signs of human evil. These are reactions to overcrowding." Aren't they the result of the same event (namely, the ARFOM)?
P. 272: "The age [1700-1900] ushered in the Industrial Revolution, of course, but this didn't bring ease and prosperity to the masses; rather it brought utterly heartless and grasping exploitation . . ." Of course. We, by way of the ARFOM, got ourselves stuck in a positive feedback loop: if it doesn't work, try doing it more.
P. 273-4: "In this age . . . religion was in fact no longer very effective as a narcotic." Then why didn't it disappear? Quinn almost seems to be making a case against himself here, in the disguise of an argument FOR his case. "Signs of Distress: 1900-60": The truth in this is positively frightening.
P. 33: What is Quinn saying with his description of the movie "Monkey"? That whatever wisdom others accept, we should reject? (This makes no sense.) That we should be open to new and different ideas? (This makes more sense.) That in the getting of wisdom we should constantly demand more of ourselves? (This seems most accurate and was probably the message of the movie.)
P.34: "Jesus didn't have any special nuggets for his disciples. . . . Nor did Guatama Buddha or Muhammad for theirs." I think Quinn is actually saying, in context, that this isn't true. This is Jared's belief, not B's. They did share intimate details with their disciples, which is just the point here. There are some teachings reserved for those who take the initiative to persevere. "But everything we need to know has been revealed. If this isn't the case . . . then revelation is incomplete - and by definition useless." But I think that just because someone isn't given a complete revelation (probably because they are not ready for it), that doesn't mean they cannot gain wisdom from the revelation they did receive. All the necessary revelation is indeed included in the public teachings, but there are some who earn a revelation that is greater still.
P. 35: "Jesus didn't have to lay a foundation every time he spoke. . . . But I do have to do that." I have heard many Christians say that Jesus came when the time was ripe for people to understand his message, according to God's perfect planning; and this absolutely makes sense. B keeps distinguishing himself from all religious teachers, particularly Jesus. This can subconsciously convince the reader that Quinn's ideas are really different - not just new ideas, but the only truly new ideas. The former they certainly are, but the latter they certainly are not.
P. 41: "No harm at all, Fr. Lulfre, because you've taught me yourself that no question is dangerous - for us." Truth is its own defense. So if what one has is the truth, one shouldn't be afraid of questions and challenges.
P. 42: "What does this mean, Fr. Lulfre? Does it mean that some questions are dangerous after all?" Ending the section with this question leaves an air of suspense. This can create a sense of fear in the reader that maybe this book will present a question that will send their faith crashing to its knees. We'll see. Truth is its own defense. "He's making as much sense as I've ever heard anybody make. What's the problem?" The problem for Jared is that the things B is saying are things he doesn't want to believe. The question we must ask ourselves is, "How much sense is Quinn really making here?" Not as much as it would first seem, when one uncovers the SI's. There are some points he makes that do make good sense. Everything must be taken into account. Of course it all makes perfect sense to Jared, because Quinn needed a character that could be easily convinced, even if he'd rather not be.
P. 277 (Public Teaching #3): "Our own vision of our place in the scheme of things has been shattered, our own mythology has been rendered meaningless, and our own song has been strangled in our throats. These are things that we all sense. It doesn't matter where you go or who you talk to." Really? Apparently I've been living in a cave.
P. 279: "This was the contract, this was the vision itself: The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. . . . This is what God created us to do!" No, it's not. Quinn is right to say that the assumption that Man was made for the purpose of destroying the world is ridiculous and dangerous. That's just the point. What we're doing is not what we were created to do; it's our own fault. We didn't live this way when we were first created; it began with the ARFOM. But what Quinn is saying is that religions support Taker-ism. They do not. They in fact lead to the opposite conclusion: It is our responsibility to care for the earth. "And please don't imagine that this was something we learned from Genesis . . . This is something we knew before . . . This isn't something the authors of Genesis taught us, this is something we taught them." What specifically is Quinn taking for granted here? Apparently, his notion of the origins of Genesis. He is putting the idea into people's heads that it was written by some obscure people at some obscure time. Now if he had come right out and said that, it would be easily deniable. But as the unspoken underlying assumption of his statement, it leads the reader to assume it as well. He also assumes that Genesis teaches Taker-ism. It does not. I don't enjoy repeating myself, but as long as Quinn continues to repeat himself, I must do so also. "This was not the human vision. . . . This is the vision that was born in us when our particular culture was born, ten thousand years ago." Of course - at the time of the ARFOM. "The truth of this wasn't doubted by . . ." these and these and these people. We've been here before. Quinn keeps trying to hammer the illusion into the reader's brain that his are the only truly new ideas.
P. 284: Now he seems to explain what he was talking about back on p. 277. Everybody is talking about "what's wrong with the world." But is this really new? Look at what we know of history and I think you'll find that it's a constant. "All the intellectual and spiritual foundations of our culture were laid by people who believed absolutely that we are humanity itself." He then goes into a long list of people who "believed it." I wish he would stop this constant repetition. It is not true; he is not the only one with new ideas. I think perhaps repetition is a strategy in itself. If one keeps hearing the same thing stated enough times and with enough authority, one will be inclined to start believing it whether it's true or not. If this is so true, why isn't it enough to say it once? Why must he force it in?
P. 48: "The world" in the "traditional biblical and literary sense" does not refer to "the planetary biosphere" but to "the sphere of human material activity." Exactly! That is what we are not to love. I just wish Quinn would not contradict himself at other times on this point.
P. 50-1: "If the time isn't right for a new idea, [a what, DQ?] no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right it will sweep the world like wildfire. The people of Rome were ready to hear what St. Paul had to say to them. If they hadn't been, he would have disappeared without a trace and his name would be unknown to us." The SI here is that the teachings of Paul (and the other apostles) caught on because people were ready to hear them, RATHER THAN because they were true. Well, of course they were ready to hear it. That in itself does not make it true or untrue. But why do you suppose it just so happened that Jesus came, and later Paul was around, at just the right time for the message to "catch on"?
P. 54: "I'm not here to make converts or defend the Faith. I'm here to listen and understand." Essentially, Jared is saying that he's not there to change others but to be changed himself. Quinn draws a distinct line here between defending one's own faith and being open-minded to new ideas. But is that line really so distinct? When one reads challenging material such as this, one should do both of these.
P. 55: "Today you're my friend, but there's a hidden line inside of you that marks the beginning of your allegiance to God. If I unknowingly cross that line, then, although you continue to smile at me like a friend, you may see that it has become your holy duty to destroy me. This week you're my friend, but next week they say I'm a witch and God wants witches to be burned, so you burn me. This week you're my friend, but next week they say I'm an Anabaptist and God wants Anabaptists to be drowned, so you drown me. This week you're my friend, but next week they say I'm a Waldensian and God wants Waldensians to be hanged, so you hang me." This is NOT the intention or purpose of Christ, by any means. It is Ianity, pure and simple. As John Stonecypher says, the types of things described in this paragraph were done by misguided souls who "didn't understand squat about what Christ is doing here."
P. 57: "I'm talking about us guardians of the faith, you understand. The professionals. We know how to deal with our suspicions - we have to, because it's our job to deal with the suspicions of other people. We are, in large part, professional soothers, professional reassurers, professional dispellers of doubt. . . . Our message to those we must reassure is: 'Don't worry, nothing's happened. The world is just what it was. Don't be anxious, don't be alarmed. The foundation is solid. The pillars are still standing. Nothing has changed since . . . the year 1000, the year 200, the year 33, when the gates of heaven were opened for us by Someone who laid down His life for our sins and on the third day rose from the dead. Not a thing has changed since then. Though we go to war with smart bombs and nerve gas instead of swords and rocks, and write our thoughts on plastic disks instead of parchment scrolls, these days are still those days." According to Quinn, the job of priests and ministers is to lull people back into complacency and blind faith. I would say their job is to provide encouragement and help during people's journeys through doubt, not to pull people out of these journeys. Good priests know that struggles will result in growth. Quinn is also saying that priests reassure us that nothing has changed since Christ came. Ironically, the SI here seems to be that Christ didn't change anything. Well of course these days are not those days. So what? Quinn seems to be simply trying to create some kind of denial for priests (and all Christians) to be in.
P. 61: There is quite a bit of foreshadowing going on, to the tune of, "There's some really dangerous stuff coming. You're really going to find out why B is called the Antichrist!" Apparently Quinn is trying to scare readers out of their pants - or out of their faith.
P. 62: "The culture of the Great Forgetting perceived the universe and humankind to be the products of a single creative effort that had occurred just a few thousand years ago. . . . the people of this time had no conception of a universe billions of years old and with more billions of years ahead of it." This would be very disturbing to me if I was a young-earth creationist. Actually, it disturbs me because I'm not; because I am being "accused" of believing something that I don't believe. But the above statement is simply not true. Most people have come to accept the overwhelming evidence that the earth is old.
P. 63: "Every generation continues to nominate a candidate of its own - Napoleon or Hitler or Saddam Hussein - but no one takes it very seriously." If we're referring to the Antichrist, that is taken quite seriously. But the suggestion of "a worse sort of Hitler or Stalin" - that is what is ludicrous, for reasons discussed way back on pages 8-9.
P. 73: "When Jesus departed, he left no one behind who was the message." In context, what B is saying is that "Jesus left behind no one who could speak with his authority, no one who could say 'This is what's what.'" If any human were to speak with the authority of Jesus, he would have to be speaking with the voice of God. He would have to BE God. He would have to be, essentially, another Messiah, which would defeat the whole purpose of there being any Messiah at all. The difference between Jesus and B here is that B's message does not inherently require divinity. This "creed" that people assembled (if one indeed assumes that it happened the way Jared describes it) is Ianity. That's just the point, which is why it makes me angry when I see book titles like, "What Every Christian Should Believe."
P. 75-7: Now here is what really makes sense.
P. 81: Now B is saying that our Taker culture assumes that we are the only ones God has spoken to; He doesn't speak to the other cultures - the Gebusi or the Bushmen or whatever. But does He? Is that such an absurd idea? C.S. Lewis writes, "But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him."
P. 85: Quinn takes macroevolution for granted as factual, although biological evidence such as the cambrian explosion and irreducible complexity strongly suggest otherwise.
P. 89: B casually lists "the appearance of salvationist religions" as a result of the appearance of Taker Culture. It only makes sense, because the rise of this type of culture is where the need for salvation came from.
P. 96-7: The Fall? That's the connection B was afraid of making to Jared? I thought that connection was made a while ago.
P. 99: "There is only one degree of having faith, but there are fifty degrees of losing it." One could easily turn this around and say that there is one degree of having no faith, and fifty degrees of having it. I think it's more realistic to say that there is one degree of pure, unwavering, untainted faith, and one degree of having no faith at all, and fifty (or perhaps forty-nine) degrees in between.
P. 99-100: "But the rest of us are still hanging on, by knees and elbows and fingertips and eyelashes and teeth and fingernails." The SI is obvious: this sentence makes all faith sound like desperate straw-clutching. Some of us intellectual believers have faith that is built solidly on reason, thank you very much! Jared has progressively gained degrees of losing faith throughout his life, and I don't have to wonder why. It's exactly what Quinn needed in his main character. We were here at the very beginning.
P. 288 (Public Teaching #4): In 190,000 years, says Quinn, our population grew at an infinitesimal rate, from ten thousand to ten million. Ten million - that's about the size of a major city. What a perspective, how small ten million people is today. The whole earth . . . one large city. Wow.
P. 289ff: The population parable, the ABC's of ecology, positive and negative feedback - this is sensible stuff.
P. 129: "The fundamental Taker delusion is that humanity itself was designed - and therefore destined - to become us. [True.] This is a twin of the idea that the entire universe was created in order to produce this planet. [Not true.]" Actually, given the infinitesimal degree of fine-tuning needed to sustain life, it is quite possible that the entire universe is cosmologically necessary to support this single planet.
"Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we imagine that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed." It does seem to be slanted this way in the way it's taught. "As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions." Some people probably do. Combine two ideologies that are popular today; cultural arrogance and new-age or "enlightened" spirituality, and one can easily fall into the mentality that religions as interpreted by modern culture are "spiritually evolved." Turning again to C.S. Lewis, the demon Screwtape instructs his nephew: "It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. 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. . . . But . . . we have largely altered that. Your man . . . doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false,' but as 'academic' or 'practical,' 'outworn' or 'contemporary,' 'conventional' or 'ruthless.' Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous - that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about." The point Lewis is making is that if something is absolutely true, then it is eternally true, not "enlightened" or "evolved."
P. 130-1: "I wonder if there's a dimension of thought that is inherently religious. I say to myself that perhaps thought is like a musical tone, which (in nature) is never a single, pure tone but is always a composite of many harmonics - overtones and undertones. And I say to myself that perhaps, when mental process became human thought, it began to resound with one harmonic that corresponds to what we call religion, or, more fundamentally, awareness of the sacred. In other words, I wonder if awareness of the sacred is not so much a separate concept as it is an overtone of human thought itself." This makes a lot of sense; and I find myself liking it, because it fits so well into the puzzle that one puts together in an attempt to answer the continually haunting question, "What is true?"
"There was once a universal religion on this planet . . . which of course is animism." But historical evidence now suggests otherwise, as cosmologist and historian Fred Heeren writes: "It is reasonable to assume that if the Creator was ever to reveal Himself to humankind, He should have done so from the beginning. Until this era, almost all religions taught that the gods came forth from an already-existing cosmos, and so the deities were physical, that is, part of the universe. . . . Going back in time further yet, however, we find that one Semitic group of worshipers at Ebla did conceive of an ultimate Creator who preceded the universe. They used the very same descriptions the Hebrews later used to portray a Lord of all who created the universe from nothing, as well as the same terms (in order) for His creation of 'the heaven and Earth,' 'light,' 'day,' 'morning,' etc. Ebla's cuneiform inscriptions were written in the 25th to 23rd centuries BC, near the dawn of recorded history; they demonstrate that his tradition was already well developed. Evidently there was a prehistoric understanding of this sort of God that turns popular ideas of religious evolution upside-down, since, according to theory, animism was supposed to lead to polytheism, which was supposed to lead to monotheism. The Ebla tablets and the Hebrew Scriptures provide notable exceptions - both to the theoretical norm and to the actual beliefs of all other ancient cultures."
P. 134: "The number of the gods is written nowhere in the universe, Jared, so there's really no way to decide whether that number is zero (as atheists believe) or one (as monotheists believe) or many (as polytheists believe)." First of all, I can box Quinn in as easily as he just boxed me in, by saying that he claims to know that "the number of the gods" doesn't matter and is "written nowhere in the universe." I know that's not the point, which is just MY point. But the more we know about the universe, the more it becomes increasingly clear that, in the words of Heeren, "modern cosmology points to precisely the same concept" as that which was believed by the Semites at Ebla.
P. 134-5: Quinn is now saying that "the God of revealed religions" has failed to make himself understood. How presumptuous to say such things when it is we who have failed to understand! The problem is that we humans are constantly messing up and blaming it on God. "Jesus might have say himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind." Well of course he didn't sit there and define issues, because that just isn't the point! Some issues are important in the short run, or even what we humans would consider the long run - but ultimately, that's not the point. And that's why Christ wasn't about issues; he was about redemption. Quinn insists that God failed to communicate. He communicates every moment through both His word and His creation, but we fail to understand!
P. 135: "Your God writes in words. The gods I'm talking about write in galaxies and star systems and planets and oceans and forests and whales and birds and gnats . . . they write physics and chemistry and biology and astronomy and aerodynamics and meteorology and geology." The single fundamental assumption here is that the God of revealed words is ONLY a God of revealed words; that words are the only way that He communicates. But of course He speaks through all these things that B lists - He created them! As my high school physics teacher once said, "Reading the book of nature reveals the mind of God."
P. 136: "Religions like yours, revealed religions, are all perceived to be at odds with scientific knowledge - at odds with or irrelevant to." Now any religious person - or anybody, for that matter - who thinks that the above is true is just plain ignorant! But theists have no excuse - who do they think created science? William Hiram Foulkes put it best: "Science and religion no more contradict each other than light and electricity."
P. 137: "Animism perceives itself as allied with science, because both seek truth in the universe itself." True; but the SI here, based on what was said before, is that animism is the only religion of which this is true. It is not.
P. 143: "You'd learn that each mite - such an inconsiderable creature! - is a work of so much delicacy, perfection, and complexity that it makes a digital computer look like a pair of pliers. Then you'd learn something even more amazing, that, for all their perfection, they aren't stamped out of a mold. No two of them are alike - no two in all the mighty universe, Jared!" No kidding! If I didn't know better, I'd think the person who wrote that was advocating theism!
P. 144-5: B is saying now that when Christianity was introduced in the Roman world, fundamental ideas are already there; whereas B has to explain from scratch. The SI is that Christianity was not new and B's message is, which leads to the conclusion that Christ's message is not true and B's is, under the assumption that new = true. There's the rub.
P. 145-6: B says that our religions are part of the vision of our culture, and that the vision of our culture is leading to catastrophe. Conclusion: our religions are part of what is leading to catastrophe. But must we assume that every part is a cause? Salvationism, rather, is an effect; the need of salvation which came from the ARFOM.
P. 147: More fear-inflicting foreshadowing.
P. 148: Quinn keeps talking about animism as a religion, and then he fazes in into - oh it's not really a religion, it's a way of looking at the world. He seems to use whichever is more suited to his point within each particular context. But the religion of animism and a worldview that values creation are NOT interchangeable ideas.
P. 150-1: Quinn's conclusion from the idea that humans belong to a different order is that they were meant to conquer the world. But religions draw the opposite conclusion: that we are responsible to care for the earth and not destroy it. All this repetition can be very tiring. "This is the Law of Life for goats not because God decided goats should behave this way but because, in any mix of strategies, goats that suckle only their own will tend to be better represented in the gene pool than any others." And God having created the stability of the Law of Life is out of the question? Of course not. Microevolution does not disprove God.
P. 155: Population explosion is not just a social problem; it's a biological one. Of course! "And of course what the Church teaches is that God will make an exception for us. God will let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species, will somehow 'fix it' so we can live in a way that is in a very real sense self-eliminating." What angers me about this statement is that there is some truth to it. Some people within the Church do teach the above mentality, which is NOT in any way the message of Christ, but rather a sick and twisted view of God's design.
P. 159: "If I were someone else, I'd try to console you with a fairy tale like the one they tell about Santa Claus every Christmas. I'd tell you that Mommy's going to be taken up to heaven to live with God and the angels, and from there I'll look down and watch over you." The SI is obvious. Using such terminology as "console," "fairy tale," and "Santa Claus," Quinn cheapens the idea of heaven and describes such a concept as escapist fantasy. But all he's doing here is using that fact that he doesn't like the idea of heaven as an argument against it. And yes, some also use the fact that they do like it as an argument for it. But it really doesn't matter who likes it and who doesn't. That in itself has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it is true. "When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky. They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far, far away - remote and untouchable." On the contrary, most theists believe in a God who is personal and knowable. The idea that God is distant and remote was Quinn's own unfortunate assumption; so when God spoke through His creation, he assumed that this must not be the God he had been learning about. (This experience is described in Quinn's autobiography, PROVIDENCE.)
P. 160: "The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.'" SI: because it does not matter; there is no one true God or set of gods. Now if Quinn had directly stated this SI, a justifiable response would be, "Says who?" But the idea of Leaver peoples not arguing about whose gods are true says nothing about whether there really are frauds or not. "Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis." But then what is it that makes them gods?
P. 162: "'Would the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God have sent his only-begotten son to save those beetles and their household mites, Jared?' 'No.'" Well of course not, because the beetles and mites didn't mess up. Humans did. The picture Quinn has been drawing is that animism sees god in everything, while theistic religion sees a God who is remote as the stars. This sounds like some kind of propaganda - believe this instead of that, because this is so much nicer. But the picture is inaccurate. I see evidence of God all around me - up in the cosmos, down in the dirt, everywhere! They are His handiwork!
P. 165: The Breakthrough - it sounds like Quinn is saying now that there IS something different about humans.
P. 168: Now we're getting into the issue of irreducible complexity. "Any sensory tissue, no matter how primitive, is better than none. No matter how the eye began, it gave its owner a slight edge." Well, first of all, how likely IS a species to survive with something less than the eye? Darwin himself said that it was "absurd in the highest sense" that the eye could have been formed by natural selection. But in any case, if the eye really is irreducibly complex, which it is, then one missing part means it's of no use at all. In order for the eye, or any organ, or any species, to go from simplicity to irreducible complexity; there would have to be stages during which some of the necessary parts were missing. Therefore, if macroevolution were true, none of the irreducibly complex organisms alive today would have survived the evolutionary process.
P. 171: "You understand that this - what you've just done - is totally beyond the capacity of any other animal on this planet." So there is something different about humans after all?
P. 174-5: An aspect of being human is the ability to predict the future through reasoning. Wow - so much of human life is centered around the future!
P. 179: "And you're in a position now to understand the universality of the animist experience - to understand why there was once a universal religion on this planet." The universality of the religious experience, yes. But then Quinn takes a leap where it doesn't connect, and says that ANIMISM was universal. Let's not forget Ebla.
P. 189: Jared articulates the animist vision: "The world is a sacred place and a sacred process, and we're part of it." This statement, in and of itself, rings true. The problem I have with animism is a metaphysical one - the belief that every living thing has a soul, or a spirit. I believe, rather, that God is so infinite and uncontainable that He overflows through His entire creation, so that it is supersaturated with a God-breathed life.
P. 308 (Public Teaching #5): "There is time for us to stop taking the drug and to stop feeding it to our children. There is time for us to begin the Great Remembering." Well, it is true that our messed-up-ness (for lack of a better term) is definitely not inherent in human nature. It is a result of the ARFOM. I suppose time may not be an impediment, but humanity would have to reach a consensus. And even if we were able to do so, we would only have saved ourselves physically. "It was understood that our culture was not only the first and original human culture but the single culture that God intended for humankind. [Quinn is entirely right to say that this 'understanding' is not at all true!] These delusions remain in place today globally [SI: including in religious thought] . . . even though the true (and well-known) story of human origins obviously gives them no support at all. [Conclusion: Therefore, our religious thought is wrong.]" There is one fundamental mistake here, which is not directly stated. It lies in the first SI. Religion does not indicate that God intended us to be the way we are. Rather, we got this way through the ARFOM. It's our own fault, and "religionists" know it.
P. 308-9: "As the foundation thinkers . . . to the present moment." SI: Daniel Quinn is the only person whose ideas are actually new. We have arrived at this prepostrous conclusion several times before . . . but who's counting?
P. 309: Quinn himself says that the Tak story is "obviously not intended to be taken as literal history." Indeed, we must be careful not to read "literal history" into it, which is easy to do when Quinn states his perception as fact. "The foundation thinkers of our culture [i.e. everyone but Quinn] imagined that our culture was born in a world empty of law. As this series of drawings shows, out culture was born in a world absolutely full of law." Conclusion: Therefore, everyone who has had anything worthwhile to say has been wrong, except of course for Daniel Quinn. Here we go again.
P. 322: Oppression of the many by the few: advocates of communism see it in democracy, and advocates of democracy see it in communism. But it is actually an inevitable part of the Taker lifestyle. "Everyone thought it had been this way from the beginning. Everyone thought this was the mature of the world - and the nature of Man. They began to think that the world is an evil place. They began to think that existence itself is evil. They began to think (and who can blame them!) that there was something fundamentally wrong with humans. They began to think that humankind was doomed. They began to think that humankind was damned. They began to think that someone needed to save us. It's important for you to see that none of these ideas sprang from the tribal life - or could imaginably have sprung from the tribal life. These are ideas you expect to find welling up among people leading anguished lives, empty lives." Yes; the world (as in the biosphere) is not inherently evil, nor is human existence. Of course the idea of the need for salvation didn't come out of tribalism - it came out of the ARFOM. It is because of this, our own self-destruction, that we need to be saved.
P. 323: "The next three millennia would see the development of all those religions that were destined to become the major religions of our culture . . . and each had its own theory about the origin and cause of human suffering." And so does Quinn. But he doesn't seem to notice that the Genesis account of the Fall and his own account of the Agricultural Revolution line up, even though he himself said earlier that he was "identifying what religionists call the Fall with the birth of our culture (256)." "And because nothing remotely compares with it in value, salvation is the one thing about which you may be totally and blamelessly selfish. Your salvation need not take second place to anything - friendship, loyalty, gratitude, honor, king, country, family. In the entire universe of possibilities, not a single one of them takes precendence over your salvation, and anyone who asks you to put something ahead of it is asking too much - no matter what it is - and may be refused without the slightest hesitation, reservation, or apology." Quinn is saying here that we give ourselves license to abandon any other need or request for the sake of our salvation. However; salvation does not ask us to spurn the needs of others, but rather to do just the opposite. Quinn creates a ridiculous image of salvation giving us free license to be "bad people."
P. 324: "The Antichrist isn't just the antithesis of Jesus, he's equally the antithesis of . . . all saviors and purveyors of salvation in the world. He is in fact the Antisavior." It seems that Quinn needed this statement in order to align B with the accusations. This statement can only be true if one conforms the biblical description of the Antichrist (maybe a literal person, maybe not) to the teachings of B. "Accompanying the legend of the Antichrist has been the bizarre and almost laughable notion that his massive global appeal will be his unbridled wickedness." First of all, note the use of the word "legend" for connotative purposes. Secondly, it has always seemed to me that the appeal of the Antichrist would be disguised as goodness. "We can no longer imagine that the gods botched their work when it came to us. . . . We can no longer believe that suffering is the lot the gods had in mind for us." Who believes that? Religion? Certainly not.
P. 324-5: "We can no longer believe that death is sweet release to our true destiny. . . . We no longer dream of wearing crowns of gold in the royal court of heaven." And of course Quinn's reason for this is that, the way he sees it, the focus is all wrong. According to Quinn, the focus must be on this world and this world only. And that, if there is indeed a world beyond this one, is the same flaw that is contained in all the other solutions to suffering. Déjà vu all over again.
P. 325: "The evangelist John wrote, 'You must not love the world or the things of the world, for those who love the world are strangers to the Father.'" Quinn is taking this verse blatantly out of context. He himself even said earlier that "the world" in the biblical sense does not refer to the biosphere. John is not telling us to despise the world of God's creation, but the world of our own corruption.
P. 206: "You see, she showed me more clearly than any advocate of ecumenism why we are a confraternity, Jared - we Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus. We've drawn ourselves up from the slime in which animism grovels so proudly. We represent what is highest, what is most upward reaching, transcendental, and sublime in makind. What stands between the members of the confraternity are minor rifts. What stands between the confraternity and animism is a gulf as wide as the gulf between man and brute, spirit and matter." This is how Quinn is portraying the religious position: Our major religions are the upper-crust, the enlightened ones; animism is primitive and lowbrow. This is most definitely not my view, and I'm certain that it is far from being the general consensus. An absolute truth is an eternal truth. And isn't Quinn just doing what we all do? Animism, he says, is the only religion that is different.
P. 215: "Religion and law extend back . . . to the very origins of human life." Of course they do!
P. 217: "When animals do battle, it's always with members of their own species, for territory or mates . . ." True, but they don't set out to kill each other. We humans are the only species that deliberately kill our own. This is because Taker Culture brought with it a different kind of warfare - involving suppression and elimination.
P. 218: "Also characteristically, the people of tribe X don't imagine that their life would be sweet if one day they went out and killed off all their neighbors." Exactly.
P. 219: "A thousand designs - one for every locale and situation - always works better than one design for all locales and situations." Yes, there is some truth to the statement that "there's no one right way to live." This doesn't mean moral relativism, or that right and wrong don't exist; it means there's no one right CULTURE. This is why it makes me angry when missionaries sometimes think they have to make people abandon their culture.
P. 234-5 (Epilogue): "Because, believe me, if you've read these words, the damage is already done, and Fr. Lulfre will know that. . . . The words have found their way to you even if, having read them, you hate them - even if you hide them from your children's eyes and consign them to the flames. They've found their way to you, so it's already too late. Even if, in the meantime, Fr. Lulfre tracks us down and sends his assassins to us, he'll be too late - because of what you've read here. The contagion has been spread. You are B." Quinn makes it sound as if reading this book will automatically turn any person into B - sort of a brainwashing effect. And I think that one will indeed be brainwashed, in a sense - IF one reads these words without thinking them through, and decides without hesitation either to accept them or to reject them. But as long as you remain an actively thinking creature, the only person for whom you can truly say with 100% confidence, "this is what's what," is YOU.
I am not B. I am not the antithesis of B. I am me.
