The sound and fury of Dinesh D'Souza - Part 3

“When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

-Sinclair Lewis


So we come to Mr. D'Souza's last claim about the western world and Christianity. In my previous two parts I've shown that he, at best, overstates his case, but often leaves out important facts to bolster his claim that, in effect, the western world was built by Christianity. Science, morality...basically all the hallmarks of western civilization are, he claims, the direct product of Christianity and the Christian world view.

This is not to say that Christianity isn't important in the history of the western world. After all, it has been the dominate religion for the centuries. For a long time questioning it publicly was a sure way to get yourself tortured and killed. Once the faith got most of its blood letting out of its system, questioning it publicly was still a sure what to ruin in your career. Sometimes it still is.

However, in as much as Christianity does inform our culture, D'Souza continually goes too far to claim that everything important about the western world comes from his chosen faith. And there is no more obvious example of this when he claims that democracy would not be possible without it.

His argument goes like this: Yes, the ancient Greeks had some kind of democracy thing going, but they had slaves. And its only through Christianity that slavery is abolished, because of course, Christians have always hated slavery, so therefore only true freedom comes from Christianity and thus so does democracy.

Anyone who knows the history of democracy, Greece, slavery and Christianity should already be able to spot the massive problems with D'Souza's argument.

First, he tries to downplay that democracy in Athens wasn't that important. Well, he would wouldn't he? To him, anything non-Christian isn't important. But the fact is that democracy beings as a radical experiment in Athens when the people rose up to depose their rulers and cease power for themselves. Without Athens there is no democracy at all. Our concepts of one person, one vote, of secret ballot, of the right of citizens to have a voice in their government and the right to choose that government all come from the Athenian experiment. (the idea of the rights and duties of a citizen being defined in a constitution comes from the great Athenian rival Sparta)

In fact, I will go a step more and say without these ideas we have no democracy at all. They are the bare minimum needed to have any kind of functioning democracy. Now, D'Souza wants to downplay this in favor of trying to say that because there were slaves in Athens, as there were, that this pretty much doesn't count.

Well, consider however, that in the Christian Bible there is not a word about how to organize a free society. Nothing about the right to vote, or run for office or any of the things that define a democracy. You do not get any instruction at all on democracy and political freedom. What you do get is a lot of talk about creating a kingdom, run by Jesus. No one gets to vote for Jesus. Or recall him from office. There are no checks and balances. No term limits. Not even a citizen's assembly. In fact, the very concept of citizenship is alien to Christianity because it is unconcerned with human freedom in the real world. To Christianity, this is all the opening act and the real show starts when Jesus literally conquers in the world at the end of time and is set up as absolute ruler. You can argue he would be a nice absolute ruler, but remember this - a gilded cage is still a cage.

Indeed it is very telling that Christianity chugged along just fine, thank you very much, under all many of totalitarian regimes for most of its history. In fact, Christianity didn't run into democracy until the concept was revived long after the dark ages ended. And when it was, did those thinkers, principally Christian because it was, after all, the only game in town, look to the bible? No they looked to Athens.

So of what the slavery issue? Well I've address this already in part one so I am not going to go back over it again. Just hop back a few posts and you'll find it. But to summarize it is very telling that Christianity functions happily in slave owning societies for centuries without much of a peep. Indeed, St. Paul counsels Christians to obey their masters and the Old Testament lays out rules by which slavery can be conducted. Nowhere in the bible will you find the phrase "thou shalt never keep slaves." And when Christian groups did get around to opposing slavery, groups like the Quakers, they had reinterpret the bible in a way that most Christians of the period were not. They became sectarian oddballs who stood with a growing secular intolerance toward slavery while the rest of the Christian world stood by.

What happened was not that Christianity created modern democratic notions forbidding slavery. Slavery died a very slow death, and often required the use of bullet and bayonets to do the job, not preaching. Wars like the American Civil War was not a battle of Christians verus evil slave owning heathens. It was a war that pitted Christian vs. Christian.

Instead, the times slowly changed. What Richard Dawkins called the moral zeitgeist changed. Christianity no doubt informs that change as more and more believers began to view the bible as a Quakers did on the issue. But even then it is not the exclusive domain of Christianity as D'Souza claims. For instance, the woman's right to vote was opposed by many religious groups, and the argument won on what was near completely secular political grounds.

The problem with all D'Souza's arguments is that he deliberate excludes important facts, presenting a black and white view of history in which Christianity beats back all negative things, leaving only good and positive things. It's the simply morality play of most comic books, ignoring the complex vagaries of human history in favor of scoring points with his conservative constituency.

It is not in Jesus that we find the roots of democracy, but in brave Athenian citizens who took the first steps toward creating a free society and inventing the very notion of democratic rule. It is not the bible that we find modern notions of equality and freedom but in the brilliant works and actions political men and women, some inspired by their faith and many without an a faith at all, shifted the political zeitgeist toward inclusiveness.

To claim this was the work of a single religion requires ignoring history and rewriting it as a religiously induced fantasy.

The sound and fury of Dinesh D'Souza - Part 2 -con't

It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo's work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.
-Carl Sagan

There is a story about Galileo.

Having engaged his in one man revolt against the Catholic Church, the scientist is dragged before the dreaded Inqusition. Forced to recant his findings that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the cosmos, he is dragged away to live under house arrest. And as he is about the leave the room he whispers under his breath "and yet it moves," in defiance of the Chruch's insistence that the Earth stands still.

Hell of a tale isn't it? There's just one catch. It's not entirely true. And that last bit about "and yet it moves"? Rubbish. Never happened. But its part of the myth that has become part of the story of what is often called "The Galileo Affair." Now in his attempt to show that Christianity is the inventor of science, Dinesh D'Souza sets out to do what he figures is a revolutionary act - debunk the myths around the story of Galileo. (Hint to Mr. D'Souza. No serious scholarship has every taken this myth seriously.) Morever, he oddly claims this is an "atheist" myth, part of some nebulous atheist propaganda machine meant to make Christians look bad. You can see his views on this here.

He is actually quite right about several things. Galileo was never tortured. He was also a huge egoist who was not going to be old by anyone what he could think or write. And that Galileo was too smart not to know he was really going to piss off the pope by making him seem a fool in this great book. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. (I wrote more about the detials Galileo affair on this blog here and I am not going to repeat them at this point. So pleas feel free to back and read them).

D'Souza is also right that the church tired, in its way, not to get into a row with Galileo. You see he had written a letter to a Duchess who had asked him if when the bible said the earth didn't move was the bible wrong? Galileo said, well, yes, in fact scientifically speaking the bible was wrong. Rome, which had already decreed that the sun centered system first proposed by Copernicus was in violation of scripture and church teaching, wasn't going to take that laying down. And D'Souza is also right to say that Galileo was ordered by the infamous Cardinal Bellarmine not to "hold or defend" the Conperincan view. (Galileo agrees and asked for a ceritificate explaing the Cardinal orders and recieves it, signed by Bellarmine himself.) But then, as D'Souza always does, misses the important facts in favour a pre-determine conclusion. He portrays the Church as being intellectually honest and patient, and forced to bring Galileo before the inquisition. Hey sas Galileo recants out of exhaustion but it otherwise treated with respect by the Inquisition (and office well known for its tolerance and honesty.) Galileo, whose defense at this trail is "dishonest" according to D'Souza, is placed under house arrest and lived in comfort until his death 8 years later. Moroever, he implies that Galileo is to the blame here. It's his fault, not the church's.

Oh and the kicker here: Galileo was NEVER charged with heresy, D'Souza says. But facts are tricky things, particularly when you avoid them. D'Souza says this about Galileo's trail:

In 1633, Galileo returned to Rome, where he was again treated with respect. He might have prevailed in his trial, but during the investigation someone found Cardinal Bellarmine's notes in the files. Galileo had not told the present Inquisitors - he had not told anyone - of his previous agreement not to teach or advocate Copernicanism. Now he was viewed as having deceived the church as well as having failed to live up to his agreements. Even his church sympathizers, and there were several, found it difficult to defend him at this point.

Ah, but that is not the whole story. One again, D'Souza doesn't do his research. Galilieo is actually charged by the Inquisition with "vehement suspicion of heresy" a fact D'Souza leaves out. Then there s this business bout the notes of Cardinal Bellarmine that apparently cannot be found. Tsk tsk. Here D'Souza makse a massive blunder.

You remember that note that Galileo had asked for from Ballarmine explaining the order not to hold or defend the sun centered view? This comes into play in a big way. The Inquisition says Galileo's book violated Ballarmine's orders not to "hold, defend or teach" and produce a document to that effect. But the old buzzard Galileo has an ace card. He produces HIS certificate given to him and signed by Ballarmine. It only says he could not "hold or defend" the view, but it says nothing about not teaching it. The you know what hits the fan. The Dominicans running the show during the trail are taken aback. They are meticulous record keepers and this is unexpected. The signature on the Inquisition's document appears suspect. And this might be the loop hole that Galileo needs to avoid torture. (These documents are all kept in the Vatican archives which shows the Inquisitor threatening to torture Galileo if he does not recant. D'Souza might want to look em up.)

Anyway, despite this pretty shocking term of events, Galileo's fate is sealed. He is ordered to recant, and this is a BIG thing D'Souza leaves out, under the threat of torture. Galileo is an old man backed into a corner. So he surrenders and recants. He is placed under house arrest for his remaining eight years of life.

D'Souza is correct to say that Galileo was being directly confrontational with the Church. And his sly gambit of producing Bellarmine's letter didn't work. And then D'Souza gets really odd. He basically says the Church acted in good faith in handling Galileo. Good faith? Threatening to torture an old man for holding a view that was forbidden by Church doctrine? Placing his books on the banned this and threatening those who read them with dire consequences? He says because the evidence Galileo presented was no definitive (in particular Galileo's use of the tides of proof, which turned out to be wrong) that the Church was right to censor Galileo. Consider what he is saying here. It's Galileo's fault for exploring science and talking about it, not the Church's fault for suppressing knowledge. D'Souza is saying that Galileo should have just obeyed the orders of a dictatorial church!

No, Mr. D'Souza, you got it wrong by ignoring the facts. It is true that Galileo caused himself a whole world of grief when he mocked the pope in his book. But he was silenced by a church with thin skin, threatened by new ideas and so threatened him with tortured and his books were banned. This is not the actions of a reasonable opened minded organization that D'Souza wants us to believe the church was. It was a dictatorial power that crushed any opposition to its authority.

This is why Galileo is rightly revered today. For this great scientific work and his arrogant defiance of religious authority.

There are many myths about what happened to Galileo, most simplifying a very complex situation. Well all D'Souza has done is created another myth by ignoring the facts.

By the by here is Carl Sagan presenting some of the important details of this subject. Compare to anything D'Souza presents:

The sound and fury of Dinesh D'Souza - Part 2

People believe that this disease is sacred simply because they don't know what causes it? But some day I believe they will, and the moment they figure out why people have epilepsy, it will cease to be considered divine.

-Hippocrates

The man pictured here on an Iraqi currency is
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, better known as Al Hazen.

He is a titanic figure in the history of science. His works on optics were absolutely critical in Europe in the 15th century when Europe was pulling it's ignorant ass out of the dark ages during the Renascence. It was Al Hazen, a 10th century Arab, who figured out why we see what we see. That is, how light works.

He used logic, reason and experiment to demolish all the old theories about how we saw things - like the idea that light came from your eyes to light up what you were looking it. Al Hazen figured out that light came into your eye from all the objects around you. And the reason that your eye didn't get confused by all this input was that most of the light rays were refracted in your eye, allowing you to see some light, but not all of it. His work was used later in Europe to figure out problems in geometry, optics and architecture.

There is a pretty good chance you've chance you've not heard of Al Hazen. His name doesn't come up much in high school history lessons (or university lessons for that matter) and it appears, neither has Dinesh D'Souza.

You see, D'Souza likes to claim that everything good about the western world is the baby of Christianity. He really does. And this includes science. Take this from one of his recent blogs promoting his new book:

..where did Western man get this idea of a lawfully ordered universe? From Christianity. Christians were the first ones who envisioned the universe as following laws that reflected the rationality of God the creator. These laws were believed to be accessible to man because man is created in the image of God and shares a spark of the divine reason.

It's a lovely conceit I suppose. It's also completely wrong. Now it is true that for believers, a rational universe created by god makes sense, and explains for them why science works. However, it is utterly false to say that "Western man" first got his idea that the universe was knowable through reason from Christianity.

Apparently, D'Souza has never heard ofAnaxamander, Epidicles or Anaxagoras or Hippocrates. These men went about figuring out how the universe worked long before a certain Hebrew carpenter was a twinkle in a virgin's eye. All of them opperated on the notion that the universe was knowable through reason. Not because a god had created it thus, but because that was how the universe was. Men like Democritus weren't even sure the universe and the Earth had been created at all, and suggested that everything had existed forever. Moreover, they looked for material explanations of the universe. In fact, it is from these Greeks that we get the term "cosmos" - the orderly universe. The important thing to note here is that these men came about to this realization without Christianity and their ideas formed the spine of what would become modern science.

Indeed, once the Christians had finished, or thought they had finished, crushing the Greek schools of philosophy with their crazy ideas of rational inquiry and logic, and Europe plunged into the dark ages, did they continue or improve upon the traditions of Greek science? Not in the least. They turned instead to mysticism and superstition. The bible was all the education anyone needed. Augustine's maxim, "believe and then you'll understand" ruled the day. The natural world, from this point of view, wasn't worth bothering about. You know, life is a veil tears and that sort of thing? That was dark ages Europe for the most part.

But, as Jonathan Miller points out, the term "dark ages" is little more than a cliche because it is impossible to totally wipe out free thought. But it is true that this period was one of deep ignorance compared to what came before it.

Yet rationale inquiry lived on, particularly in the Muslim world. It might be hard for us to imagine it now, with rise in Islamist terrorism and draconian Muslim laws regarding women and blasphemy, but there was a time when the Arab world was the most sophisticated culture on the planet. Long before Muslim clerics came up with the bizarre notion that in order to please god, Muslim societies had to try and restore their world to the days of the prophet, the scholars of Islam were the leading scientists on earth.

Men like Al Hazen had kept the old Greek knowledge alive and were taking the next steps. Picking up where the Greeks left off and advancing human knowledge about the universe. And what is critical to remember about this is that Europe began to dig itself out of the dark ages because of an influx of Arab texts. Where once all Europe had was the bible, religious writings and scraps of Aristotle and Ptolemy, now they had volumes of long forgotten Greek and Roman texts, complete with Arab commentaries - not to mention the direct writings of men like Al Hazen. All of these texts operated on that Greek idea of cosmos. That the universe was knowable through reason. An idea much older, and more profound, than any revelation found in the bible or koran.