Disturber of the Peace |
|
|
"Any questioning of the moral ideas that prevail ...is received with the utmost hostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to disturb the peace" --H. L. Mencken
Almost-Pithy Punditry from a Predominantly Papist Perspective, Sponsored by Disturber of the Peace Institute, a Washington, DC Think Tank which does not exist
Responses are welcome, especially free offers of the Pultizer Prize, Cuban cigars, or single malt scotch: dpinstitut@aol.com E-mails from nitwits, nitpickers, loons, cranks, self-appointed censors, or lawyers will be promptly processed in our Oliver North Virtual Shredder. This Site Adheres to the WELBORN PROTOCOL: "All correspondence is blogable unless you specifically request otherwise." Click HERE to go to our Bullies 'N' Bozos web log for the latest news and updates on the New Know-Nothing Party, Nitwits of the Net, 'Hos of Babble-On, Net-Nazis, and other various and sundry Denizens of the Lunatic Fringe Click HERE to go to The Lidless Eye Inquisition web blog, at which fellow Catholic apologeti-geeks and St. Blog's Parish members I. Shawn McElhinney, Chris Burgwald, Gregg the Obscure, F. John Loughnan, and the Parish's Canon lawyer Pete J. Vere of Envoy magazine (and yours truly) take on the Lunatic Fringe and Sieg Heil Wings of Catholic traditionalism. Our Favorite Places in Cyberspace: NEWS, ISSUES, AND COMMENTARIES First Things ...Well-written and often scholarly monthly journal of contemporary political, cultural, and religious issues from an ecumenical and orthodox Judeo-Christian perspective Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity ..."a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content," written from Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox POVs Townhall.com Columnists, a web site featuring the editorials and commentaries of over 60 conservative and libertarian pundits Sean Hannity's Official Web Site ...The cyber-HQ of the popular talk radio host and one of our favorite conservative Catholic pundits The American Chesterton Society ...Dedicated to the life and (often prophetic) writings of G. K. Chesterton, one of the sharpest minds and wittiest commentators of the early 1900s The H. L. Mencken Page ...A site devoted to the Bard of Baltimore, one of the USA's most effective and wittiest newspaper columnists. Contains many articles and columns by and about Mencken Keep up with what's going on in Christianity around the world: Check out The Christianity Today Web Log, set up by the leading national Evangelical journal SATIRE & HUMOR The Door ..."The world's pretty much only religious satire magazine" is wickedly funny Catholic Humor ...A great collection of very funny (and occasionally irreverent) jokes, stories, and parodies for, by, and about Catholics Official Dilbert Web Site ... Dilbert creator Scott Adams' very own! Excellent satire not only on the business world but on human nature in general The Onion ...Easily the funniest news parody site on the web (warning: includes some occasional R-rated language) SOME NOBLE & NOTEWORTHY ST. BLOG'S PARISH MEMBERS: Mark Shea's BLOG: Catholic and Enjoying It! ...the popular writer and speaker holds forth daily on a variety of issues, in his own inimitable style Catholic apologist I. Shawn McElhinney's Rerum Novarum Lane Core's Blog from the Core News and Commentaries Molly's Musings ...by "an opinionated conservative Catholic chica living in San Diego, California John Betts' Just Your Average Catholic Guy Bill Cork's Ut Unum Sint Gerard Serafin's Catholic BLOG for Lovers Fr. Jim Tucker's Dappled Things Catholic book author Amy Welborn writes In Between Naps The Mighty Barrister's Catholic Commentary On-line Atheist to a Theist by Jeff Miller Archives DPI Statement of Faith  
|
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
H. L. MENCKEN AND RELIGION: An "Atheist" Reader Takes Exception Early last week --barely three days before Christmas Day, of all times!-- a self-styled "atheist" sent us an e-mail to let us "know" something he had apparently already determined we did not know, namely that our "patron saint," early 20th century pundit and skeptic H. L. Mencken, was "agin" religion (as we Virginia gentlemen would put it). Of course, anyone with more than two brain cells working can tell just by reading a good cross-section of Mencken's writings, the Bard of Baltimore was no friend to the "established" religions of his time --Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish-- and disdained religious belief and theology in general. No argument there. The problem, and point of departure with our "atheist" interlocutor, comes when some folks with ideological axes to grind hijack Mencken to make him appear to be one of their crowd. Just do a Google search with "Mencken" and "atheism," and up will pop more "atheists" on the internet than Hosts in Heaven selectively quoting Mencken's most bombastic and less mature statements about religion and religious persons as "proof" that Mencken was an extremist unto their own image and likeness. Never mind that Mencken at times had some complimentary things to say about some religious persons (cf., his obituary of the scholarly Presbyterian theologian J.Gresham Machen), and even some religious institutions (cf., his comparison of the Catholic and Protestant churches of his time). And never mind that Mencken never once called himself an atheist, preferring instead to be seen as a "doubter" or a "skeptic," and only because "sound thought," he wrote in 1921 to his then-girlfriend Marion Bloom, cannot take us further than that: ...No sane man denies that the universe presents phenomena quite beyond human understanding, and so it is a fair assumption that they are directed by some understanding that is superhuman. But that is as far as sound thought can go. All religions pretend to go further. That is, they pretend to explain the unknowable... In other words, to Mencken, both theism and, by implication, atheism (which also "pretends to go further ...[and] explain the unknowable," namely by denying that category en toto) were presumptuous, so he embraced neither camp although he was more sympathetic to the latter. Catholic journalist and Mencken scholar George Weigel puts it this way in his thoughtful First Things article, "God, Man, and H. L. Mencken": Throughout his mature life, Mencken insisted that he was not an atheist (for such a judgment would require a knowledge that was beyond "sound thought") but rather an agnostic. Asked once what he would do if on his death he found himself facing the twelve apostles, he answered (and in this instance we may be sure that beneath the humor lay deep convictions about intellectual honesty), "I would simply say, 'Gentlemen, I was mistaken.'" Imagine Carl Sagan saying such a thing about the possibility of his encounter with a postmortem minyan, and you begin to understand the difference between the agnostic Mencken and the true village atheist. Noted essayist and Mencken scholar Joseph Epstein, as cited by Weigel, presents a more nuanced interpretation of Mencken's relationship to religion than the simplistic militant atheist P-R image both Protestant Fundamentalists and Atheist Fundamentalists like to promote: ...[Mencken's] objection to religion is that it represents an effort by ignorance to account for a mystery that knowledge simply puts aside as intrinsically impenetrable... None of this is to deny that Mencken regularly made mock of religious convictions and practices. But he did it with a deftness and, in most cases, a good humor in which was rarely found the arrogance of sheer contempt. Moreover, Mencken was not insensible to the allure of religion or to religious contributions to what he regarded as the world's meager stock of decency. Thus Mencken on Roman Catholicism in 1923 (and in what some will regard as virtually a prophetic mode): "The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its frequent astonishing imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. . . . Rome, indeed, has not only preserved the original poetry in Christianity; it has made capital additions to that poetry-for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass must be a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermons ever roared under the big-top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone. . . . "[But the Roman] clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. . . . If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that the faithful may be convinced by it." In summary, as in the areas of politics, economics, social criticism, journalism, and culture Mencken was "a party of [his] own" when it came to religion. Neither atheist nor theist can squeeze him into their prefabricated pigeonholes. He was simply too big for them. Of course, such "inconvenient" facts serve only to irritate those who prefer caricatures and fantasies over reality, and who --like our "atheist" interlocutor-- prefer to call those who present them "liars" and "sophists" for having the temerity to cast doubt upon those caricatures and fantasies.
Comments:
Post a Comment
|