Mystery, certainty, and heresy

I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for fourteen years, so I guess it's to be expected that some of my opinions have changed over that time.

I think the biggest shift has been in my attitude toward religion.  When I first started this blog, I was much more openly derisive about religion in general.  My anger is understandable, I suppose; I was raised in a rigid and staunchly religious household, and the attitude of "God as micromanager" pervaded everything.  It brings to mind the line from C. S. Lewis's intriguing, if odd, book The Pilgrim's Regress: "...half the rules seemed to forbid things he'd never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing; and the number of rules was so enormous that he felt he could never remember them all."

But the perspective of another fourteen years, coupled with exploring a great many ideas (both religious and non-religious) during that time, has altered my perspective some.  I'm still unlikely ever to become religious myself, but I now see the question as a great deal more complex than the black-and-white attitude I had back then.  My attitude now is more that everyone comes to understand this weird, fascinating, and chaotic universe in their own way and time, and who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle?  As long as religious people accord me the same right to my own beliefs and conscience as they have, and they don't use their doctrine to sledgehammer in legislation favoring their views, I've got no quarrel.

The reason this comes up is, of course, because of the election of a new Pope, Leo XIV, to lead the Roman Catholic Church.  I watched the scene unfold two days ago, and I have to admit it was kind of exciting, even though I'm no longer Catholic myself.  The new Pope seems like a good guy.  He's already pissed off MAGA types -- the white smoke had barely dissipated from over St. Peter's before the ever-entertaining Laura Loomer shrieked "WOKE MARXIST POPE" on Twitter -- so I figure he must be doing something right.  I guess in Loomer's opinion we can't have a Pope who feeds the poor or treats migrants as human beings or helps the oppressed.

Or, you know, any of those other things that were commanded by Jesus.

The fact remains, though, that even though I have more respect and tolerance for religion than I once did, I still largely don't understand it.  After Pope Leo's election, I got online to look at other Popes who had chosen the name "Leo," and following that thread all the way back to the beginning sent me down a rabbit hole of ecclesiastical history that highlighted how weird some of the battles fought in the church have been.

The first Pope Leo ruled back in the fifth century, and his twenty-one year reign was a long and arduous fight against heresy.  Not, you understand, people doing bad stuff; but people believing wrongly, at least in Leo's opinion.

Pope Leo I (ca. 1670) by Francisco Herrera [Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing boils down to the bizarre argument called "Christology," which is doctrine over the nature of Jesus.  Leo's take on this was that Jesus was the "hypostatic union" of two natures, God-nature and human nature, in one person, "with neither confusion or division."  But this pronouncement immediately resulted in a bunch of other people saying, "Nuh-uh!"  You had the:

• Monophysites, who said that Jesus only had one nature (divine);
• Dyophysites, who said that okay, Jesus had two natures, but they were separate from each other;
• Monarchians, who said that God is one indivisible being, so Jesus wasn't a distinct individual at all;
• Docetists, who said that Jesus's human appearance was only a guise, without any true reality;
• Arianists, who said that Jesus was divine in origin but was inferior to God the Father;
• Adoptionists, who said that Jesus only became the Son of God at his baptism; and
• probably a dozen or so others I'm forgetting about.

So Leo called together the Council of Chalcedon and the result was that most of these were declared heretical.  This gave the church leaders license to persecute the heretics, which they did, with great enthusiasm.  But what occurs to me is the question, "How did they know any of this?"  They were all working off the same set of documents -- the New Testament, plus (in some cases) some of the Apocrypha -- but despite that, all of them came to different conclusions.  Conclusions that they were so certain of they were completely confident about using them to justify the persecution of people who believed differently (or, in the case of the heretics themselves, that they believed so strongly they were willing to be imprisoned or executed rather than changing their minds).

Myself, I find it hard to imagine much of anything that I'm that sure of.  I try my hardest to base my beliefs on the evidence and logic insofar as I understand them at the time, but all bets are off if new data comes to light.  That's why although I consider myself a de facto atheist, I'm hesitant to say "there is no God."  The furthest I'll go is that from what I know of the universe, and what I've experienced, it seems to me that there's no deity in charge of things. 

But if God appeared to me to point out the error of my ways, I'd kind of be forced to reconsider, you know?  It's like the character of Bertha Scott -- based very much on my beloved grandmother -- said, in my novella Periphery:

"Until something like this happens, you can always talk yourself out of something."  Bertha chuckled.  "It’s like my daddy said about the story of Moses and the burning bush.  I remember he once said after Mass that if he was Moses, he’d’a just pissed himself and run for the hills.  Mama was scandalized, him talking that way, but I understood.  Kids do, you know.  Kids always understand this kind of thing...  You see, something talks to you out of a flaming bush, you can think it’s God, you can lay down and cry, you can run away, but the one thing you can’t do is continue to act like nothing’s happened."

So while my own views are, in some sense, up for grabs, my default is to stick with what I know from science.  And the fifth century wrangling by the first Pope Leo over the exact nature of Jesus strikes me as bizarre.  As former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin put it, "Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything."

Be that as it may, I wish all the best to this century's Pope Leo.  Like I said, he looks like a great choice, and a lot of my Catholic friends seem happy with him.  As far as my own mystification about a lot of the details of religion, it's hardly the only thing about my fellow humans I have a hard time understanding.  But like I said earlier, as long as religious people don't use their own certainty to try to force me into belief, I'm all about the principle of live and let live.

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The disappearance of Bruno

UFO enthusiasts are currently in a tizzy over the disappearance last week of a university student from Rio Branco, Brazil, who left behind a bizarre video about 16th century philosopher, scientist, and theologian Giordano Bruno and a room whose walls are covered with esoteric symbols.

The student's name is Bruno Borges (I wondered if his first name was in honor of Giordano, or whether it was a coincidence; of course, in the minds of the UFO conspiracy theorists, nothing is a coincidence).  He apparently had a reputation as being a bit of an odd duck even prior to his disappearance.  He was obsessed with aliens, and his fascination with the earlier Bruno came from the fact that the Italian philosopher/scientist was one of the first to speculate that other planets -- even planets around other stars -- might harbor life.  Borges hinted that Bruno's execution at the hands of the Inquisition was to keep him silent about the reality of aliens, when in reality it was just your average charges of heresy.  The church made eight accusations, claiming that Bruno was guilty of:

• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as Christ
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and Mass
• claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity
• believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes
• dealing in magics and divination

Given the intolerance of the time, any one of these would be sufficient, but the Catholic Church is nothing if not thorough.  Bruno was sentenced to be burned at the stake, and supposedly upon hearing his fate made a rude gesture at the judges and said, "Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam" ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it"), which ranks right up there with Galileo's "Eppur si muove" as one of the most elegant "fuck you" statements ever delivered.

I suppose it's understandable that Borges thought Bruno was a pretty cool guy.  A lot of us science types do, although that admiration might be misplaced.  Hank Campbell writes over at The Federalist:

Bruno only agreed with Copernicus because he worshiped the Egyptian God Thoth and believed in Hermetism and its adoration of the sun as the center of the universe.  Both Hermes and Thoth were gods of…magic. 

The church and science did not agree with Bruno that pygmies came from a “second Adam” or that Native Americans had no souls, but they were also not going to kill him over it.  There is no evidence his “science” came up at any time.  He was imprisoned for a decade because the church wanted him to just recant his claims that Hermetism was the one true religion and then they could send him on his way.  When he spent a decade insisting it was fact, he was convicted of Arianism and occult practices, not advocating science.

So right off, we're on shaky ground, not that this was ever in doubt.  In any case, between Borges's devotion to Bruno and his fascination with aliens, he apparently went a little off the deep end.  He left behind over a dozen bound books, mostly written in code, and only a few of which have been deciphered.  Here's a sample passage from one of the ones that has been decrypted:

It is easy to accept what you have been taught since childhood and what is wrong.  It is difficult, as an adult, to understand that you were wrongly taught what you suspected was correct since you were a child.  In other words, if you fit into the system, your behaviour will be determined, making you at the mercy of beliefs already provided and well established in dogmas and rituals, with the masses.

Which is standard conspiracy theory fare.  He wouldn't tell his parents or his sister what he was up to, only that he was working on fourteen books that would "change mankind in a good way."  Besides the symbols painted on his walls, he also had a portrait of himself next to an alien:

Borges's apartment wall, showing the symbols, writing, and the portrait of him with a friend

Borges has now been missing for over a week, and his family is understandably frantic.  The UFO/conspiracy world is also freaking out, but for a different reason; they think that Borges knew too much (in this view of the world, people are always "finding out too much" and having to be dealt with), and either the people who don't want us to know about aliens, or else the aliens themselves, have kidnapped him.

But the whole thing sounds to me like the story of a delusional young man whose disappearance is a matter for the police, not for Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.  It's sad, but I'm guessing that aliens had nothing to do with it.  Of course, try to tell that to the folks over at the r/conspiracy subreddit, where such a statement simply confirms that I'm one of "the two s's" -- sheeple (dupe) or shill (complicit).  I'll leave it to wiser heads than mine to determine which is most likely in my case.