Norm Allen on humanism, politics, Malcolm X

"On Conceptions of Humanism, Freethought, Atheism, Rationalism, Skepticism, etc."
By Norm R. Allen Jr., December 21, 2012

Although Norm's argument that there is no necessary correlation between nontheism & political positions is correct, there are further implications, in that "humanism" too is almost politically meaningless though it promises more, in a strictly definitional sense, than "atheism". This is true for "secular humanism", all of its manifestos and affirmations notwithstanding, and a fortiori for religious humanism, which stretches the meaning to unlimited flexibility and hence virtual meaninglessness.

Norm recognizes the entire political spectrum that nontheists occupy. Among black atheists, he singles out the group of nationalist bigots (my designation) Black Atheists of Atlanta.  He did not mention other black nontheists who do not only advocate a tie to social justice issues but demagogically presume they represent black atheism as a whole in contraposition to white atheism. But black atheists, however the percentages may be skewed, also span the spectrum of political philosophies.

Back to Norm: Groups that couple a primary interest in atheism (or any of its synonyms) with a specific political philosophy should label themselves clearly reflecting their position. But also, there are nontheists who engage their social justice issues in other organizations and don't wish to narrow the common agenda of nontheists & secularists by tying down that movement to a specific political orientation.

The term "humanism' brings with it a source of confusion not found in the other terms:

Many humanists focus primarily on atheism, freethought, and rationalism. However, politically, they rend to be liberal or progressive. This causes much consternation among conservatives, libertarians and others that attend humanist gatherings. Yet unlike most of the other terms that non-theists use to describe themselves, humanism means a belief in humanity, and implies caring and concern for human beings, which usually translates into support for progressive social, political and economic programs. Conservatives, libertarians, and others might want to exercise caution when considering becoming involved with a humanist organization.

Perhaps a statistically oriented survey will bear out this generalization. However, many nontheists are not very discriminating about the labels or organizations they affiliate with or consider themselves humanists no matter how reactionary their politics. And the good liberals are not necessarily so discriminating either when choosing their heroes.

The problem is that the intellectual basis of the humanist movement is basically identical to that of any of the other labels used, and is so threadbare that it can't nail down anything more specific than general abstract principles, or platitudes. As a rule, humanism articulates certain general principles of liberal democracy, which are compatible with a range of political positions from capitalist libertarianism to Marxist humanism. (And this is not to take into account hypocrisy whatever the position taken.) This flexibility allows "humanism" to be a strategic focal point for organization and agitation in a variety of contexts, and for strategic alliances. But this does not make "humanism" a complete philosophy or world view. Not to see this is to fail to recognize that "humanism" essentially functions ideologically in the pejorative sense, that its proponents do not understand the deep structure of their own ideas.  For historical amplification, consult my podcast Atheism & Humanism as Bourgeois Ideology (11/17/12).

So whatever your conviction is as to what constitutes a true humanism, whether it be Barry Seidman's anarchosyndalism, which is as analytically vacuous and platitudinous as humanist liberalism, or something else, your efforts at hijacking the concept of humanism in general will be futile.

The threadbare intellectual character of the humanist movement in the USA can be seen in another essay:

MALCOLM X FROM A BLACK HUMANIST VIEW By Norm R. Allen Jr., September 10, 2011

. . . which contains this preposterous assertion: "As far as Black leaders of national renown go, Malcolm seems to have been the leading critical thinker."

This is not only nonsense with respect to the entire history of black American political thought, but also with respect to Malcolm's contemporaries. I am reminded of a remark C.L.R. James once made when questioned about Malcolm X, responding that the person who really matters is Paul Robeson.  This remark implies a whole lot more than it says, for it points to a larger historical perspective lacking among Americans, black Americans included, as James asserted in another speech.

Malcolm X emerged in a political vacuum created by the silencing of the infinitely more sophisticated black left in the McCarthy era. Malcolm trashed mainstream American liberalism not from the left but from the right. One can focus on the more intelligent components of his speeches, but his defamation of the civil rights movement coupled with his alternative separatist fantasy bespeaks a decidedly inferior politics. A disciple of Elijah Muhammed's fascist religious cult, Malcolm could only be considered a critical thinker in a limited sense. Malcolm's world view could only be considered compatible with humanism in the last year of Malcolm's life when he renounced the Nation of Islam and refused to make authoritarianism and racialism the basis of his political world view (though he became an orthodox Muslim).

Norm to be sure is no blind hero-worshipper. Yet a critical evaluation of Malcolm demands more than a criticism of his sexism, the blandest, easiest, and most politically correct criticism to make. As for critical thinking, I've argued elsewhere that there is only critical thinking in particular, not critical thinking in general, and that "critical thinking" is selective and content-driven. See my bibliography Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking: A Guide.

Philosophically, "humanism" has always been quite feeble though its platitudes are salutary. Here we have further confirmation of this philosophical anemia.

Jeremiah Wright, MLK, black theology & Obama (2)

Given Obama’s situation, he handled the Wright “scandal” well. Obama's speech on race tipped me in his favor, but only out of alarm at how easily he could be jimcrowed out of the presidency. Obama’s speech was not one for the ages, but he delved deeper than the average politician, declining to relinquish an aspect of his previous social identity, while pandering to white people more than they deserve.

This was not enough for Caucasian talking heads concerned with whether Obama had sufficiently distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright. A few were put off by his reference to his grandmother exhibiting the questionable attitudes of a "typical white person". Imagine that! And then there was the question of Wright himself. White journalists grappled with the allegedly shocking and horrifying remarks of Wright, apparently never having before witnessed a black man in a dashiki spouting off.

Some black commentators, for their part, attempted to contextualize Wright’s “inflammatory” soundbites, in many cases defending him tout court and placing him solidly within a black tradition of political “prophetic speech”. In several instances, Wright was legitimated by a linkage to the civil rights movement and even to Martin Luther King, Jr. One typically obnoxious example is:

Ralph E. Luker, Jeremiah, History News Network, March 17, 2008.

Before we examine any specific linkages, let us note the objectionable assumption that no one in the news media (mainstream or “progressive”!) has questioned: why should the theological interpretation of secular social issues be considered legitimate under any circumstances? It is one thing to use cultural or symbolic metaphors as ingredients in one’s rhetorical appeals; it is something more to convert a political argument into theologically legitimated metaphysics. Luker, for example, is blind to how thoroughly ridiculous it is to argue politics on a theological basis.

True, Luker’s defense is not quite as ludicrous as the overblown white response to Wright, who exemplifies a fairly commonplace social type and hardly a shocking novelty. To be shocked and scandalized reveals how poorly white Americans still apprehend the social reality of their own society. The black response is disappointing in a different way. It too is "mainstream"—or maybe I should say conventional—in another sense. This is a highly anti-intellectual country and one with a very restricted ideological discourse, a discourse which excludes not only the left but freethought and secular humanism (i.e. Obama's mother!). As such, the real problems with Wright's rants and with the defense of them cannot be publicly discussed, because in so doing one would have to challenge the current theocratic temper of American politics and the entire tradition of Protestant preaching, black and white.

The problem is not with this or any preacher's specific comments, but of the very genre of prophetic discourse, especially in the mouth of a religious leader with a claim to a special authority. Like it or not, a “civilian” may damn America as he pleases, but by what right does a clergyman claim divine authority to utter such a pronouncement? That is the authority to be challenged, denied, and ultimately obliterated.

Theology and liberation have been intertwined since slavery days, but does this imply that every black preacher that has combined the two has participated from the same perspective in the same category—a construct known as black liberation theology? The blowhard pop intellectual Michael Eric Dyson on Meet the Press lumped Wright and King together in the same tradition, evidenced by the fact that at the time of his assassination King was scheduled to deliver a sermon about America being damned to hell. I would like to read the text of this sermon, if it has been preserved, to determine just what he planned to say and how he planned to say it. Even the similarity cited fails to convince me that King’s message was at all the same.

What kind of authority did MLK claim for himself? Was his invocation of religious language identical to that of his contemporaries or of ours? How did he see the role of religious discourse in a society presumed to be more secular in the '60s (at least outside of the South) than ours is today? Did King resort to demagogy and mystification in making his political points?

These are the questions that no one has posed, as they lie outside the boundaries of the visceral thoughtlessness and ideological superficiality that saturate every corner of the popular media.

Furthermore, is it valid to classify MLK under the rubric of a socially recognized ideological movement known as "black liberation theology", formulated by McCone and others in the '60s and after? King’s engagement with theology should by all means be studied so that his precise commitments can be ascertained, but the liberation theology of the black power movement strikes me as fulfilling a purpose not envisioned by King. Black liberation theology does not merely exploit religious metaphors, it squanders much mental energy in the construction of a racial metaphysics, which I can’t see as being useful to King. Black people are like the children of Israel, but then who isn’t? King was aggressively militant and became ever more so after the initial aims of the Southern civil rights movement were attained, but while solidly rooted in his Southern black heritage, he remained a universalist to the end. That is a principal reason he is not with us today. He was not the first militant black preacher and he won’t be the last, but few are of King's caliber.

Now, here are a few essays on MLK’s relation to black theology:

“Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Theology—Black Church” by James H. Cone, Theology Today, Vol. 40, No. 4, January 1984

“The Word That Moves: The Preaching of Martin Luther King, Jr.” by Richard Lischer, Theology Today, Vol. 46, No.2, July 1989

“Preamble to A Critique of James Cone” by Stephen C. Rose, OpEdNews.com, April 2, 2008

“Is Reverend Wright a Black Liberationist?” by Clare L. Spark, History News Network, April 7, 2008

Cone, an architect of black power theology, argues that King belongs to the tradition as he construes it, Cone does raise an interesting point about a putative difference between King's pitch to black and to white audiences, but otherwise I find his argument unconvincing.

Lischer downplays the influence of the thinkers King studied in seminary and argues for the primacy of the oral tradition rooted in black culture. Lischer nonetheless admits that King balked at fundamentalism and expanded on the traditional repertoire of black preaching. King’s amalgam of different influences was pitched to all of his audiences, not neatly segregated into black and white, but a different mood can be detected in his relationship to black and white audiences. In the wake of the landmark civil rights victories, as a rift grew between political strategies and the possibility of a transracial political consensus, King’s synthesis of diverse elements was strained to the breaking point. King’s preaching becomes more visibly “blacker” in the last phase of his life. Lischer, however, does not extrapolate the implications of this logic beyond a celebration of King as black America’s prophet. However “black” King’s discourse, it seems to me from this description that King did not aim at constructing a metaphysical doctrine for black people, but that he combined improvisation tailored to circumstance (a practice, incidentally, much explored in the work of Zora Neale Hurston) with ideas borrowed from the world beyond the segregated culture in which King was reared.

Suppose King’s ideology died so that Cone’s could live. Is that a good thing? If we are all the products of historically delimited circumstances, what are we to say for ourselves when we run up against our historical limitations? Cone outlived King physically, but suppose he failed to elevate himself ideologically? Whose path is then a dead end?

Rose claims contact with both MLK and Malcolm X, claims that both moved beyond race, and argues that Cone’s theology, which purports to synthesize both, is entirely misguided. As a theologian himself, he should know that much.

Spark’s underlying agenda as well as several particulars of her exposition are questionable, but let’s focus on the relevant points: Spark distinguishes the universalist claims of MLK from the particularist world view of cultural nationalists and the irrationalist basis of Cone’s ideology in particular (i.e. the rejection of logical reasoning and accountability).

Can any theology withstand the test of critical thought? There is another permutation in the domain of black liberation theology—that of religious humanism, most notably exemplified in the work of William R. Jones (featured in two blog entries here). Religious humanists work within a theological framework though they dissent from established theism and theological traditions. It’s an odd enterprise but useful as far as exploring the logical possibilities and implications of various doctrines goes. A black religious humanist more recently on the scene is Anthony Pinn, author of Why Lord? and other books.

Now that Jeremiah Wright in the flesh has the media spotlight, I shall continue to explore these issues in a follow-up entry.

What’s in a name? What’s in a movement?

(The following was originally posted on my blog on the Freethought Forum on 8 February 2008. Note comments there. I will reproduce my own follow-up comment on this blog.)

Many of the the various names for what we do are packed into the title of my web guide:

Atheism / Freethought / Humanism / Ethical Culture / Rationalism / Agnosticism / Skepticism / Unbelief / Secularism / Church-State Separation Web Links

Still, I omitted other terms in use or historically related, such as ‘irreligion’, ‘naturalism’, ‘deism’, and ‘godless’. Some of these terms have meanings outside of our central area of concern, some have distinct agendas (e.g. skepticism), and some overlap or appear to be synonymous. I was never particularly preoccupied with terminology, but the history and distinction of these terms are relevant to my current research.

I note, for example, that in my current environment, people in our groups customarily refer to themselves as atheists or humanists. I do not meet people who have adopted the label “freethinker” or refer to “freethought”. While this term persists in other English-speaking countries, none of the extant national organizations in the USA have “freethought” in their name. (I think some of the local and regional organizations do.) The organ of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is Freethought Today, which is the most prominent usage of the term I can think of in the USA today. I assume that the title “Freethought Forum” was chosen because of the obvious affinity to FFRF. I note that its mission statement includes a dedication to ‘social activism’, though what that means beyond activism for irreligion and secularism is not specified. As FFRF embodies a concern with feminism, it appears that this forum is similarly inspired as well.

I hardly gave the distinctions among these terms a second thought, except for some impressions about their acceptability in mainstream society. Since the word ‘atheism’ is anathema in American society, I assumed that this was the boldest term, and since American Atheists had the history of greatest stridency, I assumed that ‘atheism’ is socially more confrontational than the more restrained if also hated (secular) ‘humanism’. Only recently, when I made a survey of my personal library in pursuit of some research, did I realize I had simply not paid attention to something very obvious. All of my books on the history of atheism as a movement and atheists as social reformers carry the word ‘freethought’ in their titles. All of my books on the history of atheism with ‘atheism’ in their titles are not about movements or organizations but ideas. (Wikipedia follows this pattern as well.) For all practical purposes, ‘freethought’ is historically the fighting name of a fighting movement, while ‘atheism’ seems to have come into organizational use with American Atheists. Also, freethought has a history of linkage with other social reform movements not strictly connected to irreligion or secularism. I read a number of books on the subject without thinking of ‘freethought’ as anything other than an antiquated term. Now, though the word ‘freethinker’ still sounds quaint to me, I think I’d much rather be known as a ‘freethinker’ than as an ‘atheist’ or ‘humanist’. It’s a history to be proud of, especially since it embodies a social consciousness that seems much scarcer among America’s atheists today.

These musings are actually by-products of a different focus. My original intent was to research the histories of secular humanism and the skeptical movement as distinct topics, because I have found that these categories embody certain ambiguities and ideological undertones in both their world-views and institutional histories that invite scrutiny in a way not required by the other main terms in use, whatever their organizational histories might be. I have only begun this project, but I want to call your attention to two new web pages:

Secular Humanism—Ideology, Philosophy, Politics, History: Bibliography in Progress

and

Humanism—100 Years of Freethought by David Tribe

The latter is a section of David Tribe’s 1967 100 Years of Freethought. This chapter, on ‘Philosophical Outlook’, covers the histories of freethought, secularism, ethicism, rationalism, humanism, atheism, agnosticism, materialism, and determinism. The survey is global, and the emphasis is decidedly British rather than American, which means that the political purview is much more progressive than one often finds here in the USA.

‘Humanism’ apparently grows out of the liberalization of religion, and the secular or atheistic variety only becomes sharply defined with time. There is also a political and organizational as well as intellectual history, but the strongest social histories can still be found under the rubric ‘freethought’.

My esteemed colleague Fred Whitehead, cultural activist, co-editor of Freethought on the American Frontier and editor of a marvelous bulletin Freethought History, took steps to revive the old-time activist tradition of freethought, but could find no takers.

As for the social perspective of contemporary atheism, a comparison of the so-called ‘new atheists’ and the freethinking agitators of yesteryear might well be in order, perhaps yielding a different perspective on ‘change we can believe in’.

Is God a white racist?

Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology. New York: Doubleday, 1973.

Whatever else you might say, anyone who could come up with a book title like Is God a White Racist? deserves a medal. Jones contains all the contradictions of a religious humanism: he dwells ideologically within the parameters of religious mythology while attempting to clean it up at the same time and make it answer to more enlightened needs. Except for the fact that it forces theologians to face up to certain questionable features of their superstitions, the reinterpretation of said superstition does not topple its cognitive authority, but perpetuates the imprisonment of intellectual energy within ideology.

The demythologization and higher criticism of religion has a history with a certain nobility in its earlier stages. Spinoza already did this to Judaism, taking considerable risk in an era before this was permissible. Left Hegelianism made a decisive historical contribution, following from the ambiguities of Hegel's position to David Strauss (also passing through Heinrich Heine), to the revolutionization of philosophy itself as well as religious criticism via the Young Hegelians from Bruno Bauer to Ludwig Feuerbach to Max Stirner and Karl Marx. However, not recognizing Marx's rupture of the closed circle of ideology, subsequent liberalizing or modernizing of religions tends to lapse into equivocating make-believe, the philosophy of "as if", and the exploitation of the malleability of symbolism. Religious liberalism and liberation theology have been pulling a sleight-of-hand for some time, but now religious fascism resurfaces to topple the liberal/radical facade.

In addition to the great title, Jones pushes the envelope on theodicy as the deciding issue in theology: whose side is God on? If you're interested in theology, you will find his pushing has made an impact and holds some interest. At the end of the day, if you have any sense you will find that secular humanism beats out the humanocentric theism Jones poses as the only other viable alternative. So maybe you can escape after all.

In his writings Jones has performed one other service: he coined a term that is absolutely hilarious— Whitianity!

To be thorough, he should have called its theological tradition Honkeology.

Jones was influenced most notably by existentialism and post-Holocaust Jewish theology. Albert Camus' The Rebel suggests that Golgotha can also be interpreted as divine misanthropy. Hence occasions of suffering—events in the world— lend themselves equally to opposing interpretations, referred to by Jones as multievidentiality. (8) Jones reviews skepticism about God's benevolence in black American literature. Especially notable is a passage in Nella Larsen's Passing. (38-9) Part I, then, sets up the issue of divine racism.

Part II is an internal critique of black theology, particularly of Joseph Washington, James Cone, Albert Cleage, Major Jones, J. Deotis Roberts. The non-religious reader will probably be least interested in this section.

Part III—Toward a Black Theodicy for Today—is the punchline, the most important section for those not sympathetic to the subject matter. In this section, Chapter XI—Toward a Prolegomenon to Black Theology (169-184)—is the chapter you most want to read. Jones argues that only two models for black liberation theology are viable—secular humanism and humanocentric theism. (172) Secular humanism is a viable option, but Jones prefers to explore the possibilities of humanocentric theism as the last hope for theism.

Jones was influenced by the parallel experience of Jewish suffering, the Holocaust being the last straw. He undertakes an analysis of the work of Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, in the balance of this chapter. (175-184) Rubinstein rejects the standard conception of God and God's role in history. God is really the cannibal goddess Earth! The only Messiah is death. Jones takes up the challenge to show that this alternate theodicy is not the only alternative. Rubinstein rejects secular humanism. Jones refutes this rejection, citing Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew. Jones cannot accept Rubinstein's pessimistic conclusions.

The final chapter—XII: Humanocentric Theism: A Theistic Framework for Ethnic Suffering— is Jones' alternative. The logic of his position is more interesting to me than the position itself. It removes the charge of white racism by stripping God of his sovereignty over human history. It also removes any excuses for the white oppressor. It also removes the option of quietism for the oppressed. (195)

Further references:

Professor Emeritus, Dr. William R. Jones

Toward an Interim Assessment of Black Theology by William R. Jones

Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows by William R. Jones, The Christian Century, May 21, 1975, pp. 520-525.

Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology by William R. Jones reviewed by William Muehl

“Is God a White Racist?”, sermon by Rev. Dan Harper

Black Theology with a Process

Two worthless subjects meet and compare notes—black theology and process theology. To be fair, William R. Jones is arguably the most important black religious humanist thinker of our time, having raised the fundamental question of theodicy as it relates to black suffering and liberation, most notably in his seminal book Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (Doubleday, 1973). Process Theology is a branch of the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. These two streams of thought meet in this article:

Process Theology: Guardian of the Oppressor or Goad to the Oppressed by William R. Jones, in Process Studies, pp. 268-281, Vol.18, Number 4, Winter, 1989.

The issue is whose side is the God of process theology on—on the side of the oppressed, the oppressor, or everyone (meaning the oppressor in practice)? Jones has a number of questions for process theology as he does for all others:

Given the factor of ethnic suffering, can one assume that God is good? Are not the interpretations that Miller cites — God is benevolent, indifferent demonic/evil — equally probable? Though the position of humanocentric theism accommodates the divine freedom in a manner that prevents making God responsible for the crimes of human history, it does so at the cost of making a demonic deity equally probable. As the divine joker in Bertrand Russell’s eschatological scenario illustrates (FMW), each and every instance of divine benevolence can, with equal validity, be interpreted as a divine misanthropy and malevolence.

I must confess that the manner in which process theology affirms the benevolence of God over against the option of God as demonic or indifferent, is, for me, blatantly question-begging. Howard Burkle, for instance, purports to show that these options are not equally valid. However, the superiority he assigns to the option of benevolence rests on the question-begging foundation of a stipulative definition. The very idea that God may be demonic, he contends, is "inherently inconsistent and therefore not a possibility at all. God cannot be demonic because ‘God’ means ‘absolute perfection.’ If the dominant universal power is not perfectly good, there is no God" (GSB 77).

It would also appear that the logical and theological maneuvers that avoid God’s responsibility for the crimes of human history have several undesirable consequences: any appeal to the future becoming of the divine as preeminent events of liberation is ruled out; even more important, we are left in the dark about God’s character as demonic, indifferent or benevolent. Granting freedom to humans for example, is logically and theologically multievidential. Ultimately, this divine "grace" tells us nothing about whose side God is on or about the divine intent for the future of the human species and its oppressed communities. In what sense can we speak of a divine intent or telos in human history beyond the granting of freedom to humanity, a freedom that is acknowledged to be multivalent, an equal ground of being for good or evil?

Given the insights of humanocentric theism, we are also pushed to ask what it means to advance God, the transcendent, as the ground for the just society? Does it mean more than the claim that the transcendent is both the ground for human freedom/autonomy to operate as moral creator and foundation of the world in which this freedom is exercised? Or does it mean that ultimate reality sponsors, and thus guarantees, the ultimate triumph of specific activities in human history? That is, once humanity is given the status of moral creator, does ontological priority -- i.e., the transcendent -- still establish moral priority? It seems clear that the species of human freedom endorsed by humanocentric theism precludes, at the very least, any immediate movement from ontology to ethics, from the "is" to the "ought," without the intermediate operation of human evaluation. Is this an area where process theology ultimately grounds itself on a question-begging norm?

While I enjoy philosophical puzzles, if I am going to spend my time in a mythical universe, I might be better off going to a Star Trek convention, playing Dungeons & Dragons, or viewing The Lord of the Rings. While cults of any kind invite excess, the difference is to recognize without equivocation that a man-made fictional landscape is involved. Even if you're a cultist, at least you know the object of veneration is naught but a literary artifact. The discipline for analyzing such cultural artifacts is literary criticism or art criticism. Left/liberal theology is another matter. Liberal theologians are pushed towards the recognition that their sacred texts are fiction but can't just accept them as fiction; instead they play the game of "as if" in order to preserve an authoritative status for outmoded superstitions. So instead of good literary criticism we get bad metaphysics--liberation theology, process theology, death-of-god theology, post-Holocaust theology, feminist theology, black theology. A few of these fictional constructs may be of interest, but the whole enterprise is a sad waste of intellectual energy.

If there is some good that can come out of this bad medicine, it is that radicalizers of these traditions may on occasion push the envelope from within the mythical structures that religionists inhabit. Jones, by pushing theodicy as the question for oppressed peoples and following through on its internal logic, forces an alteration of the mythic structure of Christianity without abolishing it, and he pushes these questions with every theological system he encounters.

Process philosophy has attracted liberals and even some Marxists. It has linkages to the reactionary obscurantism of contemporary proponents of Daoism and Confucianism. It has linkages to biosemiotics and creationism. It's a slippery devil. Its linkages to liberation theology and particularly black theology enable more mischief. The best thing one can say is that Jones challenges the political implications of its metaphysics.

But sadly, there's more:

Hartshorne's Neoclassical Theism and Black Theology by Theodore Walker, Jr., in Process Studies, pp.240-258, Vol. 18, Number 4, Winter, 1989.

Alien Gods in Black Experience by Archie Smith, Jr., in Process Studies, pp. 294-305, Vol. 18, Number 4, Winter, 1989.

Walker defends process theology against Jones's doubts by adumbrating the differences between Hartshorne's theology and orthodox theism and showing its consonance with statements about God in connection with black liberation from the abolitionist movement on. No doubt such arguments were once useful in appealing to a religious populace, but to have to waste one's time on this nonsense to convince fools of something on the cusp of the millennium is just backward.

But Smith is much worse. Reviewing the literature on the subject, he concludes that there is a need for a holistic view of "relational reality" integrating material and spiritual forces and incorporating the concept of "principalities and powers". Unrecognized social forces are "alien gods" that "represent the visible and invisible principalities and powers that circumscribe human existence." An example of the trial of an Australian aborigine who killed his female companion is analyzed. I can't go on about this superstitious garbage.

The intellectual vampires of liberation theology are perfectly capable of perpetrating their obscurantist mischief without the help of process philosophy, but here we have yet another terrain in which it works its baleful influence. We can thank the liberal and radical mind-manipulators once again for muddying the waters of the human intellect.

My remarks on Whitehead & his influence:
Whitehead & Marxism: Selected Bibliography
Does anyone give good Whitehead?
Whitehead or Marx? Or, How to Process Philosophy
Chinese Philosophy in the West: Globalization Gone Bad (1)
January 2007 reading review (1)
Emergence: Theology or Materialism?