Religion

CHILDREN OF FAITH:

My Conversion to Skeptical Belief (Christopher Beha, 2/10/26, NY Times)

To many, this will sound like a bit of a paradox, since skepticism and belief are understood to be in serious tension, if not outright opposition. We are all skeptical at certain times about certain things, but when we refer to someone more generally as a “skeptic,” we tend to mean that this person bases beliefs about the world entirely on the rational examination of objective evidence. More pointedly, we almost always mean that this person does not believe in God. But this is not at all the term’s historical meaning.

The Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis is often counted as the first philosophical skeptic. His complete doubt about the possibility of any human knowledge extended so far that, according to an ancient, possibly apocryphal account, he refused even to accept the evidence of his senses while walking down the street, “taking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not.” (His less skeptical friends followed behind to keep him out of trouble.)

Pyrrho’s first great modern disciple, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, would not even say that he knew nothing, which seemed to express too much certainty. He preferred to put the matter as a question: “What do I know?” Yet Montaigne’s essays contain countless expressions of Christian piety. Precisely because we can’t have knowledge about even the most basic points, he argued, we must inevitably take certain things on faith — at least, if we don’t have friends kind enough to spend their lives guiding us around dogs and carts.

It’s possible to understand the entire modern philosophical tradition as an effort to grapple with the extreme skepticism that Montaigne reintroduced to Western culture without falling, as Montaigne did, back on faith. Four hundred and fifty years later, that project has brought us to a strange point.

The strangeness resides in the fact that reason disproves the foundations of Reason and demonstrates that all is faith.

WOULDN’T SAY, “NO”:

A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot: In 1978, Soviet scientists stumbled upon a family living in a remote part of Russia. They hadn’t interacted with outsiders for decades. Almost half a century later, one of them is still there (Sophie Pinkham, 1/22/26, The Guardian)

None of the Lykov children had ever seen bread. But when the geologists offered them a loaf and some jam, they refused. “We are not allowed that,” they said, in a refrain that would become familiar to all their visitors. Natalia and Agafia were hard to understand, not only because of their archaic vocabulary but also because of an odd, chanting cadence that one geologist described as “a slow, blurred cooing”.

The Lykovs were Old Believers, members of the Orthodox Christian schismatic sect whose history is deeply bound up with that of the forest and the countryside. The Old Believers emerged in the mid-17th century after Patriarch Nikon, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, amended the liturgy to bring it into harmony with the Greek Orthodox version. The reforms altered the spelling of “Jesus” – at a time when letters were understood as something close to the literal flesh of God – and changed the number of fingers to be raised when making the sign of the cross from two to three.

Those who rejected these innovations became known as Old Believers. To the rebels, who soon broke into many different branches, Nikon’s reforms were a betrayal of the true Christianity. Their anger fed on broader social injustices of the era and was further stoked by the notorious lack of respect for Russian Orthodoxy shown by Peter the Great. A self-consciously westernising tsar, Peter preferred the gods Bacchus and Mars.

In the early days of the schism, Old Believers were burned alive, tortured and imprisoned for their faith. Many were cast into pits in the ground. They believed that they bore a tremendous burden – the preservation of the true words of God – and their extreme ways of living reflected this sense of responsibility. As the whole world fell into sin, they maintained their purity. While they awaited the end of the world, they maintained strict rules about diet (for the Lykovs, no bread or jam), clothing, everyday practices and the adoption of new technology. Some Old Believers and other religious dissidents resorted to self-immolation. Whole communities locked themselves in their village churches and set them aflame.

Others took refuge in the forest, the safest place to hide from the authorities and preserve their way of life without risk of contamination by the outside world. Many branches of Old Believers were “priestless”, meaning that a family could worship without the help of a professional man of God. For the most radical Old Believers, holiness was directly correlated to isolation. The highest holiness was the life of the hermit. In the Bible hermits retreated to the desert; in Russia they retreated to the forest. But they called the forest a desert, deriving the names for hermits and for monasteries from the same word. The forest was the wasteland of holiness, the emptiness of God.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

The Jews’ time of miracles (Samuel Rubinstein, 12/19/25, Englesberg Ideas)

It is not hard to see why non-Protestant Christians thought 1 and 2 Maccabees bore the mark of revelation: the martyrdoms (including the elephant-slayer Eleazar’s) prefigured Christ on the Cross, and the wars gave them succour in their own battles with heathen enemies, whether Saracen, Magyar, or Dane. For Jews, however, the story posed a problem. It was difficult to celebrate the ancient recovery of a homeland when that homeland had since been lost, or the consecration of a temple that the Romans were later to destroy. Hanukkah was a celebration of Jewish cultural and national independence: it did not fit the needs and realities of a scattered people. The festival in diaspora had to be rethought and redefined. The Talmud made popular a story that does not appear in the books of Maccabees: the miracle of the oil, which Jews commemorate by lighting the Hanukkiah. There was a shift in the meaning of Hanukkah, as Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks put it, from a celebration of ‘military power’ to one of ‘spiritual strength’.

But the more martial themes of the Maccabees story resurfaced in Jewish thought, much as they once had been put to use by Ælfric.

MORALITY IS A FUNCTION OF BEING OBSERVED:

Seeing a Superhero on the Subway Makes People More Likely to Surrender Their Seats (Jake Currie November 21, 2025, Nautilus)

The researchers found that 38 percent of passengers were altruistic enough to offer up their seats without Batman watching, but that number jumped to over 67 percent when the Caped Crusader was present.