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Losing the War on Xmas #8 - Christmas Crosses

2011-12-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

It would seem that I've lived in OKC far too long now, because just as soon as I begin to rouse myself from my turkey-induced Thanksgiving slumber, I begin to dread my morning commute even more than usual, because of this annual religious display:

Every year, throughout all of December, the OKC skyline is marred by eight fluorescent depictions of these instruments of torture and execution, some of which are visible from pretty much anywhere within sight of downtown. Just what I need while trying to navigate my subcompact through interstate traffic – a reminder of just how slow and painful death can be.

Now, substitutionary atonement is a fairly bizarre and immoral idea in and of itself, but let’s put that to one side for now and look at the timing. Why do these crosses blaze forth once a year, from Thanksgiving until New Year’s? Why not from Good Friday until Easter? Is it not staggeringly poor form to co-opt the celebration of someone’s birth in order to celebrate his death? I presume that the capitalist evangelists behind this scheme want to make it abundantly clear that less-than-devout citizens cannot have their seasonal celebrations without constantly being reminded of just how very un-jolly their religion really is, at its soteriological core. From the crèche to the cross, with just the flick of a switch. Never have I seen a lighting display so deeply dark.

Finally, consider that the building owners have decided to pay homage to the martyrdom of a Middle-Eastern religious zealot by emblazoning a symbol of his death upon a pair of American skyscrapers. Just think about that for a second, let it sink in. Have the culture warriors battling to re-sacralize Christmas no sense of propriety whosoever?

Losing the War on Xmas #5 - Christmas Booze

2011-12-05T09:07:00.000-08:00

Remember to do your shopping on Xmas Eve!

Happy Repeal Day! Upon this day patriotic Americans celebrate the freedom to drink and be merry, taken back by the American people from pietistic Protestant reformers on December 5th, 1933.

Of course, repeal didn't go into effect everywhere all at once. Many individual States and counties remained dry for years thereafter, and the vestiges of Prohibition remain with us to this day. For example, consider Oklahoma Statutes §37-537 (6)(C)(3) "...no such sales shall be made, or package store premises be allowed to remain open for the purpose of making such sales, on New Year's Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day" (emphasis mine).

Long story short, Christian demands for special treatment have not only given them the only exclusively religious holiday widely recognized at all levels of government, but have also ensured that last-minute shoppers will be enjoined to sobriety upon that day, just as the Christian temperance movement would have them do.

Surely, this is a minor victory against the forces of secularism and equal treatment, but nonetheless, I must congratulate the Christian soldiers for once again gaining special rights, and in taking away the rights of those who might choose to ignore the wisdom of Proverbs 20:1.

Losing the War on Xmas #4 - Deck the (City) Halls

2011-12-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

Imagine that an American city decides to create a government owned and operated display featuring a Christian nativity scene, tin soldiers, Christmas trees, snowmen, reindeer and other animals, an array of lights, and a shed with a Santa Claus and elves. Imagine further that the city refuses offers from citizens to include non-Christian religious symbols such as a menorah and a sign marking the winter solstice. What would be the likely outcome of such a scenario, in the nation which first birthed the idea of a formal separation of church authority from state power?

Before you answer, you may want to bone up on the increasingly murky jurisprudence of government religious displays. Here is a concise and accurate article from Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, and here is a bulleted summary from Religious Tolerance. Now that you've got that material under your belt, how do you think the case at hand actually turned out?

Should one recall that these posts are part of a series called Losing the War on Christmas, that might well give away the (invariably unhappy) ending. However, I hate to always end on a down note, so here are a few words of wisdom from then Circuit (now Chief) Judge Mary Beck Briscoe, “Denver has taken the position that, as regards religious items, only items pertaining to the holiday of Christmas are welcome in its display. Wells' sign, like the menorah, represents an alternative religious perspective that Denver has opted to exclude from its display. The decision to exclude Wells' sign and a menorah from the display sends the message that Denver supports Christianity and does not support other religions or religious viewpoints. When the City creates that impression, it violates the Establishment Clause.”

With any luck at all, Briscoe's unbiased and well-reasoned case for genuine religious neutrality will someday become the norm within the Tenth Circuit, and indeed, all of the courts of our fair land.

UPDATE: My preferred solution is an open forum.

Losing the War on Xmas #3 - Indirect Support

2011-12-03T18:34:00.000-08:00

Christmas enjoys a sort of special status even in states which retain a Constitutional prohibition on taxpayer support for religious sects. For example, the State of Oklahoma will help you find a Christmas tree or hold a Christmas parade or advertise for a Baptist Christmas pageant.

Once again, defenders of Christmas, rejoice! You are winning the war on religious pluralism and church-state separatism.

Losing the War on Xmas #2 - Public Spaces

2011-12-02T07:47:00.000-08:00

Unlike the Occupy movement, in America, Christmas is literally everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to find a downtown anywhere in this nation where the shops haven't dolled up for the season, and most often the city council has also elected to spend some green on greenery and banners and the like. Here are just a few examples: OKC, Chicago, Rochester.

Now, some Christians are going to say that there are too many pretty lights and not enough Baby Jesus in the public spaces (not true) but that is a bit like winning a major battle and complaining that it just wasn't enough of a rout. No one can walk downtown without being visually assualted by a thousand little reminders that the Christmas season is upon us.

Not only has Christmas attained a unique position as the only religious holiday granted to all state and federal employees, but it is also the holiday upon which by far the most collective effort is spent upon decoration and promotion. Rejoice, defenders of Christmas! You've won again.

Losing the War on Xmas #1 - Officially Happy Holidays

2011-12-01T13:33:00.000-08:00

The federal calendar is loaded with various days of recognition, some far more widely recognized than others. Here is a list of the most important of them all: [PDF]

In the PDF, do have a long look at the list of holidays recognized by the State of Oklahoma. Can we explain their importance in terms of general overarching themes? We have several holidays recognizing some of the greatest movements for social and political change (Independence Day, Labor Day, MLK Day, and quite arguably Veterans Day and Memorial Day as well) and two holidays in recognition of the turning of the calendar (New Years and the annual harvest festival that we call Thanksgiving in North America) and a couple of celebrations of individual leaders (President's Day and MLK) who have made outstanding contributions to moving America forward.

That just leaves Christmas. What's that even doing on the list? If it is essentially just another solstice festival, we could surely lump it in with the others marking changing of the seasons. If it is something more (as Christians generally claim) we are forced to the conclusion that Christmas is a uniquely religious holiday during which all of America pauses (except for Chinese take-out restaurants - God bless 'em) in order to pay homage to one particular religion.

This counts as a distinct victory in the War on Christmas. Take heart, soldiers of theocracy. You won this battle back in June of 1870.

What's up with the 1% - Trends in annual income

2011-10-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I posted very briefly on the topic of whether the very rich are getting richer and thereby driving the mostly peaceful youth uprising we've seen in the streets and parks of major American cities. I am satisfied that the overall wealth inequality in our society hasn't changed that much in my lifetime, at least according to the numbers given in table two of this report. Today's graph is about income disparity over time, and the data are from the same table, which are ultimately derived from the Survey of Consumer Finances conducted by the Federal Reserve Board.

(click to enlarge)

Here we can see two things right off the bat. Firstly, the top %1 are indeed taking more and more money home each year, as the red portion of the chart climbs erratically from 12.8 to 21.3% of the total income. Secondly, the next 19% of earners are holding relatively steady over time, as the overall shape of the entire graph is being driven by the shape of the 1% in red. So maybe the protesters really are on to something when they pin the blame on the 1% for the current state of affairs.

It is unclear to me, however, why people should feel worse off just because some other people are getting better off, although I've heard it is a well-documented aspect of human nature. Next time, we'll look at whether the middle class is itself being squeezed.

What's up with the 1% - Trends in net worth

2011-10-07T09:49:00.001-07:00

Last night on TRMS we were treated to this graph of percentage income increases over the years. It made me think, is annual income what this is really about? I had been given to understand that the problem is wealth disparity, rather than income disparity. Maybe, though, I've been misled, so let's look at the numbers.

On the theory that wealth disparity might actually be a major component of the collective angst, I dug into this report to find out how net worth (defined on page 6) has trended since 1983:

(click to enlarge)
The results shown above (taken from table 2 on page 44) were really quite surprising, at least to me. It turns out that the top 1% aren't going gangbusters after all, at least not if the Levy Economics Institute is to be trusted on such matters. Moreover, to the extent that the top earners are getting even wealthier, it is primarily on account of the top 5%, rather than the top 1% which have been trending flat for two and a half decades. So, five-percenters, consider yourself warned. Once the rabble eat the super-rich, you're next.

Tomorrow: Income trends

Celebrate Freedom

2011-07-04T07:04:00.000-07:00

On account of my wife's pleadings and our mutual lack of closet space, I had to get rid of a number of old t-shirts this morning. Among them was an old favorite with an American flag pictured waving across the front, and the phrase "Celebrate Freedom" emblazoned thereunder.

I would love to celebrate freedom, but it's difficult to do so when I cannot help but thinking of how many of our fellow citizens we deprive of liberty when compared to other nations whom we condescending think of as less libertarian than ourselves. You can lie to yourself and blithely "celebrate freedom" as if we Americans enjoy liberties that other developed countries are sorely lacking, or else you can get real and do something to address the underlying problems which have lead to our current status as the world's leading jailer.

Happy Independence Day!

2011-07-02T07:02:00.000-07:00

Signage at Moore Liquor
Photo credit: Danny Wallace

Today is July 2^nd, the anniversary of the date in 1776 on which the Second Continental Congress voted to formally cut legal ties with Great Britain by adopting the Lee Resolution. This momentous event prompted John Adams to write the following to his wife on July 3^rd:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more...

Turns out he was only off by a couple of days, because Americans were so taken with the wording of the subsequent declaration of independence to the British that they pretty much disregarded the fact that the colonies had formally voted for independence two days earlier. A cynic might say that the triumph of style over substance in American self-governance took all of 48 hours, but the full story is just a bit more complicated, but we'll not go into it just now.

According to Professor James R. Heintze, one of the first celebrations of the 4th of July took place two years later, in 1778, as "General George Washington direct[ed] his army to put 'green boughs' in their hats, issue[d] them a double allowance of rum, and order[ed] a Fourth of July artillery salute" from his headquarters in New Jersey.

Which brings me to the problem of rum. I'm a fan of rum, especially Puerto Rican rum, and it seems that we Okies cannot buy any rum on July 4th (because it is Independence Day) or on July 3rd (because it is the Lord's Day). So, if I want to celebrate July 4th in grand Washingtonian style, with a double helping of my favorite rum, I've got to get my ass out to the liquor store today. On that note, I'm off to Moore Liquor, because it seems that they alone are willing to publicly condemn the foolishness and irony of celebrating our national independence by curtailing our individual liberties.

Movie review - The Ledge

2011-07-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Do not read this post if you have yet to enjoy The Ledge. Seriously, turn back now. Here are several helpful links which paint this film as a pro-atheist masterpiece. Click on those, then go watch the show.

Still here? Not to be reflexively contrarian, but I think that after thoroughly enjoying this well-executed and suspenseful thriller, we should take a moment to ponder the following: Does this movie tend to reinforce some of the worst stereotypes which are laid on us unbelievers in America?

Atheists are often portrayed as arrogant and caustic, ever ready to take the slightest excuse to passionately attack any expression of religious faith. Granted, I’m exactly like that myself, but then I’m pretty much of an all-around asshole, as my few friends will happily confirm. I’ve noticed, however, that most of my comrades at the local freethought group don’t take nearly such a combative approach. Unlike me, they are frequently fairly friendly, even in the face of faith-based foolishness. I suppose one could make the argument that the protagonist was in this movie was goaded by unsolicited expressions of homophobia, but the viewer gets the sense that he is pretty much always like this.

We unbelievers are thought of by theistic moralists as sexually unrestrained, indifferent to the sanctity of marriage and the Golden Rule. The protagonist perfectly demonstrates all of these unpleasant qualities by deliberately seducing his neighbor’s wife, in precisely the same way that his wife had been seduced away from him – screwing unto others as he had been screwed, rather than doing unto them as he would be done by.

We are also thought of as Nietzschean, arrogant, and selfish. While this might be true of the hard-core Ayn-Randroids, it is not true of the vast majority of us. The protagonist of this movie, however, acts in the spirit of a Randian leading man, taking charge in every situation and even pressuring one of his subordinates (whom he had brought on and could presumably let go) to into a sexual relationship. There is a reason people get sacked for this sort of behavior nowadays, especially when they don’t prove invariably irresistible to the opposite sex. Had the male lead looked less like Charlie Hunnam and more like the bosses I've known, we might have instantly realized just how creepy his unsolicited come-ons really were.

What just kills me about all this seductive nonsense is that none of it was essential to the plot line. The male and female leads could have fallen in love simply by spending too much innocent time together and not ever realizing their inner feelings until they were mutually overwhelmed. Granted, that’s a bit of a trope, but then the scheming seduction of a submissive female by a dominant male is even more overused and timeworn, as tropes go.

Speaking of submissive females, can I grouse about Liv Tyler’s character for just a moment? She doesn’t seem to have an independent thought in her head. She goes from being told what to do by her crippling addiction, to being told what to do by her pimp, to being told what to do by her church and her husband, to being told what to do by her godless boss and eventual lover. At no time does she take a stand against the flow of events as they pour over her. No wonder she talks to goddamn softly the whole time. I’ve never met a woman quite like this character in the real world, and with any luck I never will.

To sum up, insufferably arrogant and inordinately sexy atheist man seduces unbelievably submissive and similarly sexy Christian woman. Psychopathic jealous husband takes Old Testament commands to heart and does what comes naturally. In the end, everyone gets that which they should have seen coming, and we can all go home happy, with most of our worst stereotypes about men, women, atheists, and Christians more-or-less intact.

Contradiction #30 - Vicarious punishment?

2011-06-30T06:30:00.000-07:00

SAB #30

We have in our Bibles a few Bible verses which clearly indicate that children ought not be put to death for the sins of their parents.

What then are we to make of verses described divinely ordained genocide in the Hexateuch, wherein the soldiers are ordered to completely destroy "the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites" leaving "alive nothing that breathes" as they find themselves stabbing eastward into the Promised Land, wiping out city after city along the way.

Moreover, we have the following from Isaiah 14:21-22 (YLT):

Prepare ye for his sons slaughter; Because of the iniquity of their fathers, They rise not, nor have possessed the land, Nor filled the face of the world [with] cities. And I have risen up against them, (The affirmation of Jehovah of Hosts,) And have cut off, in reference to Babylon, Name and remnant, and continuator and successor, The affirmation of Jehovah.

Isaiah 14 is basically one long fuckyoulogy to the late king of Babylon, which seems like a harmless bunch of invective until we get to the part at the end praising YHWH for wiping out all the sons of Babylon.

I would suppose the apologetical approach to this problem is to carve out an exception for divinely ordained genocide, so the rule should be taken to read "Do not kill the children for the sins of their fathers, unless that sin happens to be the sin of being born into the wrong tribe."

Contradiction #29 - Guided by voices (nigh unto Damascus)

2011-06-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

SAB #29

Here are two stories related to us by the author of gLuke. Actually, it is the same story, twice, with somewhat variant details. In the first account, it is said that Paul traveling companions "stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man" while in the second one it is said that they "saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake" unto Saul of Tarsus.

The only possible apologetical approach to this problem is to claim that the verb signifying hearing means something different in each story, perhaps merely "hearing" in the first case but "comprehending" in the second. One could well imagine Paul's companions hearing an indictinct sound like the adults speaking in Charlie Brown animated specials. It would seem that this approach to reconciling these verses is the one favored by the NASB.

The problem with this solution is that the same verb is used in both places and there is no reason from context to believe that hearing with comprehension is not implied in both places. Indeed, I've yet to see any exmaples in the NT in which ἀκούω is taken to mean hearing a voice without making out the words. Even in verses like Mark 4:12 is it taken as read that the listeners are understanding the words and the surface meanings of the parables, but not the profound meanings thereof. Unless such examples prove forthcoming, it is the utmost in special pleading to claim that this word means "hearing a voice without catching the words" in just this one place, given how often it is used throughout the NT to denote hearing voices.

Contradiction #28 - An unforgivable sin?

2011-06-28T06:28:00.000-07:00

SAB #28

When I was a kid, I was travelling for some reason with my Dad and his best friend. Possibly they both brought their whole families along, I really cannot now recall the context of the trip. At any rate, they got into a really energetic argument over whether or not there is a unforgivable sin named in the Bible, and if so what it might be. As best as I can now recall, one of them vigorously defended the view that a particular sort of blasphemy is a divinely condemned thoughtcrime (or perhaps spoken offense) which God will never forgive, while the other man maintained that all synoptic references to an unforgivable sin were not really about blasphemy per se but were rather about the total rejection of the Christian gospel.

This apologetic has a certain appeal, because it is difficult to imagine anyone but a confirmed apostate taking excessive joy in blaspheming the most obscure third of the Christian Trinity. That said, the crimes of blasphemy and apostasy have always been listed and punished separately, both in Jewish tradition and in Christian catechisms. The apologetical attempt to cleave them together into a single unforgiveable sin seems hamfisted at best.

Moreover, if the universe is such that there is only one word or deed or state of belief that will earn someone irrevocable eternal damnation, surely a loving deity would make it abundantly clear to his beloved creations what exactly that might be. The fact of widespread confusion on this issue, a confusion that I first encountered so many years ago, militates against the position that an all-powerful being actually wants everyone to be saved.

Contradiction #27 - Touching Reunions

2011-06-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

SAB #27

This alleged contradiction hinges on the notion that Jesus' prohibition on touching, which he spoke unto Mary Magdalene in John 20:17, was a general prohibition which applies to everyone in the time between the bodily resurrection and the ascension. For once, I found the apology at Looking Unto Jesus more or less satisfactory, although the Fourfold Gospel reads waaay too much into the Greek.

Contradiction #24 - Does God tempt?

2011-06-24T06:24:00.000-07:00

SAB #24

James 1:13 clearly states that "God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man" but we can see several examples in the Hebrew Scriptures in which God directly tempts his followers to do evil things, such as when God tempted Abraham to perform a child sacrifice, or when God tempts David to conduct a census. We also see at least one example of God sending an otherworldly Adversary on a mission to tempt his beloved servant, a mission which was both approved and subtly suggested by God himself.

I've yet to see any worthwhile treatments of this problem, but perhaps I'm not looking hard enough. Suggestions are welcome.

Contradiction #22 - Does God repent?

2011-06-22T06:22:00.000-07:00

SAB #22

This one is a theological puzzle about the nature of the Hebrew God, and a doozy to boot. The central question here is whether the God of the Hebrew Bible ever changes his mind and repents of an earlier course of action. Here are four key passages which argue that YHWH never repents. All but the last of these four verses make use of the Hebrew word נָחַם (Strong's H5162) which is the very same word used in loads of other verses to indicate divine repentence, usually accompanied by a changing in course of dealings with the covenant people.

In order to untie this Gordian knot, the apologist must maintain that נָחַם means one thing in Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29 and Ezekiel 24:14, but must be taken in context to mean something else entirely in all those other verses. Good luck with that.

Contradiction #20 - Who is righteous?

2011-06-20T06:20:00.000-07:00

SAB #20

The problem here is one of equivocation between at least two meanings of the word "righteous" in the OT. The relevant terms here are Strong's H6662 and H6663, and they are used alternately to describe total blamelessness or to describe righteousness in the everyday sense of the term, that of upstanding character which is nonetheless well short of moral perfection. All an apologist has to do to wriggle out of this bind is to note that Hebrew and Greek words (like any other words) can take on different meanings in different contexts.

Contradiction #19 - New Moon sacrifice?

2011-06-19T06:19:00.000-07:00

SAB #19

The problem here is that YHWH himself prescribes two different sacrificial recipies for the same religious festival. The problem with the problem, here, is that any true believer is free to say that God changes the rules for worship however and whenever He wants. Indeed, all Christians are theologically committed to the proposition that God changed at least a few ground rules a bit with each new covenant.

Contradiction #18 - How did Judas die?

2011-06-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

The two Bible stories depicting Judas' death contradict each other on various points. The various attempts to cobble all these bits together are actually quite entertaining reading. They all depend upon ignoring the plain reading of one passage in order to forcefully interpret it in terms of the other one.

It should be clear that Judas either died from hanging by his neck or else from a particularly nasty fall. To try to pretend that both of these things happened in a bizarre tragicomical sequence is to say that one's own proposed synthesis takes priorty over a straightforward reading of either text on its own terms.

Contradiction #17 - Jesus testifies of himself?

2011-06-17T06:17:00.000-07:00

The next purported contradiction in the SAB short list is between two passages in gJohn: John 5:31-40 and John 8:12-20.

In the first passage, Jesus seems to say that if he alone bore witness of himself, his testimony should not be considered true, but then he goes on to marshal other purported witnesses to the truth of his ministry. In the second passage, Jesus seems to say that even if he does testify on his own behalf, his testimony ought to be believed because of such other witnesses. Taking both statements fully in context, I honestly don't see much of a problem here. The contradiction only holds up if we completely eliminate the context and then take the remaining snippets completely literally. I don't recommend pursuing this one.

Contradiction #16 - When was Jesus crucified?

2011-06-16T06:16:00.000-07:00

This purported contradiction is clearest in the NIV, one of the few translations which takes the trouble to translate into our modern time system. At the very least, this shows that the NIV translators were dedicated to methodological consistency in this particular case.

It appears that Jesus was crucified either at 9 a.m. or else sometime after noon. This may seem like a small detail to some readers, but the inerrantist literalist apologist must find some way around it, which means that he must find fault with one or both of the NIV translations of these verses.

Contradiction #15 - Did the Nephilim die in the Noahide flood?

2011-06-15T06:15:00.000-07:00

SAB #15

First off, who are the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33? Evidently, they are a race of misbegotten superhumans, born of unholy unions between mortal women and fallen angels. At this point, the average Bible reader may become uncomfortable on account of the obvious parallels to pagan myths of demigods, but it gets so much weirder if one strays outside of the usual canonical scriptures.

At any rate, the question for the apologist here is how this mythological race of preternatural giants survived the great flood, in which "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died." I have yet to see a passable reply to this problem.

Contradiction #14 - Who rose first?

2011-06-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

SAB #14

This one is too easily dismissed by all but the most dedicated literalist. The apologists reply here is that Jesus was "the first that should rise from the dead" into a new (immortal and incorruptible but nonetheless physical) body, while all the other Biblical resurrections are either spiritual or else mere bodily resuscitations back into original mortal form.

This is a good enough reply, except that it raises the awkward question of what became of Jesus' physical form upon his ascension into the vacuum of space. Presumably, it has been placed in cold storage awaiting Jesus return to the planet Earth. Also, it is presumably being retrofitted with bizarre orally deployable weaponry.

Contradiction #13 - Accursed for lack of figs

2011-06-13T06:13:00.000-07:00

SAB #13

This is a fascinating problem of narrative chronology arising from difference between two of synoptic gospels, at Mark 11:19-21 and Matt 21:17-19. These events are narrated as having taken place on the same morning, but while Mark has Peter hearkening back to Jesus cursing the fig tree the previous day, Matthew depicts the event as taking place all in a single morning.

Probably the best way to visualize the problem in its entirety is to visit the CARM page exploring this issue in some detail and including a handy parallel table of events. Upon seriously considering this problem, the innerantist will be forced into fabricating ad hoc solutions (e.g. two fig trees) or else reconsidering whether both of these sources can be taken to be chronologically accurate.

Contradiction #12 - Who bought the field of blood?

2011-06-12T06:12:00.000-07:00

SAB #12

Matt 27:6-8 and Acts 1:16-19 seem to be telling very different stories about a certain place called the field of blood. One has only to read these stories side by side to get the sense that something went amiss between the synoptic authors of gLuke and gMatt when they both attempted to explain the mythical relation of this particular field to the literary figure of Judas Iscariot. Two obvious questions arise here: Why is this field called the field of blood? and Who purchased said field?

Contradiction #10 - Who ascended first?

2011-06-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

SAB #10

The question here can be put very straightfowardly: According to the Bible who was the first person to ascend directly to heaven? There are three possible answers to be found in the Bible itself: Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus. The Johannine gospel seems to be distinctly at odds with the Hebrew scriptures on this question.

Here is one apologist's reply which I found immensely entertaining, since it relies on the idea that Enoch and Elijah were translated into an indescribable limbo (which doesn't lead to paradise) rather than to the bosom of Abraham wherein righteous Jews are said to abide. J.P.H. is ignoring various Hebrew sources and traditions in a valiant attempt to remain ignorant of the fate of Enoch and Elijah according to the Hebrew Scriptures, which he claims are the revealed and perfect word of God. Seems like he should be trying a bit harder than that.

Contradiction #9 - Zin or Sin?

2011-06-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/waterrock.html

The problem here is that a story from the Book of Exodus is retold in the Book of Numbers in a totally different setting. Here are the relevant verses and here are the relevant maps: Kadesh Barnea, Rephidim.

Here is a single map to illustrate the distance between these two regions and cities:

I've not yet found any harmonies of these two stories, but I'm guessing that some apologists will fall back on "nearly the same story happened twice" as we've seen in gospel harmonies. Naturally, I'm hoping for a more creative and interesting solution.

Contradiction #8 - David turned not aside

2011-06-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/davidsin.html

2 Samuel 24:10
And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the LORD, I have sinned greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O LORD, take away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.

1 Kings 15:5 (KJV)
Because David did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, and turned not aside from any thing that he commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.

This one pretty much speaks for itself. For an apologist to get out of this one, he has to maintain that (somehow) David "sinned greatly" in the matter of the census, but at the same time he "turned not aside" from the Lord's commandments concerning the census.

Contradiction #7 - Unshod and staveless?

2011-06-07T06:07:00.000-07:00

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/barefoot.html

This one is a bit unusual in that the alleged contradiction arises from an in-house dispute within the synoptic gospels, that is, between gMark and the other two. Here are all the relevant passages: KJV, NIV.

The author of Mark makes it clear that the disciples are to "be shod with sandals" and carry a staff, while the other two authors seem to have Jesus saying that the disciples can go forth without even such necessaries as these.

I would suppose that a common apologetical approach would be to say that it is understood that Jesus was talking about packing extra staves in Matt 10:10 and Luke 9:3 and that these verses must be taken in light of his earlier insistence in Mark 6:8 that they are to take just one walking stick. The only problem with this approach is that the authors of gMatt and gLuke both dropped the part about wearing sandals in their retelling of Mark's story! Such a deliberate redaction does not argue for reading the later books in light of the former, but rather for ignoring the earlier tradition in favor of the revised version of the story.

Contradiction #6 - Did Jesus Baptise?

2011-06-06T06:06:00.000-07:00

The next contradiction is a small conundrum from the Gospel attributed to John. Full context here. All Bible verses are taken, of course, from the one and only perfectly preserved English translation of the Bible.

John 3:22-23
After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judaea; and there he tarried with them, and baptized. And John also was baptizing in Aenon near to Salim, because there was much water there: and they came, and were baptized.

John 4:1-3
When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, (Though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples,) He left Judaea, and departed again into Galilee.

Prior to reading chapter 4, a straightforward reading of 3:22 would lead most people to conclude that Jesus had both tarried and baptized with his disciples. When we get to 4:2, however, we find that Jesus should not be considered to have been personally engaged in acts of baptism. There are several possible hermeneutical workarounds for this problem.

One solution, suggested by Jerome Murphy-O'Connor (Professor of New Testament at the École Biblique in Jerusalem) is that these two verses were authored by two different people, the later of whom was attempting to put a midrashic gloss upon the earlier account. In an article published in New Testament Studies he posits the possibility of "a Johannine editor, whose specific contribution is to be found in the interpolation at John 4:2." This does not eliminate the contradiction inherent in a plain reading of these two passages, but it does explain how such contradictory passages could end up effectively side by side, evidently situated within the same gospel pericope.

Another solution has been suggested by Calvinist blogger Alan Maricle who claims that Jesus "didn't physically immerse people with His own hands" but rather deputized his disciples to do the baptizing for him. To accept this view, one must take John 3:22 to mean "he tarried with them and [they] baptized" while Jesus merely supervised. The problem with such an attempted reinterpretation is that the verb form of baptise doesn't allow for it. Here, βαπτίζω is used in the imperfect active indicative third person singular form. To quote Dr. Peter Moses, "In this verse we have the imperfect active indicative of baptizo in the third person singular. The imperfect tense shows continual action whilst the third person singular indicates that at this stage Jesus Himself kept on baptizing people."

There are other solutions, to be sure, such as the hypothesis that these two verses represent two distinct phases in Jesus' ministry. According to this model, Jesus personally baptized some of his early followers, and later deputized his inner circle to do the baptizing on his behalf or in his name. It borders on special pleading, however, to attempt to read this transformation of Jesus' ministry into a single pericope spanning John 3:22 through 4:3, describing a single missionary trip from Galilee into Judea.

Of all the possible solutions, I personally find Murphy-O'Connor's hypothesis most plausible, because it explains both the parathetical and paradoxical nature of 4:2, which reads on its face like an editor's note correcting an error in the original text. Of course, such a solution is not available to those who consider 4:2 to be inherent to an innerrant autograph, but it must be noted that (alas!) we simply do not have the original manuscripts.

Contradiction #5 - Baptizing in the Name of _______?

2011-06-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/baptism.html

This contradiction focuses on a fascinating little theological dispute over whether baptisms are to be performed in the name of Jesus (alone) or using the trinitarian formula of Matthew 28:19. Here are all the relevant verses: KJV, NIV

So far, all of the apologetical attempts to deal with this problem seem to hinge on the implicit claim that the author of Acts meant "in the name of" to mean something different than the author of gMatt when he uses the same Greek words. Obviously, this is unwarranted special pleading. Thus far, I've not found any convincing answers to this little conundrum, trivial though it may seem.

Contradiction #4 - Mystery Mom of Abijam

2011-06-04T18:40:00.000-07:00

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/abijam.html

The response to this problem is typically something along the lines of "Maachah is the daughter of Uriel and the granddaughter of Absalom" and this solution hinges on whether the Hebrew word "daughter" in 1 Kings 15:2 should be taken to mean "granddaughter" instead. I checked a couple of Hebrew lexica, and sure enough the word בַּת (bath) is one of very wide semantical extent, and can be used to describe literal daughters, adopted daughters, daughters of a tribe, and essentially any female descendants of a given ancestor, as in C.S. Lewis' coinage of "daughters of Eve" for all human females.

As to the problem of Maacha/Michaiah, the typical explanation is that the latter name is a theophoric honorific, while the former is a given name. The Bible doesn't actually state this, but it does have a plenitude of both throne names and theophoric names, so it's not an implausible explanation. Moreover, it seems likely to me that the chronicler had access to the four books of the kingdoms (Samuel and Kings) and therefore wouldn't have gotten the names just plain wrong.

Contradiction #3 - Father Abraham's faith (and works)

2011-06-03T06:03:00.000-07:00

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/abe_justified.html

This particular contradiction is so blatant that is needs only be pointed out: KJV, NIV.

No amount of hermaneutical contortionism is going to untie this gordian knot, seeing as the later verses (attributed to James) were written specifically to uphold the doctrine of faith plus works in order to counter the earlier Pauline doctrine of faith alone. Naturally, this has spawned Christian factions on both sides of the issue, entire denominations lined up on one side or the other of this first century debate.

Contradiction #2 - John the Baptist was Elijah the Prophet?

2011-06-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/elijah.html

The question here is a bit difficult to frame sensibly, partly because it is unclear what should be taken to mean when someone claims that one prophetic figure is (in some sense) the incarnation of an earlier prophetic figure. It is especially unclear when operating within a worldview that denies reincarnation in favor of another view.

The problem here is both shallower and deeper than it might seem. Let's start in the shallow end, with the sayings of Jesus from two of the synoptic gospels along with angelic testimony from the third:

Mark 9:10-13 (KJV)
And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean. And they asked him, saying, Why say the scribes that Elias must first come? And he answered and told them, Elias verily cometh first, and restoreth all things; and how it is written of the Son of man, that he must suffer many things, and be set at nought. But I say unto you, That Elias is indeed come, and they have done unto him whatsoever they listed, as it is written of him.

Matt 11:10-14 (KJV)
For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.

Luke 1:13-17 (KJV)
But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John. And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth. For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb. And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

Taking all the synoptics together, we are lead to believe that John the Baptist is to be identified (in some missional or spiritual sense) with Elijah the Prophet, especially respecting the fulfillment of a prophecy found in the final chapter of the Old Testament. Seems clear enough, that is, until we get to the fourth gospel.

John 1:19-25 (NASB)
This is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent to him priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” And he confessed and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” They asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” And he said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you, so that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am A VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS, ‘MAKE STRAIGHT THE WAY OF THE LORD,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.” Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, and said to him, “Why then are you baptizing, if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

Here we have John the Baptist flat-out denying that he is to be considered either Christ or Elijah in the sense those terms were taken to mean by his hearers. Instead of identifying himself with the prophecy of Malachi 4:5-6 he identifies himself with another prophecy from another prophet. How is this conflict between the synoptics and the Johannine narrative to be resolved?

A favorite apologetical trick consists of a bizarre reversal of the fallacy of equivocation, where the apologist explicitly claims that the same term (or phrase) takes on completely different meanings in similar biblical contexts. Here, the apologetical equivocation takes the following form:

1) "He is Elijah" means one thing in the synoptics
2) "He is Elijah" means something else in gJohn
:. He is both Elijah (sense 1) and not Elijah (sense 2)

This could be made to work, of course, if a good contextual or cultural reason is given (beyond special pleading for the sake of forced harmonization) to believe that we really should take the same phrase in two different senses. In this case, I've yet to see any good reasons given to warrant such semantical sleight of hand.

Contradiction #1 - Yeshua ben Yosef ben _______?

2011-06-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/joseph.html

The first of the alleged contradictions is a fairly straightforward question of fact: Who was Joseph's father? I defy anyone to attempt to answer this using only the gospels themselves without the benefit of commentators, exegetes, or would-be midrashic fabulists. Can anyone suss out Joseph's father sola scriptura, as it were?

If one has to resort to lexical legerdemain to explain away this problem, it comes down to how willing we are to entertain pleading for a special treatment of these texts, one which somehow or another avoids the plain meaning thereof.

R.A. Heinlein and the unsubtle art of the embedded editorial

2011-05-15T06:16:00.000-07:00

"Either you love Heinlein, or you hate him. Very few people are wishy-washy on the subject. When is the last time you found somebody who couldn't stand Arthur C. Clarke? Who loathed LeGuin? But when you mention Heinlein in certain circles, you can expect the `How Heinlein Changed My Life´ speech, or the `Why Heinlein Is An Over-Opinionated Hack´ speech."
- Britt R. Scharringhausen

I just finished reading Heinlein's final novel last week, and I'm still recovering from it. Not being a church-going fellow, I'm not used to sitting through sermons. As an Asimov fan, I'm especially unused to sermons embedded within what otherwise could have been a perfectly passable sci-fi novel. Consider the following:

Family decay: I think it came mainly from both parents working outside the home. It was said again and again that, from mid-century on, both parents had to have jobs just to pay the bills. If this was true, why was it not necessary in the first half of the century? How did labour-saving machinery and enormously increased productivity impoverish the family?

Seriously? Had RAH ever done a load of laundry by hand (soiled cloth diapers and all) he would have surely realized that working inside the home was at least as laborious as working outside the home until at least the middle of the 20^th century. Given that, it made sense to dedicate one full-time worker to all the various tasks associated with domesticity. However, as American homes came to be wired with electricity and filled with all manner of labor saving devices (dishwashers, washer/dryers, various other electrically operated cleaning machines, not to mention pre-portioned heat-and-serve meals) it became possible, if a bit exhausting, to keep house as a part-time job in the evenings. This in turn facilitated the entrance into the workplace of those who had previously been culturally conditioned to full time housekeeping, although it may be said that society and culture lagged behind by at least a few years. Decades, if you are expecting men to fully indulge their inner nesting instinct. To add insult to ignorance, this little editorial passage was allegedly authored by protagonist/narrator Maureen Johnson Smith Long, a woman who had personally experienced the various 20^th century transitions which allowed women to transition out of the home and into the office.

Here is another little editorial gem:

'Bread and Circuses' is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, the day marks the beginning of the end of that state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader - the barbarians enter Rome.’

The Roman Republic undoubtedly suffered from various systemic problems, but extending the franchise to every warm body was never nearly one of them. If he wanted an historical example to illustrate how universal suffrage leads to collapse under the ever-increasing weight of a welfare state, he should have kept looking. Come to think of it, the best example that comes immediately to mind of this allegedly inevitable phenomenon is 21st century Greece, but surely RAH didn't see it coming that the birthplace of democracy would eventually preside over its dotage.

Okay, just one more bit of blatant sermonizing:

Consider these:

1) 'Bread and Circuses'
2) The abolition of the pauper’s oath in Franklin Roosevelt’s first term;
3) ’Peer group’ promotion in public schools.

These three conditions heterodyne each other. The abolition of the pauper’s oath as a condition for public charity ensured that habitual failures, incompetents of every sort, people who can’t support themselves and people who won’t, each of these would have the same voice in ruling the country, in
assessing taxes and spending them, as (for example) Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie or Andrew Jackson. Peer group promotion ensured that the franchise would be exercised by ignorant incompetents. And 'Bread and Circuses’ is what invariably happens to a democracy that goes that route: unlimited spending on 'social’ programmes ends in national bankruptcy, which historically is always followed by dictatorship.

Historically? Always? This would imply that there are at least a handful of examples of democracies which, having granting the universal franchise, subsequently collapsed under the weight of welfare programs and were thereby replaced by dictatorships. I hereby defy Heinlein's supporters to come up with two or three.

Truly great science fiction authors, such as Asimov and Herbert and Morrow, do not merely sermonize from the mouths of their main characters (though they have all been known to indulge in this on occasion) but rather weave for us a narrative in which the moral of the story is ambiguous and the morality of the characters doubly so, thus permitting the reader to engage in robust ethical reasoning and drawing their own conclusions. Alas, the libertine libertarianism of To Sail Beyond the Sunset doesn't nearly do this. Even on highly controversial matters (e.g. free-love, voluntary incest, the role of women, the limits of capitalism) the reader is provided only one narrow point-of-view, all else is summarily dismissed.

BHO pwns UBL - GWOT FTW!

2011-05-02T06:16:00.000-07:00

First off, to all of my friends who say it is inappropriate to revel in the death of a human being, I implore you to loosen your codpieces and tighten your circles of moral concern a bit, just enough so as to exclude high-achieving mass-murderers. Those who take their greatest joy in massive exhibitions of suffering and death do not warrant the level of empathy that we extend to other living beings, such as snakes and spiders and streptococcus. You don't need to be a hardcore utilitarian to do the maths on this one. Humanity is better off without people like Saddam and Usama, and this is true whether or not it will ultimately prove possible to civilize, modernize, and liberalize either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Is it not clear that we can save lives in the present by going after the apex of any given murderous organization or regime, as opposed to waging conventional war against countless waves of newly-minted foot-soldiers? Without the meme-machines at the top and the malevolent mullahs who support them, these recruits would never have been recruited.

Morever, for those of us who support the Obama administration, it is clear that the GOP had planned to attack his presidency as soft on terror, while the wingnut fringe has worked to make that position look mainstream by claiming that Obama sympathizes with at least some of the ideology of radical Islamism. They might yet use this strategy, in fact, I sincerely hope they try to fly that old lead balloon. There is nothing quite like vanquishing actual enemies to bolster one's national security credentials.

Finally, we need to look forward here at how many innocent lives will be spared now that the world's foremost network of institutionalized mass murder has lost its greatest single human resource. No one in the movement has the articulation, charisma, intelligence, folk hero status, monetary resources, socio-political connections, training, and leadership experience of bin Laden. While he will be succeeded, he can never be replaced.

Book of Joshua

2011-03-17T06:16:00.000-07:00

We covered the Book of Joshua in our Bible study last night, and I'm just going to share a few of my thoughts here. No time for a detailed chapter by chapter breakout this week.

First off, I don't see a morally significant difference between the Joshuaite concept of herem and the Mohammedean concept of jihad. Both are essentially holy wars of conquest, fought in the name of God and justified by the idea of divine sanction.

Secondly, this is a surprisingly earthly book with far more talk of bloody conquest and real estate transactions than piety, and when it does touch upon matters of personal piety it often confounds it with the disposition of personal property, as in the case of Achan.

Finally, we still haven't seen much in the way of moral progress so far. Kill everyone and destroy everything is still the rule of the day, whether applied to entire tribes (Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, along with the peoples of Jericho and Ai) or when applied in cases of individual justice (as in the destruction of Achan along with all of his wives and children and property). I suppose this is to be expected when morality is reduced to "whatever the priests tell us that God told them" as opposed to having to reason out for ourselves which actions will have desirable consequences.

When it comes down to it, it is really hard to believe that people can read this book, ponder it for a bit, and still somehow come to believe it was ultimately inspired by someone who loves everyone.

Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19 (Ki Teitzei)

2011-03-02T23:45:00.000-08:00

Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19

What a gloriously disturbing collection of verses are these? Why were they never covered in Sunday School?

Here is the rundown with commentary:

21:10-14 describes how to ~~forcibly subjugate and frequently rape~~ "marry" one of the aforementioned [Numbers 31] virgin girls whom you took captive in battle after killing her relatives. That is, until you grow tired of her and yearn for new captives. Simply divine!

21:18-21 describes how to run the trial and public execution of a rebellious and party-going son. Martin Sheen, take note.

21:22-23 describes a curse which the L-rd G-d puts upon certain dead people because of how other people cruelly killed them. Interestingly, Christians tend to think these verses apply in some bizarro-world way to Jesus of Nazareth, whose divine cursing allegedly brought forth a blessing.

22:5 - God also hates cross-dressers. British satirists, take note.

22:8 - As it happens, I own a home with a flat roof and no parapet, and evidently that's just one more reason for Jehovah to hate me. I've done worse, of course.

22:12 - God loves tassels! Inexplicably, though, he hates Mardi Gras.

22:13-22 - If a girl doesn't bleed from her crotch on her wedding night, the men of the city shall publicly stone her to death. Divine sex tip: Men, try to avoid foreplay and don't be gentle!

22:28 - Punishment for raping a virgin is (wait for it...) fifty shekels of silver and an unbreakable vow of marriage to the rape victim. There is no punishment for raping a widow, evidently. Also, how must it be for the virgin to get the chance to be raped on a daily basis by the fellow who ruined sex for her in the first place? Now where did the first-wave feminists ever get the idea that the Bible is a patriarchal, barbaric, and oppressive document?

23:1-3 - God is a real man's man and refuses to be seen with guys who are less than fully equipped and properly endowed, if ya know what I mean. Also, God loathes bastards and their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids, for some reason or another. Probably the sanctity of marriage or some bullshit like that. Also, He is a bit racist when it comes to certain non-Israelites, but we sort of caught the drift of that already.

23:13-14 - Please don't take my word for it, just go read these verses yourself. Right now. Otherwise you'll think I'm exaggerating when I say that these verses commit thoroughgoing Biblical literalists to the odd position that God is angered when He steps in poop. No, really.

23:15 - The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 may not have been unconstitutional, but it was clearly unbiblical. I've got to remember to go book-mining for references to this verse in the sermons and polemics that went back and forth between northern and southern preachers at the time.

23:17 - No whores and sodomites allowed.

23:20 - Confirms certain European Gentile stereotypes about Jewish custom, oddly enough, by specifically commanding that it is okay to screw over goyim (and only goyim) by lending at interest.

24:1 - Whenever the authors cannot think of a rational justification for a new rule, they always whip out "That would be detestable in the eyes of the LORD." Wish they'd had invented an abbreviation or one word acronym for that.

25:12 - Women may have their hands cut off for an oddly specific offense. I'm wondering if I go through all of WestLaw or Lexis if I can find any instances of this particular form of physical assault. I'm also wondering whether this law arose out of something that the priestly scribe who wrote it shudders to recall. Given the ban against those "wounded in the stones" this could have been a career-ending injury for him.

While this passage ends with yet another ruthless exhortation to wage total genocide, I'm going to skip lightly over that and attempt to end this post on a positive note. This passage has several positive injunctions not to oppress the poor, strangers, orphans, and widows, or even hardworking oxen, and moreover it lays out a rudimentary system of welfare at 24:19-22. So that was a nice change of pace from all the smiting and cursing. Even a blind squirrel finds a tasty nut every once in a while.

Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9 (Shoftim)

2011-03-01T03:01:00.000-08:00

Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9

At the end of chapter 16, we learn that the L-rd hates sticks and stones (growing trees and graven images depending upon one's translation) for some reason. Presumably it is because he is homicidally jealous of other gods. I'm not even going to get into the whole thing about what it might imply about someone that they are jealous of a mere phallic symbol, such as an Asherah pole. Seriously, I'm not even going to get into that.

In 17, we find that the penalty for idolatry (as with apostasy and blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking) is death, which is evidently a sort of one-size-kills-all solution to lawbreaking in the Israelite theocracy. At least they are requiring multiple witnesses and a rudimentary trial now. Also in ch 17 we get something akin to an outline for theocratic government, in which the priests pass on the laws and sit in judgement in individual cases, while the king faithfully executes the laws he receives from the priests. We are then reminded once again to give various foods and goods to the priests, a class of people who swear that they didn't actually write this book by themselves.

We are reminded at 18:9-13 once again that the ancient Hebrews considered it perfectly plausible to speak of divination, enchantment, channeling, witchcraft, wizardry, and necromancy, not as superstitious attempts to deal with the unknown and unknowable (as we post-englightenment moderns tend to see such things) but rather as genuinely magical practices which connected people to an actual world of demons and ghosts. Also, they are to be considered an abomination to the Lord, which would explain why it was widely considered moral and just to torture to death those accused of engaging in these fictional pastimes. It still is today in some parts of the world, and it must be noted that the Bible itself is still helping people to murder other people on account of these ridiculous and barbarous ideas.

We've already covered the cities of refuge, so we'll skip lightly over those for now.

Chapter 20 has some fascinating instructions on how to go to war. Send home everyone with urgent business at home, such as a new vineyard, house, or fiancee (some really lucky guys might have had all three) and everyone who tends towards cowardice. Thus the army can focus more sharply on the tasks at hand, that is, conquest, enslavement, genocide, and plunder -- not necessarily in that particular order.

We then get yet another divine injunction to genocidal total warfare at 20:16-17: "[O]f the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee ." This is the part where I don't make a tactless comment about an ideologically supremacist tribe waging a war of conquest for the sake of Lebensraum im Osten. Once again, I'm not even going to go there. See how restrained and diplomatic I can be?

Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17 (Re'eh)

2011-02-28T06:16:00.000-08:00

Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17

More memetic engineering up front here: Pass on these religious memes you get the big carrot. Fail to pass them on, you'll get the giant stick. We've heard this many times before by now, and it never fails to inspire.

Deut 12 reads like an attempt to centralize religious authority in the cult of the temple (the same folks who would go on to become the Sanhedrin in Jesus' time) and ensure that they don't have to compete with other religious ideas or priests. More carrots and sticks at the end of this chapter.

I'd like everyone to read Deut 13:6-9 just to get an idea of how serious these memes are about protecting themselves from contamination. Any apostasy or idolatry merits an immediate death sentence, and it is ordered here that we take care not to pity the victim nor hearken unto her cries for mercy. No doubt apologist gits and post-modernist twats will see this as an understandable cultural innovation, necessary to preserve the ideological purity cult of YHWH, but it looks like cold-blooded murder to me. I should also point out that this particular passage is inextricably conceptually linked to the first of the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20 (one states the crime, the other states the punishment) and therefore modern calls for posting those verses on government property should be seen as far more sinister than generally supposed. A few verses later, the authors go from murder to genocide, ordering the destruction of entire cities who fail to worship the right god. The various bloody religious wars of both the Middle East and Europe have demonstrated that this principle lived on for centuries after being put to paper in the Torah.

Chapter 14: God loves uni-brows. Who knew? Also, it turns out that some animals are unclean to eat. I think we've covered this material before. I love the line about seething a kid in it's mother's milk. Caught my son doing that just the other day.

Chapter 15 is mostly restatement of earlier law, with a few odd bits thrown in. Curiously enough, the Jews are encouraged to be moneylenders to non-Jews herein this chapter. Personally, I don't mind usury, but evidently it leads to bitterness in some quarters.

Chapter 16 gives us the rough outline of the feasts of passover, weeks, and booths. One gets the sense that the audience is taken to be familiar with how these festivals are traditionally celebrated.

Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25 (Eikev)

2011-02-27T08:32:00.001-08:00

Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25

Herein we have the interesting command never to bring certain things into the home, "Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it: but thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing."

What counts as an abomination in the Bible? Loads of things; including but not limited to the following: shellfish, eagles, osprays, flying creeping things, creeping things that creepeth, gays (but not lesbians), graven images, and so forth. Do check around your home and see if you've any of these things hanging about, and adjust your lack of detestation accordingly, if you happen to believe that this book is indeed a treasure trove of timeless wisdom revealed by a perfectly wise and loving being.

Chapters 8-11 contain a good deal of recap of earlier books in the Torah. I'm thinking that if you want to read the Herbrew Bible, you can start in Deuteronomy and still get by fairly well, because there are several "Previously on the Bible" summary montages, just like in serial television dramas.

This passage closes out pretty much as it began, with exhortation to obey and pass on the correct memes, coupled with an array outsized carrots and sticks.

Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11 (Va'etchanan)

2011-02-26T02:26:00.000-08:00

Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11

I may be mistaken about this, but it appears that this passage has the very first instances of full-bodied monotheism in the book so far at 4:28, 4:35-9 and 6:4. Compare these statements of unique godhood to earlier expressions of polytheistism and henotheism at Exodus 15:11, 18:11, 23:13, and indeed within this very passage at 5:7 and 6:14. One definitely gets the sense that Israel is gradually moving from henotheism which acknoledges the other gods as real but inferior to true monotheism which says that there is only one being we can call a god.

In other news, we get a restatement of much earlier law here, including the commandments of Exodus 20 at Deut 5. At 5:17 in particular, we get "Thou shalt not kill." which is just rich, given the various divinely-ordained genocides we've read through to this point in the book, not to mention the occasional bout of divinely-commanded fratricide. Indeed, the command not to kill is followed later in this very passage by this rare gem at 7:1-2:

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them

So I suppose the rule really should be taken to mean, "Thou shalt not kill of thine own volition and initiative but thou shalt surely kill whomever thy rulers have commanded you to kill." Also, it is okay to covet and steal thy neighbors cattle if thy neighbors happen to be Bashanites. So much for the Ten Commandments, when there is a war of consquest to be waged. Apparently these absolute moral norms that apologists keep going on about aren't all that absolute after all.

Chapter six is fairly standard memetic engineering: Protect these memes and replicate them at all costs and you will be greatly blessed, otherwise you'll be horribly cursed; pass the memes on to your offspring, don't try out other memes, etc.

Chapter seven starts off with an injunction to total warfare and thoroughgoing genocide:

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them...

The chapter goes on to justify such a conquest of middle-eastern lebensraum in terms of racial supremacy:

For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

A comparison comes to mind with another nation seeking living space for its master race, claiming "God with Us" as it marched forth, but it would just be tactless to put that to paper, and so I'll stop right here.

Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22 (Devarim)

2011-02-25T02:25:00.000-08:00

Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22

Here at the beginning of Deut we realize pretty early on that this book is a redaction of ealier material, because it covers much of the same ground, with minor changes along the way. Note that the D author writes Moses' father-in-law out of the narrative at 1:14, wherein Moses alone takes the credit for the scheme to delegate authority originally credited to Jethro in Exodus 18. The rest of this passage is essentially a recap of earlier books, which has described the fearfulness of the Israelites to conquer the land, their wanderings in the wilderness, defeats of Hesbon and Bashan, and the hardcore genocidal reality of total warfare, as depicted at 2:34 "And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain."

Numbers 33:1-36:13 (Masei)

2011-02-24T22:22:00.000-08:00

Numbers 33:1-36:13

Chapter 33 makes out wonder why God never revealed that sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, since an illustration would have really helped things along here. Thankfully, someone eventually got around to drawing us a crude map which pretty much lays it all out. The chapter ends with an admonition not to forget about the the importance of thoroughgoing ethnic cleansing when invading the Promised Land. Otherwise, they would end up with something like the Gaza Strip, which would be unpleasant for all concerned.

More mapmaking in chapter 34, and a list of tribal chieftans. [Zzzzzz.]

In chapter 35, the L-rd eschews the idea of an outright prohibition of blood fued and personal vendetta ("Thou shalt not kill, even if...") and instead sets up a system by which those who kill without malice aforethought can flee to selected cities. Sounds like it would make a fantastic reality tv show, and the KJV even provides us with a working title for the pilot at 35:12 Refuge from the Avenger. Probably we should work in manslayer somewhere in the subtitle. It is also in chapter 35 that we discover that suburbs existed back then, and that they stretched out for a thousand cubits or about .28 miles. This sounds like an easy enough commute, whether on donkey or on foot. I wonder what rush hour looked like.

Finally, chapter 36 closes out the book with a surprising affirmation of female choice, "Let them marry to whom they think best; only to the family of the tribe of their father shall they marry." Okay, so it's not that wide a range of choices, but at least these particular women had some say in marriage. Of course, had their fathers remained alive, it would have been another matter altogether.

Numbers 30:2-32:42 (Matot)

2011-02-23T06:16:00.000-08:00

Numbers 30:2-32:42 (KJV)

In chapter 30 we find that male and female vows (even vows unto the L-rd) are not created equal, because the women is subject to the authority of her father or husband. Of such vows, the KJV says that "her husband may establish it, or her husband may make it void." So, one may well suppose Paul's famously misogynist writings are just another thread in a long rabbinical tradition of sexual inequality and female subjugation.

Then we come to Numbers 31, possibly the most barbaric chapter in the entire Torah. It is here in which we have Moses thundering at the soldiers for not being more thoroughly genocidal, "Have ye saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD!" Moses then provides very specific instructions on whom is to be killed and spared alive, "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." Keep for yourselves? To what end, one may well ask. The exegetical key here is that they are virgin girls and there is already a Biblical procedure in place for ~~sexually enslaving~~ "marrying" captive women and thereby multiplying one's tribe all the more fruitfully. The overall message of this chapter can be summed up thusly: "Kill everyone, destroy everything, but keep the young girls for raping and the cattle for eating. Oh, and don't forget to give the priests their share of the booty." Some claim that this represents timeless wisdom from a perfectly moral transcendant being, but it might easily be mistaken by an impartial observer to be naught more than ethics of a barbarous people bent upon regional conquest.

After such gory details as these, chapter 32 is a bit of a bore, laying out the logistics of making war, the obligations of military service, and which tribes eventually ended up with which bits of land. Do not fear, though, there are many more stories of all-consuming holy war yet to come!

Numbers 25:10-30:1 (Pinchas)

2011-02-22T06:57:00.000-08:00

Numbers 25:10-30:1

In this passage, G-d Himself duly praises Phinehas for his innovative and efficient combination of coitus interruptus and double homicide, and to mark the occasion, He rewards him with a promise of a lasting priesthood. Evidently, when it comes to whoring about with idolatrous shiksas, there is no need for a trial and we can commence forthwith to the vigilante death penalty phase. Jewish boys, take heed that none of the lasting priesthood of Phinehas are lurking thereabouts before you allow a gentile cutie into your backseat, even if she does claim royal ancestry.

Chapter 26 is mostly census data. Timeless, profound, divinely-inspired census data. Chapter 27 contains an interesting bit of Mosaic case law on how inheritance works for the ancient Hebrew. It goes well beyond primogeniture and may be the progressive bit of the Torah so far. Speaking of passing on to the next generation, it is also in this chapter that Moses passes authority to Joshua. Chapters 28-29 contain even more details on how to feed the priests, and a few other ritual matters. Ungh.

Numbers 22:2-25:9 (Balak)

2011-02-21T08:08:00.000-08:00

Numbers 22:2-25:9

This passage is (hands down and by a wide margin) my absolute favorite Biblical passage so far this year. It has a bit of everything: communal punishment via divinely ordained plagues, double-homicide as atoning sacrifice for whoring about, an angel wielding a sword, dozens of dead animals in high places, a prophet of dubious pedigree hired to pronounce curses which come out as blessings, and the Lord G-d Himself talking out of Balaam's ass.

There is so much good stuff here that (like a mosquito in a nudist colony) I just don't know where to begin. Just for the sake of argument, though, let us begin with Phinehas son of Eleazar, double murderer and biblical hero. Here is the story in a nutshell: Israel goes in for foreign women and their gods (Baalpeor) which greatly angers the L-rd and brings down a plauge. Our hero Phinehas takes it upon himself to rectify the problem by sneaking into the tent of one of his fellow tribesmen, catching him and his shiksa wench in flagrante delicto, and running them both through with a javelin. This double-homicide greatly pleases the L-rd, who relents and stops the plague, which to that point has killed 24,000 people. Two idolatrous fornicators isn't a bad price to pay, I suppose.

Here also we have the fascinating character of Balaam, a prophet of questionable provenance hired by Balak to curse Israel but who instead blesses her not once but three times, and then for an encore he prophesies a great leader for Israel and the conquest or destruction of the people of Moab, Sheth, Edom, Seir, Amalek, Ken, Asshur, and Eber. Did I mention that en route to his misfired attempts at cursing he has an argument with his donkey and an encounter with an angel of God? You've really got to read this part for yourself, because if you don't you'll be missing out on one of the few bits of the OT which really reads like something right out of Æsop.

Numbers 19:1-22:1 (Chukat)

2011-02-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

Here we have the ritual law of the red heifer, a ritual which went by the wayside long ago, but which some folks are trying to bring back in Jerusalem, just as soon as the controversial third temple can be built. Because of the implications that this has for certain versions of Christian eschatology, this long-forgotten tradition, practically irrelevant to most self-identified followers of any of the Abhrahamic faiths, has taken on a whole new life in Jerusalem, at the crossroads of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Ian McEwan to unpack the details in a recent lecture at Stanford:

[P]rophetic believers are certain that Jesus will return at the height of the battle of Armageddon but his thousand year reign which will ensure the conversion of Jews and Muslims to Christianity or their extinction cannot begin until the third temple is built. And so it comes about that a cattle breeding operation emerges in Israel with the help of Texan, Christian fundamentalist ranchers to promote the birth of the perfect unspotted red calf and thereby we have to assume bring the end days a little closer. In 1997, there was great excitement as well as a good deal of press mockery when one promising candidate appeared. Months later this cherished young cow nicked its rump on a barbed wire fence causing white hairs to grow at the site of the wound and earning instant disqualification. Another red calf appeared in 2002 to general acclaim and then again later disappointment. In the tight squeeze of history, religion and politics that surround the Temple Mount, the calf is a minor item indeed but the search for it and the hope and the longing that surround it illustrates the dangerous tendency among prophetic believers to bring on the cataclysm that they think will lead to a form of paradise on earth. The reluctance of the current US administration to pursue in these past six years, a vigorous policy towards a peace settlement in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, may owe less to the pressures of Jewish groups than to the eschatology of the Christian right.

Unlike just about any other passages in the Book of Numbers, the red heifer is seemingly entangled in matters of contemporary international foreign policy. This is, of course, utterly staggering to the average rationalist, who would expect the theory and practice of ritual sacrifice to have been firmly relegated to the dark ages by now.

Also, in this passage we have the miracle of a stone producing water, which Moses accomplishes by means of his magic wand, er, staff. In the days of Moses, conjurers had not yet realized that it is not the size of one's rod which counts, but rather the quality of the wood.

God gets angry at Moses and Aaron because Moses didn't cast an audible spell as divinely ordered, but instead went straight on to striking at the rock. So, once again we see the theme that magical rituals must be followed carried out precisely, or else we may expect divine retribution. Later in this passage, God kills Aaron in retribution for their failure to perform the miracle of the waters in the proper way. Well, at least no one gets burned alive this time.

Speaking of casting magical spells in bizarre ways, check out Numbers 21:4-9. The people complain (again) and the Lord send poisonous snakes. The people repent (again) and the Lord sends Moses a new spell which operates as anti-venom. You have to read this particular passage for yourself to get just how paganish it sounds.

Number 16:1-18:32 (Korach)

2011-02-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

Herein we have the first egalitarian uprising in the Bible, in which Korah (great-grandson of Levi) and many of men of renown (altogether two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly) rise up against the autocracy of Moses and Aaron, declaring that "all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them" which sounds to me an awful lot like the idea of a priesthood of all believers which would later be adopted by many Christians.

Evidently, the God of the Moses isn't ready for anything like a universal priesthood yet, and He responds by opening up the Earth and swallowing up Korah and "all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods" who "went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them." Now this sounds unpleasant enough, but the 250 princes of the assembly are burnt alive by God Himself, "there came out a fire from the LORD, and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense." Just as in the case of Nadab and Abihu, if you offer incense in the wrong way, God will burn you alive. Catholics, consider yourself warned.

Chapter 17 has yet another affirmation of the divine ordination and unquestionable authority of the Aaronite priesthood, which has become a running theme by now, especially in Leviticus and Numbers. The following chapter lays forth (yet again) instructions for bringing the best food to the priests to eat, or else redeeming it with hard currency.

"All the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine, and of the wheat, the firstfruits of them which they shall offer unto the LORD, them have I given thee. And whatsoever is first ripe in the land, which they shall bring unto the LORD, shall be thine; every one that is clean in thine house shall eat of it. Every thing devoted in Israel shall be thine."

I should point out here that the two major competing hypotheses for the Torah are (1) The Creator of the entire Cosmos inspired this book or (2) The Hebrew priests compiled it based on traditions and myths adapted over time to serve the needs of the priesthood. If the former hypothesis were true, we might expect all manner or timeless wisdom and insights into how to live well. If the latter, we might expect a good deal of talk about how important it is to respect the priesthood, never to question their authority, and to bring loads of food and money to them. I leave it to the reader to decide which sort of writing is more dominant in this book.

Numbers 4:21-7:89 (Naso)

2011-02-15T06:16:00.000-08:00

Numbers 4:21-7:89

Here we have another chapter with nothing but census data, preserved from time immemorial down the generations to provide you with wisdom and encouragement in your walk with God. Then we get to a few bits about ceremonial cleanliness, and how to provide (even more) sacrifices to the priests in a novel situation which is somewhat difficult to briefly explain.

Then we come to 5:11-31, which looks to be a ceremony which combines ritual actions, audible incantations, the and medical administation of an oral abortifacient, all in an effort to punish a wife suspected of marital infidelity. I'm going to break from my personal preference to quote the NIV here, because it is significantly more comprehensible than more literal translations from the Hebrew:

If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse. If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children.

Wow . . . just . . . wow. Try teaching this one to the fourth-grade sunday-schoolers sometime. In any event, it makes sense that people who thought that magical spells and potions like this really worked would take the threats posed by witches and wizards so damn seriously.

After this, we get the details of undertake the vow of a Nazarite, to separate oneself unto the LORD. Personally, I wish we'd bring this one back into contemporary usage, if only so we can spot hardcore religious fundamentalists at a fair distance by their unusually long hair. If we can appeal to the Torah for the Ten Commandments, well, why not the Nararite vow as well? It is somehow less timeless than the proscription of seething a kid goat in it's mother's milk? G-d forbid!

Chapter 7 can bascially be summed up in these lines: “[T]hey brought their offering before the LORD… And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Take it of them...and thou shalt give them unto the Levites." The chapter provides a very detailed list of all sorts of things that are considered worthy to give unto the Levites. I will remind the reader again at this point that the two most popular competing hypotheses for the authorship of this book are (1) the Creator of the Cosmos and billions of galaxies or (2) Levitical scribes redacting Levitical traditions justifying Levitical authority and Hebrew supremacy. Dear reader, I leave it to you to make the call, after reading the material yourself.

Numbers 1:1-4:20 (Bamidbar)

2011-02-14T09:35:00.000-08:00

Numbers 1:1-4:20

This book leads off with a census of the tribes, which is preserved here for all generations to enjoy, purportedly as timeless and inspired wisdon revealed by G-d Himself. There is also the curious verse at 1:51, wherein we learn that it is a capital crime to attempt to sneak a peek at the Man Behind The Curtain.

We learn in chapter 2 how the marching shall commence, which tribes are arrayed where relative to each other and the Levites in the center. Instructions are also given here (in Drosnin's skip code) for the proper handling of the Holy Hand Grenade.

In chapter 3 we find once again that the Levites are to be given pride of place in all things, which is precisely what one might expect from a book written by priests in an attempt to secure their preminence and livelihood. Here is a shining example of self-serving "divine revelation" to the Levitical authors of the Torah:

3:48 And thou shalt give the money, wherewith the odd number of them is to be redeemed, unto Aaron and to his sons. 3:49 And Moses took the redemption money of them that were over and above them that were redeemed by the Levites: 3:50 Of the firstborn of the children of Israel took he the money; a thousand three hundred and threescore and five shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary: 3:51 And Moses gave the money of them that were redeemed unto Aaron and to his sons, according to the word of the LORD, as the LORD commanded Moses.

In other words the priests shall get theirs whenever you celebrate the joy of a firstborn. Now is that some Revealed Truth, or what?

Chapter 4 is mostly concerned with matters of interior decorating, and God has to be very specific in these commands, having already ordered the Israelites to kill of all their gays. Did I just type that out loud? Sorry.

Leviticus 9:1-11:47 (Shemini)

2011-02-07T07:27:00.000-08:00

In chapter 9 we have Aaron demonstrating that he learned well how to do sacrifices from the instructions given in the previous chapters, serving as a model priest for the members of the Aaronite priesthood who edited these books together.

In chapter 10 we have a strange incident involving "strange fire" offered before YHWH, offered by the Aaronic priests Nadab and Abihu , who are summarily and divinely burned to death for their offering. Evidently, this particular brand of incense was not a "sweet savour unto the LORD" as are the offerings of cooked meat. The rabbinical and clerical exegesis of this passage offers every possible spin on the story, from Nadab and Abihu perishing in righteousness having conscientiously done their duty, to them perishing justly as a result of divine retribution for their vanity or even idolatry.

Here is a useful place to start reading about them if you want to know more. The lesson appears to be that unless you perform your priestly duties precisely in accord with the levitical codes, you may be smitten by G-d Himself. Interestingly, Moses commands Aaron not to mourn the passing of his sons and commands Aaron's surviving sons not to mourn their brothers, "lest wrath come upon all the people." Evidently, God protests family funerals, just like the WBC.

Finally, in chapter 11 we have a collection of dietary laws delineating what is kosher and what is abominable. Interestingly, G-d considers coneys, hares, swine, and shellfish are all to be abominations unto His people. Why then did He create them to be so darned tasty? Only G-d knows.

Leviticus 6:1-8:36 (Tzav)

2011-02-07T07:13:00.000-08:00

Here we have more specific rules for the ceremonial sacrifices, and a bit of detail as to which bits are eaten by whom and which are burned to ash. There is also a touchingly numinous scene in which the priests are ordained in a christening of blood and oil, and then they feast on meat and bread for a week. Sounds like a great deal for the priests, who are clever enough to write this book so as to make it appear that their ceremonial scheme for taking bread and meat from those who labor was ordained by God directly through Moses and Aaron.

Leviticus 1:1-5:26 (Vayikra)

2011-02-07T06:36:00.000-08:00

In this part of the Holy Bible, we learn that divine command theory and ethical veganism just don't mix. God just loves the aroma of roasting meat, as do His priests, who are appointed the self-gratifying task of having to consume much of the sacrifices. I'd be far more impressed if God just ate the sacrifices Himself. As it is, this looks a lot like a program created by the priests for their own sake, rather than a divinely inspired commentary on the need for personal atonement.
Moreover, it is here that we learn that the more senseless laws that the Levitical class lays down, the more sin and guilt offerings they can expect to be brought to them as sacrifices to God. This might help explain why we will see many hundreds of "divinely revealed" laws in the books to come. From the perspective of the preisthood, the more laws you break, the more bread we take.

Genesis 50: Setting up the Sequel

2011-01-18T07:11:00.001-08:00

In this closing chapter, Joseph and his people make the trip out of Egypt back to Canaan to inter Jacob (Israel) in the promised land, thus presaging the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. The key difference here are that this pre-exodus occurs with the blessings of Pharaoh and his people, indeed, the "elders of the land of Egypt" and the "chariots and horsemen" accompany the Hebrews back to Canaan. As to the body of Jacob, they "buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought with the field for a possession of a buryingplace of Ephron the Hittite." Instead of staying in Canaan, though, Joseph and "all that went up with him to bury his father" journeyed back into Egypt, thus setting up the children of Israel for a far more dramatic Exodus.

Genesis 49: The Prophecy of Israel

2011-01-18T07:10:00.001-08:00

In this chapter, Jacob (Israel) explains how the tribes will come to be, and provides an explanation for why they come to be what they will someday become. This prophecy makes little sense if it is taken to be about the twelve children, but it makes perfect sense when taken as a story to explain the nature of Hebrew tribes by the time that this national origin myth was generated and put into writing. Reuben will be punished for his sexual escapades, and the tribes of Simeon and Levi will be scattered among the other tribes, because of their wrath, Zebulun shall be a coastal people, and so on. Israel blesses all of his son's

As in the previous chapter, we see here two fundamental themes. Firstly, that the first shall be last, with the demotion of Reuben from the pride of place usually reserved to the firstborn. Secondly, we see here once again the overarching purpose of this book: Explaining the relationships of the tribes one to another, binding together those considered to be Israel's children, and setting them apart from and against foreign tribes.

Genesis 48: The First Shall be Last

2011-01-18T07:09:00.001-08:00

In this chapter, Jacob blesses his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh, giving the lesser (left-hand) blessing unto the firstborn, to Joseph's consternation. In this we see the continuance of a subversive and inversive theme of which stretches as far back as Cain and Abel and will continue at least until Jesus say “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” Moreover, we see here yet again the central theme of this book - putting all of the various tribes into their mythical proper places, according to the heirarchy which the biblical authors would prefer to see fulfilled.

Genesis 47: Land o' Goshen

2011-01-18T07:08:00.000-08:00

In this chapter, Joseph secures huge tracts of land for his sheparding relatives from the north. Also, Jacob stands before Pharaoh and declares "The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage." Such beautiful language, and it underscores the point that we expect to have things as well as our forefathers and are disappointed whenever we fall short in that respect. After all, when Abraham was 130 years old, he was still making new babies with his new wife.

The later part of this chapter describes Joe's shrewd dealings as the viceroy of Pharaoh, buying up pretty much everything from the people of Egypt: firstly their monetary savings, then their herds, then their lands, and finally even the people themselves as serfs. Meanwhile, even as Joe is buying up everything and everyone in Egypt, the people of Israel are thriving and multiplying in the land of Goshen.

Finally, in a scene which makes little sense to us moderns, Jacob undergo a testicular testimonial, swearing solemnly to bury his father with his ancestors back in Canaan. I hear this was really quite routine back then, so, um, nothing to see here.

Genesis 46: Jacob journeys to Egypt

2011-01-17T13:43:00.000-08:00

Just as Abraham before him, Jacob and all of his ample household (many of whom are enumerated at length herein this chapter) go down into Egypt, there to escape the dearth of famine and renew their fortunes. Also like Abraham before him, Jacob is promised by God that he will be made into a great nation. After the tearful reunion of Jacob with his long lost (and presumed dead) son Joseph, the son arranges for his fathers people to be settled in the land of Goshen, for "every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians."

I'd like to focus just on this phrase for a moment, that is, the idea that a certain lifestyle might be "an abomination unto the Egyptians." Does this not imply that the term "abomination," as used in the KJV's rendition of the Torah, should not be take to denote timeless moral truth which applies at all times and everywhere (e.g. "perjury is immoral") but rather a cultural preference for one lifestyle over another. If so, what does this imply for later uses of the term to condemn, for example, shellfish and buggery?

Genesis 43-45: Sons of One Man United

2011-01-16T09:03:00.000-08:00

Joseph continues his elaborate prank upon his elder brothers, who have returned to Egypt and brought their youngest brother Ben with them this time. Joe sets them up in this crib and makes ready a feast, but the brothers are fearful that "he may seek occasion against us, and fall upon us, and take us for bondmen, and our asses." As it happens, Joseph was indeed plotting something quite like that, as he arranges for his silver goblet to be found by Joe's men in little Ben's sack, the upshot of which was that Ben must be given as bondsman to Joe. "Your ass is mine, Ben." was redacted from the manuscripts at some point, but I'm almost sure Joe said it.

Evidently it was by this ruse that Joe meant to take Ben into his household and away from his other brothers, leaving them none the wiser.

At this point, though, Joe's ruse of making himself strange unto his brothers finally falls through. When Judah offers himself in Ben's place, Joe can't take it anymore and loses it. He reveals himself to all of his brothers, declares them forgiven, and sends them back again to Canaan to retrieve their father.

Usually I have something snarky and sarcastic to say, but these chapters are really quite moving in a positive way. Good story.

Genesis 42: Tricky Joe and the ten brethren

2011-01-16T08:28:00.000-08:00

In this chapter, Joseph sets up a prank of Biblical proportions to play upon his ten brothers. He pretends to be an Egyptian native (not hard to pull off as steward to the king) by speaking to them through an interpreter, accuses them of being Canaanite spies come to discover the strategic weaknesses of Egypt, and slams them all in jail for a few days. He also does a little spying of his own, listening in on his brothers as they speak Hebrew to one another on the reasonable assumption that Joseph (who goes by the Egyptian name of Zaphnathpaaneah) cannot understand what they are saying.

Joseph then has his brother Simeon bound and sends the other brothers on their way back to Canaan and their father, complete with stores of food and with a surprising refund of the money which was intended to pay for the food. But this prank is just getting started.

Genesis 41: The Rise of Joe

2011-01-16T07:57:00.000-08:00

Pharaoh has a nightmare, Joseph tells him it is a prophecy, and Pharaoh duly puts Joseph in charge of Egypt. Anyone remember how alarmed some Americans were when we found out that Joan Quigley was acting as unofficial White House astrologer? Well, this is far worse than that. In this story, the autocratic head of state makes economic decisions of great national import on the basis of a nightmare and the say-so of a foreign national and ex-con just out of prison. He goes on to make Joe chief royal steward over the entire palace and second in command in the whole of Egypt, even before discovering that the dreams were indeed prophecies after all. Not particularly stunning executive leadership there, Pharaoh. Good on Joe, though.

Also on the upside, Joseph's plan of warehousing grain works out well when the lean times come upon Egypt and all the surrounding lands. We can actually draw a timeless moral lesson from this, if only we studiously ignore the part where they are reacting to their dreams as if they come from something other than one's own mind.

Genesis 40: The butler, the baker, and the Hebrew dreamcatcher

2011-01-15T00:05:00.000-08:00

In this chapter, Joseph interprets the dreams of his fellow inmates.

How cool is this parallelism?

"...within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thine head, and restore thee unto thy place."

"...within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree."

Good news for the chief butler, bad news for the chief baker, and our man Joe has the presence of mind to frame both bad news and good in the same methaphorical terms.

As to the interpretation of dreams as divine portents, does anyone (including even devout Christians and Jews) really find it plausible that the process by which our subconsious mind randomly manifests itself during our sleeping hours is a reliable method for the gods to manifest themselves? Seems to me like there might be more than a little potential for confusing one's own deepest desires for the revealed will of the gods. On the upside, though, fewer prayers will seem to go unanswered.

Genesis 39: One Hot Cup o' Joe

2011-01-14T11:00:00.000-08:00

In this chapter, we learn that Joseph is blessed in all things, including sex appeal. Just as Dinah and Sarah (and possibly Rebekah) were the targets of gentile royal lust, so also Joseph proves irresistible to the opposite sex. Evidently both the patriarchs AND the matriarchs were all smoking hot. Also, it would appear that our modern American obsession with personal appearance and sexual attractiveness, especially noticeable in television and movies, has a very ancient pedigree indeed. One might say it is rooted in those fabled "Judeo-Christian values" I keep hearing about from the politicians.

In any event, Joseph manages to preserve his virtue by fleeing the house, and then gets smacked with a rape charge, in one of the earliest documented cases of "he said / she said" in a sexual assault trial. Personally, I consider the wife's story to be the more plausible of the two, but as they say "history is written by the winners" and I don't see anyone worshipping the gods of Egypt around here.

Genesis 38: Tamar keeps it in the family

2011-01-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

To invoke the KJV euphemism, Judah "went in unto" a certain Canaanite woman, who bore him Er, Onan, and Shelah. To this day, when Englishmen having trouble finding the right words to say, they invoke the name of Judah's firstborn.

Er marries Tamar, who is soon widowed because the LORD slays him for reasons only known to God. Onan was then ordered by his father to "go in unto" Tamar and duly impregnate his late brother's widow. He goes in to her alright, but pulls out of her at the last moment, thus spilling his seed and demonstrating to posterity that the ancient Semites knew at least one method of birth control. The LORD, never one for a disobedient smartass, slays Onan for failing to go all the way. And thus down to this very day the practice of coitus interruptus with one's sister-in-law is referred to as Onanism. Wait, wait, that's not what it means?

One might be tempted to think that Onan's story is the only bizarre sexual incident involving Tamar in this chapter of the Bible, but wait, there's more! Judah impregnates his daughter-in-law without ever looking her in the face because he thinks she is a working girl. Maybe it was custom back then never to look a prostitute in the face? Certainly this would open up the field of competition.

At any rate, Judah becomes wroth when his daughter-in-law, the widow of both Er and Onan, starts to show as pregnant. He commands that she be burned alive (seems a bit harsh) but then she provides the proof of purchase which he had given her as a receipt for services rendered. Alas, Judah, you are the dastard who knocked up this hapless woman! Perhaps you should both be burned alive?

Chapter 37: Selling Dreamy Joe

2011-01-13T11:29:00.000-08:00

(The following post is not in any way about Starbucks.)

In chapter 37 we start in on Joseph’s story, and we find out that multicolored coats were as fashionable in ancient times as they were in the 1980’s. We also find that God communicates to people through their dreams of all things, which seems to me the method most perfectly suited to providing true believers with as many false positives as possible, very often believing that God is telling them to do whatever their subconscious minds happened to be mulling that night.

Joseph's brothers betray him on account of his dreams and his unfortunate proclivity for prophesying aloud their eventual servitude unto him, and they sell him to some Midianite slavetraders, and make it look to his father as if he was killed by wild animals. (For the record, Reuben wasn't in on any of this infamy, which is why his sandwiches are so tasty.) Joseph is resold to the Egyptians, which is necessary to set up the sequel to this book.

Genesis 36: Putting the tribes in their places

2011-01-13T06:16:00.000-08:00

It’s impossible to write about chapter 36 without delving into a bit of history. Biblical Edom was the kingdom to the south of Judah, and may well have been the original birthplace of the cult of YHWH, as noted by Karel van der Toorn, which went on to become the monolatrous (and eventually monotheistic) religion of both Israel and Judah.

Penning Esau (Edom) into the story as the less-favored elder brother of Jacob (Israel), who is identified as the father of Judah (and eleven other tribes) is an ingenious attempt to knit together the sundry tribes of the ancient near east into a single coherent mythical narrative, which not coincidentally puts the Israelite authors in pride of place among all the surrounding nations. This motivation explains why so much time and effort in this supposedly timeless narrative is given over to explaining who fathered whom, which tribes came therefrom, who ruled over whom and where.

Genesis 35: The Curse of Rueben

2011-01-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

It little commented or sermonized upon that Jacob's firstborn son Reuben lays with Bilhah, his father's concubine and the maidservant to his aunt Rachel. I have it on good authority, however, from a learned biblical numerologist and part-time hermit, that buried herein these passages is an ancient and potent curse cast upon Reuben such that he would evermore be known primarily on account of his namesake sandwich.

In other news, Rachel dies in childbirth and Isaac dies of advanced old age. We also get a handy list of all of Jacob's twelve sons. Here they are in illustrated form.

Genesis 34: Besotted rapist provokes vengeful two-man killing spree

2011-01-12T01:23:00.000-08:00

I've sort of given it all away with the post title this time.

Chapter 34 doesn't naturally lend itself to sermons, but it would make for a fine movie. Prince Shechem became deeply enamored of Dinah, spoke tenderly and sweetly to her, and raped her, though not necessarily in that order if you take the text as chronological. He is willing to do anything to make Dinah his wife, even if that means going to the public square and there persuading all of his men to be circumcised immediately. Imagine what an amazingly motivational speech this must have been! I'd bet it would put even the great St. Crispian's Day speech in its place, though the phrase "hold their manhoods cheap" would doubtlessly have been used to a very different effect by Prince Shechem than by King Henry.

Shechem and all his men are duly circumcised, excited at the prospect of finally getting to select for themselves wives from among the foreskin-phobic Hebrew daughters. Before they are healed, and while they are still presumably bed-ridden with pain and infection, Dinarh's two brother's go on a killing spree throughout the town, putting every man to the sword and taking for themselves all the various forms of property found therein. The Bible itself remains unclear on whether these men are to be considered war heroes, inglorious bastards, or both.

Genesis 32-33: Moving Day (and Night)

2011-01-11T01:11:00.000-08:00

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+32-33&version=KJV

Recently,I've had to move my office for the tenth time in as many years, and I'm appalled by the sheer amount of junk I've acquired here at the office. I'm guessing that Jacob could relate to my problem, but on a far vaster scale.

Much of this book so far has been concerned with three categories of property of great concern to those who would someday be considered patriarchs: real property and the demarcation thereof, personal portable property (e.g. goats, ewes, rams, camels, kine, bulls, asses, foals and such like) and dependents (wives, concubines, children, and servants). If you took out from this book the descriptions of whom had acquired which of these possessions, and when and how, you could readily render the entire book down to pamphlet form. In these two chapters, we see Jacob moving all of his people and all of his stuff from one place to another, along with a couple incidental scenes of human and theological interest.

We find out that "Israel" is the ancient forebear of the modern term "wrassle" which is still in contemporary usage today in towns such as Stillwater, OK. In any event, you just have to love a people who denominate themselves as "wrestling with god" because it sounds so damned ambitious, and might allow for reinterpretation and humanistic reasoning some millennia thereafter. Incidentally, the reconciliation of the brothers Jacob and Esau is one of the most moving and realistic scenes so far, and was only slightly spoiled by the relentless focus by the narrator on the various forms of property listed above.

Genesis 28-31: More selective breeding

2011-01-09T13:12:00.001-08:00

Isaac send Jacob forth into the world to find a bride, telling him to "take thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban thy mother's brother." This Isaac does, not just once but twice.

Jacob works for seven years to marry Rachel, but he is tricked into marrying her older sister Leah instead. Somehow, he doesn't notice this until after consummating the union. I know they didn't have electric indoor lighting back then, but I'd wager good money that I could tell my wife from her older sister even in the dark, and even though their voices sound fairly similar. Perhaps seven years of celibacy makes one a bit overhasty.

Jacob does eventually get to marry Rachel, however, after only seven more years of working for his new father-in-law. As an added double bonus, he also fathers children upon both of his wives' maidservants, firstly with Rachel's maid Bilhah and later with Leah's maid Zilpah. I've heard a good deal about Biblical family values from the politicians and preachers around here, but I'm thinking they need to be a bit more specific as to which bits of the Bible contain the family values which they would like us to emulate.

Jacob works some magic with selective breeding of his father-in-law's livestock using specially prepared almond trees. How this works is a bit obscure, but the practical upshot was that he ends up with loads of sheep and cattle. He tries to sneak away from his father-in-law, but he is pursued. Rachel steals some of the household goods, or rather gods, for reasons unknown, and hides them quite well. Eventually, Jacob and Laban reach a sort of détente, and go their separate ways.

Genesis 25-27: Pericopes of patriarchal progenitorial prowess

2011-01-08T16:31:00.000-08:00

Abraham may be "well stricken in age" but that doesn't stop him from taking a new wife (Katurah) after the passing of Sarah, and fathering six more children thereafter. I get now why they call this guy Father Abraham. One begins to get the sense that the point of enumerating all these various offspring (and their respective cities) is to mythically link together the diversity of tribes living throughout the ancient near east, and perhaps more importantly, to put the Sons of Jacob (later rechristened "Israel") in pride of place among all the many children of Abraham.

Oddly enough, Isaac pulls the old "she is my sister" gag on the king of Gerar, just like his father before him. Why didn't Abraham tell his sons that this trick doesn't play well in Gerar? Personally, I think that Hebrew narrators are running out of original ideas fairly early on in a thick book. Maybe they are just into bragging about their super-hot foremothers, who were evidently the envy of kings.

In a familiar tale, Esau sells his birthright for a mess of pottage, because although he was a cunning hunter, he wasn't a good negotiator. In his defense, lentil stew can be really delicious. I'm wondering what the moral of this story is, and supposing that it can't really be about the price of stew. Eventually, Esau takes a wife, and another wife, and they prove to be "a grief of mind unto" Esau's parents. The new mother-in-law says "I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth." Isn't that just the way of it with new wives?

Speaking of dirty tricks, we get to see Jacob putting on the goatskins and pulling the wool over Isaac's old eyes. This story has always puzzled me, even when pastors tried to draw something useful out of it. Are we supposed to believe that paternal blessings and curses are magic words that may be chanted only once and thereafter cannot be revoked? "Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing," says Isaac, evidently powerless to bless his favored son.

The best lesson I can take from these stories is that if you send your big hairy brother, the guy who kills wild beasts for a living, into a murderous rage, be sure to hide away in a foreign land for awhile. This is not what I told the kids in Sunday School, but it's the best I've got.

Genesis 23-24: Sarah passes, Abraham haggles, Isaac marries

2011-01-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

Sarah dies, and instead of hearing her life regaled in epic poetry, we are treated to a lengthy account of real estate transaction for the "cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre" where she is buried. Abraham makes his chief steward swear that he "shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites" and this he faithfully does, by means of a most curious method involving thirsty camels.

My favorite verses so far are to be found in 24:57-58 in which a Rebekah is consulted before being married off to a stranger. Good for her.

Genesis 21-22: An evitable child sacrifice

2011-01-06T18:16:00.000-08:00

Ismael learns that in the house of Abraham, it doesn't pay to mock the matriarch, as he and his mother are cast out. Hereafter she was referred to as Sarah "Barracuda" for her take no prisoners approach to multiple marriage.

In other news, Isaac is born, grows up a bit, and then is taken by his father to become a human sacrifice. If I can recall the pastoral sermons of my youth, it is important to emphasize Abe's obedience and try to ignore Isaac's point of view. No matter how much mental anguish that might entail for a child to be tied up and placed on a sacrificial altar by his own father, and to see the gleaming blade as his father raises his hand to slice him open, the important thing is to remember that Abraham obeys the LORD without questioning Him or trying to haggle down the price to just an amputation or two. What happened to the guy who just a while ago negotiated down the price of sparing Sodom?

Either this is an historical tale about an actual schizo who followed the voices in his head, or else it is a fable intended to convey a moral lesson. If the latter, the lesson must be this: Obey your tyrant without hesitation, no matter how arbitrary and immoral his commands might seem to you.

Genesis 20 - Theodicy FAIL

2011-01-06T10:10:00.000-08:00

Most theodicies (counter-arguments against the argument from evil) run something like this: "God cannot intervene to prevent evil because if He did so it would go against _______" where we can fill in the blank with something we tend to like, such as free will or personal moral development. Here in chapter 20 we find that the God of Abraham wasn't terribly concerned with these philosophical notions, at least not where Sarah's virtue was on the line. Once again Abraham has played the sister card and given her unto a king (Gerar rather than Egypt this time around) because although she may be ninety years old, she is still smoking hot. God himself warns the king against following in the way of Pharaoh:

"I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from sinning against me: therefore suffered I thee not to touch her. Now therefore restore the man his wife; for he is a prophet, and he shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live: and if thou restore her not, know thou that thou shalt surely die, thou, and all that are thine."

The king is naturally upset with Abraham for pulling the sister stunt, and Abraham excuses himself by noting that the people of Gerar are probably godless killing machines, and anyway Abe's wife really is his half-sister. (Incest prohibitions will come along later in the Torah.)

The moral of the story is somewhat unclear, however, whether it is to be taken as parable or history, it is clear that the God of Abraham has yet to hear of the free-will defence or the soul-building theodicy, since he steps right in to intervene with revelation and miracles and threats of regicide.

Genesis 18-19: God Hates Inhospitality

2011-01-06T10:00:00.001-08:00

In chapter 18 we find Abraham and Sarah at home (with their new and slightly different names) demonstrating their impeccable manners as host and hostess by preparing bread, butter, meat and milk from scratch for three men who seem to pop into the narrative from nowhere in particular. After the extravagant meal, the men inform the elderly couple that they will have a son. Laughter ensues, and Sarah claims it was just the laugh track. Abraham then sends these strange men off to Sodom, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

After this point, a curious thing happens. The all-knowing all-seeing all-powerful creator of the universe starts haggling with Abraham over the conditions of Sodom's utter destruction. Now I've always been skeptical of stereotypical portrayal of Semites as stern negotiators, but here we find the putative forefather of their many nations wrangling over price with the Lord God Himself, bargaining the price down from fifty righteous souls to only ten. Good on him, I say. Too bad Jesus couldn't talk God down a bit at Gethsemane, "Please Lord, take this cup away, maybe I just could just die of thirst instead?"

Anyhow, in the next chapter we find Lot demonstrating his own admirable hospitality by taking in and dining with two angels who have for some unfathomable reason taken upon themselves the form of attractive young men. The locals of Sodom gather around the house and say unto Lot, "Hey! Get those guys out here so that we may get to know them, you know, in the Biblical sense, by which we mean gang rape." Evidently the Sodomites had a very different sense of hospitality than that of Abraham and Lot. Being a proper patriarch and host, Lot refuses this offer, and counters with his own virgin daughters instead. Evidently, Lot isn't nearly as good a negotiator as Abraham. He should have lead off with goats and let the Sodomites haggle up from there.

The men of the city at this point try to break down Lot's door, evidently overjoyed at the prospect of getting to gang rape everyone in the house. The angels then strike the Sodomites with blindness, and hasten Lot and his family out of the city, to the nearby hamlet of Zoar in good time for the Lord to rain fire down upon the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. While escaping, Lot's wife looks back and turns into a pillar of salt, and to this very day the families fleeing fearfully from the cities to the suburbs are referred to as "white flight," presumably in her honor.

After settling outside of Zoar, Lot's virgin daughters devise a clever plan to drug and rape him, because they wanted to have children and, well, their father was the only guy around. Thus did Lot demonstrate his own sexual prowess, in that although he was elderly and drunk out of his skull, he still managed to knock up two virgins, on two consecutive nights, against his will and without his knowledge or consent. It appears legendary feats of virility are becoming a running theme in this book, one gets the sense that the authors really wanted to play up the manhood of their forebears.

Genesis 16-17: The Joy of Sects

2011-01-06T06:56:00.001-08:00

In these passages we find the mythical origins of both Islam and Judaism, that is, the very first mentions of both Ishmael and Isaac. Both boys will be circumcised, but only one will be covenanted and featured throughout the rest of this particular holy book. This may cause some degree of animosity between those who claim the one and those who claim the other as their forefather, but we'll overlook that eventuality for now and focus on the creation myths of these two monotheistic sects.

The obvious question arising from the events of chapter 16 is this: If your wife had trouble conceiving, and she encouraged you to instead impregnate her personal assistant (who is on your payroll) would you go ahead with the plan? Even supposing polygyny was the norm, and even given that the first wife okays the plan, it seems more than a bit like sexual harassment to compel one's employees to bear one's children. I can already hear anthropologically trained moral relativists saying that we shouldn't project our modern norms against sexual slavery back to the ancient world, but we are talking about someone who is to this day considered morally exemplary by Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Baha'i. If he were indeed so, surely he wouldn't have leveraged his position of power to get into his servant's pants. That's just the sort of abuse of power we'd expect from Bill Clinton or Newt Gringrich, but never Father Abraham. Contrary to our modern notions of personal liberty, however, we find that being the man on top makes it okay to sexually exploit one's servants, by Biblical standards. Not only acceptable, but actually worthy of angelic support in the wilderness crisis pregnancy center, where Hagar is told that her most important duties are to submit and obey. How uplifting is that, ladies? And unto this very day, the women of Islam are oft encouraged to emulate the wifely submissiveness of their putative forebear.

In chapter 17, we find that the God of Abraham has a bit of a sexual mutilation fetish. I can just imagine Abraham saying "we shall do *what* to the flesh of our foreskins? Didn't you put it there for a reason?" At this point, it is absolutely necessary to quote at some length from Rabbi Maimonides:

"As regards circumcision, I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual
intercourse, and to weaken the organ of generation as far as possible, and thus
cause man to be moderate. Some people believe that circumcision is to remove a
defect in man's formation; but everyone can easily reply: How can products of
nature be deficient so as to require external completion, especially as the use
of the fore-skin to that organ is evident. This commandment has not been
enjoined as a complement to a deficient physical creation, but as a means for
perfecting man's moral shortcomings. The bodily injury caused to that organ is
exactly that which is desired; it does not interrupt any vital function, nor
does it destroy the power of generation. Circumcision simply counteracts
excessive lust; for there is no doubt that circumcision weakens the power of
sexual excitement, and sometimes lessens the natural enjoyment: the organ
necessarily becomes weak when it loses blood and is deprived of its covering
from the beginning. Our Sages ... say distinctly: It is hard for a woman, with
whom an uncircumcised [man] had sexual intercourse, to separate from him."

For once, I am in complete agreement with the good Rabbi, and I would also note that my wife has shown no inclination to separate from me as of yet. At this point in the Bible, I am starting to notice that there is an awful lot of bizarre fetishizing and sex talk in this supposedly family-friendly book. Putting aside the aforementioned nakedness of Noah, here we have God is commanding a 99-year-old man to mutilate and cripple his own penis and go on to impregnate his 90-year-old wife. Really? I've heard that "with God all things are possible" but this seems like an arbitrarily difficult feat of sexual prowess. Why not go ahead and make them sleep in separate beds, too?

In any event, God establishes his covenant with the offspring of Isaac, and provides to them a readily identifiable means of telling their offspring apart from those of other sects, assuming of course that they are male, you catch them in the nude, and you aren't averse to a bit of impolite staring.

Genesis 13-15: In the land of Girgashites, Rephaites, Amalekites, Sodomites, Perizzites, and the like...

2011-01-05T02:00:00.001-08:00

The Bible is nothing if not a tribal document, and here we see the distinctions between the tribes drawn to such a degree as to make modern white supremacist racism seem incredibly inclusive by comparison. As to which tribe is considered supreme herein this narrative, the reader is not given unto any doubt:

"Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and
southward, and eastward, and westward... For all the land which thou seest, to
thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. ... Unto thy seed have I given
this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates,
[land of] the Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, and the Hittites,
and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and
the Girgashites, and the Jebusites."

So, one might suppose that all the "-ites" who aren't fit to be called "Israelites" are going to have to go, by whatever means necessary. Perhaps, though, it is overly pessimistic to assume, at this point in the story, that even an ancient tribal deity would ordain and establish war and genocide as His preferred means of settling the Promised Land. Surely the god who would later be described as loving and just and merciful by Christian theologians would never do such a barbaric thing. We shall see.

As to the main characters in the story, Abram and his nephew must go their separate ways, as they have become the very first exemplars of what would much later become known as the prosperity gospel. They are by this point so gloriously blessed that, like rich people everywhere, they just can't stand each other's company anymore. Out of necessity, they invent and implement the concept of exurban sprawl, and that thousands of years before it catches on here in the West. Abram journeys out to the western plains, and there sets up his tents and settlements in defiance of native land claims, thus presaging the Oklahoma Boomers. Lot,
for his part, pitches his tents towards the thriving metropolis of Sodom, where the markets are overfilled and the women are undersexed.

There is also a bit of a war, but it didn't really more the narrative forward.

Genesis 12: Isaac's Mom has got it going on

2011-01-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

When it comes to full-on hard-core self-fulfilling prophecy, it's damnably difficult to top the following:

I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing...and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed... Unto thy seed will I give this land.

After committing these verses to papyrus, the Jewish people went on to become the only tribe to ever engage in a truly global diaspora, somehow retain their unique ethno-religious identity, and go on to retake their ancestral homeland. Moreover, the scribes who penned these verses managed to pass on their fundamental religious and cultural memes to at least 7.5 million Bahá'í, 14 million Jews, 1.6 billion Muslims, and 2 billion Christians. Not exactly "all the families of the Earth" but those are damned impressive statistics for a particular collection of ancient memes, the contemporaries of which are today almost entirely extinct.

Back to the story. Abram sojourns around a bit, and ends up in Egypt during a time of desperate need. If this sounds familiar, it is because the story will be retold time and again throughout the Bible. Note especially the narrative elements of Egypt, famine, Pharonic dialogue and dialectic, and that "the LORD plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues," which is a bit of a bloody giveaway that the authors of the narrative (and the Author of the Universe, as some would have it) do not mind heavy-handed heapings of foreshadowing. At the end of this particular pericope, the Pharaoh finally stops sticking it to the prototypical Jewess, and lets her people go.

One really can't blame the poor Pharaoh too much, because Sarai was really quite a "fair woman to look upon" as they say, and while a later Pharaoh was to suffer the affliction of a divinely hardened heart, we can fairly assume that this one was quite naturally smitten with a different variety of personal turgidity.

Genesis 10-11: Setting Tounges A Wagging

2011-01-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

Confusion of the tongues by Gustave Doré (1865)

This part provides us with a whole load of begatting, however, (alas) those events are not illustrated in any Bible of which I am currently aware, which makes it into a fairly dry account of which tribes came from whose loins. I defy any pastor to do a homily chapter 10 without dwelling on the only interesting figure found therein: Nimrod. Thanks to him we have the ancient idiomatic expression "as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD" a turn of phrase by which one could render praise. Later extrabiblical folktales were to tarnish his name quite a bit, which may help explain why it is currently considered a term of abuse in American English.

Next we have the old and familiar folktale about the confounding of the languages of man by the gods. According to Josephus, this unprecedented tower was commissioned by King Nimrod, and may well have come in on time and under budget, if only the king wasn't being such an impious tyrant, setting his face and his followers against the gods.

This particular tale really makes one wonder why Allah is allowing the all those ludicrously tall structures to remain standing in Dubai. Can anyone gaze upon the Burj Khalifa for more than a moment or two without immediately recalling the artistic depictions of Babel? Possibly the Arabs are just pious enough as a people to get away with these architectural shenanigans without having their language split apart into various mutually incomprehensible dialects.

Speaking of how languages naturally evolve into dialects, why is it that the science of comparative linguistics is not constantly under attack from the religious right? Not unlike the clever biologists, these cunning linguists are making scientifically testable claims about the gradual evolution of new forms over aeons, and in the process directly contradicting the literal interpretation of how these forms arose suddenly via divine intervention. I'd expect that the Biblical literalists should at least try for equal time in the science classrooms wherever modern linguistics are being taught in lieu of ancient folktales. Perhaps a disclaimer sticker on undergraduate linguistics books? Probably I'd best stop giving them ideas now.

Genesis 6-9: God Poureth Forth Mighty Wrath, Noah Poureth Out Strong Wine

2011-01-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

I don't bother overmuch with those who maintain there is ample scientific evidence for a truly global inundation, because doing science means following the evidence to conclusions rather than dragging the evidence along to wherever you were hoping to arrive. That said, what we have here is a mythic parable about the wrath and power and mercy of God. The key passage is this: "And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." If we had to define the term "overkill" using only one ancient myth, this story would be the way to go.

I've always wondered why a putative God would use a natural disaster to get His message across. I mean, wouldn't it be quicker and easier just to magically kill all the offending humans, as God allegedly did with the miserly and dishonest Ananias and Sapphira? Surely the use of a global flood (whether metaphorical or literal) sort of sets the unfortunate precedent that any given massive natural disaster will be assumed to be divine retribution? For that matter, why not just zap all the offending humans into nonexistence and leave the animals alone?

Now this is a more-or-less universally familiar story, at least up to Gen 9:17, wherein God promises never again to destroy all life with water, and provides the rainbow as a symbol of his friendship with men. Presumably, though, the Lord has an infinitude of other means at His disposal (including everything listed in Death From the Skies) and thus this covenant ought not be particularly reassuring to the theologically inclined.

After this point in the story, things get a bit more obscure and obscene. You have to read this bit for yourself or else you'll think I'm just making it up:

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

So Noah goes to a great deal of personal effort to make a bit of wine (this is the guy who built the entire Ark after all) and then he overindulges and finds himself laying around naked in his tent. I'm not saying anything negative about Noah here. It's his tent, after all, and it's not as if we Americans never lay around the house naked drinking wine. Evidently, though, the ancient Hebrews considered nakedness to be a Very Big Deal, so much so that Noah immediately curses his grandson (who was nowhere on the scene during this story) when he discovers that his grandson's father has seen him naked. Maybe it's because Noah is more than 600 years old by this point, and his body hasn't held up so well over the centuries. Maybe it's because the authors of the book wanted to dishonor the Canaanites early on in the narrative. Either way, it seems a bit extreme to lay down a perpetual curse upon so many tribes on such a *ahem* flaccid pretext as one's own nakedness, exposed entirely by accident, to someone other than the object said curse.

Genesis 4-5: The Parable of Cain and Abel

2011-01-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

A friend of a friend once knew a telepathic gorilla, who thought it was plainly obvious that the story of Cain and Abel was a parable about the interaction between the sons of Cain (agriculturalists) and the sons of Abel (herders) and how it all went down in the Fertile Crescent between those two competing modes of human existence. The gorilla is reported to have said "The Semites were telling their children, 'God is on our side. He loves us herders but hates those murderous tillers of the soil from the north.'" This is about as much sense as a gorilla has ever made, in my experience, when doing Scriptural exegesis.

In particular, the gorilla's take on this makes sense of the question that will occur to most modern readers , "Why does God seem to arbitrarily prefer shepards to tillers?" If you think you can best the telepathic gorilla on this point, I'd be interested in hearing other theories.

Blogging The KJV

2011-01-01T01:01:00.000-08:00

So, it's the four hundredth anniversary of the finalization of the original 1611 King James Bible, which would eventually supplant earlier translations of the Bible into English. Accordingly, this seems as good a year as any to read through the KJV, as suggested by Bruce. I'm going to have a go at this here on this blog, and my friend Paul is also posting a few of his thoughts here.

Acura Declares War on Xmas! (not really)

2010-12-01T22:22:00.000-08:00

Okay, so check these out:

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/789-the-season-of-reason.html

http://www.acura.com/vb/tlp/tlp_allmodels.aspx

The catchy phrase "Season of Reason" is in both cases is being used to promote and raise money for the corporate cause, while telling the customer/donor that she is a bright person who makes rational choices. That's all well and good, but doesn't Acura have anyone in the PR dept who can translate from English to Midwestern? Such blatant pandering to the rationalist crowd will surely draw a harsh backlash from the culture warriors on the far right.

Cue FauxNews hissy fit in 3... 2... 1...

Liveblogging Dinesh D'Souza

2010-12-01T18:07:00.000-08:00

Q&A time starts around 21:07 or so. Woo hoo!

21:05 - Back to Romans 1:18-25. Given the preponderance of Sunday School teachers and students here, this argument seems a bit unoriginal and superfluous. Evidently I'm not taking advantage of the real joy of religious unbelief, which is unfettered debauchery. Damn!

21:01 - He does a better Bertrand Russell than Sam Harris impression.

21:00 - Now we've moved on (slightly) to atheism = communism. My brain is bleeding.

20:55 - Back to the argument that (1) Western culture rules :. (2) Xn doctrine is true.

20:50 - Now we're on to fine-tuning of the universe. Nothing new or surprising here.

20:45 - Arguing that the Big Bang in particular supports Augustinian cosmogony. He makes an incredible (some might last inordinate) amount of hay over this, then makes a poop joke at Hawking's expense.

20:42 - Evidently modern science overwhelmingly supports theism. Don't tell the NAS!

20:40 - Now he is getting into the argument that methodological naturalism has slowly displaced faith-based thinking.

20:35 - Turns out Christianity hated slavery all along. Who knew?

20:33 - Dinesh does his Sam Harris impression. Evidently Sam has a significantly deeper and manlier voice than Dinesh. :)

20:30 - Starting in on the argument from his bestselling apologetic book that Xn culture is compassionate and good, thererfore Xn doctrine is true. Is is true that Eastern cultures don't believe in compassion and the dignity of life? Don't tell the Jain!

20:25 - He has covered the "accident of birth" argument for one's faith, and the problem of childhood indoctrination. So far so good.

20:20 - Claims he is going to answer the "best arguments " of the Gnu Atheists, appealing solely to evidence and reason.

20:15 - Now he is telling us about the New Atheists and Hitch's hairdo. He claims that atheists want to convince people that atheism is correct. How very un-Xn of them! It is not as if Christians are evangelical about their worldview.

20:10 - He looks even goofier in person. Starts off with a joke and an anecdote about Churchill.

I've never had the chance to see Zaltzman in person, so it may be said that D'Souza is the most consummate bullshit artist that I may ever get the chance to see live. Probably I should not be this excited about it, but here we go!

Pasquale's Wager

2010-10-29T10:12:00.001-07:00

Suppose Pasquale Galante came to you and said that not only had he personally seen a flying saucer but that he would like you to believe that they are real – based on his testimony and that of other alleged eyewitnesses claiming similar experiences. If you’re anything like me, you’d require stronger evidence than a few firsthand accounts. Why? Because people are mistaken all the time, about what they think they are perceiving, what they recall having seen, and how they recount their stories. Some people can even be dishonest with themselves and others at times, especially when that inures to their personal benefit, as when incredible stories attract undue attention to their bearers.

Now suppose that in order to bolster his credibility and compel you to take his testimony seriously, Pasquale asks you to consider the following possibility:

· If you choose to believe in the extraterrestrial UFO’s, you will not lose anything thereby.

· If you do not choose to believe in the UFO’s, the aliens might well abduct and torture you just to prove the point.

So just go ahead and believe what Pasquale does, because the aliens are thought (by some) to be vengeful and cruel to unbelievers.

Now, how might you react to this little gambit?

You might say that one does in fact lose something whenever one claims that camera-shy extraterrestrials are visiting our planet and teasing credulous eyewitnesses with gratuitous acts of crop flattening. You lose face, you lose credibility, you lose the ability to have critical thinkers take you seriously. So it is not as if there is nothing on the line here. At the very least, one’s own self-respect ought to depend somewhat on one’s sense of having lead an examined life, rather than blithely believing whomever walks up and claims to have had a personal encounter with super-intelligent beings from the heavens.

More importantly, though, one should notice that Pasquale would be threatening you with force by proxy, by saying that unless you believe what he says someone (in whom you do not now believe) may make you suffer for not believing. Even leaving aside the fact that beliefs are not subject to direct acts of the will, this is an exceedingly bizarre way to attempt to compel belief. It is a bit like pointing a toy gun at someone and telling them that if they don’t believe the gun is really real, well, you’re just going to pull the trigger and show them.

Now that I’ve gone and created an analogy for my original analogy, probably I should go ahead and get to the point: Threatening unbelievers with hell is pointless. Many people of faith have trouble seeing this, because they’ve been raised with the idea that hell is a real place to which their all-loving heavenly father will someday consign everyone who fails to adhere to their own faith. But viewed from the outside it is no more credible as a threat than alien rectal probes or toy guns. You have to already believe in the threat in order to take the threat seriously, but the whole point of the wager is to help unbelievers come to believe.

*8^D

NOMA - ¿No va?

2010-08-04T11:08:00.000-07:00

Some of my friends have recently gotten into a bit of an discussion over S. J. Gould’s proposal that science and religion ought to be considered non-overlapping magisteria (oddly dubbed ‘NOMA’ for the sake of brevity). Essentially, this model states that science should stick to empirical questions of fact, while religion may be left to deal with questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. I contend that the model consists of four distinct propositions, some of which are more controversial than others.

1) Scientists should address themselves to empirical questions of fact, so long as they claim to be doing science.

2) Scientists should not address questions of ultimate meaning and moral value, so long as they claim to be doing science.

3) Religious leaders should not address empirical questions of fact, when acting in their capacity as people of faith.

4) Religious leaders should address themselves to questions of ultimate meaning and moral value, so long as they are acting as people of faith.

The reason these propositions are somewhat carefully circumscribed is that many people are both scientists and people of faith. Some biologists go home from the lab on Saturday and lead Sunday School classes the following morning, while the Vatican famously employs astronomer-priests to study how the heavens go rather than how to go to heaven.

A few caveats before moving forward. Firstly, it is important to notice that this model more prescriptive than descriptive. Gould was well aware of the fundamentalist resurgence against science, aimed primarily at his own field, and he spilled vats of ink working tirelessly against this phenomenon. So, it must be assumed that the advocate of NOMA is not saying that science and religion do not in fact overlap, but rather that we would be better off if they did not. Sort of an epistemological “good fences, good neighbors” policy between these two fields. Secondly, it is vital to note that NOMA only addresses the ideal relationship between the human endeavors of empirical science and religion. It says nothing about other fields of study such as historical exegesis, politics, economics, aesthetics, philosophy, etcetera. It may be that some of these fields necessary overlap with either science or religion, or both, but NOMA does not address this problem. Finally, it is important to note that NOMA is not necessarily an idealized end game. It may well be that I’d much rather my cranky preachy neighbor sold his home and moved away, but for now the best I can do is to extend and augment our mutual fence.

With all these caveats in mind, then, what of the four propositions themselves? I consider the first and fourth claims relatively uncontroversial, because they are basically saying that scientific and religious people should pursue their chosen specialties. So long as both fields of endeavor continue to coexist, their practitioners will address themselves to their respective fields of study, which are aptly described and empirical research on the one hand and questions of ultimate meaning on the other. Some will no doubt object that ethics are far too important to be left to people of faith, and should be carefully studied and skillfully debated by ethicists and philosophers. I have no problem with this, and would merely point out that the NOMA paradigm does not address itself to ethicists and philosophers. Such fellows can knock up my religious neighbor all they like and attempt to engage in lengthy discussions with him, without violating the NOMA principle, although I doubt they will be cordially invited in for tea.

The third proposition essentially states that we should not take something on faith which can be readily tested, for example, claims about the age of the Earth or the origin of species. Those who object to this principle are unwilling to consider evidence when they have presupposed the truth of faith-based propositions, and thus are not worth engaging in dialogue. No amount of logic and reason will avail against one who rejects both.

This leaves only the second and arguably most controversial principle, that scientists should refrain from claiming that science provides answers to questions of ultimate meaning and moral values. There are actually two distinct questions here: “Can science provide ultimate meaning?” and “Can science provide moral values?” Personally, I take the view that all meaning and purposes are proximate rather than ultimate (as Gould himself intimates towards the end of his original essay with his ‘cold bath’ theory of nature) and thus the NOMA model graciously grants religious figures his blessing to muck about with naught but an imaginary category. I’m unsure what the implications of this practice might be, except to say that is it probably harmless unless combined with harmful moral principles, e.g. “Your ultimate purpose is to please Elohim/Allah/God, and He has commanded you to take over a given patch of land by any means necessary.” The NOMA advocate does not say that such nonsense cannot be vigorously refuted, but merely that it cannot be addressed using the hypothetico-deductive method.

As to the formulation of moral values themselves, that may be the ultimate sticky wicket. To those who adhere to the idea of an ‘is-ought gap’ and assert that we should mind the gap, it seems clear enough that science can only address questions of what is rather than how things ought to be. It can tell us how to prevent HIV infections, but it cannot tell us why we should do so. To do that, we have to draw on inherent values such as love of health and empathy for others. There are some who claim that our values should be deduced from facts about the world, but I’ve not yet seen one of them make a persuasive case. I’ll try to keep my eyes and mind open for a good argument to that effect, however.

Friday Fish

2010-07-16T10:09:00.001-07:00

It's been quite awhile since I've posted up a new piece of "Friday Fishbait" but someone just *has* to explain this one to me, because it is entirely unclear to me what it might possibly mean. I brake for vicious fishes? I follow an angry messiah? What, what?

Good time for a protest

2010-05-05T10:16:00.001-07:00

It’s that time of year again. The tea-and-crumpets-and-bigotry crowd is coming out of the proverbial prayer closet tomorrow in an annual effort to create the false impression that America is an officially Evangelical Christian Nation. Everyone else can just pack up and move back to Europe, or Canada, or Rhode Island, or wherever they came from with their wacky ideas of religious plurality and tolerance.

Let me be totally clear about this: If you want to pray, that’s just fine. If you want to cast aside Jesus’ explicit commandments in Matthew 6 and choose to go out in public and make a big spectacle of yourself praying to Jesus, well that’s fine too – I’m not saying you have to make sense. What I am saying is that I find it beyond bizarre that the National Day of Prayer Task Force insists on having a pray-in at the State Capitol and inviting high-ranking state officials to explicitly endorse their evangelical faith.

Think about it: Tomorrow we will have public officials preaching piety on public property in the shadow of the seat of state government. Yes, it is constitutionally protected free speech, but what possible purpose can such hypocrisy serve other than to create the impression that anyone who does not sign up to the Lausanne Covenant should be considered second-class citizens with less than full access to the participatory political process and privileges of citizenship? If you can think of even one legitimate reason for ignoring explicit Christian doctrine along with the longstanding American ideal of keeping the state out of the church, please do let me know.

The question of whether we should have national days of religious observance was definitively settled quite some time ago, when it was directly and forcefully addressed by the author of the Declaration of Independence:

“I consider the government of the US. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. … I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. … Fasting and prayer are religious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the time for these exercises, and the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and right can never be safer than in their hands, where the Constitution has deposited it.” – Thomas Jefferson, to Reverend Samuel Miller, 23 January 1808.

Itchy Okie trigger finger

2010-04-16T10:00:00.001-07:00

http://www.newson6.com/Global/story.asp?s=12320402&clienttype=printable

Please read the original interview transcript, linked above, before reading this post. Without the full context, we run the risk of misinterpreting the words of a man who hopes to be elected to the highest office in Oklahoma. There have been more than a few bits of disinformation circulating about this particular interview, and so I’d like to try to clear up a few things for the record.

“Keep and bear arms” originally meant, at a minimum, the idea of owning personal firearms and using them in warfare or training. Assuming, then, that our elected officials are generally familiar with the political terms of art they employ, this means that when Brogdon says “I have the right to keep and bear arms and to provide and protect our families from an overreaching federal government” he means to convey the idea that he perceives a need to arm and train in preparation to slay federal employees.

Now, I’m no longer directly on the federal payroll, but I spend the bulk of my working hours directly supporting federal civil servants, as well as Air Force officers and airmen, and I’ve got to say that they are all fairly decent folks. I’ve also met Mr. Brogdon on occasion, and he seemed like a pretty nice guy. As a result of these experiences, I’ve a good deal of difficulty imagining him shooting to kill my co-workers on account of their overreaching efforts. Who, then, are the “out of control” feds against whom Brogdon hopes to prepare a well-trained militia? Here, one is left to speculate because Mr. Brogdon was not so incautious as to precisely whom his proposed Oklahoma militiamen ought to be targeting. Nevertheless, it is ominous that the anti-government rhetoric advocating training in preparation for insurrection (once the exclusive domain of marginal radicals) has become so mainstream that even gubernatorial candidates of major parties have no problem going on the record with such talk.

There are those who will say that it is premature to link Brogdon’s assertion of the need for an explicitly anti-federal militia to the far-right wing militia movement, but to them I must point out that the rhetoric used is too strikingly similar to be merely coincidental. Consider, for example, the following quotation from Thom Robb:

“You should be in the movement out of a sense of duty toward our children. Our duty in life is to assure a peaceful life for our children. There is a war in America today. In one camp is the federal government…[t]heir goal is to destroy us. Our goal is to destroy them. There is no middle ground. There is only right and wrong.”

Notice several elements in common between Robb’s and Brogdon’s worldviews here: Both men divide the world into patriots and their beloved families on the one side and evil faceless agents of federal government on the other; both of them anticipate an armed conflict between these two groups; and both assert the duty of patriots to arm themselves and train for to fight in this conflict. The notable dissimilarities between these men are that Brogdon has not (yet) claimed that armed conflict is inevitable, and that Brogdon tends to frame the opposing groups in terms of spiritual and ideological purity, whereas Robb focuses on spiritual and racial purity. These distinctions do not make enough of a difference to comfort me. How about you?

Steven Pinker at USAO

2010-04-12T13:01:00.001-07:00

Last week, the campus of USAO in Chickasha was graced by one of the greatest minds of our time, and for once I can say that (by the grace of one of the greatest wives of our time) I was in attendance and paying attention. The lecture was rooted in the concepts of Dr. Pinker’s most recent book but he managed to make it significantly more accessible and even more entertaining than the book itself.

One of the highlights was a breakdown of English dysphemisms, their appropriate uses, and the strong emotional reactions that each category conjures up (e.g. revulsion, shock and awe). Also, a reading of the Congressional attempt to ban naughty words by enumerating all of them.

The Ultimate Truth-Seeker Challenge

2010-03-05T12:31:00.000-08:00

PROGRESS UPDATE (31-Mar-2010)

I've already finished Nicholas Everitt's book.

ORIGINAL POST

Here are the details of the challenge itself, as put forth by a rising star in the worldwide freethought memeplex.

I’ve finally given in and given up on one of my less well-thought-out New Year’s resolutions, and decided to overhaul my ‘now reading’ list with the above challenge in mind. Anyone care to join me in this quixotic quest to read through over 10,000 pages covering (more-or-less) the same subject matter from brilliant and thoroughgoing authors on both sides?

Haskell County Monument now officially unconstitutional

2010-03-01T15:45:00.001-08:00

The story broke today (via Tulsa World) that the Haskell County monument to theocracy has been denied review by the Supreme Court, effectively making this decision the law of the land. Congrats to the Greens and the ACLU for triumphing over this attempt by theocrats to resurrect archaic religious dicta.

Force-feeding faith to tiny tots

2010-02-11T09:40:00.001-08:00

Despite the steaming hot editorial imprecations flowing forth from the BM, it is emphatically not the case that we unbelievers are indoctrinating our children. This is not a case of pot and kettle, this is a case of the purest tu quoque. We freethinkers want our children to learn to think for themselves. We don't just tell them what to believe but rather we try to teach them how to think, how to separate the wheat of rationality and evidence from the chaff of fallacy and myth. We do this, in part, by exposing them to all sorts of various worldviews and letting them discern for themselves which ones to believe.

A confident worldview, firmly rooted in reality, need not isolate and indoctrinate its children, forcing them to repeatedly intone the creeds that they must needs believe, cocooning them in an echo-chamber of Sunday Schools and private Christian Academies or home-schools. We freethinkers allow our children to interact with people of any faith or none, having confidence in their ability to learn to reason for themselves. We feel free to take them to Christian services, Baha'I services, Jewish synagogues, Wiccan rituals, Humanist/Unitarian services, and anything else we can find to broaden their horizons. Having seen all these for myself, I can say that few congregations are so pathetic as those which feel the need to constantly reassure themselves (and their children) that the object of their devotion is really real. Here are some lyrics on point:

I believe I believe that God is here
I believe I believe that God is here
I believe I believe that God is here

Offhand, I cannot think of anything more indicative of a deep-seated need to compensate for a total dearth of evidence ("We have ancient books!") than standing and swaying and repeating lines such as these over and over (and over). I also cannot think of anything more personally stultifying, but I sit through it, gritting my teeth and humming vaguely along, because it is important to me that my children learn to understand the cultural milieu into which they were born, without which they cannot hope to understand why their neighbors behave as they do. Now, have you Baptists ever showed your children a Dawkins film, in an attempt to expose them to other worldviews than your own? Ever take them to an Orthodox or Catholic church to witness a liturgical service? Ever take them to meet the friendly Unitarians or the Soka Gakkai Buddhists at the Gay Pride Festival? Given them a book by Philip Pullman? I didn't think so. You are too threatened by the mere possibility of heresy and apostasy to even contemplate allowing your kids to sort such things out for themselves.

Why is that, exactly? I suspect it is because you fear you might face the unimaginable "wrath stored up for a man who would obstruct children from coming to Jesus" with which Mr. Prentice so unsubtly threatens his readers. This should give us all pause. What sort of Heavenly Father gives his children such an ultimatum? Love Me or Burn! This is an abusive father figure if ever there was one. Somebody call the metaphysical DHS!

Seriously, though, if you Baptists want to teach your children to tremble in fear of a cosmic ruler who fully intends to torture most of his subjects forever for the victimless crime of improper belief, so be it, that is your right as an American. All we ask is that you respect our right to raise our children to think for themselves, instead of teaching them rely upon ancient documents of questionable provenance to provide all the important answers about life, the universe, and everything.

Contra Plantinga #6 - Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN)

2010-01-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

A bit of background reading may be necessary here, because Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) is fairly technical and most people do not intuitively understand probability theory, especially Bayesian maths. Suffice to say that in order for Plantinga’s argument to go through he must show that humans most always form true beliefs about the world [ P(R)≈1 ] and that probability of this happening on the joint hypotheses of metaphysical naturalism and evolutionism is low [P(R|E&N)≈0]. Alas, Plantinga fails to substantiate either of these claims in anything like a rigorous logical fashion. He more or less assumes the truth of the former premise and merely hand-waves his way to the latter. Whenever you see a brilliant logician such as Plantinga eliding the steps to his conclusion instead of outlining a tightly reasoned deductive argument, well, caveat emptor.

A couple points must be made here. Metaphysical materialists cannot assume P(R)≈1 since we believe that all of the (oddly pervasive) talk of gods, spirits, ghosts, magic, chakras, witches, faeries, etc. is all so much bunk. People all around the world make up all sorts of wacky beliefs about disembodied minds and the imaginary forces emanating therefrom, and thus P(R) is evidently nowhere near unity. Moreover, since most religions (with a few interesting exceptions) assert that all other religions make up all sorts of untruths about the world, which are integrated into their devotees worldviews, it seems odd for any religious person to argue that humans almost always form true beliefs about the world. Finally, it should be evident from the overabundance of material at websites such as http://snopes.com/ and http://nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ that we humans are indeed quite prone to all manner of irrational thinking, not least of which an inborn tendency to attribute agency where none exists. Daniel Dennett and Pascal Boyer (among others) have written extensively and convincingly on this latter point, and I commend them to anyone interested in mapping out the bounds of human rationality.

Secondly, while the probability P(R|E&N) is nowhere near unity, it is neither nearly so low as to allow Plantinga's argument to go through. The crucial question here is whether we would expect naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms to select for true beliefs over false ones. This question is not nearly so simple as it sounds (or as Plantinga's treatment suggests) but it should be fairly obvious that it is generally far easier to program a neural network to solve problems of circumstantial adaptation by providing them with adaptive goals and good data than by providing them with maladaptive goals and bad data, as Plantinga suggests. Indeed, if E&N are both true we must expect that adaptive goals (e.g. craving food, avoiding pain) came first and the neurological wiring which allows for holding propositional truths (and hence the possibility of R) came along some time later.

Solidarity with Kurt Westergaard

2010-01-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

May the forces of religious fanaticism and censorship drown in the blood they spill. Amen.

Slave States and Religion

2009-12-30T11:01:00.001-08:00

Here are the fifteen slave states and two territories in which slavery was legally practiced prior to the American Civil War. To each I've added an ostensibly unrelated ranking from a relatively recent Pew Forum poll:

Mississippi (1)
Alabama (2)
Arkansas (3)
Louisiana (4)
Tennessee (5)
South Carolina (6)
Oklahoma (7)
North Carolina (8)
Georgia (9)
Kentucky (10)
Texas (11)
Utah (12)
Virginia (15,18)
Missouri (17)
Florida (20)
Maryland (21)
Delaware (24)

Before I tell you what the ranking means, I'd like to point out a few obvious things. Firstly, all of these former slave states are clustered in the top half of the states, which is statistically vanishingly unlikely on chance alone. Moreover, every single one of the top twelve (12) states in the Pew poll are formerly states or territories in which slaveholding was legally practiced.

Now, here I the kicker: The Pew Forum poll had nothing to do with slavery or race or even civil rights. It was merely a measure of religious faith, and not even some particular religious faith historically tied to denominational support for the institution of Negro slavery, but really just ANY faith at all.

Now, here is the poll page itself:
http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=504&loc=interstitialskip

I know as well as the next stats geek that correlation is not (necessarily) causation, but these massive overlaps cry out for some common factor. What is it about faith which facilitates slavery, or vice-versa, or what might be the hidden variable here? Is it that religious faith allows people to override their own sense of morality, which might well balk at seeing a fellow human in bondage? Is it that some Christian sacred texts expressly condone slavery? Or is it something else entirely?

A brief meditation on human rights

2009-11-30T16:20:00.000-08:00

Francis Abbot to Elizabeth Stanton, on women's rights and faith:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8hwWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA63

In my previous post I wrote about the suppression of political freedoms and all the various forms of free expression represented at the Peace Festival which will inevitably ensue if the organizers of that event get their way and bring about the premature withdrawal of NATO forces. In this post, I'd like to quickly point out that Islamists are not the only ones with a long history of subordinating civil liberty to religious piety.

F.E. Abbot wrote an excellent letter to some years ago, on the subject of the interaction between human rights and religion. Towards the end, he summarizes his thesis thusly, "You may search the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, and not find one clear, strong, bold affirmation of human rights as such." I encourage everyone to read all of Abbot's letter and seriously consider whether he is far off the mark.

I would argue that Abbot is spot-on and moreover that his argument may be readily extended to other groups in other times, such as the LGBT communities even now struggling for recognition and equality all across America. Until they are willing to boldly criticize the numerous and various faiths which have historically justified intolerance, fear, and loathing of them, they cannot hope to be truly free. So long as they are willing to pay even the smallest bit of deference to religious faith as a means to understand morality and establish law, they will inevitably be held captive to the blind bigotry of our ignorant forebears.

Indeed, it seems clear that Abbot's argument may be made even forcefully in our own time and place than as originally written. Women of faith could argue, contra Abbot, that the Christian Bible has a reserved a place for them (however humble) as devout believers and even missionaries, so long as they never went too far and attempted to wield authority over a man. This option is unavailable to the LGBT community without deliberately misconstruing significantly passages (such as Romans 1) or else pretending that those particular bits of holy writ are somehow inapplicable to the modern Christian life. I've always had a soft spot for those who value right morality over intellectual consistency in such cases, but it should be obvious that outright skepticism is the preferable path.