…and this is a 
I woke up this morning after a poor night's rest, with a surly brain and tired eyes, and what do I behold as I scan through the last few day's worth of email? Stories of faith that piss me off. So allow me to purge my demons by slapping around a few religious goofballs — it'll take the edge of my headache and lighten my step for the rest of the day. Don't worry, I'll start off easy and work up to the really bad ones.
John Shelby Spong is giving some lectures. You know, I think I'd like Spong as a person, and I think he espouses some worthy humanist values, but jeez, he always comes off as a cheerful airhead. He's essentially an atheist who skims off a bit of the moldy skin of the rotten fruit of religion, and tells us how pretty the colors are…thereby making an implicit argument to keep the decaying garbage around.
Yes, God exists, but God is not a separate deity who intervenes in our lives.
Jesus' resurrection is not an historically accurate event, but a symbolic story of what it means to live a fully human life.
Eternal life is not a journey to heaven or hell, but a state which can only be glimpsed when we experience love.
He's like Karen Armstrong, so taken with the language of religion that they're willing to ignore the substance. When you've reduced god to the uncaring smear of cosmic background radiation and a collection of psychological quirks in the human brain, you might as well admit it: he's dead. Get over it and move on. And deceased figments don't need a weepy wake or much sympathy for the family.
Similarly, Bible scholars can be such nuisances. Actually, Bible scholarship is a fine thing; I appreciate historical analysis, and think the secular study of old documents is an eminently respectable academic discipline. Unfortunately, the freaking Bible is fraught with cultural connections that lead too many people to draw unwarrantedly deep conclusions from it. I'm sure this Professor van Wolde is a reasonable scholar, but her conclusions about Genesis are fine nits that need picking, nothing more.
Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.
She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.
Yeah, yeah. It's a small piece of the puzzle, nice to know, tells us squat-all about the origin of the world (which van Wolde is not claiming), and a little bit about the culture that scribbled down the Genesis myth. It generates breathless excitement among the credulous, though, who believe the book actually provides some insight into the creation of the world.
It doesn't.
Here's how you should look at the book of Genesis. Long, long ago, a tribe of desert nomads bumped up against the more cosmopolitan culture of Mesopotamia. They learned useful skills from the city people, like writing, but at the same time, the allure of those older, more sophisticated ideas was leading to the dissolution of tribal identity, and especially to a loss of respect for the austere and demanding desert god. Who wants to worship dry old El when slinky, sexy Innini is calling?
So in a move as old as religion, almost, the desert priests slyly adopted the popular culture of their neighbors, stealing all their myths, but rewrote them to put their one great god in charge of the whole story. Genesis is an exercise in syncretism, a wholesale theft of one tradition to be repackaged with a new set of symbols. It is not about the creation of the universe. It is about resolving a conflict between two human cultures. That's interesting, sure enough, as long as you don't forget where you are and start building big pseudo-museums in Kentucky dedicated to your misconceptions.
It's also a problem when you have professional rabbinical nit-pickers who use their silly fine-grained interpretations of ancient texts to demand ridiculous and irrelevant impositions on people's lives. As a further example of scholars losing sight of the context of their great big dusty books, consider the case of Shabbos elevators. There is a strict Jewish tradition of not doing any work on the sabbath, even to the point of not flicking any switches, so many buildings in Jewish communities have ridiculous and wasteful elevators that stop at every floor, so the devout don't need to push a button. Except that as they learn more about the technology, they are becoming afraid that it might offend their god.
But the recent ruling, whose signers included Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv -- at 99, widely considered the most influential Torah sage of his generation -- introduced a caveat based on new technology in elevators. The rabbis wrote that this new technology, which was explained to them by elevator technicians and engineers in "a written and oral technical opinion," made them aware for the first time that using Shabbos elevators may be a "desecration of the Sabbath."
They did not name the offending technology. But for several years there has been debate among Orthodox rabbis in Israel over whether devices that measure the weight in an elevator car, and adjust power accordingly, effectively make entering a car the equivalent of pressing a button.
Come on. Seriously? Listening to the most hidebound, most literal, most conservative, and most ancient geezer in your community is a useful way to maintain tribal tradition, but sometimes traditions need to break and respond to the times. Whoever scribbled down the old Sabbath laws couldn't even imagine elevators, let alone electronic sensors, so it would make more sense to abide by the spirit of the old laws rather than trying to impose a precise meaning on them that simply isn't there. Adapt! Your pointless dilemmas simply make you look like a gang of unimaginative old fools.
Adhering to ancient dogma kills people, too. Khristian Oliver has been convicted of murder and sentenced to die. I'd be willing to concede that he's a bad guy who committed an evil act — nobody seems to be arguing over whether he actually committed the crime — except that his trial took place in Texas, and we've had a few examples of Texas "justice". But let us, for the moment, concede that he has legitimately been found guilty. Now look at how the decision to execute him was reached.
After the trial, evidence emerged that jurors had consulted the Bible during their sentencing deliberations. At a hearing in June 1999, four of the jurors recalled that several Bibles had been present and highlighted passages had been passed around.
One juror had read aloud from the Bible to a group of fellow jurors, including the passage, "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death".
Holy crap. Condemned to death because of a Bible verse? By the way, if you read the rest of Numbers 35, from which that verse was taken, it's fairly exhaustive: if somebody kills someone else with iron, wood, or stone, they're murderers, and need to be put to death. It's simply yet another piece of Old Testament blanket savagery: simple-minded, unthinking, absolutist, and prejudicial demands for execution of anyone who violates their rules.
The jurors also seem to have ignored the subsequent verses, where it says that you can offer an alternative verdict in the absence of malice of confining the killer to his 'city of refuge,' until the high priest dies, at which time he's free to go. Is that a valid sentence in 21st century America, too?
Given that Texas is a state that can't be trusted in determining guilt, and given that the dim-witted jurors threw away reason and justice to blindly obey an archaic book (and only a select, small piece of that book), that sentence ought to be reduced, and the death penalty in general stricken from the state law books. Until, that is, enough of the state's population is well-enough educated to make rational determinations of guilt, at which time they'll also be smart enough to reject the death penalty as a primitive barbarism anyway.
I feel a little better now. Still need a nap, though, and maybe some aspirin.
Politics
Comments
Posted by: TalkingSnakeBite
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October 13, 2009 10:55 AM
The scene in Religulous when Maher visits the orthodox Jewish "scientists" who are inventing ways to avoid work on the sabbath is hilarious.
How can these people expect to be taken seriously?
Posted by: WmOckham
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October 13, 2009 11:01 AM
"When you've reduced god to the uncaring smear of cosmic background radiation and a collection of psychological quirks in the human brain, you might as well admit it: he's dead. Get over it and move on."
For some reason, this puts me in mind of Monty Python's classic Dead Parrot sketch: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm
Posted by: sorceror171
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October 13, 2009 11:02 AM
"Several thousand years ago, a tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories wore embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject [of origins]." - Tom Weller, _Science_Made_Stupid_
Posted by: Benjamin Geiger
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October 13, 2009 11:05 AM
That's one reason (of many) I could never follow orthodox Judaism. How twisted does your reasoning have to be to consider walking up multiple flights of stairs to be less work than pushing a button and waiting for a ding?
I understand the gist of most Biblical rules. "Relax for one day per week" is a reasonable rule for a goatherd. So is "don't cook a kid/calf/etc in its mother's milk" (all about respecting one's livestock, not mixing meat and dairy). Even without believing in an all-powerful sky-daddy, the rules make sense.
The problem comes in the form of literalism... or, as it's better termed, fundamentalism. Combine literal readings with differing circumstances and you get trouble.
Posted by: SciencePundit
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October 13, 2009 11:06 AM
You're just saying that because, unlike Ken Ham's or Ellen van Wolde's interpretation, it's consistent with the archeological evidence. I'm on to you! ;-)
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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October 13, 2009 11:07 AM
I understand that view, but it's just not how myths operate. The Hebrews, Israelites, whatever, shared Semitic (and no doubt some non-Semitic) myths with their neighbors, and each group adapted them to fit their own situations. The less powerful did go for more anal versions, however.
They weren't any more "plagiarizing" from anyone else than others were plagiarizing from them, it was merely a shared set of stories, statements, and traditions.
The difference is that the Jewish versions never died out as a belief entirely, which is why such useless junk (to us) continues today.
But I can't fault the Hebrews or their priests for simply taking a common set of beliefs and stories and using them for their purposes, when that's what everybody did.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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October 13, 2009 11:11 AM
Or in other words, not something worth learning about from Spong or anybody else.
I get it now. Oh, no, that's not right, that's what I have long thought.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: Mena
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October 13, 2009 11:13 AM
For some reason I always see biblical studies and scholarship on the same level as people going to blogs and, in the old days, Usenet to discuss Star Trek or some other show that they like. They have all sorts of ideas about why the show is going in a direction that it is, why the characters are doing what they are doing, etc but at the end of the day it's all stuff that was made up and whoever wrote it was doing it only to the limits of his or her storytelling abilities.
Posted by: truthspeaker
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October 13, 2009 11:14 AM
Another excellent post, PZ.
Posted by: Matt Penfold
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October 13, 2009 11:15 AM
There is one thing in Spong's favour compared to Armstrong, and that he is seems a bit more clear on what he actually thinks and believes. I can spend hours reading some of Armstrong's stuff and still not have a clue what she is on about.
Still, being slightly less opaque in your writing is not really much of an endorsement.
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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October 13, 2009 11:18 AM
Really, it's about both. The Hebrews were as curious about beginnings as we are, maybe even more so. That's why they believed the creation myths that they told and that they heard from others.
But of course they had to make it all fit their own "truths," their gods, and eventually, their one god. They had to make the myth their own.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: Zifnab
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October 13, 2009 11:20 AM
In all fairness, if you stab or shoot or impale or bludgeon someone to death, I don't see anything wrong with giving said person whatever the appropriate punishment for murder (likely Murder 2 or 1) is in your state. There's nothing particularly absolutist and prejudicial about that, although suggesting punishments that predate the invention of the wheel are suitable for modern society seems a bit absurd. (Historical tip: They weren't giving anyone lethal injections in 1200 BC).
#4:
I always thought this was the most absurd fundamentalist adaptation from the Bible. Watching some Luddite refuse to eat shelfish or wear poly-blends when he has absolutely no reason why those dictates existed in the first place exemplifies how even the primitive goat herders of Mesopotamia had more common sense than their modern day descendants.
They were enshrining dictates in religion for survival, health, and happiness. These modern idgits are embracing antiquated traditions purely to appease the magic sky fairy, even if it makes life more difficult, more dangerous, and more miserable.
Posted by: Isherwood
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October 13, 2009 11:23 AM
Once again I find myself nodding in agreement and frustrated that I can't shout all that from the roof.
Or can I?
Gah!
Posted by: Abdul Alhazred
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October 13, 2009 11:26 AM
Sabbath elevators are nothing comepared to sabbath refigerators.
(Link to General Electric official website explaining how it works.)
:)
Posted by: TheLady
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October 13, 2009 11:30 AM
Glen @ #6 makes a good point - Genesis is no more plagiarised from Mesopotamian, Egyptian or Syrian sources than teh story of a mythical king drawing a magical weapn from a watery source was plagiarised from the Welsh, Irish or Cornish sources (or any more true/realistic). It's just a wide ranging set of cultural beliefs circulating around a geographic area and being reinterpreted by the different people living in it.
No less interesting (from a text analisys and historical study POV) is the fact that Genesis is a hotch-potch of at least 3 distinct "voices" or sources, pretty roughly and at times ineptly cut-and-pasted together.
The most well known example of the occasional botch is right at the start, with the creation story: the first version is poetic, and employs a lot of imagery from Mesopotamia - watery deeps, dark chaos etc. Then right after it comes a shorter, much more matter of fact version that is different in content and in philosophy, specifically it is a much more "desert" type story in that it concentrates on rain as the impulse for life (very important in a dry environment) and doesn't mention any abyssal deeps (more likely to be a primal fear for people living near great rivers and vulnerable to floods).
The whole of Genesis is like that; there's been a whole sea of ink spent on identifying and labelling the different sources, and tehn carefully determining which bits of the story were contributed from whom. There's also been a fair bit of linguistic analysis which has shown the different sourced to be hundreds of years apart, chronologically.
For all that the Bible is not a very good source book for all the moral and scientific questions int he world, it is a more iteresting document than one would think from listening to the wingnuts... Pearls before swine, if you ask me...
Posted by: Richard Eis
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October 13, 2009 11:34 AM
-"in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.-
Nope apparently the original had giant serpents. Or something.
Posted by: TheLady
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October 13, 2009 11:36 AM
Mena @ #8: the difference is that we know who wrote Star Trek, we can ask them wheat they meant by it, we know who the actors are and what they're like (within limits) in real life, and we have a vast body of cultural context to place the series in. When it comes to the Bible, especially the really really ancient bits, we know bupkiss, and quite often the archaeological or third party evidence is not much help. That's why it's a historical document in a way that a recent pop culture artefact couldn't be - it opens the door to actual new knowledge about the past.
Posted by: Forbidden Snowflake
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October 13, 2009 11:37 AM
Ehm... Are you serious? You do realize that there are pretty elaborate rules about the kinds of activity that are considered work?
I agree that it's a bit crazy in the modern context, but there's method to the madness, and it's not some secret knowledge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat#The_39_categories
Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky
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October 13, 2009 11:37 AM
A few minor nitpicks:
First, note that what you refer to as an alternative test involving the city of refuge isn't quite what was going on. There's some interesting issues here going on in that the relatives of the deceased were allowed to kill the person if they found him before he got to the city of refuge. The individual wasn't confined there but rather had to run to get their before the vengeful relatives. It had an element sort of like a trial by combat in that regard. (Insert obligatory remarks about the amazing moral clarity of this text and how much sense it makes in modern times. At some level, though after all the genocide and slavery endorsed, little things like trials by combat for manslaughter come across as almost a drop in the bucket)
Also, there is a point in regards to the Shabbat rules that makes the behavior make sense. A common belief among Orthodox Jews is that the rules have direct metaphysical/supernatural repercussions. Thus, one form of work triggers those repercussions and the other does not. If one buys into this sort of magical thinking, the approach to elevators makes a lot a more sense.
Incidentally, note that Elyashiv is the same guy who lead the ban on wigs with human hair that lead to burning large piles in the streets. A faction that was associated with him was also involved in the attempted declaration that all New York City water was not kosher. However, in this particular case, many people who might otherwise listen to Elyashiv are more or less ignoring him. Elevators are too common and too useful for the old and the infirm. He's more or less tried to press his reactionary attitudes one step too far this time.
Posted by: Strangest brew
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October 13, 2009 11:39 AM
"Bias or prejudice either inherent in the structure of the trial system or as imposed by external events will deny one's right to a fair trial."
"In 2008, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that the jurors had "crossed an important line" by consulting specific passages in the Bible that described the very facts at issue in the case. This amounted to an "external influence" on the jury prohibited under the US Constitution."
And then ignored their own determination...how very err! constitutional...in fact how very christian...ahh! there you have it!
Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky
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October 13, 2009 11:41 AM
Also, while van Wolde is a respected scholar, most people in her field aren't buying into this claim. It is an interesting one but it is very hard to fit with the general evidence.
Note that the idea that Genesis is allowing for a lot of stuff before God's intervention isn't a new idea. This figure into some serious medieval debates in Christianity and Judaism (my understanding is less so in Islam which took creation ex nihilo more or less for granted but I know a lot less about the Islamic end of things)
Posted by: Forbidden Snowflake
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October 13, 2009 11:42 AM
Also: I does too say "in the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth". It's not as if nobody speaks the language of the original anymore, you can't just say crap like that and expect not to be called on it.
Posted by: Blue-eyed Videot
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October 13, 2009 11:46 AM
re: #14
These Jews who "keep" the sabbath... Who, exactly, are they trying to fool with this business? Reminds me of the old saying, "a vegetarian is a person who doesn't eat meat...in public."
Posted by: heironymous
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October 13, 2009 11:52 AM
Glen D -
I'm not sure if I can agree with you when you say "it's just not how myths operate"
I don't know the Hebrew-Mesopotamian relationship well enough to comment, but I do know the Christians stole wholesale from Mithras, the Egyptians and other religions in the establishment of their myths.
Posted by: TheLady
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October 13, 2009 11:52 AM
#22, the Hebrew for used in G1.1, "shamayin" is the same as the modern Hebrew word for "sky". "Heaven" is a pretty loaded bit of creative license to my eyes. Translated literally, the verse would go something along the lines of "at first, YHWH made the sky and the land".
Posted by: Carlie
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October 13, 2009 11:54 AM
Sabbath elevators are nothing compared to sabbath refigerators.
Wow. Do the people using it realize that when they open the door, it warms up the inside, thereby causing the motor to run a bit more to cool it back down again once the door is closed?
Posted by: Blake Stacey
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October 13, 2009 11:55 AM
It's long been said that the KJV translation of Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," doesn't reflect the grammar of the original, and that the first three verses of Genesis should be rendered together, something like the following:
Quoted from Avalos's The End of Biblical Studies, which cites various people on this point, including the medieval Rabbinical commentator Rashi, and then goes on to say,
A footnote here refers to an article by W. Randall Garr in the Harvard Theological Review which I can't get online. . . . Point being, I don't think Prof. van Wolde's argument is as novel as that news story makes it out to be. And I'm shocked, shocked, that a news story indulges in that kind of sensationalism.
Posted by: DerekK
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October 13, 2009 11:56 AM
I don't think John Shelby Spong is really all that much like Armstrong. He's serving a purpose that she's incapable of: standing in a place where he can actually work to change an entire institution/denomination.
Yes, he's akin to the accomodationists and I understand that we sneer at them, and yes I join in the sneering sometimes. But if the intelligent, liberal, nigh-atheist religious folks completely abandon every single religious (in our context, Christian) denomination, be the group as a whole moderate or extreme-right, then all that's left is the hardliners.
I mean, that's exactly what happened to the Southern Baptist Convention. The fundamentalists got into power, and all the moderates and liberals abandoned the denomination, which now has literally no break as it descends into increasingly rightist, Calvinist, theocratic dogma.
Spong (for the Episcopal church) is very similar to some pretty liberal (and in some cases openly homosexual) friends I have who are working directly in the midst of a religious machine (in one case, the Methodist Church, in another, the Presbyterian) in a way that can only help move them away from dogma, superstition, and blinkered obsession with willful ignorance. This is something that I myself was completely unable to do - I fled Baptist Calvinism the day after I realized my errors - and that I admire them for attempting.
Posted by: Ichthyic
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October 13, 2009 11:56 AM
Wow. Do the people using it realize that when they open the door, it warms up the inside, thereby causing the motor to run a bit more to cool it back down again once the door is closed?
yeah, but how else are we gonna see if the light goes off when we shut the door unless we open it first?
Posted by: TheLady
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October 13, 2009 11:57 AM
heironymous, that's just silly. They didn't "steal", they absorbed and repurposed the myths of the people already living in the territories into which Christianity expanded. Today we would call them "inclusive" and "multi-culturalist". If Christians today were as "larcenous" as you think they were back then, we'd have a lot less hassle! =)
Posted by: Carlie
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October 13, 2009 11:59 AM
yeah, but how else are we gonna see if the light goes off when we shut the door unless we open it first?
If a light goes on in a Shabbat refrigerator but no one opens the door to see it, does it make a sound?
Posted by: SplendidMonkey
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October 13, 2009 11:59 AM
It's a liberating act to throw out a bible. I threw out another one I found in my old stuff just yesterday.
Posted by: Ichthyic
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October 13, 2009 12:04 PM
The fundamentalists got into power, and all the moderates and liberals abandoned the denomination, which now has literally no break as it descends into increasingly rightist, Calvinist, theocratic dogma.
you say that if it's a bad thing.
frankly, the descent into extremism makes it all the easier to marginalize, yes?
have you ever considered this might be part of the actual strategy many of us are thinking is the most productive way to finally rid ourselves of this insanity?
Posted by: raven
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October 13, 2009 12:04 PM
A lot of Bible scholars end up as atheists or Deists. If you look at early xianity and the early religious scriptures, it all ends up looking like man made myth making.
I've been reading Bart Ehrman and Burton Mack among others. Early xianity evolved and for that matter is still evolving. The earliest surviving documents were written 2 decades after jesus death. Like today, there were many xian religions with little in common. Some of the books of the bible are forgeries, others are anonymous works that someone attributed later to famous dead people. The modern version contains later additions made by people with a theological agenda.
Evidently the more one knows, the harder it is to believe in myths. No wonder fundies hate education and science.
Posted by: Abdul Alhazred
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October 13, 2009 12:04 PM
Of course they do. Read the specification. On the sabbath that's not how it works.Unlike Jehovah's Witnesses, there are plenty of Orthodox Jewish electrical engineers.
Posted by: Ichthyic
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October 13, 2009 12:06 PM
A lot of Bible scholars end up as atheists or Deists.
ooh! ooh!
shameless plug for Hector Avalos...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2569440864215926514
worth watching (there's two parts), if you haven't seen it.
Posted by: Carlie
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October 13, 2009 12:07 PM
I mean, that's exactly what happened to the Southern Baptist Convention. The fundamentalists got into power, and all the moderates and liberals abandoned the denomination, which now has literally no break as it descends into increasingly rightist, Calvinist, theocratic dogma.
That's an interesting point, DerekK. I left the Southern Baptists in the mid-90s and tried to go back in the early 2000s, and found it to be amazingly bizarrely fundamentalist. I thought that was simply a matter of distance allowing for some perspective, but some of it may also have been the slide you speak of. I had known about the moderate to fundamentalist power shift, but hadn't taken it all the way down to realizing that level of effect.
Posted by: Blake Stacey
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October 13, 2009 12:09 PM
Addendum to my comment #27: I lack the expertise to sort through all these claims and judge which ones might be right (Dammit, Jim, I'm a physicist, not a Hebraist). I just think that the general tenor of van Wolde's statements is not as novel as it's been made out to be, which is not all that surprising.
Posted by: Marcus J. Ranum
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October 13, 2009 12:12 PM
Yes, God exists, but God is not a separate deity who intervenes in our lives.
If he doesn't intervene, how do they know he exists at all?
Posted by: Carlie
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October 13, 2009 12:14 PM
Of course they do. Read the specification. On the sabbath that's not how it works.
I did - it says that the defrost cycle isn't activated by door openings on the Sabbath, but then it says that "Quick Chill and temperature settings will remain at temperatures set before Sabbath Mode". I don't know how they could stay at the same setting yet not adjust the internal temperature to match. It sounded to me more like the setup is such that it runs quietly and makes it appear as though nothing is happening, rather than actually having nothing happening. I guess I'd like to test one out - leave the door open for half an hour or so in Sabbath mode and see if it just lets all the food warm up or what.
Could just leaving it plugged in at all constitute a violation of Sabbath law, since you're taking an action (not unplugging it) that causes it to use electricity?
Posted by: Abdul Alhazred
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October 13, 2009 12:24 PM
It means you don't lose the settings for when you switch off the sabbath mode later. They are not operative during the sabbath. I know how these things work.
It's not the use of electricity per se (notionally "fire"), it's deliberately turning it on ("starting a fire"). Of course starting a fire was a lot of work until fairly recent times.
These are not boobs and they've had plenty of time to think it all through. You won't find any obvious glaring contradictions. Only plenty of absurd premises.
Posted by: Marcus J. Ranum
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October 13, 2009 12:24 PM
The Hebrews, Israelites, whatever, shared Semitic (and no doubt some non-Semitic) myths with their neighbors, and each group adapted them to fit their own situations.
It sounds so much like bacterial conjugation - it's PROOF of god's plan to, uh, have religions EVOLVE! But what started the first religion? Could all religion have grown from a single small lie, told to a child on a hillside under the starry sky? No! That's impossible! When you look at the insane complexity of jewish law, there's no WAY that could have simply "evolved" from the random rantings of a few village idiots. It had to have been intelligently designed! Maybe some old asshole or schizophrenic in a cave wrote it all in 6 days or something.
Actually, this gets me thinking - someone ought to arrange the components of various abrahamic religions into a chart of clades, showing which evolved from the other and the "common ancestor" (zoroastrianism?) I wonder if we'd find there are 'punctuated equilibria' when religions constrict (I.e.: are stuck in the desert and get really bored and make up an extra load of stuff) and what they correlate to. Then we could start poking at the faithful "transitional form! transitional form!" and see how they like it.
Posted by: heironymous
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October 13, 2009 12:26 PM
To The Lady of Comment 30
Isn't theft about perspective? I just finished Gore Vidal's "Julian" and I'm certain the Emperor Julian would have considered those myths as stolen :)
It's just like my own atheist take on Christmas. I celebrate it. I sing _all_ of the Christmas carols. I recognize them as culturally significant (to me) and I enjoy all of the rituals. I just repackage them for my children without all the religious overtones. After all, Christmas is just a celebration of the Winter Solstice.
Posted by: Ichthyic
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October 13, 2009 12:27 PM
These are not boobs
of course not!
If anything, they're clowns, not boobs.
Posted by: Mena
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October 13, 2009 12:28 PM
TheLady@17: True, but if there was this sort of global communication back then we would know too. The point that I was trying to make, however, is that people like to interpret stories into something they can participate in. That can lead to some people who are barely interested nodding along and others spending hours discussing it with whoever will listen. Some people just like the bible as much as some people like Star Trek. Most of us fit in the middle, we are aware of it but won't go to an extreme like learning Klingon. Bible scholars go to an even higher extreme where they actually believe that the story is real and devote their lives to reading and discussing it. For a long time too, they and those like them have managed to convince others in society that they deserve to be placed almost on a pedestal and can't be questioned about their ideas.
Posted by: bunnycatcher
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October 13, 2009 12:36 PM
I think you're being unfair to Karen Armstrong. In a recent article in
The Wall Street Journal she says:
I'm concerned that after defeating religious fundamentalism you'll point your cannons at poets and English majors next.
Posted by: kopd
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October 13, 2009 12:40 PM
"Religion is not an exact science..."
Understatement of the year?
Posted by: TheLady
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October 13, 2009 12:47 PM
Mena, I think you are confusing Biblical scholars and religious people. The religious take the text as "the thing and the whole of the thing", whereas Biblical scholars treat it as a piece of archaeological, historical and cultural evidence, and they do scholarship on it. They are not more obsessive fanboys of Yahwe than WWI historians are obsessive fanboys of Bismark. It's just not the same quality of doscourse: fandom discourse is solipsistic, scholarly discourse is purposeful and open to criticism.
Posted by: Joe Geronimo
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October 13, 2009 12:51 PM
I'm sitting in law school down in Texas (it is a good school despite the state's general lack of education), and I can't wait to graduate in May and get back up North.
Posted by: Janine, Vile Bitch, OM
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October 13, 2009 12:53 PM
I'm concerned that after defeating religious fundamentalism you'll point your cannons at poets and English majors next.
Bunnycatcher is on to our nefarious schemes! We best shut up before the person finds out that after we banish the English department we will go after the ceramics department.
Posted by: Celtic_Evolution
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October 13, 2009 1:02 PM
I think we might be grasping a bit here, bunnycatcher... no?
Posted by: SEF
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October 13, 2009 1:04 PM
@ Marcus J. Ranum #42:
A lot of the cladistic stuff for religions has already been done. You're a bit late to the party. However:
Or: "If Protestantism evolved from Catholicism, then how come there are still Catholics?"
Posted by: Nemo
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October 13, 2009 1:05 PM
And here I thought regular Christianity was crazy.
You throw the supernatural out of religion, and the excuses you have to come up with to continue clinging to it only become more ridiculous.
Posted by: truthspeaker
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October 13, 2009 1:07 PM
I think that was his point.
Posted by: Forbidden Snowflake
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October 13, 2009 1:11 PM
I'm sorry, but in your quote, Karen Armstrong misrepresents religion like crazy. Religion makes truth claims about the world, truth claims of doubtful origins and similar quality which the arts are not known to make. The misrepresentation is glaring and PZ or anyone else is justified in pointing it out.Posted by: raven
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October 13, 2009 1:18 PM
Don't be so silly and paranoid. Everyone knows philosophy is next.
{This is a joke. OTOH, it isn't that far away from the truth. A lot of philosophy is solipsistic bafflegab pretending to be thought.}
Posted by: raven
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October 13, 2009 1:30 PM
There are lots of transitional xian forms.
Anglo Catholic is transitional between Catholic and Protestant.
The early xians were all Jews. There was a Jewish-Xian religion that is now extinct. It does keep reevolving however with a few Messianic Jews found today.
Some modern Protestant denominations are transitional between Mainline Protestant and Deist.
Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip
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October 13, 2009 1:34 PM
@Blue-eyed Videot #23: Great, now I have Larry Groce's "Junk Food Junkie" stuck in my head.
Posted by: Ibis3
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October 13, 2009 1:34 PM
@ Marcus J. Ranum #42:
You mean kind of like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUaE0UlGYxE
(Not completely accurate, but then rock bands aren't known for the accuracy of their scholarship)
Posted by: Marcus J. Ranum
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October 13, 2009 1:35 PM
Raven writes:
Anglo Catholic is transitional between Catholic and Protestant.
Oh YEAH?? Well then what's between anglo catholic and catholic, huh? SHOW ME THE TRANSITIONAL FORMS!
(Gosh this could be fun. Seriously, though, I've found that you can almost always end a christian's proud declaration of faith by spending an hour or two going through the doctrinal checklist to see what kind of christian they are. It's especially fun when you find a unique specimen and get to ask for a blood sample)
Posted by: CJO
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October 13, 2009 1:36 PM
It's not a "botch." There are certainly two separate stories, but the scribe who redacted them wanted both. Robert Alter has called the method "composite artistry". It's an example of an interesting pattern in the Genesis texts: where P (Priestly) and J (Yahwehist) materials are used together, the P version (almost) always comes first. A while back, Owlmirror posted a link to a fascinating article making the case that in the Old Canaanite pantheon, Yahweh was actually a child-deity, and how you can see this reflected in Gen 2. So where the redactor wants to use these ancient stories with this now somewhat embarrassing origin and archaic flavor, he 'primes' the reader with a cosmic version and employs what is probably a heavily edited version of the Yahwehist's text to develop the action. (J had probably already been through redaction and combination with E, so I'm not saying that all this is due to one hand.)
Anyway, it's not as if the redactor of the stories and the audience for the final version were too "primitive" or stupid to see that there were two stories, or that they differed on certain seemingly crucial points. In some cases, to paraphrase Thomas Thompson (probably the most radical biblical scholar I've read): "We have to consider that the author knew what he was doing, but that we do not." Also, taken together as a whole story, ignoring the contradictions, there's a pretty bitter irony to the composite creation account that comments on the whole of the tradition. In P (Gen 1), God famously creates man "in his image" right after he's done a bunch of creating and called it all "good." So God does what is good in his own eyes, and creates an autonomous being "in his image" who will likewise do what is good in his own eyes. Cue the snake.
Finally, you don't have to live in the desert to be afraid of abyssal deeps, they're just scary period. "The deep" here is a cosmic concept, formless chaos, foreign to the Yahwehist's mythology, sure, but because it's a later influence on the tradition; it's similar to the Babylonian dragon, Tiamat, whom the creative deity Marduk has to slay in order to make the earth and the sky out of her body. Formlessness, chaos, emptiness, barren wilderness: these are all mythological metaphors for godlessness; life without a divine patron, the worst imaginable fate for a people in the ancient world. Only the divine can keep chaos at bay.
Posted by: DerekK
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October 13, 2009 1:36 PM
Re: #33...
I've never seen anybody outline a strategy for ending fundamentalist insanity that relied on fascilitating their shift into further extremism. I'm certainly willing to consider it, I've just not ever run into it.
I do agree with you that the more ridiculous a sect of Christianity becomes, the more easy it might become to marginalize them. But even if it's easy to see that as a good thing, it's also important to remember that those are real people trapped in the slide, especially the kids being indoctrinated. I tend to see that as a bad thing.
Posted by: SEF
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October 13, 2009 1:52 PM
@ Marcus J. Ranum #60:
I generally find they won't let me do this. :-D
They jump straight to "you're a big atheist meanie" whinge-mode and demand that their belief, that they are whatever they claim to be, despite copious evidence that they're not, should be respected. I think some of them secretly already know that any honest appraisal of their position would immediately separate them from their dishonestly claimed fellowship (ie secret-handshake support network advantage and privilege) and quite possibly completely destroy their faith.
That's pretty much every single one of them! It's the dark secret hiding under the big tent.
Posted by: MikeyM
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October 13, 2009 1:55 PM
I graduated from Berkeley so sheltered and naive that when I met someone who said he was part of a weekly "Bible study," I thought he meant the Higher Criticism type, because I couldn't believe any grownups would waste time with the devotional type.
Posted by: raven
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October 13, 2009 1:55 PM
From the Journal of Religious Evolution:
"Anglo Catholicism developed from Catholicism by a saltational event followed by microevolution and genetic drift. Today some populations are hybridizing with closely related species. Other populations in the third world are undergoing adaptive radiation and back mutation and are well on their way to speciation themselves. The whole species complex is under severe pressure by invasive weedy species and may eventually go extinct without conservation measures."
Posted by: davem
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October 13, 2009 1:56 PM
Best thing about the shabbat refrigerator - the price for the kit - 299 for some stuff that makes your fridge work less well. That's about what I paid for my whole unit. The stupid get milked. A big win for GE.
Posted by: Abdul Alhazred
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October 13, 2009 1:58 PM
It's safe to say whoever wrote the book of Genesis in something like its present form was not a "Biblical literalist". That whole business had to come much later.
Likewise in the New Testament, did the apostle Paul know he was writing scripture when he wrote "All scripture is inspired of God"?
Posted by: Chris Heard
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October 13, 2009 2:01 PM
Full disclosure: I am a biblical scholar, employed by a university to teach undergrads about the history, religion, and literature of ancient Israel.
The above paragraphs contain almost (an important qualifier) as much misinformation as any two random paragraphs about evolution from the Institute for Creation Research.
First of all, neither the Iron Age Israelites nor their Bronze Age forebears were ever "desert nomads." If the progenitors of the Israelites were anything like what the Bible claims they were, they were semi-nomadic pastoralists herding their flocks around the arable portions of the western part of the Fertile Crescent. Their only connection with the "desert" is the alleged generational turnover in the Sinai peninsula, between Moses leading them out of Egypt and Joshua leading them into Canaan. Of course, that connection only holds if you think that part of the biblical story is historically accurate, and there's really no better historical evidence for that than there is for Noah's flood, at least so far as we know right now. If the biblical story about Israel's origins isn't accurate, then they most likely originated from local Canaanite populations, in which case they again have no roots in the "desert," but in the hilly part of Canaan. A biblical scholar hearing somebody call the ancient Israelites "desert nomads" (PZ) or "desert tribesmen" (Dawkins, in The Greatest Show on Earth, an excellent book overall) is somewhat comparable to a biologist hearing somebody say that evolutionary theory claims humans descended from bonobos.
When the Israelites began to emerge (however that happened) as a distinct population in Canaan, near the beginning of the Iron Age, and as they moved toward organizing themselves as a nation-state (kingdom), the big Bronze Age empires (Egypt, Hatti, Assyria, and Babylon) were in decline. Indeed, the relative lack of Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, and Babylonian presence in early Iron Age Canaan is probably what allowed the Philistines and Israelites to get a foothold there in the first place. By the middle of the 9th century BCE, Assyria (properly the Neo-Assyrian Empire) had recharged and re-expanded enough to come into contact with (and dominance over) the little kingdom of Israel. But this is not a contact between "desert nomads" and "city people"; it is a contact between an urbanized superpower and a small urbanized kingdom. Israel was a little dinky nation compared to Assyria, but it was no less urbanized or sophisticated. By this time, Israel had its own writing system, derived from a common ancestor with Phoenician and other Canaanite scripts, but several times removed on the linguistic tree from Akkadian (used in Assyria and Mesopotamia). The Israelites or their forebears didn't learn writing from the Mesopotamians, but from a different branch of the Semitic language tree.
The adoption of Assyrian deities in the little kingdoms of Israel and Judah had basically nothing to do with adopting a "sexy" deity over a "dry old" deity, but can be attributed much more to a simple "more is better" polytheism (if one god is good, two are better, and five are better, unless they are fighting with each other—in religious studies, the technical term for this is "hedging your bets") and to realpolitik (if your overlords worship Asshur, you'd better worship Asshur too, simple as that). The biblical story of King Manasseh gives a pretty good window onto this. According to the story's ideology, bad kings are supposed to get punished and good kings are supposed to prosper. Manasseh prospers, having the longest reign of any king of Judah (as ascribed in the Bible, note), but the writers also consider him the worst king ever, precisely because of his wholesale support for Assyrian religion as an official state religion of Judah. He enjoyed a long reign full of peace and prosperity because he made nice, in every way, with the superpower. (Later writers thought this was a big problem and invented a story about him repenting and turning back to Israel's god, so that history would fit their ideology.)
Now there is some possibility that some of the biblical creation myths rewrite Babylonian creation myths, but if so, that probably didn't happen before the middle of the first millennium BCE, when the kingdom of Israel had already been destroyed by the Assyrians, the Assyrian Empire had been destroyed by the Babylonians, the kingdom of Judah had been destroyed by the Babylonians, and a bunch of the Judean royalty and intelligentsia had been deported to Babylon. That—not some imaginary past where the Israelites' forebears were "desert nomads"—is the most likely context for the biblical tradents and writers to come into contact with Mesopotamian creation stories. But frankly, it's not all that likely that the biblical writers cribbed from Mesopotamian stories. If they cribbed from somebody else's myths, they more likely adapted Canaanite myths such as the Baal epics known from the city of Ugarit. The biblical creation traditions do have some similarities to Mesopotamian creation stories, and reading them side by side is a very useful exercise. But the Israelites and Judeans more plausibly borrowed from their West Semitic neighbors than from the East Semitic (those are linguistic terms, of course) Mesopotamians far away. Again, consider a biological analogy: the Israelites probably didn't adapt their creation stories from Assyrian or Babylonian exemplars, but they probably share a common ancestor with those stories—an ancestor that branched off from the Mesopotamian tradition long before there were any Israelites to speak of.
I mentioned above that I'm a biblical scholar by trade. Imagine how a biologist feels when some creationist nitwit trots out some old, tired argument that misrepresents evolutionary theory ("If humans evolved from chimpanzees, why are there still chimpanzees?" for example). That's how I feel when I read paragraphs like the two posted above, which get ancient history all wrong. 'nuff said.
And as for Ellen Van Wolde: her argument (so far as I can tell; the full argument has only been published in Dutch, so far, and unfortunately I don't read Dutch) appears to relate to a fairly technical point of Hebrew lexicography, and despite the hype, the conclusion is old hat. I've written about that in more detail elsewhere. In addition, the media treatments make it sound like she thinks she's discovered something new (though it's a really old debate) about the origin of the world, rather than just about how the writer of Genesis 1 described the origin of the world.
Posted by: raven
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October 13, 2009 2:07 PM
A bit of irony here. Roughly half of the New Testament was supposedly written by Paul. Some of it is now thought to be written by him and some of his work is almost certainly forgeries written by other people borrowing his name. And it all has been revised after the fact by various people for various reasons.
That is one reason why all that scripture inspired by god is full of contradictions and discrepancies..
Posted by: PZ Myers
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October 13, 2009 2:09 PM
Obviously, you are failing to read my paragraphs as poetic metaphor.
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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October 13, 2009 2:14 PM
Don't worry, though, because we do see you as the PZ who is not a separate deity who intervenes in our lives, yet the PZ who exists.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: SEF
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October 13, 2009 2:15 PM
Pharyngula too! ;-)
Posted by: Sili
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October 13, 2009 2:15 PM
The argument against the translation of Genesis is not new at all. It caused hella argument here in Denmark some years ago when the new Bible translation was made. The scholars were upset that theologians got away with putting the old, wrong meaning back into the verse.
I believe as a result there was an attempt to make a third - non authorised - translation to ensure strict scholarly standards. Don't think much came of it - lack of funds.
---
Being a misanthropic, fascistoid bastard I'm all for elderly and infirm orthodox Jews having to walk up 76 flights of stairs.
---
Is just me, or does Spong sound like an ironymeter breaking?
Posted by: Chris Heard
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October 13, 2009 2:20 PM
I always thought a spong was a cross between a sponge and a thong.
Posted by: CJO
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October 13, 2009 2:26 PM
Chris Heard, if you're sticking around for follow-ups, do you give any credence to Egyptian influence on the biblical tradition, specifically the patriarchal narratives using elements from the Osiris/Horus cycle?
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler
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October 13, 2009 2:27 PM
Here are a couple of news items that our esteemed host has yet to share:
Supporting the troops and changing battle outcomes remotely.
Glenn Beck curses God.
Posted by: Moggie
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October 13, 2009 2:31 PM
John Shelby Spong,
Is not even wrong.
Which is his right,
As the Pope of Trite.
Ok, I'll be the first to admit it needs some work.
Posted by: Draken
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October 13, 2009 2:31 PM
Interestingly, Ellen van Wolde's conclusion was published in Trouw, a moderately protestant newspaper. A day later the paper got a washing from some obscure christian group for committing a serious sin (Dutch). Yes, they do exist, even in the Netherlands.
Posted by: Helioprogenus
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October 13, 2009 2:35 PM
As PZ said, pretty much every story from the old testament is hijacked from the mesopotamian mythos. Those people, who invented literacy had to put up with having their religion repackaged and sold as a different product that was even more absolutist. Suddenly, you go from interpretation of what gods may possibly believe to absolute edicts of a single god that is such an angry fuck, you wonder about the psyche of those goat herders. I can understand sumerians having deities that may seem menacing, considering the unpredictable nature of their environment. The sumerians had it tough. It was never a guarantee that the Tigris and Euphrates would flood and refertilize the fields like the near clock-work regularity of the Nile. Further, considering the changing climate and near arid nature of their habitat, who would be surprised at such depressive deities. Yet, this was supplanted by some uncivilized goat herders and made even more oppressive and wrathful. Even thousands of years later, these same goat herders are telling their people whether they can or can't use modern trappings of civilization on a certain day based on their interpretation of some stupid vaguely worded text. That's not the worst of it, because suddenly, a small cult that branched off from these goat herders now is the dominant religion of the world and influences billions of people. Further, another offshoot has the other majority. All of this because some unsophisticated nomads adapted the Sumerian religion and subverted it into something even more deadly and oppressive.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler
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October 13, 2009 2:41 PM
And a couple more neglected newz breakthruz:
The AntiChrist is coming to your neighborhood. (Doesn't that dude on the right seem kinda familiar?)
Protect health care from evolutionists!
Posted by: sendaianonymous.wordpress.com
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October 13, 2009 2:43 PM
IT'S "INANNA" NOT "INNINI"!!!!!!!!!!!Sorry, my inner assyriologist couldn't stop herself.
Also, by the time the nomads met Assyrians and Babylonians, the deity known also as "Inanna" had for centuries been called "Ishtar".
Posted by: Chris Heard
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October 13, 2009 2:49 PM
CJO: Maybe. I'm afraid that's a topic I haven't explored nearly as fully as Mesopotamian and local Canaanite connections. I find fault with myself for that; over the last century, biblical scholars have tended to neglect Egypt in favor of Mesopotamia, though Egypt cast an extremely long shadow.
Helioprogenus: Admittedly the time scales are different, but saying that the Israelite literati hijacked stories from Sumeria is a little bit like saying that homo sapiens hijacked from marmosets the inability to synthesize vitamin C.
Posted by: Owlmirror
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October 13, 2009 2:53 PM
Prof. van Wolde's thesis is freely available online, here:
http://www.ru.nl/aspx/download.aspx?File=/contents/pages/516144/oratievanwoldedef1.pdf&structuur=theologie
http://www.nos.nl/nosjournaal/artikelen/2009/10/8/081009_bijbel_oratie.html
Although, as noted, it is in Dutch. She uses English translations of the Akkadian/Sumerian works of the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Song of the Hoe and so on, which seems odd to me (no Dutch translations? German translations not preferred?), but what do I know?
Anyway, her point seems to be (since I am just getting the gist of it rather than actually understanding Dutch) that bara (ברא) is cognate to the Akkadian parāsu, which is translated as "separate" in those epics.
Since I was just recently arguing with heddle about it, I have in mind that the word "bara" is also used in Isaiah 45:7 ubore ra (ובורא רע) (and create evil).
I note that Isaiah uses the word multiple times, and as far as I can tell, uses it to denote singular things created, rather than things separated. Since it's easy to do a text search, I note that Jeremiah and Ezekiel use the word this way as well (Jer 31:22 , Ezk 21:19).
I am pretty sure that for these native speakers of Biblical Hebrew, the word bara meant "create" rather than "separate".
Although this does not address what the word may have meant to the original author of the E and J texts of Gen. 1 and Gen. 2, which is what van Wolde's thesis focuses on exclusively.
As I think she addresses, did any author of Middle-Eastern texts actually conceive of their god or gods creating anything ex nihilo? The idea that any god was actually, genuinely omnipotent and eternal is, I think, not something they had in mind back then.
Posted by: CJO
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October 13, 2009 2:55 PM
As PZ said, pretty much every story from the old testament is hijacked from the mesopotamian mythos.
That's not true. "Sharing a larger mythical tradition" is not "hijacking." And, as Chris Heard says at length above, there's a whole native West Semitic tradition circulating in the region, from which many of these stories derive.
I can understand sumerians having deities that may seem menacing, considering the unpredictable nature of their environment. The sumerians had it tough. It was never a guarantee that the Tigris and Euphrates would flood and refertilize the fields like the near clock-work regularity of the Nile. Further, considering the changing climate and near arid nature of their habitat, who would be surprised at such depressive deities. Yet, this was supplanted by some uncivilized goat herders and made even more oppressive and wrathful.
Can you not see a social dimension to the anxieties expressed in the texts? By the time we're dealing with the final form of the biblical tradition, the literary elites (hardly "uncivilized goat herders") responsible are well beyond using myths to explain floods and earthquakes; their theology is one of kingship and divine patronage. Yes, there is a lot that is "oppressive and wrathful" in the texts: this reflects the brutal legacy of empire in the region as much as anything. The later tradition uses much of the wrath and brutality in a more critical idiom than your superficial reading credits.
Posted by: sendaianonymous.wordpress.com
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October 13, 2009 2:57 PM
@ Chris Heard
I'M SORRY BUT NO BLOODY WAY.
First, it's Sumer, not "Sumeria".
Second, those stories were still in circulation as late as in 5th century BC. This is because they didn't die along with the Sumerian civilisation, but were borrowed by the East Semitic settlers, who spoke Akkadian and its various dialects. Therefore, those narratives were borrowed from Sumarians *via* Babylonians.
I admit I'm not a biblical scholar. I'm an assyriologist, though.
Posted by: sendaianonymous.wordpress.com
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October 13, 2009 3:02 PM
@ Helioprogenus
You're joking, right? Have you actually *read* the stuff? In a translation that wasn't 100 years old?
Posted by: bunnycatcher
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October 13, 2009 3:13 PM
@CJO -are you the same CJO from WBS wayback when?
Posted by: Owlmirror
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October 13, 2009 3:20 PM
A nit: Gen 1 is an P (E?) document -- "Elohim made the sky and the land"
Posted by: CJO
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October 13, 2009 3:22 PM
Nope. What's WBS?
Posted by: JBlilie
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October 13, 2009 3:22 PM
Spong's nonsense is the typical trash flogged by every spiritual "guru." Like a horoscope, it can be plausibly molded into any form that suits your mood or recent past.
I heard that usually insufferable NPR program "Speaking of Faith" last weekend when it featured a charlatan called Eckhart Tolle. Whoo, baby, what a massive fired earthen vessel of steaming fecal matter. From the intro, they were going to interview Tolle, "to explore his appeal to millions." Such rigorous standards! If a million rubes buy the guy's book, he's worthy. I was shouting at the radio and scaring my kid who wanted to know who was in trouble!
Seriously, I need to rename myself Valentine Michel, Deepak, or L. Ron, make myself a religious guru, promise Oprah I'll cure her weight issues with meditation and extracts of cucumbers, get on her show and make milions and retire in comfort to the Vaucluse and swill fine Cotes du Rhone Villages from a Evian bottle for the rest of my life.
-------
I oppose the death penalty because it is barbaric (although, like PZ, I sport a beard), and it's permanent. We know there have been innocent people executed. Once you're dead, though, there's no way to say, "sorry," and let you out of jail. The "judicial" killing of an innocent person is worse than murder.
And here's the other thing, the death penalty is capitulation in the face of a difficult moral problem. It's more or less exactly what the murderer does: "I can't think of what else to do with this person, so I'm going to kill them." The excuse that it provides relief (revenge) to the grieving relatives of the murder victim is also barbaric and false. Interesting that that most "Christian" of states has the greatest execution rate, Texas. So much for "turn the other cheek" and "love thine enemy."
Posted by: Owlmirror
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October 13, 2009 3:25 PM
Oh, and the concept of "heaven" as something holy and apart from the Earth is something that was, for a very long time, conflated with "sky", as in where the clouds and stars are.
There's a reason that the planets -- wandering stars -- are named after gods, after all.
Posted by: robinsrule
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October 13, 2009 3:40 PM
In addition there will be no musical instruments allowed in science buildings. Harmonicas, accordions and banjos will also be prohibited.
Posted by: butterflyfishhm
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October 13, 2009 3:41 PM
@TheLady:
Which is different, how?
I don't think heironymous was suggesting that early Christians tiptoed around at night with a mask and cudgel and bashed Mesopotamians over the head, running off with their literature. I think he was saying they peered over their metaphorical shoulders and copied it. And I honestly don't see the difference between what he's saying, and what you're saying.
Posted by: rugrsi
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October 13, 2009 3:42 PM
Looks like symptoms of Sleep Apnea (the bad night sleep and morning headaches that is).
Posted by: Susannah Anderson
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October 13, 2009 4:29 PM
When I realized that this was where Spong was going (and this was some years ago), I stopped reading Spong. He had nothing more worth saying, until he began to pay attention to his own words.Posted by: Susannah Anderson
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October 13, 2009 4:32 PM
I hate TypePad.
Just saying. Yesterday, it wouldn't let me comment; today it got my name wrong.
Posted by: Sastra
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October 13, 2009 4:39 PM
Should we criticize murky theologians like Karen Armstrong and Bishop Spong, who are more than halfway towards atheism and perhaps represent a position where people can legitimately modify and humanize their religion? They can look very much like allies and friends.
Yes, I think we should. For one thing, the arguments are bad, or at least unimpressive (or deceptive.) And, for another thing, this liberalized form of spirituality is not necessarily any more sympathetic or accepting of honest atheism than more traditional forms of religion. They're still promoting the earth-shattering significance of having faith in Faith, and belief in Belief. Instead of castigating atheists for being evil and sinful, we're condemned for being shallow and dull. We don't understand or experience love and beauty: frankly, I'd rather be accused of rebelling against Hell and damnation.
Finally, the arguments of the Murkies are often paraded before us as "the sophisticated arguments" which atheists are afraid to address. Of course fundamentalism and literal beliefs are easy targets. But this tripe is the Real Deal, deep and close to true nature of God, the inscrutable.
Let's assume for the moment that they're right: this means that we ought to focus on them, not leave them alone. An astronomer who deliberately ignores cogent criticism of his theory to address the nutcases who insist that we never landed on the moon is usually considered chicken-hearted by his peers.
People seem to want it both ways: if we attack the spiritual-folk, we're reproved for going after valuable allies against fundamentalism. If we attack fundamentalists, we're sneered at for avoiding the theology which really undermines our position. Damned if we do; damned if we don't.
What a surprise.
Posted by: Chris Heard
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October 13, 2009 4:43 PM
@sendaianonymous: By the time the Judeans could have borrowed any mythology from the (Neo-)Babylonians (including mythology transmitted down from the Sumerians), they probably already had some pretty well-established traditions of their own. Biblical creation myths owe much more to Ugarit than to Sumer. I suppose Sumerian mythology could be the common ancestor; I don't know enough about the literary prehistory of Ugaritic mythology to say. But the idea that sixth-century BCE Judeans were casting about for creation mythology and borrowed it from the Babylonians rather strains the imagination, and the much stronger links with Ugarit suggest a West Semitic lineage for Israelite/Judean creation stories.
(Then again, a fragment of the Gilgamesh epic was discovered at Megiddo, IIRC. Never let it be said that I don't "teach the controversy.)
Posted by: sendaianonymous.wordpress.com
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October 13, 2009 5:49 PM
@ Chris Heard
I'm not some crazy SUMERIANS ONLY sort of crazy person. However, your analogy was absolutely inaccurate.
The motives that Judaeans "borrowed" were actually commonplace stuff in the Ancient Near East. Also, the cultural exchange was constant and ubiquitous. The parallels between the biblical story of the flood, and the flood part f the Gilgamesh epic are, in my opinion uncanny. However, the Gilgamesh epic and Sumerian myths about Gilgamesh are quite different.
There were also Sumerian texts discovered in Ugarit ;)
Also, Ugarit basically lost all power after the invasions of Sea People in 12 century BC, which is long before the Bible was edited. I don't doubt at all that the religious concepts found in Ugarit were typical for the Western Semitic religious thought, but, direct borrowing from there?
Also, let's not forget about Ebla where we have Sumerian script and a Western Semitic language around 2250 CE.
Posted by: CJO
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October 13, 2009 5:56 PM
But the idea that sixth-century BCE Judeans were casting about for creation mythology and borrowed it from the Babylonians rather strains the imagination, and the much stronger links with Ugarit suggest a West Semitic lineage for Israelite/Judean creation stories.
Is there a reason we have to assume that both the P and the J texts came from the same place, though? My amateur hypothesis is that you're both right: the J story is west semitic/Canaanite what have you, and the P text is the syncretic product of some elite remnant actually living in Babylon in exile imposed by the Assyrians. The people "casting about" had a creation tradition from home, sure, but they were men of the East now and they didn't like the J text, and wanted something more stately and cosmic. Taming chaos and creating with a word was cooler than making little men out of mud.
Posted by: John Morales
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October 13, 2009 6:06 PM
Chris @68, that was really interesting. Thanks!
Posted by: bunnycatcher
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October 13, 2009 6:27 PM
@Sastra
As long as we murk dwellers avoid making statements about the material (as opposed to the poetic, mythic, emotional, etc,etc,etc) world why should we appear on your enemies list? Yeah, we get a little freaky with metaphor. But nothing gets us higher than watching "God" prance down the catwalk wearing a newly created personal mythology -especially if it cultivates compassion! I've read Dawkins and I agree that "God" is a delusion but then so is the concept of the self and so is love and so is every reason we get out of bed in the morning.
Posted by: Helioprogenus
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October 13, 2009 6:32 PM
@sendai.............. and Chris Heard,
Considering the influence of cuneiform on ancient cultures of the middle east, it is of no surprise that sumerian cultural practices were supplanted by so many peoples, especially the semitic tribes that settled and eventually inhabited their lands. When I say that sumerian deities were depressive, it's only in comparison to egyptian ones of the time. If the religious nature of a civilization is effected by geography and climate, then naturally, Sumerian civilization is going to have some tempestuous deities. When you look at ancient city states like Sumer, Akkad, Assur, etc, you see cultures that are sophisticated beyond their neighbors. Comparing Egyptian deities and the afterlife to those of the Sumerians is like comparing Norse gods to those of the Greek. They're relevant to the geographic environment. You're not going to find a snow god in the desert.
Posted by: Chris Heard
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October 13, 2009 6:33 PM
sendaianonymous: I wouldn't propose direct borrowing from Ugarit, only that it's closer on the tree of borrowing than Sumer.
But CJO also has a good point, that the various components don't have to have the same lineage. Still, the "battle against the sea" motif has a decent Canaanite pedigree—though somewhere that may trace back to Mesopotamia.
At any rate, PZ's poetic metaphorical paragraphs on this topic don't get us very close to historical reality. Closer than Genesis 1-3 themselves, I'll grant you. I just get tired of the "Bronze Age goatherders" or "desert nomads" trope. The biblical books aren't the product of Bronze Age desert nomads, but of Iron Age urban elites. And the Bible itself, as a collection, is a product of Hellenistic-Roman era urban literati.
Posted by: John Morales
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October 13, 2009 6:46 PM
bunnycatcher:
What?
How are the concept of the self, love, and every reason we get out of bed in the morning not real, abstract entities though they are?
The concept of God is real, too, it's the belief that God is a concrete entity that is delusional (i.e. unfounded).
Posted by: Sastra
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October 13, 2009 7:12 PM
bunnycatcher #102 wrote:
Since when is honest disagreement the same as forming an "enemies list?"
Getting freaky with metaphor usually includes dancing around on meaning. Now it's poetry, now it's not. It's both at once!
What John Morales said.
Remember, we atheists are the ones who take God completely figuratively, and place it in the same category as emotions, values, symbols, and abstractions. If you're doing the exact same thing, but pretending this is a celebration of God, you're going to be misunderstood. That's not really rescuing the concept of God from irrelevance. It's a stealth concession. And unclear.
Posted by: truthspeaker
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October 13, 2009 7:21 PM
Bunnycatcher, if Armstrong had been writing about what she thinks religion should be, then we wouldn't have much argument with her. But she erroneously claimed that that's what religion always has been. If she hadn't spent her whole adult life studying the histories of various religions, one could charitably give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was just misinformed ( and repeating that misinformation without verifying it, which is as bad as lying in my opinion). But since she has done enough research to know what religious people believed in the past, then we can only conclude she is lying.
The concept of self is not a delusion, it has a physical basis in neurology. Love is not a delusion, it is a feeling, or collection of feelings, caused by certain chemicals in the body.
If you think God doesn't exist but is a useful abstract concept, congratulations, you're an atheist. My only disagreement with you is on how useful that concept is.
Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip
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October 13, 2009 8:44 PM
Luckily we have tools like Limewire to speed that sort of thing up nowadays.
Posted by: MartinDH
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October 13, 2009 8:46 PM
Re van Wolde: Didn't Stephen Jay Gould publish any essay, in one of his collections, on the very subject of "Genesis creation as a set of separations" (light from dark, waters above from waters below, land from waters &c. &c.)? I believe he was inspired by a large ceiling painting.
--
Martin
Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip
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October 13, 2009 8:50 PM
My cat's demands for food are a just delusion? Woo-hoo!
Posted by: bunnycatcher
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October 14, 2009 3:49 AM
Yep, I agree that's a bit over the line. I understand the sarcasm but, yes, outside the antialiased world of materialism things are both/and -I know I'm going to get beat up for this but...ahem, the double slit experiment *ducks/covers/runs*....Thank you (Sastra, Truthspeaker, John Morales,) for your helpful responses -oh, and NakedBunny -I may have been mistaken about your cats. Please continue to feed them until I get back to you on this. I'm looking forward to going over your positions and am encouraged that a few more pieces of "the puzzle" may have been placed.
Posted by: Knockgoats
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October 14, 2009 9:18 AM
I can spend hours reading some of Armstrong's stuff and still not have a clue what she is on about.. - Matt Penfold
My impression is that Armstrong has spent years writing her stuff, and still doesn't have a clue what she is on about!
Spong (sponnngggg!!), Dom Cupitt and the like are very similar to the "Sealed Knot": those people who like to dress up in period costume and re-enact the English Civil War - except that they expect their activities to be taken as serious intellectual and moral endeavour rather than a somewhat eccentric and expensive hobby.
Posted by: Knockgoats
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October 14, 2009 10:34 AM
I understand the sarcasm but, yes, outside the antialiased world of materialism things are both/and -I know I'm going to get beat up for this but...ahem, the double slit experiment *ducks/covers/runs*. - bunnycatcher
Is it actually a law (in either the legal or scientific sense) that every mysterian has to invoke quantum mechanics (without, of course, understanding the first thing about it)?
Chris Head, sendaianonymous, CJO, Owlmirror - thanks for that enlightening discussion. Chris, can you really compare the Israelites as urbanites to the Assyrians? IIRC, Nineveh is thought to have had a population on the order of 50,000. Would Jerusalem at the relevant times have had even a tenth as many?
Posted by: Chris Heard
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October 14, 2009 11:15 AM
Knockgoats: Size doesn't matter. :-)
Seriously, population isn't nearly as important as whether the city's population engages in civic administrative and/or mercantile tasks. Even a small city, if it has a king, is more likely to produce literary works than a band of "desert nomads."
The biggest Israelite and Judean cities would undoubtedly have been somewhat smaller than the biggest Assyrian cities, and of course estimating population for any city that long ago is rather difficult (the favored method among archaeologists focusing on ancient Israel and Judah seems to be to estimate the population density, then multiply by the inhabited area in any given occupation layer). As for Jerusalem, it was undoubtedly a tiny place in the 850 BCE or so (on the order of 8,000 inhabitants), but it swelled to 30,000 or more by 700 BCE (largely attributable, it seems, to an influx of Israelite and perhaps even Aramean/Syrian refugees fleeing those aforementioned Assyrians, as well as folk from the Judean countryside moving closer to or into the city for fear of invasion) and seems to have grown to 40,000 or more by 600 BCE. So yes, during the time period that is the best candidate for the beginnings of the biblical books (as literary works), 700-600 BCE, Jerusalem was practically a metropolis for its region. In fact, I've sort of presented this backwards; the population estimates, based on the size of inhabited Jerusalem, are a strong part of an argument for seeing precisely the late 8th through late 7th centuries as a key time frame for literary production by ancient Judeans. I won't rehearse it all here, but will refer you to W. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge U.P., 2004).
Posted by: shatfat
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October 14, 2009 11:49 AM
You have a time machine? Do tell. :D
Assuming you meant BCE, though, that puts you about 1400 years before Chris' estimate of the origins of the text. That's stretching it to me. And I think Chris' thesis is along the lines of "saying the Judeans borrowed their myths from Sumer is like saying the Europeans borrowed their language from India/the Rig Veda."
For the scholars out there, what about the claim that was made to me in CCD (RCC sunday school) all those years ago that the Hebrew creation and flood myths were *commentary* on the Sumerian (ancient Mesopotamian--we're not talking archeologists making these claims, natch, but they had heard of Gilgamesh)?
Also, how is YHWH, Elohim (like that's not plural), Adonai, etc worse than the Babylonian gods? Don't they decide to destroy humanity because they're sick of them? I can't remember the details of the story, just that Ishtar figured big (and had a short temper) and there was this one dude who survived (the dude abides). Also, the implication that he would therefore be the father of all humanity post-flood doesn't seem to have been taken up by the text. (IIRC, which I probably don't.) Almost like they were exaggerating or something...
Posted by: Hector Avalos
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October 14, 2009 12:48 PM
I generally concur with my friend, Chris Heard, about the over-emphasis on the Israelites being desert dwellers. The authors of the Hebrew Bible, in particular, were probably elite scribes, and most desert nomads were illiterate. I think only time will tell whether Ellen van Wolde’s thesis will be substantiated.
However, I think there is plenty of evidence that Genesis creation stories owe a lot more to Mesopotamia than they do to West Semitic predecessors. I do so for the following reasons:
1. The thematic parallels between Genesis 1-11 and Mespotamian literature are much closer than anything we find in West Semitic literature, which usually refers to Ugaritic or Phoenician sources. For example, Tablet XI of the Gilgamesh Epic has some astounding verbal similarities to the Flood stories in Genesis 6-8.
2. Some of the more exact verbal parallels still remain largely unknown unless biblical scholars poke around Mesopotamian literature very much. For example, a text of a building ritual, previously published but yet perhaps missed by many biblical scholars, ends with a recitation of a creation story, whose first line in Sumerian (e-nu-ma [dingir]A-nu ib-nu-ú An-e = When Anu created heaven) is more verbally similar to Genesis 1:1 than the first line of the better known Enuma elish. See Marc Linnsen, The Cults of Uruk and Babylon: The Temple Ritual Texts as Evidence for Cult Practices (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 301.
3. I think many of the main works in the Hebrew Bible could have been written in Mesopotamia after the exile in 587/6 BCE. These include Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Ezra. Thus, it is plausible that Judean authors became familiar with Mesopotamian creation/flood stories then.
4. We know that the Gilgamesh epic (at least a fragment of it) has been found in Canaan, along with many other cuneiform texts. Thus, there seems to be more evidence now that Mesopotamian cuneiform literature could have flourished in Canaan, as well. See further, Wayne Horowitz, Takayoshi Oshima, and Seth L. Sanders, Cuneiform in Canaan: Cuneiform Sources from the Land of Israel in Ancient Times (2006).
Although I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea that the authors of Genesis copied Mesopotamian sources directly, biblical authors certainly show knowledge of them or may have used intermediary sources.
Posted by: CJO
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October 14, 2009 1:14 PM
Thanks for stopping by, Dr. Avalos.
Do you have any insight on the question of Egyptian influence? Specifically, I'm thinking of elements in the Patriarchal narratives that it has been suggested have been influenced by the Osiris/Horus mythology.
I recently read a book by Gary Greenwood, which, in general, I didn't like very much, but in it he did make an interesting case for verbal and thematic parables between the Seth/Osiris rivalry and the stories of Cain and Abel and Esau and Jacob, among others. As I say, it was an interesting claim in a kind of muddled overall presentation, and I'm not sure if it's an idiosyncratic hypothesis on his part, or if, as Chris said above, Egypt has been neglected as a possible sourse of influence on the biblical tradition.
Posted by: sendaianonymous.wordpress.com
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October 14, 2009 1:31 PM
@ Helioprogenus:
Um. Have you read the Jacobsen translation? Because, Jacobsen had a *vision* >.>
@ Chris Head and the "desert nomads"
I nodded vigorously!
@shatfat:
DAMN TYPING!FAIL. (Now the idea of Cyberpunk!Ebla won't leave me for hours, most likely =_=).
I wasn't trying to tell Western Semitic cultures had to borrow stuff from Ebla. I just wanted to point out that there was cultural exchange and the people most likely knew each other's myths to an extent.
That's not Chris' estimate, that's reality-based researchers' estimate.
Yeah, only not. Because there was no contact between India and Europe at that time, apart from indirect one that involved trading and caravans and multiple intermediaries. There was a cultural exchange between Western and Eastern Semites, and Sumerians in ANE, though.
Therefore, analogy invalid.
Obviously, we can't just say there was only one source or anything like that. However, dismissing the Sumerian link (hee) from the start might be stretching it a bit, too.
@ Hector Avalos:
Yes, this! I always thought the similarities between the flood narratives were especially striking.
Posted by: SEF
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October 14, 2009 1:36 PM
I'm unconvinced that a story of brother/brother rivalry actually requires one culture to have been influenced by another. Rather, such a plot falls into the set of blindingly obvious things observed in real life, all the time, everywhere. It would be necessary for unusual names or some very specific magical/supernatural device or similar to be the same in both before there was any reasonable suspicion of plagiarism.
Posted by: sendaianonymous.wordpress.com
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October 14, 2009 1:38 PM
@ shatfat:
Yup. Basically, Enlil, the big guy in the pantheon, decided that the world was overpolulated, therefore too noisy, therefore he can't sleep, therefore, flood! And there were no more children on his lawn.
(The god of wisdom, Ea, felt sorry for humans, and warned one of them, Utnapishtim, instructing him to build the ark)
I'd say, that makes Enlil significantly more mercurial than the OT God.
Posted by: Lynna
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October 14, 2009 1:40 PM
Hector Avalos @116: I recently watched online one of your presentations about archaeology and biblical history. It was so well done that I plan to watch it again. Just wanted to say "Thanks".
Posted by: Hector Avalos
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October 14, 2009 1:43 PM
Dear CJO,
I am somewhat skeptical of the Horus/Seth parallels with biblical figures in Genesis.
However, I am not an Egyptologist, which is what is needed to evaluate how close
any claimed verbal parallels are. I tend not to trust parallels based on translations, and so
one must consult the original Egyptian sources to be sure. Despite that caveat, I am more convinced by the parallels between the Egyptian proverbs of Amenemopet and Proverbs 22:17-24:34 in the Bible.
Posted by: Hector Avalos
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October 14, 2009 1:48 PM
Lynna,
Thanks for your kind words. That video was made when I spoke to the Minnesota
Atheists. I will be speaking to them again this Sunday, October 18 at 2pm on "Can Science Prove that Prayer Works?"
See http://www.meetup.com/minnesota-atheists/messages/boards/thread/7786990
Posted by: sendaianonymous.wordpress.com
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October 14, 2009 1:50 PM
Uh-huh. There's no way you can call that sort of thing "plagiarism". It's just like, migrating tropes.
Posted by: Paul
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October 14, 2009 2:01 PM
I think the point that SEF was making is that brother/brother sibling rivalry is more of a universal trope, and any theorized migration of specific tales/lore would require some glaring similarity to get beyond the noise offered by groups that independently shared similar experiences.
Posted by: sendaianonymous.wordpress.com
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October 14, 2009 2:10 PM
@ Paul
I don't disagree. I just have a problem with the word "plagiarism" in this context.
Posted by: CJO
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October 14, 2009 3:25 PM
I'm unconvinced that a story of brother/brother rivalry actually requires one culture to have been influenced by another. Rather, such a plot falls into the set of blindingly obvious things observed in real life, all the time, everywhere. It would be necessary for unusual names or some very specific magical/supernatural device or similar to be the same in both before there was any reasonable suspicion of plagiarism.
The parallels advanced in Greenwood's book go considerably beyond the basic plot. But I don't know enough to assess the exactness of the verbal similarities he points to. One of them is that Esau is red and hairy, attributes also assigned to Seth.
Posted by: SEF
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October 14, 2009 3:48 PM
There's been a long-standing anti-ginger bigotry around though. And humans do like to boast that they're not hairy like apes etc. So those would again both be quite traditional attributes with which to afflict the notional villain (or merely loser!) of the tale, on the mistaken principle that badness should be physically visible. Like claiming Richard III was an ugly hunchback.
As you say though, it would help to have the actual argument presented in the book rather than potentially misremembered snippets.
Posted by: Chris Heard
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October 14, 2009 4:03 PM
Hector and sendaianonymous: I wouldn't want to exclude Mesopotamian sources, certainly, especially with Hector's caveat about intermediate sources or stages in the mix. I just don't see the Judeans coming into new creation mythology "all of a sudden" after 586 BCE. I think we are on more solid ground if we talk about a common cultural/theological heritage rather than specific sources and specific literary copying. For example, I can certainly see Mesopotamia in the genealogy of the biblical deluge story, but I have a hard time seeing Noah's flood story as a direct descendant or direct adaptation of, say, Utnapishtim's story from the Gilgamesh epic in the same way that Utnapishtim's story seems to depend literarily on that of Atrahasis.
Hector: I assume your answer on October 18 will be, "No." :-)
Lynna or Hector: Where is the video available online?
CJO: I've no wish to speak ill of Gary Greenberg, with whom I've corresponded on occasion, but if scholarship were a soccer game, I'd probably pull a yellow card on him from time to time. Sometimes Gary can resemble Ellen Van Wolde, with semi-sensationalist presentations of ideas that are more or less old hat. Other times, he stretches his evidence pretty thin to achieve provocative results. What were you reading? The Moses Myth book?
Posted by: Hector Avalos
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October 14, 2009 4:49 PM
Hi, Chris,
Thanks for the input. I should clarify that the line from the building inscription I quoted contains both Sumerian and Akkadian words.
I agree that direct copying is not likely, given all the differences. But there
is a definite relationship that looks more Mesopotamian than anything I see in
Ugarit or Egypt, especially in the Flood Story.
My experience with literature also suggest that we don't need a very long period for one author to adapt/modify the work of another. The elaborate King Arthur cycles
of around 1130 appear from nearly out of nowhere, as I explain in The End of Biblical Studies.
At the same time, the amount of cuneiform literature in Canaan allows sufficient time to explain a longer transmission process. The Gilgamesh fragment from Canaan, after all, is dated to around the 14th c. BCE.
RE: Hector: I assume your answer on October 18 will be, "No." :-). You know me too well.
The video should be on these websites:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2569440864215926514#
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=59967
It is really a summary of some of the material in my history/archaeology chapter
in The End of Biblical Studies.
Posted by: CJO
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October 14, 2009 5:21 PM
What were you reading? The Moses Myth book?
No, a book I picked up at the library called 101 Myths from the Bible.
In it, he makes a lot of hay over Egyptian parallels being neglected by scholars. It was also an irritating presentation, as it was hard to discern from his "myth-busting" whether he thought the "real story" was just misinterpreted and something historical actually happened, or whether the passage in question should be considered pure myth, just from an unrecognized source. There would be stuff like (paraphrasing) "David didn't kill Goliath, his bodyguard did," leaving it entirely ambiguous as to whether he thought that some literal, historical event lay behind the myth. He seemed to be trying to have it both ways between scholarly skepticism and idiosyncratic devotion (I do not know his religious affiliation, if any). In short, I didn't get much out of it other than a sense that there might be something to Egyptian parallels to the patriarchal narratives.
Posted by: truthspeaker
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October 14, 2009 5:33 PM
Well said. I agree with this view.
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