Failing the Insider Test is one of those great blogs that almost never gets updated. That means that I forget that it exists for months on end, then suddenly think, “Hey, I wonder if anything’s been posted?” Today was just such a day. And I discovered a great, if long, post about the morality of god that was written back at the tail-end of May.
It posits that the question of how people base their morality without the Bible is just a weasel attempt to get out of answering questions about how you can call a homicidal maniac of a god “moral” and “loving.” It also includes this brilliant thought:
The truth is that Jesus loves people in much the same way that a stalker in a horror movie loves the woman he's harassing. When he's turned down, he'll turn nasty, hunt her down, and begin torturing her. But if only she hadn't rejected his love, she would have seen how loving he is!
But it really got me thinking about something else, a question.
What, precisely, is the purpose of Hell?
Let’s accept for the moment the three premises upon which Hell is founded:
1. Hell is eternal.
2. Hell is punishment for sins.
3. Hell is part of the plan of the infinite god.
Now let us ask what the purpose of punishment is. I would argue that there are two purposes:
1. Punishment is a deterrent.
2. Punishment is a corrective behavioral measure.[1]
We see punishment as a deterrent in the idea that you do not want to go to prison. We also see quite a bit of the idea in ancient/primitive systems of law. If you steal, your hand is cut off. If you kill, your head is cut off. Therefore, you probably don’t want to steal or kill. I most civilized nations there is a move away from this attitude.[2]
We see punishment as a corrective behavioral measure in the treatment of children. If you don’t play nice you don’t get to play at all. If you don’t do your homework you don’t get to go hang out with your friends. The idea is to say, “If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you don’t get to do what you want to do.” The primary difference between punishment as a corrective measure and punishment as a deterrent is that punishment as a corrective measure is not permanent.[3]
Hell is not, and by definition cannot, fall under category 2. An eternity of suffering pretty much precludes that idea. Catholic doctrine attempts to work around that with the idea of Purgatory, but even so it leaves Hell as a place where any rehabilitation is impossible.
So that leaves Hell as a deterrent. But it’s really not good at that role, either. See, the thing about prisons is that we can see them and we can think, “Yeah, I don’t want to end up in that place.” I cannot see Hell, however. Moreover, the descriptions we get of Hell are from people who also did not see it. Our primary Biblical conception of hell comes from the Book of Revelation. Our modern idea of Hell comes from a combination of Dante, Milton, and Medieval and Renaissance painters. The one thing that John of Patmos, Dante, Milton, and all those artists had in common is that none of them ever actually went to Hell.
Moreover, the idea of Hell doesn’t actually fit in to a Jewish cultural context. The punishments of Yahweh were made against people, their descendents, and their tribes. “I will punish you, your children, and your children’s children,” is actually far more effective of a deterrent than, “After you die you’ll be sent to this horrible, horrible place that neither you nor anyone else has ever seen. Trust me.”
This argument, however, is a dead end. It’s one of those that would be answered with a, “Yeah, just wait and see…” sort of response. So let’s end it here.
Instead, let us go back to the basics.
What is the purpose of punishment? To get people to follow the rules. Period. Full stop.
So what rules am I supposed to follow in order to stay out of Hell? Is it the Ten Commandments? Is it Jesus’s two commandments? Is it the codification of rules decided on at the Council of Constantinople? Last week’s Papal Bull?
It’s none of that. The entire point of Hell is to force people to acknowledge that Jesus is god and totally in control of everything. That’s it. You can be a loving, caring, peaceful person who does not accept Jesus and be sent to Hell. You can be a complete bastard and get your ticket stamped for Heaven. This is problematic for the idea of Hell, but not for the reasons most people argue.
Quite simply, if Jesus shows up and takes over the world, anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that it happened is a moron.
Imagine that you lived in Rome at the time of Attila the Hun. Someone says, “The Huns are coming, evacuate!” You don’t actually believe that there is any such tribe as the Huns, so you stay where you are. One day Attila shows up with his horde and all of the sudden you’re forced to acknowledge that, yes, Attila and the Huns exist.
At the point the ravening horde of Huns shows up at the gate the question of belief is thrown out the window. In the same way, if Jesus were to show up today at the head of the Heavenly host, belief and non-belief would become a non-issue. Hell, too, would become a non-issue, since the entire purpose of Hell is to act as a deterrent to non-belief.
Moreover, at the moment of death if there is a Heaven and Hell non-belief becomes a non-question. So, again, Hell becomes a non-issue, punishment for something that is now no longer an issue.
It also makes god and/or Jesus in to a pair of complete jackasses. If Hell exists as a place of eternal punishment for non-belief that was set up as part of god’s plan, then you cannot, by definition, say that this fits in to any example of love. And it certainly doesn’t fit in with the concept of forgiveness.[4]
You can, however, say that it fits quite well in to a primitive understanding of law as a deterrent from breaking the rules.
------------------------------
[1]This can fall in to two categories. There’s retributive, or an “eye for an eye” mentality. In this if I do something bad an equivalent bad should be done to me with an eye towards teaching me that if I don’t like something, other people probably don’t, either. There’s also a code of laws idea where certain things are judged to be of a certain level of pain. For some transgressions I would need to pay a fine, for others I would need to be incarcerated.
[2]Just, y’know, not America, where we’re coming up with fun new ways to throw people in to prison and make sure that it becomes a stigma that follows people throughout their lives. Because we wouldn’t want to actually evolve as a society or anything. It’s much easier to say, “They’re bad people, that’s why they’re in prison and not out here with us good people.”
[3]Prison, in theory, should be a corrective measure. Separate offenders from the normal population, force them to serve their time, and in the process help them find some way of contributing to society when they get out. But by overcrowding prisons, understaffing them, and basically reducing it to a situation where a whole lot of people are just killing time, waiting to be released and ostracized from their communities we turn prison in to a deterrent. There’s a very strong chance that it will basically ruin your life. And all the prison rape stuff doesn’t help…
[4]This is one of the biggest problems with the love/forgiveness idea of Jesus and why the whole “Jesus as a stalker” thing is so apropos. If I love someone, I want to see that person happy. If it turns out that me not being involved in their life makes them happy, then if I love them it means I let them go off and do whatever. If they then turn around and say, “Wow, I just realized that my life would be much better with you,” then love means that I take them back and forgiveness means I don’t hold any bitterness I might have against them.
For that matter, if there was someone I loved (in a romantic sense, since it’s an easier story to tell that way) who left, then many years later came back and said, “I’ve made a mistake, I’m sorry,” I would not then force them to be punished for all those years of neglect. It’s entirely possible that if my world had moved on since then and I’ve gotten married and am quite happy then I wouldn’t say, “Hey, sweet, I’ll dump my wife just for you.” But when confronted with this sort of situation what sort of sadistic bastard would say, “I still love you, I forgive you, but now I’m going to have to chain you to the wall in my basement and poke you with white-hot metal pokers for all eternity.”
Because that’s what Hell is.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Questions that Could Use an Answer
The debate over the Cordoba House[1] has apparently become my big hot button issue, to the point where I have twice violated my policy against getting in to Facebook-related arguments over random shit.[2] Here’s the new one.
A friend of mine posted a link to this article in the New Yorker. It’s yet another one of those think pieces that points out that the arguments against the Cordoba House are shrill, bigoted, and ignorant and advanced by people who are shrill, bigoted, and ignorant. It also helps to point out the divide in this country: there is an intellectual elite that is apparently “out of touch” with “real America.” Unfortunately “real America” is a self-defined collection of reflexively ignorant morons.
Anyway, it turns out that my friend has a friend who is a reflexively ignorant moron who popped in to say, basically, “That’s interesting, but I don't [EDIT: oops, missed that word] see the author’s viewpoint.”
This hit my hot button. I basically asked what it was about the author’s viewpoint that was flawed, seeing as how he pointed out that it’s a bunch of ignorant demagogues pushing a narrative that there’s going to be a giant mosque planted on Ground Zero when the reality is nothing of the sort.
There was also a humorous interlude when someone asked the friend of a friend if she’d actually read the article. A response was up for about two minutes that snapped, “Did you read the article?” It was deleted, I’d assume at the moment the friend of a friend realized she was posing that question to the author of the article in question.
Anyway, I then got the old, “Well I guess we just have to agree to disagree.” This statement annoys me. I articulated my annoyance by basically saying this:
We can’t agree to disagree, as you haven’t actually managed to articulate a position with which I can disagree. All you’ve said is that you don’t like the idea of the Ground Zero Mosque, which is actually none of those things.
For the record, I’m going to use that first thought again.
My friend then popped in and told me to be nice. This got me thinking about all the clucking over “tone” whenever the New Atheists dare to hold an opinion on things. So I asked about it, basically saying this:
Why is it that being perceived as “not nice” is apparently so much worse than being perceived as an ignorant bigot?
These were, in all actuality, rhetorical questions. I mean, they may or may not have received answers, but I’ll never know, since I dropped a friend and went to bed. Quite frankly, I don’t give a shit.
Still, I think it’s a question worth asking over and over and over again.
Why is it that being perceived as an ignorant bigot is apparently a more desirable trait than being not nice?
--------------------------------
[1]Better known as the (not) Ground Zero (not) Mosque…
[2]This, by the way, illustrates one of the things I absolutely hate about Facebook. It’s what I like to think of as the “Two Degrees of Separation” principle. You’re always within two degrees of seeing something massively stupid on Facebook. Either you find out that your friends have moronic stances on things, or you find that their friends have them. Hence my anti-Facebook arguments policy.
There’s also the minor problem that the vast majority of people you’re friends with on Facebook aren’t people you usually talk to. So that random person you haven’t laid eyes on in, like, five years can continue to annoy you by proxy or they might have a random acquaintance who annoys you due to the Two Degrees of Separation. It’s a pain in the ass.
It’s also why I have one less Facebook friend[3] as of tonight. The mathematics are simple: I don’t think less of the friend in question. However, I haven’t talked to said friend outside of this interaction more than, like, twice in the last three years. I honestly don’t care if I ever see this friend again and her Facebook status updates don’t exactly make my life better. So why bother keeping track of this person? And can I honestly call her my friend?
And if she doesn’t want to keep track of me, well, I can’t say that I give a shit about that, either. Would I have known the difference if she had de-friended me? Probably not. I’m actually somewhat lost on the point of Facebook, really. I’m reasonably certain that I could drop down from my current collection of over 200 “friends” to around 60 and it wouldn’t actually change a thing. Except that the people left would be the ones I genuinely want to keep track of.[4]
[3]Actually, seven. I figured I’d clean house while I was thinking about it. I probably would have dropped several more, but I found myself discouraged from my task by the fact that Facebook has made it much harder to de-friend people. Which is a really bizarre thing to lament, now that I think about it. So I basically dropped the people who I'd really rather never see again in real life and a couple of people who I apparently went to high school with but who I barely remember and who keep inviting their entire Friends list to events I wouldn't go to even if I didn't live a thousand miles away from Chicago.
[4]Thus begins my Facebook rant. It goes like this:
I have a policy when I'm cleaning my apartment. If I pick something up that I haven't seen in a month three, look at it, and can't imagine wanting to see it again in three months I throw it out. This goes for anything that lacks intrinsic or sentimental value (I will throw away some random trinket. I will not throw away my signed vinyl pressing of Scott Lucas & the Married Men's George Lassos the Moon. I also do not tend to get rid of books or CDs). This was an exceedingly easy decision tree to work through before my last move. If I looked at something and said, "I can't imagine taking this to Texas with me," it did not go to Texas. Friendships are like this. We stop talking to people for a reason.
I left the church I grew up in with absolutely no intention of going back. Yet I'm still connected to that church because I'm Facebook friends with a lot of people who I went to church with. I'd like to keep a connection with a few of them, but that sub-set of people I knew from church and still want to talk to is significantly smaller than the full set of people I knew.
For these purposes I can divid my Facebook friends list in to five buckets.
Bucket 1: People I like and want to keep an active relationship with.
Bucket 2: People I like but just want to be able to contact if need be.
Bucket 3: People I don't care about, but once did.
Bucket 4: People I barely remember and can't fathom why I am "friends" with them.
Bucket 5: People I have come to actively dislike for one reason or another.
At a rough estimate, approximately half of the people on my Facebook friends list fall in to Buckets 3-5. This wouldn't be that big of a deal if Facebook were just a contacts list. But it's not. It's a social networking site. That means that you find yourself either actively or passively networking with people you aren't actually friends with and then you find yourself networking with their friends.
The big question is, "Why bother?"
Facebook is basically a daily high school reunion. My ten-year reunion rolled around last fall and I didn't go. I had other things to do that particular weekend, specifically dogsitting a hyperactive schnauzer and the Illinois Storytelling Festival. However, even if I hadn't had those other more important, time consuming things to deal with I would not have gone to my ten-year reunion.
Why? I didn't like most of the people who I went to high school with and have forgotten a lot of the rest. The ones that I did like I can still get ahold of.
I'd also hazard a guess that I wasn't missed. I was a fat, poorly socialized nerd. Most of the people I went to high school with probably don't remember me and probably didn't miss me at the reunion.
If I can't be bothered to go to my high school reunion, why would I want to see Facebook status updates from the people I'd see there? More importantly, in what universe would I consider the people there my friends?
A friend of mine posted a link to this article in the New Yorker. It’s yet another one of those think pieces that points out that the arguments against the Cordoba House are shrill, bigoted, and ignorant and advanced by people who are shrill, bigoted, and ignorant. It also helps to point out the divide in this country: there is an intellectual elite that is apparently “out of touch” with “real America.” Unfortunately “real America” is a self-defined collection of reflexively ignorant morons.
Anyway, it turns out that my friend has a friend who is a reflexively ignorant moron who popped in to say, basically, “That’s interesting, but I don't [EDIT: oops, missed that word] see the author’s viewpoint.”
This hit my hot button. I basically asked what it was about the author’s viewpoint that was flawed, seeing as how he pointed out that it’s a bunch of ignorant demagogues pushing a narrative that there’s going to be a giant mosque planted on Ground Zero when the reality is nothing of the sort.
There was also a humorous interlude when someone asked the friend of a friend if she’d actually read the article. A response was up for about two minutes that snapped, “Did you read the article?” It was deleted, I’d assume at the moment the friend of a friend realized she was posing that question to the author of the article in question.
Anyway, I then got the old, “Well I guess we just have to agree to disagree.” This statement annoys me. I articulated my annoyance by basically saying this:
We can’t agree to disagree, as you haven’t actually managed to articulate a position with which I can disagree. All you’ve said is that you don’t like the idea of the Ground Zero Mosque, which is actually none of those things.
For the record, I’m going to use that first thought again.
My friend then popped in and told me to be nice. This got me thinking about all the clucking over “tone” whenever the New Atheists dare to hold an opinion on things. So I asked about it, basically saying this:
Why is it that being perceived as “not nice” is apparently so much worse than being perceived as an ignorant bigot?
These were, in all actuality, rhetorical questions. I mean, they may or may not have received answers, but I’ll never know, since I dropped a friend and went to bed. Quite frankly, I don’t give a shit.
Still, I think it’s a question worth asking over and over and over again.
Why is it that being perceived as an ignorant bigot is apparently a more desirable trait than being not nice?
--------------------------------
[1]Better known as the (not) Ground Zero (not) Mosque…
[2]This, by the way, illustrates one of the things I absolutely hate about Facebook. It’s what I like to think of as the “Two Degrees of Separation” principle. You’re always within two degrees of seeing something massively stupid on Facebook. Either you find out that your friends have moronic stances on things, or you find that their friends have them. Hence my anti-Facebook arguments policy.
There’s also the minor problem that the vast majority of people you’re friends with on Facebook aren’t people you usually talk to. So that random person you haven’t laid eyes on in, like, five years can continue to annoy you by proxy or they might have a random acquaintance who annoys you due to the Two Degrees of Separation. It’s a pain in the ass.
It’s also why I have one less Facebook friend[3] as of tonight. The mathematics are simple: I don’t think less of the friend in question. However, I haven’t talked to said friend outside of this interaction more than, like, twice in the last three years. I honestly don’t care if I ever see this friend again and her Facebook status updates don’t exactly make my life better. So why bother keeping track of this person? And can I honestly call her my friend?
And if she doesn’t want to keep track of me, well, I can’t say that I give a shit about that, either. Would I have known the difference if she had de-friended me? Probably not. I’m actually somewhat lost on the point of Facebook, really. I’m reasonably certain that I could drop down from my current collection of over 200 “friends” to around 60 and it wouldn’t actually change a thing. Except that the people left would be the ones I genuinely want to keep track of.[4]
[3]Actually, seven. I figured I’d clean house while I was thinking about it. I probably would have dropped several more, but I found myself discouraged from my task by the fact that Facebook has made it much harder to de-friend people. Which is a really bizarre thing to lament, now that I think about it. So I basically dropped the people who I'd really rather never see again in real life and a couple of people who I apparently went to high school with but who I barely remember and who keep inviting their entire Friends list to events I wouldn't go to even if I didn't live a thousand miles away from Chicago.
[4]Thus begins my Facebook rant. It goes like this:
I have a policy when I'm cleaning my apartment. If I pick something up that I haven't seen in a month three, look at it, and can't imagine wanting to see it again in three months I throw it out. This goes for anything that lacks intrinsic or sentimental value (I will throw away some random trinket. I will not throw away my signed vinyl pressing of Scott Lucas & the Married Men's George Lassos the Moon. I also do not tend to get rid of books or CDs). This was an exceedingly easy decision tree to work through before my last move. If I looked at something and said, "I can't imagine taking this to Texas with me," it did not go to Texas. Friendships are like this. We stop talking to people for a reason.
I left the church I grew up in with absolutely no intention of going back. Yet I'm still connected to that church because I'm Facebook friends with a lot of people who I went to church with. I'd like to keep a connection with a few of them, but that sub-set of people I knew from church and still want to talk to is significantly smaller than the full set of people I knew.
For these purposes I can divid my Facebook friends list in to five buckets.
Bucket 1: People I like and want to keep an active relationship with.
Bucket 2: People I like but just want to be able to contact if need be.
Bucket 3: People I don't care about, but once did.
Bucket 4: People I barely remember and can't fathom why I am "friends" with them.
Bucket 5: People I have come to actively dislike for one reason or another.
At a rough estimate, approximately half of the people on my Facebook friends list fall in to Buckets 3-5. This wouldn't be that big of a deal if Facebook were just a contacts list. But it's not. It's a social networking site. That means that you find yourself either actively or passively networking with people you aren't actually friends with and then you find yourself networking with their friends.
The big question is, "Why bother?"
Facebook is basically a daily high school reunion. My ten-year reunion rolled around last fall and I didn't go. I had other things to do that particular weekend, specifically dogsitting a hyperactive schnauzer and the Illinois Storytelling Festival. However, even if I hadn't had those other more important, time consuming things to deal with I would not have gone to my ten-year reunion.
Why? I didn't like most of the people who I went to high school with and have forgotten a lot of the rest. The ones that I did like I can still get ahold of.
I'd also hazard a guess that I wasn't missed. I was a fat, poorly socialized nerd. Most of the people I went to high school with probably don't remember me and probably didn't miss me at the reunion.
If I can't be bothered to go to my high school reunion, why would I want to see Facebook status updates from the people I'd see there? More importantly, in what universe would I consider the people there my friends?
Monday, August 16, 2010
Monday Morning Demagoguery
This is why we can’t have nice things. The demagogues like to tell us that those nice things are actually shit sandwiches. To wit, this quote from the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, the president of some stupid anti-gay group called Human Life International:
The rapid decline of Ancient Greece? Really? You mean the society that lasted for a good, oh, six centuries whilst allowing (encouraging? Idealizing?) homosexual activity throughout? You mean the tiny collection of city-states and their colonies that managed to basically conquer the entire known world, taking down the greatest empire to date in the process? You mean the society that had an indelible impact on the Roman Empire and Byzantium? You mean the society that indirectly caused the Renaissance when the first Humanists began to bring Greek manuscripts back to Western Europe?
That society?
If that’s your definition of “rapid decline,” I’d say you should encourage homosexuality in America, Reverend Euteneuer. That means America will be certain to maintain a dominant world position for several centuries, which will be followed by an impact that reverberates through the next two millennia.
I’d take it.
(via Right Wing Watch, by the by)
[A] society cannot long survive this kind of violence done to its basic values, and history surely shows many societies like Ancient Greece, whose rapid decline was preceded by the proliferation of the gay lifestyle and its public acceptance.
The rapid decline of Ancient Greece? Really? You mean the society that lasted for a good, oh, six centuries whilst allowing (encouraging? Idealizing?) homosexual activity throughout? You mean the tiny collection of city-states and their colonies that managed to basically conquer the entire known world, taking down the greatest empire to date in the process? You mean the society that had an indelible impact on the Roman Empire and Byzantium? You mean the society that indirectly caused the Renaissance when the first Humanists began to bring Greek manuscripts back to Western Europe?
That society?
If that’s your definition of “rapid decline,” I’d say you should encourage homosexuality in America, Reverend Euteneuer. That means America will be certain to maintain a dominant world position for several centuries, which will be followed by an impact that reverberates through the next two millennia.
I’d take it.
(via Right Wing Watch, by the by)
Saturday, August 14, 2010
On Gay Marriage
I had a pastor once who got a bug up his butt about abortion. I don’t know how it happened or when, but I remember that one Sunday morning he did a long message about the importance of fighting abortion. I don’t remember him ever really talking about abortion before that, so I’m guessing that it just kind of became a trigger one day. Or perhaps it had always been an issue, but he’d been holding it in. I don’t know.
I remember being pissed after that Sunday morning because he basically said that if you weren’t trying to stop abortion you were a bad Christian. I wasn’t trying to stop abortion, but I wasn’t a bad Christian.[1] It just wasn’t my issue.
One thing that the pastor said that morning has apparently stuck with me. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Hell, it’s entirely possible that I agreed with it at the time, or at least allowed his argument to hold sway. Now, though, I just kind of want to smack him.
The argument basically went like this: “Opponents of abortion say we cannot legislate morality. But in America we legislate morality all the time. Look at all the laws against murder and theft.”
The pastor was a good man. He was a good speaker. He was a good husband and father. I’m going to assume he still is.
But he most definitely was not a Constitutional lawyer. Or if he was he got his degree from Hollywood Upstairs Law School. He was also not a historian.
See, I’m not a lawyer, either. I don’t pretend to be one. But I don’t have to be a lawyer to understand something: the laws of the United States of America were not designed and were not intended to legislate morality. They were designed to create a livable society. The problem that a lot of people have is that the necessary conditions to create a livable society and the necessary conditions to create a moral society have an awful lot of overlap. And most people are unwilling to understand the nuanced differences between the two things.
I can say that the religious or philosophical morality tells me I should not murder or steal. I can also say that a society that allows people to be murdered or stolen from is an inherently unstable society. Both of these statements are true[2] but both of these statements are not equal. Both of these statements are also immaterial. There isn’t anybody arguing against outlawing murder and theft.[3] We can all agree that they’re bad to do and bad for society to allow.[4]
It is in the lesser crimes and misdemeanors that we see the difference between a drive towards a moral society and a stable society. It is also where we can see that a drive towards a moral society is actually an inferior goal to a drive towards a stable society. Morality, after all, is fungible.
Let us consider for a moment the concept of usury. It was once considered one of the worst of all sins to charge any interest on a loan.[5] This is no longer considered an issue. This, though, is also one of those places where the proponents of a moral society and the proponents of a stable society really should be working together. I can stand behind the argument that credit card companies should not be extending lines of credit at better than 20% interest to anyone capable of filling out a form that arrives in convenient junk mail form is immoral. I can also stand behind the argument that the practices of the banks related to credit cards and mortgages destabilizes society. For evidence, please look at the last two years of life in America.[6] Even this, though, doesn’t really help me to illustrate my point. So let’s look at that most contentious argument in American politics: gay marriage.
The main arguments against gay, well, anything, have been primarily moral in America. It was simply regarded as being wrong. This was fine as long as the homosexual population was forced to stay in the closet. Ever since the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Pride Movement, however, the idea of being an out and proud homosexual in America has gradually gained greater and greater acceptance. Now we’re at the point where gay marriage is allowed in some places and wide swaths of the country are fighting for it everywhere. Much like the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement before it, the fight has been taken up by people who are not part of the repressed group but realize that there is a greater issue at stake than the rights of people who are different.
When the issue of gay marriage comes before a court, as it recently did in California, the arguments about the morality of gay marriage do not matter. The issue is one of a stable society and the rights of those who reside in that society. Opponents of gay marriage are starting to get that, but it seems to me that they’re largely trying to work around that pesky First Amendment without seeing the larger issue. For this isn’t actually a First Amendment issue at all.
If the argument were as simple as one side waving its favored religious text and the other side holding up the Constitution, we’d be able to handle this in a jiffy. But there are religious people on both sides of the argument. There are religious people pointing to different verses in the same exact holy books on both sides of the argument. And no one is going to say that we should make gay marriage illegal on First Amendment grounds because someone reads that verse where Paul says that there is no longer male or female, slave or free now that Jesus has done his thing, then extrapolates that to say we shouldn’t make distinctions between gay and straight.
The concept of marriage for civil society is quite different from the concept of marriage in religion. For the religious it is often a sign of some sort of miraculous, god-given institution. For civil society it is a contract that binds two people together and brings with it certain benefits related to inheritance, the custody of children, responsibility and visitation in the event of illness, and probably a bunch of other things that have never really mattered that much to me personally. It is a legal combining of household assets and debts that allows us to have a more stable society because we can see the contract. The fact that gay people cannot get married to each other right now means that they do not have access to those same contracts. This reduces the stability to society. It is also a violation of the rights of a non-zero number of American citizens. This, I would argue, is wrong.[7]
Any argument against gay marriage, then, has to be an argument from stability.
This is why we’re being subjected to the bullshit of people like the Liar Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. They have to argue that gay people will make bad parents. They have to argue that gay marriage will somehow destroy straight marriage. They have to argue that the tyranny of the majority should be allowed to trump the rule of law in this case. They have to do this because these are the only sorts of argument that will make sense given the parameters of the argument.
Consider the ever-popular slippery slope argument. Gay marriage opponents stand up and hyperventilate about how if we allow gay marriage we’ll have to allow polygamous marriage and if we allow that we’ll have to allow adults to marry children and people to marry ducks. It’s a hilariously ignorant argument about societal instability, but that’s exactly what the argument is. If gay marriage were made legal tomorrow in the entire country the only thing that would change is that gay people could enter in to a marriage contract with each other. It’s that contractual agreement part that matters, too. Children cannot legally sign contracts. Ducks and dogs can’t either. There’s the question of polygamous marriages, but that’s a different argument.[8]
Similar, too, is the “gay marriage will destroy straight marriage” argument. It’s not a valid logical argument. In fact, it’s a pretty fucking stupid argument from a logical perspective. But it’s a visceral argument that attempts to paint a picture of a bleak future where the very fabric of American society has been ripped apart.
The very absurdity of the arguments, though, point to the complete indefensibility of the position being argued for. The thing that’s truly sad, though, is that we have to have these arguments at all. And that, for the moment at least, the side that is in favor of ignorance and absurdity still has the upper hand.
--------------------------------
Side note: people talk about allowing civil unions as a substitute for marriage in order to keep the precious religious folks from worrying. It's stupid, especially when you consider it from the perspective that marriage is simply a contract in the eyes of the law. If a civil union is going to be thought of in the same way as a marriage for contractual perspective, then they're the same thing. But they're not, which brings up a thorny issue: a little case called Brown v. Board of Education.
A marriage and a civil union that are separated because a certain class of people is considered less desirable to have one or the other creates a situation known as "separate but equal." That term comes from a court case called Plessy v. Ferguson. Brown v. Board overturned the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Creating a separate category of civil unions specifically to allow gay marriage would require overturning Brown v. Board. Which is a bit problematic. This is a backdoor argument, but it shows exactly why the gay marriage fight is a Civil Rights activity.
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[1]Seeing as how I’m no longer a Christian this will become a point of contention for certain parties. If I am not now a Christian that means that I could never have possibly been a real or good Christian because to admit that it’s possible for me to realize it was a load of bullshit and walk away would require them to admit that they could decide to do the same thing. This is terrifying.
I have decided that from here on out I will not accept any other argument for this phenomenon without a hell of a lot of additional support. The arguments that I hear from a certain segment of Christians for why people leave Christianity are completely founded on laying blame and projecting. This cannot be accidental. The entire fundamentalist Christian mindset is founded on maintaining beliefs that cannot stand up to prolonged exposure to reality. The desperate anti-evolution fights, attempts to change history curricula, and creation of an isolated, parallel Christian educational subculture bear this out and offer more than a little proof of the fact that those who are in the evangelical and fundamentalist subcultures are, at the very least, viscerally aware of this. Constant checking of Bible verses that belittle the idea of the wisdom of man whenever this Bible/reality divide comes up doesn’t really help any attempt to make a case for the contrary, either.
[2]The former statement requires more qualification than the latter, however. But for the sake of simplicity I’m drawing a bright line around murder and theft and labeling them as Bad Things.
[3]With the possible exception of Basil Marceaux.com.
[4]Even there, though, we can have an argument. Watch a couple episodes of Leverage and you’ll understand what I mean. The entire concept for the show revolves around the idea that there are some people who absolutely need help and cannot get it, so a team of thieves and con artists who have switched to the good side pull off elaborate schemes to right the wrongs done. This generally involves some measure of deception and theft and general lawlessness, but we overlook that because the people who have been wronged have had much greater evils visited upon them by much worse people. Hence the show’s tagline: “Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys.”
[5]This was actually the root of European anti-Semitism and the root of the myth of the cabal of Jewish bankers who rule the world. The Church did not allow Christians to charge any interest but did not give a shit what the Jews did, since they were all going to Hell for killing Our Lord and Savior, anyway. This meant that if people needed money for something and had to get a loan the only people who were likely to loan money were the Jews because they, unlike anyone else in Christian Europe, could demand an appropriate ROI. Note, too, the idea that it’s not okay to loan money at interest, but it’s absolutely a-okay to take out a loan with interest. Morality is flexible.
[6]This, unfortunately, is one of those places where absolutely no one was looking out for morality or stability. It was a maelstrom of idealistic attempts to help create the American Dream combining with corporate greed. And that’s where we absolutely need the government to step in and regulate. There exist in this world greedy motherfuckers who will take everything they can get their hands on just because they want it. There also exist in this world people who are unwilling or unable to properly plan ahead. The government should be doing everything in its power to minimize the damage that can be done when these groups meet. This supports societal stability and, I would argue, is a morally important position to take. Also, I feel like Fred Clark right now.
[7]I would argue this is another example of the fungibility of an argument from morality. Fred Phelps would argue that gay sex is immoral. I would argue that violating the Constitutional rights of American citizens is immoral. How do we choose between those two arguments, especially since Phelps would argue that he trumps me because his arguments come from a higher moral authority while I would argue that I trump him because his moral authority is nothing but his imaginary friend and his own overinflated sense of outrage. Arguments from morality are fungible precisely because moral frameworks vary according to people and experience.
This is, ultimately, why we have the First Amendment of the Constitution. By eliminating religion as a consideration, the Constitution allows us to create a nation based on the idea of creating a stable society specifically to allow people to pursue life, liberty, and happiness as they see fit. If I am killed I obviously cannot do that. If my possessions are stolen from me I cannot pursue happiness. If I decide to pursue a homosexual relationship I am attempting to use my Constitutional freedoms to find happiness. This is why murder and theft should be illegal, while homosexuality should not. Once we get over that hurdle the question of whether gay marriage should be allowed is merely academic.
[8]I have nothing against polyamory or polygamous marriages, morally or legally speaking. However, if we’re talking about marriage in terms of a contract that handles inheritance and questions of who is responsible for making medical decisions in the event of incapacitation, I’m willing to hear arguments against polygamous marriages from a stability standpoint. Again, IANAL.[9]
[9]That’s one of my favorite internet acronyms, by the by. Because although IANAL, I cannot say that I anal. Although I can say that I am anal…
I remember being pissed after that Sunday morning because he basically said that if you weren’t trying to stop abortion you were a bad Christian. I wasn’t trying to stop abortion, but I wasn’t a bad Christian.[1] It just wasn’t my issue.
One thing that the pastor said that morning has apparently stuck with me. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Hell, it’s entirely possible that I agreed with it at the time, or at least allowed his argument to hold sway. Now, though, I just kind of want to smack him.
The argument basically went like this: “Opponents of abortion say we cannot legislate morality. But in America we legislate morality all the time. Look at all the laws against murder and theft.”
The pastor was a good man. He was a good speaker. He was a good husband and father. I’m going to assume he still is.
But he most definitely was not a Constitutional lawyer. Or if he was he got his degree from Hollywood Upstairs Law School. He was also not a historian.
See, I’m not a lawyer, either. I don’t pretend to be one. But I don’t have to be a lawyer to understand something: the laws of the United States of America were not designed and were not intended to legislate morality. They were designed to create a livable society. The problem that a lot of people have is that the necessary conditions to create a livable society and the necessary conditions to create a moral society have an awful lot of overlap. And most people are unwilling to understand the nuanced differences between the two things.
I can say that the religious or philosophical morality tells me I should not murder or steal. I can also say that a society that allows people to be murdered or stolen from is an inherently unstable society. Both of these statements are true[2] but both of these statements are not equal. Both of these statements are also immaterial. There isn’t anybody arguing against outlawing murder and theft.[3] We can all agree that they’re bad to do and bad for society to allow.[4]
It is in the lesser crimes and misdemeanors that we see the difference between a drive towards a moral society and a stable society. It is also where we can see that a drive towards a moral society is actually an inferior goal to a drive towards a stable society. Morality, after all, is fungible.
Let us consider for a moment the concept of usury. It was once considered one of the worst of all sins to charge any interest on a loan.[5] This is no longer considered an issue. This, though, is also one of those places where the proponents of a moral society and the proponents of a stable society really should be working together. I can stand behind the argument that credit card companies should not be extending lines of credit at better than 20% interest to anyone capable of filling out a form that arrives in convenient junk mail form is immoral. I can also stand behind the argument that the practices of the banks related to credit cards and mortgages destabilizes society. For evidence, please look at the last two years of life in America.[6] Even this, though, doesn’t really help me to illustrate my point. So let’s look at that most contentious argument in American politics: gay marriage.
The main arguments against gay, well, anything, have been primarily moral in America. It was simply regarded as being wrong. This was fine as long as the homosexual population was forced to stay in the closet. Ever since the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Pride Movement, however, the idea of being an out and proud homosexual in America has gradually gained greater and greater acceptance. Now we’re at the point where gay marriage is allowed in some places and wide swaths of the country are fighting for it everywhere. Much like the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement before it, the fight has been taken up by people who are not part of the repressed group but realize that there is a greater issue at stake than the rights of people who are different.
When the issue of gay marriage comes before a court, as it recently did in California, the arguments about the morality of gay marriage do not matter. The issue is one of a stable society and the rights of those who reside in that society. Opponents of gay marriage are starting to get that, but it seems to me that they’re largely trying to work around that pesky First Amendment without seeing the larger issue. For this isn’t actually a First Amendment issue at all.
If the argument were as simple as one side waving its favored religious text and the other side holding up the Constitution, we’d be able to handle this in a jiffy. But there are religious people on both sides of the argument. There are religious people pointing to different verses in the same exact holy books on both sides of the argument. And no one is going to say that we should make gay marriage illegal on First Amendment grounds because someone reads that verse where Paul says that there is no longer male or female, slave or free now that Jesus has done his thing, then extrapolates that to say we shouldn’t make distinctions between gay and straight.
The concept of marriage for civil society is quite different from the concept of marriage in religion. For the religious it is often a sign of some sort of miraculous, god-given institution. For civil society it is a contract that binds two people together and brings with it certain benefits related to inheritance, the custody of children, responsibility and visitation in the event of illness, and probably a bunch of other things that have never really mattered that much to me personally. It is a legal combining of household assets and debts that allows us to have a more stable society because we can see the contract. The fact that gay people cannot get married to each other right now means that they do not have access to those same contracts. This reduces the stability to society. It is also a violation of the rights of a non-zero number of American citizens. This, I would argue, is wrong.[7]
Any argument against gay marriage, then, has to be an argument from stability.
This is why we’re being subjected to the bullshit of people like the Liar Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. They have to argue that gay people will make bad parents. They have to argue that gay marriage will somehow destroy straight marriage. They have to argue that the tyranny of the majority should be allowed to trump the rule of law in this case. They have to do this because these are the only sorts of argument that will make sense given the parameters of the argument.
Consider the ever-popular slippery slope argument. Gay marriage opponents stand up and hyperventilate about how if we allow gay marriage we’ll have to allow polygamous marriage and if we allow that we’ll have to allow adults to marry children and people to marry ducks. It’s a hilariously ignorant argument about societal instability, but that’s exactly what the argument is. If gay marriage were made legal tomorrow in the entire country the only thing that would change is that gay people could enter in to a marriage contract with each other. It’s that contractual agreement part that matters, too. Children cannot legally sign contracts. Ducks and dogs can’t either. There’s the question of polygamous marriages, but that’s a different argument.[8]
Similar, too, is the “gay marriage will destroy straight marriage” argument. It’s not a valid logical argument. In fact, it’s a pretty fucking stupid argument from a logical perspective. But it’s a visceral argument that attempts to paint a picture of a bleak future where the very fabric of American society has been ripped apart.
The very absurdity of the arguments, though, point to the complete indefensibility of the position being argued for. The thing that’s truly sad, though, is that we have to have these arguments at all. And that, for the moment at least, the side that is in favor of ignorance and absurdity still has the upper hand.
--------------------------------
Side note: people talk about allowing civil unions as a substitute for marriage in order to keep the precious religious folks from worrying. It's stupid, especially when you consider it from the perspective that marriage is simply a contract in the eyes of the law. If a civil union is going to be thought of in the same way as a marriage for contractual perspective, then they're the same thing. But they're not, which brings up a thorny issue: a little case called Brown v. Board of Education.
A marriage and a civil union that are separated because a certain class of people is considered less desirable to have one or the other creates a situation known as "separate but equal." That term comes from a court case called Plessy v. Ferguson. Brown v. Board overturned the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Creating a separate category of civil unions specifically to allow gay marriage would require overturning Brown v. Board. Which is a bit problematic. This is a backdoor argument, but it shows exactly why the gay marriage fight is a Civil Rights activity.
--------------------------------
[1]Seeing as how I’m no longer a Christian this will become a point of contention for certain parties. If I am not now a Christian that means that I could never have possibly been a real or good Christian because to admit that it’s possible for me to realize it was a load of bullshit and walk away would require them to admit that they could decide to do the same thing. This is terrifying.
I have decided that from here on out I will not accept any other argument for this phenomenon without a hell of a lot of additional support. The arguments that I hear from a certain segment of Christians for why people leave Christianity are completely founded on laying blame and projecting. This cannot be accidental. The entire fundamentalist Christian mindset is founded on maintaining beliefs that cannot stand up to prolonged exposure to reality. The desperate anti-evolution fights, attempts to change history curricula, and creation of an isolated, parallel Christian educational subculture bear this out and offer more than a little proof of the fact that those who are in the evangelical and fundamentalist subcultures are, at the very least, viscerally aware of this. Constant checking of Bible verses that belittle the idea of the wisdom of man whenever this Bible/reality divide comes up doesn’t really help any attempt to make a case for the contrary, either.
[2]The former statement requires more qualification than the latter, however. But for the sake of simplicity I’m drawing a bright line around murder and theft and labeling them as Bad Things.
[3]With the possible exception of Basil Marceaux.com.
[4]Even there, though, we can have an argument. Watch a couple episodes of Leverage and you’ll understand what I mean. The entire concept for the show revolves around the idea that there are some people who absolutely need help and cannot get it, so a team of thieves and con artists who have switched to the good side pull off elaborate schemes to right the wrongs done. This generally involves some measure of deception and theft and general lawlessness, but we overlook that because the people who have been wronged have had much greater evils visited upon them by much worse people. Hence the show’s tagline: “Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys.”
[5]This was actually the root of European anti-Semitism and the root of the myth of the cabal of Jewish bankers who rule the world. The Church did not allow Christians to charge any interest but did not give a shit what the Jews did, since they were all going to Hell for killing Our Lord and Savior, anyway. This meant that if people needed money for something and had to get a loan the only people who were likely to loan money were the Jews because they, unlike anyone else in Christian Europe, could demand an appropriate ROI. Note, too, the idea that it’s not okay to loan money at interest, but it’s absolutely a-okay to take out a loan with interest. Morality is flexible.
[6]This, unfortunately, is one of those places where absolutely no one was looking out for morality or stability. It was a maelstrom of idealistic attempts to help create the American Dream combining with corporate greed. And that’s where we absolutely need the government to step in and regulate. There exist in this world greedy motherfuckers who will take everything they can get their hands on just because they want it. There also exist in this world people who are unwilling or unable to properly plan ahead. The government should be doing everything in its power to minimize the damage that can be done when these groups meet. This supports societal stability and, I would argue, is a morally important position to take. Also, I feel like Fred Clark right now.
[7]I would argue this is another example of the fungibility of an argument from morality. Fred Phelps would argue that gay sex is immoral. I would argue that violating the Constitutional rights of American citizens is immoral. How do we choose between those two arguments, especially since Phelps would argue that he trumps me because his arguments come from a higher moral authority while I would argue that I trump him because his moral authority is nothing but his imaginary friend and his own overinflated sense of outrage. Arguments from morality are fungible precisely because moral frameworks vary according to people and experience.
This is, ultimately, why we have the First Amendment of the Constitution. By eliminating religion as a consideration, the Constitution allows us to create a nation based on the idea of creating a stable society specifically to allow people to pursue life, liberty, and happiness as they see fit. If I am killed I obviously cannot do that. If my possessions are stolen from me I cannot pursue happiness. If I decide to pursue a homosexual relationship I am attempting to use my Constitutional freedoms to find happiness. This is why murder and theft should be illegal, while homosexuality should not. Once we get over that hurdle the question of whether gay marriage should be allowed is merely academic.
[8]I have nothing against polyamory or polygamous marriages, morally or legally speaking. However, if we’re talking about marriage in terms of a contract that handles inheritance and questions of who is responsible for making medical decisions in the event of incapacitation, I’m willing to hear arguments against polygamous marriages from a stability standpoint. Again, IANAL.[9]
[9]That’s one of my favorite internet acronyms, by the by. Because although IANAL, I cannot say that I anal. Although I can say that I am anal…
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
On a Related Note
There's this note about Shakespeare denialism over at Unreasonable Faith. It seems germane to the discussions we've been having about history over in our neck of the woods...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Terracina Hypothesis
This is a thought experiment based on the discussion that has been started on the whole 99.6% accuracy of the New Testament claim made by Ravi Zacharias in the video I posted yesterday. It is an attempt to explain why brute-force calculation using numbers and relative ages doesn’t mean a damn thing.
Let us, for the sake of argument, invent a historical event. Let’s say that after the decisive Battle of Cannae, but before the extended stalemate/delaying tactics period, the possibility has arisen that the Romans and Carthaginians fought one more major battle near the city of Terracina. Let’s say that it’s something that has been hinted at, but there was no direct evidence and precious little indirect evidence until recently when a series of manuscripts were discovered that had previously unknown historical documents and have allowed us to track down a larger collection of previously unknown documents, including several dozen records of the Battle of Terracina.
Historians immediately begin rifling through the documents, excitedly attempting to pick apart this heretofore undocumented battle. But they quickly run in to a problem. Some of the documents claim that the battle took place near Terracina. Some claim that they took place near a city a few miles away called Ad Turres. Some documents claim that Hannibal won the battle handily, while some claim that the Romans very nearly carried the day before being forced to retreat when one of their key commanders died. A pattern quickly emerges where in all but one case the documents that say the battle was fought at Ad Turres was an unquestioned victory for Hannibal and the documents that say the battle was fought at Terracina was a close-fought thing. But that one remaining document says that Hannibal won the battle decisively at Terracina. It, unlike the other two, is also the only document that does not reference previous works. It also contains information that is repeated in all of the other documents, much of which is shared across both sides types, but it has a lot of unique data and points out several unique features of the terrain around Terracina.
No documents can be dated before the year 100 CE, more than three centuries after the Second Punic War. But the document from 100 CE is, in fact, the one unique document.
The historians see the pattern and formulate what’s called the Terracina Hypothesis. They posit that the singular document is based on the oldest source and, therefore, that the one, single document (known as T1) that says that Hannibal won a decisive victory near Terracina is the oldest, with the other documents all based off of it. Further, they posit that the two different tales depend on two later modifications different modifications. They hypothesize that there were two different documents, now known as X1 (antecedent to the Ad Turres documents) and Y1 (antecedent to the Terracina documents), that both made mistakes and were copied forward, while the T1 document was lost to the historical record sometime around 100 CE.[1]
This is where the Hannibal at Terracina story rests for about a decade. Books are written about it, textbooks modified to indicate it. Everyone is satisfied by the explanation. Then two things happen.[2]
A certain Professor Jones then begins a close study of the various Terracina sources for an upcoming book, during which he discovers two things that had been missed before.
First, The T1 document makes reference to several place names that did not exist before 50 BCE. The document also makes reference to a prominent citizen of the city who was not alive during the Second Punic War, but who has been referenced as living in the area a generation later. Originally these errors were taken as alternate spellings of similar places that were known to exist in Terracina and an individual who was known to be a minor Roman general at the time of the Second Punic War. This new information casts doubt on the validity of the T1 document and it’s placement as the original document. Second, he discovers that there was a mis-translation of a section that only survives in one of the documents that claims the battle occurred near Ad Turres. According to the original translation, the scribe who wrote the document had claimed to be making a copy of someone else’s copy of the original, but he actually claimed to have been entrusted with the original document and was working off of it. This may or may not be the truth, but the those two bits of information are enough to cast serious doubt on the Terracina Hypothesis.
Meanwhile, an archaeological expedition operating near the ancient town of Terracina made two interesting discoveries. The first is that there are an awful lot of Carthaginian artifacts in the area and there is evidence that there was, in fact, a battle.[3] The second is that it’s still possible to make out several different landmarks mentioned in all three accounts. This provides strong evidence that all three accounts recorded the same events.
Our professor from above takes the new information he has uncovered and the new archaeological evidence and formulates a new hypothesis. He theorizes that there was, in fact, a X1 document and a Y1 document. But they did not follow the T1 document, but were the independent creation of two different writers while T1 came from a third source.
The biggest obstacle is, of course, the different city names given. X1, according to the new hypothesis, was simply written by a scribe who was a bit lost and didn’t know the name of the actual city near which the battle took place. Accurate descriptions of the immediate terrain lend credibility to the account.
But what of the other discrepancies? The professor’s hypothesis explains it thusly:
The Battle of Terracina was the first major battle after Hannibal completely wiped out the Roman legions at Cannae, which followed Hannibal’s decisive victories at Lake Trasimene and Trebia. Another decisive victory would cause complete despair in Rome and invite the possibility of a complete victory for Hannibal if he could figure out how to exploit the situation. The Y1 document, then, was a bit of Roman propaganda, to say, “Well, Hannibal won, but we bloodied him pretty well and he’ll have to be far more careful in the future.” The X1 document, meanwhile, was written by someone traveling with Hannibal who did not know the area, but recorded a great Carthaginian victory, possibly as propaganda, but equally likely to be an accurate account of the battle due to the consistent Roman inability to deal with Hannibal. The T1 document, meanwhile, was actually the last document produced. It was based, at least partially, on some sort of local tradition, most likely oral, which had been modified slightly between the original event and when it was finally recorded, thus accounting for the inconsistencies in place names.
This theory then becomes known as the Jones Hypothesis. Jones presents it at a symposium and publishes some papers. Several other historians review his papers and take a look at his sources, re-check his translations, and do the whole peer review thing. They conclude that it’s a good theory. It is then largely accepted as the most likely explanation for what happened at Terracina and why we have three different stories and becomes the standard academic explanation for what happened. This does not mean it is universally accepted. Some historians still hold to the old Terracina Hypothesis. But the general consensus falls to the side that Jones has the right idea.
Interestingly enough, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Jones Hypothesis is right. It may well be that the Romans nearly did win the day and no propaganda was needed on the Roman side. It might also be that there was no battle, but that Hannibal’s army encamped in that location and two factions in his army that was a large collection of disparate peoples from all over started fighting each other in an event that was later recorded as a major battle. But the Jones Hypothesis best fits the information we have available, which is why it is generally accepted within the academic community.
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Now, then, I’ve told a story here about the formulation of two different hypotheses about a historical event. Even though I’ve made the event up, we can say for the sake of the illustration that we’re reasonably sure that the event actually did happen. Note what we had available: several different accounts that differed in specifics but agreed on a general idea of what happened. Note, too, what we did not have: original source documents or, for that matter, any documents dated within three centuries of the event. To this we then added archaeological evidence and external research (the place names given and whatnot).
Note, though, the thing that no one in this story did at any point: add up the number of manuscripts found and divide by their proximity to the original event in order to come up with some bullshit, hyper-accurate statistic of “accuracy.” That’s history, that’s propaganda. What the actual (pretend) historians did was take the various accounts, figure out the points of difference and commonality, and iron out a specific narrative.
If you’re reading this and you’re the sort of person who wants to believe Ravi Zacharias, I’d be willing to bet you just thought, “But you’ve just disproved your original point!” And if you didn’t think that, well, I’m going to just hand you a freebie right here. So, y’know, pay attention.
“Aha,” you’ll point out, imaginary internet debate partner, “Doesn’t the huge number of New Testament manuscripts we know of mean that we can be sure we have created an accurate composite of the story of Jesus. Perhaps even, I don’t know, 99.6% sure? Doesn’t that just prove the New Testament is true?”
The short answer is, “No.” But I’m guessing that you’ll be wanting the long answer. You imaginary internet debate partners are so hard to please.
In the book Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman tells a story about a page from the Codex Vaticanus he has hanging in his office. His explanation of the paper is basically this: there is a passage at the beginning of Hebrews that contains the Greek word PHERON[4] in most manuscripts. The passage translates to “Christ bears all things by the word of his power. In the original of the Codex Vaticanus, however, the scribe replaced PHERON with PHANERON,[5] which translates to “Christ manifests all things by the word of his power.” Another scribe later came along and replaced “manifests” with “bears.” Still later another scribe came and put “manifests” back in, then added the note, “Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don’t change it!” Ehrman then says:
Bear in mind, too, that the Codex Vaticanus is one of those 5600 source documents that supposedly creates a 99.6% accuracy. Counted among them, too, is the P52 fragment mentioned by BeamStalk in the comments on the first Ravi Zacharias entry. Well, actually, to call P52 a fragment is practically an insult to fragments everywhere. Not only does it not contain a complete book of the New Testament, it doesn’t even contain a complete thought couched in a single complete sentence.
And this doesn’t even get in to the fact that the writers of the four Gospels had different ideas about what the Christ story actually meant. It doesn’t get in to the fact that Paul wrote his epistles without a full knowledge of the Christ story or a complete understanding of it’s importance. It doesn’t get in to the fact that the letters attributed to Paul offer a somewhat different theology than the one attributed to James and are still different from the letters attributed to Peter. For that matter, the letters attributed to Paul offer a different theology than the letters attributed to Paul that we’re pretty sure Paul didn’t actually write (basically, the three “pastoral epistles:” 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus).
Meanwhile, there’s an extremely important bit of this discussion that I haven’t even encroached upon. It boils down to a simple concept:
There’s no one telling me that I will go to Hell if I don’t accept the Jones Hypothesis to explain the Battle of Terracina.
When people like Ravi Zacharias trot out their stupid statistics to explain why the Bible we have today is a more accurate book than, say, Homer’s Illiad or the Histories of Herodotus, they unwittingly do the Bible a great disservice. See, I don’t have to believe that Helen of Troy actually had a face capable of launching a thousand ships that then remained beached outside of Troy until the night a large wooden horse filled with Greeks was wheeled up to the gates.[6] And I don’t have to accept Herodotus’s version of the Life of Cyrus as the absolute, definitive story of the life and times of Cyrus the Great.
So, yes, we can have a pretty good idea that we have the ability to find an accurate picture of the New Testament. But that just means that the New Testament is subject to the same exact scrutiny I’d place the Illiad or the Life of Cyrus under. And under that scrutiny the New Testament fails miserably, as it is an internally inconsistent document that is not well-supported by external evidence. In fact, it’s basically not supported by any external evidence. And there’s actually external evidence that neatly undercuts the validity of the Bible.
You have to approach the Bible with the attitude that you will believe it in order to believe it. So when an apologist like Ravi Zacharias makes the argument that you can support the Bible with historical evidence what he actually does is undercut the validity of the said document. He invites inquiry of the document and insists that the Christian faith will fall apart if the Bible is shown to be unreliable.
Skeptical inquiry in to the Bible does exactly that.
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[1]This is, basically, a modified use of the “Two-Source Hypothesis” of the origin of the four Gospels, natch.
[2]Everything here is massively oversimplified. I’m creating a scenario and attempting to tell a quick and useful story about how historians do things. That means that an awful lot of convenient things have to happen to make the narrative, y’know, work and be usefully easy to understand.
[3]Generally speaking, the evidence of battle takes the form of two things: discarded, damaged, and broken implements of war and graves. The occupants of said graves generally provide evidence that they did not go peacefully in to that good night. There will be shattered skulls, broken bones, and no evidence that the bones had the time to heal. You could basically call Ducky to the scene of an ancient battlefield and he’d be able to do his thing right there. With some modification.
Either way, if you get enough bodies from the same general time period in the same place you can generally determine if you’re looking at the local cemetery or a battlefield. You can also generally determine if the people died violently or peacefully. It’s exceptionally hard to figure out the precise circumstances of death, however. By which I mean, we could determine there was a battle, but not who won or who killed whom in the process.
[4]There’s an accent mark on the O that I’m not entirely sure how to reproduce. But it doesn’t technically matter for the purposes of my retelling of Ehrman’s story.
[5]Again with accent marks…
[6]For that matter, I don’t. One of the weasel things Bible “historians” do is point to archaeological evidence to show that there were cities and whatnot in the Middle East and Levant in the Bible times and crow, “See, the Bible is right!” Archaeological evidence has shown there was a city in Troy and has shown that one of the incarnations of Troy was destroyed at about the time Homer’s Illiad would have existed. That doesn’t mean that Achilles, Hector, and Menelaus were there. And Athena, Apollo, and Zeus sure as shit weren’t, either. Oh, and Hephaestus probably didn’t forge[7] the armor of Achilles in the fires of Olympus, in case you’re wondering.
[7]Word 2007 insists that I want to use the word "forget" here. I'll be honest, I find the red lines and spelling auto-correct to be helpful sometimes (but don't get me started on the iPhone's auto-correct. Every single time I try to write "hell" it changes the word to "he'll." That's annoying as he'll). I find the green lines to be helpful sometimes, specifically since I have a bad habit of hitting the space bar twice very quickly without realizing it and I do have a habit of writing sentences that don't exactly have specific subject-verb agreement in them when I'm getting flowery. So the grammar correct can help me keep an eye on some things. But, so help me, I have no clue what the hell they were thinking with the little blue squiggly lines.
Let us, for the sake of argument, invent a historical event. Let’s say that after the decisive Battle of Cannae, but before the extended stalemate/delaying tactics period, the possibility has arisen that the Romans and Carthaginians fought one more major battle near the city of Terracina. Let’s say that it’s something that has been hinted at, but there was no direct evidence and precious little indirect evidence until recently when a series of manuscripts were discovered that had previously unknown historical documents and have allowed us to track down a larger collection of previously unknown documents, including several dozen records of the Battle of Terracina.
Historians immediately begin rifling through the documents, excitedly attempting to pick apart this heretofore undocumented battle. But they quickly run in to a problem. Some of the documents claim that the battle took place near Terracina. Some claim that they took place near a city a few miles away called Ad Turres. Some documents claim that Hannibal won the battle handily, while some claim that the Romans very nearly carried the day before being forced to retreat when one of their key commanders died. A pattern quickly emerges where in all but one case the documents that say the battle was fought at Ad Turres was an unquestioned victory for Hannibal and the documents that say the battle was fought at Terracina was a close-fought thing. But that one remaining document says that Hannibal won the battle decisively at Terracina. It, unlike the other two, is also the only document that does not reference previous works. It also contains information that is repeated in all of the other documents, much of which is shared across both sides types, but it has a lot of unique data and points out several unique features of the terrain around Terracina.
No documents can be dated before the year 100 CE, more than three centuries after the Second Punic War. But the document from 100 CE is, in fact, the one unique document.
The historians see the pattern and formulate what’s called the Terracina Hypothesis. They posit that the singular document is based on the oldest source and, therefore, that the one, single document (known as T1) that says that Hannibal won a decisive victory near Terracina is the oldest, with the other documents all based off of it. Further, they posit that the two different tales depend on two later modifications different modifications. They hypothesize that there were two different documents, now known as X1 (antecedent to the Ad Turres documents) and Y1 (antecedent to the Terracina documents), that both made mistakes and were copied forward, while the T1 document was lost to the historical record sometime around 100 CE.[1]
This is where the Hannibal at Terracina story rests for about a decade. Books are written about it, textbooks modified to indicate it. Everyone is satisfied by the explanation. Then two things happen.[2]
A certain Professor Jones then begins a close study of the various Terracina sources for an upcoming book, during which he discovers two things that had been missed before.
First, The T1 document makes reference to several place names that did not exist before 50 BCE. The document also makes reference to a prominent citizen of the city who was not alive during the Second Punic War, but who has been referenced as living in the area a generation later. Originally these errors were taken as alternate spellings of similar places that were known to exist in Terracina and an individual who was known to be a minor Roman general at the time of the Second Punic War. This new information casts doubt on the validity of the T1 document and it’s placement as the original document. Second, he discovers that there was a mis-translation of a section that only survives in one of the documents that claims the battle occurred near Ad Turres. According to the original translation, the scribe who wrote the document had claimed to be making a copy of someone else’s copy of the original, but he actually claimed to have been entrusted with the original document and was working off of it. This may or may not be the truth, but the those two bits of information are enough to cast serious doubt on the Terracina Hypothesis.
Meanwhile, an archaeological expedition operating near the ancient town of Terracina made two interesting discoveries. The first is that there are an awful lot of Carthaginian artifacts in the area and there is evidence that there was, in fact, a battle.[3] The second is that it’s still possible to make out several different landmarks mentioned in all three accounts. This provides strong evidence that all three accounts recorded the same events.
Our professor from above takes the new information he has uncovered and the new archaeological evidence and formulates a new hypothesis. He theorizes that there was, in fact, a X1 document and a Y1 document. But they did not follow the T1 document, but were the independent creation of two different writers while T1 came from a third source.
The biggest obstacle is, of course, the different city names given. X1, according to the new hypothesis, was simply written by a scribe who was a bit lost and didn’t know the name of the actual city near which the battle took place. Accurate descriptions of the immediate terrain lend credibility to the account.
But what of the other discrepancies? The professor’s hypothesis explains it thusly:
The Battle of Terracina was the first major battle after Hannibal completely wiped out the Roman legions at Cannae, which followed Hannibal’s decisive victories at Lake Trasimene and Trebia. Another decisive victory would cause complete despair in Rome and invite the possibility of a complete victory for Hannibal if he could figure out how to exploit the situation. The Y1 document, then, was a bit of Roman propaganda, to say, “Well, Hannibal won, but we bloodied him pretty well and he’ll have to be far more careful in the future.” The X1 document, meanwhile, was written by someone traveling with Hannibal who did not know the area, but recorded a great Carthaginian victory, possibly as propaganda, but equally likely to be an accurate account of the battle due to the consistent Roman inability to deal with Hannibal. The T1 document, meanwhile, was actually the last document produced. It was based, at least partially, on some sort of local tradition, most likely oral, which had been modified slightly between the original event and when it was finally recorded, thus accounting for the inconsistencies in place names.
This theory then becomes known as the Jones Hypothesis. Jones presents it at a symposium and publishes some papers. Several other historians review his papers and take a look at his sources, re-check his translations, and do the whole peer review thing. They conclude that it’s a good theory. It is then largely accepted as the most likely explanation for what happened at Terracina and why we have three different stories and becomes the standard academic explanation for what happened. This does not mean it is universally accepted. Some historians still hold to the old Terracina Hypothesis. But the general consensus falls to the side that Jones has the right idea.
Interestingly enough, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Jones Hypothesis is right. It may well be that the Romans nearly did win the day and no propaganda was needed on the Roman side. It might also be that there was no battle, but that Hannibal’s army encamped in that location and two factions in his army that was a large collection of disparate peoples from all over started fighting each other in an event that was later recorded as a major battle. But the Jones Hypothesis best fits the information we have available, which is why it is generally accepted within the academic community.
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Now, then, I’ve told a story here about the formulation of two different hypotheses about a historical event. Even though I’ve made the event up, we can say for the sake of the illustration that we’re reasonably sure that the event actually did happen. Note what we had available: several different accounts that differed in specifics but agreed on a general idea of what happened. Note, too, what we did not have: original source documents or, for that matter, any documents dated within three centuries of the event. To this we then added archaeological evidence and external research (the place names given and whatnot).
Note, though, the thing that no one in this story did at any point: add up the number of manuscripts found and divide by their proximity to the original event in order to come up with some bullshit, hyper-accurate statistic of “accuracy.” That’s history, that’s propaganda. What the actual (pretend) historians did was take the various accounts, figure out the points of difference and commonality, and iron out a specific narrative.
If you’re reading this and you’re the sort of person who wants to believe Ravi Zacharias, I’d be willing to bet you just thought, “But you’ve just disproved your original point!” And if you didn’t think that, well, I’m going to just hand you a freebie right here. So, y’know, pay attention.
“Aha,” you’ll point out, imaginary internet debate partner, “Doesn’t the huge number of New Testament manuscripts we know of mean that we can be sure we have created an accurate composite of the story of Jesus. Perhaps even, I don’t know, 99.6% sure? Doesn’t that just prove the New Testament is true?”
The short answer is, “No.” But I’m guessing that you’ll be wanting the long answer. You imaginary internet debate partners are so hard to please.
In the book Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman tells a story about a page from the Codex Vaticanus he has hanging in his office. His explanation of the paper is basically this: there is a passage at the beginning of Hebrews that contains the Greek word PHERON[4] in most manuscripts. The passage translates to “Christ bears all things by the word of his power. In the original of the Codex Vaticanus, however, the scribe replaced PHERON with PHANERON,[5] which translates to “Christ manifests all things by the word of his power.” Another scribe later came along and replaced “manifests” with “bears.” Still later another scribe came and put “manifests” back in, then added the note, “Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don’t change it!” Ehrman then says:
I have a copy of the page framed and hanging on the wall above my desk as a constant reminder about scribes and their proclivities to change, and rechange, the texts. Obviously it is the change of a single word: so why does it matter? It matters because the only way to understand what an author wants to say is to know what is words – all his words – actually were. (Think of all the sermons preached on the basis of a single word in a text: what if the word is one the author didn’t actually write?) Saying that Christ reveals all things by his word of power is quite different from saying that he keeps the universe together by his word!
Bear in mind, too, that the Codex Vaticanus is one of those 5600 source documents that supposedly creates a 99.6% accuracy. Counted among them, too, is the P52 fragment mentioned by BeamStalk in the comments on the first Ravi Zacharias entry. Well, actually, to call P52 a fragment is practically an insult to fragments everywhere. Not only does it not contain a complete book of the New Testament, it doesn’t even contain a complete thought couched in a single complete sentence.
And this doesn’t even get in to the fact that the writers of the four Gospels had different ideas about what the Christ story actually meant. It doesn’t get in to the fact that Paul wrote his epistles without a full knowledge of the Christ story or a complete understanding of it’s importance. It doesn’t get in to the fact that the letters attributed to Paul offer a somewhat different theology than the one attributed to James and are still different from the letters attributed to Peter. For that matter, the letters attributed to Paul offer a different theology than the letters attributed to Paul that we’re pretty sure Paul didn’t actually write (basically, the three “pastoral epistles:” 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus).
Meanwhile, there’s an extremely important bit of this discussion that I haven’t even encroached upon. It boils down to a simple concept:
There’s no one telling me that I will go to Hell if I don’t accept the Jones Hypothesis to explain the Battle of Terracina.
When people like Ravi Zacharias trot out their stupid statistics to explain why the Bible we have today is a more accurate book than, say, Homer’s Illiad or the Histories of Herodotus, they unwittingly do the Bible a great disservice. See, I don’t have to believe that Helen of Troy actually had a face capable of launching a thousand ships that then remained beached outside of Troy until the night a large wooden horse filled with Greeks was wheeled up to the gates.[6] And I don’t have to accept Herodotus’s version of the Life of Cyrus as the absolute, definitive story of the life and times of Cyrus the Great.
So, yes, we can have a pretty good idea that we have the ability to find an accurate picture of the New Testament. But that just means that the New Testament is subject to the same exact scrutiny I’d place the Illiad or the Life of Cyrus under. And under that scrutiny the New Testament fails miserably, as it is an internally inconsistent document that is not well-supported by external evidence. In fact, it’s basically not supported by any external evidence. And there’s actually external evidence that neatly undercuts the validity of the Bible.
You have to approach the Bible with the attitude that you will believe it in order to believe it. So when an apologist like Ravi Zacharias makes the argument that you can support the Bible with historical evidence what he actually does is undercut the validity of the said document. He invites inquiry of the document and insists that the Christian faith will fall apart if the Bible is shown to be unreliable.
Skeptical inquiry in to the Bible does exactly that.
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[1]This is, basically, a modified use of the “Two-Source Hypothesis” of the origin of the four Gospels, natch.
[2]Everything here is massively oversimplified. I’m creating a scenario and attempting to tell a quick and useful story about how historians do things. That means that an awful lot of convenient things have to happen to make the narrative, y’know, work and be usefully easy to understand.
[3]Generally speaking, the evidence of battle takes the form of two things: discarded, damaged, and broken implements of war and graves. The occupants of said graves generally provide evidence that they did not go peacefully in to that good night. There will be shattered skulls, broken bones, and no evidence that the bones had the time to heal. You could basically call Ducky to the scene of an ancient battlefield and he’d be able to do his thing right there. With some modification.
Either way, if you get enough bodies from the same general time period in the same place you can generally determine if you’re looking at the local cemetery or a battlefield. You can also generally determine if the people died violently or peacefully. It’s exceptionally hard to figure out the precise circumstances of death, however. By which I mean, we could determine there was a battle, but not who won or who killed whom in the process.
[4]There’s an accent mark on the O that I’m not entirely sure how to reproduce. But it doesn’t technically matter for the purposes of my retelling of Ehrman’s story.
[5]Again with accent marks…
[6]For that matter, I don’t. One of the weasel things Bible “historians” do is point to archaeological evidence to show that there were cities and whatnot in the Middle East and Levant in the Bible times and crow, “See, the Bible is right!” Archaeological evidence has shown there was a city in Troy and has shown that one of the incarnations of Troy was destroyed at about the time Homer’s Illiad would have existed. That doesn’t mean that Achilles, Hector, and Menelaus were there. And Athena, Apollo, and Zeus sure as shit weren’t, either. Oh, and Hephaestus probably didn’t forge[7] the armor of Achilles in the fires of Olympus, in case you’re wondering.
[7]Word 2007 insists that I want to use the word "forget" here. I'll be honest, I find the red lines and spelling auto-correct to be helpful sometimes (but don't get me started on the iPhone's auto-correct. Every single time I try to write "hell" it changes the word to "he'll." That's annoying as he'll). I find the green lines to be helpful sometimes, specifically since I have a bad habit of hitting the space bar twice very quickly without realizing it and I do have a habit of writing sentences that don't exactly have specific subject-verb agreement in them when I'm getting flowery. So the grammar correct can help me keep an eye on some things. But, so help me, I have no clue what the hell they were thinking with the little blue squiggly lines.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Ravi Zacharias Disproves Biblical Literalism
Sadly, he doesn’t realize this is what happens and, rather, thinks he’s defending the whole thing.
Either way, I had about four different posts I could have written this evening. Then, towards the end of my work day, I found someone from my former life had posted this video on Facebook. Said friend was, I have no doubt, intending to use this video to bolster the message of the Bible and apologetics, not the other way around. But I shall use it to show that it’s extremely easy to debunk standard Biblical apologetics, and further to show why they seem so very convincing.
Either way, the video is from a talk given by Ravi Zacharias, a fairly well-known evangelist, at the University of Illinois. A student asks him why I would uncharitably tend to label as a set up question.
Yeah, seriously. That’s his question. And it’s intended to get a set answer, roughly broken down in to, “This is why the Bible is correct, this is why everything else is wrong, and this is why you should accept Jesus.” The student in question will then, theoretically, be able to go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations because of the Ravi Zacharias method of proving the Bible is the most believable document in the history of the universe. So how does Zacharias respond?
First, with a whole bunch of mealy-mouthed philosophical garbage.
This is an awful lot of words that say absolutely nothing. Let’s break it down in to its component ideas. He basically says that he believes truth exists, that truth can be supported by human thought and human history, and that it’s important to pursue truth, not just as a thought exercise, but as an attempt to give meaning to human existence. There is nothing wrong with this, but it doesn’t say anything. More precisely, it doesn’t say anything about the Bible or why the Bible would hold truth. Mostly, it doesn’t explain why we should look to the Bible for truth.
But it uses a lot of big words and sounds really, really smart. And I’m reasonably certain that’s what it’s there for.
Then he tosses in the most random and oversimplified explanation of existentialism I’ve ever heard, in which he says it’s a rejection of rationalism and an appeal to, as Zacharias puts it “gut level feeling.” As someone who has read his own fair share of existentialist thought and is prone to identify himself as one, I have no idea where that idea would possibly come in to play, as existentialism was the realization that relentless rationalistic thinking wasn’t overly helpful in understanding people and the true quest for any person was to figure out how to give their own life meaning. This doesn’t reject rationalism so much as it admits that people aren’t unfailingly rational and probably aren’t ever going to be capable of becoming unfailingly rational. But that’s neither here nor there, as I have no clue what existentialism has to do with explaining why we should believe every word of the Bible and give our entire lives to Jesus. So I’ll just skip on ahead a bit.
I find this fascinating, because what Zacharias is explaining here is more or less exactly the path which I took to stop believing in the Bible and, ultimately, to decide to leave Christianity behind. He even goes on to use one of the earliest parts of the Bible that caused me to begin questioning the validity of the Bible in an attempt to prove the Bible. But I’ll cross that bridge when Zacharias does.
Anyway, what I’d like to point out here is that Zacharias actually neatly lays out the flaws in fundamentalist/Biblical literalist thinking. If your entire belief system depends on the thing you believe in being without flaw, then in the presence of flaws you either have to give up on the belief system or give up on reality. There’s really no way around it. It sets up exactly the sort of impossible arrangement that forces people to leave, live with cognitive dissonance, or remain purposefully ignorant of any data outside of that which is supported by the Bible. That’s why Christianity has a cottage industry of people who create books about history and creationism and then attempt to get those things taught in school.
They use “teach the controversy” to create wedges in education. But they don’t simply want their garbage taught in schools, they want reality removed. Because reality threatens Biblical literalism. The city known as Jericho has been inhabited since before the universe was created. The World Flood occurred during the Old Kingdom period in Egypt. We have no archaeological or documentary evidence for a massive settlement of Jews in Egypt, nor do we have evidence of a mass exodus and re-settling of said Jews. The Biblical account of Persian succession is just flat-out wrong. And it offers three contradictory accounts of the rise of the Persians and return of the Jews to Israel. There is no evidence that Caesar Augustus called for a census of the entire world that required everyone to go back to their home (which is a stupid thing to do, anyway. I filled out a census form a couple months ago. Guess where I said I lived? Texas. Why? Because I currently live in Texas, even if I spent my entire life prior to January 8, 2010 as a resident of Illinois).
Either way, Zacharias then devolves in to an explanation of why the Bible is better than the Qu’ran. It basically boils down to, “The Muslims say that the Qu’ran is literally the perfect word of Allah. But the Bible is better because it isn’t perfect. It just perfectly predicts the future.” It’s a bit that starts at 3:10 and doesn’t get anywhere close to logic. Or Yuma, for that matter. And it hinges on an extremely bizarre definition of “perfection” which he basically reduces to nit-picking over what words are “better than” others.
This, for the record, is a terrible definition of “perfection.” I could make a grammatically perfect statement like, say, “I drive a Maserati GranTurismo.” The sentence is in the right order. There is a verb and a subject. So it’s a perfectly formed statement. Except for the bit where I have never driven a Maserati, never sat in a Maserati, and just so happen to drive a Mazda 6 (with which I am quite happy, thankyouverymuch). Now, by most definitions a Maserati GranTurismo is, in fact, “better than” my Mazda 6. Except the statement doesn’t reflect reality, which would be accurately stated even if the sentence was, “I gone done drived a Mazda 6 to work today.”
What’s my point? Zacharias is picking nits here. Muslim claims of revealed truth hinge on claims that the Qu’ran is the perfect, revealed word of Allah. The question that Zacharias is answering hinges on the claim that the Bible is the Word of God and we should believe every word in it. These are, in effect, two claims to the perfection of two different holy books. And Zacharias has potentially painted himself in to a corner by arguing that you cannot trust the Bible if you find that it keeps making false assertions. So his next step is an appeal to prophecy.
I remember being about 18 or 19. I’d finally decided I was going to really get serious about following Christ and incorporating the teachings of the Bible in to my own life. My plan was to do the whole reading through the Bible in a year thing. I apparently managed to make it all the way up to Daniel, which kind of surprises me. I don’t ever remember making it much past Joshua during those attempts to do the Bible in a year thing. Perhaps I was doing something else and happened to read Daniel for the first time at this same juncture in my life and have just combined the two memories. Either way, I confronted Daniel for the first time. And not the Daniel and the lion’s den story or the Rack, Shack, and Benny story. I read the prophecies.
I remember, specifically, reading the stuff about the one-horned goat charging in from the west, laying waste to all that opposed him, specifically a two-horned ram. Then goat’s single horn fell off and was replaced by four horns, then two, then one. Daniel then helpfully explained that the ram was the Persians, which the Bible splits in to the Medes and the Persians (for reasons that, honestly, don’t make much sense. The Medes were a kingdom and the Persians their neighbors and/or vassals. Then the Persians conquered the Medes on their way to conquering, well, everyone but the Greeks, basically. There is no mention of this construct of “Medes and Persians” in the Persians’ own history that I’m aware of). The goat’s one horn was Alexander the Great, then the four horns were four successor kingdoms.
I found this absolutely fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that I decided it was one of those places where the Bible could be proven to be accurately prophetic. I was shocked to discover that there were way more than four successor kingdoms. There were more like twelve.
It eventually settled down to four kingdoms, plus an independent Epirus, after the battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE. But then there was intrigue in Macedon and that left the borders open for a Gallic invasion of Asia Minor. When Rome came on to the scene the old Alexandrian Empire was split between the Ptolemies, who held Egypt and Syria, as well as Cyprus and a few bits of Asia Minor, the Seleucids, who held the vast majority of the territory from Afghanistan to the Ionian coast, the Antigonids, who held Macedonia, and the Aetolian League, which were a bunch of semi-independent city-states in mainland Greece.
Now, this whole thing might seem like picking nits. But the “prophesy” of Daniel as explained by Zacharias doesn’t actually hold up in light of, y’know, reality. There is an alternate explanation, however. Let us consider verses 23 through 26 of Daniel 8:
The interesting thing about this is that there is a very specific and particular king to which this could easily refer: Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucids. Basically, Antiochus IV was a usurper of the Seleucid crown who was considered to be mad, so much so that he was given the nickname “Epimanes,” which means “The Mad One.” Over the course of his life, Antiochus IV raided the Temple in Jerusalem, outlawed traditional Judaism, attempted to force the Jews to worship Zeus, and was ultimately struck down by disease during the Maccabean Revolt.
Certain theologians, including John Drane and Bryan Rennie, associate the Nebuchadnezzar of the book of Daniel with Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Basically, the attempts to force everyone to worship a large golden idol, which led to the whole Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego story, sound a lot like the stories of Antiochus IV attempting to get the Jews to worship Zeus. The bit about Nebuchadnezzar going mad sounds a lot like Antiochus IV’s own purported madness. There’s also a bit at the beginning of Daniel 5 about Belshazzar, the king who succeeded Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel and eventually died and was replaced by Darius the Mede (all of which is BS. The father of Belshazzar was Nabonidus, who was actually still alive and kinda-sorta in charge when Babylon was conquered. By Cyrus the Great) holding a feast and requesting all of the gold drinking cups that were taken from the Temple by his father. Moreover, Jewish numerology associates Nebuchadnezzar with Antiochus IV Epiphanes. I’ll allow Bryan Rennie to argue that point for me.
Either way, Daniel 8 contains a brilliant little prophecy of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Except modern scholarship also tends to place the writing of the book of Daniel after Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Moreover, the Jewish Tanakh places Daniel not in the books of prophecy, but in the third section, the Ketuvim, or “Writings.” This indicates that the compilers of the Jewish canon did not see Daniel as being a prophetic book, but instead a work of history and/or allegory. This is also interesting, as the Nevi’im includes the books that cover the time from the entrance to the Promised Land until the Babylonian Captivity, but does not include Chronicles or Daniel, indicating that both of those books were written later. This is probably key to understanding the historicity and prophetic validity of the book of Daniel.
But I digress.
Zacharias takes the basic statement, “The Bible has accurately predicted the future.” He follows it up with proof in the form of, “Look at the book of Daniel.” The next thirty seconds of the video then basically say, “Since we can believe this prophecy from Daniel, we can believe all the prophecies that point to Christ.” I can go back to this another time, but I’ll gloss over it quickly. No, we can’t. If you read the Old Testament as a narrative of Jewish history and thought it makes sense. But if you read it with the intention of finding Jesus, you have to hop, skip, and jump around, take things out of context, and generally bollix up the whole thing. You have to eisegete Jesus in to the Old Testament in order for any of the arguments of the Old Testament’s prophetic powers to even make a lick of sense.
The thing to realize is that Zacharias has not actually managed to formulate a defensible apologia for the accuracy of Biblical prophecy. But he has created a form of, to borrow from Stephen Colbert, truthiness. It sounds good, but in order to understand why it is not, in fact, good argumentation you have to really get down in to the weeds and understand that the Bible is an extremely inaccurate historical document.
My confrontation with the reality of the successor kingdoms was the first time I had an inkling of that. I did what anybody does the first time unpleasant reality intrudes on a cherished (or, at least, firmly held) belief: I tried to ignore it or work around it. That moment of intrusion, however, opened up the door and each time reality contradicted the Bible from then on I was more likely to look to see what reality had to say and attempt to understand what the real answers were. It became, to borrow from Zacharias’s introduction to the idea, an attempt to come to a philosophical and existential understanding of the truth. And that’s all because of the insistence that the Bible was accurate no matter what reality might have to say to the contrary.
But we’re not quite done. No, siree.
“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.” – Homer Simpson
I’m just going to lay this right out there for you: I have abso-fucking-loutely no clue what it means to say that the New Testament has a “99.6% accuracy.” That might well be the most completely and totally meaningless statistic ever thrown out by anyone ever (and I’m sure that 56.2% of all people would agree with me on that one). A cursory Google search just for “bible 99.6% accuracy” leads me to a lot of people who are either explicitly re-stating Zacharias’s quote or basically cribbing from it.
I believe I recall someone from back in the day asking me about this quote or one that’s similar. At the time I recall saying that it was a load of BS. And I’m going to keep saying it. Even in the face of this handy-dandy chart put out by something called the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry. It’s just a list of historical documents followed by the year of the oldest copy of said document, the number of copies, and a percentage that indicates how accurate said documents are without giving any sense whatsoever of what methodology was used to reach that percentage.
But, basically, it seems to say that if we crunch all the numbers we can be 99.5% sure of being able to create an accurate rendition of the source documents of the New Testament. There are several problems with this train of thought.
First, compare the four Gospels. Each one tells a different story about Jesus and each one has a different conception of who Jesus was and what his message was. Then compare the message of Jesus to the epistles of Paul. You will get a different idea of who Jesus was and what his message was. Then compare the epistles of Paul to the book of James. You will get a still different idea. And so on and so forth.
Then compare the world of the New Testament to the historical record. There are plenty of discrepancies. The big one is the whole bit with Caesar Augustus’s stupidly planned and carried out census of the whole world that required people to go back to their home village and was never actually called. But there’s other stuff that I’m sure I’d love to get in to if I weren’t already 3,500 words in to this post that I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere close to this long.
So even if we can be 99.5% certain that the New Testament is an accurate copy of the New Testament of old based on manuscript evidence, we can’t be anywhere near that certain that the manuscripts themselves are reliable. Moreover, the brute-force number crunching completely ignores the reality of the manuscript evidence. Not all of them are complete. Not all of them are in the same language. Not all of them use the same words. Not all of them put the stories in the same order. So we can come up with a pretty damn good composite picture of the New Testament, but we cannot say that what we can come up with is anywhere close to 99.6% accurate. And we can’t be at all sure that that composite manuscript actually reflects reality.
It’s basically an extremely convoluted way of lying with statistics. But it also makes a compelling sounding case for the accuracy and believability of the Bible. 99.6% is, after all, a big number. And it has a decimal point, which gives the illusion of hyper-accuracy. So let’s break it down one last time.
Zacharias begins by claiming he’s making a simple, humble search for truth. Then he claims that the Bible is the best (and, really, only) vehicle for truth. To prove this he says that the Bible accurately predicted the future between 500 and 300 BCE. He then extrapolates to say that if it did so once, it must have done so again. He then concludes by saying we have a nearly unassailably accurate picture of what the New Testament actually looked like when written.
It sounds compelling, especially for someone who hasn’t researched the specific points that Zacharias brings up. I’d hazard a guess that I’m in a pretty small minority on that one, so I’ll give anyone who has been taken in by that (including 18 year-old me) the benefit of the doubt. And if you are sitting there without any research in front of you it’s hard to refute. It has, in fact, taken me nearly four hours to write a post based on a seven minute YouTube video. And I knew basically everything I was going to say about it going in.
The most important thing to consider, though, is this: the presentation is key. Zacharias tells a story that sounds good because it’s specifically constructed to sound good. He tells a story that sounds compelling because it’s specifically constructed to sound compelling. But absent the construct, his arguments do not logically follow one from another. To wit:
I am searching for truth, therefore I will consider the Bible.
The Bible accurately predicted a single event, therefore it could accurately predict all events.
The Old Testament can be read to predict Jesus, therefore it accurately predicted Jesus.
We have a shitload of old manuscripts of the New Testament, therefore we can believe everything in the New Testament.
These are four thoughts that don’t actually logically progress from each other. It is, in fact, a prime example of what is known as sophistry, using subtly deceptive argumentation. But you really have to know your shit and you really have to pay attention to catch all of it. But the beauty of it is, since the entire point is to defend an all-or-nothing approach to the truth of the Bible, if you can show that it’s false, you can turn the arguments back on the apologist and disprove their use of the Bible.
Either way, I had about four different posts I could have written this evening. Then, towards the end of my work day, I found someone from my former life had posted this video on Facebook. Said friend was, I have no doubt, intending to use this video to bolster the message of the Bible and apologetics, not the other way around. But I shall use it to show that it’s extremely easy to debunk standard Biblical apologetics, and further to show why they seem so very convincing.
Either way, the video is from a talk given by Ravi Zacharias, a fairly well-known evangelist, at the University of Illinois. A student asks him why I would uncharitably tend to label as a set up question.
I just wanted to ask you, could you explain in a manner more pragmatic than we’re used to why a person should believe in the word of god as the Bible and why they should basically believe every word it says as opposed to any other “holy” [air quotes and everything] book and why they should give their entire lives to Christ.(23 seconds in)
Yeah, seriously. That’s his question. And it’s intended to get a set answer, roughly broken down in to, “This is why the Bible is correct, this is why everything else is wrong, and this is why you should accept Jesus.” The student in question will then, theoretically, be able to go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations because of the Ravi Zacharias method of proving the Bible is the most believable document in the history of the universe. So how does Zacharias respond?
First, with a whole bunch of mealy-mouthed philosophical garbage.
Let me start off as best as I can. First, I believe that truth as a category does exist. Number two, it is possible, in a majority of claims of philosophical and historical statements to verify the truthfulness of those affirmations. Third, I believe there are existential realities from which I cannot run which drive me to find the answers to the existential questions that I live with, not just the philosophical ones. The philosophical ones are real and I have to deal with them, but so are the existential ones. (1:17 in)
This is an awful lot of words that say absolutely nothing. Let’s break it down in to its component ideas. He basically says that he believes truth exists, that truth can be supported by human thought and human history, and that it’s important to pursue truth, not just as a thought exercise, but as an attempt to give meaning to human existence. There is nothing wrong with this, but it doesn’t say anything. More precisely, it doesn’t say anything about the Bible or why the Bible would hold truth. Mostly, it doesn’t explain why we should look to the Bible for truth.
But it uses a lot of big words and sounds really, really smart. And I’m reasonably certain that’s what it’s there for.
Then he tosses in the most random and oversimplified explanation of existentialism I’ve ever heard, in which he says it’s a rejection of rationalism and an appeal to, as Zacharias puts it “gut level feeling.” As someone who has read his own fair share of existentialist thought and is prone to identify himself as one, I have no idea where that idea would possibly come in to play, as existentialism was the realization that relentless rationalistic thinking wasn’t overly helpful in understanding people and the true quest for any person was to figure out how to give their own life meaning. This doesn’t reject rationalism so much as it admits that people aren’t unfailingly rational and probably aren’t ever going to be capable of becoming unfailingly rational. But that’s neither here nor there, as I have no clue what existentialism has to do with explaining why we should believe every word of the Bible and give our entire lives to Jesus. So I’ll just skip on ahead a bit.
You start off by saying, if you take the Bible at the question then why the Bible and why not any other system of thought? You start off with the scriptures and ask yourself the question, here there are sixty-six books by nearly forty different authors over nearly fifteen hundred years that are books on history, that are books on philosophical thinking, that are books on theological thinking and systematic thinking [note, I’ll buy the first three, but I fail to see how the Bible has books on “systematic thinking”]. Now, if the Bible made several assertions one after another that you found out to be false, either historically or philosophically or in the existential realm, you go further and further and if you see that kind of systemic contradiction and failure then you have reason to believe that I cannot really trust this document it is not in keeping with the way I am seeing history and reality. (2:23 in)
I find this fascinating, because what Zacharias is explaining here is more or less exactly the path which I took to stop believing in the Bible and, ultimately, to decide to leave Christianity behind. He even goes on to use one of the earliest parts of the Bible that caused me to begin questioning the validity of the Bible in an attempt to prove the Bible. But I’ll cross that bridge when Zacharias does.
Anyway, what I’d like to point out here is that Zacharias actually neatly lays out the flaws in fundamentalist/Biblical literalist thinking. If your entire belief system depends on the thing you believe in being without flaw, then in the presence of flaws you either have to give up on the belief system or give up on reality. There’s really no way around it. It sets up exactly the sort of impossible arrangement that forces people to leave, live with cognitive dissonance, or remain purposefully ignorant of any data outside of that which is supported by the Bible. That’s why Christianity has a cottage industry of people who create books about history and creationism and then attempt to get those things taught in school.
They use “teach the controversy” to create wedges in education. But they don’t simply want their garbage taught in schools, they want reality removed. Because reality threatens Biblical literalism. The city known as Jericho has been inhabited since before the universe was created. The World Flood occurred during the Old Kingdom period in Egypt. We have no archaeological or documentary evidence for a massive settlement of Jews in Egypt, nor do we have evidence of a mass exodus and re-settling of said Jews. The Biblical account of Persian succession is just flat-out wrong. And it offers three contradictory accounts of the rise of the Persians and return of the Jews to Israel. There is no evidence that Caesar Augustus called for a census of the entire world that required everyone to go back to their home (which is a stupid thing to do, anyway. I filled out a census form a couple months ago. Guess where I said I lived? Texas. Why? Because I currently live in Texas, even if I spent my entire life prior to January 8, 2010 as a resident of Illinois).
Either way, Zacharias then devolves in to an explanation of why the Bible is better than the Qu’ran. It basically boils down to, “The Muslims say that the Qu’ran is literally the perfect word of Allah. But the Bible is better because it isn’t perfect. It just perfectly predicts the future.” It’s a bit that starts at 3:10 and doesn’t get anywhere close to logic. Or Yuma, for that matter. And it hinges on an extremely bizarre definition of “perfection” which he basically reduces to nit-picking over what words are “better than” others.
This, for the record, is a terrible definition of “perfection.” I could make a grammatically perfect statement like, say, “I drive a Maserati GranTurismo.” The sentence is in the right order. There is a verb and a subject. So it’s a perfectly formed statement. Except for the bit where I have never driven a Maserati, never sat in a Maserati, and just so happen to drive a Mazda 6 (with which I am quite happy, thankyouverymuch). Now, by most definitions a Maserati GranTurismo is, in fact, “better than” my Mazda 6. Except the statement doesn’t reflect reality, which would be accurately stated even if the sentence was, “I gone done drived a Mazda 6 to work today.”
What’s my point? Zacharias is picking nits here. Muslim claims of revealed truth hinge on claims that the Qu’ran is the perfect, revealed word of Allah. The question that Zacharias is answering hinges on the claim that the Bible is the Word of God and we should believe every word in it. These are, in effect, two claims to the perfection of two different holy books. And Zacharias has potentially painted himself in to a corner by arguing that you cannot trust the Bible if you find that it keeps making false assertions. So his next step is an appeal to prophecy.
Let me give you an example of this. The Book of Daniel is written in the late 500s before Christ and yet when you study the book of Daniel you begin to see the specifics of a fantastic prophecy. He talks about a massive empire that will come in to being and how that empire will be divided in to four and that empire will be led by what they call a strident, strong he-goat from the west who will be marching several nations under foot but shall be suddenly cut off and his empire will be divided in to four. Those four then merge in to two and those two blend in to one. When you take the book of Daniel, written late 500s, and put it pro-forma on to Alexander the Great in the 300s before Christ you see the stridency of Alexander, suddenly cut off in his 20s, four kingdoms emerge, given to his four generals, those four come in to two, the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid Empires, that merged then in to the Roman Empire. Centuries before to be so specific in prophecy. (4:19 in)
I remember being about 18 or 19. I’d finally decided I was going to really get serious about following Christ and incorporating the teachings of the Bible in to my own life. My plan was to do the whole reading through the Bible in a year thing. I apparently managed to make it all the way up to Daniel, which kind of surprises me. I don’t ever remember making it much past Joshua during those attempts to do the Bible in a year thing. Perhaps I was doing something else and happened to read Daniel for the first time at this same juncture in my life and have just combined the two memories. Either way, I confronted Daniel for the first time. And not the Daniel and the lion’s den story or the Rack, Shack, and Benny story. I read the prophecies.
I remember, specifically, reading the stuff about the one-horned goat charging in from the west, laying waste to all that opposed him, specifically a two-horned ram. Then goat’s single horn fell off and was replaced by four horns, then two, then one. Daniel then helpfully explained that the ram was the Persians, which the Bible splits in to the Medes and the Persians (for reasons that, honestly, don’t make much sense. The Medes were a kingdom and the Persians their neighbors and/or vassals. Then the Persians conquered the Medes on their way to conquering, well, everyone but the Greeks, basically. There is no mention of this construct of “Medes and Persians” in the Persians’ own history that I’m aware of). The goat’s one horn was Alexander the Great, then the four horns were four successor kingdoms.
I found this absolutely fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that I decided it was one of those places where the Bible could be proven to be accurately prophetic. I was shocked to discover that there were way more than four successor kingdoms. There were more like twelve.
It eventually settled down to four kingdoms, plus an independent Epirus, after the battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE. But then there was intrigue in Macedon and that left the borders open for a Gallic invasion of Asia Minor. When Rome came on to the scene the old Alexandrian Empire was split between the Ptolemies, who held Egypt and Syria, as well as Cyprus and a few bits of Asia Minor, the Seleucids, who held the vast majority of the territory from Afghanistan to the Ionian coast, the Antigonids, who held Macedonia, and the Aetolian League, which were a bunch of semi-independent city-states in mainland Greece.
Now, this whole thing might seem like picking nits. But the “prophesy” of Daniel as explained by Zacharias doesn’t actually hold up in light of, y’know, reality. There is an alternate explanation, however. Let us consider verses 23 through 26 of Daniel 8:
“In the latter period of their rule, when the transgressors have run their course, a king will arise, insolent and skilled in intrigue.
"His power will be mighty, but not by his own power, and he will destroy to an extraordinary degree and prosper and perform his will; he will destroy mighty men and the holy people.
"And through his shrewdness he will cause deceit to succeed by his influence; and he will magnify himself in his heart, and he will destroy many while they are at ease. He will even oppose the Prince of princes, but he will be broken without human agency. "The vision of the evenings and mornings which has been told is true; but keep the vision secret, for it pertains to many days in the future."
The interesting thing about this is that there is a very specific and particular king to which this could easily refer: Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucids. Basically, Antiochus IV was a usurper of the Seleucid crown who was considered to be mad, so much so that he was given the nickname “Epimanes,” which means “The Mad One.” Over the course of his life, Antiochus IV raided the Temple in Jerusalem, outlawed traditional Judaism, attempted to force the Jews to worship Zeus, and was ultimately struck down by disease during the Maccabean Revolt.
Certain theologians, including John Drane and Bryan Rennie, associate the Nebuchadnezzar of the book of Daniel with Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Basically, the attempts to force everyone to worship a large golden idol, which led to the whole Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego story, sound a lot like the stories of Antiochus IV attempting to get the Jews to worship Zeus. The bit about Nebuchadnezzar going mad sounds a lot like Antiochus IV’s own purported madness. There’s also a bit at the beginning of Daniel 5 about Belshazzar, the king who succeeded Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel and eventually died and was replaced by Darius the Mede (all of which is BS. The father of Belshazzar was Nabonidus, who was actually still alive and kinda-sorta in charge when Babylon was conquered. By Cyrus the Great) holding a feast and requesting all of the gold drinking cups that were taken from the Temple by his father. Moreover, Jewish numerology associates Nebuchadnezzar with Antiochus IV Epiphanes. I’ll allow Bryan Rennie to argue that point for me.
Either way, Daniel 8 contains a brilliant little prophecy of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Except modern scholarship also tends to place the writing of the book of Daniel after Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Moreover, the Jewish Tanakh places Daniel not in the books of prophecy, but in the third section, the Ketuvim, or “Writings.” This indicates that the compilers of the Jewish canon did not see Daniel as being a prophetic book, but instead a work of history and/or allegory. This is also interesting, as the Nevi’im includes the books that cover the time from the entrance to the Promised Land until the Babylonian Captivity, but does not include Chronicles or Daniel, indicating that both of those books were written later. This is probably key to understanding the historicity and prophetic validity of the book of Daniel.
But I digress.
Zacharias takes the basic statement, “The Bible has accurately predicted the future.” He follows it up with proof in the form of, “Look at the book of Daniel.” The next thirty seconds of the video then basically say, “Since we can believe this prophecy from Daniel, we can believe all the prophecies that point to Christ.” I can go back to this another time, but I’ll gloss over it quickly. No, we can’t. If you read the Old Testament as a narrative of Jewish history and thought it makes sense. But if you read it with the intention of finding Jesus, you have to hop, skip, and jump around, take things out of context, and generally bollix up the whole thing. You have to eisegete Jesus in to the Old Testament in order for any of the arguments of the Old Testament’s prophetic powers to even make a lick of sense.
The thing to realize is that Zacharias has not actually managed to formulate a defensible apologia for the accuracy of Biblical prophecy. But he has created a form of, to borrow from Stephen Colbert, truthiness. It sounds good, but in order to understand why it is not, in fact, good argumentation you have to really get down in to the weeds and understand that the Bible is an extremely inaccurate historical document.
My confrontation with the reality of the successor kingdoms was the first time I had an inkling of that. I did what anybody does the first time unpleasant reality intrudes on a cherished (or, at least, firmly held) belief: I tried to ignore it or work around it. That moment of intrusion, however, opened up the door and each time reality contradicted the Bible from then on I was more likely to look to see what reality had to say and attempt to understand what the real answers were. It became, to borrow from Zacharias’s introduction to the idea, an attempt to come to a philosophical and existential understanding of the truth. And that’s all because of the insistence that the Bible was accurate no matter what reality might have to say to the contrary.
But we’re not quite done. No, siree.
Bruce Metzger, who’s a scholar from Princeton, made the comment, he said, “Take the twenty thousand lines of the New Testament. It is safe for any scholar to say there is a 99.6% accuracy.” No ancient document, none, has the kind of documentary support that the Bible has, over five thousand documents.” (5:54 in)
“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.” – Homer Simpson
I’m just going to lay this right out there for you: I have abso-fucking-loutely no clue what it means to say that the New Testament has a “99.6% accuracy.” That might well be the most completely and totally meaningless statistic ever thrown out by anyone ever (and I’m sure that 56.2% of all people would agree with me on that one). A cursory Google search just for “bible 99.6% accuracy” leads me to a lot of people who are either explicitly re-stating Zacharias’s quote or basically cribbing from it.
I believe I recall someone from back in the day asking me about this quote or one that’s similar. At the time I recall saying that it was a load of BS. And I’m going to keep saying it. Even in the face of this handy-dandy chart put out by something called the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry. It’s just a list of historical documents followed by the year of the oldest copy of said document, the number of copies, and a percentage that indicates how accurate said documents are without giving any sense whatsoever of what methodology was used to reach that percentage.
But, basically, it seems to say that if we crunch all the numbers we can be 99.5% sure of being able to create an accurate rendition of the source documents of the New Testament. There are several problems with this train of thought.
First, compare the four Gospels. Each one tells a different story about Jesus and each one has a different conception of who Jesus was and what his message was. Then compare the message of Jesus to the epistles of Paul. You will get a different idea of who Jesus was and what his message was. Then compare the epistles of Paul to the book of James. You will get a still different idea. And so on and so forth.
Then compare the world of the New Testament to the historical record. There are plenty of discrepancies. The big one is the whole bit with Caesar Augustus’s stupidly planned and carried out census of the whole world that required people to go back to their home village and was never actually called. But there’s other stuff that I’m sure I’d love to get in to if I weren’t already 3,500 words in to this post that I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere close to this long.
So even if we can be 99.5% certain that the New Testament is an accurate copy of the New Testament of old based on manuscript evidence, we can’t be anywhere near that certain that the manuscripts themselves are reliable. Moreover, the brute-force number crunching completely ignores the reality of the manuscript evidence. Not all of them are complete. Not all of them are in the same language. Not all of them use the same words. Not all of them put the stories in the same order. So we can come up with a pretty damn good composite picture of the New Testament, but we cannot say that what we can come up with is anywhere close to 99.6% accurate. And we can’t be at all sure that that composite manuscript actually reflects reality.
It’s basically an extremely convoluted way of lying with statistics. But it also makes a compelling sounding case for the accuracy and believability of the Bible. 99.6% is, after all, a big number. And it has a decimal point, which gives the illusion of hyper-accuracy. So let’s break it down one last time.
Zacharias begins by claiming he’s making a simple, humble search for truth. Then he claims that the Bible is the best (and, really, only) vehicle for truth. To prove this he says that the Bible accurately predicted the future between 500 and 300 BCE. He then extrapolates to say that if it did so once, it must have done so again. He then concludes by saying we have a nearly unassailably accurate picture of what the New Testament actually looked like when written.
It sounds compelling, especially for someone who hasn’t researched the specific points that Zacharias brings up. I’d hazard a guess that I’m in a pretty small minority on that one, so I’ll give anyone who has been taken in by that (including 18 year-old me) the benefit of the doubt. And if you are sitting there without any research in front of you it’s hard to refute. It has, in fact, taken me nearly four hours to write a post based on a seven minute YouTube video. And I knew basically everything I was going to say about it going in.
The most important thing to consider, though, is this: the presentation is key. Zacharias tells a story that sounds good because it’s specifically constructed to sound good. He tells a story that sounds compelling because it’s specifically constructed to sound compelling. But absent the construct, his arguments do not logically follow one from another. To wit:
I am searching for truth, therefore I will consider the Bible.
The Bible accurately predicted a single event, therefore it could accurately predict all events.
The Old Testament can be read to predict Jesus, therefore it accurately predicted Jesus.
We have a shitload of old manuscripts of the New Testament, therefore we can believe everything in the New Testament.
These are four thoughts that don’t actually logically progress from each other. It is, in fact, a prime example of what is known as sophistry, using subtly deceptive argumentation. But you really have to know your shit and you really have to pay attention to catch all of it. But the beauty of it is, since the entire point is to defend an all-or-nothing approach to the truth of the Bible, if you can show that it’s false, you can turn the arguments back on the apologist and disprove their use of the Bible.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Open it Up and Let My Yearning Shine
And the true dope on salvation is
Two weeks in a clinic
And a public testimonial
You tell them kids
Tell them not to hurt themselves
Speeding fast from who you were
--Mike Doughty, “No Peace, Los Angeles”
Four trains of thought came crashing together in my mind.
It’s strange how that happens to me. All the trains start from the same station running on parallel tracks. I can usually tell that they are related. Sometimes I can even tell how. But it’s not until that moment of clarity that I realize why they were all running.
I’ve often tried to figure out how to communicate that moment of convergence but I’ve concluded that it’s impossible. So, in the spirit of my new dabblings in written minimalism, I’m going to try something different.
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When will I hear the click?
When will I know that it is time to split?
What is the use of it?
What is my life without the heart at risk?
--Mike Doughty, “40 Grand in the Hole”
I wrote a paraphrase of that last line on my own blog comments while sitting in the Chupacabra Cantina in Austin, TX. It was some 14 hours after something happened that I had begun to think would never, ever happen again. Some 72 hours after that I sat and looked at the lyrics and realized something:
It’s a song about addiction.
More than that, it’s a song about wanting out.
I don’t understand the specific situation that lead to the song and hope I never, ever will. But I’m pretty sure I understand the concept all too well.
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I realized at some point over the course of my oft inane and pathetic ramblings about Her that I wasn’t actually talking about Her. Not really. She’d always represented something bigger, something more fundamental about my universe and my place in it than she or I understood.
She was supposed to save me.
In time I realized that she couldn’t.
It wasn’t a clean path from Point A to Point B. And I’m reasonably certain that much psychological violence was done during and after. In fact, I know it was.
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Now the harder I fight the stronger it’s coming
I wipe the tears from my eye and keep on strumming
I ain’t running away
Just trying to find you something better inside me
--RCPM, “Your Name on a Grain of Rice”
Worship concerts used to open up something inside of me that rarely ever peeked out. When I started to lose the ability to connect with god I started to lose the ability to connect to that part of myself. For a while I desperately clung to her, hoping that she would allow me to find that part of me.
But she didn’t want to. I think she was tired of the game, tired of my neediness. She had her own shit to deal with, too.
She had been supposed to lead me back to god, but it didn’t work. Then she had been supposed to lead me back to that part of myself I was losing, but it didn’t work. Finally she was just supposed to give me some reason to believe there was a purpose in continuing on. That didn’t work, either.
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It screams at me from the pages of my mis-remembered college paper drafts. It unlocks so many things that I never quite connected, never quite understood. Even though I know I’ve mentioned it, I know I’ve said the words, even though I’ve acknowledged it as a factor, I’ve never realized that it was the driving, central factor.
Salvation.
I wanted it. I needed it. I genuinely believed she could provide it.
It’s why I left the church behind, but I tried to stay with her. It’s why I recognized that nothing would ever happen but still tried. It’s why I finally realized that there would have to be a final split but still kept myself tethered to the idea of her. I couldn’t figure out anything else to do.
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It’s been more than two years. I’ve been on quite a few first dates, approximately zero second dates. I began to wonder a while ago if that was it, if I would never again be able to make a connection to anyone, never again meet someone and actually want her in my life again. I began to wonder if I was emotionally crippled, doomed to relive a shitty, stillborn relationship endlessly because it was the best I’d be able to do ever again.
In one night that question was answered. I may never see that girl in red again (and, I must begrudgingly admit, the prospects don’t look too good at the moment, which makes me a sad panda), but no matter what happens I now know one thing: I’m still capable of having all those feelings. I want to have all those feelings.
I repeated a line I’d recently come up with to a friend of mine recently. “I’m as warm and fluffy as a Brillo pad.” She told me that she doesn’t buy it, that she thinks I protest too much, that I’m just trying to cover.
I argued the point, but I’m pretty sure she’s right.
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Never thought I’d need someone to save me
Now I’ll be free as soon as you enslave me
--RCPM, “I Don’t Need Another Thrill”
It seems strange to disagree with a Peacemakers song. But at some point over the last week I heard that line and realized that no, no it doesn’t work that way.
I heard a lot about it in church, you see. We were supposed to hand over our sovereignty to Jesus, let him take control. Only then could we be freed from the world. Slavery described as freedom.
Of course one doesn’t just hand over their freedom to another without repercussion. There’s rebellion. Within the Christian context it’s the flesh striking back in its sinful, horrible way. At least, that’s the general story.
It’s impossible to live that perfect, godly life. Because those who try have to stop being themselves to a certain extent. There is a part of the enslaved soul that longs to be free.
There is a part of the newly freed soul that seeks re-enslavement.
It’s a vicious cycle.
That story of Jesus as perfect sovereign is a myth we keep telling ourselves. Jesus doesn’t save.
Jesus can’t save.
Any more than she could. Any more than anyone can.
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I hate the way the story writes itself.
Boy does a bunch of stupid, idiotic, self-defeating things. Fate sends boy to a place he doesn’t want to live. Boy finally starts to accept that this is his life. Boy finally starts to have fun.
Girl walks in to boy’s life at that exact moment. Girl has had her own pain, her own heartache, her own happiness.
Girl tells boy she’ll break his heart in six months. Boy takes girl up on the offer because he’s finally learned that tomorrow can take care of itself, it’s only today that matters.
And, of course, they live happily ever after.
But it’s too neat, too tidy.
That story doesn’t exist.
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It’s not what is that’s the killer. It’s what could have been.
But at least I now know the thing I’ve most needed to learn. There’s something in between a life unfettered and a life enslaved. Neither extreme leads to true healthiness or happiness.
It’s that in between spot I need to find.
And that story is still writing itself.
Two weeks in a clinic
And a public testimonial
You tell them kids
Tell them not to hurt themselves
Speeding fast from who you were
--Mike Doughty, “No Peace, Los Angeles”
Four trains of thought came crashing together in my mind.
It’s strange how that happens to me. All the trains start from the same station running on parallel tracks. I can usually tell that they are related. Sometimes I can even tell how. But it’s not until that moment of clarity that I realize why they were all running.
I’ve often tried to figure out how to communicate that moment of convergence but I’ve concluded that it’s impossible. So, in the spirit of my new dabblings in written minimalism, I’m going to try something different.
------------------------
When will I hear the click?
When will I know that it is time to split?
What is the use of it?
What is my life without the heart at risk?
--Mike Doughty, “40 Grand in the Hole”
I wrote a paraphrase of that last line on my own blog comments while sitting in the Chupacabra Cantina in Austin, TX. It was some 14 hours after something happened that I had begun to think would never, ever happen again. Some 72 hours after that I sat and looked at the lyrics and realized something:
It’s a song about addiction.
More than that, it’s a song about wanting out.
I don’t understand the specific situation that lead to the song and hope I never, ever will. But I’m pretty sure I understand the concept all too well.
-----------------------------
I realized at some point over the course of my oft inane and pathetic ramblings about Her that I wasn’t actually talking about Her. Not really. She’d always represented something bigger, something more fundamental about my universe and my place in it than she or I understood.
She was supposed to save me.
In time I realized that she couldn’t.
It wasn’t a clean path from Point A to Point B. And I’m reasonably certain that much psychological violence was done during and after. In fact, I know it was.
-----------------------------
Now the harder I fight the stronger it’s coming
I wipe the tears from my eye and keep on strumming
I ain’t running away
Just trying to find you something better inside me
--RCPM, “Your Name on a Grain of Rice”
Worship concerts used to open up something inside of me that rarely ever peeked out. When I started to lose the ability to connect with god I started to lose the ability to connect to that part of myself. For a while I desperately clung to her, hoping that she would allow me to find that part of me.
But she didn’t want to. I think she was tired of the game, tired of my neediness. She had her own shit to deal with, too.
She had been supposed to lead me back to god, but it didn’t work. Then she had been supposed to lead me back to that part of myself I was losing, but it didn’t work. Finally she was just supposed to give me some reason to believe there was a purpose in continuing on. That didn’t work, either.
----------------------
It screams at me from the pages of my mis-remembered college paper drafts. It unlocks so many things that I never quite connected, never quite understood. Even though I know I’ve mentioned it, I know I’ve said the words, even though I’ve acknowledged it as a factor, I’ve never realized that it was the driving, central factor.
Salvation.
I wanted it. I needed it. I genuinely believed she could provide it.
It’s why I left the church behind, but I tried to stay with her. It’s why I recognized that nothing would ever happen but still tried. It’s why I finally realized that there would have to be a final split but still kept myself tethered to the idea of her. I couldn’t figure out anything else to do.
-----------------------
It’s been more than two years. I’ve been on quite a few first dates, approximately zero second dates. I began to wonder a while ago if that was it, if I would never again be able to make a connection to anyone, never again meet someone and actually want her in my life again. I began to wonder if I was emotionally crippled, doomed to relive a shitty, stillborn relationship endlessly because it was the best I’d be able to do ever again.
In one night that question was answered. I may never see that girl in red again (and, I must begrudgingly admit, the prospects don’t look too good at the moment, which makes me a sad panda), but no matter what happens I now know one thing: I’m still capable of having all those feelings. I want to have all those feelings.
I repeated a line I’d recently come up with to a friend of mine recently. “I’m as warm and fluffy as a Brillo pad.” She told me that she doesn’t buy it, that she thinks I protest too much, that I’m just trying to cover.
I argued the point, but I’m pretty sure she’s right.
--------------------
Never thought I’d need someone to save me
Now I’ll be free as soon as you enslave me
--RCPM, “I Don’t Need Another Thrill”
It seems strange to disagree with a Peacemakers song. But at some point over the last week I heard that line and realized that no, no it doesn’t work that way.
I heard a lot about it in church, you see. We were supposed to hand over our sovereignty to Jesus, let him take control. Only then could we be freed from the world. Slavery described as freedom.
Of course one doesn’t just hand over their freedom to another without repercussion. There’s rebellion. Within the Christian context it’s the flesh striking back in its sinful, horrible way. At least, that’s the general story.
It’s impossible to live that perfect, godly life. Because those who try have to stop being themselves to a certain extent. There is a part of the enslaved soul that longs to be free.
There is a part of the newly freed soul that seeks re-enslavement.
It’s a vicious cycle.
That story of Jesus as perfect sovereign is a myth we keep telling ourselves. Jesus doesn’t save.
Jesus can’t save.
Any more than she could. Any more than anyone can.
-------------------------
I hate the way the story writes itself.
Boy does a bunch of stupid, idiotic, self-defeating things. Fate sends boy to a place he doesn’t want to live. Boy finally starts to accept that this is his life. Boy finally starts to have fun.
Girl walks in to boy’s life at that exact moment. Girl has had her own pain, her own heartache, her own happiness.
Girl tells boy she’ll break his heart in six months. Boy takes girl up on the offer because he’s finally learned that tomorrow can take care of itself, it’s only today that matters.
And, of course, they live happily ever after.
But it’s too neat, too tidy.
That story doesn’t exist.
----------------------------
It’s not what is that’s the killer. It’s what could have been.
But at least I now know the thing I’ve most needed to learn. There’s something in between a life unfettered and a life enslaved. Neither extreme leads to true healthiness or happiness.
It’s that in between spot I need to find.
And that story is still writing itself.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Monday Evening Ramblings
Right now is a dangerous time. I’ve had a lot of thoughts flying about my head lately that haven’t exactly come to roost. I feel like writing. But I have no particular thing I feel like writing about.
This means it’s time for an odd, disjointed post. Hooray!
----------------------------------------
I wandered across a post this morning over at Atheist Revolution entitled “Understanding Apathetic Atheists.” The, uh, the title is pretty damn self-explanatory of the purpose of the post. But, in general, the point was to basically berate those of us non-theists who aren’t active. Y’know, for atheism.
Now, the overall argument that we shouldn’t let moronic fundamentalists walk all over us is good. But, then, I would have been against the Texas School Board of Education’s travesty of a history and science curriculum before I left the church. I was pro-choice before I left the church, too. I also had absolutely nothing against gays and would have been fine allowing them to marry each other to their hearts’ content.
Oh, I was also strongly in favor of separation of church and state long before I was pro-choice or fine with the idea of gay marriage. In fact, the latter two ideas grew out of the former.
Let’s consider my motivation. I see the science and history stuff as a matter of accuracy. Science says A. Ergo, we should teach A in school. Same thing with history. To do otherwise is utter foolishness and a dangerous road to travel. You don’t see anyone seriously suggesting we teach that the world is flat or that pi is exactly 3 just because you can find that in the Bible.
Similarly, I don’t see where the government should limit abortion or the ability of two consenting adults to get married. I especially don’t see it when the bald-faced justifications of the people in favor of making those things illegal is religious. Making something illegal just because it’s against someone’s religion is a violation of the First Amendment. Period. Full stop.
I realized at some point in my life that Christians can’t unilaterally declare something illegal just because they don’t like it. I didn’t need to leave the church to see that. I’m pro-choice. I’m pro-gay marriage. I’m anti-TxSBoE. But I don’t hold any of these positions because I don’t believe in god.
Moreover, I would never argue that someone should agree with me just because they’re an atheist. That’s stupid. Being an atheist doesn’t make anybody an authority on anything. If Richard Dawkins walked up to me tomorrow and said that the moon is made of green cheese I’d respond with, “Yeah, prove it.” If PZ Myers walked in to my living room right now and told me my couch was on fire and I should believe him without looking down because he’s an atheist and that means he’s right I’d take a look before standing up.
Either way, they put up this handy-dandy list:
To that I’d like to add a sixth:
Fuck you and stop telling me what to do. I’m going to be as disinterested as I want to be. And if you think I’ll change because you’ll shame me in to being active…well, I got that in church for 25 years…
----------------------------------------
Similarly, Ken Pulliam’s latest post elicited this comment from someone named James:
My response was a long way around saying, “Atheism can’t do that.” Atheism just says, “There is no god that I can find any evidence for.” This is not an ethical framework, this is an observation.
----------------------------------------
So I guess I’m an apathetic atheist. I’ll take it.
Honestly, to me all atheism means is that I don’t go to church on Sundays. It also means that I don’t feel guilt for it. And it means that I don’t have any particular belief that you must be religious to be good. Any other desire to be active in any endeavor comes out of a belief in a particular position. The interesting thing is that I held the vast majority of the positions I held now before I left Christianity.
So I guess that means you don’t have to be an atheist to hold any number of atheist-friendly positions.
Gee…wonder how that’s going to go over…
----------------------------------------
I have a question for people who have spent time in Dallas: What are the giant red wasp thingies?
Oh, and as a follow-up: what the fuck was a giant red wasp doing in my bedroom when I got home from work tonight?
Seriously, the thing must have had a two-inch wingspan. And I’m not the sort of guy who usually gets too worked up about killing bugs, but I hit that fucker with a broom. Like, a dozen times. I think I only managed to stun it.
Either way, seriously. GIANT. FUCKING. WASPS.
----------------------------------------
Right after I moved I spent a bunch of time bitching about personality tests administered by HR people. The worst one of those I ever took was also the first one. I was doing an internship at my church and they gave me a spiritual gifts inventory to take.
So, basically, I took this test and it told me what spiritual gifts I had and, crucially, which ones I didn’t. As I recall, the point was to figure out what Jesus had made me good at and what Jesus had been all, “Nah, dude, don’t worry about that shit, man,” about.
Of course if you know Jesus he’s all about half-assing it through life. So this is a perfectly valid use of the various Biblical lists of what we should be if we’re proper and good Christians.
Either way, as I recall, I did well on the teachin’ and the preachin’ type stuff. I did poorly on the hospitality type stuff.
One of my stated goals, now that I live on my own and all, is that there’s always room in mi casa for someone who needs a place to crash. Y’know, for a night or two. Ain’t nobody moving in all permanent-like.
Since I’ve moved to Dallas I’ve had an Irish rock band crash in my living room and a Peacemakers’ fan stay in my guest bedroom.
So I guess it’s good that my fruit of the spirit didn’t involve hospitality, then. Maybe I had to leave Christianity to get the Holy Spirit to say, “Okay, you got this now…"
----------------------------------------
I upgraded the ol' iBomination to OS 4.0 today.
Here's what I love about 4.0: you can always see the wallpaper. I've had the same phone wallpaper for four years now, ever since the first time I saw RCPM at Joe's on Weed Street and took this picture with my very first camera phone (1.3 whole megapixels!):
There was really no point in which I could see it on the Tilt, since the menu covered half the pic.
----------------------------------------
I'm apparently getting a spot at a VIP table for the Austin show at Antone's on Friday. In a word: giggity.
----------------------------------------
Seriously.
GIANT. FUCKING. WASPS.
Erm, well…GIANT. FUCKING. WASP.
This means it’s time for an odd, disjointed post. Hooray!
----------------------------------------
I wandered across a post this morning over at Atheist Revolution entitled “Understanding Apathetic Atheists.” The, uh, the title is pretty damn self-explanatory of the purpose of the post. But, in general, the point was to basically berate those of us non-theists who aren’t active. Y’know, for atheism.
Now, the overall argument that we shouldn’t let moronic fundamentalists walk all over us is good. But, then, I would have been against the Texas School Board of Education’s travesty of a history and science curriculum before I left the church. I was pro-choice before I left the church, too. I also had absolutely nothing against gays and would have been fine allowing them to marry each other to their hearts’ content.
Oh, I was also strongly in favor of separation of church and state long before I was pro-choice or fine with the idea of gay marriage. In fact, the latter two ideas grew out of the former.
Let’s consider my motivation. I see the science and history stuff as a matter of accuracy. Science says A. Ergo, we should teach A in school. Same thing with history. To do otherwise is utter foolishness and a dangerous road to travel. You don’t see anyone seriously suggesting we teach that the world is flat or that pi is exactly 3 just because you can find that in the Bible.
Similarly, I don’t see where the government should limit abortion or the ability of two consenting adults to get married. I especially don’t see it when the bald-faced justifications of the people in favor of making those things illegal is religious. Making something illegal just because it’s against someone’s religion is a violation of the First Amendment. Period. Full stop.
I realized at some point in my life that Christians can’t unilaterally declare something illegal just because they don’t like it. I didn’t need to leave the church to see that. I’m pro-choice. I’m pro-gay marriage. I’m anti-TxSBoE. But I don’t hold any of these positions because I don’t believe in god.
Moreover, I would never argue that someone should agree with me just because they’re an atheist. That’s stupid. Being an atheist doesn’t make anybody an authority on anything. If Richard Dawkins walked up to me tomorrow and said that the moon is made of green cheese I’d respond with, “Yeah, prove it.” If PZ Myers walked in to my living room right now and told me my couch was on fire and I should believe him without looking down because he’s an atheist and that means he’s right I’d take a look before standing up.
Either way, they put up this handy-dandy list:
1. Learned helplessness: I've tried, and it is futile. Nothing I do seems to make a difference.
2. Safety: Taking some sort of action would mean "coming out" as an atheist, and that isn't safe for me.
3. Insufficient information: I'd like to help, but I honestly don't know what to do.
4. Low relevance: It isn't personally relevant or I've got more important things to worry about.
5. Identity: Taking action to promote atheism sounds like something religious people would do, and I don't want to be anything like them.
To that I’d like to add a sixth:
Fuck you and stop telling me what to do. I’m going to be as disinterested as I want to be. And if you think I’ll change because you’ll shame me in to being active…well, I got that in church for 25 years…
----------------------------------------
Similarly, Ken Pulliam’s latest post elicited this comment from someone named James:
Maybe the atheist equivalent of apologetics (has it a name I don't know?) should address this I think not uncommon assumption, and (a) set out the case against theistic ethics (Euthyphro, Old Testament horrors), (b) set out the case for a creditable and respectable non-theistic ethics (e.g. Pullian's intuitionism, Luke's desirism), and (c) set out the case for a non-transcendent but more than satisfactory meaning of life not endorsed by God.
My response was a long way around saying, “Atheism can’t do that.” Atheism just says, “There is no god that I can find any evidence for.” This is not an ethical framework, this is an observation.
----------------------------------------
So I guess I’m an apathetic atheist. I’ll take it.
Honestly, to me all atheism means is that I don’t go to church on Sundays. It also means that I don’t feel guilt for it. And it means that I don’t have any particular belief that you must be religious to be good. Any other desire to be active in any endeavor comes out of a belief in a particular position. The interesting thing is that I held the vast majority of the positions I held now before I left Christianity.
So I guess that means you don’t have to be an atheist to hold any number of atheist-friendly positions.
Gee…wonder how that’s going to go over…
----------------------------------------
I have a question for people who have spent time in Dallas: What are the giant red wasp thingies?
Oh, and as a follow-up: what the fuck was a giant red wasp doing in my bedroom when I got home from work tonight?
Seriously, the thing must have had a two-inch wingspan. And I’m not the sort of guy who usually gets too worked up about killing bugs, but I hit that fucker with a broom. Like, a dozen times. I think I only managed to stun it.
Either way, seriously. GIANT. FUCKING. WASPS.
----------------------------------------
Right after I moved I spent a bunch of time bitching about personality tests administered by HR people. The worst one of those I ever took was also the first one. I was doing an internship at my church and they gave me a spiritual gifts inventory to take.
So, basically, I took this test and it told me what spiritual gifts I had and, crucially, which ones I didn’t. As I recall, the point was to figure out what Jesus had made me good at and what Jesus had been all, “Nah, dude, don’t worry about that shit, man,” about.
Of course if you know Jesus he’s all about half-assing it through life. So this is a perfectly valid use of the various Biblical lists of what we should be if we’re proper and good Christians.
Either way, as I recall, I did well on the teachin’ and the preachin’ type stuff. I did poorly on the hospitality type stuff.
One of my stated goals, now that I live on my own and all, is that there’s always room in mi casa for someone who needs a place to crash. Y’know, for a night or two. Ain’t nobody moving in all permanent-like.
Since I’ve moved to Dallas I’ve had an Irish rock band crash in my living room and a Peacemakers’ fan stay in my guest bedroom.
So I guess it’s good that my fruit of the spirit didn’t involve hospitality, then. Maybe I had to leave Christianity to get the Holy Spirit to say, “Okay, you got this now…"
----------------------------------------
I upgraded the ol' iBomination to OS 4.0 today.
Here's what I love about 4.0: you can always see the wallpaper. I've had the same phone wallpaper for four years now, ever since the first time I saw RCPM at Joe's on Weed Street and took this picture with my very first camera phone (1.3 whole megapixels!):
There was really no point in which I could see it on the Tilt, since the menu covered half the pic.
----------------------------------------
I'm apparently getting a spot at a VIP table for the Austin show at Antone's on Friday. In a word: giggity.
----------------------------------------
Seriously.
GIANT. FUCKING. WASPS.
Erm, well…GIANT. FUCKING. WASP.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Hello Highs, Hello Lows, Custers and Geronimos
T-Minus four days to Rogapalooza. And, boy, do I need this on this craptastic Monday morning...
----------------------
EDIT: Two things: First, DM seems to have made his way to my blog. Second, we won't be having any of that.
Also, of all the posts where I, y'know, mock religion and whatnot, why finally show up when I'm posting RCPM videos? I'm even more confused by that than anything else...
----------------------
EDIT: Two things: First, DM seems to have made his way to my blog. Second, we won't be having any of that.
Also, of all the posts where I, y'know, mock religion and whatnot, why finally show up when I'm posting RCPM videos? I'm even more confused by that than anything else...
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