Debunking Christianity

Is the Christian God loving and compassionate?

2009-07-19T16:57:00.001-04:00

First an apology. I accidentally deleted my previous post "A Simple Question"--along with all the comments--in the process of editing this one. Sorry! I'll do what I can to retrieve it.

The following argument is valid.

1. No one whose rational faculties are functioning perfectly can make an irrational decision.(premise)
2. Rejecting God is an irrational decision. [assumed for the sake of argument]
3. Therefore, the rational faculties of nonbelievers are not functioning perfectly. (from 2, 1)
4. Therefore, their rational faculties are defective in a way that prevents them from making a rational decision with respect to accepting God. (from 3)
5. If the Christian God were loving and compassionate, then he would want to correct this defect in all nonbelievers (premise)
6. The Christian God does not want to correct this defect in all nonbelievers.(premise)
7. Therefore, the Christian God is not loving and compassionate. (from 7, 6)

A delicate situation

2009-07-19T12:26:00.002-04:00

For several years my wife has been occasionally attending a local “home church,” usually about once a month. A couple of families take turns hosting the once-a-week meetings in their home, the father of the host home directing the activities with the large families in attendance: Bible study, Bible memorization, singing, and prayer, all of which is followed by a hearty meal. I normally join the group for the meal on days when my wife and children attend. I get along fairly well with the leaders of this home church, even though their worldview is diametrically opposed to mine. We have had some spirited discussions over the years, but we’re all normally quite friendly and congenial to each other.

Disclaimer: I am not a first-hand participant in the story I’m about to tell; I have heard only one perspective, so I cannot claim complete objectivity, but I present the story as accurately as I’m able.

A member of this home church, a single mother (I’ll call her Jane) who was abandoned by her husband about eight years ago, recently started dating another man (I’ll call him John) whose wife had left him and their three children a few years ago. Both John and Jane are fundamentalist believers. I met John at a recent home church dinner, and he seems very personable and successful in his career. In observing them together, I am happy for them: they’re obviously in love, talking about marriage. She has worked so hard as a single mother, baby-sitting and cleaning houses, to provide for her children for so many years, but if they marry, she will no longer bear this intense burden. In turn, John will have someone to help care for his children.

Enter the home church leadership. Their understanding of Jesus’ teachings does not permit them to bless this relationship or the marriage into which John and Jane seem to be headed. They feel that John should make a greater effort to be reconciled with his former wife, even though she was the one who initiated the divorce. Otherwise, if he remarries, he will be living in sin. Not only is the home church leadership not prepared to bless the relationship; they have gone so far as to confront Jane, a longstanding member of the home church, and when she declined to call off the relationship, the leadership excommunicated her.

Of course Jane is devastated by all this: in the midst of one of the most joyous periods of her life, she is sternly confronted and excommunicated by some of her closest friends. John will not speak to the home church leaders, knowing how they have treated Jane. It appears the relationship will go forward, but their joy has been doused by the moral zeal of Jane’s home church.

Now my wife is wondering how to relate to the home church. She feels for Jane and doesn’t understand the actions taken against her, but she wishes if possible to retain her ties with the home church. In discussing the situation with my wife, I expressed my dismay at what the leadership had done, but I did not advise her one way or the other—I felt it was up to her to decide whether to continue her occasional attendance at the home church. So far no decision has been made, and since her attendance was only occasional, perhaps no stir will be caused if she quietly stops attending the church.

Perhaps I have taken the easy way out by washing my hands of the situation. I’m glad Jane will no longer be part of the home church and that she will be free to marry John. I just wish it hadn’t happened, and part of me wants to confront the home church leadership to show how ugly their faith has become. Then again, none of my prior conversations with them about the age of the earth or the reliability of the Bible had any apparent effect, so I’m doubtful they would be any more swayed by a moral confrontation from an infidel like me.

This is truly a lamentable situation. It shows how human compassion can be made to take a back seat to the “righteousness” of one’s firm religious views.

Paul Tobin's Book: The Best Skeptical Book on the Bible as a Whole

2009-07-18T22:16:00.009-04:00

Paul Tobin’s new book, The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible and the Historical Jesus has arrived and I am very glad it did. It is the best skeptical work on the Bible as a whole. Gerd Lüdemann, author of several skeptical works on early Christianity, recommends it “with the utmost enthusiasm.” I do too.

Tobin’s whole argument is aimed to show that Pascal’s famous wager has no effect on us because we are not forced to choose between Pascal’s Catholic brand of Christianity and unbelief. Why? Because the central claims of Christianity are false. He takes aim at the Bible to show that while it may be a great work of literature it is not the word of God. And Tobin backs his claim up with his massive 652 page book, complete with a nice bibliography and indexes.

If you’re a Christian who has deconverted at a later time in life then you need to re-learn most all of what you were taught about the Bible. If you were college and seminary trained like me, this can be a difficult thing to do. So, you could go on a massive reading binge, spending many hours and a lot of money feasting on book after book. Or, you could read this one. Given that choice I highly recommend you get this one. Tobin masterfully takes us through the Bible using critical scholarship to show us what we can and cannot know about it. It has helped me remember several things I learned back in college and seminary but had forgotten. It taught me some very interesting things I hadn’t yet thought through as a skeptic, and I think I’ve read a great deal on the subject since my deconversion. Tobin showed me I hadn’t read enough.

It’s all here for the most part in an encyclopedic fashion, covering the ancient myths, the errors, the lack of confirming archaeology, the failed prophecies, and the forged authorship. He also covers the ad hoc canonization process and the textual transmission of these texts. Tobin is a very good guide to these topics, using the results of critical scholars whom he refers to time and again.

He writes and thinks well too. Take for instance Noah’s Ark. Tobin tells us simply that on the one hand “it is too big,” in that the structure could not be seaworthy. On the other hand “it was too small,” with not enough room for all of the animals it would have had in it. (pp. 75-77).

Tobin also spends a few pages effectively dealing with the minutia of numerical “contradictions” in the Bible, like the value of π (pi) found in Kings 7:23-26 (pp. 29-38). He even shows how that the evangelical New International Version has purposely mistranslated several passages to eliminate the appearance of difficulties inherent in the original languages (pp. 197-204).

And he addresses how the liberals view the Bible by concluding that they “did not reach their conclusions by abstruse theological reasoning: they were forced by external circumstances—the findings of science, comparative religions, enlightenment philosophies and historical criticism.” (pp. 187-196).

If you want to know why scholars think the Gospel of Mark was written first you may only need to read this book. If you want to know why scholars don’t think Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the authors of their gospels, and why they are written later than evangelicals claim, you may only need to read this book. If you want to know why the Nativity stories are fictions you may only need to read this book. If you want to know why scholars have serious doubts about what Jesus may have said, or why they doubt the Passion Narratives and resurrection stories, you may only need to read this book.

If you have only one skeptical book about the Bible as a whole this one is all you need. And even if you have some other books, this one will still inform you of issues you probably haven’t read up on, like it did with me.

Tobin did a massive amount of work here. I will use it as a reference when dealing with some of these topics in the future. It’s worth the price. I liked it so much I asked Tobin to write a chapter for a book I’ve been editing/writing.

Why does God give up on nonbelievers?

2009-07-18T14:55:00.002-04:00

If rejecting God is a grave mistake, then why would God not wish to help nonbelievers see the error of their decision? Why would he let them perish in hell for all eternity (or simply perish) without any hope of redemption? The reason, Christians tell us, is one of respect: God respects the decision to reject him, and therefore will not devalue this “free choice”—however irrational—by interfering. Below, I show why this answer is problematic.

First, the answer assumes that the “free” decision to reject God is worthy of respect, since without this assumption, it is impossible to explain why God would respect it. It makes no sense to say God will respect decisions unworthy of respect. So what is it about the decision to reject God that is worthy of respect? I see only two possibilities: the decision is either (1) intrinsically respectable or (2) worthy of respect because it is made by a free being who is itself worthy of respect. No will argue the first possibility. As for the second, the Christian needs to demonstrate the connection between a free agent being worthy of respect and the (irrational) choices she makes being worthy of respect. What is this connection? If I see my friend ready to jump into a volcano, should I “respect” his choice, or attempt to prevent him from making a grave error? The latter, clearly. Thus, I can respect my friend’s worth without having to respect his irrational choices. As the example illustrates, I can even respect my friend’s worth while interfering with his free will.

Christians will undoubtedly argue that God cannot interfere with the nonbeliever’s free will, despite how she chooses to exercise it. For if God were to not accept the nonbeliever’s irrational choice, he would be devaluing her humanity or intrinsic moral worth. I’d like to see some justification for this claim, but even supposing the Christian could provide a satisfactory answer, there lies a deeper problem: why would God wish to give up on the nonbeliever? According to Christians, the decision to reject God is indicative of a deep defect in the nonbeliever’s moral and rational faculties. So it is utterly incomprehensible why God would wish to give up on trying to correct this defect. If God thinks the nonbeliever is making the biggest mistake one can possibly make, then it is far more plausible to suppose he would do everything in his power to help her realize her error—reach out to her until she ‘gets it’, no matter how long it takes. Hence, the obvious answer to the question of when God should give up is ‘never.’ It is what a fully compassionate and loving being would do, and therefore what God would do, if he exists.

Is the nonbeliever at fault for rejecting God?

2009-07-17T22:26:00.006-04:00

No, she is not at fault. Consider the following:

1. If one is adequately informed of the consequences of a decision, and willfully choosing to make that decision is clearly irrational, then it is irrational to willfully choose to make it.
2. If one willfully chooses to make an irrational decision, then one's moral or reasoning faculties are defective.
3. If one's moral or reasoning faculties are defective, then this defect was either the result of (a) choices that the agent herself made in the past or (b) external causes.
4. If one's moral or reasoning faculties are defective due to external causes, then it cannot be one's fault that one's reasoning faculties are defective.
5. If one's moral or reasoning faculties are defective due to choices that the agent herself has made in the past, then it cannot be one's fault that her reasoning faculties are defective.
6. If it cannot be one's fault that one's moral or reasoning faculties are defective, then it cannot be one's fault for willfully making an irrational decision.
7. Nonbelievers are adequately informed of the consequences of rejecting God, and willfully choosing to make that decision is clearly irrational. [assumed only for the sake of argument]
------------------------
8. Therefore, nonbelievers who willfully choose to reject God are irrational in choosing to make this decision. (from 6, 1)
9. Therefore, those nonbelievers' moral or reasoning faculties are defective. (from 7, 2)
10. Therefore, it cannot be the nonbelievers' fault that their moral or reasoning faculties are defective. (from 8, 5, 4, and 3)
11. Therefore, it cannot be the nonbelievers' fault for willfully choosing to reject God. (from 10, 8, and 6)

Some would question (5). Some, I suspect, are inclined to think that if one's moral or reasoning faculties are defective due to choices that the agent herself has made in the past, then it can be her fault that her moral or reasoning faculties are defective. Not so: we first have to inquire why the agent made the choices she did. Were they rational choices or irrational choices? Was she aware of the fact that her past choices would result in her moral or reasoning faculties becoming defective? If she was aware of this consequence, then her past choices could not have been rational -- hence they were irrational. But if willfully choosing to make those choices was irrational, then her moral or reasoning faculties were already defective.

At some point, after we have inquired into why the agent made the choices she did, we arrive at an external explanation. We thus arrive at conclusion (4): that if one's moral or reasoning faculties are defective due to external causes, then it cannot be one's fault that one's reasoning faculties are defective.

Philip Davies on The End of Biblical Studies

2009-07-16T23:59:00.000-04:00

Does Prof. Davies love the Bible more than Prof. Avalos?

Philip Davies, a professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield in England, is one of my heroes. He has been a long-time critic of biblical scholars who claim that there is more history in the Bible than there is.

His work is one of the inspirations for my book, The End of Biblical Studies (EOBS), which argues that the field of biblical studies is still permeated by religionist biases.

But, although Davies may agree with me on some major issues, he says he disagrees with me on the notion of ending biblical studies. He has expressed his opinion in his review of my book in The Journal of Theological Studies 60:1 (2009):214-219. He has also posted a related item at The Bible and Interpretation blogsite--- Philip Davies’ post.

There already is a response to Davies at Missives from Marx

Here, I will respond briefly to some of Prof. Davies' observations (quoted in bold italics and numbered in no particular order for convenience).

1. “It may be relevant in ways that we don’t like, but the last thing that the situation calls for is to stop studying it, and its effects, critically.”

Davies seems to misunderstand what I mean by “the end” of biblical studies. On. p. 341 of EOBS, I clearly state that I don’t want to stop studying the Bible. I want to end THE WAY the Bible is studied. In fact, I provide three scenarios on that page:

1) Eliminate biblical studies completely from the modern world.

2) Retain biblical studies as is, but admit that it is a religionist enterprise.

3) Retain biblical studies, but redefine its purpose so that it is tasked with eliminating completely the influence of the Bible in the modern world.

I stated there that I do not advocate the first option, at least for the moment, because I do believe that the Bible should be studied, if only as a lesson in why human beings should not privilege such books again. My objection has been to the religionist and bibliolatrous purpose for which it is studied.

The second option is actually what is found in most seminaries, but we must advertise that scholars in all of academia are doing the same thing, though they are not being very open and honest about it.

I prefer the third option. The sole purpose of biblical studies, under this option, would be to help people move toward a postscriptural society. The third option is also the most logical position, given the discovery of the Bible’s alien character. This scenario also calls for studying the "effects" of the Bible, just as Davies suggests we ought to do.

2. “Avalos’s criticisms of both the Bible and biblical scholarship are valid enough (and well known to most scholars, too); but his conclusion and his suggested remedy are nonsensical. It would leave the Bible with little function or value other than to serve as Christian and Jewish scripture, to be studied (in whatever fashion) only by the faithful—who, he says, do not and cannot properly read or understand it.”

Not under my option 3 above. If our task, as biblical scholars, is to end THE INFLUENCE (or what remains of it) of the Bible in the modern world, then there should be no function or value left to the Bible anymore than there is to Homer’s Iliad in modern society.

3. “But in assuming that the relevance of the Bible to the modern world is purely ethical Avalos allies himself precisely with this constituency.”

But I do not assume that the relevance of the Bible to the modern world is “purely ethical.” In fact, Davies quotes my sentence where I define biblical irrelevance as follows: “a biblical concept or practice that is no longer viewed as valuable, applicable and/or ethical.” So, I list THREE items here (valuable, applicable, and/or ethical), and now he has reduced it to one (ethical). By “valuable” I also include literary aesthetics, or the claim that the Bible is more beautiful than other books, and that we should privilege it for that reason.

4. “Yet Avalos’s criticism of the Bible is directed not at its aesthetics, but its morality, which most literary criticism would regard as beside the point.”

Not quite. I devote pages 237-240 to explaining why we cannot always divorce aesthetics from ethics. I explained that there is a whole philosophical school that argues that we cannot necessarily divorce ethics from aesthetics. I gave a few examples of how often biblical episodes of violence were extolled for their literary quality, thereby deflecting attention from the violence endorsed therein.

5. “What we need is not the end of biblical scholarship but more of its critical engagement with the public (mis)use of the Bible.”

That is not much different from my option 3: Retain biblical studies, but redefine its purpose so that it is tasked with eliminating completely the influence of the Bible in the modern world.

I argued precisely that what biblical scholars are not doing sufficiently is informing the world that the Bible is not relevant. It is partly the fact that biblical scholars largely hide the Bible's irrelevance that makes people think it is relevant. That false sense of relevance is what allows the Bible to be misused more than any other work from antiquity. By the end of the process I envision, the Bible will be just as relevant as The Epic of Gilgamesh.

6. “‘Why not extend our thesis to all ancient literature?’ asks Avalos (p. 24), and wonders whether he might be suspected of what he sees as typical American ‘anti-intellectualism’. Allowing that he could extend his critique, he explains that he is concentrating on the ‘most egregious and historically important example.’”

I explained, however, that people usually don’t kill other people because of misinterpretations of Hamlet or almost any ancient work we can name. That does make the Bible different. That is also why it is particularly important to reduce the Bible to the importance of Homer or the Epic of Gilgamesh in the modern world. It is not that Homer should be MORE important, but rather that we should work to expose the fact that the Bible should be as EQUALLY relevant as The Epic of Gilgamesh or Homer's Iliad are today.

Throughout Davies’ commentary there is the sense that somehow Western civilization will be less fulfilling without biblical literacy. He cites figures on how illiterate modern people are about the Bible. An acute answer to Davies’ plea for his type of biblical literacy is given by Craig Martin (and quoted in Missives from Marx), in his commentary on Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know---And Doesn’t (2007):

Prothero’s grave concern about religious illiteracy seems to be invalidated—or at least attenuated—by his own argument. On the one hand, he argues that Americans don’t know much about religion anymore and, on the other hand, that this ignorance prevents them from understanding religious references in popular culture, political speeches, etc. However, if people don’t know much about religion, won’t those references slowly disappear, in which case there’s no need to worry about the matter? There is a part of me that wants to summarize Prothero’s central concern like this: “Americans don’t any longer know about this important part of their culture that’s no longer important.” This formulation is unfair—Prothero’s argument is not this superficial—but I think that there is something to it that is right.

Yes, it seems as if Davies himself realizes that most people are not reading the Bible. We, biblical scholars, just have to help those that are still reading it realize that it is no more more relevant than many other ancient works.

7. ...Hector Avalos, the only non-religious scholar I know of that actually seems to hate the Bible...”

As has been pointed out at Missives from Marx, Davies must surely mean “the only non-religious BIBLICAL scholar.” However, this characterization of my position is not quite correct. I certainly do not like any book that endorses genocide, misogyny, etc. However, if I hate anything, it is the WAY that the Bible is being used. Otherwise, I don’t hate the Bible anymore than I hate the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In any case, Philip Davies is still my hero. I am one of “the monsters” that he has helped to spawn, whether he takes credit for it or not.

.

The Influence of The Canaanite Religion on The Theology of Jesus And The New Testament

2009-07-16T18:59:00.006-04:00

It has long been known by ancient Near Eastern scholars who concentrate in the Hebrew Bible that early oral traditions were used as major references in shaping the Patriarchal narratives, particularly in the Jacob Cycles (such as noted by Julius Wellhausen (1844 - 1918), Herman Gunkel (1862 - 1932), Martin Noth (1902 -1968)) and thus formed the bases for Israel’s narrative traditions.

In 1928, an Arab peasant plowing the land near a mound struck a slab of stone. Upon raising the stone, he found traces of an ancient tomb with potsherds and small undamaged vessels. The antiquities service in Syria was informed who, in turn notified the French archeologist Mons. Ch. Virolleaud.

The stone that the peasant had hit turned out to be just an ancient necropolis with little promise. However, the archaeologist in the team next turned their attention to an artificial near by mound (named by locals as Ras-ashShamrah), which, when explored, proved to be the site of the ancient city know in texts from Babylonian, Hittite and Egyptian as the city of Ugarit.

Excavation carried out by the French archaeologist Mons. C.F.A. Schaeffer between 1929 and 1939 and then continued after WWII, have unearth thousands of clay tablets around the main library attached to the temple of Baal. The tablets are dated between 1400 and 1350 BCE and are extremely varied in their contents.

The script of the tablets are written in Akkadian, Hurrian and Sumerian, but the native language of the city is a script using the cuneiform symbols based on an alphabetic constant signs now classified in the group of Northwest Semitic languages which predates Hebrew. This language, now know as Ugaritic, is the parent language of the Israelites who are said to have spoken Hebrew.

Because the name of one of the gods in the text was called “Baal” and of whose temple the library it was next to, the city has now been identified with the Canaanites with whom the Israelites are said to have taken the land from to form Israel.

Modern scholars of the Hebrew Bible such as Richard Clifford, Frank M. Cross, Nicholas Wyatt, Mark Smith, John Day, William Dever, J.C. de Moor the late Marvin Pope, C.H Gordon and M. Dahood see a direct connection or continuation of Canaanite stories in the older cycles of the Israelite.

An example here is Psalm 29 which is traditionally assigned to King David, but is basically a reworked Canaanite hymn from Ugarit.

So, did this connection and continuation of Canaanite material end in with the Hebrew Bible or is this tradition (which was once held in high regards by the early Israelites) still able to shape the New Testament? I think so and I list the following:

A. Jesus never calls the deity of his Jewish nation by his personal proper name Yahweh, but simply Theos = El ("El" is Hebrew for god) . El is the same name of the supreme god of the Canaanites at Ugarit.

B. Jesus calls El “Abba” or father: (“And He was saying, "Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You will." Mark 14: 36). Jesus tells his disciples to call El also “father” in the Lord’s Prayer. Baal calls his god “ab” or father too. Both divine fathers of Jesus and Baal (El, the supreme god of the Jews and the Canaanites) are fatherly figure gods who live in Heaven.

C. Jesus is called “Lord” many times by his followers in the Gospels and Jesus is identified with God in the Gospels. Likewise, God is Jesus’ heavenly father.

In the Ugaritic texts, the term b’l=baal can simply mean “Lord” or elsewhere it can be used as a proper name “Baal” where he is the title of the chief god of the Canaanites who is the son of the supreme god El.

D. Jesus descends and returns from the neither world (Hell) (For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Matt. 12:40 and “By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; I Peter 3:19) so too does Baal descend and return from the underworld.

E. Jesus stills a storm on the Sea of Galilee, so too does Baal control the wind and weather.

F. Jesus intervenes between his followers and God his father. So too does Baal intervene between the people of Ugarit and El his father.

G. Jesus is depicted as King seated on a throne ruling his kingdom and giving righteous judgments. So too is Baal seated on his throne ruling a kingdom with righteous judgments.

H. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus fights and kills the evil serpent / dragon. So too does Baal fight and kill the twisted serpent Ugaritic “ltn btn brh” (Litanu, the serpent or Leviathan).

I. Biblical numbers such as 3, 6, 7 and 40 are used many times in the New Testament are used equally in the Ugaritic text to give divine meaning to these Canaanite texts.

Why I've Been Somewhat Quiet Lately

2009-07-16T17:47:00.009-04:00

It's because I'm finishing up editing a new book to be published by Prometheus Books, which is due shortly. This should be very good! See below for the title and the table of contents:

The Case Against Christianity: Why Faith Fails

Foreword by Dan Barker
Introduction

Part One: Is Christianity True?

1 The Culture of Religion and the Culture of Freethought. Dr. David Eller
2 Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science. Dr. Valerie Tarico
3 The Malleability of the Human Mind. Dr. Jason Long
4 The Outsider Test for Faith Revisited. John W. Loftus

Part Two: Is the Bible True?

5 What Biblical Scholarship Shows Us About the Bible. Paul Tobin
6 The Cosmology of the Bible. Edward T. Babinski
7 The Mythical Unicorn. Jeffrey Mark
8 The Mythical Story of Samson. Joe E. Holman

Part Three: Is the God of the Bible Perfectly Good?

9 What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate. John W. Loftus
10 Human Sacrifice in the Bible. Harry McCall
11 Yahweh is a Moral Monster. Dr. Hector Avalos
12 The Darwinian Problem of Evil. John W. Loftus

Part Four: Are Christian Claims about Jesus Based on Fact?

13 Jesus: Myth and Method. Dr. Robert M. Price
14 At Best Jesus Was a Failed Apocalyptic Doomsday Prophet. John W. Loftus
15 Why the Resurrection is Unbelievable Dr. Richard Carrier

Part Five: Does Modern Civilization Depend on Christianity?

16 Does Christianity Provide the Only Basis for Morality? Dr. David Eller
17 Was Atheism the Reason Hitler Killed So Many People? Dr. Hector Avalos
18 Was Christianity Responsible for Modern Science? Dr. Richard Carrier

Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?

2009-07-14T23:59:00.005-04:00

It all started recently with Richard Dawkins and his charge that the God of the Old Testament is the most unpleasant fictional character he'd ever seen. So Paul Copan, President of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, wrote an article defending Yahweh's ways. Here are links to the further discussion so far. How does Copan's position fare now?

This is Copan's original article: Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?: The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics.

Hector Avalos wrote a devastating response to Copan: Paul Copan’s Moral Relativism: A Response from a Biblical Scholar of the New Atheism.

Here is professing Christian Wes Morriston's devastating response to Copan's inerrantism: Did God Command Genocide? A Challenge to the Biblical Inerrantist.

Undismayed, Copan wrote a rejoinder here: Yahweh Wars and the Canaanites: Divinely-Mandated Genocide or Corporate Capital Punishment?

Anyone see Copan's Cognitive Dissonance Reduction like I do?

FYI: Paul Copan knew of Avalos's response before he wrote this last article. I had emailed him about it. But he chose not to respond to it. I wonder why?

HT on the Morriston paper to exapologist.

The Story of Suzie

2009-07-13T19:44:00.000-04:00

I Highly Recommend the New Book, Doubting the Resurrection

2009-07-13T14:00:00.001-04:00

It is rare that I recommend a new book twice to my readers, but the recommendations for Kris D. Komarnitsky's book keep coming in: Doubting Jesus' Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box? In it he lays out a probable naturalistic hypothesis of Christian origins. Here's what some scholars are saying about his book:

“If you liked my book Beyond Born Again, you're going to love this one by Kris Komarnitsky! He shows great acuity of judgment and clear-eyed perception of the issues. He does not claim to have proof of what happened at Christian origins, but he does present a powerfully plausible hypothesis for what might have happened, which is all you need to refute the fundamentalist’s claim that things can only have gone down their way. By now it is a mantra – it is also nonsense, and Kris shows that for a fact.”

–– Robert M. Price, Ph.D. Theology, Ph.D. New Testament

“A surprisingly excellent demonstration of how belief in the resurrection of Jesus could plausibly have originated by natural means. Komarnitsky is well read in the leading scholarship on this issue and boils the debate down to bare essentials in plain language. He quotes and cites dozens of scholars and primary sources to build a solid case. Though I don't always agree with him, and some issues could be discussed at greater length, everything he argues is plausible, and his treatise as a whole is a must for anyone interested in the resurrection.”

–– Richard Carrier, Ph.D. Ancient History

“Komarnitsky is addressing an important topic in a considered and rational way. This book offers the open-minded reader an opportunity to work through some of the key questions surrounding the Easter mystery that lies at the heart of Christian faith.”

–– Gregory C. Jenks, Ph.D. FaithFutures Foundation

“Clearly written and well argued, Doubting Jesus’ Resurrection lays out a plausible and intriguing case for a non-supernatural explanation of the New Testament resurrection accounts. Don’t be put off by the fact that Komarnitsky is not a scholar – his book makes a solid contribution to the historical-critical understanding of these immensely important texts. This book deserves serious attention from scholars and all those interested in Christian Origins.”

–– Robert J. Miller, Professor of Religious Studies, Juniata College.

"In Komarnitsky's third chapter he ventures onto my home turf--psychology--and his treatment of the the subject is impressive. I found the chapter opening a bit hard to follow, but persistence paid off in spades.

Komarnitsky pulls together the work of historians and psychologists and tells story after story of apocalyptic cults that find ways to sustain their beliefs despite radical disappointments (a messianic figure betrays trust, an end-of-the-world date comes and goes, aliens fail to appear). Social psychologist Leon Festinger's work on cognitive dissonance provides a theoretical framework for understanding an otherwise incomprehensible phenomenon. For anyone who is interested in how apocalyptic beliefs are sustained, whether in a Christian context or not, I recommend this thorough, well-documented overview.

Although the Christian resurrection story is shrouded in mythos, making it hard to know what actually happened in history, modern examples and cognitive dissonance theory offer a compelling possible scenario. Without resorting to any form of supernaturalism, drawing just on what we know about human behavior, Komarnitsky offers a sufficient explanation for the resurrection story at the heart of Christian orthodoxy."

-- Valerie Tarico, Ph.D., Author: The Dark Side - How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth

The Bible and the Treatment of Animals

2009-07-13T10:00:00.000-04:00

In this Blog post I want to take a good look at what the Bible says about the treatment of animals. Like most any topic we find in the Bible from abortion to war, there will be inconsistencies and contradictory emphases within its pages, since the books compiled into the Bible were written by different people at different periods in time, and even edited along the way with inserted comments by pseudonymous authors up until the canon for each testament was declared closed. So we can expect to find inconsistencies within the Bible when it comes to the proper treatment of animals as well. And this is what we find. Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan are probably today’s most important Christian voices in support of a new respectful animal theology, having written a number of books on the topic. They admit that “what is clear, and what can be asserted confidently…is that…there are alternative, initially plausible and yet mutually inconsistent ways of interpreting the holy scriptures, some of which supports humanistic interpretations of the values nature holds, others not.” [Animals and Christianity: A Book of Readings (New York: Crossroad Pub., Co., 1988), p. xii-xiii). Indeed, that is par for the course.

In what follows I’ll admit there are passages that speak warmly of animals and of our human obligation to treat them well. These pericopes exist. There are not many of them. We do find a few of them in the pages of the so-called holy scriptures. But we need to keep them in perspective by placing them within the larger context of the whole of holy writ. We need to understand the over-all thrust of what the canonical writings say about human beings, their relationship to their God, and toward animals. We need to place those texts into that whole context. There are always minority voices in any political party or religious grouping. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find minority voices concerning the treatment of animals in the Biblical texts and in the church down through the centuries, and we do. But that’s what they are. Keep this in mind. They are minority voices.

Christians today are resurrecting these minority voices by placing an emphasis on them as if they were “plain as day” to the people of old. They’re not. We need to ask ourselves what the people in the biblical era would have thought about the treatment of animals in their day, not ours. Given the new paradigm that Darwinian evolutionary biology provides us for thinking about this issue, Christians are reinterpreting the main thrust of the Biblical passages to fit this new paradigm in light of these minority voices. They are doing this because we now realize that all animals are considered interconnected with each other in an ecosystem favorable for the rise of human beings where we are all dependent on each other. Given Darwinian evolutionary biology we now see an obligation to keep species from becoming extinct, as far as is possible. We must now care about all animals on the planet to help maintain this favorable ecosystem.

We must place this new Christian emphasis on the minority animal advocacy voices found in the Bible into this larger context. The same thing has happened with regard to anti-Semitism, feminism, slavery, war, capital punishment, homosexuality and the treatment of children. John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal Bishop no less, has documented some of these kinds of Biblical texts and how they were used by the Christian believers down through the centuries in his book, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). As history has moved on so also has our sense of morality. With this newer heightened sense of morality, Christians have been forced time after time after time to look for these minority voices in the texts of the Bible and in the theologians of the past. But doing this won’t exonerate the Bible from the majority voices that are to be blamed for the horrendous treatment of animals down through the ages.

So my challenge as we look at these texts is twofold. My first challenge is to ask what best explains the fact that Christians must continually seek out these minority voices in the past to defend what they believe? On the one hand is my thesis that the Bible was predominately written and compiled by anthropocentric barbaric men of the past who saw their relationship to the universe and their world in a self-centered patriarchal manner. They saw themselves as patriarchs ruling over nature, over other nations, over their families, over their slaves and over their animals. Just as women and slaves and children were regarded pretty much as chattel (property), so also were their animals. They predominately had an instrumental regard (versus intrinsic regard) for their property. This so-called property, all of it, was to help these ancient men in a hostile world throughout their lives, and so the care of their property was indeed real, but for the most part they cared for it mainly because by caring for it they had a better life. Again, there were exceptions, minority voices. But this is what we find in the majority of the pages in the Bible itself.

By contrast is the Christian thesis that God revealed the essential truth about himself, the world, how to regard other nations, their families, their slaves and their animals. This thesis will be tested in this present chapter. If God revealed the essential truth about everything then how can the Christian explain the passages in the Bible which clearly don’t support such a thesis? I will maintain they cannot satisfactorily do this, especially in light of the new paradigm of Darwinian biology and the new awareness of the need for the rights of animals.

Since I don’t think my first challenge can be adequately met, my second one follows on its heels. Why didn’t God reveal the truth about the intrinsic worth of everything from the environment, to other races of people, to women and to animals from the very start? With regard to the sufferings of animals, why didn’t God tell believers in his book that animals felt pain and that they deserve to be treated with respect with dignity? Why didn’t God dictate several laws to the Israelites against animal cruelty? If God exists and has any foresight at all, and if it’s true that God knows human beings are “wicked,” then why didn’t he do this? If he had done so there would be no biblical justification for any kind of animal cruelty. Lacking this justification his faithful followers wouldn’t do it, or at least, they wouldn’t openly do so with a clear conscience. And such practices wouldn’t have gained any official church blessing. My explanation for this lack of divine guidance is because there is no divine being to be found in the Judeo-Christian religion. It is a man made religion, period.

So let’s look at the Biblical texts according to how they have been understood prior to the rise of Darwinian evolutionary biology, the rise of Biblical Criticism and our heightened sense of civilized morality found in democratic loving societies. The reason for doing this is because it would become uncharacteristic of a perfectly good God to wait until the 18th century for these texts to be understood properly. For he would’ve known believers could not understand what he really wanted them to think and to do. And he would be found misleading believers that is was okay to be cruel to animals up until such time that they understood the minority voices found in his so-called word. For Christians to object that it might have been necessary for God to reveal the truth in this manner will be the subject of a later chapter.

Creation and the Dominion Mandate.

In Genesis chapter one there are six successive creative days represented. The first three days prepare the earth for the populations that will inhabit it in the last three days. Mankind is created last. After creating the world God declares it all “good.” Good for what purpose? Good for whom? Of humans alone is it said we are made in God’s “image” and to humans alone was given what has been called the “Dominion Mandate” over the earth to rule and subdue it. We are to multiply and fill the earth, like some of the other created things, but we are also told to “subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

It is quite clear from reading this text that mankind was the apex of creation, the crown jewel, or the pinnacle of creation. Evangelical Ronald B. Allen sums this up in these words: "The biblical view starts with the assertion that the eternal God has created man, the most significant of all his created works." “Man is not only God’s creation, but the pinnacle of his creative effort…man is distinct, the high point of God’s creative work, the apex of his handicraft. The progression of the created things in Genesis 1 is climatic; all of God’s created work culminated in his fashioning of man.” ["Man, Doctrine of" Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible. H. D. McDonald, another evangelical, concurs when he wrote: “The impression that the Genesis account gives is that man was the special focus of God's creative purpose…All the previous acts of God are presented more in the nature of a continuous series…Then God said, ‘Let us make man.’ Then--when? When the cosmic order was finished, when the earth was ready to sustain man. Thus while man stands before God in a relationship of created dependence, he has also the status of a unique and special personhood in relation to God." ["Man, Doctrine of." Evangelical Dictionary of Theology]. Other scholars concur: "The Genesis account of creation accords to man a supreme place in the cosmos." ["Man," New Bible Dictionary]; "...the creation of humanity is surely accented as the climactic achievement of God’s creative activity." [The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1:1166)].

It is argued that other passages say otherwise. Some have argued that along with Psalms 8; Psalms 144:3, and the ending of Job that man is insignificant. But insignificant compared to what? Human beings are insignificant compared to God alone, but this says nothing against the idea that human beings are the apex of his creation. It’s entirely consistent for man to be the reason for creation and at the same time for God to be so above mankind that the Psalmist can wonder why God even bothers with us at all.

The world was created for human beings. It was a “good” world, for them. And then God tells them what they are to do with the rest of creation; they are to subdue it and have dominion over it, something reiterated in Genesis 9:1-3 and Psalm 8. When we look at the Hebrew words for “subdue” and “dominion” we see just what God wanted from us. The Hebrew word for subdue is כָּבַשׁ and it’s a very harsh word which literally means “to trample on.” According to an authoritative Lexicon it means to “tread down, beat or make a path, subdue; 1. bring into bondage, 2. (late) subdue, force. [Brown, F., Driver, S. R., & Briggs, C. A. (2000). Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon]. We see this word used in Zechariah 9:15 of Israel trampling on the weapons of her enemies. In Jeremiah 34:11 it’s used of slave owners taking back released slaves and subduing them again. The word “subjugate” would be an appropriate word for what this word means, and ding this demanded force. The same word is used by a king Ahasuerus who was angered at what he considered Haman’s attempted sexual assault (”subduing”) of Queen Esther, in Esther 7:8. It’s also the derivative word for the word “footstool.” What God said was for mankind to make the rest of creation a footstool for his own purposes.

The word “dominion” doesn’t fare any better. It has as similar meaning to the word subdue except that it also includes the idea of chastisement. This is no benign way to rule over nature. It meant to “master” over someone, especially when he refused to be subdued, or after conquering him. It’s used of King Solomon’s overseers who forced his laborers to build the Temple in I Kings 9:23. It’s used in Isaiah 14:2 describing the time when the Israelites defeated her oppressors and subdued. According to Biblical Scholar John C. L. Gibson, to “dominate” or “lord it over” would be what is meant. These two words, according to him, were “autocratic, imperialist verbs.” [Genesis, (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1981), p. 80]. One of these words was enough to convey the harshness of this man-given lordship, but when both words were used together the impression is of a dictatorial and domineering rule over nature, subject only to God’s rule over man.

Roderick Nash, a history and environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sums it up in these words: “The image is that of a conqueror placing his foot on the neck of a defeated enemy, exerting absolute domination. Both Hebrew words are also used to identify the process of enslavement. It follows that the Christian tradition could understand Genesis 1:28 as a divine commandment to conquer every part of nature and make it humankind’s slave.” [The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 90].

In 1967 professor Lynn White Jr. laid the blame for our present ecological crisis upon Christian understandings of the Biblical desacralization of nature in an essay titled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” [Science 155: 1203-1207]. Of the Genesis creation account White argued that Christians believe “God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes.” And he charged that: “Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” He wrote: “Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man's relation to nature…Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.” Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, viewed as the “Bible” of the animal liberation movement, soon followed on the heels of this essay which supported his claims.

Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong agrees by claiming the Genesis 1:26-28 text “set the stage for seeing the earth as the enemy of human beings.” [Sins of the Scripture, p. 49]. As such the Christian attitude that was derived from it is “anti-earth.” [Ibid., p. 55]. Spong articulates the Darwinian problem of evil for us in these words: “Human beings were not created in the image of some external deity; we developed out of the evolutionary soup as part of the fabric of life itself. DNA evidence today demonstrates that we are kin not only to apes, but to cabbages. We are part of an emerging life force sharing a common environment with every other living thing. No creature can dominate the world, as those called Homo sapiens have sought to do, because all life is radically interdependent.” [Ibid, p. 65].

Several Christian scholars have objected to this interpretation of the Genesis creation text. John C. L. Gibson argues that “what professor White is describing, though a very real Christianity, is a debased and adulterated Christianity.” Gibson claims that “these verses in Genesis could not possibly have been taken by their first hearers to suggest that ‘man’ could do what he liked with God’s creation.” Accordingly, “‘Man’ is God’s representative on earth, his ambassador, and possesses no intrinsic rights or privileges beyond those conferred on him by his divine master, to whom moreover he has to render account.” [Genesis, p. 79-81]. Gordon Wenham, the Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the College of St. Paul and St. Mary in Cheltenham, England, concurs. He claims that although man rules over the world, he “rules the world on God’s behalf,” and as such in this text “mankind is here commissioned to rule nature as a benevolent king, acting as God’s representative over them and therefore treating them in the same way as God who created them. This is of course no license for the unbridled exploitation of nature.” [Genesis 1-15, p. 33]. Richard Bauckmann, professor of New Testament Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, documented several responses to Lynn White’s thesis. His claim is that these responses “can fairly be said to have refuted it over and again.” He even wrote his own chapter length response to it. [God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), p. 131. See his chapter 7, “Human Authority in Creation.”].

I find it puzzling that these Christian scholars dispute what seems quite evident from the text itself, even if it can reasonably be said other factors were involved. While we must grant that the dominion mandate cannot mean humans can do anything we want to nature, including animals, the words used are extremely harsh ones when compared to our sensibilities toward animals today. How can someone “trample upon” a slave or a sheep beneficently? What does that even mean? It’s an oxymoron.

These Christian scholars claim our God given dominion mandate over the world should be compared and contrasted with how God rules over the world. We are not God. Instead we are God’s viceroys. So we don’t have the same rights that God has to create “evil” or “calamity” (Isaiah 45:7), nor do we have the same rights to kill at will because we didn’t create life in the first place (Job 1:21). We are caretakers who have been given a stewardship, they claim. But even if our role is to be described as they argue, Marti Kheel, a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, argues: “Whether as dominators or as caretakers, human still occupy the hierarchical position of managers of the rest of the natural world. I found the idea of a God who, through divine act of nepotism, selects a ‘chosen species’ to manage the rest of the natural world deeply disturbing, and at odds with my feelings of kinship with the rest of nature.” [Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p. 21].

Apart from these kinds of things, it’s said our rule must be based upon a loving, kind God. Implicit for them is the benign, loving, beneficent God of Anselm’s 11th century perfect being theology after centuries of theological gerrymandering. Having come to believe that God is perfect in love these Christian scholars would want us to think of the biblical God’s lordship in the same manner, as characterized by a loving beneficent king. Hence, man’s rule must have the same moral care in his lordship over nature. But this is emphatically not what we find in the Bible of God’s rule. Yes, there are voices describing God as love and/or caring for his creatures. But there are also many voices showing that God’s rule over us is very harsh, which is reflective an ancient brutal world. It was a very difficult world the ancients lived in where they must struggle to survive against early death and painful diseases from which they had no cures. Starvation was sometimes a few weeks away if they failed to successfully kill their prey. Wars took place almost every year in the springtime (I Chronicles 20:1). Kings were often brutal. Famines and droughts could devastate them. It was a hostile world they lived in. They must subdue it and make it obey.

The people in Biblical times conceived of God based upon this brutal world and the brutal rulers they have known. This God can be cruel. He can be kind. He is cruel with those who do not submit to his rule and obey his every command. He can be kind with those who do. This God can slam the world with a flood for disobedience, require Abraham to sacrifice his only son, pulverize the Egyptian nation with devastating plagues, send snakes to kill 3000 people for their disobedience, and be pleased when babies are dashed against the rocks (Psalms 137:9). He can send a drought or famine or plague of locusts or even another nation to kill every man women, child and animal for being disobedient. This God also threatens us with eternal punishment if we don’t think the evidence to believe in him is convincing. This God is described as a God of War, a Jealous God, and an Avenging God. This would be the divine model we find as the model for man’s given lordship over the earth. Be kind to subjects who are in obedience. But be very harsh toward those subjects who are disobedient. Trample on them. Break them down. It was a patriarchal world. Man was to dominate over the world just as God ruled. And so it couldn’t have been pretty world to live in as women, slaves, children and animals in this world. If a fig tree produced fruit, for instance, bless it, but if it didn’t, then curse it as Jesus did (Matthew 21:18-19).

If I’m wrong about this Genesis text and if Richard Bauckmann is correct to say that despite what seems evident in the Bible the responses to my position “can fairly be said to have refuted it over and again,” which I deny, then Christian scholars still have a major problem. For then the problem is no longer an exegetical one but a historical one. The problem becomes not what the Bible says as interpreted by these modern Christian scholars, who base their exegesis on Anselm’s view of God in light of the new Darwinian evolutionary paradigm, but why God allowed this biblical text to be used by Jews and Christians to abuse the environment and abuse animals. This relates to my second challenge mentioned earlier. Why didn’t God reveal the truth about the intrinsic worth of everything from the environment to other races of people, to women and to animals from the very start? It’s far from clear in this text that he did. He could’ve been much clearer, easily, even if these modern Christian scholars are correct in their exegesis based on hindsight. So the fact that God wasn’t clear is an indictment of a perfectly good God who should’ve known how human beings would interpret these verses. As the CEO of any company knows, if there is any miscommunication about the goals of that company, the fault is his or hers. If the company does wrong because it misunderstood the CEO’s directives, then it’s his or her fault.

Biblically speaking we do not clearly see God’s special providential care for animals in the Creation story with its dominion mandate, nor as we will see in a later chapter, do we see it based on God’s judgment upon the world because of the sin of man. It’s just not to be found in these early chapters in the Bible, the ones that speak of the beginnings of God’s creative work in the world, the ones that set the stage for interpreting the rest of the biblical texts regarding the treatment of animals and of nature.

Old Testament Passages Both Good and Bad.

In the Old Testament there are good passages on behalf of animals as well as passages disrespectful and hurtful to animals. Believing that God is perfectly good means that believers must try to explain why he commanded the abuse of animals. We would expect that any society would produce something good to say on behalf of animals, especially one that collected her writings together into a canon for over a millennium. And so we have some minority voices can be found. After God destroyed all flesh in the Flood he then subsequently promised to all living creatures, man and beast, not to do this again (Genesis 9:8-17), providing the rainbow as a sign of this covenant (as if THAT was the first time a rainbow was ever seen before!). Some comfort that; given God’s post-flood mandate for humans to hunt animals down and kill them for food. The Sabbath day was a rest for both man and beast (Exodus 23:12; Deuteronomy 5:14). The Israelites were told that if they saw their “brother’s ass or his ox fallen down by the way,” they were not to withhold their help from them, but rather to “help him to lift them up again.” (Deuteronomy 22:4). We also read: “If you chance to come upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting upon the young or upon the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young; you shall let the mother go, but the young you may take to yourself; that it may go well with you, and that you may live long.”(Deuteronomy 22:6-7). The ox was not to plough with the ass (Deuteronomy 22:10), nor were the Israelites to muzzle the ox when it treads out the grain (Deuteronomy 25:4). In Psalm 36:6 we’re told God saves a beast as well as a man. In Psalm 147:9 we’re told that God gives the beasts their food, and in Psalm 148:7-10 they praise him. In Proverbs 12:10 we read: “A righteous man has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.” (See note) And in Jonah 4:11 God is concerned for both the Ninevites and their beasts.

NOTE. If someone wants to hang the care for animals on this lone passage in the Bible from the book of Proverbs then we should be sure to understand something about the genre of that book and with it wisdom literature as a whole. According to Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, the book of Proverbs contains “prudential wisdom—that is, rules and regulations people can use to help themselves live responsible, successful lives.” If a person wants to be successful then he or she should follow its advice, they claim. [See their book, How to Read the Bible For All its Worth (Grand Rapids; Zondervan, 1982), pp. 195-203.] Read with this over-all context of the book in mind, Proverbs 12:10 may merely be saying that if a man wants to be successful he will have regard for the life of his beast, for a righteous man was a successful man and a successful man was a righteous man, usually. This is why we find in the story of Job, as another book in the wisdom literature, a man having great difficulty defending his righteousness before his critics even though disaster has struck him not just once but twice.

Expressed in these verses is some minimal concern for animals. However, one can question the reason why Israelites cared for their animals, given the harshness we find in the dominion mandate and the earliest parts of Genesis. Surely it wasn’t just that they cared for the intrinsic worth and value of animals qua animals. It was because they needed them. Animals were part of their domain, their property, and if found in the wild they were hunted and eaten. Caring for them, just like caring for their wives and children and slaves, was important to Israelite men. For by doing so it was better off for them, their patriarchal headship, and their lordship over their households. Animals would have had merely instrumental value, not intrinsic value. If a man became emotionally attached to an animal to give it special care, which no doubt was done, that was well and good. But it would do little to stop him from butchering it for a future meal much like how farmers do today, or in sacrificing it to God. The Israelites were given permission to eat the ox, the sheep, the goat, the hart, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, sheep, birds and fish, what are known as “clean” animals. (Deuteronomy 14:4-20).

Speaking of animal sacrifices, the Bible strongly suggests this was done quite a bit by everyone, especially at festivals and dedication ceremonies, all sanctioned and commanded by God. According to the Bible there were priests who came from the tribe of Levite who were to offer up sacrifices to God for everything from thanksgiving, to expiation for sins for the individual, to expiation for sins for the whole nation on the Day of Atonement. When Solomon’s slave laborers finished the Temple we read where “the king and all the people offered sacrifice before the Lord. King Solomon offered as a sacrifice twenty-two thousand oxen and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep.” This was surely an exaggeration if it happened at all (see Jeremiah 7:22-23), but it’s stated nonetheless (II Chronicles 7:5).

Of course, from our perspective this was a completely unnecessary waste of animal life, and a brutal way to kill them. Even if we admit that animal sacrifices were to prefigure the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to atone for our sins, and even if we set aside the insurmountable intellectual problems in understanding how Jesus’ death does anything to atone for our sins, Old Testament sacrifices, according to Christian theology, did nothing to atone for anyone’s sins…nothing. In the canonical book of Hebrews we read that it was “impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins,” that all of these sacrifices could “never take away sins.” They couldn’t have, otherwise Jesus would never had to die on the cross as a sacrifice “for our sins” it’s argued (see Hebrews 10:1-18). These innumerable animals were brutally butchered for no reason at all…none. Their throats were slit and the blood was drained on the altar where they were subsequently skinned and quartered into pieces and then burnt with the smoke of their flesh rising up to God who was considered to reside up in the sky (i.e., “heaven”), as a sweet smelling aroma (Exodus 29:18, 25; Leviticus 3:16; 23:18, etc). Depending on the kind of sacrifice offered some of the meat went to the priests and/or the person making the sacrificial offering. [For more on the biblical depictions of this sacrificial system see Roland de Vaux’s classic work, Ancient Israel: Religious Institutions Vol 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company1965), pp. 415-456]

The “Prophetic Tradition.”

Conspicuously lacking in the Old Testament are any prophetic denunciations of animal cruelty, since it’s regularly claimed that the biblical prophetic tradition expresses the moral core of Judaism and Christianity. [One can see this expressed in my former professor Daniel Maguire’s book, The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity: Reclaiming the Revolution (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993]. When arguing against the so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, John F. Haught, the former Chair and professor in the department of theology at Georgetown University, in Washington D.C., faulted them for not understanding this. Describing the moral core of the prophetic tradition with its emphasis on justice as “God’s preferential option for the poor and disadvantaged,” he wrote: “To maintain that we can understand modern and contemporary social justice, civil rights, and liberation movements without any reference to Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jesus, and other biblical prophets makes Dawkins’s treatment of morality and faith almost unworthy of comment.” [God and the New Atheists: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), p. 68]. But there is nothing in these Old Testament prophets decrying any injustice done to animals. And as we shall see shortly, Jesus’s words and actions fare no better. If the prophets represented God’s concern for the disadvantaged and lowly then apparently God was not concerned for them. If these prophets truly represented the moral core of Judaism and Christianity then it doesn’t include any concern for animals.

There is a vision for the future in the book of Isaiah (11:6-9; 65:17-25), which can easily be disputed given the biblical fact that all God’s creatures were not originally vegetarians. Isaiah 11:6-9 says: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” Isaiah 65:25 says: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the LORD.”

About these passages, Paul Copan in his book, “That’s Just Your Interpretation” (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001), p. 229, footnote # 34), rightly points out that Christians “must be cautious about literalizing a poetic and highly symbolic text.” Right that. In Isaiah 65:20 it also says that, “No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the child shall die a hundred years old, and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed.” If taken literally, Isaiah’s vision for the future still involves death, hardly a description of the supposed original paradise in the Garden of Eden and certainly not that envisioned by the final state of man in heaven. Concerning this verse in its context, Copan argues: “Surely the text does not urge literalism here! It uses understatement to stress the longevity of life during the Messiah’s reign.” Distinguished New Testament scholar and professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, C.F.D. Moule, was referring to Isaiah 65 when he wrote: “No one with a grain of sense believes that the passage…is intended literally, as though the digestive system of a carnivore were going to be transformed into that of a herbivore. What blasphemous injury would be done to great poetry and true mythology by laying such solemnly prosaic hands upon it!” [Man and Nature in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964), p. 11.]

Copan quotes from John Oswalt’s commentary on Isaiah 11:7 where we find the point of the passage is that “the fears associated with insecurity, danger, and evil will be removed.” [Isaiah 1-39, New International Commentary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 283.]. These passages do not express literal truth even from a biblical perspective. And they are not to be considered prophetic unless it can be shown they were something more than a mere wish for the future. Something yearned for is not a prediction. Anyone can hope for a peaceful paradisiacal future. As such, anyone could write similar poetic things as these. Unless there are explicit dates set for such a prediction to be fulfilled that can be either confirmed or denied such a vision of the future is a mere wish for a blissful future. Even given this hope for the future, the child will not literally play over the hole of a poisonous asp, and neither will the lion nor the ox eat straw. Copan rightly tells us that “the emphasis in these allegedly vegetarian texts is not the nature of the lion’s diet but his domestication, his being tamed so that he is no longer a threat. To eat straw like an ox is to be tamed and not to be a danger.” [Emphasis his]. If, however, the authors of these passages in Isaiah really thought they were describing a literal return to the paradise in the Garden of Eden, then they got it wrong. There was animal predation before the fall as we’ve shown.

The prophets did speak against the waywardness of God’s people and their tendency to offer a false or insincere formalized worship, along with a condemnation of their unrighteous and unjust ways. They condemned any and all animal sacrifices and formalized worship that did not spring from clean and sincere hearts. The prophetic voice in Psalm 50 typifies this (even though it’s a Psalm). There we read: “I am God, your God. I do not reprove you for your sacrifices; your burnt offerings are continually before me. I will accept no bull from your house, nor he-goat from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High; and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” What is going on here? According to The Bible Knowledge Commentary : An Exposition of the Scriptures (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1983-1985, Volume 1, page 831), as just one source among many: “God did not reprove them…for their meticulous keeping of the letter of the Law in offering the prescribed sacrifices. But Israel failed to realize that God did not need their bulls or goats (v. 9; cf. v. 13), for He is the Lord of all Creation. He already owns every animal and knows every bird. He instituted the sacrifices not because He needed the animals but because the people desperately needed Him. He is not like the gods of the pagans who supposedly thrived on food sacrifices. The Lord does not depend on man’s worship for survival” (Emphasis mine). This is hardly a text supportive of God’s care for animals. What God wanted from his people is also expressed in Micah 6:6-8. The important thing for God wasn’t their sacrifices, but “to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly” with him as their God. This does not mean God didn’t also demand their sacrifices. He did. He just wanted these sacrifices to come from a pure and sincere worshipful heart. To say God did not demand their sacrifices pits these prophets against the Mosaic law.

We also read in Isaiah 1:11-17: “‘What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?’ says the Lord; ‘I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of he-goats. When you come to appear before me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and the calling of assemblies— I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.’” Again, there is no care expressed for animals here either, just a condemnation of the injustice of those who made “vain” sacrifices to their God.

We even read in Amos (6:4-6) where God is seemingly displeased with the eating of meat by the people in the southern kingdom of Judah: “Woe to those who lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the midst of the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David invent for themselves instruments of music; who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” But Amos’s God is confronting his people with a totally unexpected reversal of what the people expected when the so-called “Day of the Lord” comes. They believed God desired sacrifices, and they were right as we’ve seen. We don’t see anywhere in context where God denies this. Instead, God would rather that they do justice and righteousness (v. 24), not to the neglect of their sacrifices, but along with them. They didn’t heed the prophet’s warnings of judgment. They instead indulged themselves in a decadent hedonism. Their sole concern seemed to be for their own gluttonous lifestyle rather than grieve over what had happened to the northern kingdom of Israel who were slaughtered by the Babylonians They showed no concern with their own impending “Day of the Lord” when they will meet with a similar fate. Therefore, Amos says that God says their gluttonous drunken and luxurious lifestyles with come to an end. The sound of their musical revelry will be silenced.

Robert N. Wennberg, Christian professor of philosophy at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California, sums up what I’m claiming in these words: “To be sure, prophetic condemnation of animal sacrifices occurred from time to time, but the prophetic objection was not directed against animal sacrifices per se; rather, it was an objection to sacrificial offerings in a context devoid of genuine repentance, devoid of compassion for the needy, devoid of a true commitment to justice. It was any ritual divorced from true spirituality, not only animal sacrifice, that was the object of prophetic condemnation.” [God, Humans, and Animals (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 296].

When God’s judgment does come on people, their animals suffer along with them for their sins. This can be seen first and foremost when we read the story of God sending the ten plagues upon the Egyptians to free the Israelite slaves at the hands of Moses, the supreme prophet of the Old Testament. Water is turned into “blood” and all the fish in the rivers and streams subsequently die. Frogs were made to cover the land and then all but those remaining in the river Nile were destroyed by God. Gnats laid waste to the land, we read. The Egyptian livestock were all killed with a severe pestilence in the fourth plague; all of their horses, their donkeys, their camels, and their flocks of goats and sheep (but then where did they get horses to pull their chariots to chase the Israelites into the Red Sea?). We also see God sending a fifth plague of painful boils (the same kind we read Job was afflicted with), and then a sixth plague of a storm of fire and hail on both the Egyptians and their beasts. (Note: How many times can the Egyptian livestock be punished after they were already killed in the fourth plague!). Then God ends with a scorched earth policy where an eighth plague of locusts devour any and every green plant or tree which might have been left after the storm of hail. The ninth plague of darkness puts a finishing touch on what God had done to the land indicating there was nothing left for the Egyptians. Here we see a wanton divine disregard for animal and plant life (along with human life since the tenth plague was the death of their first-born sons). All of this devastation was done, not because any of the Egyptian’s animals did anything wrong. It was because of the sins of the Egyptians, particularly those of the Pharaoh who refused to free the Israelites. (See Exodus 7-9).

Likewise when a plague of locusts came and devoured the land of God’s own people the prophet Joel (1:18-20) speaks these words: “How the beasts groan! The herds of cattle are perplexed because there is no pasture for them; even the flocks of sheep are dismayed. Unto thee, O LORD, I cry. For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and flame has burned all the trees of the field. Even the wild beasts cry to thee because the water brooks are dried up, and fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.” Surely this is a prophetic metaphor aimed at his people who had fallen under God’s judgment. Again we read in The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1983-1985, Volume 1, page 1415): “The people were all too aware (before their very eyes) that their food supply, and with it all reason to rejoice, had disappeared (v. 16). Drought had apparently set in as well, for the seeds had shriveled….With no harvest available, the storehouses and granaries had been left to deteriorate. The domesticated animals (cattle. . . . herds . . . flocks of sheep) were suffering from starvation.” As such, God was punishing nature and with it animals for the sins of man. Again, this is not a text supportive of the care of animals. On the contrary, God punishes animals for the sins of man. (In Hosea 2:18-20 we see a reversal where God promises a covenantal contract with animals, as was done in Noah’s day above, precisely because of the righteousness of human beings).

New Testament Passages—Jesus and Animals.

In the New Testament the treatment of animals seen there fares no better. In fact, it’s claimed that it’s worse. Robert Wennberg acknowledges that the New Testament is not “quite the resource for moral concern for animals that the Old Testament is. This has prompted some to view Judaism as a better friend to animals than Christianity.” [in God, Humans, and Animals (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 291]. Given what we’ve just seen in the Old Testament this doesn’t look good. Peter Singer charged that while the Old Testament “did at least show flickers of concern for their sufferings,” the New Testament is “completely lacking in any injunction against cruelty to animals, or any recommendation to consider their interests.” [Animal Liberation, p. 191].

There is some concern shown in the New testament nonetheless. In the Gospels we read where God feeds the birds of the air (Matthew 6:26; Luke 12:24, 27) and cares for the smallest of sparrows (Luke 12:6-7). But after each of these sayings we subsequently read Jesus saying that human beings are more important to God than they: “Are you not of more value than they?”; and “Of how much more value are you than the birds!”; and “Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

Richard Bauckham tries to remedy this understanding of the New Testament texts in a couple of important chapters dealing with Jesus teachings about animals and how he treated them. [Animals on the Agenda, pp. 33-60]. Of the just cited passages he claims: “Only those who recognize birds as their fellow-creatures can appreciate Jesus’ point…it is not an argument which sets humans on a different plane of being from animals. On the contrary, it sets humans within the community of God’s creatures, all of whom are provided for” by God. [Ibid, p. 41]. When it comes to the word “valuable” in these texts where it’s said humans are of much “more value” than these particular animals, Bauckham admits the best interpretation of that word (διαφέρω) is to say humans are “superior” to animals, which is a “hierarchical superiority.” But he comes up with a false analogy to suggest this hierarchical superiority can be compared to a king who is superior to his subjects. There is nothing here to suggest this, nothing. A king is a human being who rules over other human beings. [Ibid, p. 45-46]. And while Bauckham may be correct to suggest these animals have some intrinsic worth to God as the creator and caretaker of them, it doesn’t follow that they have intrinsic value to human beings. Bauckham even admits there were several Old Testament laws where animals were to be regarded as property (see Exodus 21:28-35; Leviticus 24:17-21).

Jesus is also represented as teaching he could heal on the Sabbath by using examples of animals who could be rescued on the Sabbath. Matthew 12:11-12 is typical where Jesus said to his critics, “What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.” (See also Luke 14:5; 13:15-16). Such acts were acts of compassion, Bauckham argues, “intended to prevent animal suffering.” [Ibid, pp. 37-38]. Since acts of compassion to help animals are lawful on the Sabbath, so also are acts of compassion toward human being are also lawful, he argues. Of course, here is that same Greek word again, expressing the phrase that humans are of much “more value” (διαφέρω) than these animals. It’s not that animals have no value at all to God or to man, but the kind of value is different for God than for man, as I’ve suggested.

In any case, is this any different than the parable of the man who leaves his flock of a ninety-nine sheep in the open pasture to find the one which was lost, who then rejoices when he does? (Luke 15:4-6) What will he eventually do with his sheep? He will eventually sell it to be killed for a meal or kill it and eat himself. The same thing would go for any sheep that a man rescues from a pit on the Sabbath. The question of what work could be done on the Sabbath day was a legal one, which was disputed in Jesus’ day. Jesus (Mark 12:24-27; John 5:16-18; 7:23), like Paul after him (Acts 17:22-31; 23:6), reportedly used arguments based on what his critics accepted in order to argue his case. Paul did this when in the midst of the Sadducees (the conservatives who believed there was no resurrection of the dead), and the Pharisees (the liberals of their day who did), when he said, “with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead I am on trial,” which immediately “divided the assembly” until the dissention became “violent.” Jesus was doing the same thing with regard to his “healing” people on the Sabbath. He was using something his critics agreed on to make the point that it was also permissible to heal on the Sabbath. Does this actually mean he cared for sheep? Who knows?

Bauckham argues that rescuing a sheep from a pit “cannot be understood as motivated by a concern to preserve the animals as property,” because they were not in any life threatening danger. Would the sheep be in danger of dying if left for a day in a pit? Who knows? Would it suffer harm if left there? Yes. Does this entail a compassion for the animals? Maybe, but it’s not a forgone conclusion given what we know from the majority voices found in the Old Testament itself about the value of animals. If Jesus was indeed expressing some compassion for the individual animal itself, then such an understanding comes from the minority voices in the Old Testament, which I already acknowledged. But surely the desire to keep the sheep from being further harmed could also be understood as a desire to limit any additional loss to the owner of the sheep if not immediately rescued and treated by the owner.

In another story in the life of Jesus he encountered a man with a Legion of demons who feared Jesus would cast them out without providing them another host. [The commonly known Latin word “Legion” referred to a Roman army regiment of about 6,000 soldiers.] So the demons begged him to cast them into a herd of swine, which Jesus did. Upon Jesus’ command they “came out, and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.” (Mark 5; Matthew 8:24-34; Luke 8:26-39). It was a common myth that demons needed a host to inhabit, and it was also a common myth that if they couldn’t find a different host after leaving, or being exorcized out of one, they would try to return to the one they left (Mark 9:25; Matthew 12:43-45). Richard Bauckham tells us that upon being cast into the pigs the reason why the pigs were destroyed by the demons is because this “manifests the inherent tendency of the demonic to destroy whatever it possesses (cf. Mark 5:5; 9:22).” [Animals on the Agenda, p. 47]. Bauckham believes these demons could not be sent back into the “abyss” as they requested (Luke 8:31), because until the final end of history evil can only be “deflected and diminished but not abolished,” based on a passage (Matthew 13:24-30) that has nothing to do with these particular demons and what Jesus could or could not do with them as the supposed “Son of God.” So Bauckham merely admits the supposed completely sinless Jesus “permits a lesser evil” here. He says that “the destruction of the pigs is preferable to the destruction of a human personality,” [Ibid., p. 48] as if there were no other alternative options for Jesus who as God’s “Son” was supposedly omnipotent with “all authority over heaven and earth” (Matthew 28:18). I see no reason at all why Jesus, if he is who Bauckham believes he is, couldn’t have sent them back into the “abyss,” as they requested, especially since these demons would have some idea what was possible for him to do. Or, Jesus could have imprisoned these demons in a cave in the mountains, send them into the evil money changers who’s sins may have deserved it, sent them into a murderer condemned to die, or a number of other alternatives. He could even have sent them into the pigs and then kept the demons from drowning them. As it stands this shows a wanton disregard of the “sinless” Jesus toward swine, animals that the Old Testament already declared unclean.

A few things are sure about Jesus. He was certainly not a vegetarian. We read that in contrast to John the Baptist who came “neither eating nor drinking,” Jesus came “eating and drinking” (Matthew 11:18-19). He would especially eat meat when invited into the homes of some wealthy people (Mark 2:15; Luke 7:36; 11:37; 14:1; and 19:5). We read where Jesus assisted his disciples to catch fish (Luke 5:11), multiplied fish along with some bread for the multitudes to eat (Mark 6:38-43), and it’s even reported after he supposedly resurrected that he prepared a meal of fish for his disciples (John 21:1-4) and even ate fish (Luke 24:42-43). He ate a lamb for the Passover meal every year, certainly at his last supper (Matthew 26:17-20), which had been sacrificed that same day in the Temple. As a good Jew it is almost certain he participated in sacrificing animals to God, which took place during the yearly festivals he attended in Jerusalem (John 2:13; 7:1-10; 10:22-23).

We also know Jesus neglected animals when describing the greatest commandments (Mark 12:28-32; Matthew 22.34-40; Luke 10.25-28). He said all the law and prophets could be summed up in two commandments. The first greatest commandment is that we are to love God above all with everything within us. The second greatest commandment was to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus said: “There is no other commandment greater than these.” That’s what he said, and he said nothing about caring for animals, or the environment itself as even a distant third, which is what a perfectly good person should have said, if he was perfectly good. To say that loving God includes loving nature and animals doesn’t follow, otherwise Jesus would not have had to mention that we should also love our neighbors as we do ourselves, since if by loving God we should also love our neighbor then the second commandment was superfluous.

Jesus is also heard to commission his disciples with a new mandate at the end of the Gospel of Matthew when he commands them to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:16-20). No expressed concern for nature or animals expressed here! The drama of the New Testament is one for the hearts and minds of people whom Jesus died for to atone for their sins. Salvation of men’s souls was of the utmost importance lest they be cast into eternal fire. It was a cosmic battle with the forces of Satan and his evil hosts. It’s this passion for the souls of men that drove the Apostle Paul to suffer much as a missionary for Jesus (II Corinthians 11:23-33). He was after all, not on a mission to alleviate the sufferings of animals.

According to Jesus at the Judgment Day depicted in Matthew 25:31-46, we will be judged by our deeds. That is, if our faith has led us to feeding the poor, being kind to strangers, caring for the sick, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, then we will be welcomed into God’s presence in the kingdom. Nothing is said here about caring for animals, nor in James 1:27 where the practice of true religion is “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” And nothing is said in the final chapter of the book of Revelation that animals will be in the new Heavenly Jerusalem either.

New Testament Passages—Peter, Paul and John the Revelator.

There was a major shift in the eating habits of Christians in the New Testament. The Jews had already distinguished between the animals they could eat (clean) from the animals they could not eat (unclean). But with a vision of Peter this all changed. In Acts 10:9-16 we read about it. A sheet came down from heaven and in it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. A voice told Peter to rise and eat but Peter refused. Then a voice told him: “What God has cleansed, you must not call common.” This vision in a “trance” was thought by Peter to be a divine instruction that uncircumcised Gentiles who believed would be accepted by God: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” This same sentiment was written back into the words of Jesus in Mark 7:19. Unlike in the Old Testament all animals were considered fair game for hunting, herding, raising and eating.

In I Corinthians 9:9-10 the Apostle Paul wrote in defense of him needing to be given financial help for his ministry by allegorically interpreting an Old Testament passage (Deuteronomy 25:4): “For it is written in the law of Moses, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain.’ Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of a share in the crop.” The problem here was penned adequately by Robert Wennberg, who said Paul “argues that because we could not suppose that God is concerned with oxen, some alternative meaning must be assigned to this passage….and if God is not concerned with oxen, then by implication God is not concerned with any other animal either.” [God, Humans, and Animals, p. 298]. In reply a Christian interpreter could claim this doesn’t mean Paul’s implication follows, but I don’t see why not, for what could it mean to say that while God was not concerned with oxen other animals were? That hardly makes sense. What’s the difference in moral status between oxen and other animals? Other Christian interpreters may claim Paul was not denying the literal truth of Deuteronomy. He was only describing a deeper truth in addition to the literal truth, but that is quite a stretch. The text does not suggest this as a possibility. Conservative Biblical scholar F.F. Bruce simply bites the bullet here by rejecting attempts to soften the blow of Paul’s words by saying that while Paul’s argument clashes with a modern concern for animals, “he must be allowed to mean what he says.” [New Century Bible: First and Second Corinthians (London: Oliphants, 1971, pp. 84-85].

John the revelator in the book of Revelation, who was probably not John the Apostle, used many different animals in telling his apocalyptic vision for end times. Ninety three verses contain references to lions, bears, dogs, cattle, birds, eagles, a Lamb, serpents, scorpions, locusts, horses, a dragon, and a beast. There is a lot of carnage taking place, mostly by these animals to human beings. They are used by God to inflict pain and suffering. Reading through the book we get the very real impression that the animal world is a hostile word for the most part. Locusts and scorpions torment men, while birds feed on their flesh and the flesh of horses. There is a dragon and a beast (numbering 666) which are at war with believers. The one exception, of course is the Lamb, who represents Jesus who conquers over this hostile animal kingdom and rescues believers. But in the heavenly city when all is said and done we read that the wicked, who are represented as “unclean,” will not be there (Revelation 21:27), and that outside are “the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.” (Revelation 22:15) Using “dogs” to represent wicked people who will be eternally condemned to the lake of fire is surely a disgusting image unbecoming of a caring attitude toward them, even if dogs at that time were scavengers.

The only expressly positive thing about the New Testament with regard to animals is that because Christians viewed Jesus’ death on the cross as the final sacrifice they no longer had any reason to participate in the Jewish animal sacrificial worship (See the book of Hebrews). This would mean that animal sacrifice was abolished as unnecessary for them. How long it took Christians to actually understand this is not clearly known. We know the Apostle Paul went up to the Temple to offer animal sacrifices when he visited Jerusalem after his third and final missionary journey. In order to help silence his critics the Jerusalem church elders told Paul to show them he still lived “in observance of the law.” Then we read in Acts 21:24-26 that Paul took four men with him “and the next day he purified himself with them and went into the temple, to give notice when the days of purification would be fulfilled and the offering presented for every one of them.” The church had not yet ceased offering animal sacrifices. Presumably Christians came to understand what they did about Jesus’ sacrifice later, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans around 70 C.E. The Jews themselves ceased offering animals sacrifices after that time as well, so even though Christians ceased offering up animal sacrifices they probably didn’t do so any sooner than the Jews themselves. Even if they did, it would best be understood as an unintended consequence of a developing Christian theology. It was not something that they ceased doing because of any care they might have had for animals.

A Final Note.

After reviewing a few of the Biblical passages concerning the treatment of animals in the Bible, Christian philosopher Robert Wennberg candidly speaks about what Christians must do to defend holy writ from this appalling lack of concern found in the Bible about animals. He suggests that the defenders of the Bible who are seeking a Biblical basis for a “dramatic revisioning” of Christian attitudes toward animals “are no worse off, possibly better off, than those who in an earlier century turned to Scripture in order to condemn slavery.” [God, Humans, and Animals, pp. 299-302]. He openly admits that “Scripture may seem to have been more of an impediment to the Christian community’s finally making a decisive break with slavery than it was a help,” which I find a major understatement. According to him “there seems to be considerable textual ammunition for the southern white preacher in the 1850’s to rebut attacks on slavery by Christian abolitionists,” but that eventually the abolitionists won the debate. These Christian abolitionist apologists were not “principally seeking to decide whether slavery is right or wrong,” though. They already knew it was wrong and sought a Biblical justification for it, he admits. What necessitated these attempts, he honestly confessed “was the independent conviction that slavery is wrong.” Hence, just as in the case of slavery where the goal of explaining these specific texts “is typically an activity that occurs after we have come to see slavery to be an evil, not before,” so also he challenges the whole Christian community to “come to terms with all of Scripture,” with the goal of arriving at a “thorough and defensible theological vision of animals and their place in the moral universe.” [Ibid., p. 308].

Such a goal as Wennberg proposes is called special pleading, pure and simple. The conclusion has already been reached. Now find the reasons for accepting it in the texts of the Bible. As I’ve argued in this chapter the Biblical texts do not support Wennberg’s animal concern. The truly intellectually honest thing to do, in my opinion, would be to seek to understand what the Bible actually teaches rather than force it to fit inside the grid of anti-slavery, pro-feminism, or animal advocacy concerns. Only after being candidly honest with the texts themselves will he be able to be intellectually honest when thinking about God and the Bible. My claim is that we do not see much of a concern at all for animals in the Bible. It truly is anthropocentric to the core. And as such it’s not indicative at all of what a perfectly good God would reveal to us. If God was truly concerned for the welfare of animals he would’ve said, “Thou shalt not mistreat, abuse or kill animals,” and said it as often as he needed to without giving any conflicting advice. Then God’s people could not justify the ill treatment of them down through the centuries. Then there would be nothing to reform, since there wouldn’t be such wanton abuse, organized abuse, of them in his world.

Science and Religion: A Truce

2009-07-13T09:57:00.000-04:00

I, Science, have heard your plea for a truce, oh religion, My nemesis of ages past.

You are wounded, oh religion.
The still-warm blood runs down your side as you say it did your savior on the cross.
My Soldiers in white coats have maimed you.
They have crippled you, leaving you to limp away a casualty from the battlefield.

And now, on the loser’s end, with My chipped and crimson sword laid at your throat, you plead for mercy.
You beg Me to spare your life.
You ask for compassion and for understanding from Me, Science.
You want to be held up and accepted.

Know that I, Science, have no obligation to hear you.
Better it is that you should die, as all things old and decrepit.
But out of compassion and mercy, I grant you what you seek.

I let you alone.
I let you go your way.
I spare you.
But like a fool, you press your luck and demand more.

Instead of running away with your tale between your legs, with a morsel of thankfulness, and what little dignity you have left intact, you debase yourself.
You whine and complain.
You want your doctrines to be accepted in the universities and Institutions of Science and higher learning as viable theories, if not Scientific Truths.

You ask, “Why does science have to be so hostile to religion?”
“Why does the Scientific Community mock us so?”
“Why can't we as religious believers get the respect that we seek?”
“Why can't science and religion join hands?”

And I, Science, reply to you that We are hostile to you because you claim to be of Our Number, but are not.
Your representatives – the creationists and apologists of the ID movement – claim allegiance to Science when your claim is invalid and a manipulation for your own advantage.

You are imposters, all of you, liars and imposters with an agenda.
You serve yourselves and your own interests, and not those of Science.
You seek to exalt your savior and your faith.
You don't seek Truth.

So this I say to you – the religious intelligencia who actively seek an alliance with, Me, Science – take the liberties I give you. Bask in the sun of the life conveniences and the comforts I have granted to you, to worship, to sing, to pray, and to affirm or to deny any belief you want; teach and expound; reprove, rebuke, and exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine; imagine and create, appoint and oversee; stand outside and admire the stars and the host of heaven as you believe your god provided them for you to admire.

Let the raindrops bounce off of your tongue; admire to no end; teach on love, seek peace, and promote change as you see fit. Do all these things and My covenant of peace shall abide with you, and a very small number of My White-coated Representatives of Science shall at times join you as you worship.

But should you cross into My Territory, into the Territory that belongs to Science, should you bring your antiquated holy books into My Realms of microscopes and peer-reviewed journals, should you take select quotes from real Scientists to bolster your own beliefs and the claims of your false scientists, I will attack you and will kill you in open debate.
You can never stand up to Me, oh religion.
I am your Successor.
I am your Better.

Should the outstretched arms and bleeding hands of your savior embolden you to embrace Our Naturalistic Approach and begin to choke our Scientific Method, should the representatives of your splintered, pious movements begin to interfere and impersonate Our Scientists, to subvert our Work and to make it your own work, a great trespass is committed, and I will remember no more the covenant I made with you.

Nay, I, Science, shall strike you down, and your academics shall be cast out of the universities.
All My Scholars shall hiss at you, and you will be a mockery and an abhorrence to all of the Enlightened everywhere.
You shall grope in the darkness.
Only the simpleton and the ignoramus and the child shall hear you.
The dumb and the fool and the unlearned shall be they who give ear to your words.

And I, Science, shall surely slay you in the courts of the lands.
Cursed shall you be in the schools and cursed shall you be in the colleges.
Cursed shall you be in the laboratories and cursed shall you be in all of the institutions of higher learning.

I, Science, have spoken.

(JH)

What Is The Difference Between A Perception And Knowledge?

2009-07-13T00:24:00.004-04:00

Or, "What is the difference between private personal experience and knowledge?". I know this may sound like a stupid question to some, but it seems that it is pivotal in the "Disregarding Established Knowledge..." discussion. In my view, considering inaccessible personal experience to be of the same value as established knowledge is untenable.

Disregarding Established Knowledge Is Bad, UnKay?

2009-07-12T03:52:00.000-04:00

Its simple,
If your beliefs are not consitent with established human knowledge, then they probably are not justified. In that case, other people are not justified in believing what you say about them, and furthermore you have no reason to expect anyone to believe you.

Another One Leaves the Fold: YOU Could Be Next.

2009-07-11T07:50:00.007-04:00

Below are excerpts from yet another former Christian telling his family and church friends he no longer believes. Isn't the internet a wonderful thing?

I dare say no one has called out more to God than I for answers, even for answers about his own existence. No one has pleaded more with God for help. No one has been on their knees more than me. But I’ve heard nothing. Not one thing but my own voice, until eventually I got the impression that my prayers were merely floating to the ceiling and falling back down like stillborn stars. So, I got off my knees and determined, like the human that I am, to find the truth.

We have, indeed, for centuries, received nothing at all but silence from the God of the Old Testament, just as we have received no recent word from Jesus or Zeus or Apollo or Allah or Osiris. Thousands of years have passed and not an utterance. Does that not strike anyone else as peculiar?

I did not set out at the start to disprove anything. I set out to find the truth. And these truths we can’t escape: Earth is billions of years old, Earth exists on a spiral arm of our galaxy, an insignificant spot, and not the center of the galaxy as many of our forebearers thought (which, by the way, gave creedance to the argument that we are the special planet, and a special species, in all of creation). The Earth will one day be uninhabited by people once again, not by a rapture, but either by a wayward asteroid or gamma ray burst or by the sun losing power. The truth is the canonical Bible contains many irreparable self-contradictions; condones slavery, mass slaughter, rape, the mutilation or altering of children’s genitalia, among other things; and cannot even get the details straight about the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

And at some point, all us of have to make a similar choice: Do we want to be complacent in living our lives for a faith that may or may not, in reality, be true, or can we mentally and emotionally handle another possibility: that we are an insignificant dot in a vast, vast universe.

For me, the option that we are an insignificant dot in a vast universe, takes much more wherewithall, and frankly, is a quite liberating axiom, to know that we are, at the core, connected and interconnected with the universe, not just Earth, and everything the universe is quite a beautiful thing, as astrophycisist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted.

His name is Jeremy Styron.

Debate with Jerry McDonald: Round three

2009-07-11T01:11:00.003-04:00

The third round is now completed.

Direct Evidence Of Moral Behavior From Evolution

2009-07-10T00:38:00.005-04:00

My working hypothesis is that Game Theory and simple rules derived from self-interest are sufficient to generate self-organized behavior that is labeled as "Morality". Here's more evidence to back that up.

Evolution Guides Cooperative Turn-taking, Game Theory-based Computer Simulations Show, ScienceDaily.com

"We published indirect evidence for this in 2004; we have now shown it directly and found a simple explanation for it. Our findings confirm that cooperation does not always require benevolence or deliberate planning. This form of cooperation, at least, is guided by an ‘invisible hand’, as happens so often in Darwin’s theory of natural selection.”

Should Skeptics Send Their Children to Church on Sundays?

2009-07-09T23:59:00.002-04:00

Last night I talked with a skeptic who wants his children to be exposed to Christianity in order for them to learn about it and to decide for themselves. So he's sending them to some church on Sundays. Is this a good strategy? NO, not at all, for several reasons. There are other alternatives. I have an alternative proposal for him and others like him.

Let me suggest to these skeptics what they ought to do. If they want to truly expose their children to religious ideas then they should send their children to different churches for a month at a time, or more. Have them attend them in a random order. Have them attend a Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, Seventh-Day Adventist, United Church of Christ, Congregational, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic, Unitarian, Disciples of Christ, and Non-instrumental Church of Christ churches. And don't forget a Jewish Synagogue, a Muslim Mosque, a snake handling service, a Pentecostal healing service, and so on and so on, and so on and so on. If this skeptical parent truly wants to expose his children to the religious ideas of his culture then give them the whole range of choices to choose from. And don’t forget to take these children to atheist meet-ups, and freethought gatherings too. Then these children can truly choose for themselves. Then these children can be truly educated about these ideas. And then these children will most assuredly choose to be skeptics.

Nothing but total exposure to the varying options will educate his children. This is what Daniel Dennett proposes with regard to educating our youths in American schools, but will probably never fly because of First Amendment concerns. When placed on a equal playing field religious options are no options at all. THAT’s why I love Bill Maher’s movie Religulous, because it does just that.

One danger in sending our children to the same church over and over is that children are easily swayed to believe what an authority figure tells them in a community of happy looking, but deluded, people. Take for instance Norman Geisler, known as the "Dean of Christian Apologetics." He was raised in an atheist home, but because of a bus ministry he went to church every Sunday for nine years and was swayed to accept and then later defend Christianity. His parents thought the same thing as this skeptic, but they were wrong to do so.

Inerrancy and the Crisis of Evangelicals in the Late 70's

2009-07-09T10:38:00.005-04:00

Last night I heard my friend Bob Price give a talk on his new book Inerrant the Wind, which describes the crisis evangelicals had in the late 70's to the early 80's, of which I remember very well. Harold Lindsell dropped his bombshell of a book on us titled, The Battle for the Bible, where he drew a line in the sand whereby evangelicals must accept inerrancy in order to stay evangelicals. Afterward all of us had to take a position on the matter.

This book is Price's dissertation finally in print about that era. There were five evangelical responses as he describes them. Each one of them opened the door to liberal thought, and he takes us through each one of them. Price argues that basically Lindsell was right. Once evangelicals denied inerrancy they were on a slippery slide to liberalism, but Lindsell was wrong in that the Bible is in fact errant, which led evangelicals to travel on this slippery slide in the first place. A history of evangelicals since that time proves that Price's predictions were correct. Evangelicals who denied inerrancy did indeed become more and more liberal. It's a good book and a very interesting read.

In our own day a recent attempt to reformulate and question inerrancy is the book by Carlos R. Bovell. He's already given up the ship.

I also had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Bruce of "Bruce Droppings" who also wrote about last night.

Genesis Chapter 1 (Revised Reality Version)

2009-07-07T01:01:00.000-04:00

Rumors of a Tunnel in the Underground Railroad: Using Both Reason and Evidence to Learn the Truth

2009-07-06T23:59:00.002-04:00

This past weekend my wife and I went to hear a presentation about the Underground Railroad in Orland, Indiana. This small town has quite an interesting past with regard to aiding runaway slaves. Then we went on a walking tour of a few of the homes where these slaves found rest on their journey to Detroit and then into Canada, which was a free country. The people of this town probably helped thousands of them.

Our guide mentioned that there are rumors of an underground tunnel between the leader’s house to either the library or someone else’s house. But the library wasn’t built until years later and she couldn’t find any evidence of a tunnel.

Here then lies an example of what we do in testing a claim. The first thing we do is to think. Can we account for the origin of a rumor that would lead us to think it’s not true? The Underground Railroad was neither underground nor was it a railroad (although in some cases slaves did hitch a ride on trains). Rumors after all, like folklore, spring up all of the time because we’re story-telling people. Rumors of tunnels have sprung up everywhere with no basis (although archaeologists did discover one under George Washington’s home). Then too, we must ask ourselves what would be the purpose of a tunnel? Tunnels to transport slaves would require a great deal of work, so the payoff would have to be significant. Our tour guide told about one house that had a trap door on the second story where runaway slaves would climb down into a room with no windows and no other way to get out but to climb back up. That seems to have been a good enough hiding place. Why would they need a tunnel? These runaway slaves could be easily transported at night, which they were.

While this disproves nothing, it does cause us to require evidence before we’ll accept such a claim.

See, that way easy. The analogy here at DC is obvious. If it isn't then my next post will make it so.

If God Knows How to Get My Attention Why Doesn't He Do So?

2009-07-06T23:56:00.006-04:00

After hearing a presentation of the Underground Railroad my wife and I watched a local parade and then went to the Park to mingle, eat, and watch some skydivers land in an open space. I saw an old friend named Joe there are we got into a conversation. He is a Bible Thumper, and by that I mean someone who finds all of his theological questions answered decisively in the Bible, not in reason. Even as a believer I thought Joe was lopsided, since reason was something God created and he required us to think about these issues as well. But Joe has all of the answers.

Joe is sure that he's right and that he has the proper interpretation of the Bible, even though he has had no deep theological training at all. He has the tendency to talk down to others since he has divine truth and it doesn’t matter if someone has studied these issues out deeply either. Again, he has divine answers.

In the course of our conversation he told me that he cannot convince me to believe again, only the Holy Spirit can do that. As he was starting to quote the Bible I interrupted him. I told him about the presentation I just heard concerning the Underground Railroad and the rumors of a tunnel, and how to think through such claims. Then I said to him he needs to begin by thinking, not quoting.

“Don’t quote the Bible to me. Just think about what you’re saying. Does the Holy Spirit know how to get my attention?” He said that “it depended on whether I reject the Spirit or not.” “But even if I rejected it can the Holy Spirit get my attention anyway, like what supposedly happened to Paul who was so hard-hearted that he was even persecuting Christians? Can he get my attention like his supposedly got Moses’ attention with a burning bush? Can he get my attention like he did with Gideon, or many others?” Joe had to admit that I was right, "yes he knows how to get your attention." Then I simply asked him: "If God knows how to get my attention why doesn’t he do so? It’s not that I don’t want to believe. I am open to the evidence just like I’m open to the evidence that there is a tunnel in the town of Orland. It’s just that I cannot believe. I really can’t. It not only doesn’t make sense, there isn’t enough evidence to believe these ancient stories.”

In the end Joe asked if he could pray for me. I told him yes that would be fine. But then I also said if prayer works it’s a done deal. I should eventually believe.

We parted as friends, but I hope the lesson was not lost on him. We must begin to evaluate a claim by simply thinking about it.

End Times: A set of prophecies or a set of hallucinations?

2009-07-06T14:50:00.004-04:00

Real Christians are going to disappear abruptly someday soon. The world is going to descend into a bloodbath while someone known as the antichrist attempts to seize control of the planet. That is what some of your neighbors think—and some of your politicians. Many of them even relish the thought. Is Revelation, the last book in the Bible, a set of prophecies or a set of hallucinations? Neither, says Reverend Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard Washington.

If the Book of Revelation isn’t a blueprint that tells us what is coming in the End Times, what the heck is it?
Like any book in the Bible, Revelation was written from the perspective of faith for the purpose of giving faith. It was written in the early days of the Jesus movement to a persecuted minority that was fearing worse persecution.

As the Jesus movement started in Jerusalem and Jesus was crucified, and there was this experience of resurrection, at the same time, there was a simultaneous political movement within Judaism of rebellion against the Roman Empire. It peaked in the 60’s and 70’s. It culminated finally—horrifically-- in the Roman legions marching into the country, destroying Jerusalem and burning down the temple. These two factors – the young Jesus movement and the brutally crushed rebellion–intersect in the writings we now call Revelation

But Revelation doesn’t talk about Jerusalem being destroyed. It talks about a beast with many heads and a dragon and the four horsemen. . .
That poetic language which sounds so strange to us was actually familiar to ancient readers. The author was writing a dramatic script in a form of popular media. Today we all recognize different modes or “genres” of writing—the detective novel, the love sonnet, manga. . Each has its own familiar structure and images. The same was true in the past.

The book of Revelation belongs to a then popular genre of literature called apocalyptic. The term apocalypse means “unveiling.” There were lots of apocalypses, each a graphic poetic vision of some radically transformed future in which the good guys win. This genre began around 200 BC and went out of style around 150 AD. The book of Revelation is also called the Apocalypse of John, and it is one of several explicitly Christian apocalypses that still exist today. In each, metaphoric language was used to communicate something that, experientially, felt too big for words. It was a way of trying to speak the unspeakable—and to inspire endurance and hope.

So what was the author of Revelation unveiling?
Revelation was written about twenty years after the fall of Jerusalem. The author, who we know only as John, had lived during the horrors that accompanied fall of the city. Imagine: the Roman Empire is surrounding Jerusalem. At the same time, civil war is raging within the walls. People are literally starving to death. As the siege continues, the Romans capture 20,000 Jews and crucify them on the walls of the city—while the city still is under siege.

20,000! We think of the crucifixion being unique.
No. Crucifixions happened all the time. There were thousands and thousands of crucifixions. The Jews wanted freedom. To them it was a blasphemy to have the Romans in their land. Many of them rebelled, and they lost. Eventually, the city fell, and the people were slaughtered. Many remaining were expelled from the land. This is part of the Diaspora—the scattering of the Jews, who became dispersed around the Mediterranean—Asia Minor, Greece, Northern Africa and Europe.

But the author, John, is a Christian.
Remember, the earliest members of the Jesus movement were Jews, and so early Christians scattered with the rest of the Jewish people. Over time, thanks to this scattering and missionary activity, Christianity began to be adopted more widely by gentiles and at that point it began to grow rapidly throughout the Mediterranean. John is writing to Pauline (gentile) churches, but they are very rooted in Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures.

At the time Revelation is written, about twenty years after the devastating events of The Great Revolt, the young scattered Christian movement is being persecuted. They are treated like Blacks in the South during the ‘30s and ‘40s. A Christian carpenter might not be able to get work. Some are lynched. John, himself, is writing from exile, so whatever he was preaching was viewed by the Roman Empire as a threat to law and order.

Why was the message so threatening?
Clearly, part of his message was “Stop participating in the imperial cult. Stop participating in the patriotic way of life of the Roman Empire which requires paying homage to the gods of the Empire and in particular the emperor as an incarnation of God.” The Early Christian movement was an alternative to the way of empire. You know, Jesus is called “Lord and Savior”. If you ask where did that language came from, that language came from Caesar. Caesar was “Lord and Savior.” Christians celebrate the birthday of Jesus on December 25, which was when Roman celebrated the birthday of the Unconquered Sun. The pagans believed that if they didn’t take care of the gods, the gods wouldn’t take care of them. By forbidding the cult of the gods, the Christians threatened this balance.

One thing confuses me. Is John writing about events in his past or events in his future?
First of all, he is writing from a lived experience of what Empire can do. That is the key to understanding his perspective. He is writing a book that combines familiar political images. The dragons, for example, are much like our political cartoons. When you see an eagle and a bear you know it means the United States and the Soviet Union. For him, he is using images largely out of Hebrew scripture to convey what the Roman Empire is, and what he believes will happen to the early Christian movement. John’s primary message comes in Chapter 18: Empire will fall. Rome cannot last. This power structure that seems so big and is so crushing of the people will crumble, and God will re-create out of the ruins a new Jerusalem. John continually counsels the movement to hold fast: Those who endure to the end will be saved. This is a book of hope: The empire is going to fall. God is going to make a way where there is no way.

But had he—lost it? With all of the bizarre images, I’ve heard Revelation called “John on Acid.”
No. Almost all the imagery in the book of Revelation is rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, and some comes from Greek myths. In Chapter 12, you have the woman clothed in the sun and Satan falls out of the sky and there is this dragon that chases the woman. Well, that is the birth of Apollo. Domitian, who is the emperor at that time, he likens himself to Apollo. He is the sun god. So John is taking this known story and writing a counter-myth. He is saying that Domitian is not so important as he thinks. The birth of the child, Jesus, that’s the real big story.

The images of Jesus himself are rooted in Hebrew stories. They simply cannot be understood unless you know that they are coming from the book of Daniel and Ezekiel and Zachariah. The narrative, the story line is rooted in the Exodus story in which God liberates the Jews from Pharaoh’s empire – walks them through the Red Sea and the wilderness and sends them to a promised land. Revelation is a recapitulation, a re-telling of the same story. God is the god who frees us from empire, whether Pharaoh or Dominion. We will come out of this into a land flowing with milk and honey. One of the big exhortations of the book is: “Come out of her.”—Come out of Roman Empire (as the Jews came out of Egypt).

What you are saying helps me to understand why people who are immersed in this theology are so fearful of empire – the League of Nations, the Soviet Union, the United Nations—any form of internationalism. Among the “Left Behind” crowd, people who are bridge builders or peacemakers are seen as evil and to be mistrusted. That is what John was talking about, that was his experience, even if people take it out of context.
From the very beginnings, part of the Christian message was the notion of an end time. God is going to clean up the world –which is a messy awful a place with a lot of violence and evil. After all, the central hero of the Christian story is tortured and crucified-- put to death by an empire! How is God going to clean up the world? Jesus is going to come back and rule the world and shepherd the nations.

The Hebrew understanding of history is that it is going somewhere. It is linear, not cyclical, which is a break with the agriculture-based earth religions. Christianity, which is a child of Judaism, picks up the Hebrew storyline: History is linear. But –and this is really important-- in the Bible the end is never the end of the physical world. It is the end of an age. It’s the end, for example, of the Roman empire, and then what happens is not that everyone is whisked off to heaven but that on earth there is a renewal , a renewal of the earth itself, of culture, of the nations ,peace and justice, everyone has their own vineyard and fig tree.

So, where did the notion of everyone being lifted out of their clothes and cars and cockpits come from?
That comes from the 19th Century. An Anglo-Irish theologian called John Darby created a new interpretive lens for the Bible. It’s called Dispensationalism, because in this system, history is divided into seven “dispensations” or ages within an age. In this system, the Rapture leads to the Millennium when Jesus reigns on Earth for 1000 years but before the Millennium is the reign of the antichrist. At different historical junctures different bad buys are picked as the antichrist. In the 1970’s, thanks to Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, it was all about Russia. And the ten nations, the European Union would become part of the Beast. Today dire warnings about Barack Obama being the antichrist are scattered about the internet. Or Osama Bin Ladin.

Believe me—I’ve seen plenty of both—even Chavez and Bono. But come back, for a moment, to the Rapture itself. What about that verse in Thessalonians (1 Thess. 4:16). There’s the Lord descending with a trumpet, and the dead in Christ rising and then “we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air.”
That is wonderful graphical mythical language which, when written, had very little to do with the plot of Left Behind.

Thessalonians is Paul talking with an early church in southern Europe, and he faces a specific challenge: Christians have died. We had expected Jesus to come back before that happened. Now what do we do? Paul thought he was living at the end of an age. He thought he would see the day that God would come back, clean up the earth and restore Paradise. But it hasn’t happened within the timeframe he expected, so he offers an explanation that integrates the existing facts—instead of Christ returning before any Christians have died, the dead and the living are united with Jesus together.

Flash forward a little bit. When you study very early church history, if you study the art of the early church you don’t see a lot of images of the crucifix or scenes of the crucifixion; you see images of paradise. And there was a proclamation of the early church that had an optimistic view – that where we were headed --on earth as in heaven, was a paradise. This was the expectation of many in the early Jesus movement.

There was a historical process, and over time this expectation changed for some. This process, which I don’t have time to go into, was wrapped around when Constantine became emperor and absorbed Christianity as the state religion. Rather than being a minority faith it became the dominant faith.. Once it became the dominant faith Christianity radically changed because it became about politics and power and control of the nations.

You have this book that is all about how evil empires can be because he has this horrifying experience and now all of a sudden Christianity is in power; empire is on the side of Christianity. That’s a little awkward.
Yes. And, the book of Revelation was dormant for many many years because of this. In our time the book of Revelation has come back with a vengeance because the imagery is made to order for wild interpretation. You’ve got an entire generation of children being raised in these fundamentalist end-times churches, being told they are the last generation.

You obviously think this is a bad thing.
Well, thankfully these families don’t live as if what they say is true is really true. They are still stashing away money to send their kids to college and for their own retirement. If they really believed you would see a hardening of the faith. There is a far right segment of Christian in which you do see this hardening—churches focused on “spiritual warfare” building walls rather than bridges, organizing services to celebrate gun rights, praying public prayers for the death of abortion providers or Barack Obama or judges. This kind of far right hardening comes out of the misuse of apocalyptic literature. Christianity gets translated into a quest for purity and righteousness that will bring these prophesies to fruition.

You said earlier that there were lots of apocalypses. It was a popular medium. How did this particular book get into the Bible?
Well, there was controversy about that. Many Christians didn’t want it in the Bible, and even Martin Luther question the decision of the Catholic councils to include it. Revelation got into the Bible because the church fathers chose to believe that the same John who knew Jesus in person was the author of this and several other texts. Their primary criterion was “apostolic authority.” What we now know – this is just the evolution of our own knowledge—is that the authors who wrote the Gospel of John, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Letters of John, and the Apocalypse of John, were not the same person. The script is very different. The same phrases are not used. One is written by a highly educated Greek author, the other written by a person whose primary language is Semitic.

These books that the counsels thought were written by John, the companion of Jesus, they were written by two or three people?
The people who actually knew Jesus, the twelve, none of them left writings for us. All of these writings are written well after the death of Jesus. The Church was looking for authority, and so they tried to choose writings that fit a hierarchical form of Christianity and that traced their lineage through the apostles back to Jesus. The Bible is the book for the church and it was compiled by the Church for the purpose of helping the Church advance faith. The books didn’t become finalized as scripture till 300 years after Jesus lived and died.

I was taught as a child that the Bible was essentially dictated by God to the authors. I was never taught about which books were chosen and how. But I would assume that Catholics believe God gave perfect insight to the councils that made the decisions?
I would assume so. And that is a wonderful mask for authority. When religion becomes a pursuit of power—a system to keep people in control, you are always going to have those games that are being played. Against religion, you have the message of Jesus, which is a spiritual message – a message of freedom.

Part of what this comes down to is: What is the Bible? When you are dealing with an end times fundamentalist Christian, you are dealing with a person who believes that the Bible was written by God– God writes it and there is a secret code and if you are in the know you will know the code and the elect will know the code. The Bible itself becomes a magical book, a secret script. If you just know how to read the script, you’ll know where the world is going. And so people begin to live this script as if they live in the end times.

We’re so into that secret knowledge thing, aren’t we? You see it many places: Gnosticism, the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, the Mormon temple, childhood clubs, Skull and Bones . . . .
Yes, and I think you see it in all religions. I think that part of the religious impulse easily gets perverted into a quest for secret knowledge because it makes me more than you. I am special, I am elect, I am closer to God, I know the truth. The reality is that we are all schmucks trying to muddle through as best we can.

This article is adapted from an interview conducted by Valerie Tarico on Moral Politics Television, Seattle, June 12, 2009. Special thanks to Producer Bill Alford.

Is Atheism Rationally Coercive?

2009-07-05T23:59:00.010-04:00

Let me comment on what Eric said here at DC, who is an intelligent Christian:

I'm just trying to get at the truth. I was an ardent atheist for a number of years, but gradually came to believe that the theistic worldview and the arguments for it are more consistent with my experience of the world and my philosophic intuitions (which we all rely upon when thinking these things through). I've changed my mind in the past, and I'm certainly open to doing it again in the future. I don't think that my position is rationally coercive, but I do think that it's rational, just as I would say (and I presume John would agree) that the arguments for atheism aren't rationally coercive, but atheism is rational. LINK

First off I really appreciate Eric's honesty and willingness to consider his faith to be in error. Not many believers will say what he did, and for that I find it a joy to discuss these issues with him, even if we both think the other person is wrong. Kudos to him! Can I say the same thing?

Am I open to the possibility that I'm wrong? Well, it depends on the question. If the question is whether there was a supernatural force or being who may have created a quantum wave fluctuation which caused this universe to spring into existence as his last act before dying, then yes, I could be wrong. Such a being might have existed. Nor am I 100% sure no supernatural force or being exists now. But if the question is whether evangelical Christianity is true or many other moderate to liberal versions of that faith, then yes, I am very sure. Do I think there is a slightest chance that I might be wrong about Christianity? No. In fact, I am so sure I'm right that I'm willing to risk being thrown into hell for all of eternity. I think this says a lot about how assured I am that I'm correct.

That being said, do I think arguments for atheism aren't rationally coercive? Yes, that's what I think. Let me explain by defining the words "atheism" and "rationally" as well as what it means for something to be "coercive". These distinctions need to be fleshed out to see why I say this.

If the word “atheism” means “metaphysical naturalism,” as Eric and many Christian theists equate the terms, then I do not think “metaphysical naturalism” is “coercive” in the sense that the evidence compels people to accept it. One could affirm deism, or the philosopher’s god. If the word "atheism" is defined as simply "the lack of a belief in God," then that too is not rationally coercive, if for no other reason but that rational people disagree (as I'll explain later when it comes to the word "rationally"). I do think that agnosticism is rationally coercive, if by that we mean a skeptical method for assessing truth claims. We should all be agnostics in the Huxleyan sense. I also think agnosticism is rationally coercive if by that we mean the view that we just don't know why the universe exists (known as "soft-agnosticism"). We must all admit this is the default positon before making any positive claims about the origins of existence. I just happen to think this kind of agnosticism leads us to atheism though, as defined in either sense above.

When it comes to what it is that makes a person reasonable or “rational,” this is a complex topic. If people can only be considered rational if they are correct, then there are a few serious problems to be dealt with which cannot be satisfactorily answered. For one, how is it possible for a rational person to change his mind and still be considered a rational person both before and after changing his mind? Did he all of a sudden become rational because he changed his mind for the truth, or did he become irrational because he changed his mind and is now wrong? Besides, how do we describe what it means to be rational when all of us are surely right about some things and yet wrong about other things? Are we just rationally schizophrenic human beings? Furthermore, how can we tell when someone is rational if being rational means being correct, since everyone is influenced by non-rational emotional factors having to do with what William James described as our passionate natures? If we are to judge whether someone is wrong about an issue and hence irrational, then how sure can we be that we are not wrong and therefore irrational ourselves?

If instead we think being rational means following the rules of logic, then rational people can be dead wrong and still be rational. All they have to do is follow the rules of logic to be rational. Rational people can be dead wrong simply because they start with a false assumption. If they take a false assumption as their starting point then they may be perfectly rational to follow that assumption with good logic to its logical conclusion, even though their conclusion is wrong. They would be wrong not because they are irrational, but because they started with a wrong assumption.

To people who think we should have no assumptions I merely say that we must all assume some things if for no other reason than that we can never examine everything we accept to be true all at once. Ideas which are not subject to conscious scrutiny form a set of background beliefs which are used in assessing a given issue at hand. Our conclusions on these other issues are our accumulated set of assumptions. Yes, we must try to examine everything we accept one at a time, but we can never examine all of that which we accept as true. Just as Michael Polanyi effectively argued that we know more than we can tell, we also accept more than we can justify. Have you, for instance, ever serious examined whether or not communication is even possible between two people? Some philosophers have, and at least one ancient Greek philosopher named Cratylus concluded this was impossible. Given that conclusion of his, Cratylus merely wiggled his finger whenever he was asked a question, which, if he was correct, was the logical thing to do even if it might seem irrational. Your assumption that we do communicate is just that, an assumption, until you actually examine the arguments to the contrary. Was Cratylus correct? I don’t think so. But even if he was wrong he was still being rational. In the same sense I think George Berkeley was wrong for arguing there was no physical universe even if I think he was rational in doing so, and I do.

As another example, I personally think the logic of the Inquisition was impeccable, but absolutely wrong because it assumed God was the author of certain Biblical texts that justified it. As another example, if a believer assumes God exists then this might lead him to logically conclude God is the author of morality and that there is a life after death. The logic is probably there, at least for believers. It’s just that their starting assumption is false.