[...] please stop labeling the other side of the argument as “hate speech” and bigotry. It’s not. It is a working out of deep convictions and a particular understanding of sexuality as a good gift from a good Creator, to be used within certain boundaries.

I originally responded with a riff off a previous post, because I’m not convinced that these “deep convictions” are anything more than unreflective conservatism combined with some proof texting. But I really like Ari Kohen’s response to a Glenn Loury and Ann Althouse bloggingheads talk:

Religions aren’t monolithic; if people really are involved in deep spiritual reflection on the matter of homosexuality, then they will surely be able to find an interpretation of their religious texts that allows for the kind of evolution that President Obama described. This doesn’t mean I’m not serious about practicing Judaism; it means I’m serious about finding a way to reconcile my belief in the teachings of Judaism with my belief that people should be treated equally. But, obviously, one must actually have both of these beliefs.

What do we call someone who either fails to consider the alternative teaching of his or her religion or rejects that teaching because it doesn’t lead to continued condemnation of gays and lesbians, someone — in other words — who doesn’t actually have both a religious belief and a belief in equality?

With apologies to Loury and Althouse, I think I have to call it bigotry.

I really like this response, because it recognizes that religions are variegated things that allow the individual more control than most folks acknowledge. We’re fond of treating religion as something you’re born into and stuck with barring deconversion. We don’t often talk about the streams of tradition within the religion that an individual must accept or reject.

Look around you: in our culture the chances are you’re going to see someone who is a Christian but holds to different interpretations of what Christianity means. Every sect has a tradition that explains how they’ve come to understand their religion the way they do. Every permutation has an argument as to why their tradition is legitimate. And this is fractal: every community has within it different streams of tradition that emphasis and interpret the components differently.

Perhaps you’re an evangelical who places high importance on the words of the Bible. But why do you take this passage at face value, while interpreting that passage in its historical context? Why is this verse intended only for that time and place while that verse is immortal and internal? Why do you interpret this passage in light of that passage instead of the other way around?

More ink has been spilled writing biblical commentaries than writing Bibles. Many of these interpretations are reasonable and the arguments sensible. How do you decide which is the “right” interpretation? Different members of your community have honestly looked and yet come to differing conclusions.

Kohen offers one way out of this mess: certain principles are non-negotiable. With Kohen, one of these principles is that all humans are equal. If you’re thinking leads you to the conclusion that some people have rights that others do not have, then it’s time to think again.

This is an old, old method. Rabbi Hillel is supposed to have said that the golden rule is the core of the law, and that all the rest is commentary. If your interpretation of the law leads you towards treating someone in a way that you would find hateful if the situation were reversed, then your interpretation is wrong. Supposedly his followers expanded this to say that the love of one’s neighbor is the core of the law, and any interpretation that leads you away from that love is flawed.

This should be natural for Christians, since Jesus spelled out the two most important commandments in Matthew 22:36-41, one of which was to love your neighbor as yourself. If your interpretation of the Bible leads you towards treating your neighbor as if their love, vows and relationships are less real than your own, then – as we say on the interwebs – “ur doin’ it wrong.”

And, as Kohen concluded, if your only guiding principle seems to be that gays are icky and less than equal with heterosexuals, then we have to conclude that your principles are bigoted. No matter how prayerfully and deeply you hold to a bigoted principle, it does not stop being bigoted, nor do you.

They could learn a lesson from that old time religion, Christianity, where instead of just shouting at people, like John the Baptist did (and look what happened to him), St Paul professed to become all things to all men in order to win souls to his cause. Eventually, that strategy made Christianity the majority faith of the Roman empire.

I’ve run across these ideas about Paul before, and I thought I’d use this as an excuse to complicate them a bit.

John, Jesus and Paul

Let’s get the first part out of the way. According to tradition, John the Baptist and Paul both met the same fate: beheading as a punishment for troubling the authorities. And according to most historical Jesus scholars, John the Baptist played mentor to Jesus, so you can’t say he never accomplished anything. Any comparison has to accept that John started the movement that Paul found so inspiring.

Hoffman alludes to 1 Corinthians and Paul’s claim to be “all things to all men.” But accepting that at face value causes a problem when you run into one of Paul’s testy moments. For example, in Galatians we get to see Paul when his authority has been questioned.

Paul insisted that he derived his authority solely from God – no scholar’s modesty here. He prayed that “If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received [from me], let him be accursed.” And cursed “I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves!” Since his opponents were arguing for circumcision, this is sometimes translated as a wish that they’d ‘finish the job’ and castrate themselves. Fun guy.

Rather than being a flexible teacher, Paul had a very touchy pride that appears to have led to rifts between himself and the rest of the movement. His preaching led to a near riot in Ephesus (Acts 19:21-41), which the author of Acts attempts to explain away as caused by the base motives of the pagans, but which was more likely caused by the perception that Paul was dishonoring the patron Goddess Artemis.

Constantine

Then there’s the question of how much Paul accomplished. This question is hard to answer, because we have no reliable numbers from the period. Most of the traditional estimates come from Christian sources that were written very late. Some estimate that 10% of the Roman population was Christian by the time of Constantine.

There are problems with that number. 10% is also an estimate as to the number of Jews in the Empire. We have a great deal of archaeological evidence for the presence of Jews, including artwork and synagogues. In comparison, we have scant archaeological evidence for the presence of Christians.

This has led some historians, notably Peter Brown and Kenneth Harl(*), to suggest that Christians never spread as widely or as deeply as once thought. Whatever Paul’s successes as a missionary, his converts mainly stayed within the Jewish communities. The Neronian persecution put the brakes on future missionary work, and Christianity remained a minority of the Jewish minority until Constantine

If Brown and his colleagues are right then Constantine’s role is absolutely vital. There are many people who shaped early Christianity, like Paul, Ignatius and Origen. Without their influence Christianity may have survived, but it seems unlikely that it would become a world religion. However, without Constantine and the powers of the emperor, there is no real question: Christianity would have remained an afterthought.

So what can we atheists learn from “old time religion”? I suppose the lesson is that it doesn’t matter how cranky and controversial you are. If one of your converts holds absolute power, then your success is assured. I’m not sure how this lesson is useful, but there it is.

(*) Arguments here drawn for Kenneth W. Harl’s Teaching Company lectures, “Fall of the Pagans and the Origins of Medieval Christianity.”

Back when I was a wee little vorjack, my grandfather would always tell me Jack stories. These were little folk stories common in the southern appalachians.

Some Jack stories have fairy tale elements: kings, giants and dragons. You’re probably familiar with Jack the Giant Killer or Jack and the Beanstalk. My grandfather’s stories were always more mundane. They were stripped down Horatio Alger stories; no so much rags-to-riches as rags-to-financial-self-sufficiency.

The typical story had a small young man named Jack out in search of his fortune. Along the way he would have to outwit his larger, oafish older brothers (Will and Tom traditionally) and get cheated by a prosperous but conniving farmer. He would eventually outmaneuver the farmer with some clever wit or some homespun common sense, marry the farmer’s daughter and become prosperous.

Now open your bible to the story of young Jacob, about Genesis 25:24 to about Genesis 30:43. Jacob is a small young man out in search of his fortune. But first he must outwit his larger, oafish older brother (Essau) and he’ll get cheated by a prosperous but conniving farmer, his uncle Laban. Eventually Jacob outmaneuvers Laban with some clever animal husbandry, marries both of the farmer’s daughters and becomes prosperous.

Tricking the Trickster

The parallels are interesting. Both Jack and Jacob are archetypal trickster characters. And when the trickster is your hero, you can’t just have him launch into his pranks. The other guy has to start it. And so, Jack and Jacob get taken.

In Jack stories, this frequently involves squeezing more work out of the poor boy. In one story I remember, the conniving farmer orders Jack to plow until he can no longer see. Once the sun goes down Jack starts to unhitch the mules, only to turn around and find the farmer handing him a lantern. Once the lantern has burned out the sun is starting to rise. Keep plowing, boy.

Poor Jacob works for his uncle for seven years so that he can marry Laban’s daughter Rachel. Finally, on the day of the wedding, Jacob lifts the veil and finds the Laban has switched Rachel with his other daughter Leah. Ha! Sorry, Jacob, you got the wrong daughter. Seven more years of work if you still want the other one.

(You may notice that the women are practically non-entities in these stories. That’s the proof that they’re stories for young boys, for whom girls are still alien creatures.)

Brains over Brawn, Looks and Money

Eventually, the trickster wins by outsmarting his rival. In another Jack story, the conniving farmer is despairing the number of suitors after his daughter. In frustration. he tells his daughter that he’ll throw a dance, and whoever she’s dancing with at the end will be her husband.

Jack overhears, and convinces the other suitors that he just saw the daughter eating ramps (wild garlic) and that if they were going to get close to her they’d better eat ramps as well. While the other suitors are chowing down on ramps, Jack chomps on some breath mints that he’d palmed earlier. When the dance occurs, the daughter – who was sensible enough to have never touched a ramp – cannot tolerate the breath of any suitor except Jack.

The idea that eating ramps can protect you from the smell of ramps is a questionable bit of folk wisdom. (in my experience, the only thing that works is moving to another state.) But our boy Jacob uses an even less likely bit of ancient wisdom to make his fortune.

It stems from an agreement between Jacob and Laban: Jacob would watch Laban’s flocks, and in return Jacob would get to keep those sheep that were spotted and speckled. Sneaky Laban tried to cheat, by removing all the speckled sheep from his flock before Jacob could even begin. Where would Jacob’s wages come from now?

Jacob decided that is there were no speckled sheep in the flock, then he’d make his own. In the ancient world, it was believed that a baby would be affected by what the mother was looking at during the moment of conception. So Jacob took branches and cuts strips of bark off, making them striped and speckled. He placed the branches near the watering trough where the sheep would breed. And so many striped and speckled lambs were born, and Jacob’s fortune began to grow.

Just Another Tall Tale

So where exactly do these parallels come from? Barring a time machine, the most obvious answer is that the storytellers took the Jacob story as a model. But the men from the region I’ve met were not the sort to look to the Bible for bedtime stories. Religion is a sober thing, not a source of entertainment.

I kind of like the idea that there’s just something natural and intuitive about the shape of the story. When telling stories to a young grandson, what better hero than a strapping young lad. I like the idea that men have been telling such stories to sons and grandsons for over 2,500 years.

Unfortunately, my own grandfather is no longer telling these stories. He died last weekend, after long life, and surrounded by friends and family. He left behind a sprawling family, a hundred whittled toys, the lingering smell of pipe tobacco and fragments of stories like the ones above. I can no longer remember more than a few bits and pieces, but I hope that there are others who are passing down the old Jack stories, along with the love of a story well told.

But that cutting joke gets turned around and slices the wrong way when the word “biblical” is substituted for the word “creationist.” It thus winds up reaffirming Ham’s assertion that his “scientific creationism” is the best and the only way to read the Bible. It suggests, as Ham does, that “biblical = creationist.” It suggests that Hamsterian “scientific creationism” provides a valid interpretation of the story of Noah rather than being a weirdly illiterate exercise in missing the point.

Whenever we atheists talk about the bible, I’m reminded of the great Ingersoll quote:

“Too great praise challenges attention, and often brings to light a thousand faults that otherwise the general eye would never see.

Were we allowed to read the Bible as we do all other books, we would admire its beauties, treasure its worthy thoughts, and account for all its absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in rude, barbaric times. But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that it contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its parts; the source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the star and anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in Nature’s night.

These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact, so palpably absurd, that every free, unbiased soul is forced to raise the standard of revolt.”

Ingersoll was writing this before the Liberal/Fundamentalist split, before the waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants really began to arrive on American shores, before Tri-Fath America and so on. As one historian put it, America was as Reformed Protestant a nation as it was possible to be. Ingersoll could speak to an audience who overwhelmingly believed that the Bible should only be approached in a literal, “face value” fashion.

But that’s not the case today. While still a third of American Christians are biblical literalists, two thirds are not. Catholics are now the largest single denomination, making up almost a quarter of the Christian population. The numbers of liberal Christians are growing. The largest growing religious group are the unaffiliated, many of whom are seekers with broad religious ideas.

Should we still be approaching the public as if we’re talking to protestant biblical literalists? Granted, the literalists are still a large and vocal faction who need to be countered, but maybe it’s time to start aiming at biblicism rather than the bible itself. Maybe we should be trying to marginalize the biblicists, rather than treating them like the standard.

Yet, when left with a Bible for a suitable length of time, the same people will produce timelines like the following:

As folks like Fred Clark will tell you, there’s no quick and easy explanation of the Rapture in the Biblical text. You have to take pinch of Daniel and a soupçon of Ezekiel and fold it into the Revelation of St. John. Is this really “face value”? Can we call this “literal” in any meaning of the word?

(Image via Christian Nightmares)

Massey starts by quoting David Wright of Answers in Genesis setting the date of the Deluge at 2348 BC. He then provides some basic ancient history, so that we can see just what the rest of the world was doing during or soon after being drown:

It must have come as a real shock to Noah and his children when, in 2334 BC – only 14 years after the flood – Sargon the Great began establishing the powerful Akkadian empire. [...] “Barefoot and pregnant” doesn’t begin to describe the work involved in repopulating the planet at the pace necessary to give Sargon armies to fight and people to rule.

[...]

Down in Egypt, the United Kingdom established by Menes circa. 3000 BC was humming along nicely. By the time of Noah’s flood, the Egyptians were just wrapping up their 5th dynasty. Pharaoh Unas was, no doubt, quite perturbed to see his empire underwater, especially since he was in the middle of building a pyramid complex at Saqqara, which you can visit to this day.

It reminds me a bit of the old Onion article: Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World:

Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

[...]

“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

Somewhere I picked up the idea that Cyrus the Great, the ruler of Persia who allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland, was a great example of enlightened rule. In a recent TED talk, Neil Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, spoke about the Cyrus Cylinder. The Cylinder, a triumphal declaration of Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon, explains how Cyrus repatriated displaced people, rebuilt temples to the Babylonian god Marduk, and in general acting like an enlightened and merciful conqueror. MacGregor spoke about it in glowing terms:

The Cylinder bears one of the “great declarations of a human aspiration,” comparable to the American Constitution and Magna Carta. Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire he established (ca. 550-330 B.C.E.) bequeathed to history “a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.”

Over at HuffPo, Jacob L. Wright … complicates this story:

As most historians who specialize in early Persian history would readily point out, the chief objective of Cyrus and his successors was no different than that of other imperial powers: to maintain control of their vast empire and to exploit the wealth of its subjects. [...]

Influenced in great measure by the biblical image of Jews returning to their homeland under Persian hegemony, many assume that the rule of Persian kings was much more tolerant than that of the Assyrians. But recent research has demonstrated the significant lines of continuity between these two empires. The Persians engaged in the same mass deportations and harsh punishment of rebels for which the Assyrians are famous. The extent to which the Persian court involved itself in the affairs of its subject peoples was determined by concerns for the king’s prosperity. In order to ensure that wealth flowed from the provinces into the imperial coffers, rulers sometimes practiced the politics of benefaction, granting favors to representative groups in return for loyalty and compliance.

Hat tip to Robert Cargill, who sums it up well:

The fact that Persia preferred to rule its provinces, including עבר-נהרה (Avar-Nahara), the Persian province Yehud (known previously as Judah) through temples and religious leaders (and governors, rather than risking the rebellion of foreign kings), should not disguise the fact that it was just as authoritative as Babylonian and Assyrian empires that preceded it. In fact, Persia went the extra step of promoting a single national tongue – Aramaic – an issue that is just as controversial today in the US as it was then in Persia.

[via]

There are many troubling portions of the Bible, but the one that occurs to me first is the first story of Phineas (AKA Phinehas and some other variant spellings) found in Numbers 25:1-13. Philip Jenkins uses this as a his prime example in Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses.

While Israel dwelt in Shittim the people began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate, and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Ba’al of Pe’or. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel; and the LORD said to Moses, “Take all the chiefs of the people, and hang them in the sun before the LORD, that the fierce anger of the LORD may turn away from Israel.” And Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Every one of you slay his men who have yoked themselves to Ba’al of Pe’or.”

And behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Mid’ianite woman to his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping at the door of the tent of meeting.

When Phin’ehas the son of Elea’zar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation, and took a spear in his hand and went after the man of Israel into the inner room, and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman, through her body. Thus the plague was stayed from the people of Israel.

Nevertheless those that died by the plague were twenty-four thousand.

And the LORD said to Moses, “Phin’ehas the son of Elea’zar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the people of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I did not consume the people of Israel in my jealousy. Therefore say, `Behold, I give to him my covenant of peace; and it shall be to him, and to his descendants after him, the covenant of a perpetual priesthood, because he was jealous for his God, and made atonement for the people of Israel.’”

So Phineas kills a man and his wife for the sin of miscegenation. This was obviously written during one of the xenophobic periods of Jewish history.

There are some ridiculous elements to it. The supposed “crime” was marrying a Midianite, and the text makes a big deal out of the fact that this was brazenly done in front of Moses. But Moses himself likely had a Midianite wife, from the period after he fled Egypt. Moses’ Midianite father-in-law, Jethro, seems to be a fairly important character in Exodus.

Also notice that God stays his hand and grants a covenant of peace, “only” killing 24,000 people. This is what people mean when they complain about the God of the Old Testament. Also note that Phineas’ zealotry earns him and his descendants the plum position in the priesthood.

To me, this passage represents the troubling undercurrent of ethnic purity that runs through some of the Hebrew Testament. All of these sections, found particularly in books like Ezra and Nehemiah, are ignored by most mainstream Christians. Thankfully. But there are a few groups, like the Christian Identity group the Phineas Priesthood, who use this passage as a justification for their racism.