Does this give you hope?
Alongside Twitter and Tumblr, we’ve also seen the proliferation of ultra-brief update sites like F My Life, Texts From Last Night, and My Life Is Average. They’re borderline-addictive to read, but a lot of the posts can be pretty depressing and/or depraved. I sometimes like to check out the sites It Made My Day and Gives Me Hope for more positive stories. IMMD makes me smile because the stories are so bizarre and funny, while GMH is more of the inspirational variety — so much so that it occasionally comes full circle around to sadness again. You know, kids with terminal cancer saying really sweet things to comfort their parents, formerly suicidal teens finding a reason to love life and finally stop cutting themselves, stories like this.
Lately GMH has been making me sad, but not quite for the usual reason. Here are a few recent, poignant examples of this depressing flavor of “inspirational.” All the bold and extra spacing is original, from the site.
Last Sunday, my dad was at a church service in Austin, TX. An obviously homeless man sat next to him in the pew.
During the offering, the man put $2 into the basket.
Selflessness GMH.
That’s right, we’re supposed to be hopeful about humanity because a man who really couldn’t afford it somehow scraped together some money to give to a church. Aren’t churches supposed to be helping the poor, not taking their money? I don’t know what it means to be “obviously homeless,” but I assume it means he appeared unwashed, with ragged or dirty clothes, and maybe seemed noticeably in need of medical or dental care. I’m pretty sure he could have put those couple dollars to better use at a laundromat, or Goodwill, or a grocery store. What’s the great thing the church is going to do with it — buy some new hymnals? Send some solar-powered audio Bibles to Haiti? Best case scenario, they put it towards a soup kitchen, a shelter, or other resources for the neediest in society. I think Jesus would want this man to keep his two dollars, this week and every week, at least until he is able to get his own life back on track. (Or for him to give away as much money to the church as possible, so God would make him rich. Either way.)
Today, the pastor of my church anounced that his 19-year-old daughter was pregnant out of wed-lock.
As the pastor’s wife began to cry, a little boy ran up to her and hugged her saying, “It’s okay! Babies are the best thing in the world, no matter what.” GMH
I’m sorry, no. It does not give me hope to think that this 19-year-old girl — just getting started with adulthood and figuring out what life she wants for herself — is going to be putting her life on hold indefinitely to raise a child she is probably nowhere near ready to care for, even if she had a stable partner to help, which it sounds like she doesn’t. It does not give me hope to think of the child who will grow up around grandparents (and presumably also parent/s) who were sorrowful and ashamed when they anticipated the baby’s birth, rather than proud and eager to move forward into a new and exciting part of their lives. Without further details, I am also left to assume that this girl probably missed out on anything resembling comprehensive sex education, at home or at school, all in the name of purity and devoutness. I am left to assume that if she had been more informed about how babies are made and not made, this whole thing could have been avoided. Look, I like babies too. Babies are great. But at some point we have to admit that being pregnant is not an awesome development for every female person at every point in time. Pretending otherwise is just sad.
I recently rung up a young boy and his mother. When he saw me at the register, wearing a hijab, he grinned broadly at me. As they were walking away afterwards, he tugged on his mom’s sleeve and said,
“Did you see her, ma? She’s gorgeous! I bet that’s why she’s all covered up.”
He GMH.
This anecdote fails to give me hope for precisely the reason it seems to give hope to others: this little boy is exactly right. I wouldn’t stop a woman from wearing a hijab if she really wanted to; I appreciate the importance of cultural history and tradition in some people’s lives. For some, the hijab is basically just a form of traditional dress, so who cares about where it came from. But it is important to remember that the origins of the tradition are pretty suspicious from a gender equality standpoint. There is no clear commandment in the Koran that women must cover themselves in precisely this way. The commonly cited passages sound more like suggestions, and are not specific. An ultimately more revealing passage can be found in the hadiths: “O Allah’s Apostle! I wish you ordered your wives to cover themselves from the men because good and bad ones talk to them.” Yes, by request rather than by divine order, these women (well, at least Muhammad’s wives) must be covered (in some way or other) because they are getting nonzero attention from men, and this ought to be stopped. That is the philosophy behind this tradition. So yes, it would seem that you are all covered up because you are too gorgeous to be seen by men around you. It’s nice that a little boy thought you looked pretty even though you were dressed differently than most of the people he saw in your store, but his comment is so emblematic of a larger problem that it doesn’t give me hope, it takes some of my hope away.
What is Acts 29?
You may recall Pastor Winfield Bevins from my post last week. Pastor Bevins’ byline on the Resurgence blog lists him as an “Acts 29 Pastor.” Curious as to what that was, I first tried to look up Acts 29 on Bible Gateway, but apparently it doesn’t exist. (Acts stops at 28.) So, I followed the link at the bottom of the Resurgence site to Acts 29 Network.
I couldn’t find any explicit explanation of the name on their site, but I assume their intention is to imply that their work is the “next chapter,” as it were, of the “Acts of the Apostles” (or the “Acts of the Holy Spirit,” whatever you prefer to call it). Their About section says that “Acts 29 Network exists to start churches that plant churches.” They go on to say that their intention is “to plant 1,000 new churches in the next 10 years.” (That’s one new church about every three and a half days, so… good choice not to have a starting date prominently displayed. Good luck with that!) The page explaining their doctrine says that they are “first Christians, second Evangelicals, third Missional, and fourth Reformed.”
Well, okay, so what does this doctrine actually say? Most of it is pretty straightforward. I did like the line: “First, we are Christians which distinguishes us from other world religions and cults.” Heh. Okay, if you say so. As Evangelicals they “believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God,” and you already know what I think about that subject. I’m curious which parts of the Bible they’re choosing to care about when they say that, as Missionals, they “believe that our local churches must be faithful to the content of unchanging Biblical doctrine,” and I also wonder how their churches can do that and simultaneously “be faithful to the continually changing context of the culture(s) in which they minister.” All the bullet points under the list for being Reformed sound pretty traditional to me; some other time I’ll look into what the term means in this context.
Of perhaps more note are the things which Act 29 Network does not endorse. There is a long list.
For example, they write, “We are not fundamentalists who retreat from cultural involvement and transformation, but rather missionaries faithful both to the content of Scripture and context of ministry.” They also write, “We are not liberals who embrace culture without discernment and compromise the distinctives of the gospel, but rather Christians who believe the truths of the Bible are eternal and therefore fitting for every time, place, and people.” (Aside: note the implication that “liberal” and “Christian” are mutually exclusive… also, that liberals don’t use “discernment.”)
First of all, I’m not sure I would say that fundamentalism is generally known for advocating retreat from attempts to transform culture. But even if we take that for granted, what exactly does it mean when they say they’ll be faithful to the context of ministry, if they think there is one set of rules for everyone at every time in every place? It sure sounds like they respect cultural differences, but they have two distinct bullet points in this list proclaiming that they are not “relativists.” I guess they remain faithful to the context of ministry by telling people to change only in the specific ways they need to. But they’re not fundamentalists! They just think the Bible has only one set of truths which absolutely everyone ought to live by!
They also have a statement called Acts 29 and Alcohol [PDF] which lists vomiting as among one of many sins resulting from drunkenness (citing three verses, none of which seem to really say that it’s a sin, just that it’s nasty). I guess you’re just out of luck if you get the flu or food poisoning!
But my favorite thing that Acts 29 Network doesn’t like, other than fundamentalists, liberals, and vomit, is egalitarianism. Yeah, that totally crazy notion that people should be treated as equals, with the same rights. In a blockquote so you can’t miss it:
We are not egalitarians and do believe that men should head their homes and male elders/pastors should lead their churches with masculine love like Jesus Christ.
Well, that sheds some light on this mysterious no-girls-allowed event that Act 29 is apparently promoting in Columbus, OH called Act Like Men. I know many evangelical Christians think wives should be subservient to their husbands, but I always thought “egalitarian” was an unambiguously positive word. If you were going to say that you didn’t think men and women have equal worth, I’d expect you’d find some more positive way to say it. Maybe you “believe in traditional gender roles,” or perhaps you “believe in celebrating the naturally different strengths of men and women.” Both of those are crap (the first slightly more than the second), but at least they don’t sound so blatantly awful. It’s really demonstrative of exactly how anti-woman this group is, that they don’t even perceive a negative connotation from saying, “We are not egalitarians.” Even a genuinely stingy person would probably describe themselves as frugal instead.
I know that some people are less than thrilled when I do these “somebody is wrong on the internet” kind of posts. To be honest, it’s not my favorite thing either. But it feels important. This isn’t just somebody; this is a large group of somebodies trying to start a new church every three or four days. This is truly a network of organizations, spread out all over the world. The Resurgence blog, just one part of the Acts 29 Network, has a sidebar promoting their Facebook page where they have over 14,000 fans. They have more fans than Fareed Zakaria, even if you add together the page for just himself and for his CNN show. I know that’s a silly, random measure, but I think it’s enough to say that if it’s worth discussing Zakaria’s opinions here, it’s worth discussing Acts 29’s.
Also, I hope that a couple of those 14,000+ fans, and some prospective future ones, stumble across this post and give it some real thought. Does this group’s belief system really make sense to you? (If so, please explain it to me.) Is this really the kind of group you want to be a part of?
Rules for prayer
Google Reader recommended to me a blog called The Resurgence. In their words: “The Resurgence is a movement that resources multiple generations to live for Jesus so that they can effectively reach their cities with the Gospel by staying culturally accessible and Biblically faithful.” Hmm, interesting choice, Google. But you’re right, I would certainly find this informative and worthwhile reading.
Sadly, but I think understandably, The Resurgence does not have any mechanism for leaving comments on their posts. I have a lot of questions I’d love to discuss with the post authors. There is a feedback form, and I sent in a message that way inquiring about how best to ask questions on specific post content. (I sent it anonymously, even though it asks for first and last name, so who knows if they will deem my message worth replying to.) In the meantime, I’m curious if anyone out in reader-land might have an answer for these questions that really stick out in my mind.
In a recent post about intercessory prayer, Pastor Winfield Bevins writes,
There are five major areas of intercession that we should pray for in our daily prayer life. Each one represents a circle of influence and authority that God gives us to pray for. When praying we should start with the first area and then work our way down to the last.
The circles listed below are family and friends, church, city, nation, and world. All of those are ostensibly things “that God gives us,” provided you believe in a God who gives us things. On my first reading of this paragraph, though, I thought that Pastor Bevins was saying that God in some way delineated these circles, these divisions. Are the five circles just a helpful mnemonic, so that everyone worth praying for gets covered, or is there some basis for choosing these particular five, scriptural or otherwise?
Also, it feels to me like there is a high degree of “should” in this short passage. What happens if one doesn’t pray for each of the five areas, or doesn’t pray for them on a daily basis? What happens if one starts with the last area and ends with the first, or jumbles up the order entirely? What is the basis for knowing that these are the ways one “should” pray? I know not everyone who prays believes that there are strict how-to rules, but I’m curious, in the case of those who do, what the supposed consequences of failing to follow them are. Does your prayer just not get heard? (Like calling a fax machine line from your telephone?) Or does God actually get upset at you for not following protocol?
On “Our World,” the final item in this list, Pastor Bevins writes,
Lastly, we should pray for the people and governments of the world. Although you may never leave your country, you can still have an influence in the lives of others across the world by praying for them. Remember, it is God’s desire to save the elect. Ask the Lord to speak to you about a certain country that you should pray for. God promises to listen when we pray.
Okay, tell me if I have this straight. God wants to save people. If you ask God to tell you who to pray for, and then pray for them, God will “listen” and, it is implied, actually help those people. Why doesn’t God just help those people in the first place? Why does he have to wait for some random person to pray the prayer he told them to pray?
Also, there’s this whole issue of “God’s desire to save the elect.” The elect basically means “the chosen people.” This sounds to me like a way to weasel out of any apparent failures of prayer. (As in: You prayed for the people of such-and-such country and then they had a bloody civil war and/or their cities were destroyed by earthquakes and/or everybody died of cholera? Well, I guess they weren’t the elect!) And aren’t the elect already, you know, elected? Why is it necessary to pray for people if they’ve already been chosen as part of the group God desires to save?
I realize that many of my readers don’t share Pastor Bevins’ perspective, and may not be able to clarify his meaning. I am genuinely curious, though. What is the thought process behind this understanding of prayer?
Don’t talk about politics or religion
It’s a rule of thumb for polite conversation that most of us had drilled into us as children, here in the US. Don’t talk about politics, and don’t talk about religion. You’ll only start an argument.
Maybe that’s true. After all, merely by saying “I am a member of such-and-such political party,” you are implying that you think its platform and philosophy are superior to the platforms and philosophies of all other political parties. If you didn’t think that was the case, you’d be a member of a different party. And by saying, “I am such-and-such religion,” you are saying that there is a certain set of statements about reality that you believe to be true. That means that other people, who don’t think that set of statements is true, are wrong in their beliefs. You don’t even have to say it outright. You just have to let it be known. Maybe someone spotted a bumper sticker on your car, a pendant on your necklace, a logo on your t-shirt. You can say that you think we should “coexist,” that we should be tolerant and all get along. Those are worthy ideals. But you have to face the fact that if you every commit to any opinion, you’re effectively telling everyone who doesn’t share it that they’re wrong, which doesn’t come across as very “tolerant.”
But that’s okay! I actually think we should be talking about politics and religion more freely. The discord is still happening, when the very existence of Democrats is an implicit affront to Republicans and vice versa, and when religious (or irreligious) groups rally support from within by directing anger at the mere presence of other groups. I think that by stifling conversation, we’re only silencing the argument, not really stopping it. No one gains anything from that.
I really wish I could remember the details of this story, because it made a real impression on me, but sadly I can only offer vagueness. At any rate: I read a news story once about an election happening in another country, quite possibly a country relatively new to the whole “election” thing. The focus of the story was on how the citizens were all eagerly arguing with each other about which candidates to support, all over the place. It was not a taboo topic in the least. And that’s an exciting thing to see, because it means that people are engaged in their democracy, they care about the outcome of the election. Most importantly (to me), they don’t see the election as rooting for their own team, but as a search for the best possible candidates. They’d prefer to get the right people into office, even if it means changing their minds.
Well, I’m sorry that anecdote came across as completely made up; I promise you it’s not. (If anyone remembers reading something like that – or experienced something like that! – and could help me figure out details, leave a comment. I’d bet there are plenty of countries this could apply to, but I only read a news story about one of them.) My point is that when we disagree and argue about it, it may feel a little uncomfortable and unpleasant at the time, but there are major benefits in the long run. After all, what’s more important: that your political party control a majority of seats in the legislature, or that the legislature is as full as possible of thoughtful people who have the best interests of the country in mind? Sure, you’d hope those things are the same, but you have to recognize the possibility that they’re not always. And what if there is one particular deity (or set of deities) who really wants you to live your life in a very specific way or else. Wouldn’t it be good to figure out which deity/deities it was, as soon as possible? (Alternatively, what if there are no deities like that? Wouldn’t you want to figure that out before spending your entire life obsessed with made-up rules and nonexistent judgment?)
“Sure, Z,” I can hear you saying. “I guess it would be great if we could all have these calm, reasoned debates. But how? I’m sure of my beliefs, and you’re sure of yours – we’ll never work it out!” It does seem daunting. What I do is, I try to keep a bit of agnosticism in my attitude. Perhaps it doesn’t come across that way… maybe it’d be better to call it best guess-ism. I feel strongly about my beliefs, having reflected on them and examined them before actively calling them my own, but I try to remember that they only reflect my current best guess. At any time, I could come into new information that might lead me to change my mind – to make a new, better guess. I welcome arguments because they’re the primary way I might get that new information.
I’d like to live in a society where more people had an attitude like that. But I’m open to debate about even that belief!
Heuristics for reality
This is part 2 in my response to Chris Guin. Here, I’m going to begin by setting aside some of the direct ties to religious beliefs, and talk about Chris’s general statements about how we gain knowledge about reality. Here’s the bulk of it, an explanation of why we shouldn’t be so preoccupied with Biblical contradictions in the first place:
Modern Western culture has things backwards, I believe, when it comes to the big picture of how the world works. We feel that “the ground truth” is logical, governed by strict laws, mathematical – even binary – in character, and that our emotions, perceptions, will, desire, consciousness, and languages are “heuristics” – that is, ways of simplifying a complex underlying reality to better get by in and understand the world. The idea is that, if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.
But what if that has it mostly backwards? What if the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language (”the word”), and our logic and reason are simply “heuristics” to help us simplify a complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal universe to get by in it? I think there’s good evidence that this is the case. For example, the deeper one gets into physics, the less “sense” everything starts to make. As a computer science student, I spent plenty of time in classes proving that there are things that computers can’t do – problems that can’t be solved in a reasonable amount of time. True logic knows its own limits.
The first thing I want to do in response to this is clear up some of the confusion about what the science actually says. Chris, I don’t understand how the fact that computers take a long time to solve certain problems is relevant here. Sure, EXP ≠ P, and while that may be inconvenient it doesn’t have any great significance for the value of logic. You may be going for something more along the lines of undecidability and/or incompleteness. In that case, yes, there are some things that no algorithm can compute; there will always be some mathematical truths which are unprovable with a given set of axioms. While this is true, and while it’s also true (in the more poetic, humanities-ified version) that there are some questions in life that logic can’t answer, I don’t think this is a reason to reject the answers that logic can provide. That would be like rejecting the concept of evolution because it doesn’t answer cosmological questions about the origin of the universe, or like rejecting the principles of electricity because electricity can’t bake you a pie from scratch. Like throwing out your crescent wrench because it isn’t a soldering iron.
When you say that “the deeper one gets into physics, the less ’sense’ everything starts to make,” I assume you’re referring to quantum mechanics, and maybe also chaos theory. As a physicist myself, I have to tell you that this just isn’t true. I suspect that you’re seeing physical laws and theories that are counterintuitive to you, and erroneously classifying these as nonsensical and illogical. However, they are completely logical (and, much to my undergraduate surprise – at least in the case of quantum mechanics – can eventually become intuitive).
So, I can say with confidence that nobody well-informed on the science believes that “if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.” Quantum physics and chaos theory cast a whole lot of doubt on the determinism aspect, and the computing aspect is unrealistic whether you’re talking about complexity or computability. But (and this is my real point) so what? It’s still all based in logic. Logic with limits, sure. But logic nonetheless. And the fact that limits exist way out on the horizon is no reason to reject the repeatedly verified, reliable information we can glean from working inside those limits.
Second: what is this illogical universe that you’re talking about, Chris? You suggest that perhaps “the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language” and perhaps the universe is “complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal.” The universe might be complex? Of this I have no doubt. Logic is not inconsistent with complicated systems. Reality might be based on language? I have no idea what this means, but feel compelled to point out that while subjective connotations exist within language, we couldn’t communicate at all unless we agreed on rules of syntax and a set of definitions – in other words, some basic axioms. A completely idiosyncratic string of sounds is not a language by any normal understanding. A probabilistic universe? This is my favorite one. See above… the “regular” universe is already understood in a probabilistic way.
So let’s distill what you are really proposing. I see two main ideas in the remainders of your lists. One (for perception, consciousness, subjective, personal) is a Matrix-esque “What if the universe I experience is completely dependent on my own senses and awareness?” The other (for will, desire, maybe personal again) is basically, “If I want reality to be like this, reality is like this.” I think I’ve shown why your supposed “good evidence” for this isn’t actually. I don’t think we have any evidence that these pictures of reality might be true. But I also think that this hypothetical universe you suggest is not an illogical one. It’s simply a different set of premises, new axioms from which we might build up the rules that would govern reality. “When I close my eyes, whatever I was looking at ceases to exist,” for example, might be a new rule. Or perhaps, “If I wish for something to be true, it happens.” You haven’t done away with logic in your hypothetical world.
I hope you can see why I, having read your inaccurate generalizations of science and your unclear assertions on the nature of reality, was somewhat baffled as I reached the point in your post where you claimed that God is outside the bounds of logic:
[Logic] is seldom the appropriate tool for understanding the eternal and the divine. After all, as God is perfectly supreme and in no way bound by our universe, on what basis can anyone “logic around” with God? God is outside of time, cause and effect, and even the proposition that something can not be both X and not X. Trying to reason about God as though any of these assumptions were true often results in goofy conclusions – consider the kerfuffle about predestination, or interminable arguments about the divinity/humanity of Christ, or the nature of the afterlife, or the nature of the trinity.
However, even though I don’t buy your build-up about how we should accept the possibility of a logic-free reality, I think I can be satisfied with this characterization of your God. After all, those “goofy conclusions” and “kerfuffles” resulted from contradictory passages of scripture. But you say you would reject those debates entirely in favor of a God outside of cause and effect, and while I’m not sure what exactly “outside” means, the most obvious interpretation would seem to indicate that he doesn’t cause anything. I have no idea how this could be consistent with God creating the universe, God giving Moses commandments, God sending Jesus to the people, or even God inspiring people to live good lives on a day-to-day basis in the present. God is outside of cause and effect, so nothing can be the effect of his cause.
Moreover, if we read the Bible and find that God supposedly commanded that we do X, who cares? Wherever God is, X and not-X might be the same! If the Bible says that God made a covenant with his people to protect them in exchange for their abiding by his rules, who cares? This presumes that God is okay with an initial act (rule-following) implying a resulting act (God’s protection), which may very well not be true if he exists outside of cause and effect! Any supposed sequence of events can’t be treated as truth, because God is outside of time! It is impossible to know anything about God at any time by any means, least of all by reading the Bible. In fact, it would seem that there can be no evidence, no reason to believe in this God at all.
At the very least, with this picture of God there is no reason to value what the Bible says for its own sake, no reason to suppose that the Bible says anything true. If God is not bound even by the rule that X = X and X ≠ not-X, how can you rely on the Bible or any sentence you read about God as a source of any knowledge about God whatsoever?
A quick question
Why do we say “swearing” to refer both to saying bad words and to taking an oath? That seems really weird to me. Any thoughts on this, readers?
I remember being especially confused by this as a child because the explanation I heard from kids on the school bus, about why they’d say “h – e – double hockey sticks” or something, was that it was a sin to swear. We could never agree on which words were really “swear words” (of course that list grew and changed between kindergarten and fifth grade), and I could never get a straight answer from them about whether it was a sin to use one of those words or if it was a sin to say, “I swear!” Perhaps it was both? (And yes, I was this pedantic, as a six-year-old.)
Naturally, the FCC doesn’t make you bleep out oaths on TV. Making a solemn pledge is a generally honorable thing to do. And I’m not quite sure whether the Bible takes a position on swearing as a sin. In any case, “to swear” in the Bible generally refers to oaths … and yet I know a bunch of religious people who are very careful not to swear, in the bad-word sense. I guess that’s one more question, for any religious readers who feel inclined to chime in on this: how do you feel about swearing, in both senses, and why?
How to read the Bible
I had a very interesting and increasingly complex conversation about the Bible with Chris Guin in the comments of one of his blog posts back in October. What began as a discussion about the proper way for Christians to treat nonbelievers soon became more about how the Bible ought to be read and interpreted. Go check out those old comments if you are interested; I am going to respond here to Chris’s newest post about contradictions in the Bible.
Before I delve into what Chris wrote, let me reiterate/clarify my stance. I often bring up particular parts of the Bible in discussions with Christians when we’re talking about their framework of beliefs. I make the assumption—a reasonable one, I think—that the Bible is an important part of that framework. I think it’s important to have a coherent belief system, so I might cite some part of the Bible if, for example, I think a Christian is claiming or defending something that isn’t supported by the Bible.
That’s not to say that I think that Biblical teachings are, as it were, the “gospel truth.” I acknowledge that the Bible makes many clear and relatively unambiguous statements that contradict each other, so all those statements cannot possibly be true. I acknowledge that church doctrine often differs from particular passages of scripture—in fact, that entire distinct denominations have arisen because of different choices in sorting out apparent contradictions. In a theological debate setting, my goal in pointing out a Biblical passage isn’t really to convince someone of a particular version of theology, but rather to point out that it’s seemingly impossible to form a coherent theology from a text so fraught with contradictions and ambiguities. Either you are picking the parts of the Bible you like and ignoring the parts you don’t, or you are making up context and explanation where it doesn’t exist in order to argue away contradictions. In both cases, your beliefs are coming from within yourself rather than from Christian teachings, and the text that is supposedly the foundation for your religion can’t actually hold any weight on its own.
Chris, I was very impressed by your willingness in that earlier post to grapple with “the harder teachings” of “the complex, real, dissonant Jesus.” I don’t think you fall into the first category, cherry-picking which parts of the Bible to care about. I do think that in your current post, you are offering two ways of taking the latter route.
First, you write:
Some “contradictions” require a reevaluation of how one verse or the other is interpreted (or even translated – human language is not infallible, and it’s sometimes worth checking into things). Or how BOTH are interpreted. If there seems to be a contradiction, perhaps one or more of the Scriptures don’t mean what you think they mean.
Your second suggestion is that some seeming contradictions “require a larger contextual understanding” in order to be resolved. These sound like plausible ways to go about understanding a text, and in some cases may be reasonable responses. This is certainly how I would go about reading a physics textbook. I might find in my textbook two statements that I think can be used to work out a problem, but which recommend very different methods. I could study them both in more depth, and perhaps realize that one is a generalized principle and one is a simplification of that principle in a special case, so the two can be reconciled and thought of as the same concept. Or, I could study the surrounding context of those statements, and come to understand that they answer related questions in two entirely different situations—perhaps one applies to metals, and the other is about insulators. This is fine on face.
However, if the Bible plainly says “X but not Y” in one verse, and “Y but not X” in another verse, we are in a very different type of situation. No amount of reinterpretation, no amount of additional context can change the fact that there are very clear statements in the Bible on both sides of the “saved by faith alone” vs. “saved by good works” debate. In fact, the Bible includes specific statements about many different ways to get yourself saved, including statements that it is all predestined and not actually up to you at all. (I don’t think these lists I’ve linked to are perfect, but I think they’re more than sufficient to illustrate what I mean.) You yourself bring up the issue of the old and new covenants—no additional “context” could possibly smooth over the fact that in Leviticus 23 alone God tells Moses “it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations” four times, yet the New Testament is full of statements that Christians “are not under the law” and that Jesus is the mediator of a “new covenant” which is “superior to the old one” and “made the first one obsolete.”
You point out that “nowhere does God say that the Bible is comprised of the infallible and perfect words of angels, as some other holy texts claim to be.” This could hypothetically get us around some of the stickier contradictions. Maybe one of the statements is just wrong, a mistake. I would ask, though: is it possible to tell what parts are wrong? You shrug off inaccurate troop headcounts or precise timelines, and I agree, these details probably do not matter as far as theology is concerned. But what about the stuff that does matter? For example, how do you know that “the harder teachings” you are attempting to face head-on even came from Jesus himself? Or, one could ask instead, how do you know that the nicer ones did?
The bottom line: I think there are significant internal contradictions that are impossible to wriggle out of, and I see no reason to suppose that either (or if more than 2, any) face of a given contradiction is actually true. I’ve seen no reason to suppose the Bible is a reliable source of information, and therefore no grounds to believe that the teachings in the Bible are true.
I suppose I had better stop for now; this is long enough. I look forward to hearing what you think, Chris—and other readers who may want to jump in! I hope I’ve managed to keep up the civility and that I’ve explained myself clearly.
Coming soon: my responses to some of Chris’s other remarks, about epistemology, logic, and science.
Creationist insecurity
Via the delightfully snarky Ron Britton over at Bay of Fundie, I heard about this conference/webcast called “Darwin Was Wrong” [link to program PDF]. It’s sponsored by the Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa and some group called Logos Research Associates, Inc. (Sounds sciencey!) The program itself sounds like a real train wreck, with talks such as “Darwin Was Wrong About Science,” “Darwin Was Wrong About the Fossil Record,” and “Darwin Was Wrong About God,” but out of some kind of morbid curiosity I’m going to try to watch the webcast—today’s talks are just starting now.
It’s not my goal to rebut all the stupid claims made by the speakers in these talks. First, because nobody who cares about this event would care what I have to say, but second, because I’m sure it’s been done before. I’m also in touch with the fact that, no matter how much creationists would like to paint it that way, scientists don’t worship Darwin’s word as the ultimate and unquestionable truth. (And hey, guys, if you want to criticize that way of thinking as unscientific and therefore invalid… look in the mirror.) Bottom line: sure, there were some particular claims and conjectures that Darwin put forth in his writings which we now have evidence against, but we still appreciate his work and groundbreaking ideas. We adjust and modify our theoretical models in light of new evidence, new data to compare our models with. That’s how science works.
I really just want to make one simple point, and that is: isn’t this all terrifically insecure? Creationists are really obsessed with trying to demonstrate that “Darwin was wrong” (just search Amazon for “darwin wrong” and you’ll see what I mean), but you practically never see a panel discussion with a handful of evolutionary biologists just riffing on how Biblical creation has a couple plot holes. Yes, the community of skeptics is growing, and yes, there are groups like the National Center for Science Education which have sprung up to advocate for evolution. But the vast, vast majority of the time, scientists are just going about their science, and ignoring the crazy fringe ideas. That’s because the crazy fringe ideas are obviously wrong. It would just be superfluous for biologists to spend one tenth the time creationists do, flailing around and shouting about how the other side is wrong. If you have no real proof of your point of view, the best you can do is insist that your opponent’s proof is insufficient, but if the evidence is on your side, you can rest assured that the evidence will speak for itself.
One other note. Lunch at this conference is being provided by Chick-fil-A. Of course.
Rooting for the team
Are you registered with a particular political party because you agree with their platform? Or do you agree with their platform because you’re a member of that party?
Do you follow a particular religion because you agree with its teachings and its characterization of the world? Or do you agree with its teachings because you’re a follower of that religion?
Is your goal to find ideas that you agree with, or to make your team the winning team?
This is part reflection on Friday’s post and the comments that followed it, and part inspired by some other things I’ve been noticing lately. Students wearing T-shirts that look like university sports fan gear but turn out to be promoting their religious student group. Pundits on TV talking about how to reform the Republican party’s image, or how to make the GOP more appealing to young people or to non-white people. The Catholic church trying to entice some Anglicans back into Catholicism. And of course, Democratic senators more willing to gut their health care plan in exchange for an extra vote or two than they are to advocate for and explain their original plan.
There’s nothing particularly logical about people’s allegiances to sports teams, and that’s okay. Maybe you root for a team because they represent your city, or a city you used to live in, or a city you wish you lived in. This is completely arbitrary, though at least it makes some intuitive sense. But plenty of people don’t root for their “home team,” opting instead to support the one with better stats and more success. Others like cheering for the underdog and deliberately pick a team with a history of failures. There are plenty of even more arbitrary reasons for picking your favorite team. I used to love the Florida Marlins and the Colorado Rockies solely because I liked their logos the best. (I was about 9, and I liked teal and purple. What can I say?)
Arbitrariness is okay in choosing a sports team to root for, though, because they don’t matter. Sorry, Yankees and Phillies fans, but it’s pure entertainment, with no actual ramifications. That’s why I think it’s so pernicious when people treat their other associations in life as though they were sports teams.
Political parties are alliances of people whose core values and ideas are similar enough that they feel they can cooperate to create the best policies for the country. There’s nothing magical about them. There’s no pledge you’re forced to take when you register as a member of one party that you have to support their platform forever and ever, even if you change your mind. The way it’s supposed to work is, you make up your mind about your political philosophy and then you try find a party you’re willing to ally yourself with. And perhaps you don’t find one. That’s okay too.
As for religion, I don’t know. Obviously my perspective is that we should all be searching for truth, and we shouldn’t be afraid to abandon a belief system if we find it to be false. Also obviously, though, most religions teach that there is something “magical about them,” and that you have to believe things that seem like falsehoods or you are committing a grave sin. Still, if your religious beliefs mandate that you accept that pi is exactly 3 or that ancient people sailed from the Middle East to the Americas (twice!) or that… no, I don’t know how to sum this up in a single phrase…. Anyway, my point is that hopefully there’s some line at which most people would say, “This religion cannot be true, and I will leave it to go look for a true one now.” (…And perhaps you don’t find one. That’s okay too.) Plenty of people do go on personal religious quests, and convert to new religions sometimes multiple times. I’m sure I’m not alone in my assessment that this is an important question to answer for oneself.
The real goal—in both these cases—is to pin down the truth about the way the world works and the way it ought to work. It’s not about cheering as loudly as possible for whatever interpretation of things you happened to hear first; that won’t lead us to a better society in any sense. If your team has good ideas, those ideas should be all the promotion you need. If people aren’t interested in your ideas, don’t look only to marketing some kind of “team spirit.” Sure, that’s useful to get people’s attention at first, but what you really need are better ways of explaining your ideas. Or perhaps it’s the ideas themselves that need a makeover.
Bad news from Israel
I heard this story on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, and can’t get it out of my mind. Sheera Frenkel reports:
FRENKEL: Every night, David, who asked not to be called by his real name, patrols this and other neighboring Jewish settlements. His mission is to find Arab-Jewish couples and break up their dates.
DAVID: (Through translator) My heart hurts every time I see a Jewish girl with an Arab. It’s extremely upsetting. I asked myself: How did we get to this situation? How did we descend to this level? It is a serious step backwards, in our eyes.
FRENKEL: David is the leader of a group of vigilantes that goes by several names, including Fire For Judaism and Love of Youth. They say they number between 30 and 40 men and patrol the streets each night. Officially, they’re on the lookout for any mixed couples, but T.S.(ph) a member of the group who often serves as David’s driver, says the problem lies solely with Arab men dating Jewish girls.
This is terrifying and unbelievable. Perhaps you, like me, have been lulled into complacency thinking that the days of Jim Crow laws and the like are behind us as a species, but this is happening today, in a modern democracy. Now, there will always be some crazy isolationist fringe groups out there, and many people certainly do disapprove of their own children dating outside of their own culture or religion. It’s not hard to imagine that a couple people would feel so motivated as to walk around outside and yell some threatening things. Some people are jerks. But while this isn’t Jim Crow, it’s happening on a large scale. In Pisgat Ze’ev alone, there are apparently around three dozen men on patrol every night, and this is happening in many other cities as well. According to NPR, at least one of those cities possesses a government-run dating patrol, not vigilantes. This is serious.
On another level, this terrifies me because the Jews I know are American Jews, and I think that the result (in the US at least) of years of oppression and minority status is that Jews are particularly aware of the importance of protecting minority rights and personal freedoms. Somehow, it seems that if anyone would understand the danger of society embracing an ideology like that of these dating patrols, it ought to be the citizens of the Jewish state.
I haven’t been able to find any evidence that any high government officials in Israel have come out opposing these patrolling mobs, or of police crackdowns against them. I hope they get their act together on this soon.