Atheist Schisms: Alice and Mr Dawkins

Even though Richard Dawkins taught at Oxford for the best years of his life, he never met Alice.

Alice, you’ll recall, was happiest having tea in Christ Church meadow, getting drowsy over her books, and falling down rabbit holes where she encountered all kinds of strange creatures no one had ever seen.

The probability of having never seen Alice, whose memoirs describe smiling cats, talking caterpillars, rabbits in waistcoats and the Red Queen’s caucus race–in great detail–raises serious questions about whether Mr Dawkins ever taught at Oxford at all, or if he did why he never left his room.

A natural skeptic and proud atheist would want to test the testimony, as it were. Yet there is not one recorded instance of the good professor plodding through the meadow and so much as kicking up a tuft of grass or picking up a lifeless dogeared playing card to check the sources.

This raises a question in my mind. Are the atheist fundamentalists really that skeptical, that thorough? They claim not to have seen a lot of things–miracles, resurrections, God, and the like–but given the fact that they have not even taken the time over a pretty thin volume like Alice’s biography, why should we trust them with a hefty book, full of massive improbabilities, like the Bible?

They invoke something called science, or naturalism as a proof of their knowing a thing or two about not knowing a thing or two. But I ask you: the sea monster Leviathan had to be fairly impressive, or his story would not have lasted a thousand years. Wouldn’t a real atheist want to slip on a pair of flippers and a mask and head for the Mediterranean just to be sure?

According to usually impeccable American media sources like the National Geographic Channel, Noah’s ark has been spotted on a number of rocks. Even the exoskeletons of marine animals long thought extinct have been found encrusted in its petrified planks. I suppose a scientist who can’t be bothered to find a rabbit hole won’t make the journey to Sinope to check it out. But as long as those boards go unexamined, I respectfully reserve my right to believe the flood happened just the way Genesis says it did–all sloshy forty days and every drenched zebra of it. A pure skepticism requires nothing less. We’ve got the word, we’ve got the wood: what do you fellows have?

Perhaps I shouldn’t mention the New Testament, but it seems to me a little homework would turn up “thank you notes” from at least a dozen of the five thousand men, women and children who were fed bread and fishes on that hot Thursday afternoon. These would not have been sent because thank you notes never are. They are the most massively preserved species of domestic literature after unopened tax bills. Find the family bibles of their descendants, you’ve got your evidence.

After noshing all that stodge they must have been thirsty; has anybody bothered to look for the canteens? This is simple archaeology, but over the heads of our so-called atheist fundamentalists.

What I hate most of all is when atheist fundamentalists get all pious about their atheism. Take the recent bus and subway ad-campaign that tells us “1,000,000 New Yorkers are Good without God.” You’re going to trust this statistic when it comes from guys who won’t leave their lecture rooms to see if it’s raining? 1,000,000 New Yorkers are also good without a extra slice of cheese cake, while ony 75,000 look really good in spandex: so what? 3,000,000 New Yorkers don’t believe in voting. Most are atheists. Don’t believe me? Go ask. That’s what a scientist does.

Besides, numbers games are tricky. Wait till the Baptists roll out a bus that screams “22,000,000 Jesus-believers who attend fish fries can’t be wrong.”

But back to the hot topic, the atheist schism. Hardcore and softcore atheists, big tent versus wigwam unbelievers?

I agree with some of my friends that there can’t be a schism in atheism because atheism is a big muddle, a jumble of ideas. Think of your mind as the accumulated junk of fifty years just waiting to go up for sale on card tables next weekend. Then it rains. Atheism is like that. Some say it’s a stream of thought. Some say it’s a rolling river. Like love.

At any rate, muddles and puddles can’t have schisms–that’s clear enough. So how do we know that atheism can make you as good as a believer? I have thought about this a good deal since the last bus rolled by and think I have an answer that any scientist worth his powder would agree on.

It’s based on my personal method of assessment that I call the Mercurial Goodness Index.

Goodness needs to be defined as the result of how much about God you don’t believe in. If you don’t even believe in the possibility of God (there’s a very fancy name for this in philosophy but I forget it), then you are totally good. A secular saint.

If there is a particular god you don’t believe in, then your goodness has to be calculated according to the number of things you don’t believe about him.

For example, 10 points for not believing he created the world, 10 points for not believing he created the human race, 20 points for not believing he wrote the most boring sections of the Bible, 5 points for not believing that, even if he created the human race, he did not create Republicans. Maximum 80. Only fair-weather and backsliding Christians, Jews and some Muslims can play this game. Secular- leaning Muslims who do not believe in God are required to surrender their weapons as a token of their skepticism.

Skeptical Hindus will be scored according to the number of gods they don’t believe in up to a maximum goodness score of 330,000,000 (way more than the number of good New Yorkers). They receive ten extra points if they also confess that Hindusim is a very silly religion.

Buddhists can play, but must be very quiet about it and not reveal the secret of their goodness.

I think even the most committed atheist will agree, this is the best way forward.

Booboisie Catholicism

I don’t know about you but I am still waiting for Vatican II to kick in–you know the change-for-the-better that was supposed to be the fruit of the ecumenical council (1962-1965) called by Pope John XXIII to make everything old new again.

2005 was the fortieth anniversary of its adjournment, which means that most so-called Roman Catholics born after, say, 1968 have never heard a Latin Mass, know their catechism from stories told by their mothers, went to Catholic schools populated by divorced Catholic women, and grew up thinking that the noxious hymn “On Eagle’s Wings” is the pinnacle of liturgical expression. I haven’t even mentioned a recent survey, where it was revealed that most Catholic children between the age of nine and fifteen think the most solemn part of the mass is holding hands during the Lord’s Prayer and/or the handshaking hugathonics known as the Kiss of Peace.

Rumor has it that Benedict XVI’s recent endorsement of a more liberal use of the “old” Latin mass (called without value-inflation the “extraordinary rite,” Summorum Pontificum, 2007) will awaken the deadened aesthetic sensibilities of a whole new generation of mass-goers. Now that any priests equipped to do it (not many) are permitted to celebrate in the Tridentine style, seminaries are laying on special courses (now say after me: “een no-me-nay pah-treees…”) for rosy-cheeked enthusiasts who hope to see the old mass revived in parishes around their priest-starved dioceses.

Not bloody likely. Vatican II was a colossal failure–at every level–and the time spent studying its documents, probing its theology, anticipating its bounty have all proved a waste of adult brainpower and seminary lecture time.

Its ecumenism was hollow, as proved by the recent decision to create a special Institute for unhappy Anglicans opposed to women and gay priests, gay marriage and sundry other “theological” gripes. Ecumenical dialogue with other denominations is in ever worse disarray, except perhaps with Pentecostals and fundamentalist Christians, Catholicism’s natural enemies at a theological level but their bedfellows on abortion, contraception, HIV-AIDS and sexual ethics (so-called). Its outreach to Jews and Muslims has been political, fumbling, self-serving and inauthentic.

Its attempts to reinvent Catholic theology have been stammeringly painful, testing the resolve of every paid theologian to develop new ways to say the same old thing in ways so obscure they may as well have stuck to Latin. True, Limbo has been questioned, but heaven and hell are still for sale, as are indulgences, the intervention of saints, the infallibility of the pope, and the doctrine of the real presence. Mind you, I do not mean to impugn any of these doctrines; but am I the only one who reads modern Catholic systematic theology with a cartoon balloon over my head filled with an enormous

In terms of church attendance-the once-proud symbol of Catholic allegiance–it has been in decline since 1970–and why not, we have to ask, considering the endless loop of sermons about how loving God is all about hating abortion.

H. L. Mencken died in 1956, a decade before Vatican II had had a chance to work its special destructive magic. Years before that, in 1923 (think Scott Fitzgerald, Bentleys, raccoon coats) Mencken wrote an article in The Smart Set called “Holy Writ” that might have alerted the Church to the perils of the literal in reforming ancient tropes and gestures.

The occasion of the essay was a new translation of the Bible into French, designed to get rid of the contrived antiquity of the language then used for all Bible translations. Whoever did it, Mencken said with characteristic understatement, “is chiefly responsible for the collapse of Christianity in France.”

Contrariwise, he says, “the men who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous, and often unintelligible English gave Christianity a new lease of life….The Bible they produced was so beautiful that the great majority of men could not fix their minds on the ideas in it.”

For Mencken, this inaccessibility was a good thing: it raised the text above both the theological idea-men and the critics of tradition, so that even “the assaults of Paine, Darwin and Huxley” have not been effective against it. “They still remember the twenty third psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, and they are still moved beyond compare by the sermon on the mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unashamed in the story of the manger.”

No friend of elitism, the chattering classes, politicians nor the nincompoops who worked at factory jobs, Mencken saw the language of the 1611 (King James) Bible as the high-browiest thing about a protestant culture that without it would be as crass as its native sons. He teasingly alludes to the state of an atheist, who by comparison with a Bibled Methodist is infinitely more crass.

When he turns to the cradle Catholicism of his native Baltimore, Mencken finds something different to praise. The good of Catholicism is not in the Bible but in its keeping the Bible away from people, and keeping people away from the technical theological disputes that occupy only a small segment of the learned clergy.

What keeps the Catholic in the pew Mencken thought was not theology or lectures on doctrine but spectacle. The Catholic church exceeds the Protestant as he saw it “because it has always kept clearly before it that religion is not a syllogism but a poem.” “A solemn high mass must be a thousand times as impressive to a man with any genuine religious sense…as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God.”

Mencken enjoyed toying with the contrast between the major streams of American religion. Protestantism failed not only because he had a personal dislike for “American bible searchers,” largely Baptists and Methodists, whom he often called vermin, but because their religion purported to be logical.

The Protestants, he claimed “transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise” by putting their sermons front and center and eschewing liturgy. On the contrary, “Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was little employed in the early church and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today.”

But Mencken knew the end was near, even in 1923. He observed the lengthening of the sermon by Catholic bishops and priests (blather), the loss of the aesthetic, mumbled prayers, ignored rubrics, the twenty-five minute mass–as though Latin was a cage to be gotten out of.

He associated this tendency with the Irish, who wanted more gab and less godliness. He warns of the “folly” the American church is falling into by trivializing what a later generation of theorists would call “mystique”: “A bishop in his robes playing his part in a solemn ceremonial is a dignified sight, even though he may sweat freely. The same bishop bawling against Darwin half an hour later is simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable saloon keeper in South Bend, Indiana.” Darwin’s place, no doubt, has been taken by the Abortion Provider, but the bawling hasn’t changed.

Mencken had some advice for the Church back then, especially with respect to liturgical decline: “Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will propose to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.”

What he didn’t foresee is that the work would be done by the bald headed sons of the saloon-keepers.

Why God Doesn’t Exist in 500 Words

Azimuths Community College
500 Word Essay
John Tyler
Dr. Tim Harris, ENGL 101, MWF 1-1.50

Why God Doesnt Exist

Most of my friends are thesists. That means that they believe in some kind of god or supernatural nonenity. In this essay I will give alot of reasons why the thesists are wrong and why it is possible to be good without a belief in god. Then I will explain as to why I am a member of Pastafarians which is not a church, its a joke.

First of all no one has ever seen god. And you haven’t seen Santa Claus or the easter rabbit either. Things you can’t see do not exist. This is a big reason god does not exist, because you cant see him. Have you ever seen a unicorn or a ghost, well if you have you probably also beleive in a god?

Another reason he does not exist is the bible. The bible is full of stories about oceans departing and snakes that debate with you. It has stories about Jesus on water and blood turning into wine. Some stories say that people lived a thousand years before they died, I’d like to see that happen. My granma is 86 and every day she says just let me die, no way she is going to live a century or a milinimal. This is another big reason god does not exist.

219 words Suposably god gave orders to people in olden days. These orders are called comandments. Their are ten of them altogether. They cover a lot of ground with regards to idols and sex. For example they tell you to go to church on Sunday and not to use a condumb and walk upright. There are laws about donkeys and how to keep holy ect.

These laws do not really exist because they were made up by people and they should not be hanging over our courtrooms. America is a sexular country where everybody man or woman or gay is entitled to there opinions and has never had any use for people who just want to shut you up, so this is a big reason why god does not exist. Athesism teaches you to think for yourself unlike religion.

But the biggest cause why god does not exist is intelligent design. This is hard to explain because scientists don’t agree on every aspect of whether the universe exists but most say it does. An athesist says it does but that doesn’t mean god is the one who caused it, there are better reasons like spontaneous eruption and sun spots. It didn’t have to have a reason. It just happened when conditions were right. Some of the conditions were density and mass. There was probably some kind of huge compact an infinute number of years back probably before the Trojan War. No one knows for sure because as athesists we don’t have to believe anyone is right on any theory. Athesist don’t believe the world was created 4000 years ago but more like 20 or 30 million years ago BC.

Also if you look around the universe is not intelligent at all, it is full of crap. There is debris flying everywhere and the earth could get slammed tomorrow by a meteor. Also the sun is going out. If god is good why does he do that? Also the human body is not intelligent and the prostate is in the wrong place as are some internal organs like the immune system. This is part of the theory of evolution that means things happened with no plan but just because it works. It is called natural duplication. If there was a god or a plan this procedure would not be necessary, so this is a huge reason for no god.

I said in the beginning I would tell you why I am a pastafarian but this is already 565 words and I have practice. But a Pastafarian is someone who believes that there is a flying spagheti monster instead of an angry old man named god. lol. We don’t really believe that but it is kindof funny when you think about it.

The Last LiveJournal Entry of ibn Al-Addin

Monday

Dear LJ

My father Juwat Al-addin (may he rot in hell) left me nothing but this lamp.

He refused my pleas for a BOA Visa Platinum card with overdraft protection.

He scoffed when I asked for the new Moneual cylindrical computer covered in 3,554 Swarovski jewels, and housed in gold and brass panel with 7-inch multimedia touchscreen display, ATI Radeon HD 4000 for HD video playback, a 500 gigabyte harddrive, internal speakers, a remote control, DVD-R, multimedia card reader, a wireless keyboard and mouse, Intel Core 2 Duo.

Stingy bastard.

He spent everything on his five wives. My mother Yasmin died a virtual pauper with only the gold Mercedes and the Rolls and the villa in Montserrat to save her from destitution. She was eighteen.

I hate him. Him and his crappy lamp. Him and his crappy lamp and rug that won’t stay on the floor.

He says it will teach me the value of a dinar. “Use the lamp wisely, my son, and you will inherit the earth. Use it foolishly and you will come to a fool’s end.”

F. that, f. him.

Oh look, the old dog left instructions.

“Rub briskly twice. Wait for jinn to appear. You will have three wishes, no more. You may speak your wish to the jinn, or only think it. Jinns can read your thoughts and your wish is his command.”

Yeah right. What the hell. Here I go: Rub a dub blue. Rub a dub green. Come out Mr Genie, or is it Eugene?

OMG, LJ: there’s a vapour, a kind of mist coming from the tip of the lamp.

It’s green and purple and…OMG it’s got a face and a turban and looks a lot like my uncle Ibrahim the shoe salesman.

OMG, it’s true! I can have anything I f’g want. OMG, I want to die.

Atheist Zombies from Hell

There is a post over at the Center for Inquiry site, or what is left of it, to the effect it has not been taken over by “atheist fundamentalists.”

Phew.

I have just seen Zombieland, so I feel pretty knowledgeable about what a takeover would mean.

Please, sit down.

Teams of craven secular atheists would come to your home demanding you turn over your Bibles, your rosaries, your virgin daughters.

I know, I know. Much easier to vouch for the Bibles.

Your only protection would be holy water, and they would break your cruets, laughing hysterically, and dribble it into your petunias

If you have stored communion crackers, whatever the reason, be ready to cough them up. These types are bloodless, hungry, merciless.

(But they have not taken over CFI. They are being held at bay south of Depew.)

Next they would march on Walmart, demanding that Halloween displays be taken down.

They will impale a store clerk on a flagpole if he resists. Force people to eat Kandykorn and Peeps. It’s hideous.

After all, Halloween is the Eve of all Saints Day on November 1st (“all hallows evening”), a religious holiday of the Catholic Church. The celebration of this holiday–trick-or-treating, gorging on sweets, lighting of jack o’ lanterns on front porches–must be discouraged: it violates the First Amendment.

But with atheists, it’s a matter of degree. It’s not whether you believe in God anymore. It’s what you’re willing to do about it.

The moderate secularists I know simply resort to pumpkin smashing. Or rounding up trick or treaters, reasoning with them, trying to make them understand that they are guilty of extortion.

“Listen, Jonquil: what you are doing is stealing in the name of religion,” I heard an atheist say to a little girl about to buy a fairy princess costume at Target last week.

“If you did the same thing on November 10th, we’d have to call the cops and throw you in jail.” The little girl, to her credit, understood perfectly and, fighting back a tear, asked her mother to buy her a 120 GB Ipod Touch instead.

The New Atheists, if they come to power, will ban the sale of straw brooms. You will not be able to buy a sack of caramels and a sack of apples in the same cart. Fairy costumes, forget it. You will only be able to dress up like Charles Darwin on his birthday and ask politely for
arthropods door to door.

CFI will not do this. They are decent types. Not into trickery, cheap shots or slurs.

They need offices and outreach to do what they do, and the suggestion that they are just a blog with an office–slanderous.

Blasphemy Day sort of symbolizes that, doesn’t it? The high ground. The intellectual cutting edge.

We can rest easy that the marauding atheist hordes will not invade our classrooms and take Johnnie’s hand off his chest just before he utters the dread words “Under God.”

Or (coming right up) storm the courthouse square to demolish a nativity scene and send the wise men packing back to Babylon.

We need to know that CFI stands up for the rights of the committed secularist, the little John Q. Public Unbeliever who thinks big thoughts, no matter what he or she believes. It’s secular America at its best.

Be on the right side of history: join CFI in its fight to send the atheist zombies back to hell.

Atheist Tantrums: The New Loud

What do you get when you cross a new atheist with a Jehovah’s Witness?
Someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all.

This will be brief. Blasphemy Day, God love it, has come and gone. Soon the giggling will stop. Dogs, horses and Episcopalians will be left wondering what the point was. The few Pentecostals who can read a newspaper will say, “See, told you so,” and head for the basement before the anti-Christ rides through town.

I was musing yesterday why, as a pretty fervent Roman Catholic in the 1960’s, I fell on the floor in paroxysms of laughter when a friend (also Catholic) played Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag” for me for the first time. I still laugh when I hear it, even though most twenty-first century Catholics don’t know what a kyrie eleison is or bother to stand in line for confession. In college, a little less fervent, I knew priests (many of whom aren’t any more) who knew the song from front to back. We used to break it out on cue at Charlie’s Beef and Beer (RIP) at Harvard.

So if irreverence can be funny (and I love irreverence as much as I love Mahler) why do I think Blasphemy Day was such a fuckwitted idea?

Well for one thing, as I said in my two posts on the topic, bad art, bad jokes, and behavior designed to be stupid and offensive are seldom funny except to insiders.

A competition to see who can come up with the worst art, the worst joke, and the most self-referentially stupid behavior will have to be judged by how funny the insiders think it is.

I’m guessing the atheist insiders peed their pants. As for those standing outside the circle (those dogs, horses and Episcopalians), let the cattle judge.

An NPR story on the subject tried to link the Center for Inquiry-sponsored event to a growing rift between old school and new atheism.

If I bought the distinction, I would be expected to say that the “old atheism” as represented by ardent secularists like Paul Kurtz was warm and cuddly whereas the newer form, usually thought to be incarnate in Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (et al.) is tactically less subtle, more aggressive, unkinder.

But I don’t buy it. The old atheism was full of cranks and angry old men, but some of them were clever. Many of them (as my grandmother used to say) knew a thing or two. The big distinction between the old and the new is that the old atheism depended on a narrative, based in philosophy, and linked itself to a long tradition of rational decision-making. Not choosing to believe in God was an act of deliberation, not a foregone conclusion. At its best, it was studious and reflective. At its worst, it was purely negative, abrasive and sometimes nihilistic.

The best form of the old atheism had a lot in common with certain theological trends, ranging from nominalism to religious realism and minimalism–the sort of stance you get from Don Cupitt’s best writings. The worst, rejectionist stream of atheism, was marked (or marred) by intolerance and a lack of table manners. It was an atheism for the unsophisticated young and the dispirited old. Wedged between were Philistines of all ages, one big unhappy family.

What’s now being called “new atheism” or atheist fundamentalism is really nothing more than the triumph of the jerks. Unsubtle, unlearned (but pretentious), unreflective (but persistent). They have heroes in super-jerks like PZ Myers (yes, the one who drives spikes through communion “crackers” as he calls them, and Korans) because

Edgy is what young people like….They want to cut through the nonsense right away and want to get to the point. They want to hear the story fast, they want it to be exciting, and they want it to be fun. And I’m sorry, the old school of atheism is really, really boring.

Did you get that: really? Presumably Mr Myers has tenure, but I for one would love to see his teaching philosophy unpacked when it comes out in book form. Students may also like it raunchy, naked, and loud. And that’s why we used to think a university was a good place to lead people out of the tribe and toward civilization. Not PZ. Give him a hammer and he’ll follow you anywhere.

Almost as bad is the point made by CFI executive Ron Lindsay who says that his “research” organization will “take the high road, the low road, country roads, interstates, highways, byways, — whatever it takes to reach people.” Sounds strangely like Jesus, except the bit about the low road.

To the extent this highways and hedges approach works, imagine the good news: “Rejoice greatly: for unto you this day is born in the City of Right Reason…absolutely Nothing.”

Here is my prophecy. The raw atheism of the raw atheists who have given us Blasphemy Day and probably have other delights in store for us is loud because they already know no one is listening, at least no one who matters.

The shrill tones of the movement have to be amplified for the same reason cinemas now have to pump up the volume to drown out the hundred private conversations that are going on during the film, person to person, cell phone to cell phone, tweet to tweet. It is shouting, pure and simple because loud wins. Stupid and loud is even better, and outrageously stupid and loud is best.

But while all this is going on, there are many who style themselves humanists and are not believers in any conventional sense who want to say, “Shut up-I’m watching the movie.” (More precisely, “Shut up, we’re trying to think.,” or maybe read. What we need is an intellectual resource for thoughtful humanists, the thoughtful seekers who don’t think it’s cool to “repent” of your baptism by having a hairdryer pointed at your head.

What I miss about the old atheism–even though I still find its central premises wobbly and unconvincing–is that thinking was permitted. The conversation continued. There was no infallible source of confidence. Skepticism reigned.

The new atheism is a catechism of conclusions reached, positions taken, dogmas pronounced. It is more like the Catholicism I giggled to see parodied, a church too sure of itself and its exclusive ability to save souls and reveal the kingdom.

A Prayer:

Oh Thou who hast no name and many…and may not even be there:

Bring back clever.

Smite with a bolt of intelligence all enemies of parody and good satire.

Bring low the self-assurance of the Brights, and unto the Dims give light.

With a stroke of your mighty pen lay waste the stupidity of your deniers and confound the certainty of your defenders.

Render mute, O heavenly Conundrum, the loudness of the gainsayers and the loudness of the speakers in tongues. Do it soon.

And do Thou, O King, or Something, of the Unseen Regions of my Brain, grant me the endurance to suffer religious fools as gladly as I suffer the Atheist. And failing that, send a scorching fire upon the earth, if it isn’t asking too much.

Amen.

On the Death of the Jesus Project

Reprinted from Bible and Interpretation

With the exception of the King James Bible and Westcott and Hort, the biblical Gilbert and Sullivan of their day, New Testament scholars would be hard pressed to cite examples of “scientific” collaboration prior to the twentieth century. Most of the great works of nineteenth-century scholarship were lonely affairs, created by academic individualists with theories to sell, texts to translate, problems to solve. There were exceptions of course: 2008 marked the slightly-off centenary of the publication of Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem (1911), but like its predecessor and most academic conferences since, the original volume was less a collaboration than a collection of disparate, if highly interesting, opinions. Even works that might have benefited from collaboration in terms of textual discoveries and interpretation were not normally managed that way. We still regard the nineteenth century, culturally extending to the outbreak of the First World War, as the era of biblical soloists with theories ranging from the ridiculous to the plausible.

If we compare the nineteenth century situation to the trend that developed after World War II—the Qumran, Gnostic, Pseudepigrapha, and Apocrypha projects–at a macro-level the Anchor Bible, denominational biblical, encyclopedia and dictionary projects—the contrast is startling. Partly this has to do with the simple fact that new documentary discoveries and the need for more serviceable translations seemed to dictate division of labor as a way of doing business more efficiently. Partly, interest in collaboration was the effect of biblical studies professionalizing itself along the lines being developed by European, especially British and German, archaeology and philology. The model was so popular by the end of the seventies that it was widely assumed almost any task could be approached on a “project”-basis—even efforts that were ill-suited to such an approach.

In general, collaboration is suited to constructive and technical rather than interpretative or highly theoretical work. Because of the close traditional alliance between biblical studies and theology, as well as the nature of the biblical literature itself, it is notoriously hard to keep theology at bay in the realm of interpretation. Constructive work is different. Although far from perfect on a number of levels the Hennecke-Schneemelcher Neutestamenliche Apokryphen in Deutscher Ubersetzung was a pioneer work in the non-parochial study of extracanonical literature when it was first published in German, and in English translation in 1963, making the eccentric one-man collection of ghost-story writer M. R. James virtually useless. The same can be said of James Charlesworth’s editorial management in the translation of Old Testament apocrypha in relation to the 1913 collection edited by R. H. Charles and James Robinson’s production of a serviceable English edition of the Nag Hammadi materials. We owe to that generation of scholarship a way of moving beyond the legendary slings and arrows that were characteristic of the Dead Sea Scrolls “collaboration,” tactics that spawned a whole genre of intrigue and tarnished biblical studies as being theologically interested, religiously mysterious, and academically second class.

When I say that collaboration is suited to constructive work, I mean that it is justified when the nature of the investigation is clearly indicated by the nature of the task. Translations, questions of provenance, reconstructions of fragmentary materials and documentary questions, it seems to me, have produced the greatest examples of collaboration.

Questions about “What really happened?—are fundamentally unsuited to collaborative effort. This is true because Big Questions–Who Jesus really was, or What Jesus really said are far more susceptible of opinion-mongering , ideology and religious self-interest than the architectural ones.

John Crossan lamented at the mid-point of the Jesus Seminar that the project had become a Catherine Wheel of opinions with as many Jesuses as there were books about him, to the point where the effects were becoming “embarrassing.” For Crossan, who pressed hard for his own theory, the problems of the Seminar could be traced to a failure to get the methodology straight from the beginning. In fact, however, there was no methodology to get straight apart from sources that had been laboriously clarified by scholars working on a different set of issues. I have sometimes been asked why I have made no attempt to do my own reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel; I have two answers, but the one that matters is that I have no faith in Tertullian’s memory and regard any attempt to base a reconstruction primarily on those derivatives as unreliable. That answer will dissuade (has dissuaded) no one from trying, just as the “collaboration” made possible from the Jesus Seminar turned into a cloud of witnesses to a range of historical characters named Jesus who probably (and I do not mean this in the historical sense) never existed.

All of this brings me to a difficult subject. In June 2009 the so-called Jesus Project was temporarily “suspended” by its funding organization on the verge of a conference at Stanford. Shortly thereafter I announced my decision to leave the Project–stating that sustained scholarly inquiry cannot survive a bad case of the hiccups. On-again-off-again projects are damaged by inconsistency and irregularity.

But the hiatus has given me time to consider more carefully whether the Jesus Project was ever worth the trouble. Is it a project that could have “worked” (a la Crossan) with a better developed methodology? Was it destined to survive fissiparation by the very different interests of the scholars who associated themselves with it? Could it have overcome the charge of special pleading leveled at it by scores of onlookers who regarded its sponsor, a secular humanist advocacy organization, with suspicion –though they might never have thought the same if the funds had come from a Christian agency.

And finally, and perhaps more important, Who cares? Arthur Droge of the University of Toronto made the point directly at the last meeting of the Project in December 2008, perhaps its last meeting full stop, that one should not assume that the question of the historicity of Jesus is inherently interesting. At the time, I challenged Droge’s assessment: first, because I think some questions are inherently interesting, especially the ones that yield contradictory answers. And second, because I have often made the claim that it has been largely theological interests since Strauss’s time that ruled the historicity question out of court. It seemed to me that any question concerning the biblical text should be decided on the basis of the best evidence we possess and the best interpretations we can render without wandering off course into our own enthusiasms.

With due regard to the complexity of evidence surrounding Christian origins—a subject that has been complicated, in a good way, rather than solved by the discoveries of modern scholarship—I no longer believe it is possible to answer the “historicity question. “ No quantum of material discovered since the1940’s, in the absence of canonical material would support the existence of an historical founder. No material regarded as canonical and no church doctrine built upon it in the history of the church would cause us to deny it. Whether the New Testament runs from Christ to Jesus or Jesus to Christ is not a question we can answer.

Obviously I do not deny the existence of mythic materials entwined with a more or less historical memory of a real individual. But as I have written elsewhere, we cannot point to a stratum of ancient biography where such intertwining does not exist: it is a matter of degree, not genre, and a matter of guesswork, not reconstructive surgery. The fate of the Jesus Seminar and the potential fate of the Jesus Project had it continued—or rather, had it been advisable for it to continue—reveals more about the history of guesswork than about the “reality” of Jesus. The NT documents, especially the Gospels, are precisely the sort of literature we would expect to emerge from a time when the dividing line between the natural and “supernatural,” indeed, the divine and human, was not clearly drawn: the true miracle would have been for the NT to stand completely outside the limits of Hellenistic storytelling and the rudimentary historiographical interests of a religious community.

Finally, a word about the “orientation” of participants. While I am as hermeneutically suspicious of extravagant claims for the trustworthiness of the Gospels as many of my skeptical colleagues, I regard the suggestion that the New Testament is “deceptive” as showing a lamentable ignorance about the nature of myth and the nature of history. The myth theory in its most robust form was more possible in the nineteenth century than in the late twentieth or twenty-first because we know more today about the sociology of memory and the nature of myth.

The Jesus project was announced—in fact, but somewhat irrelevantly, against my wishes—at a conference at UC Davis in 2007. It soon became famous, like Rasputin, for all the wrong reasons. Interestingly, the title of the conference, which included among many others James Robinson, James Tabor, Bruce Chilton and Philip Esler, was “Scripture and Skepticism,” a title designed to call attention to the need to avoid all forms of sensationalism (Da Vinci code style) in marketing biblical theories—a call to seriousness and sobriety.

Alas, The Jesus Project itself became a subject for exploitation: news stories, promotional material and the reactions in the blogosphere focused on the Big Question: “Scholars to Debate whether Jesus Really existed.” Given the affections of media, the only possible newsworthy outcome was assumed to be He didn’t. Such a conclusion had it ever been reached (as it would not have been reached by the majority of participants) would only have been relevant to the people April DeConnick ( a participant) has described as “mythers,” people out to prove through consensus with each other a conclusion they cannot establish through evidence. The first sign of possible trouble came when I was asked by one such “myther” whether we might not start a “Jesus Myth” section of the project devoted exclusively to those who were committed to the thesis that Jesus never existed. I am not sure what “committed to a thesis” entails, but it does not imply the sort of skepticism that the myth theory itself invites.

Do I regard the Project as worth pursuing, reviving? I think the historicity question, as I have said many times over, is an interesting one. But it is not a question that in the absence of a “real” archeological or textual discovery of indubitable quality can be answered. It cannot be answered directly and perhaps not even through the slow accumulation of new sources. The issue is not merely that such a discovery would not persuade die-hard mythers and would not support believers in the divine Christ. It is that such evidence is really not an academic possibility. Not even the unearthing of an unknown archive of the forced and sworn confession of a skilled forger and tale-teller by the name of Rufus, appearing in front of a magistrate in the year 68 CE, would suffice. We already possess material like that, it is forged.

But the chief reason that it is time to sound the knell for all such projects is that that they cannot function collaboratively, both by virtue of what they want to achieve—that is, the over-speculative nature of the task—and because they are examples of the perils of false collaboration: an incoherent anthology of opinion derived from the private prejudices and objectives of Jesus-makers.

And on the Eighth Day, God Created Scholars

And on the ninth, colleges to keep them away from others.

Update: A better Hebraist than I ever was or will ever be has called my attention to the panoply of uses by the author of Isa. 45. 12-18, where bara’is used alongside other verbs meaning collectively to refine, shape or complete: asah (made); bara’ (fashioned); nata (stretched), yasar (fashioned), kun (founded), and sawah (brought together). The difficulty is in finding a use of the verb to refer specifically to the act of separating as an aspect of fashioning. Here is the text from Isaiah:

12 I created the world
and covered it with people;
I stretched out the sky
and filled it with stars.
13I have done the right thing
by placing Cyrus in power,
and I will make the roads easy
for him to follow.
I am the LORD All-Powerful!
Cyrus will rebuild my city
and set my people free
without being paid a thing.
I, the LORD, have spoken.
The LORD Alone Can Save
14My people, I, the LORD, promise
that the riches of Egypt
and the treasures of Ethiopia will belong to you.
You will force into slavery
those tall people of Seba. They will bow down and say,
“The only true God is with you;
there are no other gods.”
15People of Israel,
your God is a mystery,
though he alone can save.
16Anyone who makes idols
will be confused
and terribly disgraced.
17But Israel, I, the LORD,
will always keep you safe
and free from shame.
18The LORD alone is God!
He created the heavens
and made a world
where people can live,
instead of creating
an empty desert.

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There is a buzz about a discovery by a certain Ellen van Wolde who is a professor of Old Testament in the Netherlands. It focuses on Genesis chapters 1-3, the most overworked piece of mythology in the world.

That is precisely why any claim to have “discovered” anything previously unknown about any verse of the book called Genesis (in Greek: the Beginning) should be treated with extreme skepticism. I humbly offer my services.

Van Wolde claims she has carried out “fresh textual analysis” that proves it was not the writer’s intention to say that God actually created the cosmos.

One review touts, “The writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.” Er, well…yes. That’s what it says alright, and unless she has just read the book for the first time, the discovery she claims to have made looks a little shy of an exegetical breakthrough.

Van Wolde claims she has “re-analyzed the original Hebrew text” and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.”

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara“, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate.”

According to her, Genesis 1.1 is not a “creation” story at all but a story about God separating the heaven and the earth–both being in the cosmic room, so to speak, when the roll was called. Think of God as a cotton gin, sort of, or a French chef who knows his way around eggs.

I don’t envy her chances when she presents her “discovery” to a room of Hebrew Bible experts in a few weeks.

In fact, if I had been privileged to sit on her thesis committee I would have said she should really go back to the drawing board because what she has uncovered is merely the peculiarity of a verb that has vexed philologists and translators for a very long time. A short list of eminent Hebraists who have played with the syntax includes Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Ewald, Dillmann, Humbert, Skinner, Speiser, Francis Andersen and Robert Alter. Probably also the translators of the King James Bible.

The choice to translate bara as “separate” misses the point about what “separation” means in the material culture of the period. The suggestion that her find makes: “the traditional view of God the Creator…untenable now” seems a little…extravagant.

Scholars of the ancient Near East have known for more than a century that other ancient creation stories assume the pre-existence of material things–water, mud, light, primal seas, monsters, fogs and abysses to name a few.

The most famous of these, the Enuma Elish, and the Atrahasic epic make similar assumptions about “pre-existing” matter. Creation is not a question of creation ex nihilo in the ancient Near East but the act of organizing what already exists.

Everybody knows that.

Christians and Jews did not begin to talk about the biblical text as an instance of “something from nothing” until speculative theology began to squeeze the poetry out of the ancient narrative.

Van Wolde’s argument is really with the church fathers and later writers rather than with the Bible. And with deference to a few others who have already commented on her claims, creation ex nihilo is not the same as what they are calling creation by divine fiat. Kings in antiquity create (cause to happen by divine command), but the wherewithal to execute their commands is already there for the taking.

God in Genesis is behaving like a king, not like a magician.

But even if she is wrong about the “newness” of her attempt to locate the biblical narrative in the context of other Near Eastern poetry where “separation” of organized mass from disorganized (usually watery) chaos is the rule (I am literally unaware of even one reputable Old Testament scholar who does not know this pattern), is she right about having cracked a linguistic enigma?

Da Vinci Code time.

Probably not. A former research associate to Umberto Eco who liked mystery and intrigue as much as the next writer, van Wolde seems simply confused about the syntax.

J. Hobbins over at Ancient Hebrew Poetry has already recounted her confusion concerning the reworking of Gen 1.1. His main point is that the act of separating and the act of making are basically the same whether the author is thinking of creation by divine fiat (“Let there be light!” when light may be there for the taking) or not.

The ancient poets were working with human models and patterns of kingship. A strong but somewhat troublous king like Gilgamesh achieved his reputation not by making bricks (they were there already) but by causing a wall to be built around his city of Uruk.

The God of Genesis works in the same way: he brings something about as a fashioner of materials that prove his organizational skills. Not something out of nothing. Something out of a mess of possibilities.

Hobbins cites the New English Bible as an example of how a good English translation can clear up some of the confusion: creation is a process (and, by the way, God is not actually called “creator” but the one who instigates a process): The temporal framework is so vague, despite the writer’s use of “days” to separate phases of the process, that even Augustine wondered what existed before there was something to exist:

In the beginning of creation,
when God made heaven and earth,
the earth was without form and void,
with darkness over the face of the abyss,
and a mighty wind that swept over the surface of the waters.
God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.

It’s a nice touch because it separates (that word again) the process of creation from the making that brings it all together–which clearly is the writer’s intention.

But also: it is pretty clearly the writer’s intention to show God as architect-in-chief, designer, and completer. Not sure what to do about the most troubling bit of Genesis 1, the creation of man in God’s image since we can’t precisely be sure what image the writer was working with.

But in part this was solved by the (different) author of Genesis 2.6ff., where God uses water and dirt to form clay and “fashions” Adam from the mixture. In other words, like most ancient cultures, when asked how they began, the answer of the Hebrew writer was “We came from the ground.” or “we sprang from seed.”

The meaning is, We have been here a very long time. From the beginning.

It’s high time someone stopped defending this sort of crass sensationalism as “revolutionary” and called it what it is: Unoriginal.

In the long run, it may be less van Wolde’s fault for trying to sell this reading as revolutionary than the media’s for buying, or at least for not asking a half-dozen biblical professionals what they think about her claim.

A Post-Secular Humanist Manifesto

We believe that secular humanism is dead.

We believe that secular humanism now means so many different things that it has ceased to mean anything at all.

We believe that secular humanism does not represent a coherent philosophy or life-stance but a patchwork of ideas that are no longer revolutionary and meaningful and will not coalesce in the future.

We believe that organized humanism and the humanist movement have lost their way in a labyrinth of special causes, pleadings and agendas; that secular humanism is now a clash of competing liberal doctrines, lifestyles and agendas forced into conformity without sufficient examination, and that reasonable people will look elsewhere for intellectual energy, political resolution, and ideological support.

We believe that the close identification of humanism with secularism, free-thought and atheism was a collusion of opposites, limiting the breadth of the humanist spirit, denying the contribution of religion, theology and spirituality to modern culture, minimizing the intellectual continuity between past and present, and discounting the evolutionary nature of ideas and ideologies.

We believe that secular humanism does not provide new or carefully reasoned warrants for its own commitments—to “naturalism,” “science,” the use of “reason,” and ethical values based on these commitments–and that neither as an ideology nor as a movement has it made concrete contributions to the areas it claims to promote. Neither science nor ethics, it has been committed to a program of abstraction, pseudo-scholarship and polemic, a cause without consequences.

We believe that secular humanism’s narrow focus on the evils of religion, the paranormal, and anti-supernaturalism has become quaint, backward, isolated from modern discussions of belief, entrenched in archaic debates unworthy of serious intellectual discussion.

We believe that secular humanism’s use of “skepticism” to debunk superstition, the eccentric and the irrational has trivialized philosophical skepticism and that its assault on credulity has been derisive rather than informative.

We believe that secular humanism provides no coherent system of values and ethics: that its social philosophy depends on a relativism it mocks and that its call for a global ethic is rooted in an antiquated view of the world and its cultures.

We believe that secular humanism’s hostility to all religion is indistinguishable from a religious hostility to all forms of unbelief.

We reject, as humanists, the belief that our way of knowing about the physical and moral world can be reduced to naturalism and science; as skeptics, that atheism is a priori the sensible position of the reasonable man or woman.

We reject the idea of a single operating system for the humanist tradition in the arts and sciences.

We believe that secularism is not an irresistible trend in culture but a pattern of detachment from the control of dogma that was the fruit of modernity. We see this process continuing in terms constantly being reshaped by believers and unbelievers.

We believe that intelligent men and women of religious faith have been at the forefront of efforts to limit the dominance of religion, to insist on human rights and freedom of expression, and the separation of religion and civil government.

We believe this as a matter of a history that stretches back to the Renaissance, and not as matter of corporate ideology.

We believe that an authentic humanism is neither “religious” nor “secular” but an engagement with the highest achievements of human civilization in the arts and sciences measured by their effect on the human spirit and human values.

We believe that human beings are value-making creatures and that humanism at its most generous is the discussion of the grounds for human action, the warrants for human assent, and the propagation of ideas and objects that are worthy of our best instincts and aspirations.

We believe that moral positions are justified not solely on the basis of the rational decisions of individuals but are responsible to history, culture, and society.

We believe that men and women of virtue and intelligence have been atheists. We believe that women and men of virtue and intelligence have believed in God.

We believe that the contemporary world is not defined by a confrontation between believers and unbelievers.
___________________________

Please feel free to comment on this post or suggest constructive changes. It is a work in progress, not a finished product.

Blasphemy and Ridicule, Yet Again

As God once said, and then repented of saying it (Genesis 6.6), “I don’t do sequels.”

Follow-ups about such trivial strategies as the Center for Inquiry Blasphemy Day are a waste of everyone’s time.

But there has been a bit of action on this front, something just short of a news splash–which seems to be the only reason the press-and-media-starved organization concocted this idiotic venture in the first place.

On its own website, former Center for Inquiry chairman Paul Kurtz sensibly distanced himself from the Animal House antics, writing that Blasphemy Day is the active promotion of insult and ridicule, not a defense of free speech but a deliberate attempt to promote indignation through ridicule.

It is one thing to examine the claims of religion in a responsible way… it is quite another to violate the key humanistic principle of tolerance. One may disagree with contending religious beliefs, but to denigrate them by rude caricatures borders on hate speech. What would humanists and skeptics say if religious believers insulted them in the same way? We would protest the lack of respect for alternative views in a democratic society. I apologize to my fellow citizens who have suffered these barbs of indignity.”

Smart words from the former leader and philosopher. They call attention to the fact that the promotion of tolerance includes the right to criticize, but not the need to be deliberately offensive.

It’s also troubling that CFI isn’t connecting the dots between vicious caricatures of Jews, Irish and Polish Catholics, African Americans and the social, educational and economic deprivation these groups suffered as a result of ridicule.

Is this category of insult “different” because it is said to be directed (or so we are urged) at belief rather than at the people who hold the beliefs? Or is dumbness of this magnitude excused because it is sponsored by an organization that touts “reason” and “science” as a basis for its irrational acts and incoherent approach to the values it sees as part of its mission.

In a wayward and hormonal reply to Kurtz, lawyer-turned CFI-CEO Ron Lindsay argued that “Blasphemy cannot be equated with ridicule of religion.”

Of course it can. Blasphemy is just the name given to ridicule, insult, or disparagement when it’s forbidden by religious canons or other laws protecting particular doctrines and practices. The only difference is that what the CFI crowd are doing isn’t blasphemy because there are no laws against their doing it. That’s what makes it ridicule. Moreover (obviously) why then do it?

To try to turn this circus into a temple of reason or a crusade for free speech rather than an exhibition of contempt simply cheapens an organization fast becoming known for taking the low road. Far better if the unfunny architects of Blasphemy Day would simply confess that they decided to sponsor this instead of a “Biggest Atheist Penis Day.”

The Catholic League noted that the “blasphemy contests” were being directed toward Christians rather than Muslims. Why? “Because even the atheists know that Christians can be counted on to react to their antics like good Christians.” More likely, they will ignore it, the same way you cross the street to avoid eye contact with odd-looking people. People like P Z Myers, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota at Morris, known for intentionally desecrating a consecrated communion host. (Ah! Achilles, What Bravery is Here!) He says the day was established to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal.” and is quoted as saying he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day.

But the sharpest commentary comes from a particularly folksy, commonsense article in the Indianapolis Star by Robert King: It may be true, he writes, that this “test of wits” designed to see who can come up with the most offensive (sorry, “blasphemous”) image, poem, or tie-dyed T-shirt is protected speech. “But this blasphemy contest strikes me as beneath a crowd of folks who pride themselves on relying on reason and science to find their way through the world. They even offer silly suggested blasphemies, such as ‘God is the Santa Claus You Never Stopped Believing in’. The whole thing strikes me as a bit juvenile — like something a group of teenage boys would come up with around the lunchroom table.”

Oh, come on. Teenage boys have better things to do. Like throwing food.