The doctrine of Transubstantiation is obviously a ridiculous one, and that ridiculousness is apparent to anyone who stops to question it, be they a child or an adult. The fact that I felt the need to suppress these doubts and questions (to even ponder them would have been sinful) and the fact that millions of adults continue to profess belief in a doctrine that even a small child with the most basic of critical thinking skills can easily debunk is a depressing reminder of the effectiveness of childhood Catholic indoctrination….
[M]illions of adults, all across the world, believe that, as the Pope puts it, the Eucharist is “Jesus who makes himself food.” That is both laughable and incredibly sad. Transubstantiation is a perfect example of the nonsensical nature of religious belief, and the fact that so many individuals unquestioningly accept such a ludicrous and laughable notion illustrates the insidious power of religious indoctrination.
Further, the fact that non-Catholics are expected to avoid questioning or pointing out the absurdity of this doctrine, out of fear of offending Catholics, is a clear example of the automatic and unquestioned respect that our society grants to religious beliefs. Think about it like this: if your neighbor told you they believe that, each night, their pet dog turns into a unicorn, runs around doing magical deeds, and then transforms back into a dog before sunrise, you would almost certainly think them delusional and/or crazy, and you probably wouldn’t be afraid to tell them so. However, because our society offers religion so much undeserved and automatic respect, pointing out the sheer absurdity of the doctrine of Transubstantiation is considered by many to be a disrespectful act, while few would think it disrespectful to point out the ridiculousness of the less absurd (yes, less absurd) belief in dog-to-unicorn transformation, for example.
Archive for the ‘Origins of Christianity’ Category
Transubstantiation
Sunday, August 8th, 2010Jesus is just alright with him
Friday, July 30th, 2010Interview with Bart Ehrman, Jesus is just alright with him:
Mark and Luke had radically different attitudes toward Jesus’ death: Mark saw him as in doubt and despair on the way to the cross, while Luke saw him as calm. Mark and Paul saw Jesus’ death as offering an atonement for sin, while Luke did not. Matthew believed that Jesus’ followers had to keep the Jewish law to enter the kingdom of Heaven, a view categorically rejected by Paul….
[M]any of the books in the New Testament were not even written by their putative authors: only eight of its 27 books are almost certain to have been written by the people whose names are attached to them. [Ehrman] writes that scholars have tended to avoid the word “forged” because of its negative connotations, but argues convincingly that much of the Bible is, in fact, forged….
As Ehrman notes, there were many other Gospels floating around in the days of the early Christians, many of which claimed to be written by apostles, and there’s no historical reason to believe that some of these non-canonical gospels were any less worthy of being part of the Bible than the books that made it in….
Finally, and most devastatingly, Ehrman points out that “some of the most important Christian doctrines, such as that of a suffering Messiah, the divinity of Christ, the trinity and the existence of heaven and hell,” were not held by Jesus himself and were not contemporaneous with him. They developed later, “as the Church grew and came to be transformed into a new religion rather than a sect of Judaism.” The doctrine of the trinity only appears once in the New Testament, and the doctrine that Jesus is equal but not identical to God is found in none of the four Gospels….
Only in one Gospel, John, does Christ call himself divine, but John’s theology is radically different from that in the other three Gospels. To understand Jesus’ attitude toward himself, Ehrman argues, we must remember who he was: a radical millenarian Jew. Like other Jewish prophets in the Palestine of his day, Jesus thought that a cosmic judge, the Son of Man, was coming soon to earth. But he did not regard himself as the Son of Man….
Jesus was not a Christian at all, but a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. It was only with his followers that “Christianity” came into existence. Ironically, Jesus preached a profoundly Jewish religion: It was the later Christians (including John and Paul) who turned Christianity into the virulently anti-Semitic religion it was to become….
It’s almost a peculiarly American version of Christianity that says that to be a Christian you have to believe in the Bible. It’s actually a modern invention, located in America and wherever American missionaries have gone out. But historically, Christianity has never been about belief in the Bible….
I don’t think Christianity or monotheistic religions are the source of all evil in the world. [Of course, no atheist, even the ones who say that "religion ruins everything" it touches, has ever claimed that religion was the source of all evil in the world—straw man, there.] I think the problem is people just do wretched things. And they’re going to do wretched things whether they’ve got a religious justification for it or some other justification for it.
God, He’s moody
Friday, July 30th, 2010Robert Wright, on God, He’s moody:
People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was not fundamentally about morality before the invention of agriculture. It was trying to figure out why bad things happen and increasing the frequency with which good things happen….
[Bad things happened because] you had done something to offend a god or spirit [e.g., an ancestor]. However, it was not originally a moral lapse. That’s an idea you see as societies get more complex. When you have a small group of hunter-gatherers, a robust moral system is not a big challenge. Everyone knows everybody, so it’s hard to conceal anything you steal [i.e., you don't need to have a god "watching" everything you do]. If you mess with somebody too much, there will be payback. Moral regulation is not a big problem in a simple society. But as society got more complex with the invention of agriculture and writing, morality did become a challenge. Religion filled that gap….
The problem of evil is a product of modern religion. If you believe in an omnipotent and infinitely good God, then evil is a problem. If God is really good—and can do anything He or She wants—why do innocent people suffer? If you’ve got a religion in which the gods are not especially good in the first place, or they’re not omnipotent, then evil is not a problem….
I believe [monotheism] emerged later than most people think—in the 6th century BCE, when Israelite elites were exiled by the Babylonians who conquered them. The spirit of monotheism was originally a lot less sunny and benign than people claim. Morally, it got better, but at its birth, monotheism was fundamentally about retribution. Israel was a small nation in a bad neighborhood that got kicked around. This culminated in the exile, which was humiliating. It dispossessed the Israelites. It’s not crazy to compare the mind-set of the Israelites then to the mind-set of today’s Palestinians, who feel humiliated and dispossessed. This kind of mind-set brings out the belligerence in a religion….
In ancient times, there was always a close association between politics and gods. The victor of a war was always the nation whose god beat the other god. But the specific political dynamic that monotheism reflected at its birth was Israel’s desire to punish other nations by denying the very existence of their gods, and also envisioning a day when Israel’s god, Yahweh, would actually subjugate those nations….
Israel was polytheistic for a lot longer than most people think. A lot of things factored into its movement toward monotheism. One was a king who wanted to eliminate domestic political rivals. Those political rivals would have claimed access to various gods other than Yahweh, so King Josiah wanted to eliminate them. He killed some of them and also made it illegal to worship their gods. That gets you to the brink of monotheism. I think the exile pushes you over. You have a very belligerent, exclusive monotheism, whose very purpose is to exclude other nations from this privileged circle of God’s most favored people….
For people who claim that Israel was monotheistic from the get-go and its flirtations with polytheism were rare aberrations, it’s interesting that the Jerusalem temple, according to the Bible’s account, had all these other gods being worshiped in it. Asherah was in the temple. She seemed to be a consort or wife of Yahweh. And there were vessels devoted to Baal, the reviled Canaanite god. So Israel was fundamentally polytheistic at this point. Then King Josiah goes on a rampage as he tries to consolidate his own power by wiping out the other gods….
You see this kind of vacillation [between "can't-we-all-get-along God" and "angry-at-other-groups God"] in the Bible and also in the Quran. In both cases, it’s a question of whether people think they can gain through peaceful interaction with other people….
The doctrines we associate with Christianity probably took root a little later than most people think. There’s reason to doubt that Jesus is the source of the stuff we consider most laudable in Christianity: universal, transnational, transethnic love. I think that is a product of people like the Apostle Paul, who, after the crucifixion, carried the Jesus movement into the Roman Empire. Paul wanted to build a network of churches. He was a true believer, but he went about this in a very pragmatic, businesslike way. In many ways, the church served as a networking service. That was part of its appeal. The network of Christian churches made it easier for merchants to travel from city to city in the Roman empire and do business….
The Roman empire was in a way waiting for a church to dominate it. The more Christians there were, the more valuable it was to join that network. When Christianity reached critical mass, then its dominance of the Roman Empire became almost inevitable….
[T]he Sermon on the Mount, which is a beautiful thing, does not appear in Mark, which was the first written gospel. And these views are not attributed to Jesus in the letters of Paul, which are the earliest post-crucifixion documents we have. You see Paul develop a doctrine of universal love, but he’s not, by and large, attributing this stuff to Jesus. So, too, with “love your enemies.” Paul says something like love your enemies, but he doesn’t say Jesus said it. It’s only in later gospels that this stuff gets attributed to Jesus….
I think [Jesus] was your typical Jewish apocalyptic preacher. I’m not the first to say that. Bart Ehrman makes these kinds of arguments, and it goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Jesus was preaching that the kingdom of God was about to come. He didn’t mean in heaven. He meant God’s going to come down and straighten things out on Earth. And he had the biases that you’d expect a Jewish apocalyptic preacher to have. He doesn’t seem to have been all that enthusiastic about non-Jews. There’s one episode where a woman who’s not from Israel wants him to use his healing powers on her daughter. He’s pretty mean and basically says, no, we don’t serve dogs here. He compares her to a dog. In the later gospels, that conversation unfolds so you can interpret it as a lesson in the value of faith. But in the earliest treatment, in Mark, it’s an ugly story. It’s only because she accepts her inferior status that Jesus says, OK, I will heal your daughter….
It’s certainly plausible that his following included poor people. But I don’t think it extended beyond ethnic bounds. And I don’t think it was that original. In the Hebrew Bible, you see a number of prophets who were crying out for justice on behalf of the poor. So it wasn’t new that someone would have a constituency that includes the dispossessed….
There’s no evidence that Jesus thought he should be equated with God. He may have thought he was a messiah, but “messiah” in those days didn’t mean what it’s come to mean to Christians. It meant a powerful figure who leads his people to victory, perhaps a successful revolt against the Romans. But Christ as we think of Christ—the son of God—that’s something that emerges in the later gospels and reaches its climax in John, which is the last of the four Gospels to be written. So the story of what Jesus represents in theology did not take shape during his lifetime….
I’m against the idea that there was a golden age of spiritual experience, but then at some point organized religion corrupted everything. I try to show that shamans are as political as anyone and were as self-serving as modern religious leaders.
Food in History
Monday, July 26th, 2010From Reay Tannahill’s Food in History:
It is impossible to know when human beings first began to dig for their food as well as gathering surface plants, but in Europe the wild ancestors of turnips, onions and radishes were used in prehistoric times, and what we now think of as flower bulbs may also have played a part in the diet. (p. 11)
There is little doubt that, from the millennia of gathering vegetables and fruits, women had discovered that it was sometimes possible to exert an active influence on plant growth. Given the right time of year and a modicum of good luck, an undersized turnip or radish put back into the ground would continue to swell; a single clove of garlic or a shallot would multiply into a cluster. (p. 17)
[From 9000 to 7000 BC, by] almost imperceptible stages, gathering developed into cultivating. The villagers discovered after a while that if they were too efficient at harvesting the wild grain, the following year’s crop would be drastically reduced. Then they learned to leave some of the ears on the stalks, with better but patchy results. When they took the next logical step and vegan to scatter some of the their carefully collected seeds evenly, by hand, over the soil, they ceased to be gatherers and became farmers. (p. 21)
Even before the glaciers retreated from Europe, [man] had begun to come to terms with the reindeer. Feeding on the mosses and ferns that flourished on land watered by melting ice, the reindeer suffered from salt deficiency and instinctively compensated for it by making periodic excursions either to the seashore or to inland salt licks; even a sprinkling of human urine helped to satisfy its need. Men, using this readily available substance as bait, began to entice the reindeer to the vicinity of their caves and even began building up the interdependence that was to play such a vital role in the subsequent domestication of animals. (p. 17)
What I’m thinking of there, of course, is about Siberian shamans supposedly observing reindeer eating amanita muscaria mushrooms and getting high from it; and experiencing the same effect just by licking up or drinking their (reindeers’, and shamans’) own urine, which contains enough of the unmetabolized hallucinogens to still trip off of it. (Plus, amanita tea—made just by steeping the mushroom caps in water—has a medium-yellow color strikingly similar to that of urine.)
[B]y late Neolithic times it was usually the creation myth (a magical explanation of the making of earth and heaven, people, beasts and birds) that preoccupied the hunting peoples and herdsmen, and the resurrection myth (explaining the annual death and rebirth of the soil) that obsessed agriculturalists as they waited for the barren ground to spring to life again. The fertility myth, subsidiary to both, could be accommodated in either.
The resurrection myth appeared in its basic form in the mythology of the predominantly agricultural Sumerians (c. 3500 BC). Inanna, goddess of love and war, set off to conquer the nether regions; while she was away the land remained infertile, but when, after many adventures, she returned to earth, everything came to life again.
[footnote: With regional variations, the same tale of human dependence on a semi-mortal god appears throughout most of the early world. In Egypt the god Osiris died and was resurrected; in Canaan Baal was below ground for seven full years during which drought and pestilence reigned on earth; in Greece Persephone spent six months out of every twelve in the underworld. Even in the Jesus of the New Testament, dead and then resurrected, echoed the early farmer's need to know that seeming death was not the end, either for nature of mankind.]
During the last 3000 years BC, however, the whole area from Sumer (under its more familiar name of Babylon) to north-west India was subject to a series of invasions by the nomad pastoralists of Central Asia. The gods of the nomads were very different from those of the settled agricultural people—positive and dynamic, gods who did things, creators gods, not saviors. As the invaders settled down and achieved a modus vivendi with their new subjects, so too did their gods, making a place for themselves in the agriculturalists’ pantheon and forcing a merger between the resurrection and creation myths.
Even so, the pastoralists’ Bull of heaven … was to sustain an independent role in many mythologies for thousands of years. Sometimes the role was half-playful, a cover for the amorous energies of Zeus. Sometimes it was symbolic, as in the Zoroastrian creed of Persia, where the original war between good and evil, light and darkness, was fought between cattle and wolves. (p. 33-5)
It is often said that the common Near Eastern prohibition on pork—in the Jewish and Muslim religions, for example—had its origins in medical doctrine, and certainly, pork can be a dangerous meat in a hot climate, which may well have been taken into account when dietary regulations were being formatuled.
But although the peoples of the Near East … must have known this for something like 5000 years, pork did not become taboo until after 1800 BC. The precise date is still debatable, but there is a clear correlation between the emergence of the taboo on pork and the arrival of the tribes of nomadic invaders who swept or drifted across great areas of eastern Europe and western Asia in the second millennium BC. These tribes, accustomed to sheep and cattle, seem to have had an almost pathological hatred for the pig—a wayward beast with little stamina, a constitutional objection to being herded and a tiresome inability to live on grass.
The Indo-European nomads disseminated much that was new throughout the lands they invaded and sometimes (if briefly) ruled, and one of their legacies was an institutionalized rejection of pork. (p. 54)
Mosaic law [was] designed to reunite [the Hebrews] by spelling out how they differed form the other peoples of their world and strengthening the single great bond that bound them—their worship of, and dependence on, Yahweh. (p. 55)
Biblio: Tannahill, Reay (1989 [1973]), Food in History (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.).
Heaven: A fool’s paradise
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010Heaven is constantly shifting shape because it is a history of subconscious human longings. Show me your heaven, and I’ll show you what’s lacking in your life. The desert-dwellers who wrote the Bible and the Koran lived in thirst—so their heavens were forever running with rivers and fountains and springs. African-American slaves believed they were headed for a heaven where “the first would be last, and the last would be first”—so they would be the free men dominating white slaves. Today’s Islamist suicide-bombers live in a society starved of sex, so their heaven is a 72-virgin gang-bang.
We know precisely when this story of projecting our lack into the sky began: 165 BC, patented by the ancient Jews. Until then, heaven—shamayim—was the home of God and his angels. Occasionally God descended from it to give orders and indulge in a little light smiting, but there was a strict no-dead-people door policy. Humans didn’t get in, and they didn’t expect to. The best you could hope for was for your bones to be buried with your people in a shared tomb and for your story to carry on through your descendants….
So how did the idea of heaven—as a perfect place where God lives and where you end up if you live right—rupture this reality? The different components had been floating around “in the atmosphere of Jerusalem, looking for a home”…. The Greeks believed there was an eternal soul that ascended when you die. The Zoroastrians believed you would be judged in the end-time for your actions on earth. The Jews believed in an almighty Yahweh.
But it took a big bloody bang to fuse them. In the run up to heaven’s invention, the Jews were engaged in a long civil war over whether to open up to the Greeks and their commerce or to remain sealed away, insular and pure. With no winner in sight, King Antiochus got fed up. He invaded and tried to wipe out the Jewish religion entirely, replacing it with worship of Zeus. The Jews saw all that was most sacred to them shattered: they were ordered to sacrifice swine before a statue of Zeus that now dominated their Temple. The Jews who refused were hacked down in the streets.
Many young men fled into the hills of Palestine to stage a guerrilla assault—now remembered as the Hanukkah story. The old Jewish tale about how you continue after you die was itself dying: your bones couldn’t be gathered by your ancestors anymore with so many Jews scattered and on the run. So suddenly death took on a new terror. Was this it? Were all these lives ending forever, for nothing? One of the young fighters—known to history only as Daniel—announced that the martyred Jews would receive a great reward. “Many of those who sleep in the dust shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt,” he wrote…. Within a century, most Jews believed in heaven, and the idea has never died.
But while the key components of heaven were in place, it was … a place where you and God and the angels sat—but Jesus warned “there is no marriage in heaven.” You didn’t join your relatives. It was you and God and eternal prayer. It was paradise, but not as we know it….
[Heaven's] primary function for centuries was as a tool of control and intimidation. The Vatican, for example, declared it had a monopoly on St Peter’s VIP list—and only those who obeyed their every command and paid them vast sums for Get-Out-of-Hell-Free cards would get them and their children onto it.
Easter Lore
Sunday, April 4th, 2010Easter is timed to coincide with the Sunday that follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox (March 21), and as such, can fall on any day between March 22 and April 25. It is not mere coincidence this most Christian of celebrations corresponds with the beginning of Spring: the deliberate linking of Son and sun is a motif throughout Christian literature. (Even though the words ’son’ and ’sun’ are not homophonous in other languages, Jesus, the son of God, is frequently associated with light and sources of light—such as the sun—in literature.) In Easter, Christian and pagan beliefs are brought together as resurrection—both of Christ and of the slumbering countryside after its long winter’s nap—and are celebrated in a festival that reaffirms the triumph of life over death. Elements of both belief systems bubble to the surface in this holiday, combining into a melded whole wherein both chocolate bunnies and solemn Easter services play a part.
The name for this holiday comes from much older times whose customs we’re now not all that familiar with. Many old religions had a Spring Goddess, a special deity who breathed life back into the world, both by banishing Old Man Winter and by encouraging growing things to grow and living things to mate. She went by many names. The Scandinavians called her Ostra, the Anglo-Saxons Eostre, and those who lived in the region that is now Germany knew her as Eastre.
All manner of rabbits are said to lay eggs on Easter Day. The hare itself is revered in lore—even in pre-Christian times, it was seen as a holy creature associated with fertility and the returning Spring. Important divinations about the character of the coming year were made from studying its movements. In northern Europe, the hare was considered sacred to Eastre, and therefore was not to be hunted.
The Easter Bunny is of German origin. He shows up in 16th century literature as a deliverer of eggs, in his own way a springtime St. Nicholas bent on rewarding the good. (Colored eggs were left only for well-behaved good children, you see.)
Eggs are very obvious symbols of resurrection and continuing life. Early humans thought the return of the sun from winter darkness was an annual miracle, and saw the egg as a natural wonder and proof of the renewal of life. The egg is also the ultimate symbol of fertility. As Christianity spread, the egg was adopted as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection from the tomb (a hard casket from which new life will emerge).
For centuries, eggs were listed among foods forbidden during Lent, so having them at Easter was a special treat that marked the end of a lengthy period of self-denial. The candy Easter eggs of modern times hark back to eggs used for a more serious purpose. Hardboiled eggs were dyed red in memory of Christ’s blood, then given to children as a talisman to preserve their health over the ensuing twelve months. This custom survived in slightly altered form almost until the present—it wasn’t that long ago one would find beautifully decorated Pace eggs kept year-round in British households for luck. The protective qualities of the scarlet-dyed egg are still invoked in parts of Europe to guard fields and vineyards from lightning and hail—one of these eggs will be buried on the property for that purpose.
Eggs themselves have their own lore, applicable both at Easter and other times. Breaking the smaller end of the egg betokens only disappointment of one’s hopes—with that supposedly lying in store, it makes sense to smack it open at the larger end. The discovery of a double yolk within is cause for terror or celebration depending on which school of thought is followed—some say it presages a wedding, others a death. Once the egg is consumed, its shell must be broken up lest a witch use it to gain power over the person who ate from it. A witch might also make a boat from an intact shell, then set sail in it and wreck ships at sea. Discarded eggshells should never be burned because doing so will cause the hens to cease to lay.
Easter lilies come by their name because of their shape (like Gabriel’s trumpet; another resurrection motif), color (white, symbolizing purity), and because they grow from bulbs, thus consequently seem to spring from the earth unbidden after the long months of winter. Incidentally, the lily was associated with the Virgin Mary, hence its common name, Madonna lily….
One curious belief has to do with “Lady Day,” March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation of Our Lady. For many centuries this date was reckoned throughout most of Christendom as the first day of the year.
The dark months were scary months, a time when everyone knew evil forces were lurking just out of sight. The winter solstice (December 21) was seen as an especially vulnerable time, with the fabric drawn between our world and the world of malicious spirits becoming rent, allowing the harmful ones to slip through to perhaps claim a victim or two. Though the bad things were around all winter, at this particular juncture, they were said to be out in force.
It became custom to hold a loud, cheery celebration at that time, in hope that the din would convince the lurking evil that there were just too many humans gathered in this one place to take on. Charms and rituals became part of the tradition surrounding this party as a further way of protecting loved ones from evil. Divination rituals further became worked into the fabric of things because the fragility of the curtain between the two worlds might allow for a glimpse from this side into the wonders of that which would be—chances were if those holes were letting evil spirits through, we might be able to peep back through them to see into their world and learn something from it….
Evergreens are symbolic of enduring and renewed life, which is why we decorate our homes with them at Christmastime. The fetching in of green branches is a magical rite to ensure the return of vegetation at winter’s end. Our modern day Christmas tree is the centerpiece of this belief.
Although these days when we think of decking the halls only Christmas trees, holly, and mistletoe come to mind, our ancestors decorated their homes with all those, plus ivy, rosemary, bay, laurel, and anything else that still showed green. Our choices have become standardized in a way theirs didn’t because we modern types observe the ritual without understanding what underpins it whereas our distant forefathers didn’t lose sight of the concept that a plant’s greenness was what counted….
Holly is celebrated in lore for its protective powers, being said to be especially effective against witches and lightning…. Holly is seen as a masculine plant and ivy a feminine one, leading to them being united at Christmastime….
Like holly, mistletoe is presumed a powerful charm against witches and lightning. At times it’s also been said to be a cure for poison, epilepsy, barrenness, and whooping cough.
Chris Hallquist debunks the resurrection
Friday, February 12th, 2010Chris Hallquist debunks the resurrection:
[A]n uncommitted but well-informed observer would conclude that Jesus was probably one of the many apocalyptic prophets of ancient Palestine, and that his life was heavily mythologised in the gospels, which were written well after his death. The ancient books traditionally ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were based on oral traditions that soon became embroidered with fanciful stories which are not even consistent with each other. The first of these books, Mark, did not come into existence until about 70 AD, and the other two synoptic gospels, Matthew and Luke, were largely based on Mark, with input from a lost document referred to by scholars as “Q.” (The gospel of “John” is later still and presents a very different account of Jesus’ life.)
It’s unlikely that the story of Jesus was made up whole—for a start, the very earliest Christian writings (those of St Paul) date from a time still too close to the events….
However, it’s conceivable that the New Testament’s “Jesus” is a composite figure to some extent, since oral traditions based on the lives of more than one of these prophets could have become conflated as the documents came into existence over time.
And yet, from the comments:
I wonder if you are projecting some of our current experience of a highly literate age in which detailed records are kept back into a culture where (outside a very few religious and government officials) almost nobody could read, write or even count very high, and the idea of keeping written records of events was totally alien to most people.
Put it this way: if Jesus had worked in Ancient Athens there would have been dozens of independent accounts of his story and many would have survived to put him in a historical context. The idea that Socrates, for instance, might be a myth is absurd.
But we have almost no contemporary records from Biblical Palestine, and I don’t see that we have any basis for asserting that Jesus was not wholly fictional. Are there not records of other prophets who are claimed to have worked miracles and resurrected? Are these also non-fictional?
My view is that the Jesus story was only one of many; it just happened to appeal to the right people (e.g. Paul) at the right time. If Paul, say, had died on the way to Damascus, the story of Jesus—if it survived at all—would be regarded as an obscure folk legend like the story of Gilgamesh.
I’ve seen Bart Ehrman claiming (no doubt validly) that there’s no dispute among professional theologians that an historical Jesus lived. I don’t know what “secret stash” of evidence they have for that, though, ’cause it seems much more likely to me that they’re just a group of people who will “go that far, but no farther,” in terms of questioning the beliefs which got them into the profession in the first place. (Would someone who was already a skeptic ever go into theology? Not likely. In fact, this is one of the reasons why skeptics’ arguments against religion and spirituality tend to be so unconvincing: While it’s not necessary to know all of the details of any fairy-tale in order to realize that it’s not true, if you’ve never fallen for the false claims yourself you won’t have made the effort to understand them at the same depth as the most intelligent of the believers do. I’m speaking from [New Age] experience, there, and have seen no examples to the contrary, in half a dozen years of reading the best of the skeptical literature. On the contrary.)
But really, just like the contemporary Babaji fairy-tale, it could go either way: There are surely many yogis named “Babaji” in the Himalayas; but just as assuredly, the Babaji of Yogananda’s Autobiography never existed, and never will.
The Faith Instinct
Sunday, November 8th, 2009Nick Wade’s new book The Faith Instinct comes out next week. I’ve been reading it for review, and it’s excellent. He seems (I’m only 60 pages in) to plant himself firmly in the religion-is-adaptive camp. This puts him in a minority among people who write about the natural history of religion. Most take religion to be an accidental by-product of cognitive processes—hair-trigger “agency detection” modules etc. Nice to see the other point of view (and group selection, too) get an airing.
I’ve got that book on order from amazon, and am quite looking forward to reading it, given the caliber of Wade’s previous writings.
But, religion is (evolutionarily) adaptive? In the sense that the belief that an Imaginary Friend in the Sky is watching you and can reward or punish you for your behaviors, no doubt it will usually result in people treating each other better than they otherwise would. And that would indeed provide a survival advantage for members of the group, and provide a converse out-group of sinners/infidels, which will further bind the in-group community together, in both war and peace. That is, there is indeed probably something to the “group selection” side of that—where the culture establishes firm group boundaries for gene flow and selection for particular traits, with marriage/reproduction happening primarily within the group—especially if it encourages women to be baby machines (cf. Catholicism, Islam). But of course that doesn’t mean that it’s an environment which anyone should be brainwashed into living in, even if, when you’re looking just at the widely-embraced, watered-down versions of “religion,” it can be “adaptive” in the sense of producing more surviving offspring.
None of that negates the by-product view, but it does provide a valid “other half” which has previously been missing from these one-sided analyses.
And yet, those two halves do not make a whole. Not even half a one. Because, what about esoteric spirituality? What about all mainstream religions beginning as Scientology-like cults, generally with a charismatic leader? (Of course, the fact that Jesus probably never even lived, but was still the “charismatic founder” of Christianity, pretty much blows the whole “charismatic founder” necessity out of the water.) What about yogis retiring to the Himalayas to live their lives in silent meditation, producing no offspring? Is that behavior also “adaptive”? If not, how do you get from a maladaptive, isolating cult, to an adaptive, community-cohesioning religion?
‘Cause Yogananda (et. al.) was right about one thing: Exoteric religions are degenerate, popularized, misunderstood (i.e., symbols being taken literally) versions of esoteric, meditative experiences. What he and others like him didn’t understand is that those experiences themselves are a product of human neurology, and get connected with the natural world via sympathetic-magical similarities in patterns—e.g., the migraine scotoma looks like a jagged lightning strike, or (in its closed-circle form) a snake about to swallow its own tail.
(I hadn’t known this before, but migraine auras can also look a lot like the Northern Lights—e.g., the souls of one’s ancestors, dancing around the North Star. ["The Cree people call this phenomenon the 'Dance of the Spirits.'"] There are some other amazing animations here—all of which are glimpses into the “other world.” That is, there are tribes [e.g., the Jivaro, IIRC] which, quite “reasonably,” take these forms and form constants as being the archetypes upon which the physical world is based.)
You can’t explain where exoteric religion comes from without understanding esoteric spirituality, with techniques of content meditation originating as internalized shamanic rituals (e.g., the believed path of souls along the Milky Way to the North Star—the “still point of the turning celestial world,” and “doorway” to the world beyond—being sympatically imitated in the climbing and descent of a pole, which was then internalized as the simply visualized climbing and descent of the spine to a point/bindu in the brain and the escape of consciousness through the brahmarandhra, cf. in kundalini meditation). And neither the by-product viewpoint nor the adaptive one can begin to account for the specific, widespread symbols which form the core of all religions. For that you need neurology and sympathetic-magical thinking. And I’d bet dollars to donuts that the latter, in particular, gets barely a mention in Wade’s book.
Like this:
Don’t try and tell me that any (esp.) agrarian culture wouldn’t have seen that as an attempt by the spirit of the crescent moon to communicate with the person experiencing the aura.
Throw out your Bibles….
Saturday, October 17th, 2009From Throw out your Bibles and free yourselves from the shackles of delusional superstition!
Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.
She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests 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….
Here’s how you should look at the book of Genesis. Long, long ago, a tribe of desert nomads bumped up against the more cosmopolitan culture of Mesopotamia. They learned useful skills from the city people, like writing, but at the same time, the allure of those older, more sophisticated ideas was leading to the dissolution of tribal identity, and especially to a loss of respect for the austere and demanding desert god. Who wants to worship dry old El when slinky, sexy Innini is calling?
So in a move as old as religion, almost, the desert priests slyly adopted the popular culture of their neighbors, stealing all their myths, but rewrote them to put their one great god in charge of the whole story. Genesis is an exercise in syncretism, a wholesale theft of one tradition to be repackaged with a new set of symbols. It is not about the creation of the universe. It is about resolving a conflict between two human cultures.
Virgin (Not!) Mary
Sunday, October 4th, 2009One of the interesting things which came up in conversation at the skeptics’ meeting I attended last month was that the supposed “virgin” aspect of Jesus’ mother, Mary, is actually a mistranslation of a (Greek?) phrase meaning “young woman.”
I had seen that idea before, but hadn’t made the obvious connection (as the speaker there did) that that means that any attempts to derive the mythology of Jesus from earlier “virgin birth” myths are inherently misplaced. Not that bits and pieces couldn’t still have been borrowed from the mythology of Horus, etc.; but the Jesus-myth overall wasn’t simply an adaptation of those earlier myths.
Or, at least, you can’t use the “virgin birth” of Jesus to argue that his story was an adaptation of those earlier stories.
Update: Googling “jesus virgin birth mistranslation young woman” brings up these pages. And there’s a whole big Wikipedia page on the Virgin birth of Jesus which also covers the “young woman” thing:
Hebrew has a specific word, betulah, for a virgin, and a more general word, `almah, for a young woman. Since `almah is the word used in the Hebrew text of Isaiah, some commentators have believed it at least possible that Isaiah had in mind only a normal conception by a young mother and that Matthew applied this text of Scripture to the birth of the one he believed to be Messiah, as John seems to have applied to his death another text of Scripture that in its original context referred to the Passover lamb.