Archive for July 30th, 2010

Jesus is just alright with him

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Interview 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.

Posted in Origins of Christianity | No Comments »

God, He’s moody

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Robert 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.

Posted in Monotheism, Origins of Christianity, Shamanism | No Comments »

The religious state of Islamic science

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Taner Edis, on The religious state of Islamic science:

If you’re talking about the proto-scientific thought that was inherited from the Greeks and Romans, all of the action [in the 9th through 12 centuries] was taking place in the Islamic world. Western Europe at the time was a land of barbarians—intellectually, totally negligible. In fact, Muslim thinkers developed Greek science; they didn’t just preserve it. But it is a mistake to think of this as analogous to modern science. What Muslims were doing back then was still a medieval, pre-scientific intellectual enterprise. They never quite made the breakthrough, the scientific revolution, that took place in Europe….

They did some very interesting things in medicine and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy and what today we would consider dead ends. This was not thinking of nature mechanistically, as happened in the scientific revolution in Europe, but in almost an occult sense….

[I]n Europe, you had a three-way interplay between science, orthodox religion and more occult religious alternatives. You could have interesting alliances. These end up being separated through historical accident—I don’t see anything special about Western Christianity that sets it apart from Islam—and they go their separate ways. This type of separation never really happened in the Muslim Middle East….

Much of the praise heaped on medieval Muslim science is due to a very selective reading of history. We tend to pick out ideas that are similar to what eventually became successful and downplay ideas that seem occult and outright crazy today. But medieval Muslim thinkers took the weird stuff as seriously as anything that fed into modern science….

[A] number of factors came together so that scientific institutions in Europe got lucky. They were able to break free of church constraints and unleash a powerful technology that plugged into emerging capitalism at that moment in history. After that, it was too late to go back and strangle science even if somebody wanted to….

[I]f you want to talk about the Catholic Church seeking an accommodation with modernism and science, you really have to come into the 19th and 20th centuries….

In the Western world, the institution of law achieved a kind of autonomy from religion early on. Some historians argue that this was really a precursor to science achieving autonomy as well. In the Muslim world, law was never entirely disentangled from religion….

It’s not so much a story of Islamic decline as Europe inventing an entirely new way of thinking about the natural world and really making a break with medieval ways of thinking. That didn’t happen in the Islamic world….

One of the features of medieval Islamic science that some modern Muslim thinkers want to revive is the way of perceiving the universe as a spiritual, God-centered place. This tends to work against the independence of science from religious institutions. It’s precisely this autonomy that helped science make the breakthrough in the Western world. In the Muslim world, this is still a relatively controversial concept. There is a tendency to say that science should operate under the guidance of religious concerns….

You can find many Muslim thinkers who say that Western Christians made a mistake by allowing science to operate independently of religious constraints….

People who read the Book of Genesis literally believe in a creation that happened 10,000 years ago [er, actually 6000 years ago, in 4004 BC—it was agriculture that began 10,000 years ago, and which gave us the myths which, ironically, lead people to believe that the world is only 6 ky old], literally done in six days. But the Quran is much vaguer about the time frame of divine action. Therefore, they are not as committed to fitting earth history into thousands of years. So Muslim creationists are almost invariably “Old Earth creationists.” They tend to think of Noah’s flood as a local event— not such a big thing—unlike the American creationists who think of the flood as the major geological event in earth history.

From the same piece, as this branches into a separate issue:

If you look into the literature on Islam and science, one of the names you will very soon encounter is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is a Muslim philosopher of science…. Seyyed Hossein Nasr says he’s trying to revive certain distinctly Muslim ways of thinking about the universe. But it’s a revival of all the strands of classical Islamic thought, including those strands which are very antithetical to science as we understand it today.

I remembered that name. Guess from where?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of [Fritjof] Schuon’s main disciples, was actively involved with promoting as well as working for and supporting the unjust regime of the Shah of Iran. The Shah embodied a puppet dictatorship in Iran, a client state set up by the U.S that was both fascist and monarchist. The Shah had a secret police organization which tortured, maimed and killed thousands from 1953-1979. Nasr was closely allied with this government even up to its final days. Nasr seems to have transferred this political zeal to Schuon, after the fall of the Shah in 1979. But besides serving the Shah, Nasr also had some influence on helping the Iranian revolution come about, since Nasr ran the Iranian academy and promoted Traditionalist ideas. The Khomeini revolution of 1979 was a Traditionalist revolution of sorts. Nasr would end in disliking its populism. It was not aristocratic enough for him. But he had an influence on it. Both the Shah’s regime and the Iranian revolution resulted in violating the human rights of the Iranian people. Nasr contributed to both systems. The free floating nature of Spiritual Fascism allows these kinds of multiple reactionary influences. Nasr’s Spiritual Fascism allowed his ideas to be acceptable to various far right dictatorships….

Many of the traditionalists, like Hossein Nasr, Ananda and Rama Coomaraswamy and Guenon were alienated and displaced individuals who were forced out of their parent countries or left it in the hopes of finding a romanticized and idealized culture elsewhere. They idealized the nostalgia they felt for cultures they romanticized as lost or on the brink of being lost. These idealizations are what the call ” traditions”….

Schuon Guenon, Whitall Perry and Hossien Nasr have all written absurd, silly and empty denials of evolutionism. Their arguments are basically the same as the creationists which have been refuted thoroughly….

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