Overcoming Bad Mental Habits

Western civilization: 2000 years ago, although the mass of people were in some senses less free than they are today -- for example, as many as 15% of the people in the Roman Empire, and as many as 40% of the population of Italy, were slaves -- still, most of them, even the slaves, were somewhat freer than we are today to speculate about religious matters.

That freedom of discussion began to go away as Christianity began to take over in the 4th century, and by the end of the 5th century, like the Roman Empire's territory in the West, it was almost completely gone.

Western civilization had adopted a very bad idea: that there was only one true religion and that no-one was allowed to have any other opinions about it. We in the Western world began to shake off this intolerance of discussion of religious things in the 17th century, and we're still shaking it off.

As Christianity has faded, capitalism has grown. As there was with Christianity before, there is very little tolerance for people (socialists) who say that capitalism is a bad idea. There is constant discussion about what kind of capitalism is best, much as the Western universities were once dominated by discussions of what kind of Christianity was best, but to say that capitalism itself is something which must be overcome is still today a lot like saying several centuries ago that Christianity itself was nonsense: it's bad for a career in business or politics.

Now I want to make it as clear as I can that I did not just say that capitalism is a religion. I said that I saw a similarity in the development of the two and their places in Western society in two different eras. But they're not the same thing.

If I point out that a cat and a dog both have fur, I am not saying that a cat is a dog or that a dog is a cat. That would be ridiculous.

But a lot of Christian theologians have said that capitalism is a religion. Other people have said it too, but it seems to be very common among the theologians to say that this or that thing which is not a religion, is a religion. Karl Barth said that everyone has a religion and that therefore everyone is a theologian of some sort.

Theologians are constantly saying completely nonsensical things like that. It seems to me that they have to say all sorts of nonsensical things in order to sustain religious belief, or, more precisely, in order to impede clear thought about religion.

Capitalism is not a religion. Neither is socialism, or golf. But because we in the Western world have become so inundated with theological nonsense and so used to it, many of us fall for absurd notions such as that a way of doing business or a sport can be a religion.

Clear thinking about religion tells us that, although it may have been very useful in the past, and may still serve many functions today, its major premises about supernatural creators and guardians and eternal reward and punishment and so forth, are all unsound.

Similarly, and once again I am by no means saying that capitalism is a religion, clear thinking about capitalism tells us that it has many shortcomings among its basic premises, and that we can do better. Capitalism is dog-eat-dog. It rewards sociopathological behavior. It is deeply, inherently unfair.

It is not particularly unusual for me to say that I am an atheist. It's becoming more and more common for people to just come right out and say that they're atheists. And we're not all extremely pugnacious and unpleasant about being atheists, the way that the New Atheists are. We're getting closer and closing to the level of religious tolerance which existed in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, when it was taken for granted that anyone was free to say want they wanted about religion and to believe and practice as they wished, and it was considered quite rude to denigrate anyone else's religion and insist that one's own was the only correct one.

They may be very many people today who believe that it would be best if society were organized so that everyone contributed to the well-being of all according to their abilities, and was cared for by all according to their needs. That's socialism. Capitalism and socialism are incompatible. Almost all of us are part-capitalist and part-socialist: part-capitalist because we have to be in order to survive within the capitalist system which dominates the world today; and part socialist, because we're decent human beings. There are very few people who are purely capitalistic all the time. They are awful, disgusting people like Donald Trump and the AIDS medication douchebag. But they are following the rules of capitalism very strictly: buy lo, sell high, put off payment as long as possible, don't let your effect on others even enter into your thoughts -- and because they've followed these rules so consistently, they're very rich. Very rich, loathesome sociopaths. The AIDS medication douchebag was always smirking in court and during interviews because he knew he was following the rules of capitalism. What's clear neither to him nor to most of the people nauseated by his behavior and smirk is that following the rules of capitalism all the time makes you a disgusting person.

Not all investors are the same, of course. Not all extremely wealthy people are the same. Not all capitalists are capitalists all of the time. Different billionaires get their billions in very different way, and do very, very different things with their billions. If Bernie Sanders grasps that, he's trying very hard to make it seem as if he doesn't. Prejudice is forming opinions about someone based on their membership in a group, rather than regarding them as individuals -- even if that group is the group of billionaires. Some billionaires are socialists to a very great degree, whether Bernie can grasp that or not, and whether the part-socialist billionaires realize it themselves or not.

"Antisocial" means both that you're against socialism and that you're an unpleasant person. "Social" means the same thing in both cases, and also in the case of the term "sociopath." Exactly the same. If you're an investor and you take actions which will tend to extend the life of the petroleum industry and hinder the growth of green energy, because you calculate that it will make you more money, you're a sociopath -- and a perfectly good capitalist. Watch the money shows on TV: the effect which investments will have on others never enters into the conversation unless someone has made a calculation that "green stocks" will make more money than others. On the money show this is all completely out in the open. Nobody's even the slightest bit embarrassed about ruining things for other people. The effect on other people is 100% beside the capitalist point of why they're there.

Capitalism = getting more and more money for yourself. Socialism = making the world a nicer place: cleaner air and water, fewer starving people, etc.

And none of that is exactly rocket science, but very few people are willing to face what they're able to understand about socialism and capitalism, the same way that very few people were able to face the fact that the stories in the New Testament made absolutely no sense, and that is was absurd to base all of society on them, although that, too, was quite plain to see, if one would but look.

Jesus' Stand On Homosexuality

A popular talking point among gay-friendly Christians arguing that traditional Christian homophobia is un-Christian -- if, that is, they are reality-based enough to admit that traditionally, Christianity has been homophobic -- is:

"Jesus never said a word about homosexuality."

Maybe not. But if he didn't, living and teaching as he did (assuming he existed, which I don't) in a cultural tradition which was decidedly homophobic, the logical conclusion would be that he went along with this homophobic tendency.

Even more logical would be for Christians to decide for themselves that homosexuality is okay, no matter what Jesus said or would have said about it. But of course, insisting that it doesn't matter what Jesus would do is entirely too logical for Christians.

Gay-friendly Christians ARE making up their own minds about homosexuality -- so far, so good. But they still have this completely irrational need to believe that they have Jesus' approval and that they are following Jesus' example. Nevermind that there is no evidence whatsoever that Jesus made any pronouncements which differed with the culture he came from on the subject of homosexuality.

But of course, theology and logic have been oil and water for a least a couple thousand years now. Evidence schmevidence, if there's no evidence we'll make up whatever we need. Of course, it's possible that Jesus was gay-friendly, and that this was edited out of the Gospels by those who may also have edited away that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, or in a gay relationship with one of his male disciples, or that he was married to Mary Magdalene and in a gay relationship with one of his male disciples. There are a few words' worth of evidence that Mary Magdalene's role in the group around Jesus may have been minimized in the New Testament. There's less evidence that Jesus was gay-friendly, and/or gay.

The thing is that there is so very little evidence about Jesus, period, which means that there has always been a great deal of room in which the imaginations of Christians could roam. It's possible that Jesus was gay-friendly, or homophobic, married or single, or that he never existed. It's certain that Christians have made whole libraries' worth of different versions of Jesus to suit what various ones of them have wanted to believe about him, out of the slender volume of dubious, self-contradicting evidence.

The Religious Situation

Back in the 20th century there was a particularly silly conversation going on among some literary critics and associated buffoons, asking when and if anyone was ever going to write The Great American Novel. Philip Roth made appropriate fun of this pretentious silliness by calling the novel he published in 1973 The Great American Novel.

One of the reasons it was silly was because many great American novels had already been written. But if you insisted on calling one of them THE Great American Novel, well that was also no problem: Herman Melville published it in 1851, and America's literary critics, those monumental wastes, trashed it. It's called Moby Dick. It stands comparison with War and Peace and Don Quixote and Tom Jones and Ulysses and any other Greatest Novel Of All Time you got. Moby Dick is the stuff.

It begins with a page concerning the word "whale" in English and the words for whales in several other languages; then a dozen pages of quotes concerning whales taken from the a variety of sources arranged chronologically from Genesis up to Melville's time; then comes Chapter 1, whose first paragraph contains these three sentences:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

When I first read Moby Dick I had already been very pleasantly surprised by the literary whaling voyage undertaken before Chapter 1, but when I read the above passage, Melville had me. I knew that he was one of my guys and that I was one of his. It came as no surprise to me when, some time after my first reading of Moby Dick, and then of his novel The Confidence Man and his story "Bartleby the Scrivener," I learned that Melville had been an atheist. Of course he had. The thing about needing the strong moral principle in order not to spectacularly lose his composure and manners had already told me that he was like me.

I came here today to talk to you about the people who make you want to step into the street and lose all control of the angry part of yourself: Christian theologians. I got a book today: The Religious Situation by Paul Tillich, translated from Die religioese Lage der Gegenwart by H Richard Niebuhr.

I have this book because I am weak, in insufficient control of my bookworm tendencies, and because it was free, one of the books being given away at the local library. I knew better than to even pick up a book by Paul Tillich. And when I read on the back cover of this Living Age Books edition, Published by Meridian Books, Fifth printing July 1960, that Nietzsche was one of the book's subjects, I knew even better.

But I'm weak. And so, on the first page of Niebuhr's introduction to his translation of Tillich's book, I read this:

"It is not a book about the religion of the churches but an effort to interpret the whole contemporary situation from the point of view of one who constantly inquires what fundamental faith is expressed in the forms which civilization takes. Tillich is more interested in the religious values of secularism, of modern movements in art, science, education, and politics than in tracing tendencies within the churches or even in theology."

"The religious values of secularism." Cato the Younger falls on his sword, Ishmael (the narrator of Moby Dick) gets on a ship, some poor guy who doesn't know what to do walks out onto a crowded Manhattan street and actually does start knocking people's hats from their heads, or something even less socially acceptable, because he simply can't take it any more, until they drag him screaming to Bellevue -- Melville and I write about it. Maybe I'll take a hint from Roth and write a book and call it The Religious Situation. Or The Moral Landscape.

Claims That Ancient And Medieval Christians Didn't Take The Bible Literally Are Ridiculous

I'm extremely skeptical of the claims -- and lately theologians and people led astray by theologians have made many such claims -- that Christians and Jews were not literalists in bygone eras. The most extreme of such claims is that there were no literalists at all until the late 19th or early 20th century in the US.

All one needs to do in order to correct such impressions is to actually read texts written by ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Jews and Christians -- I myself am angrily waving a JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh in one hand as I type this with the other -- and see how little those earlier people resemble contemporary theologians' descriptions of them. The plain truth is almost exactly the opposite: before the early 19th century, non-literalist readings were made by only a minority of believers, and before the 17th century, of course, non-literalism, like non-belief, could only be very carefully hinted at between the lines if the author were not to be tortured and burned alive for his trouble.

From before Irenaeus to after Calvin, the number of Christian theologians who referred to the Bible as the perfect, inerrant word of God was -- all of them. The number who refer to it as the perfect, inerrant symbolic and allegorical word of God was none of them.

Once again, in our time, Christian theologians -- most certainly including the most progressive among them, who want so badly to find concrete proof that Jesus was gay-friendly or even gay, and feminist, and pro-choice, and anti-handgun, and pro-stem-cell-research, that they think they already have -- are making things up.

Once again, it seems that the only people not making up their own version of Judeo-Christian history are the fundies and the atheists. The atheists are bright enough to reject the tradition with horror, the fundies aren't, and the progressive believers should be, but they're in denial and they refuse to look at what's in front of them, unless what's kin front of them is a book or article by one of these contemporary theologians spouting nonstop nonsense about how how sophisticated the faith of the ancients was, and how the fundies have gotten it all wrong.

But this stuff about people hundreds and thousands of years ago reading the Bible very much as if they were 21st-century textual critics appears to be an article of faith among some 21st-century theologians, so that there's no debating it with them. It seems that the best people interested in the truth can do is discuss things without and despite them. When it comes to politics, the progressive believers are progressive. When it comes to talking sense about religion, they're as hopeless as the fundies.

Thomas Aquinas' 5 Proofs Of God

!f I were asked for a list of the things I dislike about Christianity, the high regard many Christians have for Aquinas TO THIS DAY would be high on the list. What a Bozo! The following are Aquinas' 5 proofs of God, summarized.

l) The Proof from Motion. We observe motion all around us. Whatever is in motion now was at rest until moved by something else, and that by something else, and so on. But if there were an infinite series of movers, all waiting to be moved by something else, then actual motion could never have got started, and there would be no motion now. But there is motion now. So there must be a First Mover which is itself unmoved. This First Mover we call God.

2) The Proof from Efficient Cause. Everything in the world has its efficient cause--its maker--and that maker has its maker, and so on. The coffee table was made by the carpenter, the carpenter by his or her parents, and on and on. But if there were just an infinite series of such makers, the series could never have got started, and therefore be nothing now. But there is a maker for everything there is! So there must have been a First Maker, that was not itself made, and that First Maker we call God.

3) The Proof from Necessary vs. Possible Being. Possible, or contingent, beings are those, such as cars and trees and you and I, whose existence is not necessary. For all such beings there is a time before they come to be when they are not yet, and a time after they cease to be when they are no more. If everything were merely possible, there would have been a time, long ago, when nothing had yet come to be. Nothing comes from nothing, so in that case there would be nothing now! But there is something now-the world and everything in it-so there must be at least one necessary being. This Necessary Being we call God.

4) The Proof from Degrees of Perfection. We all evaluate things and people in terms of their being more or less perfectly true, good, noble and so on. We have certain standards of how things and people should be. But we would have no such standards unless there were some being that is perfect in every way, something that is the truest, noblest, and best. That Most Perfect Being we call God.

5) The Proof from Design. As we look at the world around us, and ourselves, we see ample evidence of design--the bird's wing, designed for the purpose of flight; the human ear, designed for the purpose of hearing; the natural environment, designed to support life; and on and on. If there is design, there must be a designer. That Designer we call God.

I've asked it before on this blog, I'll ask it again: whom was Tommaso d'Aquino (1225 – 7 March 1274) addressing with these celebrated so-called proofs? We can only infer about people's private communications from the written record which has survived, and one person can never know with certainty what any other person is thinking, except through telepathy, whose existence I regard as about as convincingly proven as God's. But to judge from the surviving written record, no one within hundreds of miles of Aquinas, during his lifetime, could express the faintest doubt about God's existence without being gruesomely tortured and burnt alive for it. Those whom Aquinas regarded as his most evil adversaries, Muslims and Jews, believed in a God with just about exactly the same attributes as those Aquinas imagined. Well, it's possible that Aquinas didn't know that, although it boggles the mind. And some scholars contemporary with Aquinas had had the temerity to write some positive things about some Muslim authors such as Averroes, occasioning one of the most angry of Aquinas' depressingly numerous books.

But no, although Aquinas flew into any number of hissies about what he saw as the errors in the descriptions of the attributes of God written by Christians and Muslims, he definitely knew that they all believed in God's existence.

Is it possible that the thing against which Aquinas was mightily struggling with such things as his 5 proofs were the faint murmurs of common sense inside his own brain (which he undoubtedly would describe as the efforts of Satan to drag his eternal soul down into Hell forever)? The thing is, I haven't yet found anything else which it possibly could be. To many Christians, Aquinas' writings represent the pinnacle of human wisdom. To me, they look like very much the opposite: an attempt to oppose clear thought at every turn with every available means, a desperate battle against the free use of yr brain.

Bias Toward Assuming That Jesus Existed

Clearly, in our culture the topic of Jesus is not handled the way that other topics are. In a culture which has been built around Jesus for 1600 years (ca AD 400 being the time in which public expressions of non-Christian worldview started to be severely curtailed), it should come as no surprise that the discussion of the historical Jesus does not resemble that of the historical Achilles or Arthur.

So, while I'm not telling you anything new when I say that Jesus has a unique place in our culture, I think it might be helpful to try to constantly keep this uniqueness in mind when we're talking about Jesus' historicity or lack of it. Habits of thought and speech which have accumulated over the course of thousands of years, and reinforced by deviations from acceptable expression being punished by torture and death, are not going to be shed so easily. Indeed, I doubt that it's yet possible even to be conscious of the extent of those habits.

And in addition to the effect that Christianity has had on our entire civilization, there is the added fact that for most of the past 1600 years, the Christian clergy held a a very tight monopoly on our educational institutions. For a large portion of the Middles Ages in Western Europe it was rather rare that someone who wasn't a member of the clergy could read. See how many Medieval works of history or science or philosophy you can find, let alone theology proper, which don't begin with a mention of Jesus. Investigate the relationships between the leaders of universities and the Catholic Inquisitions and Protestant witch hunts. This tight hold has relaxed somewhat, but we still don't find it odd -- if and when we pause to think about it at all, that is -- that very many of our leading universities in the US are run by churches, or how often private grammar and high schools run by religious institutions are still thought of as the best ones. In the Middle Ages Christian theology was called the Queen of the sciences, and theologians were the heads of the universities. Today theologians are only sometimes the presidents and chancellors of universities. But the line between Biblical scholars and theologians is still either very blurry or non-existent at most American universities.

What I'm saying is: OF COURSE there remains a great bias in favor of the assumption that Jesus existed and against any examination of that assumption. Of course the study of Jesus is dominated by a last-ditch defense of powers and authorities which used to come close to those of monarchs in many cases, and which exceeded those of monarchs in many others, besides those instances in which the local Prince and the local Bishop were one and the same. Of course many alliances between secular political power and Christian power and academic power remain, some plain to see and others decently shielded from the light of day. And of course tradition will be much more powerful in faculties of theology and Biblical studies than in some other faculties.

Where I came in was: the topic of Jesus is discussed differently than other topics. It receives many times more attention than the topic of whether Odysseus really existed. Or Paris and Helen. No one bats an eyes if you ask whether there really was a Helen. It's not a traumatic subject to anyone these days, with the possible exception of a few dozen especially-passionate Classical scholars. People react completely differently to the topic of Jesus. Of course they do. They very often lose their composure and, temporarily, a bit of their minds, whether in a pro- or anti-Christian way.

And I do think that there's a sort of traditionalist last stand going on in the very places which should be in charge of doing away with it: the places where academics specialize in the study of the New Testament and Early Christianity and Jesus. I'd be lying if I told you that the reaction of the experts to doubts about Jesus' existence didn't seem different to me, not only from contemporary academia in general, but also the reactions of the very same Biblical scholars when the topic is anything else. Anything else at all: Abraham's existence, Moses' existence, David's existence, John the Baptist's existence, Jesus' actual words, his actual deeds -- every single imaginable topic except for the topic of Jesus' actual existence. Bring that up, and a lot of them go kind of nuts. And almost all the rest go completely nuts.

"Is Truth Compatible With Fiction?"

That is the rhetorical question posed by some perfectly sensible atheists, when asked whether science is compatible with religion. They are confident that falsehoods always melt away in the light of facts, and that religion is on its last legs.

Unfortunately, they are far too optimistic. Depressingly, they sound like many 18th-century atheists, confident in Enlightenment, who were sure that religion was on its last legs, about to disappear very shortly, to melt quickly away in the glorious sunshine of Reason and Knowledge and Science. How could it not vanish, that aggravating nonsense? And yet, here we are, in the 21st century... What about before the 18th century? Before the 18th century, in Western "civilization," all the way back to the 5th century, when the Christian crackdown became complete, atheists were forced to keep their atheism to themselves. Before the 18th century, we can only guess which brave individuals might have been trying to send an atheist message between the lines of their writings. We can be sure that Hobbes was. As far as I know, the existence of any further atheists is controversial. Spinoza, Descartes, Machiavelli, Boethius -- their religious views are hotly debated.

Surprise surprise, many believers hang on to their beliefs quite tenaciously. If they do not reject science on religious grounds, they rarely miss an opportunity to insist that religion and science never conflict, and to chuckle condescendingly at people who think they do. The thing is that believers keep inventing new fictions when the older ones wear out, rather than embracing facts. Some whoppers currently popular among Christian theologians, people who actually hold Doctorates and are allowed to teach at otherwise-reputable universities:

* Before 19th-century American fundamentalism, it had never occurred to anyone to take the stories in the Bible literally.

* Galileo and the Inquisition just had a friendly chat, not a conflict; and/or: The issue between Galileo and the Inquisition had nothing whatsoever to do with science (because the Inquisitors were the most learned men of their day, and as science-friendly as could be, harrummph harrumph), but only with a personal quarrel between Galileo and the Pope.

* The Inquisition never killed anyone! (Yes, they actually say such things. All the Inquisition did was torture people and then hand them over to secular authorities who had no choice but to burn them alive.)

* Augustine and Aquinas were friends of science, nay -- there were scientists.

* (Etc. Fill in your own favorite examples of hair-raising, jaw dropping denials of plain reality which believers bring forth, rather than just say: okay, religion was mistaken, and science is a big improvement over it.)

Biblical Schmiblical!

Jay Michaelson claims that Jesus had 'advice' for homophobes. What?! you're saying. Yeah, that's what I said: What did this joker just make up and put into Jesus' mouth? Turns out Michaelson is referring to Matthew 22:21 : "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." What?! you're saying. How does does that have anything to do with homophobia? It doesn't, of course, but in Christian theology, just as in punk rock, there are no rules. If you've sat through very many Christian sermons, and actually stayed awake and paid attention, you know that it's standard procedure to pick a topic from current politics, pick a Bible verse, and then invent a connection between the two. Such was the traditional authority of Christianity that it was seldom that a member of the congregation dared to say something so shameless, so wicked and surly as, "But Reverend, that doesn't make any sense," no matter how senseless the supposed connection between the Bible verse and the current political topic may have been. Sorry, Reverends, but those days are gone.

Nevermind the way you put a statement on gay rights into Jesus' mouth, Dr Michaelson -- as someone with a a PhD in religion from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, you ought to know how high the chances are that the author of Matthew put those words, about what to give to Caesar and what to give to God, into Jesus' mouth: Matthew was probably the last of the 4 canonical Gospels to be written, and many of the possible reasons for differences between Matthew and the other 3 Gospels, besides pure accuracy on the part of Matthew, are among the things taught to freshmen pursuing Bachelor's degrees in Biblical studies or Christian theology. They're also taught things such as how many changes were made to the New Testament over the course of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and many of the reasons, besides a pure concern for accuracy, why these changes may have been made.

Maybe it's time for me to stop taking umbrage at people like you for things like that, and finally accept how widespread "lying for the Lord" is, including the lie that the Mormons are more guilty of it than others.

But nevermind the complete non-sequitor of claiming that "give Caesar the things that are Caesar and give God the things that are God's" has some relevance to the, it now appears unsuccessful, thank goodness and common sense, attempt on the part of the Arizona state legislature to give legal backing to discrimination against gays on religious grounds. And nevermind the high probability that you know damn well that Jesus very likely never said anything like Matthew 22:21, and that you probably already know much better than I do why that verse is in the Bible, and nevermind the possibility that Jesus never existed at all -- yes, ?I can picture very well the sneer you would give me for saying that, I'm very much used to getting that sneer. Don't worry, Reverend: we're sneering right back. And we in fact are not climate-change skeptics or Holocaust deniers, we're neither scientifically-illiterate nor bigoted, and we can see quite plainly the difference between when an authority provides copious data, as meterologists do when asked about climate change, and the quite curious case of authorities appealing to authority, as Biblical scholars do when asked why they're so sure that Jesus existed -- nevermind all that.

Let's say for the sake of argument that Jesus existed, and that he made that remark about giving Caesar his and giving God his, and just for the sake of argument that there really is a perfectly clear statement in there about the the legal status of LGBT's -- so what? It was Christianity which introduced homophobia into Christian lands to begin with. Homophobia was foreign to most of them before they were converted. We don't need theological arguments to undo this damage which theology has wrought.

Christians, And Homophobia, And Solutions

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush writes: Christians Are a Cause of LGBT Oppression So We Have to Be a Part of the Liberation! And it's great when anyone stands up for the human rights of any oppressed group. It's good when anyone speaks up against the homophobic policies of Uganda and Kansas and Russia and Nigeria, as Raushenbush is doing. He even admits that Christians are involved with the homophobia, which is almost enough to make you fall down in shock, a leading "progressive" Christian admitting such a link.

The thing is, Raushenbush doesn't trace the origins of this Christian homophobia back for more than a few years, when the plain fact is that until a few decades ago, homophobia was the UNANIMOUS official policy of ALL Christian groups. One reader actually responded to this story by bragging about how his Christian group, the Unitarians, had been pro-gay for "an especially long time." All the way back to 1970! Wowser. Around 1900 years of homophobia, and then, for the last 40-odd years, some Christians have begun to roll back their hostility to LGBT's in certain respects. Sorry, Unitarians, but once again, jazz musicians and gangsters have trounced you in the tolerance race, having accepted gays for decades before any Christians did.

As long as well-meaning, pro-rights Christians continue to deny that their religion was 100% homophobic in its official statements for around 97% of its existence, I don't see how they can expect their present tolerance to be anything more than a Band-Aid compared to the deep wound of the full extent of Christian homophobia. The plain fact is that the pre-Christian Roman Empire, as well as many other cultures taken over by Christianity, completely lacked homophobia as we know it.

But Christians never have been so much with the facts, have they. Well -- except for those of us who have become ex-Christian atheists. Raushenbush makes no mention whatsoever of the homophobia which characterized the vast majority of Christian history. Instead, he and the other pro-LGBT-rights Christians accuse the homophobic Christians of not being true Christians, of misinterpreting the Bible and thoroughly missing Jesus' message. Exactly the same things of which the homophobic Christians accuse them. Exactly as many, perhaps most Christians have always denounced other Christians. Some of the pro-rights Christians declare that the homophobes are not really Christians; conversely, some pro-rights Christians say that they are not Christians, but rather followers of Christ. "Followers of Christ," of course, is precisely what the term "Christians" means.

It's all just so very depressingly stupid. The ignorance of certain statements is just appalling -- and I'm talking about the pro-rights Christians, who are by far the more intelligent of the two Christian groups in conflict here. The utter lack of historical knowledge. One reader, a pro-rights guy, one of the good guys, claimed that before 1971, no-one ever referred to him- or herself as a Christian. I'm not making that up. And furthermore, that comment was posted for days before anyone thought to challenge it. Well -- unless the Huffingtom Post didn't publish any of the replies challenging it. (Surprisingly, they published my reply. I don't expect an intelligent answer, but at least someone is on record as saying something to the effect of, "WTF?! You don't realize that people called themselves Christians before 1971?!") The majority of the comments on Raushenbush' story and stories like it are from pro-rights Christians and homophobic Christians arguing over WWJD? -- What Would Jesus Do? -- and what did Jesus mean? and how are we to interpret this or that Bible verse. And very little discussion of what Christians have actually tended to do over the course of the past 2000 years. Well, again -- perhaps the majority of people who are not homophobic and who have looked into the history of Christianity are in fact no longer Christians. If they had, how could they still want to belong to such an outfit? And by looking into the history of Christianity, I mean looking at primary sources, and not relying solely on the piping-hot ahistorical bullshit served up in the sermons they hear and in the writing of popular "progressive" Christian theologians, in which they hear that Christians of earlier eras were basically identical to 21st-century progressives.

The Great Debate Over What Jesus Said About Homosexuality Is Underway

No, I don't actually find it particularly great, but I'm just one snarky person. Many thousands of Huffington Post Readers' Comments have been posted in response to one article entitled What Jesus Says About Homosexuality. (Yep: "says." Present tense.) The official HP position: Jesus said nothing about homosexuality and many things about acceptance and non-judgmentality. Conservatives counter: Jesus did say things about upholding the old law, and Jewish society was quite homophobic at the time. So far, both sides are right. (Except that Jesus also said things about tearing down the old order.) Both sides are right, that is, if we stipulate that "What Jesus says" = "What Jesus is portrayed as saying in the Gospels." Homophobic positions are taken in the New Testament outside of the Gospels. The progressives, the pro-LGBT-rights side, say that it doesn't matter what the rest of the New Testament says, the conservatives say Uh-huh it does too matter.

And then there are those who insist that it's "obvious" that Jesus and the Apostle John were a gay couple, and also that it is obvious that the centurion and his servant whom Jesus healed were a gay couple. They say this based entirely on the text of the Bible. If anyone has even attempted yet to explain how this could both be obvious and escape the attention of ridiculous numbers of people studying the Bible with ridiculous diligence for a ridiculously long time, I haven't noticed it. But of course this is theology. There's absolutely no requirement to make sense, whether you're perpetrating progressive, human-friendly theology or reactionary misanthropic theology.

And then there are those -- razor-sharp minds, these ones -- who insist that the word "homosexual" was not coined until the 19th century and that this is relevant. I suspect that there is significant overlap between this group and the group who insist on referring to Jesus as Jeshua or Yoshua or Joshua or something else other than Jesus, and consider themselves to be deep.

I don't know how any of the last group are Mainline Protestants. Not many, perhaps. But progressive Mainline Protestants tend to be very impressed with themselves in this discussion of Jesus' LGBT policies, as they generally are impressed with themselves. As far as I've noticed so far the progressive Mainline Protestants don't talk a lot about how it was their church who killed all of those people in Salem in the 1690's for witchcraft. There once again we have the tendency among progressive Christians, which I've pointed out so often, to ignore, distort, excuse away and misinterpret, in short, to lie* their smug ugly asses off about the history of their religion. And that, of course, is good traditional Christianity, as thoroughly Christian as constantly pointing out that other Christians are doin' it wrong. (*Of course, "to lie" implies conscious and deliberate deception, and so the term does not apply at all to many of these jokers, because they actually believe their own malarkey, or so it surely seems, head-spinning as it is.)

This Christian tendency to just straight-up make stuff up goes all the way back to the era of the martyrs, if Candida Moss and others are correct in their assertion that the martyrs never were, and, of course, thoroughly obviously, but we've become so thoroughly used to it that it bears repeating, further back, to the very beginning of Christianity, to the basic Christian story: an Omnipotent Creator of Everything sends His Son to Earth to be a human sacrifice (even 2000 years ago human sacrifice was an outmoded, primitive, rejected concept in Greek and Roman and also in Jewish culture), a sacrifice which the Omnipotent One, in His infinite mercy, provided in order to save mankind from -- the awful wrath of... uh... the Omnipotent Creator. Offhand I can't think of any myth which is so far from possessing internal logic.

Theologians, Christians and others but especially Christians, attempt to prevent themselves and others from even addressing the ridiculousnesses of it all by referring to them as "mysteries." The only thing which strikes me as mysterious here is how successful the theologians continue to be in preventing people from thinking clearly about the whole fooferah. The success with which they pose questions like "What did [or, more often than "did," "does"] Jesus say about homosexuality?" and deflect sensible counter-questions such as:

"Who gives a rat's ass?"

"Why are you pretending that what Jesus said [says] is equivalent to what the New Testament says he said, and ignoring the evidence of the non-canonical Gospels and of the extensive polemical re-writes of the entire New Testament in the second and third centuries?"

Or, my favorite:

"Why do you all still insist upon insisting that the question of the Historical Jesus has been thoroughly examined and was answered conclusively: Yep, he existed, decades ago, or centuries ago, depending on what sort of exaggerating full-of-shit mood you're in on a particular day?"

Actually, that's my co-favorite. The actually more pertinent and pithy question is "Who gives a shit?" Why do we keep pretending that what Jesus said is so damn important one way or another, even if we could figure out what exactly he said, which clearly we can't?

Church Of England Faces Extinction, Says Former Archbishop Of Canterbury Lord George Carey

We are one generation away from extinction and if we do not invest in young people there is going to be no one in the future, Lord Carey said one week ago today.

"Extinction" is an imprecise and overly melodramatic term when used in this context. Extinction refers to the literal, physical death of organisms. One of the things I dislike most intensely about Christian theologians is this tendency toward imprecision and wild exaggeration in their language -- when, that is, they're not outright lying or talking gibberish. If 12 pimply-faced young boys who used to comprise a model-airplane-building club have ceased to attend the meetings of that club, so that the club has ceased to be, no extinction has therewith occurred. It may well be that all 12 of the boys are, in fact, still alive. There may, in fact, be still more good news: perhaps some of the boys' faces have cleared up, perhaps some of them have gotten girlfriends, perhaps all of them now are socializing in wider circles, so that the fact that there is now no longer a model-airplane-building club might actually have to be considered, by all 12 boys and almost any outside observer, to be a very good thing, all in all. Not that there's anything wrong with model airplanes per se, of course. A man such as myself, with my passionate interest in pocket watches, would of course be on rather thin ice were he to suggest that there were anything wrong with model airplanes per se.

But my hypothetical example involves only 12 people. According to the linked article, the Anglican church has 85 million members worldwide. There are perhaps 100,000 sea otters living in the world today, perhaps 4000 black rhinos, most of them in captivity, only a few hundred Siberian tigers, perhaps 4000 or 5000 snow leopards. Throwing around terms like "extinction" in reference to a group of 85 million people would be insulting to all of those animals even if it actually were the people themselves which were meant, even if living, breathing organisms were meant.

I can already hear the theologians responding: "Oh, but a denomination IS a living, breathing organism!" Oh, but it's not! And no matter how many times you repeat yourselves, a denomination will still not be a living thing, and no matter how many other people you eventually wear down, so that finally they say, "Okay, okay, the Church of England (or the Methodist Church or Sikhism or what have you) is a living, breathing organism!" just so that they can politely be done talking to you and stagger away, desperately searching for some sensible person somewhere to talk to about something sans gibberish -- no matter how many others you wear down, you smug infuriating pustules, you will not ever get me to say that a denomination is a living thing or that 2 and 2 are 5 or that we are one in the Grace of the Body of Christ, fuck you and your tiresome boring voodoo, you evil impediments to the progress and well-being of this Earth!

Dixit Carey: "To sit in a cold church, looking at the back of people’s heads, is perhaps not considered the most exciting place to meet new people and hear prophetic words." Do you really think that the problem has more to do with the heating in churches and with the backs of people's heads than with things such as your concept of prophecy? When the Church of England began, it was, in Ricky Gervais' words, a matter of "cake or death" : English men and women were offered the choice of swallowing a piece of cake and a slurp of wine and sitting quietly while men like you blathered on and on about things like "prophetic words" -- or being imprisoned, tortured and then burned alive. And so, not really surprisingly, most said, "Uh... I believe I'll have the cake, please. Thank you very much. And yes, I'll just sit here quietly until you're done speaking, Lord Reverend" or whatever the title happened to be at the specific place and time.

But you can't get away with torturing and killing people over religious differences any more, not in England at least, and so, horribly to your traditional soul, people are free to stand up and say things like, "'Prophetic words'?! Pull the other one, Guv!" and walk out on you, and even to point out that your use of terms like "extinction" is imprecise, overly-melodramatic, self-serving, self-pitying and all-round ridiculous. People who are REALLY concerned about actual extinction are working on things like AIDS research and combating poaching and volunteering in disaster areas and boy o boy do you look petty and small and yet still like an enormous waste of time and resources compared to them.

Another Theologian Pining For The Good Old Days Before Atheists Became Uppity

John Carlson has taken the occasion of Albert Camus' 100th birthday to complain about horrible the New Atheists are.

As far as I can tell, there's no clear and widely-accepted definition of just who exactly is a New Atheist and who isn't. I'm sure some people consider me to be a New Atheist, although I don't consider myself one. If stridency is the only criterium then I may be one. Stridency is not necessarily a good thing, but I'd much rather my statements were strident and accurate than mild and vapid. In any case, I don't know of many things more likely to unite atheists, New and not, in opposition, than articles like this one. (Which is so typical of the contributions of the Huffington Post on the subject of atheism, so familiar, that I was quite surprised when I checked Carlson's author bio and found that this is his very first piece for the Huffington Post.) One of the things that's particularly annoying is the assertion that an atheist who is now dead would've been on the author's side and not on the side of these horrible atheists these days, and because Camus is dead he of course cannot contradict the author. Get a living atheist to say that he thinks you write great stuff, and then maybe I'll be impressed. Maybe. It would of course depend on which living atheist it was, among other things. There are some atheists, * cough cough, Huffington Post regular Chris Stedman, cough cough *, who have made careers around ostensibly representing atheists, when what they really do for a living is suck up to powerful religious leaders, and who are therefore very unpopular with the atheists they supposedly represent. Including this one.

And although Carlson may be right in his depiction of Camus as an avowed atheist who was particularly considerate and kind and gentle and conciliatory in his statements to believers, his suggestion that Camus was typical in this way of atheists of his time, and that stridency and open hostility to religion were invented by the New Atheists, is absurd. Even for a theologian. Hobbes and Spinoza and Hume and Gibbon and Marx and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Camus' good friend Sartre were all outrageous on the subject of religion, they all outraged their religious contemporaries. On purpose. We can debate the ways in which Camus' overt friendliness to religious believers may have been good or bad; but there is no denying that it made him unusual among the publicly-avowed atheists in Christendom in the past few centuries. Which is as long as we've been allowed to be publicly-avowed atheists. Which is just one of a bunch of perfectly good reasons for us to be pissed off in general and impatient with theologians in particular and occasionally impolite. In short, Carlson's "longing for the old atheism" is another case of nostalgia being a longing for something which never existed, as nostalgia is roughly 100% of the time.

Hope this isn't confusing to those of my readers who are used to me bashing New Atheists. Don't worry, I'll get back to them. But not today. A theologian pontificating in general terms about atheism makes me feel a temporary solidarity with almost all other atheists just about every single time. Except of course for a few jerks such as the aforementioned Chris Stedman.

The Following Is All Pretty Simple And Basic

Good and bad are relative. Not just that one and the same action is good for one person and bad for another: not just that these rural families were put onto the electrical grid and the cost of those losing their homes forever because now those homes lie at the bottom of the lake made by the dam which is producing that energy. Not that this electrification was all good or all bad for any one particular person, either: a person displaced by the dam may find it to have been both good and bad for him because he misses his own home, but he thrives in the city to which he has been relocated in a way he doesn't think he ever could have done back home. (Not that he knows for sure.) One thing can be both good and bad for the same person.

To stick with rural families and water: the same unexpected rain which cancels the Sunday baseball game for which Bob had bought tickets and driven his family quite a long way into town, an outing they had been planning for months, and they won't be able to attend the Monday doubleheader with which the team is making up for the rain-out to some its fans, but the same unexpected rain from the same storm might save Bob's parched crops, and allow him to keep his farm and head off the foreclosure, from the sadness of which he had been trying to distract his family with the outing to the city and the Sunday ballgame.

The heedless bicyclist on the sidewalk might knock me down and break my arm. Very bad for me, but it might be that at that moment I had been a very heedless pedestrian, all up in my head, concerned with moral relativity instead of traffic, muttering to myself and gesticulating angrily at theologians who weren't present instead of watching where I was going, and so the heedless cyclist, who knocked me down because I wasn't paying enough attention to jump out of his way, might have been the only thing which prevented me from stepping off of the curb and into the path of a speeding bus which would've killed me. In which case it's very good that the bicyclist knocked me down and broke my arm. Regardless of whether the cyclist or I ever had any idea that the accident which happened had prevented a worse one.

In short, reality is much too complex for concepts such as sin to do it any justice. And that's very plain to see. But wait, saying that it's simple and plain to see may be an oversimplification. It's plain for me to see because I've read authors such a s Nietzsche. Nietzsche made the case for moral relativity in a very sound and convincing manner, and I've been pondering what he wrote for over a decade and a half. During that same decade and a half your attention on the subject of morality may have been held by smug Anglican morons like GK Chesterton and CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and Francis Spufford, whose minds are as soft and sluggish as their bodies. Because of your misfortune in reading material, it may really be as unreasonable for me to be annpyed with you and think you're a moron because you haven't got a clue about moral relativism as it is for you to smirk at me because I don't understand your inside jokes about Episcopalian clergy and church services and coffee klatsches and golf courses.

Except of course that it's not unreasonable of me inasmuch as I'm speaking of principles applicable to the entire human race and to much more than that, while your frame of reference is a lilly-white WASP-y version of a nerd-filled comic-book store. The socially-crippled comic book guys won't admit that they're afraid to cross the street and talk to those women who have worked over there in those stores for years now, much the same way that you deny that you're afraid even to think about the implications of the speculations of centuries' worth of the intellectual world getting on with it without you. I'm afraid to talk to women, too, but I cross the street and do it anyway. I act in spite of feeling exactly the same anxiety as the comic-book guys, just the same way that contemplating a random universe with no supernatural Beings caring for me terrifies me, but I contemplate it anyway, because a world based on Leviticus and Matthew and so forth makes just as little sense as a universe in which Superman and Spiderman and so forth are real.

Will We Ever Have Any Idea How Widespread Medieval Atheism Was?

I've long wondered whether atheism has not become much more widespread in Christendom since the 17th century, as it sometimes seems, but whether what has changed has been first and foremost the acceptability of publicly expressing doubts about God's existence, doubts which were there all along. Sometimes people don't see something, not because it's hidden, but because it's been there in plain sight for so long that they no longer think about it. The fact that "early" atheism, from the 17th century on into the 18th, seems not to have developed so much as to have suddenly appeared, fully formed, without a long process of individual people wrestling with the issue, being torn between faith and atheism and going back and forth between the two, and atheist positions gradually developing theough this process, suggests that atheism was there all along and waited only for permission to record its existence in published writing. Who knows how much it had previously circulated in private letters and conversation.

But just recently some other things have struck me, things not at all hidden, facing me the whole time in plain sight, just waiting for me to notice: medieval proofs of God. For instance, the Quinque viæ or Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus Summa Theologiae.

The argument of the unmoved mover, the argument of the first cause, the argument from contingency, the argument from degree, and the teleological argument: Aquinas' five proofs of God, as beloved today as ever among many theologians and as tedious as ever to the rest of us.

In Aquinas' day Latin was the primary written language from Iceland, to Lithuania, to Hungary, to the non-Muslim half of of Spain, and everywhere in that Latin-writing region Catholicism was firmly in control, and from Aquinas' time no piece of Latin writing has survived containing anything even remotely resembling something which could even be misconstrued as an atheistic sentiment. Among the Catholics were a few Jews, as monotheistic as they were. And on the borders of this Latin world were territories controlled by Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims who were all every bit as monotheistic as the Catholics and Jews. And Aquinas wasn't writing for an audience in China or southern Africa.

So who was Aquinas arguing with?

Can it be that he and the many other Medieval theologians who constructed proofs of the existence of God were arguing above all with themselves, because subconsciously even they knew how ridiculous religion was?

Progressive Theology's Attempt To Distance Itself From Creationism

The Christian creationists come from the same tradition and hold the same texts holy as do progressive Christians. They're more consistent in that their mentality is closer to that of the people who wrote those texts thousands of years ago. The progressives have to distort and deny huge portions of the history of their religion in their attempt to make it compatible with modern enlightened thought, in a way not entirely unlike the way creationists distort and deny huge portions of mankind's scientific knowledge. The position progressive believers represents amounts to being a little bit pregnant. In the long run either religion or science will prevail. They're not compatible. A good deal of contemporary progressive Christian theology seems to consist of putting off the choice between science and religion, distracting people from that choice.

Say something like that to a liberal theologian, and you may well receive an answer containing several hair-raising bits of nonsense, as nonsensical as anything any creationist could ever say: you may be challenged to provide an example from the Bible which supports your assertion that there's anything creationist in it. The theologian may tell you straight-up that the doctrine of creationism is not found in the Bible and was not actively taught until the 1960s.

An example of creationism in the Bible? What, chapters 1 & 2 of Genesis don't suffice? "Actively" taught? Tell that to John Scopes, defendant in the famous "Monkey Trial" in 1925, charged with violating Tennessee' Butler Act, passed that same year, by teaching evolution in a public school. the Butler Act provided that "That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Teachers who violated the act were to be fined between $100 and $500 for each offense. Are we to assume that back then creationism was "passively" taught in Tennessee?

The Butler Act was overturned in 1967, so presumably, in reality, it was in the 1960's when not creationism but evolutionary theory began to be taught in Tennessee's public schools without the teachers risking being fined for it. I don't know how many teachers risked those fines between 1925 and 1967. I can only hope that a great many of them did.

Why this absurd claim that creationism was only "actively" taught beginning in the 1960's? As far as the date goes, the meme that creationism was only created in the 19th century was not sufficiently ridiculed and laughed out of existence when it recently appeared, and when stupid memes aren't sufficiently challenged they tend to grow more stupid. Stéphane Courtois' math was not sufficiently assailed when when he published The Black Book of Communism in the 1990's with its assertion, with that famous round number, easy for simple minds to latch onto, that 100,000,000 people had been killed by Communists, and now assertions that it was actually 150,000,000, or 200,000,000 or more, are making the rounds.

What actually happened in the 19th century was that Biblical scholarship became a bit more sophisticated, a great number of very old fragments of manuscripts of Biblical texts began to be discovered in the Middle Eastern desert, the results of the latest scholarship, not only in the field of Biblical text-criticism, but also in evolutionary biology, became known to wider circles of the public -- and for the first time, a significant number of people dared openly to speculate that creation might NOT have happened as described in Genesis. Before the 19th century, creationism, which these absurd theologians are telling us only began in the 19th century, was the default position of Christianity, accepted by the vast majority of its members.

Now, these theologians, these turnips, and those who assume the turnips know what they're talking about, will, around this point if not sooner, triumphantly announce that St Augustine of Hippo asserted the Genesis creation story was an allegory. What they will not tell you, assuming they know it -- a far too rash assumption -- is that Augustine believed that God created the entire universe all at once, in an instant. No, it's not like the theory of the big bang, because Augustine was saying that the entire universe was created as it is now all at once. All the planets and stars created just as they are now. With the Earth at the center of the universe, the sun, moon and stars all revolving around it. Around 6000 years ago. Or that Augustine did believe that the Biblical accounts of the creation of Adam and Eve and of the virgin birth of Jesus were literally true. And he converted because he heard a book talking to him. And he wrote with great relish of the destruction of all of the non-Christian temples all over the Roman Empire which was going on around him, and at the thought of non-Christians being tormented for all eternity in Hell. Not a creationist? Close enough for me. Aquinas, whom theologians and other apologists love to cite for his idea of natural reason, as if it were anything but a partial refutation of the Christian doctrine of human depravity, won't generally tell you -- if they know. And there's no reason to assume that they do -- that Aquinas also said that the Holy Scripture was perfect, and that all "seeming" contradictions and absurdity and atrocities and so forth, contained within it, were the result of man's imperfect ability to understand Scripture, and that there were some very important, some vital matters which could be found only in Scripture. Aquinas, this supposed pinnacle of reason and harbinger of modernity, looks more and more like just another Bible-thumping hick, the better you actually know what he wrote.

So we return to my central point here: that the difference between the crudest creationists, and any other Christians, is not nearly as great as progressive Christians believe, not as great as they want you to believe. They're all Bible-thumpers, it's just that each one picks out his favorite verses and explains away the rest. All just differences in interpretation, that is to say: differences of opinion about the ways that All Of The Most Important Stuff In The Universe is in the Bible.

Christianity, Version 25.34

Brandon Ambrosino writes, "A friend emailed me that I was reading the Gospels wrong, and that the resurrection was best interpreted metaphorically. To relegate the resurrection to a purely physical phenomenon was to read the Easter narrative in the most primitive way, at its lowest common denominator."

Yes, and to say that the two-thousand-year-old stories in the New Testament are primitive, even compared to other stories that old and much older, is potentially insulting to Christians, even if it's obviously true. Ambrosino's Christian friend is vulnerable to that insult, and so denies that Christians have meant what they said for 1600 years or more. He, and many other contemporary Christians like him, insists that the stories about Jesus were written metaphorically. Which means that for most of the existence of Christianity, virtually all Christians were engaged in a whopper of a ding-dang dilly of a misconception. Now, that also could be embarrassing. But only if you acknowledge the plain facts of the history of Christianity. It seems that, in the absence of a remarkably childlike simplicity, massive denial is called for in order to be a Christian: either you deny all sorts of common-sense assumptions and believe literally in the traditional stories about Jesus, including the Virgin birth, walking on water, miraculous healings and so forth, up through the Resurrection and beyond -- or you deny that Christians have traditionally believed the things which the historical record clearly says they believed, and instead believe this immense whopper currently being told by "modern" theologians (There is absolutely nothing modern about any theology.) and their fans: that believing Bible stories literally is a recent error introduced into Christianity by evangelical fundamentalists in the 19th century. Which requires ignoring an amount of evidence comparable to the amount of evidence one has to ignore in order to believe that God made the Earth 6000 or 7000 thousand years ago.

Now I know that I study the history of Western Civ much more energetically than yr average Schmoe, who has all sorts of other things on his mind -- but the theologians asserting that literal readings of the bible are less than 200 years old? Don't they have to study theology for years in order to get their degrees in theology? What on Earth is going on in those seminaries? How can they possibly believe what they're saying?

Perhaps I just massively underestimate the ability of many people -- of most people, perhaps? -- to ignore what they know whenever it conflicts with what they choose to believe. I suppose that widespread, deep-seated cognitive dissonance was required in order for Christianity to get off the ground to begin with, let alone to have lasted this long and still have billions of adherents. We really can't attribute it all to stupidity, cowardice, dishonesty and bad luck, can we?

But I keep talking about what people believe, and of course many religious -- or spiritual, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to -- people remain religious by keeping their beliefs vague. And this may be the case with Ambrosino: "Now did Jesus bodily rise from the dead? That's not my question here. I'm simply asking, 'Did the early Christians believe that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead?' And when we read the Easter stories within their first century political and religious contexts, I think the answer is emphatically, 'Yes!" So, okay then, Ambrosino and I agree about that. Ambrosino self-identifies as a Christian. So does that mean that he also believes in the bodily Resurrection? That's "not his question here." Also, unsurprisingly, he doesn't provide a link to some other place where it is his question. It's not at all uncommon for religious people, when pressed about their beliefs, to give several different answers at different times which are quite at odds with each other, and ultimately to seem greatly annoyed at the attempt to nail the blob of mercury which is their religious belief, not just because they ultimately don't know what they believe but because they don't want to know. They're floating in a cloud of vagueness, and your Hey-buddy-what's going-on-in-there line of questioning threatens to rouse them from blissful slumber, so of course they don't like it. Ambrosino self-identifies as a gay, Orthodox Christian, and gay Christians often prove to be judo black belts of vagueness about their beliefs. How could they not?

So, you deny that earlier Christians believe what they clearly believed, or you ignore the foolishness of those beliefs, or you ignore what's going on inside your own head. Or you simply wake up and stop believing, because you can't stop seeing anymore how far it all comes from adding up.

I don't relish robbing people of bliss. I wouldn't try to do it if I didn't think there were enormous compensating benefits to be had. And I believe that enhanced clearness of mind is a wonderful thing. Potentially of tremendous practical use in very many ways..

And we can still keep every bit of those thousands of years' worth of beautiful Christians art and music and literature. I love all of that stuff even more than most Christians do, I daresay, having studied it intently for a long time.

Sequel To My Blog Post "Don't Play Their Game" Or: Whose Game Is This, Anyway?

In the polemic which I entitled Don't Play Their Game and posted here last May, I said, addressing some of my fellow atheists who spend a lot of time and energy debating Christian clegypeople and theologians about subjects such as the existence of God:

We [don't] have to follow them into every absurd corner of their work in order to refute them. Indeed, if we do follow them around every turn of their labyrinths, I fear we may actually be aiding them in their work, which is taking a worldview which is simple, simplistic, primitive and crude as can be, and dressing it up and convincing people that it is complex and deep and subtle. Answering their detailed absurdities in detail may be showing too much courtesy to them and not enough respect to ourselves and to anyone else possessed of common sense

And I stand by that, except that I'm beginning to ask myself, "What you mean, 'we,' Kimosabe?" How naive of me was it to hope for solidarity from certain other atheists on this point? It's very often speculated, and not unreasonably, I think, that a significant number of clergy and theologians, and other scholars in related fields, may have completely lost their faith, but behave as if they still have it, purely and simply to protect the justification for their careers. I'm ashamed to say that it took more than 8 months after posting "Don't Play Their Game" before it occurred to me that some professional atheists might completely agree with me -- and with Nietzsche: see Morgenroethe, first book, aphorism 95 -- that Christian theology is too absurd and simplistic to merit any elaborate response, but that they might behave as if they don't agree, because if they did, well, they'd have to find some other sort of gig.

I never was very good at poker.

Don't Be a Sisyphus!

What Is the Chief Political Concern of the Bible?

"The following respondents are all heavyweights who live and work at the top of their fields in biblical studies, theology and Christian ethics."

LOL. Heavyweights in theology... (There are no heavyweights in theology. Only pinheads. And a lot of people have known it for a very long time.)

Nobody asked me, but I'll answer the question. The bible was compiled from texts written over a period of a thousand years or more, and naturally reflects a great variety of different concerns of authors writing in a great variety of political circumstances. Asking what is the chief concern of the whole thing represents a refusal to employ logic and break free from the superstitious conception that the entire bible is a unified message from an all-wise Supreme Being, to break free from the ridiculous idea that all the answers anyone will ever need are contained in those 1,000 pages or so, depending on the size of the page and the type. It's just a book. There are many good books, not one Good Book. The answer is: stop looking for the answer to Everything in there. (And if some of my fellow atheists would stop treating the Bible as if it were the vilest thing ever written and the root of all evil, that'd be equally nice, and for startlingly similar reasons.)

I sort of broke a rule of mine by responding to this question, by treating a theological question of this type as if it were worthy or response. (I partly made up for breaking my rule by using terms like "pinheads" and "ridiculous.") Any sensible person can reach the conclusions I reached above without my help, and anyone not able to reach such conclusions is either actually mentally retarded or is not looking for rational discourse, but actively avoiding it. And how many equally-ridiculous theological questions have been posed to the public in the few minutes it took me to answer this one? Answering their questions one by one is not a viable strategy, besides the fact that it's dreary hard work. Don't be a Sisyphus! Instead, you could read about Sisyphus in Ovid's Metamorphoses.Or in the Platonic dialogue Sisyphus.Except that that's actually a pseudo-Platonic dialogue. You could read about that.

I don't want to discourage you from reading the Bible, if you find it interesting. Well -- unless you're one of the people who's actually able to take a question like What is the the chief political concern of the Bible? seriously. In which case I think it's urgent that you put down the Bible, and the Bible commentaries and other theological works, and read about Sisyphus for a change. Or about Don Quijote.Or go to a death metal concert. Or just out to a bar. Anything.