thanx for the ht. i’ll address the nt thing on friday.

bc

[...] of the most recent round of craziness on Noah’s ark (see my previous post here), his post on how It Doesn’t Matter if Noah’s Ark Existed is quite [...]

Great! I’ll look forward to it.

If the Ark story is not literally true, it creates a problem. This is true for all bible stories (that most christians believe are literally true.) If they are not literally true, this introduces ERROR into the bible, because we cannot know which stories are allegories now. Plus the Bible itself claims inerrancy.

The problem here is that there is no other source material for the entire Christian mythos. No other source that validates the existence of Jesus Christ, at least none that aren’t impeachable or apparent christian forgeries. No other source material even for Yaweh Himself. It’s all based on the Bible. Everything we ‘know’ about Jesus Christ essentially comes from a single book, and this book is not only two thousand years old, and the authors not only had obvious biases, and the stories do not only not fit together into a coherent whole, but now we’re admitting that many of the stories in it are not literally true.

In any other area, people would laugh at the paucity of evidence for the very existence of Jesus Christ, much less him being the Risen God. However in a religion, a belief-system where beliefs trump thoughts and even facts, it’s taken seriously by over 80% of the population of this country.

A sad commentary on the gullibility of the average American, if you ask me.

Of course, Christianity, being the basis for western philosophy and morality, has contributed to said gullibility at every opportunity. Keep ‘em dumb, so they’ll believe this tripe. And base all morality in COERCION; be good or else, believe in God or else… threats of eternal agony do not a moral person make, sorry to so inform you all. And look, just look, at the horrific examples of absolutely amoral behavior exemplified by God the Father! He tells us not to judge others, not to murder, and then does all of that Himself, with gusto even. So like all parents that tell their children ‘Do as I say, not as I do!’ He is often ignored by His children here on earth. It’s just not credible of God does it all the time, even if He claims to have the right to do it. You can’t take moral direction from a mass-murderer who tells you to be good, or else suffer eternal agony, because I love you.

God, Our Father Who Art In Heaven, is a s***ty dad. Not only to us, either. Just look at the s*** Jesus had to take from Him! “Go die for their sins!” “But dad, why can’t you just forgive their sins without me having to die?” “I’m just not motivated to help them without someone dying in agony, sorry.”

Hi Brian, Thanks for the comment. I’m always pleased to get a diversity of perspectives on the blog. I’d like to direct you to my earlier post on this topic. I don’t like to put people in boxes, but it feels to me like you may be one of those atheists playing the “contradiction game,” as I put it earlier, with the conservative evangelicals. Do you think that is a fair characterization?

Secondly, where does the Bible claim inerrancy for itself? And since this is a collection of documents written by multiple authors, none of whom believed they were writing something called “the Bible,” how could it claim inerrancy for “itself” (as if the Bible could even be a singular “itself” with a mind of “its” own). As I suggested in my previous post, it seems like you might be falling prey to the logical fallacies that your ideological adversaries (conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists) make.

Jesus himself said that we cannot change neither a jot nor a tittle of scripture. Evangelicals and bible-literalists believe in it that way, and they’re the most common type of christian out there in the country. Most people think the Bible is meant to be taken literally. Those that do not are admittedly much less of a problem in this world.

I know that the Bible is a collection of diverse books. I also know that it was compiled by people with agendas, and much was discarded in the process. Some say that there was around two hundred gospels in circulation when the Church compiled the FOUR they decided best fit their agendas.

Roman Emperor Constantine is the one who was largely responsible for this being a worldwide religion, because he incorporated the religion into his plan for world domination. It worked very well indeed. His biographer Eusebius, the very man who penned the story of Constantine seeing that cross in the sky etc, is actually *on the record* as saying that lying to the people is acceptable as long as it deepens their faith.

I find it rather sad that people in this modern age cling to the superstitions of the past, but I find it *alarming* that they’ve succeeded so well in infiltrating every facet of our government. This country is secular like I’m a martian. And the lousy morality system bequeathed upon us by christianity! Based in coercion and not empathy.
“Be good or else you go to hell. Believe or else you go to hell. Worship me or else you go to hell. But I love you.”
This is not morality. Morality involves empathy for others. Christian morality is all about fear and egotism.

Just because most people think something doesn’t make it true. I would think you’d agree. I understand your point about the mistakes of conservative evangelicalism, but I think you simplify too much — and also lump people together too much.

You didn’t answer my first question directly, but your responses do seem to belie the same sort of marginalized victim mentality that can be found in fundamentalism — they think everybody is secular except for their small committed community of true believers, you seem to believe that most other people in society are conservative evangelicals. Both sides bicker with each other, simplifying complex issues into sound bites and proof texts. I’d rather move on from all that.

Well, I am more concerned with the ‘problem’ of christianity, which relates to how most people believe in it, not how the more sensible minority of relatively decent people like yourself take it. I see your point, but you must see mine. As an atheist I’m seeing dominionists trying to take over the country, empowered by eight years of a dominionist administration. I see the hypocrisy and hatred of fundamentalist christians, but also the idiocy of the catholic apologists with their creative lying for God (and pederasty)…. so I tend to use blanket terms which may offend the occassional decent christian who is actually relatively moral in spite of the christian system, which as stated, and even in your case as you grew up I’m sure, is based in coercion, and is therefore decidedly NOT moral. Some, like you perhaps, managed to rise above it. Most do not.

How to let you see my perspective here???… Hmm… Imagine if your religion were the ten percent minority and the majority here in the US were muslims, and the government seemed to be getting more and more muslim, the schools getting more and more muslim, how would you feel about it? While atheism is not a religion, this I feel still captures the sentiment.

Hey, didya see the newest Christian sex scandal? George Rekers, co-founder of the Family Research Council, caught on a vacation with a MALE prostitute… Too precious, no?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/05/george-rekers-anti-gay-ac_n_565142.html
The Christian Moral System at work…

Brian, thanks for your comment. I appreciate that you have toned it down several notches and explained your position more precisely. I hope to see you more around here.

By the way, just to clarify, I didn’t grow up as a Christian.

I did.

Do I need to say that leaving christianity was the most liberating thing that I ever did in my life?

However, you’ve been nice. I can only assume that you feel that becoming a christian was of similar import in your life.

Peace.

To the godless guy,

Yes, embracing theism feels like embracing what the process of evolution has made human beings: “God-prone beings.” For some students of evolution, God-proneness is a bug. For others, and certainly for me, it is a feature, one put there by a master technologist.

Pat,

I’ve responded to this post here:

http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2010/05/the-truth-about-noahs-ark-1.html

http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2010/05/the-truthvalue-of-the-biblical-flood-narrative.html

The bone I want to pick with you and Jim Getz is the following.

Given that it does not matter if Noah’s Ark existed, what does matter? What makes the flood narrative a superb vehicle for the communication of universal truths? What are those universal truths?

So long as scholars like you fail to address these questions, however tentatively, I think you essentially concede the argument to those who read the texts naively (something I argue we can and should do) without the benefit of the enrichment that comes from understanding a text like the flood narrative as protological in nature.

Hi John,

Thanks for pushing back a bit. It helps me articulate myself better and to reassess my own thoughts on the issue. I feel like you’ve made a little bit of a jump here. You’ve gone from “what matters” to “universal truths.” Is “universal truth” all that “matters”? Why must a biblical narrative necessarily contain a universal truth? I do feel I have talked about what does matter: meaning and message. I don’t feel comfortable stuffing that into a nice, neat little box labeled “universal truth.” That said, I appreciated your posts regarding your interpretation of Genesis 6-9.

I may be misunderstanding your point, but I still don’t get what difference its historicity makes, without making it about the historicity of everything in the Bible. What difference does the historicity of the flood narrative, specifically, make to faithful believers today?

Great conversation, Pat.

First of all, universal truths and a text like Genesis 6-9 or, for that matter, the Atrahasis Epic. Yes, I think the genre exemplified by these texts is designed to traffic in universal truths, the first principles of life as we know it, ecology, anthropology, and theology in the broadest terms. That’s very different than, say, the autobiographical narrative in Nehemiah. Gen 6-9, all of Gen 1-11, is protological narrative bookended, within the Hebrew Bible, with texts like Isa 65-66, and, in the larger canon, with the Apocalypse of John, 21-22, not to mention Romans 8, and so on.

Now you may have reasons for wanting to navigate through life without universal truths to inform your voyage. Post-modern liberalism tends to shy away from truth unless the emphasis is on the fact that it is subjective and fragmentary, or something that makes sense to talk about in terms of relations, but not concepts.

To that I would say that Gen 1-11 also locates truth in relationships, but does not shy away from universalization, metaphysics, or explanation. Furthermore, it works all of these things out in terms of the realm of history. That is, its content relates to events and to the deep structure of history, in a structural anthropological sort of way. So the historicity of these texts is to be affirmed. Gen 1-11 even historicizes things that are not history with a vanilla flavor, such as positing, protologically, that man and beast were to be vegetarian (Gen 1 out PETAs PETA), such that guilt is associated with the taking of life by man or beast in Gen 9:5. This then becomes a part of eschatology, Isa 11, for example.

This part of the Bible is properly referred to as the Urgeschichte in German. If this part of the Bible does not deal with the deep structure of history, its first principles, then what does it deal with?

Not to interject too much here or to force myself into a pattern, but I’m uncertain about what you mean by “universal truths”.
I’m inclined to believe, John, that you mean that these texts, produced in particular historical moments, were created in order to explain to their audience specific ideas about the nature of mankind, the nature of their divinity, under what circumstances their civilization was formed, and to put forth moral messages through the telling of those stories. In the text and its narrative they are “true” in the sense that the audience were expected to believe the stories and that the author likely believed the stories; this belief and expectation of belief applies also to the theological and moral messages contained in the stories. But I don’t believe you can call these “universal”, because other cultures have similar foundational stories that expect the same grade of belief and have “truth” in the same way the Biblical stories do.
The historicist approach, in this instance, would be to examine the means of production of these texts.

On a different note, I don’t find it surprising that texts from the ancient world do not include a disclaimer that “some of this content may be false or distorted”. Only some modern and postmodern texts are prone to subverting their own narrative authority.

Hi Mik,

Yes, you have understood what I mean by “universal truths.” As I argue on my own blog, it is incumbent on the scholar who presents the Atrahasis epic to present the text in such a way that one says, “Yes, I see how this text is true.” The same applies to Gen 6-9. In a final step, which exceeds the bounds of a purely historical take on the texts, it is possible to say things like, Gen 6-9 gets at the fundamental principles that undergird theological, anthropological, and ecological reality better than the Atrahasis Epic. Or the opposite. Or, none of the above.

All the rationalization and philosophization in the world can’t make one false thing true. But I guess it’s fun to keep on trying.

Christianity was constructed as a social control mechanism. It has nice sweet bait, Jesus, and then all the lovely programming that neuters one’s ability to descriminate reality. It must necessarily corrupt one’s ability to think, since if one really thinks, one rejects the programming. One must believe, not think. Belief entails emotional attachment to the thought. Belief in anything, is unhealthy. It clouds the judgement. Think thoughts instead, which can be updated when found to be in error. Beliefs are our achilles’ heel, our weakness. If we had less of them, the world would be a much better place.

Hi Brian, I have two responses. First, explaining Christian origins as if some person or group of persons were in “control” and “constructed” rather than a more organic process, stemming out of first century Judaism in its Roman context, is highly simplistic and problematic. Who got the responsibility of constructing this social control mechanism and what sorts of social phenomena did they want to control and why? Please be specific (names, dates, texts, material evidence).

Second, and at the risk of becoming a cliché of those Christians who “fight back” at atheists (understand I am not “fighting” here), isn’t your understanding of the world a “belief” as well? Your oversimplification of historical circumstances (more than once now) seems to tell me that your “belief” indeed “clouds the judgment.”

Your religion was essentially founded by a roman politician, and you need to ask for details?

Constantine’s biographer Eusebius, the man who wrote the account of Constantine seeing a cross in the sky and hearing the words ‘by this shall you conquor’ was also the man we have on record saying that lying is acceptable as long as it is in service to the faith.

Even Paul had his own agendas. The egotism and corruption is there throughout the early church. The religion was indeed designed, around an already existing cult. It was designed by the Holy Roman Emperor and his cohorts, in the days before there was any kind of free press or fact-checking of the leaders, so you can only imagine (or perhaps you can’t?) the much higher prevelance of corruption in government.

Nicea was a political council, not a spiritual one. In those days, there was no difference.

When you look at the overview, the corruption is obvious, I’m afraid. One has to have their pair of christ-colored-glasses firmly in place to see it otherwise. It’s the Great Lie that Keeps On Telling Itself. It was never meant to help people spiritually; it was meant to control them through fear and hope. And belief.

I do not believe, even in science. I give everything a probability of being true without accepting any one thing as definitely true. I’m the ultimate skeptic. I prefer update-able thoughts to written-in-stone beliefs. Reality changes, beliefs never change to match it. Beliefs cause people to cling to the past and fear change. They are essentially a cop-out. A cop-out on scary reality. A way to bury one’s head in the sand and sing ‘la la la la’ to reality.

Who got the responsibility of constructing this social control mechanism and what sorts of social phenomena did they want to control and why
—————
It was an expansion of the oldest political game in the world: Religion. To conflate the idea of a god with the idea of the roman emperor. To cause the people to believe that anyone in the religion would not steer them wrong.

It was Constantine that introduced the concept of a “just war” to the reilgion; before that Christians wouldn’t FIGHT in his wars. Constantine, already familiar with the christ-cult through his mother who believed, used what he knew about it to construct a New Official Version of it, State-Sanctioned, which went against everything Christ ever said about nonviolence and social justice. And the lie is so constructed that anyone can take Constantine’s place, in the power position. A pastor can use it to keep his flock coming back and growing; a priest can use it to convince people not to look too closely into how they’re treating the altar boys, an evangelical leader can use it to create a megachurch of idiots who will supply his luxury car and yacht needs, and of course the Pope can use it to retain relevance in this world, while of course looking the other way at children’s lives being destroyed. It’s like the believers have handles on thbeir heads that their leaders can just grab and direct them to do just about any stupid thing, to think just about any stupid thing, that they want them to.

And frankly it amazes me that more people can’t see it. That is due to our conditioning as a society, though, which is everywhere. If you can’t see it, you’re a victim of it already.

Hi Brian, I ask that you please keep your comments limited. At this point, you’re pretty much just ranting. I have deleted much of your posts. Just one comment at a time please, otherwise I will have to block them, which I prefer not to do.

Brian, you are fighting a battle. Your fight has clouded your vision, just as simply as it has for the conservative evangelicals with whom you’re fighting. At the moment, there is a professor at UCLA teaching a graduate class on Eusebius (Mik’s in it). If you took that class, you would see neither a “Christ-colored-glasses” perspective nor an attempt to portray Christianity as a grand (monolithic) lie. Rather, you would see real, nitty gritty historical work, and a debate over nuanced perspectives based upon the the best evidence that we have. What you’re doing is mere rhetoric. It doesn’t offend my “Christian sensibilities” or anything, but it does kind of bother me as a historian and a scholar.

Thanks for clarifying that, John. That definition and the line you drew between historicism and belief wasn’t perfectly visible in the earlier post.

[...] Cargill, Patrick McCullough, and James Getz criticize those who read Genesis 6-9 as if it recounted a series of events that [...]