MATTHEW and LUKE (bookin’ through the bible 6)
Gospels of Matthew and Luke
An amazed witness to the birth of Mithras
You are a scribbler living somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean—maybe Antioch, maybe Alexandria—a devoted follower of a scattered and struggling Jewish sect that worships Yeshua, a rabbi who died in Jerusalem fifty years earlier. Your language is Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the known world in the last quarter of the first century.
Your parents raised you on tales of Yeshua, as they themselves had been raised on them. Dozens of accounts of the life of the rabbi had been written down by others, including a book of the sayings of Yeshua, a.k.a. Jesus.
One in particular has caught the popular attention. It would eventually be known as the Gospel of Mark, though it was no more the work of John Mark than your soon-to-be-contribution was the work of the apostle Matthew. That’s right: you’re about to write a gospel.
“Mark’s” story lacked a certain something. A beginning, for example, and an end. Also missing were the details of the teachings of Jesus that had come down to you through oral tradition. You decide to write your own version using a popular technique of the time, the merging of elements from many traditions into a single new narrative. “Mark” will do fine for a framework, so you start out with your 517 favorite verses from Mark and call it a day. Your Gospel is half done.
Eager to bring the message of Jesus to life, you draw on four other sources: the aforementioned book of sayings, which would later be called the “Q” source; the prophecies of the old Law (OT); the stories you heard at your mother’s knee; and the hands-down coolest religious superhero yet conceived: the Persian god Mithras. Or perhaps more to the point, oral tradition had already merged these threads. Your gospel will simply record the story of Jesus as it emerged from three generations of oral improvement.
Mithraism was already 1500 years old by the time of Christ, but recently it had begun spreading like wildfire into the Roman Empire. And the Mithraic narrative should, to put it mildly, ring a bell for modern readers.
Born on December 25th, son of the sky god, his birth witnessed only by shepherds, Mithras was called the Way, the Truth, the Word, the Light, the Son of God, and the Good Shepherd. His followers celebrated his birth each year with hymns and the giving of gifts, as well as a sacrament involving bread and water. At the end of his life, goes the story, Mithras was laid in a tomb of rock for three days, after which he rose from the dead and appeared before his twelve disciples before ascending into the sky to join his father.
Luke, which many scholars consider the likely work of a woman, would shortly follow.
I’ve always had a love of compelling mythology, so Matthew and Luke have always appealed to me. When I heard many years later that nearly all of the details of Jesus’ birth narrative were borrowed from the Mithraic religion of Persia, it only enhanced my affection for these gospels.
Like most of my generation, my first direct contact with the Gospels was through Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas:
Luke 2:8-11 is pure loveliness, especially in the KJV. I have to shake myself out of the fog of familiarity to really hear it, to imagine myself as an ancient shepherd standing in country-darkness, then being enveloped in heavenly light. Just like Bellerophon riding Pegasus to the gates of Olympus or Brunnhilde plunging through the world-fire to return the Rhinegold to the riverbed, this is a mythic scene I saw vividly in my mind’s eye as a child.
If you know the history of the Jews during the time the gospels were written, the elation at the idea of an arriving Deliverer becomes all the more believable. Messiah refers to a political savior, not a spiritual one. The destruction of the Jewish nation and the dispersal of its people was nearly complete. Jerusalem was in ruins. The final rebellion (bar Kohkba, 132 CE) was just around the corner. Three years after that, the Romans would obliterate the last remnant of Jewish nationhood. It would take over 1800 years and another Jewish Holocaust before such a thing would rise again.
I can easily see what the Messiah concept would have meant to Jews at the time, and how the alleged arrival of a savior could have spawned a new religion.
Matthew also gives the best view of the actual teachings of Jesus. Many seem obvious and commonplace now, but at the time the suggestion in the Beatitudes that wealth and power were illusory and that the poor and meek might inherit the earth and God’s grace represented an absolutely radical inversion of the social system. It’s nothing less than revolutionary proto-Marxism, and I’m behind it 94 percent of the way.
Once I began to see the harm done by biblical literalism and the powerlessness of liberal religion to address that harm, the synoptic gospels also came to my aid in combating literalism. I pointed out Mark 7:9-10 last time, in which Jesus admonishes the Pharisees for ignoring the Old Testament requirement to kill disobedient children. In Matthew and Luke, we hear an even more precise endorsement of the continuing relevance of every last bit of the Mosaic Law (Old Testament):
Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished. (Mt 5:17-18)
But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the law to fall. (Luke 16:17)
This should be the end of the argument that the Old Testament was bad but was intended to be superseded by the New. Jesus begs to differ. So they both rise or fall together.
There is so much more to say, from petty geographic and historical errors (Luke 2 has the reigns of Quirinius in Syria and Herod in Judea overlapping at the birth of Jesus, though Quirinius didn’t begin his rule in Syria until ten years after Herod’s death) to the newly created resurrection narrative. But again, I run long, so I’ll close with three thoughts.
1. The Gnostic Compass
One of the greatest questions in gospel scholarship is why these four won the lottery. Among the gospels that fell off the table were several childhood gospels (Jesus turns his playmates into goats and is scolded for it) and the riveting Gnostic gospels, in which Jesus
was a new god trying to free the world from the domination of the old god Yahweh, who was in reality only a sub-creator called the Demiurge, the architect of the flawed material world, a world of illusion and death. Jesus did not really get crucified; he sent a double to take his place and transcended the physical world. (Callahan, Secret Origins of the Bible, 363)
2. The Blood Curse
In the synoptic gospels are the powerful seeds of 2000 years of anti-Semitism. To ensure the survival of their struggling sect, the gospel writers were keen to avoid antagonizing Rome. Hence Pilate’s washed hands and other extravagant attempts to lay the Christ-killing squarely at the foot of the Jews. Clearest of all is Matthew 27:24-26, the so-called Blood Curse:
So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”
The last clause would merely rank among the least probable and most ridiculously Pythonesque pieces of crowd dialogue in the Bible if not for the tragedy and hatred it has wrought through the centuries since it was written.
3. “[do not devote yourselves] to myths and endless genealogies…” (1 Timothy 1:4)
The last is something that has fascinated me for several reasons, but I bring it up here as the single most useful example of biblical errancy in the whole damn book: the conflicting genealogies of Matthew 1:1 and Luke 3:23.
It was very important for the fulfillment of prophecy that the eventual Messiah be descended from the House of David, so both Matthew and Luke provide long genealogies to establish Jesus’ lineage. Several things immediately strike even a casual reader:
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(1) that aside from David and Joseph, they share nothing in common—not even Joseph’s father;
(2) that Luke records 42 generations from David to Joseph, while Matthew records 26; and
(3) that Joseph’s genealogy is irrelevant anyway, since he was not related to Jesus.
Many gymnastics have been tried to resolve the genealogies, including the suggestion that one is actually Mary’s lineage. This explanation works only if “Mary” is a six-letter word starting with J.
Such inconsistencies are not a problem for those who’ve grasped the folkloric nature of the bible, of course — but the majority of Americans are still literalists, as the following postscript makes clear.
Postscript
It’s not hard to see why the message of the gospel (literally “Good News”) resonates with humanity. The Jews of the 1st century turned their own dream of rescue from political oppression into a claim that death itself, the greatest oppressor of all, had been conquered. No wonder literal belief persists.
George Barna recently completed one of his periodic polls regarding literal belief. As I noted in a comment on the Gospel of Mark post last week, The Barna Group is the one evangelical source I trust. Barna’s stated goal is to tell the church what it needs to hear, not just what it wants to hear. He uses scientific and transparent methodology to keep his finger on the pulse of American Christianity.
The Barna researchers asked a sample of 1005 adults whether they considered six key bible stories to be literally true or to be narratives that were not factually accurate but were designed to teach principles. Three of the six were in Matthew and Luke.
75 percent of respondents said that they believe Jesus Christ was literally born to a virgin.
69 percent embraced the story of Jesus turning water into wine as literally true.
68 percent view the story of the loaves and fishes as factually accurate.
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RECOMMENDED READING
Barnstone, Willis. The Other Bible. Includes ancient scriptures that did not make it into the canonical bible, including fascinating alternative gospels, even alternative creation stories.
Helms, Randel McCraw. Who Wrote the Gospels?
Callahan, Tim. Secret Origins of the Bible. Ridiculous name, terrific book. Details parallels of biblical stories and elements in earlier religious traditions.
[forward to the GOSPEL of JOHN]
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NEXT WEEK: The Gospel of John
merry krismas to all
OUR HERO
Oh, how completely I adore this.
I had an interview today with Rev. Welton Gaddy for the Air America program STATE OF BELIEF. Among the questions was the classic “How do nonreligious families celebrate Christmas?” My staple answer usually includes phrases like “Many different ways, there’s no need to all conform to a single expression,” “The winter solstice celebration is as old as humanity,” “Food, folks and fun,” and “Oh, there’s a religious version, too?”
Three hours too late, I learned from a comment on the PBB Discussion Forum that I don’t celebrate Christmas at all, and never have. I celebrate Krismas. As Jacob Walker, one of the namers of the holiday, put it:
Krismas is a secular holiday that celebrates the myth of Kris Kringle, commonly known as Santa Claus. It happens on December 25th of each year, and is also closely associated with Krismas Eve, which occurs December 24th… Krismas is about giving gifts, especially those “from the heart”; it is about the magic of childhood; it is about peace on earth; and it is about goodwill towards humankind, and anything else you wish it to mean that does not involve the Jesus as a savior bit.
Apparently this idea is three years old. Leave it to me to miss it. This is not merely cute; the more I think about it, the more genuine brilliance I see. Here’s more from Jacob:
I loved Christmas growing up. I treasure those memories buy amoxicillin. I treasure the mythology of Santa Claus, Rudolph, Elves, etc. I treasure the idea of giving gifts, the beauty of Christmas lights and the smell of Christmas trees. This is what Christmas was about to me. These are the secular mythologies and symbols that we have made Christmas about.
I really didn’t think much about the birth of Jesus while growing up; it was just another mythology surrounding the time, and I never believed in Jesus as a savior. As I have grown, I have come to believe that the notion of Jesus being a savior, and many of the ideas of fundamentalist Christian churches, and the Catholic church to be detrimental to peace, acceptance and love in our world. So I didn’t want to support them any longer. It also would not be true of me to celebrate Christmas when I really don’t follow what many people consider the MAJOR tenet of that holiday. So I decided to create a new holiday that would support the tenets that I believe are good and righteous.
In recent years there has been a movement by many fundamentalist Christian groups to “pull” Christmas back to being a religious holiday only. I think that is fine. We can have Krismas, they can have Christmas.
(Many thanks to BornAgainHeathen for the tip!)
Six things the religious (generally) do (much) better than secularists
One of the central messages of Parenting Beyond Belief is that there are secular ways to achieve all the benefits of religion. It’s true. I’ve even been so bold as to suggest we do some things better. Also true. It’s time to let that other shoe drop. Here are six things religious believers in the U.S. on the whole do much better than the nonreligious:
1. Give generously
Though the nonreligious outpace the religious in volunteerism once “church maintenance” volunteering is eliminated (Yonish and Campbell, “Religion and Volunteering in America“), when it comes to actual giving of actual money, there’s no contest: churchgoers have us licked. Even outside of church-based giving, the average churchgoer in the U.S. gives 2-3 times as much as the average non-churchgoing American. Obviously there will be notable exceptions, as there are on the other side, but the overall picture of giving by secular individuals needs improvement. [Note: Outdated stats removed 6/1/11]
Part of the solution is the systematizing of giving. That offering plate passing beneath one’s nose has a certain loosening effect on the wallet.
2. Connect their good works to their beliefs
As noted above, the nonreligious are very good about rolling up their sleeves and volunteering. But we are abysmal at making it clear that those good works are a reflection of our humanistic values, so the presence of nonbelievers doing good works is often overlooked. That’s why Dinesh D’Souza was able to write the ignorant screed “Where Were the Atheists?” after the Virginia Tech tragedy. Nonbelievers were present and active as counselors, rescuers and EMTs at the scene, but because they were not organized into named and tax-exempt units, their worldview was invisible. We must do a better job of making it clear that we do good works not despite our beliefs, but because of them.
3. Build community
I’m at work on an extensive post about this, so for now I’ll just point out what should be obvious—secularists are miserable at forming genuine community. We fret and fuss over the urgent need for more rationality in the world, completely ignoring more basic human needs like unconditional acceptance. Most people do not go to church for theology—they go for acceptance. They go to be surrounded by people who smile at them and are nice to them, who ask how their kids are and whether that back injury is still hurting.
Most freethought groups are not good at making people feel welcome and unconditionally accepted. Whenever I walk in the door of a new group, either to attend or as a speaker, I mill around and look at the walls for ten minutes before someone says something. It’s a painful ten minutes for anyone, and makes them less likely to return. Get a greeter at the door to welcome new faces in and introduce them around.
Becca made an observation that I’d never thought of before: This lack of social awareness may be tied in part to the fact that freethought groups are predominantly male, and churchgoers are predominantly female.
Until we recognize why people gather together—and that it isn’t “to be a force for rationality”—freethought groups will continue to lag light years behind churches in offering community.
4. Use transcendent language
There are many transcendent religious words without good secular equivalents. There is no secular equivalent for “blessed.” I want one. And no, “fortunate” doesn’t cut it. I also want a secular word for “sacred.” I want to be able to say something is “holy” without the implication that a God is involved. I want to speak of my “soul,” but do so naturalistically, and not be misunderstood. This list goes on and on.
5. Support each other in time of need
Individuals do a lovely job of supporting each other in times of need, regardless of belief system. But when it comes to the loving embrace of a community, religious communities once again tend to do it much, much better than any nonreligious community I’ve seen.
I once learned that a member of a freethought group I belonged to, a sweet man in his late seventies, had been in the hospital for nine days, and not a single member of the group had been to see him. We all signed a card, someone offered, knowing full well how lame that sounded.
If the man in the hospital had been a member of a church, you can bet he’d have had a stream of visitors to sit with him, talk to him, see him through it. Volunteers would have brought dinner to his wife. I’ve seen this as well. It is heartwarming, and the worst church I’ve seen does it better than the best secular organization I’ve seen. Much.
Yes, they have the numbers, and yes, they have the structure — but I’ll also give them credit for recognizing the need and having the desire to fulfill it.
6. Own their worldview
Yes, it’s easier for Christians in the U.S. to be “out” about their Christianness, because Christians are everywhere. Guess what—we’re everywhere too. Current estimates put the nonreligious at 15-18 percent of the U.S. population. There are more nonreligious Americans than African Americans. Think of that. Coming out of the closet and owning your worldview makes it easier for the next person to do so. So do it.
Need more incentive? Think of the children. I want my kids to choose the worldview that suits them best, and yes, I’d like secular humanism to be one they consider. The more visible and normalized it is as a worldview, the better chance that it will appeal to them. But in the meantime, it would also help if we gave more generously, connected our good works to our beliefs, built communities, learned to use transcendent language, and developed a better collective ability to support each other in time of need.
This is a partial list—I didn’t even touch on inspirational art and music—and I welcome your additions. We are not generally good at these things, and Christians, after millennia of practice, generally are. We could learn a thing or two. Or six.
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A similar post at Friendly Atheist.
GOSPEL OF MARK (bookin’ through the bible 5)
[back to FIRST CORINTHIANS]
[ahead to MATTHEW AND LUKE]
The multiple versions of nearly every major episode in both the Old and New Testaments—the creation of woman, the flood, the wife-sister subterfuge, the Ten Commandments, the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, the names of the twelve disciples, the Sermon on the Mount, the Shema, the Lord’s Prayer, the words inscribed on the cross, and the last words of Jesus before giving up the ghost, among scores of examples, attest to the folkloricity of the Bible.
From Holy Writ as Oral Lit by folklorist Alan Dundes (1935-2005)
quick preface, to cheat my word count limit
I’ve been insanely lucky at times. One of my luckiest accidents was my choice of university, UC Berkeley, which could hardly have been a more perfect fit for me. In addition to a dozen other lifechanging things, I met the other half of my ridiculously lucky marriage there. Most of the best things in my life can be traced to that place in one way or another.
I also studied with a number of professors who left indelible stamps on my life and mind, especially in anthropology: Tim White, F. Clark Howell, Desmond Clark, James Deetz. But one stands alone as the luckiest path-crossing of my academic career: folklorist Alan Dundes.
I’d gladly spend my thousand words talking about this unique, funny, brilliant and beloved guy, but you’ll just have to follow the link. He changed forever the way I look at the human project. Among other things, he made me find wonder and fascination in things that had formerly irritated me about the human animal. Long story.
Anyway, when I tucked into the Book of Mark, it was Alan Dundes who immediately sprang to mind. Mark is a bag of memes, after all, and it was Professor Dundes who first made me love memes.
One of Dundes’ great joys was studying the mutation of folklore during oral transmission – the changes, tiny and great, that inevitably find their way into a story, joke, playground game, nursery rhyme, or legend as it is passed orally from one person or generation to the next. Nothing pleased him more than having four or five different versions of a story in hand, then recreating the original, and he always seemed to value the variants more than the original. The original was mere creation, after all. The variants had picked up the fingerprints of folklore and so were more complexly, richly human.
The Gospel of Mark
THE BUDDY CHRIST from the movie DOGMA
The Bible provides folklorists like Dundes with one of their greatest playthings for reasons made clear in the immensely readable and fascinating book Holy Writ as Oral Lit (1999). I mentioned in the first installment that Genesis begins with two different versions of the same creation story, but as Dundes noted in the quote above, it hardly ends there. The technique in play is another form of midrash, the Jewish syncretic teaching technique I mentioned in an earlier post.
By “folkloristic,” Dundes means the stories of the Bible show clear evidence of passage through many, many layers of oral tradition prior to being recorded at all. This shouldn’t be too surprising: Mark was written no earlier than the year 70, since the destruction of the Temple is referred to (Mt 24), and more likely around the year 85 (see Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle for a brilliant discursion on dating the gospels).
One of the most wonderful aspects of Dundes’ thesis is that he doesn’t remotely denigrate the gospels on these terms. Their inconsistencies are precisely what intrigues and delights him. Loving variety as he does, he is quite impatient with those who insist, despite continuous evidence to the contrary, that the Bible is inerrant and/or consistent. He contrasts what he calls the literalists’ “governing syllogism”
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God Cannot Err.
The Bible is the Word of God.
Therefore the Bible Cannot Err.
(Geisler and Howe, When Critics Ask, 1992)
with his own syllogism:
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Folklore is characterized by multiple existence and variation.
The Bible is permeated by multiple existence and variation.
The Bible is folklore!
(Dundes 111)
Only by remembering that folklore was the love of his life can we see this as the compliment it was meant to be. The Bible is warts-and-all human, not divine, he says. Isn’t that wonderful?
There are two main kinds of memetic repetition in the gospels: (1) Luke and Matthew (written a decade later than Mark) repeat the stories of Mark, and (2) each of the four gospels, including Mark, also repeats different variants of the same story within its own text – often on the same page. The feeding of the multitudes is one example of a single event told in two variants (6:35 and 8:1), followed by a rather awkward attempt to make them appear as two different events – by putting words in the Big Guy’s mouth, no less (8:18-20). Textual analysis this simple and clear doesn’t lie: it’s one story that has drifted into two versions.
5th c. tilework from the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, Tabgha, Galilee, Israel
I could go on with this, but there’s much more to say about Mark.
There were dozens of existing first century gospels. Of the four eventual winners of the memetic lottery, Mark was written first, and Luke and Matthew were so closely based on Mark that the three are called synoptic (“same view”) gospels. So among other things, Mark gets credit for beginning to establish the New Testament’s relationship with the old.
So, with the coming of Jesus, have we decisively thrown that festering stew of the Old Testament Law nastiness onto the dung-heap of bad memes, as so many modern Christians claim? No such luck. Matthew (5:18) makes this clearest (“I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished”), but Mark already hints at the continuing enthusiasm for wretched immoral doctrine. Here’s Jesus himself (Mk 7:9-10) berating the Pharisees for not killing their disobedient children:
You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honour your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’
Oh well done, thou Font of Goodness! Let us hasten to build all human morality on His example.
So why didn’t the early Christians take this golden opportunity to bid the OT farewell? Because the gospels were carefully crafted in fulfillment of OT prophecies, making it necessary to keep the OT around as evidence. But to specifically underline the more reprehensible messages, like child-killing? Perhaps my understanding of Christ’s message of love is insufficiently subtle to grasp His divine strategy.
So long as literalism is alive and dominant, this was, in a very real way, the Last Chance in history to renounce those ideas from the Old Testament that are most reprehensible — to say, “Here is a new covenant AND the old law is renounced.” Instead, God gave those ideas his explicit and enduring Seal of Approval. Once Jesus Christ weighed in both jot and tittle, there was no further way for subsequent Christianity to decisively disclaim any given notion in the Mosaic law. And there, I suggest, is the central problem with religions of the book: they lack a meaningful mechanism for self-correction.
More on this in later posts.
By far the most interesting aspect of the Gospel of Mark is what is missing. The miracles are mild and few, and the story lacks both the beginning and the end we all know. There’s no Zeus-like insemination of the mortal woman, no manger, no wise men or shepherds — none of the things that made Luke and Matthew bestsellers. In Mark, we start with a Jesus who is old enough for his tenth high school reunion. The dying girl he revives (Mark 5) has not yet been exaggerated into a dead girl (Matthew 9:18). Even the moral messages are blander and less compelling than Matthew and Luke.
And there’s another point, perhaps most fascinating of all: Mark 16:9-20 is not present in any of the earliest manuscripts. The original Mark ended with the empty tomb but included no appearances of the risen Christ, no snake-handling or poison-drinking, no appearance to the Apostles, no Great Commission, and no ascension into heaven.
We are left with two choices: If the oldest canonical gospel lacks both the beginning and end that appear in later gospels, either Mark found Jesus’ miraculous birth and explicit conquering of death too uninteresting to include (and the cursing of figs and pigs too interesting to exclude), or those elements — the most theologically important — were later folkloric additions.
Which of those (he asked rhetorically) is 1000 times more likely?
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For December 24: THE GOSPELS OF MATTHEW AND LUKE
Read Matthew and Luke online
Believers on Matthew
Skeptics on Matthew
Believers on Luke
Skeptics on Luke
Followed by:
Dec 29 — John
Jan 8 — Exodus (special guest blogger)
Jan 15 — Leviticus
Jan 22 — Deuteronomy
Jan 29 — Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs (special guest blogger)
Feb 5 — Acts
Feb 12 — Revelation
laughing matters 1: humor and critical thinking
Your [human] race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug push it a little weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger by MARK TWAIN
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I keep thinking I know what my next post will be, then something else pops up on radar. In this case, it’s a satire currently meming its way around the Internet — an extremely subtle, mildly delicious satire about atheist parents responding indignantly to a movie trailer for the next Narnia movie. Too subtle by half, apparently; the satire is now being reported in blogs as if it were actual news — reported, in other words, by people who failed to get the joke.
So I want to lapse into the pathetic mode of the former professor and post some thoughts on humor as it relates to critical thinking. We’ll pretend I’m on-topic because both humor and critical thinking are precious values in our family, because my favorite humor targets sacred cows, and because it was inspired by a satire about atheist parents. It’ll probably end up five or six posts long, or seven, once a week, in-between the Bible study posts and random others. And here we go.
I am in the fourth decade of a hot, sweaty, nasty intellexual affair with satire.
When our family lived in England in 2004, she was the one I looked for in the bookshops of London and Oxford and Hay-on-Wye. She tickles me through the earbuds of my iPod on our long walks together. If I promise not to mention her age (about 2500 years next July), she leaves me alone about my BMI and MPB. She waits by my bedside, and for thirty minutes every night, we get it on.
(Don’t worry. My wife is generally gettin’ just as busy with Khaled Hosseini or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)
Satire is not just entertainment. It’s also a weapon for social change, and a damned effective and rightly feared weapon at that. Yet we tend too often to leave it lying in the drawer, unfired.
In The Rise of Rationalism in Western Europe, historian W.E.H. Lecky described the role of humor in a change in attitudes in England of the 1600s. For centuries, the English had engaged in witchburning to enforce this or that religious orthodoxy or express this or that superstitious fear.
In the 1650s, witchcraft trials and executions in Britain reached a fever pitch under the Puritan Commonwealth. But by the 1660s they’d stopped completely.
Why the sudden abandonment of something that was nearly universal and unquestioned just ten years earlier? According to Lecky, the agent of change was laughter.
Though the Puritans didn’t invent the practice, they were the most enthusiastic witchburners in English history and so became closely associated with it. When Cromwell died, all of the dour Puritan ideologies quickly fell out of favor. The monarchy was restored, theatres that were burned down were rebuilt, and dancing went from forbidden to being something you do in the street while drunk.
Overnight, the sanctimonious Puritans became the objects of ridicule. Every pub seemed to have a resident funnyman who could get the other patrons rolling on the floor with his imitation of the nasal Puritan manner of speech and the stiff-backed, rump-in-the-air Puritan gait.
And, by its close association with Puritanism, witch burning immediately went from obvious social necessity to ridiculous folly. Once it became laughable, it was over.
For centuries, words were thought to have magical powers. Pre-Islamic Arabs put satirists at the vanguard of military attacks, hurling epithets and ridicule at the enemy. Apparently this was also done in the medieval period:
In 1509 Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly, in which the goddess Folly gives a speech in praise of all that the human race does to serve and promote her cause. After getting the reader chuckling at judges and tradesmen and fishwives for a hundred pages, he gradually turns to the church, taking the largest and longest swipes at the clergy. He was an Augustinian monk at the time, which deflected charges of impiety. Many historians believe only his personal friendship with Pope Julius II and his ability to hide in the skirts of satire stood between him and execution. A work of sober rational argument would have been his death warrant.
But Europe got the message. The Praise of Folly hit the continent like a firestorm. Many see it as one of the final nudges for the Reformation, which began eight years later. If true, that puts satire at the center of one of the most earthshaking challenges to the status quo in Western history.
Two centuries later it was Voltaire, railing against intolerance, tyranny and superstition. It’s hard to argue for anyone exerting a greater influence on the rise of rationalism and the promotion of critical thinking over superstition. And lo and behold, he chose satire as one of his primary vehicles. His best-known bust is the only one I know carved with a smirk.
Horace Walpole, an otherwise forgettable English aristocrat, said, “This world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” And sure enough, throughout history, there’s evidence of thinkers laughing and laughers thinking, each side of that coin calling on the other to facilitate our slow crawl out of the swamp of ignorance and injustice that is our apparent human birthright.
Humor is a form of nonviolent protest, a socially acceptable way to challenge power. Over and over it has been a catalyst to social change. Yet we spend half our time dismissing it as mere entertainment and the other half deriding it as unseemly and disrespectful, especially when the humor is perceived as ridicule. Then it becomes the one thing you dare not do in critical discourse.
Six years ago, I began posting sober critical arguments against religious belief on my office door at the Catholic college where I was then employed. Each Monday for eighteen months I posted new critiques and invited replies. Nothing.
Then one day I posted a satire from The Onion targeting self-contradictory Vatican statements. The headline captured the essential predicament of Catholic salvation doctrine:
Pope Calls for Greater Understanding Between Catholics, Hellbound
VATICAN CITY — In an address before over 250,000 followers assembled outside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed his commitment to global religious unity, calling upon the world’s Roman Catholics to “build a bridge of earthly friendship” between themselves and the eternally damned.
“We have been aloof too long,” the Pope told the throng of well-wishers who crowded into Vatican Square. “For too many years, otherwise pious, observant Catholics have not made enough of an effort to reach out to nonbelievers, reasoning that, since they would have no contact with them in the next life, there was little point in getting to know them in this one.”
And so on. It remains one of the most brilliantly constructed satires I have ever seen. And less than 24 hours after I posted it, I had an outraged note from a campus theologian.
Why did he yawn at serious arguments but protest at humor? Because Catholicism has a long history of success at batting away rational argument with polysyllabic nonsense posing as rational argument. But, as Erasmus and Voltaire both demonstrated, they’re powerless when someone points and chuckles.
No God and no religion can survive ridicule.
MARK TWAIN
FIRST CORINTHIANS (bookin’ through the bible 4)
[back to GENESIS]
[onward to MARK]
FIRST CORINTHIANS
You may recall that the design of this mini-course is based on the GSBTS principle (Grade School Basketball Team Selection). Last week was skeptic’s choice (Genesis), so this week we fly over the intertestamental abyss, alight at the dawn of Christianity, and let the Christian captain choose a book.
Well, the Christian captain (in the form of several moderate Christian bible study sites) wanted to start with Matthew, but the ref blew the whistle. You have to begin with a Pauline epistle since they were written over a generation before the Gospels. Otherwise you get the idea that the Gospel stories were written, then Paul spread them. The Christians’ second choice is First Corinthians, after which we’ll visit the Gospels.
THE APOSTLE PAUL MAILS HIS FIRST LETTER
TO THE CORINTHIANS—El Greco (1606)
Paul is a sure candidate for Most Influential Human of All Time. Inventing Christianity from near-scratch is a résumé-brightener if ever there was. But if we want some understanding of First Corinthians and the other Pauline epistles, there are two things we need to know:
1. That Paul wrote them a full generation before the gospels or any other surviving accounts of the life of Christ were written, and
2. That he believed the world was going to end and Jesus return within the lifetime of those then living.
We tend to read Paul through the lens of the gospels. When he says “the Christ,” we picture mangers, shepherds, loaves and fishes, last suppers, Mel Gibson’s oceans of stage blood—and we think Paul’s picturing those things, too. He isn’t, any more than P.L. Travers, in writing Mary Poppins, imagined her singing “A Spoonful of Sugar.”
“We need to embrace the fact that none of Paul’s first readers read him [as we do],” wrote Bishop John Shelby Spong in Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, “for in their lives there were as yet no Gospels. To interpret Paul accurately, we need to put ourselves into that first-century pre-gospel frame of reference and to hear Paul in fresh and authentic ways.”
We do this lensing all the time. When Jefferson invokes a Creator endowing us with inalienable rights, we read through the lenses of subsequent history and think Why, he’s talking about the God of Pat Robertson. It would have been clear to his contemporaries that he was talking about a non-biblical god who made things, endowed rights, then turned to other projects unknown, leaving no forwarding address.
After his conversion, Paul traveled throughout the Mediterranean world, helping the fledgling church to establish itself. At one point he spent some time with the church in Corinth, not far from Athens.
Corinth was a decent-sized city of around 130,000 at the time of his visit, a place of proverbial wickedness, energy, riches, noise, home to the primary temple of the love goddess Aphrodite, which boasted 1,000 ritual prostitutes. It was the Sin City of its time. The verb “to Corinth” (Korinthiazesthai) in popular Greek meant to fornicate, as in Voulez-vous Korinthiazesthai avec moi?
Paul was in Ephesus when he heard the Corinthian church he’d just left was embroiled in a sex scandal. One of the members had had an affair with his stepmother, and the church was ready to fracture. Hence the letter’s emphasis on sexual morality. His overall purpose in writing was to set them back on the rails so they could be saved upon Christ’s imminent return.
The frantic belief that the jig was nearly up explains much of Paul’s advice to the church in Corinth. Brothers, the time is short. Those who have wives should live as if they had none. Those who don’t should not get married. This world is about to pass away (7:29 etc).
But then, weirdly, there’s a lot of long-term planning interwoven, including an exhaustive list of restrictions on women and rules for establishing a church hierarchy. Here’s A.N. Wilson’s take on that contradiction:
There are many reasons to suppose that the letters in which these [long-range plans] occur belong to a later period than Paul’s… The world which these letters reflect is not the one seen through Paul’s frantic eyes, a world about to dissolve, as Christ appears in glory above the clouds. On the contrary, the later New Testament writings seem to have settled down to the discovery that Christ will not be returning quite as soon as the Apostle predicted. They set up a ‘Church,’ with fixed officers (elders, deacons, bishops) and lay down the rules for a dull and virtuous life in which women know their place. To such a world, surely, belongs the sentence in 1 Corinthians in which we read that ‘women should be silent in the churches.’ In short, the sentence is an interpolation. (from Paul: The Mind of the Apostle)
Interpolation was the official pastime of the early Christian church. Paul’s letters passed under the editorial quills of the antisexual, body-hating, self-flagellating Church Fathers—men rooted in the dismal Greek Stoic conception that matter itself is evil and only spirit is good—in an early medieval game of Telephone.
But in addition to the misogyny and apocalyptic yearnings, First Corinthians has some really wonderful passages, mostly in Chapter 13. “When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish things behind me” is one such. Another is this exquisite passage, which served as a reading in my wedding and millions of others:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
That the biblical passage most often heard just before husband and wife say “I do” is from a letter in which marriage is discouraged and women are told to stay silent in church—well, what’s more delicious than the ridiculous and sublime, locked in a scriptural embrace?
Paul’s true genius, according to Wilson, was mythologizing the death of one Jewish teacher to fulfill the prophetic claims of that religion, giving it new energy and relevance. He took the potential energy of the Old Testament and unleashed it by “making” it come true. In so doing, he used an insular, inwardly-turned religion to birth a universally available, all-forgiving creed and conquered death in the bargain.
No wonder the damn thing caught on.
(GAME: “Find the Bad Apostrophe in the Tattoo”)
_________________________
POSTSCRIPT
Further reading
AN Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle
John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious
Thirsty for more mail from the first century’s favorite epileptic?
If First Corinthians has somehow whet your appetite for Paul, read Romans next. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, like most sequels, can’t hold a candle to the first one; he mostly asks the Corinthians why they never answered his first letter and whether it means they’ve been seeing other apostles behind his back.
See you on December 17 for THE GOSPEL OF MARK:
Mark online
Believers on Mark
Skeptics on Mark
come again!
The whole family went to church with a family friend last Sunday. Beautiful suburban church in a mainstream moderate Protestant denomination. Beautiful day.
As usual in such places, we were greeted warmly by nice and welcoming people. Lovely fellowship, coffee and doughnuts and chitchat in the lobby. A large display invited donations for a project to feed Atlanta’s urban poor this winter. Hardly a minute would go by between people dropping envelopes in the slot. Happy children darted through a forest of skirts and trousers. Pleasantries were exchanged, along with the occasional business card.
Passersby tousled my own children’s hair and asked about school. I met the two clergymen — young, energetic and extremely likeable guys — both of whom I had beat out of the womb by several Olympiads. There was talk of sports.
We entered the sanctuary, which was adorned with greenery and candles for Advent, slid into a pew, and enjoyed the prelude music, a lovely organ arrangement of a Bach cantata.
The service itself centered on the eager anticipation of Jesus’ return, which will herald the end of the world and the casting of most of humanity, writhing and screaming, into a lake of fire for all eternity. The congregation then pretended to eat his flesh and drink his blood.
On the way out, a nice lady gave us a pretty coffee mug full of candy to thank us for visiting. “Come again!” she said, the apparent theme of the day.
GENESIS (bookin’ through the bible 3)
The Book of Genesis is true from the first word to the last.
KEN HAM, CEO and president of Answers in Genesis
Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth,
more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand
years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
SAM HARRIS, Letter to a Christian Nation
GENESIS
We’re pattern-seeking, cause-finding animals. It’s a very adaptive habit. The Book of Genesis represents early attempts, in the absence of reliable methods, to find patterns and seek causes — specifically why the world is the way it is, and why we are the way we are. They’re good questions, and they deserve the best answers we can muster. For a long time, this was it.
Though the NIV Study Bible continues to credit Moses with authorship of this book and the rest of the Pentateuch, most biblical scholars have concluded it is a composite of several sources originating between the 10th and 5th centuries BCE, including the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s fascinating as mythology. Only when it is taken as literal history, as science, or even worse, as a moral guide — long after better methods have been developed for all three — do I get incredibly cranky. Here’s my stream of consciousness on Genesis.
Gen 1
I’ve always found it intriguing that Genesis begins with two quite different creation stories — the so-called Priestly (1:1) and the Yahwist (2:4) versions. I’m unaware of any other culture’s creation story that allows you to choose between plotlines.
The highest overall value of the bible — obedience — shows up for the first time in the Tree of Knowledge story. That central value is still present in conservative Christian parenting research and advice, which regularly places obedience (to God, to parents) above all other virtues. And such a telling transgression was Eve’s! Humanity earned God’s wrath not through lust, or greed, or murder, but through curiosity—the desire to know. If desiring knowledge separated us from God, willful ignorance seems the path back to the garden. Is this a belief worth embracing, or even respecting?
Literal belief in the biblical creation story in the U.S.: 60 – 61%
Gen 6
It seems downright unsporting to go after Noah and the Flood – not even every species of beetle would have fit, etc etc. I am told, again and again, that I am fighting against a belief system long-ago vanished. No one believes in the literal Ark any more.
Literal belief in the Flood and Ark in the U.S.: 60%
Gen 12
Abram/Abraham lies repeatedly, claiming his wife is really his sister. Pharaoh, who could not have known he had been lied to, marries her and is punished by God for adultery. Abram/Abraham is richly rewarded by God. If Genesis is an allegory — a teaching story — what on Earth are we meant to learn?
Gen 16:10-15
I find this passage so charmingly human. ‘You were so laughing at me!” says Jehovah, a little hurt. The changing nature of God’s interactions with humanity is the thing that most energizes the bible as literature for me. I’m not aware of another myth system with the same morphing relationship. Correct me since I’m wrong.
Gen 18
I ADORE the negotiation here — Abraham haggling God down to ten. It’s a Promethean moment, really, an incredible act of courage, of testing God’s own moral definitions. What’s interesting is that negotiations stop at ten — and Sodom is destroyed after all, sparing only Lot, his wife, and his two daughters. So somewhere between four and ten righteous exceptions is the tipping point for destroying a wicked city. Mental note.
Gen 19
The incident of Lot offering his virgin daughters to the crowd for rape is one of the most jaw-dropping moral outrages in the entire book—despicable both for the act and for the clear message. Lot, remember, was chosen by God to survive the destruction of Sodom. Because he was good? No—because in offering his daughters for rape in lieu of the angels, he proved himself obedient. I hereby welcome other interpretations of the message of this scene, which also manages to include the first hints of biblical homophobia that continues to this day.
Then there’s Lot’s wife, turned to a condiment for the Eve-like crime of curiosity — or possibly even empathy for her dying friends and neighbors. No no, those were symptoms of the real disease. Once again, the crime was disobedience.
I won’t even touch the cave scene. But think of what it says about Genesis that I can skip a scene in which two daughters get their father drunk and have sex with him and still make a plenty sound case against the moral value of the book.
Gen 22
Lot holds the heavyweight title in the category of moral menace for a very short time. Within pages, Abraham steals the crown, proving there’s no crime he would not commit, no act too vile or unjustified, so long as God ordered him to commit it. That the founder of Judaism is the first on record to make use of the Nuremberg Defense is an irony too painful to contemplate.
Gen 32
Jacob wrestling with God is another passage I find incredibly intriguing. Does anyone know of parallels in other myth systems? Paging Joseph Campbell.
Obviously there’s more, but I’d better wrap—my word count limit approacheth.
My dismay over Genesis has nothing to do with the fact that it gets the science of life wrong. Nobody in the first millennium BCE got much of the science of life right. My horror is based on three things:
(1) That 46 percent of my fellow Americans think Genesis got the science of life right, and use that profound ignorance to block the acceptance of the single most humbling, inspiring, and transformative scientific discovery in human history — that we are related by descent to all other life on Earth;
(2) That Genesis praises absolute, unthinking obedience while condemning curiosity and intelligence; and
(3) That Genesis continues to fuel ignorant literalism, the corrosive notion of “original sin,” homophobia, misogyny, and any number of other human failings against which we just might make quicker progress without the unhelpful influence of a book that condones, even loudly encourages them.
Luke is lovely. Ecclesiastes is searingly powerful. Song of Songs is sexy. But Genesis, taken literally OR figuratively, is obscene garbage. Any book that includes it is a menace to basic human decency and to the enlightenment of the human mind.
That 49 percent of Americans believe the entire Bible is the inspired word of God is, to quote Harris, “a moral and intellectual emergency,” and Genesis itself provides all the evidence needed. I respect the people who hold these beliefs — all people are inherently worthy of respect as human beings — but saying I respect the beliefs themselves would render the word respect, a very important and useful word indeed, completely meaningless.
Okay, there’s my two cents. As I said, I do not pretend to be neutral, nor should I be. To be neutral on such a thing is to have given it no real thought whatsoever. So what’s your appropriately biased view?
__________________
REMINDER: We’re pursuing an unusual study plan to shake things up and to interweave the favorite texts of skeptics and Christians. Next week:
Dec 10 — 1 Corinthians
Dec 17 — Mark
Dec 24 — Matthew and Luke
Dec 29 — John
Jan 8 — Exodus
Jan 15 — Leviticus
Jan 22 — Deuteronomy
Jan 29 — Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs
Feb 5 — Acts
Feb 12 — Revelation
a note on bias
Final thoughts before we start our romp through the Bible.
I’ve received an email from a Christian from Iowa assuring me that, as an atheist, I cannot possibly see the Bible objectively and therefore should give up the pretense of trying.
I assured her she was right on one count—I am not objective. Neither are Christians, of course, but that does not disqualify their opinions on the book. What I do is recognize their subjective bias and compensate for it. The old grain of salt.
In the course of eleven years teaching critical thinking, I ran into the bias question over and over. Students research capital punishment or gun control would throw up their hands. “I don’t know who to believe! Everyone on both sides is biased!” What they meant is “Everyone has an opinion!”
They had the common collegiate misconception that only neutral, dispassionate voices are worth listening to.
I asked whether the views expressed by Martin Luther King, Jr. in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” were invalidated by the fact that he was not neutral on the question of racism, whether Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was useless because she came down firmly on one side of the feminist question, and whether Christ’s bias toward mercy and forgiveness made him hopelessly irrelevant as a source of ethical guidance.
That always snapped things into focus.
The trick is to recognize that “bias”—an inclination to one side of a question or the other—is nearly universal, and is not in and of itself a bad thing. Most thinking and engaged persons will be “biased” in all questions that have any significance to them. Disregard those voices and we’ve limited ourselves to the apathetic and the stupid—probably not the best plan. The key is not to pretend we are unbiased, but to chose our leanings on the basis of evidence and ethics, to recognize the direction and extent of the bias, to reveal that bias as fully as possible, and to do our level best to ensure that it doesn’t blind us to good information from other perspectives.
When assessing others, we need to determine not whether they are biased, but whether their bias is so controlling that their ability to contribute to the conversation is disabled.
The most pernicious form of bias is confirmation bias – the tendency to see evidence that confirms the conclusions we’ve already reached. Scientific research has to build in all kinds of safeguards to control this one.
Engaging the Bible, interestingly, brings out confirmation bias in two different directions at once for me. My ever-increasing horror at its contents leads me to ever-less-charitable interpretations, something I must be aware of and guard against. But the far older bias that the Bible is the “Good Book” also leads me, and many others, to gloss over some genuine outrages because they are so very familiar. I’d heard the serpent-and-apple story hundreds of times before it occurred to me that Eve’s “sin”—the one that caused the Fall, the one that damned humanity to a separation from God—was one of my two highest values. No, not a hankering for apples; her sin was the desire to know.
And so, by way of full disclosure before we dive into bible study together, let me reveal my position on the Bible so you can take my input with a grain of Lot’s wife.
I am not neutral. As a result of many years of careful thought, attendance of churches in nine denominations, and conversations with theologians, ministers, priests, lay believers, nonbelievers, Thomas Paine, C.S. Lewis, Karen Armstrong, Don Bierle, Bertrand Russell, A.N. Wilson, and dozens more, I’ve concluded that the Bible is a mixture of good, neutral, and bad; that the good elements are easily found elsewhere in far less compromised forms; and that on balance, the overall influence of the book on humanity has been and continues to be so appallingly negative, in subtle and unsubtle ways, as to make me wish it reduced to a museum piece, a sobering object lesson in misplaced affections.
So go into this bible blog series with full knowledge that I’m a biased, wild-eyed extremist. I get bothered by little things, like the Good Book ordering believers to kill me (Lev 24:16, 2 Chron 15:12-13) and my wife (Deut 22:20-21) and my children (Deut 21:18-21, Mt 15:4). I am inexplicably bothered by its exaltation of obedience over autonomy and ignorance over knowledge. It’s too typical of me to fret about such trivia and characterize such a Good Book as somehow…well, bad.
But it will always be with us. So instead of wishing it weren’t, I opt for the widest possible readership in hopes that others will see my point and help me to work against its negative influence. Hence this odd little bible study.
We’ll start tomorrow with Genesis. I’ll give my thoughts in a sketchy stream of consciousness, focusing whenever possible on the implications for parenting and staying within 1000 words, then turn it over to you for discussion. Along the way, I’ll surely show bursts of impatience not only with the text, but with my central frustration regarding religious literacy – that it’s essential to be religiously literate, and I resent the fact that it is essential. I’d much rather spend my time and limited mental capacity elsewhere.
I will also take this opportunity to demonstrate that biblical literalism is not only alive and well, but predominant among believers in the U.S.
Until tomorrow, then.
on borrowed memes and missed compliments
You may have seen the article in TIME Magazine about the weekly children’s program at the Humanist Community in Palo Alto, California:
On Sunday mornings, most parents who don’t believe in the Christian God, or any god at all, are probably making brunch or cheering at their kids’ soccer game, or running errands or, with luck, sleeping in. Without religion, there’s no need for church, right?
Maybe. But some nonbelievers are beginning to think they might need something for their children. “When you have kids,” says Julie Willey, a design engineer, “you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on.” So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.
All in all a positive piece about what seems to be a lovely program by a very strong and positive group of folks. Very few wincers in the article.
It’s unfortunate but predictable that the response in many fundamentalist religious blogs has been jeering and mockery. Albert Mohler (president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) called it an “awkward irony.” Others have claimed that the fact that atheists spend so much time denying God is “proof that God exists,” or found the idea otherwise worthy of contempt.
I’ve looked in vain (so far,anyway — please help me out) for a Christian blog that says what I think is obvious, and what is essentially stated in the article itself: that this represents an enormous compliment from secular humanism to Christianity. Systematic values education for children is something they’ve developed much more successfully than we have. And for good reason: they’ve had a lot more time, centuries of development and refinement. We humanists have always attended to the values education of our kids, of course, but until quite recently it has mostly taken place at the family level. When it comes to values education in the context of our worldview community, Christians have had more practice. In the past generation, such efforts as UU Religious Education, Ethical Culture, and the Humanist Community program have begun closing that gap in the humanist infrastructure.
One of the most marvelous and successful programs in the world is the Humanist Confirmation program in Norway. According to the website of the Norwegian Humanist Association, ten thousand fifteen-year-old Norwegians each spring “go through a course where they discuss life stances and world religions, ethics and human sexuality, human rights and civic duties. At the end of the course the participants receive a diploma at a ceremony including music, poetry and speeches.” They are thereby confirmed not into atheism, but into the humanist values that underlie all aspects of civil society, including religion.
HUMANIST ORDINANDS IN NORWAY,
SPRING 2007
All of these secular efforts at values education can be seen as an evolution of religious practices, opening conversations about values and ethics while working hard to avoid forcing children into a preselected worldview before they are old enough to make their own choice. And though the practices themselves often have religious roots, the values themselves are human and transcend any single expression.
Instead of mocking and jeering, I’d like to see Christians recognize and accept these adaptations as genuine compliments. Perhaps the first step is for humanists to say, clearly, that they are meant as compliments. I can’t speak for the Humanist Community, nor for the Norwegian Humanists, but I can speak for Parenting Beyond Belief. The Preface notes that
Religion has much to offer parents: an established community, a pre-defined set of values, a common lexicon and symbology, rites of passage, a means of engendering wonder, comforting answers to the big questions, and consoling explanations to ease experiences of hardship and loss.
Just as early Christians recognized the power and effectiveness of the Persian savior myths and borrowed them to energize the story of Jesus, there are currently things that Christians do much better than we do. I’m preparing a post on that very topic. We should not be shy about considering their experiments part of the Grand Human Experiment, setting aside the things that don’t work, with a firm NO THANKS, then borrowing those things that work well, and saying THANK YOU — much louder and more sincerely than we have done.
