no cats were harmed
- July 24, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In myths, Science
23
Mother: “Don’t ask so many questions, child. Curiosity killed the cat.”
Willie: “What did the cat want to know, Mom?”
—The Portsmouth Daily Times, March 1915
An interesting character pops up in religion and folklore around the world and throughout history: the curious and disobedient woman. Here’s the story: A god/wizard gives a woman total freedom, with one exception—one thing she must not do/eat/see. She battles briefly with her curiosity and loses, opening/eating the door/jar/box/apple and thereby spoiling everything for everybody.
Curiosity didn’t just kill the cat, you see. It unleashed disease, misery, war and death on the world and got us evicted from a Paradise of blank incuriosity and unthinking obedience.
Bummer.
That this cautionary tale is found in religions worldwide leads me once again to conclude that religion isn’t the source of human hatreds, fears, and prejudices—it’s the expression of those fundamental human hatreds, fears, and prejudices, the place we put them for safekeeping against the sniffing nose of inquiry. And since the story includes three things powerfully reviled by most religious traditions (curiosity, disobedience, and women), it’s not surprising to find them conveniently bundled into a single high-speed cable running straight to our cultural hearts.
I could do pages on Eve alone and her act of disobedient curiosity with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Was she really punished for wanting to know the difference between right and wrong, or just for disobedience? How could she know it was wrong to disobey if she didn’t yet have knowledge of good and evil? etc). Then there’s Lot’s wife, poor nameless thing, a woman (check!) who was curious (check!) and therefore disobeyed (check!) instructions to not look back at her brimstoned friends and loved ones. Islam even coined a word for a disobedient woman – nashiz – and decreed a passel of human punishments for her in sharia law.
But neither Eve nor Mrs. Lot was the first nashiz woman to cross my path. Lovely, nosy Pandora was my first.
Pandora was designed for revenge on humanity by the gods, who were angry at the theft of fire by Prometheus. According to Hesiod, each of the Olympians gave her a gift (Pandora = “all-gifted”). She was created by Hephaestus in the very image of Aphrodite (rrrrrrowww). Hermes gave her “a shameful mind and deceitful nature” and filled her mouth with “lies and crafty words.” Poseidon gave her a pearl necklace, which (unlike the deceitful nature, for example) was at least on her registry. But the real drivers of the story were the last two gifts: Hermes gave her an exquisitely beautiful jar (or box) with instructions not to open it, while Hera, queen of the gods, blessed her with insatiable curiosity.
Nice.
Long story short, once on Earth, Pandora’s god-given curiosity consumed her and she opened the jar/box, releasing war, disease, famine, and talk radio into the world. Realizing what she had done, she clamped the lid on at last, with Hope alone left inside.
(This is usually interpreted as Hope being preserved for humankind as a comfort in the face of the terrors, but even at the age of ten I realized that by trapping Hope in the jar, she kept it out of the world. Are there no mythic traditions with continuity editors?)
This week I came across the anti-curiosity tale in yet another form, one I’d never seen before–a Grimms’ fairy tale called Fitcher’s Bird:
Once upon a time there was a sorcerer who disguised himself as a poor man, went begging from house to house, and captured beautiful girls. No one knew where he took them, for none of them ever returned.
One day he came to the door of a man who had three beautiful daughters. He asked for a bit to eat, and when the oldest daughter came out to give him a piece of bread, he simply touched her, and she was forced to jump into his pack basket. Then he hurried away with powerful strides and carried her to his house, which stood in the middle of a dark forest.
He gave her everything that she wanted. So it went for a few days, and then he said to her, “I have to go away and leave you alone for a short time. Here are the house keys. You may go everywhere and look at everything except for the one room that this little key here unlocks. I forbid you to go there on the penalty of death.”
He also gave her an egg, saying, “Take good care of this egg. If you should lose it, great misfortune would follow.”
She took the keys and the egg, and promised to take good care of everything.
As soon as he had gone she walked about in the house, examining everything. The rooms glistened with silver and gold. She had never seen such splendor.
Finally she came to the forbidden door. She wanted to pass it by, but curiosity gave her no rest. She put the key into the lock and the door sprang open.
What did she see when she stepped inside? A large bloody basin stood in the middle, inside which there lay the cut up parts of dead girls. Nearby there was a wooden block with a glistening ax lying on it.
She was so terrified that the egg slipped from her hand into the basin. She got it out again and wiped off the blood, but it was to no avail, for it always came back. She wiped and scrubbed, but she could not get rid of the stain.
Not long afterward the man returned from his journey and asked for the key and the egg. She handed them to him, and he saw from the red stain that she had been in the blood chamber.
“You went into that chamber against my will,” he said, “and now against your will you shall go into it once again. Your life is finished.”
He threw her down, dragged her by her hair into the chamber, cut off her head, then cut her up into pieces, and her blood flowed out onto the floor. Then he threw her into the basin with the others.
It gets worse, believe it or not, this charming children’s tale. Now I have to go away and leave you for a short time. You may read anything you wish on the Internet, but you may NOT, on pain of death, click on this link to read the rest of the story.
Given this glimpse into our cultural terror of curiosity, is it any wonder that religion and science are so often at loggerheads? One is fueled by the very thing the other has traditionally feared—the opening of interesting and forbidden jars.
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NOTES
- Fitcher’s Bird is very closely related to (and probably the source of) the tale of Bluebeard.
- The phrase “Curiosity killed the cat” is in fact a much later corruption of the original “Care (i.e., worry) will kill a cat,” which appears in a Ben Jonson play of 1598.
thinking by druthers 3
[Third installment in a series on confirmation bias. Back to Part 2.]
The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking. All the evidence for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.
Michael Shermer, in Scientific American, October 2006[Conspiracy theories] use the ‘reverse scientific method’. They determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn’t fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion.
Thomas Eagar, professor of engineering, MIT
I was cleaning moldy tuppers out of the back of the fridge the other day when Connor (nearly 13) piped up from the computer. “Hey Dad,” he said. “Have you ever heard about these conspiracy theories?”
Oh jeez. “Which ones?”
“All kinds of different ones. You wouldn’t believe what people believe!”
Since people on either side of conspiracy theories use that same sentence to mean opposite things, I asked him what he meant.
“Like some people think we never landed on the moon. But we did!”
I pulled a container of primordial soup from the lower shelf without saying a thing.
“We did…right?”
I dumped the container down the sink. “Well I certainly think so. What do you think?”
“Of course!” His voice had the slightest unsettled catch. He’d never heard it questioned before.
I used to describe two different and opposite extremes of non-thinking to my critical thinking classes. Complete gullibility is one extreme. Our family spent the 4th of July with several neighbors. At one point, one woman said that people have always teased her for her gullibility. “Well,” I said, “when they say that, just point out that the word ‘gullible’ isn’t even in the dictionary.”
A look of surprise crossed her face. “Really?” she said. “I had no idea.”
But just as bad as extreme suckers are extreme cynics, whose every other sentence is “Don’t be so naive.” The sucker believes without thinking; the cynic disbelieves without thinking. Everything is a scam, a sham, a hoax, a conspiracy. The two are opposite excuses for suspending the hard work of figuring the world out, and both are useless.
“All of these things are pretty crazy,” Connor continued, “but there’s one…well, it’s pretty convincing.”
“Oh yeah? Which one?”
“Well,” he said, his voice dropping to a — well, a conspiratorial whisper, what else– “It looks like the World Trade Center was actually brought down by explosives inside the buildings..not by planes.”
I’ll assume everybody’s heard this idea — that the Bush Administration brought the towers down to justify the invasion of Iraq. I have several extremely rational friends who were convinced of this at some point, though most have now given it up. Some even have Dick Cheney himself controlling the planes by remote, presumably while saying, “Bwahahaha!”
“What reasons do they give, Con?”
“Tons of stuff! One thing is that the buildings wouldn’t fall the way they did if a plane flew into them. They fell straight down. And you can see it in the video — boom boom boom boom, one floor after another, straight down, just like if there were timed explosions on each floor!”
It took me a minute to figure out how to proceed. You don’t want to just step right up to the plate and take his bat away.
“That’s interesting,” I finally said. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Is it true that the buildings wouldn’t fall that way if planes flew into them?”
“Well — I dunno, that’s what this guy said.”
I nodded a bit. “And other people say something different.”
“I guess so.”
And there’s the problem. We talk about critical thinking as if it’s a question of evidence, but we often have no direct access to the evidence that we claim convinces us. What first-hand evidence do I have that the earth orbits the sun? Almost none. First-hand evidence that we’ve walked on the moon? First-hand? None. In both cases I have relied on intermediaries to bring information to me, and I have believed them.
See the problem? A Catholic could say the same about the belief that crackers turn into Christ. They have relied on intermediaries to bring information to them, and they have believed them. Very little of our knowledge today is unmediated, so much of the task is now assessing the messengers and their methodologies rather than the inaccessible facts themselves. In other words, in order to decide whether my confidence is warranted, I use what I do know to ask whether their confidence appears to be warranted.
More on that in druthers 4. Right now, let’s finish with the conspiracy.
I told Connor that conspiracy theorists tend to present at least one “impossibility” about the official version which may or may not actually be impossible, and offer a blizzard of “evidence” that almost never justifies the confidence with which it is asserted. So even if you don’t know anything about structural physics or the melting point of steel, you can take a pretty good stab at a complicated conspiracy theory by stepping back and asking which scenario is more likely. Generally they won’t even be close.
In this case we have two main alternatives:
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1. Islamic terrorists struck a blow at the U.S. by hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.
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2. The government of the United States intentionally murdered thousands of its own citizens to justify a war.
I loathe the current administration. It will take two generations at least to recover from the damage done in these eight years, if indeed we can recover at all. The combination of ignorance, arrogance, and dishonesty in this White House will be hard to top. I hope we never try.
In short, the 9/11 conspiracy theory plays right into my biases. And my son’s. But I’m a fan of the real world, so I need to control for those biases.
That Islamic jihadis, fueled by religious and cultural hatred, committed this act against a perceived foreign enemy is plausible. That the Bush White House did the same thing to their own tribe requires positing a cartoonish level of baby-eating evil and duplicitousness that should shame any rationalist who suggests it. Add to this the fact that Americans have never required all that much incentive to support a war or invasion, and the 9/11 conspiracy vanishes into the swamp of ludicrous, bias-fueled fantasy.
So we didn’t have to get into the details of the conspiracy claims or their rebuttals. I simply wanted to give the boy some general food for thought that could come in handy the next time he hears an incredible claim confidently made.
fear not (so much)
Raising Freethinkers is in production, so I’m prepping the proposal for another book. One of the major themes of this one is fear, both real and imagined, and its use and misuse. In the process of researching it, I am (as usual) uncovering things at turns delicious and appalling. Thought I’d share a bit.
Media coverage, Internet hype, and even many parenting books seem hellbent on diverting our attention from legitimate but often abstract threats to dangers that are more tangible but statistically quite rare.
Fear sells papers and drives online traffic, so half-overheard urban myths that “a child is abducted every 40 seconds” (false) and “child abduction rates have risen 444% since 1982” — never with a citation of any kind — continue to make the rounds. Christian parenting books often seize this opportunity, sounding a frightening “values” alarm. Crime is spiraling out of control. Morality is on the retreat. Our children are at greater risk of teen pregnancy, kidnapping, and violent death than ever before. And terrified parents are offered the solution: Jesus.
But are the frightening claims actually true? Are our kids really less safe and less moral than ever before? Consider these statistics:
• According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime rates have declined continuously since 1994, reaching the lowest level ever in 2005.1 Given the fearful hype, would you ever guess?
• Teen pregnancy is on the decline. According the Guttmacher Institute’s 2006 report, teen pregnancy rates are down 36% from 1990 to the lowest level in 30 years.
• Child abduction rates—always infinitesimal—continue to fall. Rates of violent crime against children have fallen by nearly 50 percent since 1973. The child murder rate is the lowest in forty years. Any given child is 50 times more likely in any given year to die from a world-ending comet or meteor (1 in 20,000) than to be abducted by a stranger (1 in 1 million). (“A Fistful of Risks,” DISCOVER, April 1996)
So why do we do this? Why do we fear unlikely things and ignore far greater risks? An article in Scientific American Mind summed up the psychological research:
• We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear, like confinement, heights, snakes, spiders, and humans outside our tribe;
• We fear what we can’t control. The car is less safe than the airplane, but our hands are on the steering wheel of one and not the other;
• We fear things that are immediate (strangers around us) more than the long-term (global warming);
• We fear threats readily available in memory. Every plane crash, every child abduction, every home invasion is covered by the news media and takes on a significance far beyond the actual threat.
We can provide our children the best security and the least fearful environment by assessing risks intelligently and refusing to give in to those who benefit from fearmongering and the sounding of hysterical moral alarms.
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1The Bureau’s phrasing. I assume that “ever” means “since complete modern records have been kept.”
ACTS (bookin’ through the bible 12)
[back to DEUTERONOMY]
A few years ago, a Catholic friend and neighbor of mine put the foundation of her belief into words for me. There are lots of reasons to doubt the divinity of Christ, she said, but one powerful thing continues to keep her doubts at bay. During Jesus’ life, the apostles were doubtful, denying, noncommittal. Then something happened to transform them, and they were willing to sacrifice their own lives in the name of their newfound convictions.
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“I find it hard to account for that kind of radical transformation unless he really rose from the dead and was really the son of God,” she said with a shrug.
I didn’t say the obvious thing — that using one part of a book to prove another is meaningless. If I said I know Chapter 49 of the Koran is true because Chapter 50 says so, she would rightly laugh at me. But it wasn’t that kind of conversation, so I kept my mouth shut and gained a powerful insight into which book is the keystone and linchpin of the New Testament—the Acts of the Apostles, a.k.a. Acts.
Though its significance hadn’t hit me before, I’d already heard that argument several times before and have heard it since in various forms. The “Easter faith” of the apostles is the clincher. If you want to know something about Christianity, read a gospel. But if you want to understand Christianity, to get a sense of what makes it tick (and fizz, and shine, and honk, and occasionally explode), read Acts. Christ is born in the gospels, but Christianity is born in Acts.
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It’s in Acts that we get several post-resurrection appearances by Jesus; the Great Commission, in which Christ instructs his disciples to spread his teachings to all the nations of the world (the origin of evangelism); Pentecost, speaking in tongues, exorcism, and the raising of the dead; the first stories of persecution of Christians and the first Christian martyrs; the conversion of Saul/Paul (who was alleged to have been a persecutor of Christians), his early ministry, and his arrest and imprisonment; and the first glimmer of the spreading, enthusiastic, universal church that continues to motivate evangelists today.
As a result of all of this passionate and very human action, Acts delivers some of the best mythic narrative in the Bible. But by the end of the book, something more profound has been achieved than the gathering of heroes and transformation narratives: Christianity is converted from a Jewish sect to a religion in its own right. The teachings of Christ are now said to be for all humanity, not just a local group.
My neighbor may (or may not) be surprised to hear that the book in whose testimony she places such unsinkable faith is perhaps the most altered, amended, and interpolated book in the New Testament. Here’s bible editor and theologian Bruce Metzger writing in The Text of the New Testament: Writing in The Text of the New Testament, bible editor and theologian Bruce Metzger noted (disapprovingly) the position of many theologians including Brooke Westcott and Fenton Hort regarding the Book of Acts:
Words, clauses, and even whole sentences were changed, omitted, and inserted with astonishing freedom, wherever it seemed that the meaning could be brought out with greater force and definiteness…. Another equally important characteristic is a disposition to enrich the text at the cost of its purity by alterations or additions taken from traditional and perhaps from apocryphal or other non-biblical sources… Another impulse of scribes abundantly exemplified in Western readings is the fondness for assimilation… But its most dangerous work is ‘harmonistic’ corruption, that is, the partial or total obliteration of differences in passages otherwise more or less resembling each other.
That such a well-traveled and freely-altered book continues to convince smart people like my neighbor of anything is testimony to the incredible power of confirmation bias and provides a nice foreshadowing of the upcoming blog series. Acts also provides a handy lens through which Christians can see and “understand” nonbelievers: we are Paul before the Damascus road, the apostles before the Resurrection. They saw the light — someday, surely, goes the narrative, we will too.
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Next and final episode of the series, thank the Lord God Jehovah: REVELATION (date TBA)
parenting and the safest sex of all
by Dale McGowan
We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.
Lily Tomlin
Joycelyn Elders, the most quotable U.S. Surgeon General of all time, once said, “Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily.”
That kind of quotability can get a political appointee fired. At a UN conference on AIDS in 1994, Elders was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation to prevent young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity. “I think that it is part of human sexuality,” she replied, “and perhaps it should be taught.”
Never mind that the answer was sensible. Never mind that it was true. Once U.S. conservatives pictured their progeny receiving instruction in self-gratification—complete with cucumber-based demos, no doubt—Elders’ dismissal was assured.
Sense and truth have never had much place in our cultural discourse on sex, and few aspects of the topic have been more twitchingly mismanaged than masturbation. Those who recall the baffling mix of intense pleasure and intense shame that accompanies most discoveries of masturbation should want nothing more than to spare our own kids the unnecessary torment. Yet masturbation, the very first form of sex kids will generally encounter, is the topic most often missing from parent-child discussions of sex.
The roots of our dysfunctional attitudes toward masturbation are intertwined with the age-old distrust of bodily pleasures. That distrust probably didn’t originate in religion. Among other things, religion is simply a place to put our most beloved bad ideas for safekeeping. But when it comes to perpetuating and reinforcing dysfunctional attitudes toward the safest sex of all, it’s hard to beat the Abrahamic religions for over-the-top hysteria.
The Catholic catechism calls masturbation “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” One popular 19th century Jewish theologian called it “a graver sin than any other in the Torah.” Mormonism teaches that “masturbation is a sinful habit that robs one of the Spirit,” while Shi’a Islam forbids it completely, quoting sect founder Imam Ali as saying “one who masturbates commits a sin equal to killing me eighty times.” ¡Ay caramba!
But at least one influential religious conservative has voiced support for a more accepting, naturalistic parenting approach to masturbation—and has been excoriated for it by his fellows. The following passage refers to a conversation he had as a boy with his minister father:
We were riding in the car, and my dad said, “Jim, when I was a boy, I worried so much about masturbation. It really became a scary thing for me because I thought God was condemning me for what I couldn’t help. So I’m telling you now that I hope you don’t feel the need to engage in this act when you reach the teen years, but if you do, you shouldn’t be too concerned about it. I don’t believe it has much to do with your relationship with God.” What a compassionate thing my father did for me that night in the car.
Aside from “I hope you don’t feel the need” and the bit about God, this is almost precisely the message I want to get across to my own kids. And it comes from none other than James Dobson.
He still tangles it with silliness, suggesting that boys in the act think not of any girls they know but only of their “eventual wives.” Christian author Herbert J. Miles goes one better, suggesting that boys pray first, thanking God for the gift of sexuality, then think only of him during orgasm (which certainly gives “Oh, God!” a whole new meaning). But let’s give credit to both of them for getting the basic message right and thereby reducing the number of children growing up with unnecessary self-loathing and sexual repression.
In the absence of communication on the issue, children are guaranteed to feel tremendous shame and guilt when the natural developments of early adolescence lead them to self-stimulation. When your child is on the cusp of puberty, casually let him or her know:
- What masturbation is;
- That it’s a normal thing nearly everyone does at some point;
- That it’s a natural indication that the body is becoming ready for sexual activity and reproduction;
- That all of the stories about grave consequences are complete nonsense;
- That though it is not shameful, it should be done only in private.
Removing the guilt and shame from our children’s first encounters with their sexuality requires no detailed description or instruction—just simple permission. And nonreligious parents, free of repressive doctrines, are in an ideal position to give their children that permission, as well as the mental, emotional, and sexual health that comes with it.
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This column also appears in the June 4 issue of Humanist Network News.
A nice page of info on masturbation from Cool Nurse — Teen Health, Teen Advice.
DEUTERONOMY (bookin’ through the bible 11)
You’re a thirtyish Israelite. You’ve been wandering in the desert your entire life and are now poised on the doorstep of the Promised Land. You can practically taste the milk and honey—which, after nothing but manna all your life, sounds pretty damn good. Just one ordeal remains: the Trial by Sermon. Moses is geared up to give you Israelites a three-sermon thrashing, telling y’all (1) why you don’t deserve the reward you are about to get, (2) all the arcane rules you must henceforth follow, and (3) the many, many people you will have to exterminate — Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites — for not vacating the Promised Land. For though Yahweh was apparently able to promise you the land, he was not in a position to evict the previous tenants himself.
(For the actual slaughterfest, read Joshua. Deuteronomy is just the marching orders.)
Hangest thou in there, O Israel, until the end of the third sermon, and I promise you, Moses will finally die. Then you can proceed to the Promised Land and get on with the holy business of genocide.
So who’s ready for the most delightful combination of comedy and genocide since Springtime for Hitler?
SERMON #1: Dad reminds us what happened last time…like we’d forget
Moses reminds the Israelites of the reason for their troubles: God tried to lead them into the Promised Land 40 years earlier and they had disobeyed. (Okay, Moses was the one who actually incurred God’s wrath, but as he makes clear in Deut 4:21, the Israelites made him mess up. Did I promise comedy or did I?)
Now, as they enter the suburbs of Canaan, Moses is essentially turning around in the front seat and saying “Now listen, we’re about to pull into my boss’s driveway again, so I’m going over the rules one more time. And if you kids embarrass me again, so help me, it’s Deuteronomy 28! Got it?”
SERMON #2: The Rules
Moses: “Now listen carefully. I can’t go with you into the Promised Land, because—as I believe I mentioned—you made me disobey Yahweh. So I’ll give you the rules and then die. They are simple rules—so simple even a Hittite could follow them:
“Once you’re inside the P.L., worship only Yahweh, and only in the designated areas. Don’t listen to people from other cultures and religions. In fact, kill them. Drink, but don’t get drunk. No shrimp or pork, and if you enslave another Hebrew, be sure to let him go after six years. No fortunetelling or witchcraft. Kill stubborn sons and all Amalekites, but NOT fruit trees, the mothers of newborn birds, or livestock that have fallen over, because that would be mean.
“No mixing fabrics, crops, or genders. Follow thus-and-such rules for marriage, loans, hygiene, and military service. Don’t sacrifice blemished animals. And if you’ve murdered someone, we have designated three cities where you can flee for asylum.
“I believe that covers everything. Oh, one more, this is important: Women are forbidden to grab the groin of their husband’s enemy (Deut 25:11, lest ye doubt). Can’t believe I almost left that one out. That is all.”
That’s the gist of the sermon, but the way it proceeds is interestingly different from the earlier attempts to lay down the law—much more lawyerly and tight. He doesn’t just instruct the Israelites to worship only one god; he backs them into an epistemological corner with a pretty impressive rhetorical Q&A. It’s like Socrates, with worse logic but a much better beard—all circularity (“Yahweh is the only real god because he’s the one who spoke from the midst of the fire,” etc.) and argument from authority. But a tip of the yarmulke for at least making an effort at argument.
Take a moment to read and appreciate the breathtaking bloodlust in Deut 20:16. I’ll use the happiest, breeziest translation possible for this (The Message), and it still retains the ability to disgust an ethical humanist:
But with the towns of the people that God, your God, is giving you as an inheritance, it’s different: don’t leave anyone alive. Consign them to holy destruction: the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, obeying the command of God, your God. This is so there won’t be any of them left to teach you to practice the abominations that they engage in with their gods and you end up sinning against God, your God.
Cross-stitch THAT one on your throw pillow, Grandma.
Okay. So there’s the LAW portion of our program. Now for ORDER.
SERMON #3: THE THREATS
Sign no treaties with the heathens. Show them no mercy. Kill them all, smash their altars, chop down their sacred trees. And if your brother, or your son or daughter, or your wife, or your closest friend urges you to worship a rival god, show him no pity or compassion. Take his life. “Let your hand be the first against him to put him to death.”
And then it gets serious. Remember the hypothetical dad threatening his kids with Deut 28? Here goes. If you break Yahweh’s laws:
“You shall become a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your carcasses shall become food for all the birds of the sky.”
“The Lord will strike you with hemorrhoids, from which you shall never recover.” (28:27)
“You shall not prosper in your ventures, but shall be constantly abused and robbed.”
“If you pay the bride price for a wife, another man shall enjoy her.”
“You shall be in terror, night and day, with no assurance of survival. In the morning you shall say, ‘If only it were evening!;’ and in the evening you shall say, ‘if only it were morning!’—because of what your heart shall dread and your eyes shall see.”
“She who is most tender and dainty among you will secretly eat the afterbirth that issues from between her legs because of utter want.” (sometimes translated as eating the newborn itself)
Moses, creatively exhausted, dies, then (according to those who continue to assert that he wrote Deuteronomy) writes about his burial and the thirty days of mourning that followed.
Looking for the milk of human kindness in the Bible? Stick with the gospels—no no, better make that the synoptic gospels—and cherry-pick the epistles and proverbs, but steer clear of Deuteronomy. On the biblical wind-chill scale, Deuteronomy — please forgive the expression, Wiccans — is the witch’s tit.
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ADDENDUM: FROM THE “HONEY, THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES” DEPT.
How amazingly strange to learn that the very same evening I wrote about the death of Moses, Charlton Heston died.
Next time: ACTS
(date TBA)
LEVITICUS (bookin’ through the bible 10)
[back to ECCLESIASTES and SONG OF SONGS]
Now Moses was very humble—more humble than any other person on earth.
Numbers 12:3 (The traditionally-claimed author of Numbers is, well…Moses)
The wicked man desires the booty of evil men.
Proverbs 12:12
Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, remove the foreskin of your hearts.
Jeremiah 4:4
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Ezekiel 23:20
There are many candidates for funniest verse in the Bible, but for me there’s a clear winner—and it’s found, surprisingly enough, in Leviticus, the least funny book of the Bible:
If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death.
Leviticus 24:17
During the ethics portion of my half-day nonreligious parenting seminar, and in a previous post, I talk about what I call “boiling-pot parenting”—the notion that our children are, at root, boiling pots of depravity, and that our foremost occupation as parents is sitting hard on their lids lest their naturally sinful natures o’erflow.
I quote Christian parenting author Reb Bradley who warns that “all children are born delinquent….Given free reign to their impulsive actions to satisfy each want, every child would grow up a criminal, a killer, a thief, and a rapist.” I mention The Lord of the Flies, a novel that convincingly plays out Bradley’s nightmares.
I then make what I hope is a convincing case that this is all rather silly and thoroughly unsupported by the best research in the social and developmental sciences.
Leviticus (“of the Levites”) is the book of the Bible that most directly reflects the boiling pot mindset. And though it’s tempting to lay the blame at the foot of Leviticus, that would be silly, too. The Bible didn’t create this mindset any more than it created self-delusion, self-contradiction, bigotry and fear. These are far more ancient and basic human frailties of which the Bible is merely a potent reflection, a handy place to go when we need to feel good about our lazy inability to do any better than ignorant Bronze Age goatherds.
Because I’ve come to see Leviticus as a reflection of our fears rather than the inspiration for them, it doesn’t get under my skin anymore. It’s fascinating anthropology. The fear of disorder—the absolute terror that the second law of thermodynamics governs human life as well as the physical world—is at the root of all Abrahamic religion. We’re all hurtling toward a cliff every second of our lives, says the Salvationist, with Sin leaning on the accelerator. That’s why Leviticus, the “morality” chapter in the OT, is not a steering wheel but an emergency brake. Don’t do X, never do Y, watch out for Z. Leviticus boils down to this idea: Follow God’s rules or die.
And such rules! There are rules for the wringing off of pigeon heads, precise instructions for the killing, burning, distribution, cutting, and “heaving” of animal sacrifices, for the all-important “waving” of the entrails, for the girding of men with “curious girdles.” There are rules for allowing fields to lie fallow and for washing pots, cautions against mixing this and that—different grains, different threads, same genders, the sacred and the profane. Don’t touch a menstruating woman. Don’t think an impure thought. And if you do… If you do… (Damn. What should we say?) I’ve got it! An invisible and quite powerful force will smite you.
No, that’s not exactly right, is it. One of the things I find most curious about Leviticus is that God is telling the people to do the smiting. He’s quite busy, granted, but I can’t help thinking it strange. Why bother with intermediaries? How much more efficient it would be if God would simply set things up so the scores of capital crimes in the bible are rewarded with a nice, sudden aortic rupture. Imagine Hitler crumpling on the spot before he quite got the order to invade Poland out of his mouth. Imagine how many children would have been spared if the first child-abusing priest had keeled over, pants around his ankles, as a warning to the others. Imagine all the disobedient children, astrologers, seed-spillers, marriers of their wives’ mothers, every one of them dropped where they stand. Instead, this weird system of intermediaries. I’m sure there’s a reason.
Leviticus is often maligned for its clear and happy endorsement of slavery. But dig deep enough—granted, you’ll need a big, big shovel—and there’s a hint of moral progress here. The Israelite is instructed to treat all Israelite slaves generously: “You must not rule over him ruthlessly,” and he must be released before the periodic “Jubilee year.” A miracle of progressive thinking.
You quickly note the obvious flipside—that non-Israelite slaves are designated as property “for all time” and can be treated however you like—that this is just bigotry compounded by distinguishing between those worthy of mercy (those most like one’s self) and all others. Give me a break. I’m digging for gold under a latrine here.
The book ends with an epic speech by Jehovah in which he promises bad juju if the rules are broken:
If you reject My laws and spurn My rules … I will wreak misery upon you … you shall sow your seed to no purpose, for your enemies shall eat it … I will break your proud glory. I will make your skies like iron and your earth like copper. … I will go on smiting you sevenfold for your sins. I will loose wild beasts against you, and they shall bereave you of your children … though you eat, you shall not be satisfied … your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin …
And then some stuff about taxes.
Leviticus is an early attempt to impose the order of rules on the perceived chaos of the human condition, to articulate a workable morality. In the absence of systematic evidence, we were feeling our way forward, trying to come up with rules to live by, trying to avoid screwing up—an activity in the midst of which we generally screw up far worse.
And there’s the human comedy for ya.
Far less forgivable to me is the fact that anyone in the 21st century—anyone with access to the knowledge and insight and history these guys didn’t have—still finds a single scrap of Leviticus good for anything beyond cultural anthropology. And the occasion chortle.
UP NEXT
April 3: Deuteronomy
Believers on Deuteronomy
Skeptics on Deuteronomy
Slate blog on Deuteronomy
ECCLESIASTES and SONG OF SONGS (bookin’ through the bible 9) – guest column by Timothy Mills
The Wise King’s Fans
Guest column by Timothy Mills at Friendly Humanist
I have the good fortune to cover two of the most humanist books of the Bible: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, both traditionally attributed to wise King Solomon. Ecclesiastes is a philosophical reflection communicating an old man’s existential angst; Song of Songs is an erotic exchange between two lovers.
My wife, Deena, put it this way: “Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes before he went on Prozac and Song of Songs after he went on Viagra.”
Let’s look a little deeper.
Ecclesiastes
Identifying King Solomon as the author of Ecclesiastes “is no more than a conventional literary device; the author commends his thoughts to the public under the name of the greatest sage in Israel.”1 I’ll follow David Plotz and the folks at Humanistic Texts in simply calling the author Koheleth (“teacher, leader of the assembly”), the original Hebrew word
which translates to Greek as
Hence “Ecclesiastes”.
The main theme of the book is Koheleth saying of many things “This is vanity”2, and his repeated declarations that “All is vanity”3. That’s 12 near-identical phrases, plus the odd use of the word “vanity” elsewhere in Ecclesiastes. The slightly punchier NIV translation uses the word “meaningless” here. The New King James version offers “Absurdity, Frustration, Futility, Nonsense” as further alternatives in a footnote. When we look at the original Hebrew, we find that “The roots of the word hebel
indicate vapor, fog, steam, breeze or breath…. they all describe something that is transitory, ephemeral, impermanent.”
Aha! “Vanity”, “meaningless”, and the others are editorial extrapolations by early translators. Now we see the original sense more clearly: Everything is ephemeral; Everything is transitory. This is a difficult fact of life faced by humanists and others who do not believe in an eternal afterlife.
No discussion of Ecclesiastes would be complete without mentioning the first eight verses of chapter 3. You’ve probably already heard them – here’s the start:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
And so on. Some of the lines are questionable (“a time to kill”, “a time to hate”, “a time for war”), but the overall sentiment is reassuring – even to a humanist. Farmers must accept the seasons as they come; living creatures must accept the cycles of life. Naturally, these lines are popular for funeral readings.
The lines that follow, however, say that God ordains the time to do each thing. Is it possible to read the first eight verses without the taint of divine predestiny?
Here’s another recurring theme in this philosophical retrospective on a wise man’s life: we are told six times that the really good things in life are eating, drinking, and enjoying your work and its fruits4. Rather than simply calling this shallow hedonism, we could reasonably interpret it – especially the “enjoying your work” bit – as promoting human flourishing. Humanist philosophers and religious skeptics such as Socrates and Paul Kurtz express similar sentiments, coining words like eudaimonia and eupraxsophy to express the idea. Combine this with what we learn from his repeated use of the word “ephemeral”, and it’s easy to think of Koheleth as an early existential humanist. Cool.5
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Unfortunately, a later editor felt that such religion-free morality was not appropriate for the Jewish scriptures, and added these two verses: “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgement, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ec 12:13-14)
Twelve chapters of telling us that there is no ultimate good, nothing lasts forever, and the greatest worldly good is human well-being, and then we get the old obedience mantra that we first met in the Garden of Eden, as if it is the natural conclusion to draw from what went before. This complete U-turn suggests to non-believers and believers alike that the God-fearing stuff was tacked on some time after Koheleth composed the main body of the book.
My recommendation: do as they do at Humanistic Texts. Lop off the unnecessary addendum, and take this as a good work of humanist philosophy, poetically-presented.
Song of Songs
Now, let’s see what we can make of Solomon’s other masterpiece, Song of Songs. Reading through from Ecclesiastes into the Song, you have to agree that either these two books were written by different people, or Deena was right that there was a severe shift in the author’s pharmaceutical habits between books.
In fact, the Song is probably no more Solomon’s work than Ecclesiastes was. As its Wikipedia page notes, “It was common practice in ancient times for an anonymous writer seeking recognition for his work to write eponymously in the name of someone more famous.”
What about the content? The Song is packed with a wide variety of romantic and erotic images. It is clearly an exchange between two lovers, with some comments thrown in by others. It is not always obvious who is speaking where, though the NIV and NJB translations try to suggest divisions, with headings like “Lover” for the man, “Beloved” for the woman, and “Friends” for other speakers.6
The man compares his lover to a mare; her eyes are doves; her lips taste like honey.7 She says his eyes, too, are like doves; he is like a gazelle or young stag. His skin is golden, his hair is dark and wavy, his legs are like marble.8 So far so good – modern poems and songs contain similar (sometimes identical) imagery.
But not all of the metaphors are so familiar, nor so complimentary to modern eyes.
Hair like a flock of goats”? From a distance, perhaps a big flock of goats flowing down a slope could evoke cascading hair. Teeth like a flock of shorn ewes”? From the context (“all of which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved”), we must presume he’s telling us she has all her teeth, and maybe that they’re white. Fair enough if you’re living with bronze-age dentistry, but don’t try it in a Valentine’s Day card these days!9
I’m afraid I don’t know exotic fruit well enough to speculate about cheeks like pomegranates, and I’m completely lost when it comes to a neck like the tower of David with a thousand warriors’ shields hanging on it. Breasts like twin fawns may sound cosy and pleasant, though my knowledge of infant ungulates suggests they’re rather scrawny and leggy rather than round and bosom-like.10
With all that, you can’t blame the translators for trying in small ways to translate the imagery to contemporary romantic themes. The rose mentioned in 2:1
is a crocus in the original Hebrew.
There’s other imagery – gardens, locked gates, myrrh – but you get the idea. I’ve left the sexiest metaphors for you to find and enjoy on your own (or, preferably, with a companion).
We now have some idea what images the ancient Jews considered sensual or erotic. We can also infer that the author of this book found sex to be fun.
Which it is! Sex is a delight, physiologically and socially. Humans are adapted to wanting and enjoying sex. It is wired into us as a way of reinforcing pair bonding and maximizing our reproductive chances.
It is also at the root of what we value most: human life. The ancestors of every human on the planet (every animal of any kind, and most plants, for that matter) have been reproducing sexually for about 2.5 billion years. No sex would mean no life as we know it.
The author of the Song didn’t know just how long the history of sex is, but he almost certainly knew that sex leads to children. Even that, however, is not mentioned in the Song – and rightly so. When desire is upon us, it is not the consequences of sex that consume our minds, nor the historical precedents, nor its role in abstract moral philosophy.
It is the act itself. The raw, physical union of two people. This is what caresses the minds of lovers, what tempts and lures and pleases.
And this is what the Song is all about. It is about the fire that awakens in adolescence and, properly honoured and nurtured, doesn’t die until we do.
“Solomon’s” books
In Ecclesiastes we have a work of non-theistic moral philosophy, and in Song of Songs we have an erotic cavort through the poetic metaphors of a pastoral culture. The authors of both were big enough fans of Solomon, the wise king, that they credited their books to him. Both made it into the central canons of the Jewish and later the Christian scriptures. And both books, for the most part, convey secular humanist sentiments. What a pleasant reprieve to find, in a collection of bad science, repressive laws, and unlikely miracles, the odd book of humanist-friendly wisdom and joie de vivre.
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Footnotes
1From the commentary in print version of the New Jerusalem Bible – see also Wikipedia’s entry on Ecclesiastes.
2Ec 2:15, Ec 2:19, Ec 2:21, Ec 2:23, Ec 2:26, Ec 4:4, Ec 4:8, Ec 5:10, Ec 7:6
3Ec 1:2, Ec 3:19, Ec 11:8
4Ec 2:24, Ec 3:12-13, Ec 3:22, Ec 5:18, Ec 8:15, Ec 11:8
5This is leaving aside, of course, Koheleth’s brief lapses into nihilism (Ec 7:1-4) and misogyny (Ec 7:28).
6The feminist in me would love to rant about the linguistic sexism implicit in these translations that give the male the active label “Lover” and the woman the passive label “Beloved”, but I have too little space to make it more than a footnote.
7So 1:9; So 1:15, 4:1; So 4:11
8So 5:12; So 2:9, 2:17, 8:14; So 5:11, 14, 15; So 5:11; So 5:15
9So 4:1; So 4:2
10So 4:3; 4:4; 4:5
the open shelf
- January 24, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, myths, Parenting
- 23
Something, well…ambiguous…happened the other day. Actually it was ambiguous at first, but it got more biguous as I thought about it. (Step away from the dictionary.) I wasn’t at all sure what to think about it at first. In the end, I decided it was…good. Really good, in fact.
But before I write about that, I have some setup to do. There are at least two stories embedded in this one. I’ll start with the open shelf policy and hope I remember the point in the end.
Years ago, I recall my mother-in-law describing her father’s book-lined study. He was a Baptist minister, by all accounts a very good man. His daughter was awed by the rows upon rows of spines of books along the walls of that room. I could picture it immediately, the walls of books and the little girl.
It got me wondering how my own kids would remember the books in our house. We have just over a thousand of them — as I was painfully reminded when we moved — including many old beauties. While living in the UK in 2004, I visited 63 used bookstores and acquired 93 books (I know the stats only because I was keeping a diary for an article I was writing about the antiquarian bookstores of London).
The first one I found — the first one — was a beautifully rebound volume of David Hume’s History of England, a second edition from 1796, stuck in amongst murder mysteries in the open market under Waterloo Bridge. It was £10, about $18. (Scroll up to the top photo again — it’s on the top shelf near the middle, bright brown leatherette binding with gold lettering, just to the right of the little red Huxleys.) If that doesn’t addict a person to scouring the bookstores of London, nothing will.
I’d love nothing more than to bore you by listing the other 92 I found, but I see your cursor twitching toward the scroll bar. The point is that, largely as a result of this fetish of mine, books are all over the place in our house.
In the 1920s, newly-moneyed members of the American middle class signaled their rise out of the working class in a couple of ways. Step one was putting a piano in the parlor. A wide selection of sheet music with elaborate illustrations on their covers would sit on the music rack. Some of these pianos were even played. Most were not.
(I grew up in California next-door to a retired couple. In their living room was a highly-polished parlor grand piano. I often wondered if anyone played it. My question was answered when I realized the framed pictures that covered the piano were also lined up on the closed cover of the keyboard.)
The other way the climbers of the 20s would signal their newfound class (pronounced “cleeeass”) was by filling their bookshelves with the classics (“cleeeassics”) and keeping their tops well-dusted.
Though there are certainly books in our collection we’ll never get to — life, I’m told, ends — ours do get a workout. One message our kids are getting is that books are not for wallpaper, and not for establishing one’s cleeeass. They are invitations to walk around in someone else’s head. And I wanted to be sure my kids knew that invitation was addressed to them as well. So one day, shortly after my mother-in-law’s story, I was taking a book down from a shelf and saw Connor, then about eight, reading one of his own books nearby.
“Hey Con, come here a sec.” He did. I indicated the books on the bookshelves in our living room and asked whose books they were.
“Yours,” he said. “And Mom’s.”
I told him they were actually for our whole family, and that if he was ever curious about any of them, he could take any book off any shelf anytime he wanted and look at it. I showed him which books were old and showed him how to open those carefully, supporting the spine, never flattening the pages. For a couple of days he played along, then lost interest, which was fine. The idea was the thing: he knew that there was in principle no prohibited knowledge.
I told Erin the same thing when she reached that age, with the same result. But a few months ago, though she was only six, I had a hunch it was Delaney’s turn.
Sure enough, she leapt on it. I’ll come upstairs now and find her in the recliner in my study with a book in her lap, leafing through pages, sounding out words and looking for pictures. A few weeks ago it was Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, and she was gawking at the snake-festooned head of Medusa, dangling from the outstretched grasp of Perseus. “AWESOME!” she said. And it was.
I’ve found her looking through a leatherbound Bible in German from the 1880s, Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House, and an illustrated Decameron. But as often as not, I don’t know what she’s reading. My study is bisected by a freestanding bookcase. When I’m working at my desk, I can’t see the recliner on the other side, though I can often hear her turning pages, saying “Awesome!” under her breath or (most hilariously) reading entire sentences of Vonnegut aloud. But it’s hard to prepare yourself for the really big moments when they come. And they always do.
“Dad?” said the bookcase.
“Yeah sweetie,” I said without looking up from my desk.
“What does ‘humanist’ mean?”
lick, flush, reverse
- January 17, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, My kids, myths
- 12
Snow in Georgia, and once again I’m introduced to a neat and weird kid-legend I never heard before.
The prediction was for ice, and unlike Minnesota, which closes schools only for asteroid strikes and plague — and even then only in combination — Atlanta, we’ve been told, shuts down completely for an inch of snow or a hint of ice. Sure enough, the stores were wiped clean of milk and bread yesterday as the threat of “ice pellets” and even snow loomed in the forecast.
Our kids were elated, of course — not only at the prospect of tangible, frolic-worthy winter, but the apparent likelihood that school would be closed today. And they came home with a deal-sealer they’d learned from the Atlantans: to guarantee snow, all the kids must lick a spoon and put it under their respective pillows, flush an ice cube down the toilet, and sleep with their PJs reversed. In case you wondered at the title.
Child licking wooden spoon
(a highly suspect interpretation
of the Spoon Doctrine)
Around 5 pm it began — first with tiny, intermittent flakes, then with big beauties. Over an inch fell and stuck, plenty enough to give the school bus companies the vapors and close things down. My Minnesota-bred brood was spinning and howling on the deck, open mouths to the sky.
At bedtime, spoons were licked, ice flushed, PJs reversed. The fix was in.
Our alarm went off at 6 to the sound of the news announcer’s voice. The temperature had edged above freezing just long enough to melt the roads. Only three districts were closed, all rural, none of them ours.
I imagine the scene all over Atlanta was much the same as in the bedroom of my girls, and not too different from what I imagine would be the case when a volcano erupts despite the virgin tossed in. Talk turned to recriminations and the search for unorthodoxies. Somebody somewhere didn’t lick the spoon first, or enough, or didn’t put it under the pillow, or put it face up instead of face down, or slept with their PJs heretically oriented. Or maybe she wasn’t a virgin, someone in the village grumbles.
Thirty minutes after the bus took the girls and their grumbling colleagues to school, the boy came downstairs. His PJs. Look at his PJs!
“Con,” I said, soberly.
“What.”
“You’ve heard, I guess.”
“Yes. It’s robbery.”
“I see your PJs are on right. I won’t even ask about the spoon.”
“Pfft.”
Anybody reading this in Atlanta, especially anyone with disappointed schoolkids: I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us. He’s a good boy, really he is. Just a bit wrongheaded.
