who ARE you people?
I started this blog last March by saying what most bloggers say in their opening post: that blogging — a mostly one-way conversation in which you know there are ears pressed against the wall in the next room, but you don’t know how many, or who is attached to them, or why they are listening — is simply strange.
Though it’s no less strange after ten months, I’m more accustomed to the strangeness now. The blog has been helpful in sorting and semi-polishing rough ideas. A few published columns have already sprung from its loins. One blog entry will be the basis of the Preface for the second PBB, now in the works, and several others will be scattered through the text of that book. I’ve also develop a seminar series that will launch in February — more on that later — and again, the blog has given me a way to wrestle with its content semi-publicly.
The site’s averaging 18,000 visitors a month, but aside from my loyal and much-appreciated regular commenters, I’ve not had the foggiest hint who you fine people are. The curiosity was killing me.
Enter gVisit, a web service that gives me a list of the cities from which y’all are visiting, and includes my favorite software feature — freeness. In just the last 24 hours, The Meming of Life has had visitors from 33 U.S. states, five Canadian provinces, and eight countries.
Upcoming posts include:
- A father-son double review of THE GOLDEN COMPASS
Progressive holiday gift ideas
A father-daughter appreciation of Dr. Seuss
Bloggin’ through the Bible: Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John
The cure for arrogance in secular preteens
Why I’m obstinate about abstinence
National Geographic’s cool GENOGRAPHIC Project
Five things Christians do (much) better than we do
A shout-out to the UUs
“I want to be one of the smarties”
Music I want in my funeral…or I’ll HAUNT you, honey
The PBB seminars
I plejaleejins
So I’ll keep talking, and I’d be delighted if more of you would talk back. No need to be profound — I clearly don’t bother to be — just knock three times on the wall so I know you’re out there.
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
strange maps
- December 07, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, reviews, wonder
- 7
Please cancel my appointments for the rest of the month, take the phone off the hook, and don’t expect another blog entry until spring. I have found the website of my dreams and am going to live there for awhile. Someone please pay my rent, feed my children and satisfy my wife until I return.
Maps absorb me like a…what’s something really absorbent…like a sponge-like thing. In England I pored over the incredible Ordnance Survey maps for hours at a time.
I’ve always particularly loved the paradigm rattlers, like this
which makes the point that a Northerly orientation is arbitrary, having been selected, by the most astonishing coincidence, by Northern Hemisphereans, who apparently like it on top.
I was 18 when I first saw Joel Garreau’s “Nine Nations of North America” concept, from the book of the same name:
Now I’ve found a blog called STRANGE MAPS, and I have no further need of the outside world. In addition to the above, there are maps to compare the relative wealth of nations today
and comparisons throughout time:
Deaths in war since 1945:
There is a map of US states renamed for countries with similar GDPs:
how the world would be if all the land were water and all the water land:
and what it’ll look like in 250 million years:
…all with intelligent commentary and links. I’ve only scratched the surface. There’s Europe if the Nazis had won. A map of the United States from the Japanese point of view. A map of the U.S. with the former territories of Indian nations overlaid. World transit systems drawn as a global world transit map in the style of the London Underground. A color-coded map of blondeness in Europe and of kissing habits in France.
Plop a child of a certain type and age (about 10-16) in front of Strange Maps (or another called Worldmapper, where the resized world maps originate) and don’t expect a response when you call ’em for dinner. I can’t wait for my boy to get home.
natural generosity
[Written for Humanist Network News, December 5, 2007.]
One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.
Robert A. Heinlein
Who can resist the impulse to feel all gushy and reflective at this time of year? It’s no coincidence that holidays emphasizing family and charity and peace and goodwill are sprinkled through the shortest, coldest days of the year when, by golly, we’d better have each other to turn to if we’re going to make it through. Charity is naturally born in such a season, and just about everyone gladly succumbs to the best of human impulses.
One of the parental challenges of the season is to encourage impulses like generosity and discourage selfishness, greed, and insane materialism in our children. Christians try to keep their kids focused on Jesus as “the reason for the season,” or ask them to imitate what has been called God’s “supernatural generosity.” That’s fine, I suppose, but it’s hardly necessary. Secular parents should have no difficulty encouraging perfectly natural generosity. The secret is to simply let kids be generous.
The best thing about the phrase “it’s better to give than to receive” is that it’s actually true—especially for kids. Receiving is all too familiar to them. They are constantly in the receiving role. We give them food, clothing, and everything else they need. But give kids a chance to step outside the receiving role and experience the satisfaction of being the generous one, and they vibrate with excitement. They feel grown up. It empowers them.
The best thing about the phrase “it’s better to give than to receive”
is that it’s actually true—especially for kids.
______________________________
Generosity is absolutely addicting. But to really drive the lessons home for kids, you have to make the experience their own.
Suppose your child’s school has a canned food drive for the local food shelf. Many well-meaning parents put a few extra cans in the cart during their regular shopping, then hand the cans to the kids to bring to school. It’s a good start, but the kids don’t really feel directly active in that process. They are just the link between Mom’s purchase and the school’s drive.
If instead you want them to genuinely feel the addicting “generosity buzz,” it’s best to involve them at each step. Drive them to the store, then have them take it from there.
Let the child decide how much to spend, and if at all possible, let her use her own money. The difference between Dad’s $5 and her own $5 is the difference between helping Dad be generous and being generous herself. One is passive; the other is active and addictive. Don’t even add your money to hers. Make two separate contributions if you wish.
Schools will generally provide a list of acceptable items. Let your kids go up and down the aisles and pick out the food themselves—then watch their posture the next morning as they leave the front door for school carrying bags of their own generosity.
No need to wait for school food drives, of course—your local food shelf is always happy to benefits from generosity lessons! Charities can also provide specifics about who receives donations and the difference that donations make for families in need, which helps kids to connect their giving to those who benefit.
It’s also crucial to detach generosity from external rewards. Neither schools nor parents should offer incentives for generosity, or that incentive becomes the goal. In the process, the feeling of genuine generosity is almost completely lost.
The same goes for gift giving. Try not to buy gifts for your children to give to others. Involve them in the thoughtful selection or making of gifts for friends and relatives.
Again, when it comes to gifts, we’re not working from scratch. Children love opening presents, but they are generally much more excited when someone else is opening a gift from them—especially if it’s a gift they made, or picked out and paid for, themselves.
Another good practice is to encourage children to divide their allowance or other money into three jars. No, not Jesus—Others—Yourself, but you’re close: it’s Spending, Saving, and Giving. Let the child decide how to divide the money, but let them know that something should go into each jar every time they receive money. You’ll be surprised at how their natural generosity shows up in that giving jar—especially if they’ve had the experience of active, addictive giving.
It goes without saying that there’s no better lesson for kids than seeing generosity – of time, of money, of kindness, of spirit – demonstrated firsthand by Mom and Dad. The buzz of generosity is not only addicting—it’s downright contagious.
_______________________
Parents: Looking for a non-sectarian organization to support? Consider the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF), a tremendously effective organization improving the lives of children worldwide.
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