Monday! Time once again for Monday School. It’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” – but it’s also a great thing to have on your screen when Mom sneaks up behind you in an attempt to catch you looking at porn.

Today’s Lesson: Are Religious People Just Crazy Or What?

As mentioned numerous times before, it behooves us to always give those we disagree with the benefit of a doubt, to attribute the very best possible motives to them, and to question ourselves at least as hard as we question them.

Once we’ve done that, however – once we’ve repeatedly bent over backwards to see things from their point of view and still come to the conclusion that logic and evidence simply do not support a belief – it’s natural and proper to wonder and explore other explanations for that belief.

In particular, when people ardently embrace theism and/or religion even in the absence of good, sound arguments and evidence for doing so, it’s appropriate to ask “Are these people simply nuts?”

It’s a question I’ve asked here before – perhaps most notably in two entries I posted in my open diary way back in October, 2002.

The first (entitled Religion & Mental Health) reviewed some of the pertinent studies summarized in C. Daniel Batson’s Religion and the Individual and quoted the book’s conclusion that “religion is, if anything, associated with mental illness more than with mental health” (p. 240).

The second (entitled Religion – A Mental Illness?) quoted three psychopathologists who seem to have concluded that yes, religion and mental illness are closely related.

As I explained in those entries, however, these conclusions are somewhat tentative. More research is required before we can come to any firm conclusions.

Consider this entry an attempt to provide a bit more of that research….

First, a few additional quotes:

“Religion is a disease, but it is a noble disease.” – Heraclitus (500 BCE)

“Religion is a disease born of fear and a source of untold misery…. Fear is the mother of all gods.” – Lucretius (1st century BCE)

“My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.” – Bertrand Russell, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?

“Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more cruel than the Christian.” – Dr. George A. Dorsey (Harvard educated anthropologist)

“Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.” – Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D. Psychologist

“The most deadly form of insanity is the Obsessional Neuroses commonly called ‘religion.’ This aggressive and contagious mental health disorder has caused more death and suffering than any other communicable disease. At the root of this disease is the delusion that impossible creatures and worlds exist-angels, gods, saints, hells, heavens, etc., and that these imaginary beings demand mind deadening obedience. In its advanced stages this insanity destroys all sense of right and wrong, and the most ghastly crimes become saintly acts. The terrorist attacks of September 11th and the ‘War on Terrorism’ are the latest products of this insanity. Science must launch an ongoing study of this deadly disease in all its forms, to find how it might be cured or controlled. This insanity cannot be suppressed by force as it thrives on persecution-both to suffer and to inflict-so it must be treated in other ways yet to be discovered.” - Emmett F. Fields

“I do think the Roman Catholic religion is a disease of the mind which has a particular epidemiology similar to that of a virus…” – Richard Dawkins (Interviewed in:Sceptic vol 3, no 4, 1995)

Is there any evidence to support the view that theism and religion are the products of abnormal brain function rather than the accurate perceptions of an objective reality? Yes. And I just recently learned that some of it was examined by the BBC about two years ago in a TV program entitled God on the Brain.

I touched on some of the same points in a two-part entry I posted here.

A fuller discussion of the program’s claims and findings can be found in a Times’s newspaper article by Anjana Ahuja that was first published back on April 13, 2003.

Here’s what that article had to say:

“Did God create us or did we create God? A controversial TV documentary tonight argues that a famous evangelist’s ‘visions’ were caused by epilepsy and that religious feelings are brain malfunctions.

“THE VIVIDNESS OF HER visions and the severity of her moral judgment marked out Ellen Gould White as more than just spiritually inclined. Among the godfearing American farming community into which she was born in 1827, her 2,000 religious experiences, details of which she noted almost obsessively, made her a prophet of God.

“She married an Adventist minister and the couple founded the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which currently has 12 million followers around the world. The movement observes the Sabbath on a Saturday, and believes the Second Coming of Christ is imminent.

“Now science has afforded a new spin on White’s spirituality. A leading neurologist who has studied White’s personal history and opus has concluded that, rather than being divinely inspired, her illusions stemmed from a form of epilepsy. ‘Her whole clinical course suggested to me the high probability that she had temporal lobe epilepsy,’ says Gregory Holmes, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire. The multitude of visions, Holmes suggests, were actually epileptic seizures.

“The retrospective diagnosis, which has lain quietly in the medical literature for 20 years, is aired in a TV documentary tonight. The programme explores the new and controversial subject of neurotheology, or the role that the brain plays in religious experience. The discoveries that are emerging from this fledgling science are, depending on your religious views, either deeply fascinating or profoundly disturbing. They imply that the brain created God, not the other way round; that religious leaders throughout history were touched not by supreme beings but by mental illness; that moments of serenity common to ardent believers of all faiths are simply hiccups in brain chemistry. The findings suggest that our attitudes to religion are underpinned by biology — that some brains are physically built to be more receptive to divine thought, and that this explains why religion induces apathy in some and fervour in others. One scientist has even built a kind of ‘God helmet’ — a headset that can induce the feeling of an unseen presence by bathing the temples in electromagnetic fields.

“Holmes was moved to make his diagnosis of White on the strength of one incident in particular. When White was nine, she was hit on the head by a stone thrown by a classmate. She drifted in and out of consciousness — wavering between life and death — for three weeks. As well as being disfigured, she was unable to resume school, and buried herself instead in the Bible. Eight years later she began having visions. Witnesses are remarkably consistent in their descriptions of White immersed in these sacred moments.

“One wrote: ‘In passing into vision, she gives three enrapturing shouts of “Glory!” which echo and re-echo, the second, and especially the third, fainter. For about four or five seconds she seems to drop down like a person in a swoon, or one having lost his strength; she then seems to be instantly filled with superhuman strength. There are frequent movements of the hands and arms, pointing to the right or left, as her head turns. All these movements are made in a most graceful manner. Her eyes are always open, but she does not wink; her head is raised and she is looking upward, not with a vacant stare but with a pleasant expression….’

“To Holmes, these are the hallmarks of a partial-complex seizure, which are characterised by a heavenwards stare, a temporary loss of consciousness, automatisms (repetitive physical movements) and hallucinations. Even White’s meticulous note-taking — she produced 100,000 pages of notes during her lifetime — suggested hypographia, another feature common to patients undergoing partial-complex seizures.

“The Seventh Day Adventist Church convened a series of nine scientists, all believers, to examine Holmes’s claim. They rejected it, saying that White’s injury was to the nose and forehead rather than the sides of the head, near the temporal lobes. The eight-year interval between injury and her first hallucination also weakened the association. But Holmes stands by his conclusion that ‘although it would be impossible to prove retrospectively that Ellen White suffered from partial-complex seizures, it appears possible that not only her visions, but also her writing and the nature of her revelations, may reflect temporal lobe dysfunction’. The British arm of the church seems less bothered by the claim. ‘If God chose someone with epilepsy or any other predisposing mental factor to reveal Himself, it doesn’t substantially change the nature of the revelations,’ says John Surridge, communications director for the Seventh Day Adventist Church at its British headquarters in Watford, Herts. ‘If we look to the Bible, Moses was said to have a mental condition, and maybe that’s just the way God chose to work. In any case, while Ellen White was very influential, our beliefs don’t hang on just her writings. Our beliefs are based on the Bible. But some people may use this to reduce religious experience to merely activity in the brain, and remove God completely. We would object to that. Religious experience is an encounter with God, not just a product of the brain.’

“It would dismay Surridge to know that some scientists are tending to just this opinion — that God is an artefact of our evolved human minds, and that visions are symptoms of neurological abnormality. As well as Moses, experts are intrigued by St Paul, who famously encountered God in a blinding flash while on the road to Damascus, and St Teresa of Avila, who heard voices and is widely thought to have exhibited signs of schizophrenia.

“Pascal Boyer, in his ambitious book Religion Explained, published in 2001, suggested that our ancestors had to be able to outwit unseen predators, and so we developed a protective belief in hidden spirits. This has transmuted today into a belief in the ‘airy nothing’ of religion. For Boyer, an anthropology professor at Washington University, it is no coincidence that religion sprang up around 50,000 years ago, tallying approximately with the emergence of anatomically modern human beings. As soon as our brains became sufficiently evolved to embrace supernatural ideas, Boyer suggests, religion spread like a cerebral virus.

“Studies of patients with brain injuries or neurological disorders certainly appear to support the contentious idea that the brain houses a ‘spirituality circuit’. A proportion of people who develop temporal lobe epilepsy become intensely religious. Tibetan Buddhist monks have had their brains scanned while meditating; some regions showed signs of springing into life while other parts of the brain quietened down. Activity was quelled in the superior parietal lobe, the area that allows a person to orientate himself. When it calms down, a person can feel ‘lost’ in space and time, a common feeling among those engaged in intense religious thought.

“However, the Pennsylvania scientists who carried out this pioneering study — Dr Andrew Newberg and the late Eugene d’Aquili — declined to conclude that religion was really all in the mind. Instead of these neurological changes creating divine experiences, they said diplomatically, the brain might be adjusting its activity in order more easily to detect a spiritual reality. One scientist who has perhaps done more than any other to elevate the field of neurotheology to controversial heights is Professor Michael Persinger, a neurologist at Laurentian University in Ontario. Persinger has built a magnet-laden helmet that surrounds the skull with a mild electromagnetic field. It induces a mystical experience — Persinger describes it as a ‘sensed presence’ — in four out of five people who wear it. Importantly, volunteers are told it is an experiment on relaxation rather than a spiritual experience.

“Religious people who undergo the experiment, he says, tend to believe that God is with them; less religious guinea pigs feel as if a benevolent stranger is watching over them. Interestingly, Persinger tried his technique on Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and committed atheist. Dawkins did not have a mystical experience; Persinger says a prior test showed that Dawkins has low sensitivity in the temporal lobes, which the helmet stimulates.

“The neuroscientist Vilayanur, who has just delivered this year’s Reith Lectures, has conducted his own fascinating experiments with temporal lobe epilepsy patients. He found they show a higher brain response to words with religious connotations than to sexually charged words, unlike the general population. For many, this has nailed the link between the temporal lobes and religious thought.

“Ramachandran says such research does not devalue religious belief, and that such brain circuits ‘may be God’s way of putting an antenna in your brain to make you more receptive to Him’. Persinger, who says he is not religious, is bolder: ‘My research shows that religious experiences are created by the brain.’ To Persinger, religion, which promotes the idea that a Creator is looking after us rather in the manner of a benign parent, is a ‘delusion’.

“Persinger’s colleagues cannot understand why he pursues this work with such vigour; they tell him it will damage his reputation, alienate grant-giving bodies and legitimise study of the supernatural. He tells them: ‘My question is, why shouldn’t we study such questions? The experimental method is the most powerful tool we have. That’s how we find truth from non-truth.’”

So: Technically, yes, I suppose one could make the case that epilepsy or other bizarre firings of neurons in the brain are just a divine being’s way to get in touch with us. But by the same token, one could also argue that a discharge of electrical energy in sun-driven weather systems is simply Zeus’s way of throwing his thunderbolts. Today’s theists seem to have no vested interest in defending a belief in Zeus, however, so that argument is never made – which means that the arguments they do make on behalf of their gOd pretty much amounts to self-serving special pleading. It’s hard to take that sort of thing very seriously – unless, of course, it fits in with what you already believe (or want to believe).

Besides being obviously self-serving, such claims have at least two other serious marks against them: They seem to violate Occam’s Razor (or the logical Law of Parsimony); and they place savage (some might even say “heretical”) limits on what we have repeatedly been told is an omnipotent being.

Occam’s Razor, you may recall, asserts that explanations should not be needlessly complex. If a suicide bomber’s bringing together of fuel and oxygen and an ignition source is enough to explain an explosion, one doesn’t need to go on and hypothesize the existence of a demonic force in charge of all the explosions on earth. To insist on the existence of such a demon anyway is unjustified at best. Similarly, if the firing of specific types of neurons in our heads in specific situations can explain religious experiences, why do we need to hypothesize the existence of a gOd who causes religious experiences?

The fact that no one seems to be having religious experiences without these bizarre neuronic firings occurring is highly suggestive. After all, if a gOd were really behind these religious experiences, surely he/she/they/it could bring those experiences about without having to resort to a fixed means that others could also bring about once they’d discovered them. In other words, if humans are puppets of gOd, to say that gOd must pull this string to have humans experience X, is a form of blasphemy that denies gOd’s omnipotence. To further claim that mere humans can bring about the same thing just by finding that string and pulling is to make gOd’s of humans – another form of blasphemy. Surely any real gOd worthy of the name wouldn’t be bound by such strings nor allow us humans to so easily take hold of them. If, on the other hand, we exist in an entirely natural universe – one that conforms to unconscious natural laws – and religious experiences are simply a natural by-product of a naturally evolved brain – no such problems arise. As with so many things (such as the so-called Problem of Evil), assuming that our experiences are the natural by-product of a natural universe brings everything into focus – everything makes sense. Assuming the existence of a gOd who’s behind everything, in sharp contrast, leads to many more problems than it solves.

That’s my take on things, anyway.

What’s yours?

Related posts:

1. Monday School: Evaluating Religion
2. Monday School: Easter
3. Monday School: The Index Of Prohibited Books

Monday! (¡El lunes!) Time once again for Monday School! (¡Tiempo otra vez para Escuela del lunes!) It’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday” (Es TODAVÍA “el Correctivo Racional a Todo Que Tonterías Ellos Intentado Para Enseñarle Ayer”) and it will continue to be, too, until an Internet translation service allows you to type in a Bible passage and get it back with all the errors and inanities spelled out (y esto seguirá siendo, también, hasta que un servicio de traducción de Internet permita que usted teclee un paso de Biblia y lo recupere con todos los errores e inanidad explicada detalladamente). Wooo-hoooo! (¡Wooo-hoooo!)

Today’s Lesson: We’ve Finally Made It Through All The Absurdities Contained In The Bible – Right?

Au contraire, mon frere. It seems we have barely begun to scratch the surface of Biblical absurdity.

Here are just a few of the silly passages we have not yet given the attention they deserve:

1) “And God came unto Balaam at night, and said unto him, If the men come to call thee, rise up, and go with them…. And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went with the princes of Moab. And God’s anger was kindled because he went….” (Num. 22:20-22) Kinda reminiscent of the way gOd hardened Pharaoh’s heart and then punished Pharaoh for having a hard heart, isn’t it?

2) “And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times? And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee. And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee? And he said, Nay.” (Num. 22:28-30) Kinda reminiscent of that talking snake in Genesis, isn’t it? Not to mention Aesop. Fortunately, I don’t know anybody over the age of about 6 who believes Aesop was merely passing along an accurate record of actual events.

If the writers of the Bible really wanted us to take these passages seriously, they could at least have had Balaam and Eve express a bit of surprise when confronted with a talking animal. As things stand, they come across as cartoon figures – or insane.

3) “When you are encamped against your enemies, keep away from everything impure. If one of your men is unclean because of a nocturnal emission, he is to go outside the camp and stay there. But as evening approaches he is to wash himself, and at sunset he may return to the camp.” (Deut. 23:9-11 NIV) Gee, if nocturnal emissions are so awful, why did gOd make them a regular part of life in the first place?

Did the ancient Hebrews ever really try to enforce this rule?

Do officers in the modern Israeli military??

The mind reels….

4) “Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. For the LORD your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you.” (Deut. 23:12-14 NIV) Guess we just can’t trust gOd to watch where he’s stepping instead.

Note to sinners: If you don’t want gOd to see your transgressions, be sure to commit them under cover of dirt!

5) “If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.” (Deut. 25:11-12) Was this really such a big problem that the ancient Hebrews had to have gOd himself explicitly forbid it?? Wow… Guess I was a fool to ever think that peacemakers are actually blessed per Matt. 5:9!

6) “Is not this written in the book of Jasher?” (Joshua 10:13) “Behold, it is written in the book of Jasher” (1 Sam. 1:18) Alas, this book seems to have utterly disappeared. How could gOd have allowed this to happen? How could his “Chosen People” have so thoroughly misplaced it? What else might they have misplaced? If they’re capable of losing whole books, how can we trust that the books they managed to save weren’t less drastically messed up along the way?

7) “And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.” (Judges 1:19) Hee! I think this is my all-time favorite Bible passage. Just imagine: If the Tower of Babel had been defended by a few of those chariots, its builders might have easily routed gOd and successfully invaded heaven. (Maybe this explains why gOd wasn’t able to protect his “Chosen People” from Hitler?)

8) “And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines…. Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king’s son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.” (1 Sam. 18:25, 27)

Pop Quiz: Who’s sicker? A) Saul, for making such an obscene request; B) David, for eagerly agreeing to Saul’s request; C) David, for giving Saul twice as many foreskins as he requested; D) gOd, for allegedly believing that David didn’t break any of the commandments here (1 Kings 15:5); E) Michal, for agreeing to marry a mass murderer; E) The authors of the Bible, for yet again using other people as disposable pawns in their own self-centered stories; or F) Theists who believe this story is true and that gOd and David are praiseworthy?

9) “And when they came to Nachon’s threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.” (2 Sam. 6-7) This is probably my second favorite Bible passage, just because I’m such a fan of black humor and irony. Just think: Uzzah was killed by gOd for trying to be helpful while the same gOd allegedly protected Cain after he murdered his brother and lied about it. And what was in the ark that Uzzah was trying to steady? The tablets with the Ten Commandments – one of which says “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s like something from the Theater of the Absurd. Or maybe David Letterman on an off night.

10) 1 Kings 6:2 tells us that Solomon’s Temple measured about 96 feet long, 32 feet wide, and 48 feet high. 1 Kings 5:15-16 tells us that this modest structure required the efforts of more than 150,000 men to build. 1 Kings 6:38 says it took them 7 years. Have so many ever labored so long to achieve so little?

As Magnus Magnusson puts it in his book Archaeology of the Bible (Simon and Schuster: 1977), “The Temple was a relatively small structure; yet it apparently required a work force of 30,000 men to hew the timber in Lebanon, 80,000 men to quarry the stone and 70,000 men to haul it home, and 3300 foremen to supervise the work (I Kings 5). There is no way in which these extravagant figures can be justified, except in terms of a later romanticisation of the importance of Solomon to Israel’s image of its past and the significance of the Temple” (p. 148).

According to Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed (Simon and Schuster: 2001), no trace of Solomon’s Temple has ever been found (p. 135). Indeed, archeological excavations seem to show that the Bible has drastically misrepresented the reigns of David and Solomon.

11) “The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy. The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works.” (Psalms 145:8-9) HA! Tell that to Uzzah. Or those two hundred Philistines David killed for their foreskins. Or the people and animals who were allegedly wiped out by Noah’s flood. Or the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. Or the first-born children in Egypt. Or Onan. Or the many, many thousands of men, women, and children the LORD allegedly ordered the Hebrews to slaughter. Or the thousands of children who die every single day from hunger and disease. Or the vast majority of the world’s people who are allegedly destined for hell just because they refuse to believe in the absurd, unproven claims of a silly book.

Just don’t act all surprised and insulted by what they tell you in return.

Related posts:

1. Monday School: Bible Absurdities
2. Saturday School: Question for your Priest or Minister
3. Monday School: Astrology & The Bible

This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Monday! Time once again for – yep, you guessed it – Monday School. It’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” but by all means feel free to think of it as “The Sensible Alternative To Christian Superstitions” if you prefer.

Today’s Lesson: Does ANY Of The Bible Make Sense?

Gee, I don’t know. Every time I pick it up and go looking for a sensible claim or statement, an absurdity lodges in my eye and I have to run to my bathroom mirror in hopes of removing it before infection sets in. (NOT an easy thing to do, by the way, considering I’m usually laughing so hard, my sides hurt.)

Here are a few of the absurdities I’ve removed from my eye in the past and now have tightly sealed in a jar atop my desk:

1) Genesis 1:14-19 details the third day of creation. It basically says that gOd made the sun, the moon, and the stars to cast light upon the earth and to help us tell day from night and mark time. Unfortunately for the author of Genesis, it turns out that fewer than 10,000 stars are visible to the naked eye. According to a report that appeared on CNN last summer, that leaves approximately 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars that are not visible from earth except with telescopes that have only been around for the last few hundred years. In fact, astronomers now estimate that there are more stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches all over the world. (In contrast, you could probably hold 10,000 of those grains in one hand.) If gOd created stars to cast light on earth for our benefit, it would seem that he only succeeded about once in every 7,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts. Not very good for an allegedly omnipotent deity, is it?

2) Cain. The Bible’s story of what it claims to have been the first human born on earth is full of things that’ll make you twitch if you think about them. Here are a few:

A) According to Gen. 4:12, Cain is condemned to be a fugitive and a vagabond for killing his brother Abel, yet Gen. 4:17 tells us he actually settled down and founded a city.

B) Gen. 4:14-15 tells us that when Cain complained to gOd that someone would find and kill him for his crime, gOd put a mark on him to protect him. This would seem to contradict Gen. 9:6 (“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man”) and those Bible passages that claim gOd’s laws are just and eternal. It would also seem rather pointless, since the only other two people on earth at this point seem to have been Cain’s parents.

C) Gen. 4:15 actually quotes gOd as saying “whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” Does that mean gOd will kill that person seven times? Neat trick, that. (And isn’t it odd that a gOd who went to such extraordinary lengths to protect a murderer couldn’t lift a finger to protect the innocent Abel in the first place?)

D) Gen. 4:16 tells us that “Cain went out from the presence of the LORD….” Exactly how does one escape the presence of a being who’s allegedly everywhere? (“The eyes of the LORD are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good” – Proverbs 15:3)

E) Gen. 4:17 tells us that Cain found himself a wife and had a child with her. Where the heck did SHE come from? Was she Eve? Was she Cain’s heretofore unmentioned sister? Was gOd creating people on the sly? You tell me – the Bible sure doesn’t!

3) According to Gen. 6:2-4 “the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose” and had children with them. The mind boggles. Isn’t Jesus gOd’s only son? Are we supposed to believe that these other sons had carnal desires and human-compatible sex organs? Are we supposed to believe that these gOds or demi-gOds could find true happiness with mere mortal females – and in the days before modern antiperspirants, no less? On what basis might Jewish people and Christians say these passages are true and divinely inspired while rejecting all those Greek myths about Zeus and his affairs with human women? Maybe DNA testing might prove whose gOd fathered which people, eh?

4) Gen. 6:6 tells us that “it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth….” This is merely the first of many passages in the Bible that tell us that gOd repents.Other passages, however, tell us that gOd does not repent. Go figure.

5) Gen. 6:19 and 7:8-9 tell us that Noah took the animals into his ark two by two. After the Flood waters abate and it’s safe to leave the ark, what’s the first thing Noah does? He builds an altar and sacrifices some of the animals to gOd (Gen. 8:20). DOH! Kinda like firefighters celebrating the end of the Chicago Fire by burning down part of the town that escaped the flames, isn’t it? Except that Chicago didn’t become extinct in the process.

6) Incredibly, Gen. 8:21 tells us that gOd didn’t smite Noah for killing and burning some of the last remaining animals on earth – no, gOd allegedly liked the aroma! Mmmmmm! Nothing like smoke from a dead animal to gladden the heart of a perfect, loving being, I guess. Personally, I would have settled for a card.

7) Gen. 22:1 tells us that gOd tempted Abraham. James 1:13, however, assures us that gOd doesn’t tempt any man. (And in Malachi 3:6, gOd himself tells us he doesn’t change, so don’t try the old “that was then, this is now” argument.)

8) “And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him [Moses], and sought to kill him” (Exodus 4:24). Well, gee – you’d think that an omniscient being would have picked someone else to be his prophet rather than pick one he’d end up wanting to kill, wouldn’t you? Unlike other cases where gOd wanted someone dead, however, gOd is foiled this time when Moses’s wife, Zipporah, takes a sharp stone and circumcises their son. Apparently that’s all it took to assuage the lOrd’s murderous anger – the cutting of an innocent infant’s penis. Sick, isn’t it? Too bad Moses didn’t have a lawyer as shifty as Paul was when he presented us with the “real” meaning of circumcision in Romans 2:25-29 – the poor kid might have been allowed to sleep in peace.

9) “As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. When Moses’ hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up-one on one side, one on the other-so that his hands remained steady till sunset. So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword” (Exodus 17:11-13). Well, gee – how long before the Bible-addled Bush puts a stone under Rumsfeld and orders Cheney and Powell to keep his hands up in a desperate attempt to win in Iraq?

10) “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven’” (Exodus 17:14). Hee! The fact that the Bible mentions Amalek and has kept the name alive for centuries kinda makes a liar out of gOd, doesn’t it?

11) “….the LORD hath sworn that the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation” (Exodus 17:16). Wait – didn’t gOd just promise to completely blot Amalek out? How can you have war with someone “from generation to generation” if you’ve blotted them out? (What’s the penalty if the lOrd swears to do something, then doesn’t, anyway? Do all the other gOds and lOrds get together and beat the crap out of him or do they just mutilate the penis of one of his close relatives?)

These are just a few of the things that make me shake my head and laugh when I pick up a Bible and leaf through it. Did I miss your favorite chuckle-inducing passage? Please share!

Related posts:

1. Monday School: More Bible Absurdities
2. Monday School: Astrology & The Bible
3. Monday School: The Heart Of The Bible

Ittt’ssssss Monday! Time once again for Monday School. Yep, you guessed it – it’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Today’s Lesson: If Jesus Had Been A College Student, Would He Have Been Expelled For Habitual Plagiarism?

Hard to say – especially since it’s doubtful that any college would have accepted him in the first place.

What we can say with some certainty is this: Virtually all the things associated with Jesus have been associated with many others, both before and since.

I’ve pointed this out before, but I was reminded of it again recently while reading Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? – a collection of essays by science writer Martin Gardner. In a section devoted to medical quackery and myths, Gardner recounts how saliva has long been considered a folk remedy for a wide variety of ailments. After retelling the stories of how Jesus allegedly restored sight to a blind man (John 9, Mark 8) and hearing to a deaf man (Mark 7) with his spit, Gardner says “Similar accounts of healing with saliva abound in the myths of Hinduism and Buddhism…. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, has five pages in Volume 11 on worldwide superstitions about saliva. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, in his thirty-seven-volume Historia Naturalis (Natural History), A.D. 77, describes many curative powers of saliva that were widely believed in his day” (p. 92-93). An actual divinity might be expected to be a little more original, don’t you think?

The book I’ve read recently that really drove the point home about Jesus’s derivative ways and message, however, was Michael O. Wise’s The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Christ (HarperSanFrancisco: 1999). Wise is a professor of ancient languages and history as well as an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many of those scrolls seem to have been written in the first century B.C.E. by a Righteous Teacher whom Wise has designated the first messiah (and rather arbitrarily calls Judah for convenience). It is very hard to read this book without coming to the conclusion that Jesus was basically an Elvis impersonator who enjoyed a few lucky breaks that eventually allowed him to become a much bigger star than the original.

Wise spends the first part of his book explaining the nature of the so-called crisis cults which give rise to figures like Judah and Jesus. A LOT of them have arisen independently over the years, all over the world, which seems to be a pretty good indication that human beings who share a common human psychology will tend to react similarly to similar pressures – no divine intervention required. Wise does an excellent job setting the stage for the main show by providing details about a long list of case studies that include the medieval followers of Konrad Schmid, the 17th century followers of Sabbatai Sevi, the apocalyptic Millerites of 1840s America, the Ghost Dance mania that reached its climax among American Indians in 1890, the so-called cargo cults that have repeatedly erupted among Pacific islanders, and David Koresh. According to Wise, “Hundreds of such movements are documented; thousands find at least some mention in the annals of history” (pp. 28-29). A clear pattern emerges – and the bulk of Wise’s book is devoted to explaining at length how that pattern seems to have first emerged among those Jews who were living in the area of Jerusalem many decades before Jesus was (allegedly) born.

Apparently there was something in the culture of the time which inspired this sort of thing the way darkness, warmth, and moisture inspire mold.

“Between 100 B.C.E. and 70 C.E. many prophets and messiahs arose among the Jews. The roster includes Judas the Galilean, the shepherd Athronges, Simon the Perean, a Samaritan messiah in the days of Pontius Pilate, Theudas, ‘the Egyptian,’ Menahem ben Hezekiah, John the Baptist, and, of course, Jesus of Nazareth. Others are mentioned in the sources as existing, but with the last of their followers likewise perished their names. Not one of these prophets wrote anything (at least, anything that has survived), Jesus included” (p. 261).

Judah was different in at least two important ways: He seems to have been the first; and he did write about himself. In fact, he wrote about himself a lot, and Wise bases much of his book on his actual words.

How similar was Judah to what Jesus allegedly said and did nearly a century later? Here is the summary Wise provides near the end of his book after having spent many chapters proving each similarity, point by point:

“As Jesus declared himself a prophet, and more than a prophet, so had Judah.

“As Jesus struck contemporaries with his authoritative teaching and rare gifts of expression, so had Judah.

“As Jesus proclaimed a completed Law of Moses, perfected by his own direct revelations from God, so had Judah.

“As Jesus spoke of charity, the poor, and love of one’s fellows, forbade divorce, and proclaimed the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, so had Judah.

“As Jesus was hailed by followers as He Who Is to Come and worked attendant wonders, so had Judah.

“As Jesus’ message and claims were rejected by most of his fellows, so it had been for Judah.

“As Jesus came into conflict with the ruling powers, the Pharisees, and the high priestly families, so had Judah.

“As Jesus was tried before the council and sentenced to die, so had been Judah.

“As Jesus pronounced judgment upon Jerusalem and predicted that for rejecting him it would be destroyed by the Romans, so had Judah.

“As Jesus founded a vital and long-lasting movement before leaving this world, so had Judah.

“As the Christian church grew into an institution composed of ‘overseers’ (bishops), priests, and laity, so it had been with Judah’s followers.

“As Jesus’ followers argued that he was the Suffering Servant, the Messiah, the Good Shepherd, and other figures foretold by scripture, so the followers of Judah had argued.

“As Jesus’ sufferings were proclaimed a divine healing for all believers – an atonement – so it had been with Judah.

“As growing numbers came to believe that Jesus had been glorified and now sat at the right hand of God, so it had been with Judah.

“As early Christians anticipated the imminent return of Jesus to judge the quick and the dead, redeem Israel, and initiate a millennium wherein believers would rule the world, so it had been with Judah’s followers.

“And in all these things, Judah was first, anticipating the far more famous prophet from Galilee by a full century….

“These elements were connected to the myth-dream of Israel, which Judah had fed, molded, and changed and which came to Jesus in that changed form, ready for him to tap” (pp. 253-255).

And as Judah ultimately proved to be a false prophet and a failed messiah unable to do all the things he said he was going to do, so it turned out to be the case with Jesus.

For a Christian reading this book, it must be like finding all of Grandpa’s funny “true life” stories in a collection of vaudeville scripts written long before he was born.

I feel your pain.

But as someone once said, “The truth will set you free.”

Related posts:

1. Monday School: Nazareth
2. Monday School: God & Satan
3. Monday School: Easter

So – it’s the second to last Monday of October? That must means that it’s time for the second to last Monday School of October! Yes, it’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Today’s Lesson: Just In Case I Need To Know This To Settle A Bar Bet, What’s The All-Time Worst Theological Dispute That’s Erupted Among Christians?

Oh, dear – that’s a toughie. So many candidates – so little time!

Could it be the argument between Paul and James over the relative importance of faith and works?

Could it be the argument between Paul and the other early Christians over the importance of following the Old Testament dictates regarding food and circumcision?

Could it be the argument between orthodox Christians and Arian Christians in the 300s over whether Jesus was eternal or created?

Could it be the argument among Christians that erupted in the 400s over whether Jesus had both a divine nature and a human nature or whether he had just one nature that combined divine and human elements?

Could it be the argument over transubstantiation and whether or not the bread and wine used during Catholic mass actually become the blood and body of Jesus even though there’s no empirical way of detecting any change?

Could it be the argument between premillenialists (“Jesus will come back immediately prior to the millennium!”) and postmillenialists (“Jesus will come back after the millennium!”)?

Could it be the argument between Old Earth Creationists and Young Earth Creationists?

Could it be the argument between the 48% of evangelicals who think only born-again Christians will go to heaven and the 45% of evangelicals who disagree?

ENOUGH! I fear that merely listing all the possible candidates could occupy me for many days. Instead, I’ll simply turn to Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler’s book Best, Worst, and Most Unusual (Fawcett Crest: 1975) and tell you what THEY say.

Ready?

Here it is:

The Worst Theological Dispute is over the question “Did Adam and Eve have navels?”

Sir Thomas Browne contended back in 1646 that since they had been created and not born the answer was obviously “No!”

He was backed up by Dr. Christian Tobias Ephraim Reinhard who wrote a very lengthy book on the subject in 1752.

Did Browne and Reinhard carry the day? Of course not. As Felton and Fowler relate, “In actual practice, artists vacillated for many years, and an examination of Adam and Eve portraits from the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance shows some with and some without. By Reinhard’s time, however, the immaculate stomach was a hopeless cause. On the Sistine ceiling Michelangelo boldly asserted the legitimacy of picturing the umbilicus and greatly influenced subsequent navel tradition.”

In fact – according to Michelangelo – Adam had an inny.

Case closed? Not quite.

“The navel controversy was unexpectedly revived in 1944 by the House Military Affairs Committee. Representative Durham, a North Carolina Democrat, loudly opposed distribution of a government pamphlet entitled The Races of Mankind to American servicemen, ostensibly because in some of the illustrations ‘Adam and Eve are depicted with navels,’ an insult to fundamentalists everywhere. There were, however, some cynics who maintained that the congressman was really more concerned about a statistical table in the pamphlet showing that the average IQ for blacks in some Northern states was higher than the average for Southern whites” (p. 160).

You might think (and hope) that that certainly was the end of that, but no. As Martin Gardner reveals in his book, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? (W.W. Norton & Company: 2000), the question raises certain issues that cannot easily be dismissed.

As Gardner frames one of these issues early on in his essay on the subject, “If Adam and Eve did not have navels, then they were not perfect human beings. On the other hand, if they had navels, then navels would imply a birth they never experienced” (p. 7).

I suppose the easiest way out of that dilemma is to deny that perfect human beings must have navels. Is that really true, though? I don’t know. And I don’t suppose I ever will until someone presents me with a perfect human being who is willing to submit to a close examination. (And if perfect human beings are beings whose perfect modesty prevent them from submitting to such close examination? What then??)

And wouldn’t you know…. Gardner quickly raises the stakes by pointing out that the navel question is merely the tip of the iceberg (so to speak). British zoologist Philip Henry Gosse realized this when he wrote his book Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot back in 1857. (Omphalos is the Greek word for navel, in case you were wondering.) What bothered Gosse is that the navel’s existence in Adam and Eve would imply the existence of a time before their creation (i.e., time spent in the womb) even though no such time existed according to the Bible. The Bible’s gOd, in effect, would be revealed as a Great Deceiver.

And navels in the first people are just one part of the Grand Deception.

“As Gosse realized,” Gardner writes, “it is not just a question of bellybuttons. Adam and Eve had bones, teeth, hair, fingernails, and all sorts of other features that contained evidence of previous growth.”

And this evidence of a past that never existed hardly ends with Adam and Eve. Apparently Gosse spent several hundred pages detailing how every plant and animal necessarily contains evidence of a past that the instantaneously created plants and animals of Genesis must have exhibited even though that past itself didn’t exist. The dilemma therefore lives on: Either gOd is a Great Deceiver, or the living things he created weren’t much like the things we know today.

Perhaps the biggest issue related to this in Gosse’s day was the discovery of more and more fossils which cast doubt on the 6000-year-old Earth of the Bible. No problem, Gosse ultimately concluded. The Bible’s gOd had merely made the Earth look much older than it actually was when he created it. Not even the discovery of fossilized excrement shook his faith in this (as it apparently did the faith of others). In Gosse’s opinion, gOd had simply created animals – and Adam – with excrement already in their bowels.

Gosse’s book and arguments were not very well received. It seems that most people simply couldn’t believe gOd could have created the Earth and everything on it as one monstrous (and apparently pointless) lie. In the end, most people came to accept the idea that the Earth is in fact as old as fossils and other evidence implies and that Genesis isn’t to be read as Absolute Literal Truth.

And yet, as Gardner points out near the end of his essay, there remain the True Believers such as Donna Lowers. Donna was compelled to share her thoughts with the Des Moines Register after John Patterson wrote that the existence of a million-year-old supernova contradicted a 6000-year-old creation. According to Donna, gOd had indeed created the universe with evidence of a non-existent past. In her opinion, any scientist examining the first tree would have found tree rings indicating it had been growing for years – but it would have been a holy lie put there by gOd for his own special reasons. Just like he had instantaneously created vast pools of oil that it would have taken nature millions of years to make….

Young Earth creationists, meanwhile, have been known to glibly declare that the light just now reaching us from galaxies millions of light-years away didn’t really take millions of years to reach us – no sir. That light was created already on the way when the universe was created 6000 years ago.

Other creationists disagree. In their learned estimation, light simply used to travel millions of times faster than it does now.

Which I guess just goes to prove yet again that any hypothesis, no matter how silly, can be defended forever by anyone willing to ignore, shrug off, and explain away all the evidence to the contrary….

Which, come to think of it, is what makes so many theological disputes the extremely bitter, unresolvable, and endlessly frustrating things that they are.

BONUS INFORMATION: Jerusalem has been called the navel of the world. According to Gershom Gorenberg’s The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, for example, a Talmudic legend asserts that the creation of the world began in Jerusalem. Another legend says Adam was formed there. Another says that it’s where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac. And of course Jerusalem plays an important role in both Christian and Islamic legends as well.

Why? Hard to say, but the fixation seems to actually predate all these religions. According to Gorenberg, “archeologists conjecture that Jerusalem was a sacred center long before David conquered it. There’s a cave in the rock under the Dome [a holy Muslim spot and former site of the Jewish Temple]. One theory says it’s a Bronze Age burial cave, from 2300-2100 B.C.E. The cult of the dead was strong then; perhaps that’s how Salem [the name of Jerusalem in the Torah] became sacred” (p. 61).

Gardner reveals that the Greeks had their own myth about the navel of the world. Not surprisingly, it has nothing to do with Salem/Jerusalem. Instead, it begins with Zeus’s desire to find the exact center of the (flat, circular) earth. To find that center, he allegedly had two eagles fly at the same speed from opposite edges of the earth’s disc. They met at (surprise!) Delphi. A white marble stone, called the Omphalos Stone, was put there to mark the spot, along with a golden eagle on each side of it – all inside Apollo’s temple. According to Gardner, “The stone was often depicted on Greek coins and vases, usually in the shape of half an egg” (p. 9).

Interesting, eh?

Well, I think so, anyway.

Now if only I could find a religion that admits to having sprung from one of the world’s armpits instead of its navel….

Related posts:

1. Monday School: The First Messiah
2. Monday School: God & Satan
3. Monday School: Passages In Context

Some say it’s Monday; I say it’s time for another session of Monday School – STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” How nice that the U.S. Postal Service has suspended mail delivery today just so you won’t be distracted by nasty bills.

Today’s Lesson: Christopher Columbus Was One Of History’s Greatest Christians – Right?

Some might think so. After all, only two people in all of human history have official national holidays named after them in the United States and Columbus just happens to be one of them. And like the other person who has a holiday (the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.), there’s little doubt that Columbus was a Christian whose actions were often driven by his religious beliefs.

Unfortunately, and despite what generations of Americans have been taught, it now seems pretty clear that Columbus was far from a good man. Many would even go so far as to say that he was one of history’s greatest fiends and ought to be roundly condemned – not honored with a holiday.

The facts bear closer examination here for at least three reasons:

1) Columbus’s fiendishness seems to have flowed in large part from his Christianity and the Christian culture he was part of;

2) As with so many of the great Christian figures in history, the facts seem to have been ignored and distorted for generations in order to make Christians feel good about themselves, to diminish and demonize non-Christian cultures, and to minimize the bad behavior directly inspired by Christianity; and

3) The evils associated with Columbus, his religion, and factual distortion are hardly limited to one long-dead man but continue to manifest themselves in today’s headlines. In learning how to accurately examine and evaluate Columbus, we learn how to accurately examine and evaluate numerous contemporary figures whose bad behavior badly needs to be documented and revealed now – not 500 years after the fact.

A short but apparently accurate evaluation of Columbus can be found here for those of you who are either in a hurry or are inclined to reject out of hand anything I happen to post here.

The following, somewhat longer evaluation is based on my reading of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Richard Shenkman’s Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History (Harper & Row: 1988), and James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (The New Press: 1995).

First, here are some of the things the Britannica says about Columbus:

“[H]is thoughts, writings, and actions at times suggested a man just this side of delusion….

“[H]e was a pirate in the service of Rene d’Anjou in 1472-73….

“Columbus discovered America by prophecy rather than by astronomy. ‘In the carrying out of this enterprise of the Indies,’ he wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1502, ‘neither reason nor mathematics nor maps were any use to me: fully accomplished were the words of Isaiah’ – referring to a more or less apposite passage inIsaiah 11:10-12 – and, in fact, any writing became prophetic in his eyes when it could be interpreted as a forecast of his discovery….

“[H]e felt sure of having been divinely selected for a mission….”

The Britannica goes on to explain how Columbus derived his geography in large part from the apocryphal biblical Second Book of Edras. That book apparently indicates that the Earth is round and is six parts dry land to one part sea, among other things. Combined with other assertions and assumptions, these “truths” permitted Columbus to calculate that India ought to be where North America in fact is. Apparently Columbus never allowed the empirical evidence to interfere with this belief of his.

The Britannica goes on to say this:

“The monarchs [Ferdinand and Isabella] then decided to set up a special commission of ‘learned men and mariners’ to study Columbus’s proposals…. [This commission] made him wait four years. This was not, as is often asserted, because the commission was either incompetent or backward in its views but because Columbus was vague and secretive as well as incoherent….”

Once in the New World “he wandered among lovely islands to which he gave Spanish names, hoping ‘the Lord would show him where gold is born’…. He even thought of slavery…. He raised crosses everywhere, but he kept an eye on the material value of things even to the extent of seeing men as goods for sale. His honeymoon with the islanders may have ended on the day he removed by force seven of the inhabitants of Guanahani. They began then and there to think of the Spaniards as only a shade less tyrannical than the caniba or ‘cannibals,’ who from islands further to the south came to take them away and eat them….”

Once Columbus returned to Spain from his first trip to the New World, the Encyclopedia Britannica goes on to say, Ferdinand and Isabella “wished to send a second expedition as soon as possible; they also obtained two papal bulls granting them the Indies discovered and to be discovered and apportioning the undiscovered parts of the West between the two Iberian powers [i.e., Spain and Portugal - as if the West was the Pope’s to give away as he saw fit!]

“Wealth and honor were, indeed, his [Columbus’s]. He nonetheless insisted on being paid the prize of 10,000 maravedis promised to the first man of the crew to see land. The humble sailor who actually had sighted land went over to Morocco in disappointment and became a renegade….”

Richard Shenkman’s Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History (among other sources) reveals that this was hardly Columbus’s only crime.

“Unbeknown to much of the public, he was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Arawak Indians on Haiti….

“His first encounter with the Arawaks could not have gone better. He himself wrote that the natives on the island ‘are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.’

“Columbus, however, did not reciprocate the Indians’ kindness. Under pressure to bring back riches to Spain, he required Indians over fourteen years old to make regular contributions of gold. Indians who did not comply, according to historian Howard Zinn, ‘had their hands cut off and bled to death.’

“Those Indians who weren’t killed were often enslaved and shipped to Spain. On one trip, 500 Arawak men, women, and children were loaded onto ships bound for the Old World; during the voyage 200 died. Far from feeling guilty about the practice of slavery, Columbus boasted about it. ‘Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity,’ he wrote, ‘go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.’ Within two years of Columbus’s arrival, says Zinn, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti had died ‘through murder, mutilation, or suicide.’ Under Columbus’s Spanish successors the mistreatment continued. In 1515 there were just 50,000 Indians left. In 1550 only 500 remained. By 1650 there were none.

“Yet such is the desire for heroes Columbus will probably always be revered. [Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot] Morison says he ought to be, for although he had his faults, ‘they were largely the defects of the qualities which made him great….’

“Howard Zinn chides Morison for acknowledging mass murder on one page, then ignoring it later on. To bury the facts, he says, ‘in a mass of information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important – it should weigh little in our final judgments.’”

It is Prof. James W. Loewen who presents the most devastating critique of Columbus and the myth that has grown up around him, however. Almost 40 pages of his Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is devoted to pointing out and correcting the many common errors American History textbooks make about Columbus. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Historians have identified at least 14 different groups of people who might have made it to the New World before Columbus. A chart on page 38 gives a list along with a summary of the evidence.

“Most Europeans and Native Americans knew the world to be round…. Washington Irving wins credit for popularizing the flat-earth fable in 1828. In his bestselling biography of Columbus, Irving described Columbus’s supposed defense of his round-earth theory before the flat-earth savants at Salamanca University. Irving himself surely knew the story to be fiction. He probably thought it added a nice dramatic flourish and would do no harm. But it does. It invites us to believe that the ‘primitives’ of the world, admittedly including pre-Columbian Europeans, had only a crude understanding of the planet they lived on, until aided by forward-thinking Europeans. It also turns Columbus into a man of science who corrected our faulty geography….

“Columbus… and his royal sponsors were devout orthodox Catholics, not humanists.” (Despite this, at least one commonly used American History text claims Columbus “had the humanist’s belief that people could do anything if they knew enough and tried hard enough.”)

“[A]massing wealth and dominating other people came to be positively valued [by Columbus and Christian Europe] as the key means of winning esteem on earth and salvation in the hereafter. As Columbus put it, ‘Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise.’… But textbooks downplay the pursuit of wealth as a motive for coming to America when they describe Columbus and later explorers and colonists. Even the Pilgrims left Europe partly to make money, but you would never know it from our textbooks….

“Europeans believed in a transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized conquest. (Followers of Islam share this characteristic.) Typically, after ‘discovering an island and encountering a tribe of Indians new to them, the Spaniards would read aloud (in Spanish) what came to called ‘the Requirement.’ Here is one version:

“‘I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If you do not, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to his majesty. I will take your women and children and make them slaves… The deaths and injuries that you will receive from here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the gentlemen that accompany me.’ [Emphasis added]

“Having thus satisfied their consciences by offering the Indians a chance to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards felt free to do whatever they wanted with the people they had just ‘discovered.’”

When the people Columbus discovered resisted his attempts to enslave them, he resorted to war. Loewen quotes historian Kirkpatrick Sale and Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father as saying, “The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and ‘with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.’”

According to Loewen “Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food….

“Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves – about five thousand – than any other individual…. A particularly repellent aspect of the slave trade was sexual. As soon as the 1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape…. Columbus wrote a friend in 1500, ‘… there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.’….

“Of the twelve textbooks, only six mention that the Spanish enslaved or exploited the Indians anywhere in the Americas. Of these only four verge on mentioning that Columbus was involved….”

Loewen goes on to indicate the sort of nonsense that can flourish in a society so estranged from the truth:

“In 1989 President Bush invoked Columbus as a role model for the nation: ‘Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith.’”

It would seem that President Bush was either ignorant or deceptive when he said these things.

The remarks delivered today by his son might be even worse.

Two key passages: “ The journey of the explorer from Genoa is one of the great stories of daring and discovery. And the journey of millions of immigrants from Italy is also a story of discovery and bravery, and that journey has enriched our country, that’s really what we’re celebrating today. America is a stronger and finer nation because of the influence of Italian Americans…. The faith of the Italian-American community in God is an important part of our nation’s fabric. The faith in family, the love of life and the commitment to our country are great gifts. Italian Americans share those gifts generously. And that is why we celebrate Columbus Day.”

So, we celebrate Columbus Day because he was Italian? Or do we merely say things like this when we’re running for re-election and we’re willing to kiss the butts of any group of people who might vote for us? (I dare you to try to read the President’s remarks in their entirety without gagging. I don’t think I’ve come across so much shameless brown-nosing since I watched a fellow student trying to avoid detention in junior high.)

Adding absurdity to all the pandering: Columbus may not have been Genoese or Italian at all. According to the Britannica, “There is no explicit statement by him declaring himself Genoese. He never went back to Genoa. He never wrote in any form of Italian – not even to his brothers or to Genoese persons and institutions – but always in Spanish.” It also points out that he fought on the side of Portugal against Genoa in at least one battle and cannot be called a Genoese patriot. If Columbus actually DID come from Genoa, as President Bush claims, it would seem that the President was actually praising a 15th century John Walker Lindh in his remarks today. Was that really his intent?

According to Loewen, some historians believe Columbus was actually from Portugal, Corsica, or Spain. If they’re right, it would seem that a president willing to go to war over non-existent weapons of mass destruction has no problem using a murderous, slave-trading non-Italian as an excuse to celebrate Italian Americans….

At least the official statement that the White House released today in honor of Columbus Day seems to have gotten it right when it mentions that Columbus made fourjourneys to the “New World.” Unfortunately, it also completely overlooks the nature of those journeys. I’ve already described some of what happened during the first three. Let’s close today’s lesson by considering the fourth….

According to the Britannica, it was a mess. Columbus was expressly forbidden to go to Espanola; he went there anyway. He suffered numerous mutinies. Living more in a dream world than the real one, he sent off letters to Ferdinand and Isabella assuring them that he was just ten days from the Ganges River – and that Panama was next to Cathay (i.e., China). Storms battered his ships. He reported hearing voices from on high. After a year of waste and madness, he finally returned to Europe for the last time.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about his fourth journey, however, is why he wanted to make it. Again, in the words of the Britannica, “Columbus, now frustrated in his dreams of greatness in the New World, cast about for another grand work to achieve and found it in his biblical, prophetic mind: he would liberate Jerusalem. He did not need to consult cosmographers, merchants, or ambassadors. He read the prophets and having collected all the texts he could showing that Jerusalem would be liberated by Spain, he presented his Book of Prophecies to the king and queen.” His fourth trip to the New World was approved and undertaken in order to obtain the gold he needed to finance a new Crusade into the Middle East.

He ended up dying in 1506 instead.

In 1513, his remains were given a holy burial on the grounds of a monastery in Seville.

In 1542, the remains of both Columbus and his son were disinterred and transferred to Hispaniola where they were entombed in the cathedral of Santo Domingo.

As far as I can determine, the Catholic Church has never apologized for the crimes of one of its most famous members, let alone acted to throw his icky bones out of its cathedral.

As far as I can determine, there is no plan for the Knights of Columbus – a Catholic organization – to change its name. Indeed, its official website still talks about how its founders were “bound together by the ideal of Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of the Americas, the one whose hand brought Christianity to the New World.” If they know what else that hand did, they’re not publicizing it. Typical, isn’t it?

Hope you have a good day regardless.

Related posts:

1. Monday School: The Inquisition
2. Monday School: Astrology & The Bible
3. Monday School: Bishop Colenso

Monday! Time once again for Monday School. It’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” And it STILL doesn’t require you to drop to your knees and unthinkingly accept everything it says if you want to avoid a hellish detention.

*Brief pause so you can alert the neighbors and bring a friend*

Today’s Lesson: True Religion Can Only Inspire Peace, Love, Sunshine, And Gumdrops – Right?

Umm, noooo…. But an awful lot of people seem to think otherwise.

Consider an editorial that I clipped from the Columbus Dispatch. After listing many of the religious-inspired conflicts raging around the world today, the editors go out on a limb and courageously encourage their readers to embrace religion anyway. Why? Partly because they say religion inspires many good things, too, but mainly because they refuse to admit religion is really responsible for anything bad at all.

“Hate and fear, cloaked as religious belief, fuel extremist movements….” the editors declare, apparently denying the possibility that at least some sincerely held religious beliefs might in fact be inseparable from hate and fear.

“Religion reinforced by fear and colored by intolerance, especially when its adherents crave political power, is disastrous,” the editors also declare, ignoring the fact that some religions insist that adherents are the only ones worthy of political power and that those adherents who resist or ignore this demand are the ones we should properly consider to be the imperfect followers of that religion.

The editorial concludes by boldly asserting that “The problem in the world today isn’t religion. The problems are ignorance and intolerance, whether in the believer or the heathen.” These assertions fail to recognize that religion itself flows from ignorance (otherwise it would be a science) and that many religions embrace intolerance as a core value. Few, if any, non-religious belief systems are as dependent upon ignorance or lead to as much intolerance as religious belief systems. To look at today’s world and imply that believers and “heathen” are equally at fault when it’s the atrocious acts of the believers that fill the pages of my newspaper seems to require a willful blindness I’d find troubling in anyone but find especially troubling in the editors of that very newspaper. I suggest they spend some time reading their own publication more closely, then revise their opinions accordingly.

They (and others) might also want to consider the following facts and observations that I think reveal religion to be a much less positive force for good than so many people think it is.

Let’s start with my dictionary’s definition of religion: “Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe; a system grounded in such belief and worship; a set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader; a cause, a principle, or an activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.”

Nowhere does my dictionary say the power or creator religious people worship must be good, loving, or non-violent. Nowhere does it say that religious beliefs must promote peace, brotherhood, or tolerance. Those people who want to limit “true” religion to humanistic beliefs and practices are in effect putting humanistic beliefs above religion as defined by the dictionary, as understood by many people around the world today, and as it’s been practiced for thousands of years. And because humanistic beliefs are derived from reason and experience, these people are in effect putting reason and experience above divine revelation and what many holy books themselves say. It is a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) attempt to unfairly limit religion to a very narrow range – a narrow range that not coincidentally correlates with what the people who do this want to believe on the basis of non-religious reasons. In other words, those who hate and kill in the name of religion often seem to be more in tune with their religion than those who condemn them. Those who believe religion must express pleasant, healthy, humanistic values, in contrast, are often the ones who seem to be perverting a very bloody religious tradition by imposing their personal beliefs and desires on it or twisting it into something the founders of that religion might well have looked upon with abhorrence.

Are these just my opinions, no better and perhaps worse than those expressed by the editors of the Dispatch? No. They are the logical, fact-based conclusions I’ve come to after years of study.

My belief that religion in general has historically tended to be a force for violence and intolerance rests on the research presented by such books as God: Myths of the Male Divine by David Leeming and Jake Page; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue; Maurice Collis’s Cortes and Montezuma; Jonathan Spence’s God’s Chinese Son; Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer; and many others. Although Western religion may have once exhibited mostly positive, life-affirming elements back in the days of pagan goddess worship (as Leeming and Page suggest), that quickly changed with the rise of nations and empires. Deity became both a reflection and a tool of human leaders and kings, and religion quickly came to serve as the social glue which helped to bind societies together while simultaneously demonizing other societies and justifying war against them. According to scholars like Diamond, it’s precisely because religion was intolerant and justified war that it fulfilled the needs of people and societies and thus survived. Modern Americans who prefer to think of religion as a kind of divine sanction for their post-Enlightenment humanistic proclivities would probably have been condemned as irreligious heretics by the religious leaders who have held power for most of human history. To say that those religious leaders who continue this tradition today are the ones who have perverted or are out of touch with the “real” meaning of religion is to (knowingly or unknowingly) misrepresent the truth in a manner worthy of Orwell’s 1984 or Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

As Diamond and others have pointed out, the monotheistic religions of the West have been especially devoted to promoting hate, war, and intolerance. These religions, of course, continue to reign today. A close examination of what they say reveals just how embedded violence and intolerance are in them.

Consider Judaism – a religion which includes as holy scripture divine sanction for war, genocide, slavery, and rape. Exodus 15:3 explicitly says “The LORD is a man of war….” Many passages insist that this lord is a jealous lord, intolerant of other lords and of those who might worship them. Deut. 13 explicitly says that if a contrary prophet or “dreamer of dreams” shows up, kill him. It goes on to say that if any relative tries to introduce you to any other religion, kill him, too. Again and again, intolerance and violence aren’t condemned, ignored, or meekly accepted by the authors but alleged to be vociferously mandated by gOd himself. If you believe in the truth of the Jewish scriptures and you condemn intolerance and violence, YOU’RE the one who has some explaining to do – not those who say your scriptures clearly demand both.

Consider Christianity – a religion which includes as holy scripture passages which clearly present Jesus as the only way to gOd; which repeatedly tell Christians to preach the “truth” to those willing to listen while abandoning those who disagree to a hellish fate; which claim that a warrior Jesus will one day return to earth and battle his enemies – not win them over with love, logic, or by turning the other cheek; and which claim that this morally perfect prince of peace will one day condemn the vast majority of people who have ever lived to eternal hellfire. It’s a religion that has historically been spread abroad by the sword and defended at home with the rack and the stake. It’s a religion that presents the alleged founder of its church (Peter) as killing those Christians who refused to turn over all their wealth to him (Acts 4 & 5). As Sir Arnold Lunn once said, “The theory that you should always treat the religious convictions of other people with respect finds no support in the Gospels.” One manifestation of this intolerance can be found in Mel Gibson’s belief that his own wife is destined for hell simply because she’s an Episcopalian and not the “true” Christian he is. Pat Robertson summed things up quite nicely when he said, “You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.” This isn’t some sort of historical aberration – the liberal Christianity that has abandoned these views is.

Consider Islam – a religion which includes as holy scripture very harsh condemnation of unbelievers. (A search for “unbelievers” at one Quran site produced over 200 hits.) For more details on how violence and intolerance have been an essential part of Islam from the very beginning, check out Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim. To see that intolerance in action, just look at the laws that are in effect in most Islamic countries – or follow the news.

Polytheistic religions, while less commonly practiced in the West, fare only somewhat better. Hinduism is the most notable of these, of course, and it includes as holy scripture the Bhagavad-Gita – an extremely twisted defense of violence and war by the very important gOd, Krishna. Hinduism is also notable for inspiring one of the cruelest and most intolerant class systems in all of human history. As a Feb. 29, 2004 ABC News report entitled Still Untouchable? explained, “According to Hindu legend, the world is ordered in the image of a cosmic giant. From its head come the Brahmans — the priests and teachers. From its arms, the rulers and soldiers. From its thighs, the merchants. From its feet, the workers. And beneath all are those considered too impure to be called human beings. Many Hindus believe the last group, with a modern-day population nearly half the size of America’s, does not deserve to own property, run businesses or participate in most aspects of society. The Indian government has outlawed the discrimination, but 1,500 years of tradition do not disappear easily.” Bottom line: Well over 100 million human beings are living hellish lives in India right now because of the hateful, intolerant dogmas of one of the world’s oldest and most popular religions.

I could go on and on, but I won’t. The claim that religion cannot promote hatred and violence has already been revealed to be nonsense. The claim that ignorance or intolerance is the real problem, not religion, is clearly misguided given that ignorance and intolerance are (and apparently always have been) an essential part of the major monotheistic religions. The claim (or unstated assumption) that ignorance and intolerance are as dangerous in “heathens” as in religious people ignores the fact that “heathens” are NOT the ones who have the world in turmoil today, and it ignores all the studies that reveal a correlation between ignorance, intolerance and theistic religion. Such ignorance and intolerance does NOT correlate with humanism or atheism.

It’s not a coincidence that books like the Bible and the Quran inspire conflict, hatred, and violence in a way no math or science book ever has. It’s not a coincidence that religions based on such “holy books from the one true gOd” have a tendency to inspire Very Bad Things – not because those books are so easily misinterpreted but because these Very Bad Things flow from them as naturally as blood from a wound.

Newspaper editorial writers who suggest otherwise are like heavy smokers who refuse to see the connection between tobacco and disease, or who respond to every new medical study by saying, “Hey, non-smokers get cancer, too!”

They owe it to themselves and their families to finally face the facts and kick their disgusting addiction.

And the rest of us owe it to ourselves and the human family as a whole to refuse to any longer put up with the many dangers associated with the second-hand smoke.

Related posts:

1. Monday School: Is Religion A Mental Illness?
2. Monday School: The Pharisees
3. Monday School: You Gotta Have Faith – Or Do You?

Monday! Time once again for Monday School! It’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Today’s Lesson: What’s The Deal With The Pharisees? Were They Really A “Generation Of Vipers”??

One of the main points Monday School has tried to get across ever since it started is that the Bible lies and lies repeatedly, on matters both great and small. Its treatment of the Pharisees is just one more glaring example.

The Pharisees comprised an ancient Jewish sect. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, they “emerged as a distinct group shortly after the Maccabaean revolt, around 165–160 BC” and were “a party of laymen and scribes in contradistinction to the Sadducees, i.e., the party of the high priesthood that had traditionally provided the sole leadership of the Jewish people. The basic difference that led to the split between the Pharisees and the Sadducees lay in their respective attitudes toward the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) and the problem of finding in it answers to questions and bases for decisions about contemporary legal and religious matters arising under circumstances far different from those of the time of Moses. In their response to this problem, the Sadducees, on the one hand, refused to accept any precept as binding unless it was based directly on the Torah, i.e., the Written Law. The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed that the Law that God gave to Moses was twofold, consisting of the Written Law and the Oral Law, i.e., the teachings of the prophets and the oral traditions of the Jewish people. Whereas the priestly Sadducees taught that the written Torah was the only source of revelation, the Pharisees admitted the principle of evolution in the Law; men must use their reason in interpreting the Torah and applying it to contemporary problems. Rather than blindly follow the letter of the Law even if it conflicted with reason or conscience, the Pharisees harmonized the teachings of the Torah with their own ideas or found their own ideas suggested or implied in it. They interpreted the Law according to its spirit; when in the course of time a law had been outgrown or superseded by changing conditions, they gave it a new and more acceptable meaning, seeking scriptural support for their actions through a ramified system of hermeneutics.”

According to the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly came into conflict with both the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Indeed, the two groups often seem to be one and the same from the point of view of the Gospel writers. For example, both groups make their first appearance in the Bible in a passage that reads “But when he [John the Baptist] saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matt. 3:7). Matt. 16:1, 16:6, and 16:11-12 similarly treat these groups as equally bad. This is odd, considering the very real differences between them.

Even odder is the fact that the Pharisees merit 85 mentions in the Bible while the Sadducees merit only 14 even though it was the Sadducees who seem to have been more worthy of condemnation and to have had more power. As L. Michael White, Director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin has put it, “They were the old Jerusalem upper crust. And they were in charge of most of the political life of Jerusalem proper. They dominated the city council of Jerusalem, or what is called the Sanhedrin…. The Pharisees were a Johnny-come-lately group…. The Pharisees have a political interest, but they, in some ways, constitute a kind of outside political faction over against the landed aristocracy – the Sadducees” (PBS Frontline, From Jesus To Christ: A Portrait of Jesus’ World).

What’s going on here? According to White, “Now, we have to remember that it’s precisely in Matthew’s gospel that the Pharisees are Jesus’ main opponents throughout his life. Now, in Jesus’ own times, the Pharisees weren’t that prominent a group. Why does Matthew tell the story this way, so that a group that was less consequential during Jesus’ own life time now becomes the main opponent? It’s precisely because that’s what’s going on in the life of Matthew’s community [in 80-90 CE, some 50 years after Jesus allegedly died]…. The Pharisees are becoming their opponents and we’re watching two Jewish groups, Matthew’s Christian Jewish group and the local Pharisaic groups in tension over what would be the future of Judaism. Naturally, they have very different answers” (PBS Frontline, From Jesus To Christ: The Story of the Storytellers).

Is this just White’s opinion? No. Virtually every source I’ve checked says that the Bible grossly misrepresents the true nature of the Pharisees. Here’s a sample of what these sources say:

“The NT references [to the Pharisees] are especially derogatory and do not provide an accurate picture.” - The Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions, p. 567

“The Pharisees are routinely parodied and condemned in the gospels. The polemic more accurately reflects conflicts between the synagogue and the Christian communities that produced the gospels in the last quarter of the first century than it does the situation of the historical Jesus.” - The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, p. 547

“In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic…. In St. Matthews Gospel, Jeus is made to utter violent and rather unedifying diatribes against ‘the Scribes and Pharisees,’ representing them as worthless hypocrites. Apart from this being a libelous distortion of the facts and a flagrant breach of the charity that was supposed to characterize his mission, the bitter denunciation of the Pharisees is almost certainly inauthentic…. The anti-Semitic tone of Matthew’s Gospel reflects the tensions between Jews and Christians during the 80s.” - A History of God by Karen Armstrong, p. 72; p. 81

Numerous sources make it clear that the Bible’s Jesus and the real Pharisees actually had a lot in common. At least one source thinks Jesus was a Pharisee.

Consider:

“[M]uch of Jesus’ own teaching falls in line with that of the Pharisees.” - Don’t Know Much About the Bible by Kenneth C. Davis, p. 393

“Jesus’ teachings were probably closer to the Pharisees’ than to those of any other Jewish sect of his day; when he said ‘The Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,’ he was referring to a Pharisaic template for adjusting law to modern times.” - The Joy of Sects by Peter Occhiogrosso, p. 279-280.

Two other sources bring all the facts together and attempt to explain what’s really going on in the Gospels. Here is some of what they have to say.

The following passage is from William Harwood’s Mythology’s Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus:

“By the beginning of the first century BCE there were… just Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees. In modern terms, the Pharisees can be equated with liberals, the Sadducees with conservatives, and the Essenes with communists…. The Pharisees accepted the concept of an afterlife…. Quite hostile to the Pharisees were the Sadducees. These had no belief in an afterlife…. With the coming of the Romans, the Sadducees collaborated with the occupying power…. Sadducees dominated the Sanhedrin…. It is certain that virtually all passages in the Christian gospels that showed Jesus vituperating the Pharisees, whose beliefs he shared, were originally written of the Sadducees…. The Sadducees’ initial policy was to discredit Jesus with the masses…. The Pharisees had no political supremacy to protect, and no other reason for opposing a man who taught their own doctrines. The similarity of Jesus’ totally-Essene teachings and those of the Pharisees can be verified on almost any page of the Talmud, a Pharisaical composition. After the Zealots, the Pharisees were Jesus’ strongest supporters.” (pp. 244-245, 274)

The following passages are from Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity:

“The Gospels portray the Pharisees as the chief opponents of Jesus…. The Gospels also represent Jesus as criticizing the Pharisees most strongly, calling them hypocrites and oppressors. Because of the Gospel picture, the word ‘Pharisee’ has come to be synonymous with ‘hypocrite’ in the Western mind, and the defects attributed to the Pharisees – self-righteousness, meanness, authoritarian severity and exclusiveness – have contributed to the anti-Semitic stereotype and have been assigned to Jews generally. In recent years, many Christian scholars have come to realize that the Gospel picture of the Pharisees is propaganda, not fact…. Far from being arid ritualists, they were one of the most creative groups in history. Moreover, the Pharisees, far from being rigid and inflexible in applying religious laws, were noted (as the first-century historian Josephus points out, and as is amply confirmed in the Pharisee law books) for the leniency of their legal rulings, and for the humanity and flexibility with which they sought to adapt the law of the Bible to changing conditions and improved moral conceptions….

“[I]t may well be asked, ‘if the Pharisees were indeed such an enlightened, progressive movement, why did Jesus criticize them so severely?’ The answer has already been suggested: that Jesus did not in historical fact criticize the Pharisees in the way represented in the Gospels; he was indeed himself a Pharisee. The whole picture of Jesus at loggerheads with the Pharisees is the creation of a period some time after Jesus’ death, when the Christian Church was in conflict with the Pharisees because of its claim to have superseded Judaism. The Gospels are a product of this later period; or, rather, the Gospels consist of materials, some of them deriving from an earlier period, which were edited in an anti-Pharisee sense. Thus it is possible to refute the anti-Pharisee picture in the Gospels themselves, which even after their re-editing retain many details from the earlier accounts which show that Jesus was not in conflict with the Pharisees and was a Pharisee himself. The process of re-editing is not just a hypothesis; it can be plainly seen within the Gospels by comparing the way in which the various Gospels treat the same incident. [A comparison of Mark 12:28-34 with Matt. 22:34-40 follows this.]….

“Since Jesus certainly came into conflict with the High Priest of his day, who was a Sadducee, it would be quite natural for stories to be preserved in which Jesus figures as an opponent of Sadducee religious doctrines…. As it happens, such a story has been preserved in the Gospels about Jesus (Mark 12:18-27 and parallels). The answers given to the Sadducees are typical of those given by Pharisees in their debates….

“What was the motive for the re-editing of stories about conflict between Jesus and the Sadducees so that he was portrayed as in conflict with the Pharisees instead? The reason is simple. The Pharisees were known to be the chief religious authorities of the Jews, not the Sadducees. In fact, at the time the Gospels were edited, the Sadducees had lost any small religious importance that they had once had, and the Pharisees were the sole repository of religious authority…. [I]t was of the utmost importance to the Gospel editors to represent Jesus as having been a rebel against Jewish religion, not against the Roman occupation. The wholesale re-editing of the material in order to give a picture of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was thus essential. Also, since it was known that the Sadducees were collaborators with Rome, any substantial picture of opposition by Jesus to the Sadducees, even on purely religious grounds, would have given an impression of Jesus as an opponent of Rome – just the impression that the Gospel editors wished to avoid….” (pp. 19, 29, 34-35)

There’s much more to these sources and the story they tell than I can relate here. The important thing to remember is this: These sources all agree that the Gospels are wrong. They’re not the perfect word of a supreme being but propaganda written by those who were willing to misrepresent, even libel the Pharisees in order to suck up to the Romans, sell their message, and further their goals. To call such writing “holy” is obscene. To base one’s life on such lies is a tragedy.

If you want to make the world a slightly less obscene and tragic place, please recognize the Gospels for what they are today.

If you want to make the world an even better place, share the truth about the Gospels with someone you know tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. Monday School: Did Jesus Really Exist?
2. Monday School: Nazareth
3. Monday School: Where’s Jesus?

Monday! Time once again for Monday School. Is it STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday”? Yes, yes, oh yesssssssssssss…! And since size doesn’t matter, this time around it just happens to be short. (Please don’t give it a complex by giggling when you see just how short it is. Thank you.)

Today’s Lesson: Some Classes Spice Things Up With Story Problems. Is Monday School Ever Gonna Stop With The Long Lectures And Give Us A Story Problem? Can We Have A Story Problem TODAY? Pleassssse?

Yes, you can have a story problem.

Ready? Here it is:

YOU are the Supreme Being. The Almighty. The Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Eternal Ruler of Everything. (Kinda like gOd, only YOU really exist.)

PAT is a human being – and an atheist.

PAT has just died.

What happens next? Why?

Related posts:

1. Monday School: An Introduction
2. Monday School: Bible Absurdities
3. Monday School: The Bible’s Weird Morality

Charles Panati, for his part, has this to say about the Trinity in his book, Sacred Origins of Profound Things:

“ [A]mong the three great monotheistic religions, only Christianity embraces the Trinitarian Creed: the coexistence of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in a single Godhead, distinctly different, yet one and the same. Little wonder that Romans eavesdropping on early Christians suspected them of idolatry; how many gods did these people worship?

“One might ask – as Jews and Muslims repeatedly have – isn’t it cheating for a religion to claim to be monotheistic if it recognizes three distinctly different Gods? Three Gods; three different names; three different functions…. Should, Muslims suggested, this not be called ‘tritheism’?….

“Significantly, the Christian books of the Bible… make no explicit reference to a threefold Godhead.

“Nor did Jesus, a Jew, perhaps with rabbinical training, violate the Jewish motto – ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” – in his teachings….”

Panati says the task of developing and justifying the concept of the Trinity fell to Tertullian, a lawyer who was born about 160 CE and is famous for having said “I believe because it is absurd!” I get the feeling that Tertullian might have self-consciously attempted to deepen his belief by making Christianity even more absurd by adding his ideas of the Trinity to it.

As Panati makes clear, Tertullian’s work did not meet with universal approval. “For many decades, Church fathers bitterly argued fine points among themselves. Some viewed the Son as secondary to the Father. No one was quite sure how to rank the Spirit.”

Panati continues:

“Critics of Christianity, Romans and Jews alike, charged that the fledgling two-hundred-year-old religion had merely given a new spin to pagan polytheism. Christians, they argued, clearly worshiped three gods. The new Church had to do something decisive…

“Early in the fourth century, the Trinitarian controversy heated to the high point of heresy, pitting two theologians, Athanasius and Arius, against each other and drawing concern from the Roman emperor Constantine himself….

“Back in 320, Arius, who knew Scripture inside out… insisted that Christ, the Word, Logos, could only be a creature like ourselves, created by God. When he put his ideas to music and sang songs of Christ’s second-rank status, thousands of ordinary Christians, once content in their monotheism, became aware of the passionate debate raging among bishops.

“Arius, from his arsenal of textural ammunition, fired off passages to theologians proving Christ was not part of the Godhead…. A key weapon… was a passage in Proverbs that describes divine Wisdom, and states explicitly that God had created Wisdom – the Word, Logos, Christ – at the very beginning. Thus, asserted Arius, Christ, the Word… had been created by God… was essentially different and distinct from God… [and] Jesus Christ was not God’s equal.

“Constantine, troubled by the growing split among theologians, demanded resolution…. Christian bishops gathered at Nicaea on May 20, 325… [and]… after much acrimonious contention, decided upon the crucial formula for the Trinitarian doctrine….

“In fact, the entire lengthy creed, as first written, wrestles with logic and common sense to equate Father and Son, giving nod to the Holy Spirit only in the last passing line: ‘And we believe in the Holy Ghost.’ That’s it. One line… An afterthought. Three hundred years after Christ’s Resurrection and the Latin doctor’s of Christ’s Church still didn’t know what to make of the Spirit who could be a peaceful dove or licking tongues of fire….

“In truth, theologians had not comfortably agreed, and the Arian crisis raged on for the next fifty years.”

But surely things are all settled now – right? Ha!

“The Nicene Creed is professed by the majority of Christians, although some, such as the Baptists, the Disciples of Christ, and the United Church of Christ, refuse to endorse it…” Panati tells us.

My Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions adds this:

“The Orthodox Churches… reject the insertion of FILOQUE into the Nicene Creed.” What is the FILOQUE? “A phrase inserted in the eighth century into the Western text of the Creed of the Council of Constantinople (381), describing the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father ‘and the Son.’ The phrase seemed to Eastern Christians to compromise the Father’s role as sole source of deity and was a major theological factor in the schism between Western and Eastern Churches in 1054.”

Karen Armstrong elaborates in her book, A History of God:

“[I]n 1054 Eastern and Western Churches broke off relations in a schism which has turned out to be permanent…. The conflict had a political dimension… but it also centered on a dispute about the Trinity…. Greeks had always distrusted Augustine’s Trinitarian theology, because it was too anthropomorphic. Where the West began with the notion of God’s unity and then considered the three persons within that unity, the Greeks had always started with the threehypostases and declared that God’s unity – his essence – was beyond our ken. They thought that the Latins made the Trinity too comprehensible[!], and they also suspected that the Latin language was not able to express these Trinitarian ideas with sufficient precision. The filoque clause overemphasized the unity of the three persons and, the Greeks argued, instead of hinting at the essential incomprehensibility of God, the addition made the Trinity too rational…. What the filoque rift had revealed was that the Greeks and Latins were evolving quite different conceptions of God. The Trinity had never been as central to Western spirituality as it has remained for the Greeks…. In later chapters we shall see that Western Christians were frequently uneasy about the doctrine of the Trinity and that, during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, many would drop it altogether. To all intents and purposes, many Western Christians are not really Trinitarians. They complain that the doctrine of Three Persons in One God is incomprehensible, not realizing that for the Greeks that was the whole point” (pp. 200-201).

Many of the key Founding Fathers seem to have rejected the idea of the Trinity as absurd. As Bruce Bawer reminds us in his book, Stealing Jesus, John Adams rejected the 3-in-1 gOd concept as mere superstition. Edwin S. Gaustad’s Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson makes it clear that Jefferson thought his version of Unitarianism was the wave of the future and would soon cast the bizarre trinitarian ideas onto the scrap heap of history.

Richard and Joan Ostling’s Mormon America reveals that “In Mormon theology, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are tritheistic, three separate gods or personages, united in purpose. In the classical Christian Trinity, the three persons are united not only in purpose but in substance, as truly one monotheistic God. Mormons generally dislike the term ‘polytheism,’ generally regarded by non-Mormons as pejorative and pagan; some like to use the term ‘henotheism,’ meaning one head God who is worshiped as supreme while allowing for the existence of other gods.” The Ostlings go on to detail how Joseph Smith’s own understanding seems to have shifted from ditheism to trinitarianism to a plurality of gOds; how Mormon views have continued to evolve in more recent years; and of course how Mormons believe they themselves are going to become gOds in the future.

Peter Occhiogrosso’s The Joy of Sects reminds us that “Christianity may have its Holy Trinity, but it has shed blood insisting that the Three Persons of that Trinity… are really only one God” (p. 201). It quotes Migene Gonzalez-Wippler’s A Kabbalah for the Modern World as saying that “The Holy Spirit is really the Mother, and thus the Christian Trinity properly translated should be Father, Son, and Mother” (p. 243). It points out that Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses reject trinitarianism entirely (p. 368). It traces Unitarianism’s multiple origins back to 16th century anti-trinitarians and the liberal wing of the Congregational church (pp. 392-393).

Occhiogrosso also points out that Hinduism has its own Trinity – the Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva which is often depicted as one figure with three heads facing in different directions (p. 19). Taoism also has its Trinity, or San Ch’ing, composed of the Three Pure Ones who have gone on to become the highest deities of Religious Taoism. In typical religious fashion, however, different Taoist temples disagree about who these Three Pure Ones may be, thus four or fives figures share the honor (p. 179).

Leeming and Page’s God: Myths of the Male Divine (among many other sources) reminds us that the Egyptians had their own “trinity story” featuring Osiris, Horus, and Isis.

It’s all enough to make one’s head spin, isn’t it? Which is exactly the point. Contrary to what Christians often claim, the concept of the Trinity does not make perfect sense (or even imperfect sense); all Christians do not understand it the same way (or even accept it); it had confused, tortuous origins that cannot convincingly be traced back to Jesus; it’s inspired lots of unnecessary confusion, conflict, and angst over the centuries (like many other Christian dogmas); and – like virtually all of the elements of Christianity – it is not unique, being merely one variation on polytheism that was born of religious delusion and has been sustained by emotional and cultural needs and impulses, not logic or empirical evidence.

Please help a Christian friend break free of its madness if and when you can.

(And if you happen to be a Christian who sees the Trinity performing a rooftop concert – or anything else – be sure to take a picture!)

Related posts:

1. Monday School: The Trinity (Part 1)
2. Monday School: The Apostles’ Creed
3. Monday School: God & Satan