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Magi Thoughts, 1

Monday 12 December 2022

I’m reading Dwight Longenecker’s Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men. Longenecker is the pastor of the Catholic church we used to attend here in Greenville, so it’s one of those rare experiences of reading a book whose author you know personally.

Naturally, as a skeptic, I picked up the book with a healthy dose of doubt: I don’t buy the majority of the most basic gospel stories; a fanciful tale of wise men coming from afar, guided by a star, while not as crazy as the idea of a virgin birth, a talking snake, or an apple curse the dooms all humans, is a pretty tough story to sell as historical fact. That is, however, exactly what Longenecker is attempting in the book.

Early in the book, Longenecker begins explaining how so much of the Magi story we’ve come to associate with Christmas is not in the Gospel of Matthew (the only place the Magi appear). At its simplest core, the story is about some wise men who, guided by a star, come to see Jesus at some point after his birth. The camels and the arrival with the shepherds and all the other stuff — that was tacked on later.

Longenecker explains,

Like all good stories, [the Magi story] spread, and as it spread, the simple became embellished, exaggerated, and exploited.

By the Middle Ages the elaborate versions of the Magi story were accepted as historical.

Mystery of the Magi, 24

That sounds awfully similar to skeptics’ view about the development of the New Testament, in particular the stories of the gospels. When you look at the gospels from oldest to news (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John), you see a sort of increasing sense of the supernatural. The stories get more far-fetched. The sayings of Jesus become more philosophical and “deeper.” The miracles increase. In fact, in Mark’s gospel, there isn’t even a post-resurrection appearance: the women go to the tomb, find it empty, and leave afraid. What comes after appears only in later versions of the gospel.

If I were to suggest this to Longenecker, though, I have a feeling he would have a way to explain it away. I doubt I’d be convinced, just as I wasn’t convinced with Hard Sayings. Horn and Longenecker even use a similar rhetorical technique:

  • make a claim that is reasonable but is only an assertion based on logic;
  • explain how it is logical;
  • refer back to it later as established fact.

Hard Sayings and Sunday Conestee Walk

Sunday 13 March 2022

I’m still working my way through Trent Horn’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. I encountered two passages this evening that just left me shaking my head.

The first was about Lot’s behavior in Genesis 19:

The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. 2 “My lords,” he said, “please turn aside to your servant’s house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.”

“No,” they answered, “we will spend the night in the square.”

But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. 4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

“Get out of our way,” they replied. “This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door.

But the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. Then they struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door.

How can Lot be considered righteous when he offered his daughters up to be raped?

Ice from last night’s freeze

Trent explained it, in part, thusly:

Lot’s righteousness is also seen in his hospitality toward strangers, which was a sacred duty in ancient Mesopotamia. In a time when you couldn’t go to a department store for clothes or check in at a motel when you needed shelter, the kindness of strangers could mean the difference between life and death. Lot understood that anyone who slept outside in Sodom was in grave danger of being attacked. Therefore, he offered the city’s visitor’s shelter and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

That, I admit, is at least somewhat reasonable. It seems to be the bare minimum as far as morality goes, but it’s at least a step in a good direction.

But what about Lot’s offer to give the crowd his daughters to be raped? How can that be justified? Surely it can’t.

But that doesn’t stop Horn from trying. The very next sentence:

Even Lot’s misguided decision to offer his daughters to the mob can be seen as an act of hospitality meant to protect the guests dwelling under his roof.

Go back and reread that sentence.

It’s unlikely you’ve ever read apologetics so preposterous. It’s hard to take this book seriously after reading that.

Yet the second passage that floored me this evening makes it clear that the book is not even meant for me, however seriously (or not) I take it.

Crumbling pot

Horn closes one chapter with a quote from Karl Keating:

The Bible appears to be full of contradictions only if you approach it in the wrong way. If you think it is supposed to be a listing of theological propositions, you won’t make heads or tails of it. If you think it is written in literary forms you’re familiar with, you’ll go astray in interpreting it. Your only safe bet is to read it with the mind of the Church, which affirms the Bible’s inerrancy. If you do that, you’ll see that it contains no fundamental contradictions because, being God’s word inspired, it’s wholly true and can’t be anything else.

I have so many issues with this that I don’t know where to begin.

Making new friends

First, I take umbrage with the assertion that there are only three options to approaching the Bible:

  1. reading it as “a listing of theological propositions”
  2. reading it assuming “it is written in literary forms you’re familiar with”
  3. “read[ing] it with the mind of the Church”

None of these approaches accurately describe how I’m reading it. I’m reading it with the claim that it is the word of a god firmly in my mind and then seeing what kind of god appears in its pages.

What Keating (and by quoting him, Horn) is suggesting is that we first assume that the Bible is the word of the Christian god, read and interpret the Bible as the Catholic church instructs, and that will clear up all our difficulties. I’ve never seen such an obvious, almost-celebrated example of begging the question in my life.

And it’s that notion that makes it clear that I am not the intended audience of this book. This book is not intended to respond to skeptics’ concerns; this book is for Catholics who’ve discovered those skeptics and are starting to have doubts. Thus Horn is leaning heavily on his shared assumptions with his audience. He knows that they, at one point or another, at least gave lip service to the proposition that the Bible is inerrant. He’s just calling them back to that notion. He even once admitted that he’s not trying to answer these objections but simply to show that there are possible answers out there. Well, sure, there are possible answers out there, but they’re not terribly convincing — unless you’re a believer starting to feel pulled under by doubt, then they’re a lifeline.

Circles and Spirals

Thursday 10 February 2022

I’m reading Trent Horn’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. He speaks of Karl Keating’s argument for scriptural inspiration, saying “when taken as just a reliable human document, the Bible shows that Christ not only rose from the dead, but that he established a Church built on the apostles.” These apostles “were then able to authoritatively declare the Bible to be the word of God.” So the Bible proves the church and the church proves the veracity of the Bible. That’s called circular reasoning, isn’t it? Horn doesn’t think so.

This is not a circular argument, in which an inspired Bible is used to prove the Church’s authority and the Church’s authority is used to prove that the Bible is inspired. Instead, as Keating says, it is a “spiral argument,” in which the Bible is assumed to be a merely human document that records the creation of a divinely instituted Church. This Church then had the authority to pronounce which human writings also had God as their author.

The level of cognitive dissonance in this statement is absolutely astounding. He can assert that calling it a “spiral argument” somehow removes the circularity of the argument, but in essence, he is still using the Bible to prove the Church to prove the Bible. No Christian ever regards the Bible as “a merely human document.” People regard the Bible as authoritative because they see it as divinely authored. I get that this is a distinctly Catholic explanation of things, but no Catholic ever sees the Bible this way, either. It is, defacto, divinely inspired in their eyes. The so-called divine nature of the Catholic church is in no way illustrated in the pages of the Bible, and we still have the basic problem of Biblical error: how are we to know that that particular portion of the Bible detailing the founding of the church is accurate? In short, we don’t. We have to take that on faith. And who is the one explaining all of this? The Church. So the Church says the Bible is just a humanly written document that proves the Church is divinely inspired, which then proves the Bible is not just a humanly-written document.

It’s almost as convoluted as God impregnating Mary to give birth to God to die to appease God’s anger, which is the story of Christianity in its most simplistic form.

Catholic “Humor”

Saturday 23 October 2021

The group that is putting out the Bible in a Year podcast that I’ve been listening to on and off (mainly off, I must admit) has a social media page for podcast participants. Someone posted a joke about one of the most horrific stories in the Bible, when God commands Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac.

“Wait,” Isaac asks in the meme, “don’t we need a ram?’

The original passage reads,

“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” (Genesis 22.7, 8)

It’s the initial confusion of a boy who’s probably beginning to suspect what’s up but can’t possibly accept it. It’s the confusion of a boy about to experience such trauma that I’m not sure multiple lifetimes of therapy and counseling could heal. It is, in short, the beginning of one of the most horrifying stories in the Bible, a story that non-believers point to as strong evidence of the immorality of the god portrayed in the Old Testament.

In the meme, Abraham answers Isaac’s confusion flippantly, “Not when you’ve got family.”

It’s a screenshot from some film or TV show with which I’m completely unfamiliar, so I’m likely missing something as memes depend often on the disconnect between the visual and the verbal. A quick search reveals the line is from the Fast and the Furious film franchise, something I know absolutely nothing about and have no interest in. Apparently, references to the importance of family in memes stem from these films.

I found the humor disturbing, though. Here’s a man joking about the fact that he’s about to kill his own son. That he was willing to do so in the first place is striking; that the Abraham in the meme is being flippant about it is obscene. So of course I called them on it with a single-word comment: “Disturbing.”

The administrator, though, didn’t like my comment and removed it.

Apparently, I wasn’t being respectful and courteous. They want “all members to feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and opinions about the Word of God” as long as those opinions don’t actually criticize the “Word of God.”

Was the comment disrespectful? I wasn’t criticizing the person, just the idea of the meme, so I don’t see how it was disrespectful.

Did I demean anyone with the comment? Not that I can see.

Did my comment include foul language? No, not at all.

Indeed, it was the meme itself that was disrespectful and demeaning. In making light of such a brutal and barbaric act that a supposed man of God was about to comment, it trivializes the trauma of the story and demeans victims of abuse at the hands of those who are supposed to be protecting them.

I’m sure the common response would be, “Come on, man — it’s just a joke! Relax.” But it makes me wonder how they would react were the roles reversed. Let’s say I share a joke I encountered on Twitter: “When the Holy Ghost impregnated Mary with Jesus, was he shouting ‘Oh me! Oh me! Yes! Yes! Oh me!’?” I don’t think they would be willing to accept the “Come on, man — it’s just a joke! Relax!” argument.

Of course, this “joke” (it’s really not even funny at all) is problematic to believers for two reasons. Most obviously, It’s very disrespectful of one of the central tenants of Christianity, turning it into a crude sex joke. The virgin birth of Jesus is, for some strange reason, very important in traditional Christian theology, and the way this happens is with God himself (in the form of the Holy Ghost) performing the actual impregnation. In no way would this really be thought of as a sexual act. It was a miracle according to Christians. To juxtapose this miracle with the crude image of a sex act demeans the nature of the supposed miracle and makes a mockery of the claim that Jesus was born to a virgin. In truth, it’s not a joke as much as a crude attempt at humor. But that leads to the second reason it’s problematic for believers: It highlights the illogical nature of that central tenant in a way that’s hard to ignore. Due to the dogma of the Trinity, God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost are all just God. So God impregnated Mary with God. That makes Mary both God’s spiritual spouse and God’s mother. That’s illogical and disturbing, and the joke gets at that around the edges by pointing out that the Holy Ghost is also God, so instead of saying “Oh God!” he/it would be declaring “Oh me!” It’s a very unrefined way of making a basic observation: the idea of the Trinity is illogical and makes the incarnation of Jesus a weirdly incestuous act.

In short, believers don’t like having their beliefs mocked, and that joke does that. But what it’s mocking cuts close to the theological bone: it takes a basic tenant of Christianity and says, “Okay, let’s look at it from a purely logical, material point of view.” But in telling this “joke,” I would essentially be mocking Christian teaching and by proxy Christians themselves.

But doesn’t the original meme do that to victims of domestic abuse? Doesn’t it make light of one of the most tragically common and inexcusable crimes humans across all cultures have historically committed? Certainly. But because it’s wrapped in the cloak of religious dogma, many believers are blind to it.

Back to BIAY

Wednesday 19 May 2021

Although I haven’t listened to a Bible in a Year podcast in over a month now, I’m still following a couple of groups on social media. Every now and then, I’ll see something that interests me: someone expresses a doubt or a worry, and I immediately begin listing the ways people will try to help. Sometimes, I make my own comment.

Today I read,

Although I had a lot of children’s bibles growing up, went to catholic school, and go to Sunday church so I know the stories of the Bible for the most part – this is my first time really “reading” the Bible all the way through with BIAY.

And honestly – I’m struggling. Every day it just seems like one depressing story after the next. Every day it’s just horrifying tales, little Joy, and lists of names. Men being awful and women’s lives being ruined. […]

I decided to use the line of reasoning that’s not entirely true at this point in time but was true some months ago:

I had similar problems. So much of the awfulness comes with God’s tacit approval or, worse, at his command. I’ve taken a break, but it’s done serious damage to my faith.

Granted, I’ve rejected faith altogether (again), but I did go through this process. I was wondering (again) how people would respond. Typically, there are a few responses to “Oh, that gory stuff in the Old Testament is troublesome.”

  • It’s for the Israelites, not for all of us.
  • Just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean God approves of it.
  • God in the Old Testament is slowing bringing about moral change. It’s a slow, gradual process. These are the first steps.
  • God said to do it, so it is right. Who are you to judge God?

Eric jumped right in with the tried and true “just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean acceptance” argument, almost word for word:

Assuming the existence of tacit approval is a dangerous move to make. It assumes that because a bad thing is recounted, it is recounted with approval, but that’s just not how biblical texts are written. I’m sorry to hear your faith is wounded, but rest assured God does not approve of immoral actions, even when He brings good out of them.

This reply always frustrates me because it misses the point. I’m not saying that the immoral behavior of various characters is troubling: I’m saying the immoral actions and commands of God are troubling. I replied:

Just look at all the awful punishments he commanded. Look at the genocides he commanded. That goes well beyond tacit approval.

His response? The classic “God said to do it, so that makes it acceptable” line. He didn’t ask me directly “Who are you to judge God,” but it was implicit:

OK so for those, did people other than God make those commands, or was it God, who after all does decide, every day, who lives and who dies? If I commanded that, or my national leader, that would be wrong, but when God commands punishment of people that are very clearly morally in the wrong, isn’t that the one time it’s OK?

It’s important to point out that according to this theory, the only thing that Islamic suicide bombers got wrong was the god. The reasoning behind what they’re doing is sound: God commands it; that makes it right.

Still, I didn’t go that line. I simply asked, “To punish by stoning?”

At this point, Eva jumped in:

God had to do a cleansing, just as he will when Jesus comes again. After all the evil in the world God still gave his son for our salvation. How much more can we ask of God? The world is lucky God is making the decision not mortal man because I as a human would have given up on humans a long time ago.

“God had to do a cleansing” sounds an awful lot like “God had to do an ethnic cleansing,” and that’s because it’s exactly what he does in the Bible. He commands the Israelites to wipe out whole nations. The Bible says it’s because they’re so immoral, but that just sounds like propaganda to me. Add to it the fact that there’s no evidence any of this immorality that keeps appearing in apologist arguments (namely, that the Canaanites burned their children alive as offerings to Ba’al). There’s simply a claim in scripture, which sounds a lot like after-the-fact justification.

Eric also replied, using another of the popular arguments: it’s a gradual movement to a more moral society:

Remember that God was leading his people gradually to an end point. The original moral framework He gave was just the 10 commandments. But when Moses came down Mt. Sinai and the people had sinned, God gave more laws—a lot more. And those extra laws are the ones that contain more age-specific laws that we rightly shake our heads at today.

Jesus himself made this exact point when he said that Moses had allowed things like divorce, it was not b/c that’s how things should be, but b/c that’s what the people were capable of at the time, but it was not always so and hence that’s not the rule now. Laws and commands for a people in 1000BC were tailored by God for them at that time. They weren’t His vision for How Society Should Work; they part of a larger plan for guidance, so they only needed to be Better Than What Came Before. Case in point: the lex talionis “an eye for an eye”. This sounds terrible compared to today, but the comparison we should make is with what proceeded it. “An eye for an eye” was *limiting* revenge to something approaching proportionality. And so on with other decrees of the law of Moses. You absolutely have to judge them in comparison to the societies Israel was surrounded by.

I’m sorry, but stoning someone is not a moral step up from anything. I can’t think of anything that would rank below that. Still, it shows how people fall back on familiar tropes to justify the unjustifiable because the alternative (rejecting the Bible, even in part) is utterly unthinkable.

The Slip

Wednesday 17 March 2021

One thing I love about being a teacher is that I don’t have to know everything. “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer to a student’s question, and I’m not afraid to admit as much. I follow that admission with a promise to find out, or, in some situations, I suggest to the student to do a little research herself.

When you’re a priest leading who knows how many thousands of listeners through 365 days of Bible reading, you’re going to encounter some troubling passages. You’re probably going to do your best to explain them, and sometimes, the explanation might be reasonable. But statistically speaking, you will eventually say something that is so completely outrageous that you’d probably wish you hadn’t said it.

Today Fr. Mike had just such a day reading Numbers 31. It tells the story of God’s command to the Israelites to wipe the Midianites off the face of the earth. What was the Midianite crime? Well, they’d introduced the Israelites to the false god Baal, and the Israelites became so smitten with this new god that at least two of them conducted a fertility ritual in the Holy of Holies — the holiest place on Earth, Fr. Mike explained. It’s a troubling passage, and Fr. Mike struggles to explain it from God’s point of view:

You have to go to battle against the people who have already corrupted you. … You have already been corrupted, so you have to put an end to this. That’s one of the reasons why the warfare there is, like, ‘kill everybody,’ which is really hard for us. And it’s not because God wanted everyone to die. That is not the case. In fact, that kind of warfare would not have existed — this is important for us to understand — that kind of warfare would not have existed if the people of Israel had been faithful. This is so critical for us to note, that that is not the plan of God.

The first problem I have with this is that it’s almost as if Fr. Mike has forgotten the reading from just the other day from Deuteronomy 28.63:

And just as the Lord took delight in making you prosperous and numerous, so the Lord will take delight in bringing you to ruin and destruction; you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to possess.

Killing and bringing things to ruin seem to be what this god enjoys, and he seems to boast about how much he enjoys it. How does Fr. Mike reconcile these two passages? Simple. He doesn’t. He probably didn’t even notice it.

Second, what about the responsibility of the Israelites? If they went astray, the Midianites certainly had something to do with it, but ultimately, it’s the Israelites who went astray, not the Midianites. Fr. Mike is essentially saying that they deserve total eradication because they tempted the Israelites to idolatry. But Fr. Mike tries to deal with this:

They are so weak that they worship other gods. It’s because of the people’s weakness that Moses has to command — and I say, ‘has to command’ because it’s just, like, no other way around their weakness than the kind of total destruction of the Midianites here. We’re going to see this warfare again and again. It can be troubling for us, and that’s okay that it’s troubling for us because it’s not good, right? It’s not good. It’s not what God would ultimately want.

There’s no other way around their weakness?! This is an omnipotent, omniscient god we’re supposedly talking about here. Surely he could figure out another way to deal with this that doesn’t involve wholesale slaughter. Hell, I’m just a stupid human, and I can probably come up with at least half a dozen other ways that don’t involve genocide.

It’s as if Fr. Mike’s version of the OT god is sitting up in heaven going, “Dang, I wish they hadn’t done that. I don’t know what I’ll do about it. Well, I can’t see any alternative to killing them all.” It’s ludicrous. But Fr. Mike doesn’t see the box he put this god into. He just has to explain it.

He can’t say, “I don’t know. I just don’t get it. It seems brutal, and I can’t really understand it myself.” That’s not an option if you approach the reading with an a priori assumption that this book is the perfect word of a perfect being. That assumption forces you into saying utterly stupid things like Fr. Mike.

There’s another little treasure in the reading that Fr. Mike didn’t mention: “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31.17). “Keep the virgins for yourself,” is what this god is saying.

Fear and Trembling

Monday 15 March 2021

Today’s reading included Deuteronomy 28, which is about the blessings and curses that God offered (for lack of a better term) the Israelites. I guess you could say they constituted the terms of the contract. It begins,

If you will only obey the Lord your God, by diligently observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth; all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the Lord your God

Right away, I noticed how this seems to be such conditional acceptance. Fr. Mike argued that this was simply the same as parents do (laying out consequences for actions), but I beg to differ. The consequences are quite harsh, including this gem from verses 54 and 55:

Even the most refined and gentle of men among you will begrudge food to his own brother, to the wife whom he embraces, and to the last of his remaining children, giving to none of them any of the flesh of his children whom he is eating, because nothing else remains to him, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in all your towns

It’s not the first time God has threatened his people with conditions that induce them to cannibalism, but this one notches it up a level somehow. It’s not that they’ll eat each others’ children; they’ll eat their own children and not even share! That sounds like I’m being flippant, and I guess I am — I don’t know how else to react to this but mock the brutal stupidity of it. A god that threatens to do this is somehow good?

Verse 63 states that not only will God do this, he’ll enjoy doing it:

And just as the Lord took delight in making you prosperous and numerous, so the Lord will take delight in bringing you to ruin and destruction; you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to possess.

What does Fr. Mike say about these troubling passages? Not a single word. Why? There’s nothing he can say. There’s no way to excuse it. (I sound like a broken record, but I want to keep an account of all these issues that arise, and this silly blog is the easiest way to do it.)

Finally, though a little earlier (verses 58 and 59) there’s this gem:

If you do not diligently observe all the words of this law that are written in this book, fearing this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, then the Lord will overwhelm both you and your offspring with severe and lasting afflictions and grievous and lasting maladies.

I don’t get this desire to be feared and worshiped. It feels a little like what a despot would want. It feels like it could come from Kim Jong-Un more than an omnipotent, omniscient being.

 

More Fr. Mike

Friday 12 March 2021

We’ve been going through a rough stage with Fr. Mike. It’s stoning, stoning, stoning. I finally got sick of screaming into the wind and joined a discussion group to talk about it.

I struggle greatly with all these passages about stoning. Why would God command such a brutal and barbaric method of execution? I wish Fr. Mike would address that. Thoughts?

People responded, but they tended to be the same thing. Later, more stoning, so I posted again:

Today’s reading was the most shocking thing I’ve ever encountered in the Bible. Stoning your own children because they’re incorrigible?! Does anyone really think there’s any way to defend this command? I think this is the last straw for me.

I’ve heard the same argument so many times now that it’s almost predictable: “But God was dealing with barbaric people in barbaric times.” It’s the justification believers make for the barbaric passages in the Old Testament that so upset our modern moral sensibility. People are commanded to stone rebellious children, stone people who break the sabbath (including a man who was simply picking up sticks), stone women who don’t scream when they’re raped, and genocides are demanded time after time. All those verbs were in passive voice to reflect what seems to be happening in believers’ brains. There is a strange bifurcation that happens that prevents believers from seeing what is startlingly incorrect in their argument.

Their suggestion is that we can’t judge these passages by modern standards because God was working with a barbaric and backward people. He was civilizing them step by step. This argument would be applicable if the passages in question read like this:

Now the Israelites sought a method of punishment for adultery, and they decided that stoning was an adequate deterrent. God saw these things and was displeased at their decisions but understood that it was an improvement over the barbarity they had been displaying. He said, “I will allow this for a time, but know that there are more humane ways of living. I wish to raise you to the highest moral standard, and you will not behave this way forever.”

In other words, it would work if these were acts of free will, acts the Israelites committed of their own volition, acts which God was simply allowing.

But they’re not.

These are God’s commands to the Israelites. These are God’s statutes, God’s requirements, and God’s prescribed punishments. This is God saying, “You shall do this.” What’s more, the god of the Old Testament says over and over that these commands to be kept in perpetuity.

And I’ve yet to see anyone really confront that directly.

Five, Six, Pick Up Sticks

Friday 5 March 2021

Today’s reading with Fr. Mike included Numbers 15, and if I’m writing about it, you can probably guess why: more brutality. Verses 32 through 36 read

When the Israelites were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. Those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses, Aaron, and to the whole congregation. They put him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him outside the camp.” The whole congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.

Fr. Mike knew that this was a troubling passage. I could hear it in his prayer after the final reading:

Father in heaven, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your scripture today. We thank you also for the great wisdom you give to us in helping us understand your word. Lord God, for all the times we are perplexed and troubled — not just perplexed but deeply troubled, even troubled in our heart by you, by your teaching, by what you reveal about yourself, we ask that you give us not only a, not only take away a spirit of skepticism or spirit of cynicism, but you give us a spirit of openness, a spirit of truth and of honesty. A spirit of trust that when we don’t understand, we ask. And when we still don’t understand, we continue to ask. Lord God, give us a spirit of trust. Give us a spirit that is open to whatever it is you will for us this day and every day.

What’s wrong with a spirit of skepticism? Shouldn’t we be skeptical about a great many things? Just look at the news — Qanon, claims of a stolen election, anti-vaxers. There’s plenty we should be skeptical of. Being skeptical just results from being a critical thinker, so I feel like Fr. Mike is asking his god to turn off our critical thinking faculties for this passage.

To his credit, Fr. Mike does try to explain things this time. In the past, he’s just glossed right over it, but he deals with the troubling passage this time:

Remember: the heart of these laws is that God has said, “No, you are my people.” He has set his love upon them. This is so important. These laws, the consequences of sin, the consequences of going against the Lord are so great that they shock us, right? Capital punishment as a violation of the sabbath. For picking up sticks, it says here in Numbers chapter 15.

Then he reviews the passage before continuing,

We can look at that, we can hear that and think, “That is, um, I don’t want to say crazy, but that is something we wouldn’t expect […] out of God’s law. Clearly it’s not something we would expect from the god that is mercy and love. How do we understand this?”

That’s exactly my point: it’s something we wouldn’t expect out of a God that is described as loving and merciful. How do we deal with that contradiction? There are a few options:

  1. Suggest that this is evidence that this god is not loving and merciful.
  2. Suggest that this god’s sense of love and mercy is conditional at best, barbaric at worst.
  3. Suggest that we might not understand it and move on.
  4. Suggest that it is indeed loving and merciful but that we simply don’t understand it.

“It can seem so extreme for us,” Fr. Mike admits, but he simply points out that there is a provision for those who do this unwillingly. They’re not to be executed. It’s only those who do so willingly, flagrantly — those who thumb their noses at this god’s commands. He then suggests that the third tithe

Third tithe mentioned in Deuteronomy 14 somehow makes up for it.

Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.

It can seem “schizophrenic” (his word), but he points out that it’s extremely generous and merciful to take care of widows. That’s what we’d expect from a god of love

I joined a FB group for this Bible in a Year reading plan and posted my concern: “I struggle greatly with all these passages about stoning. Why would God command such a brutal and barbaric method of execution? I wish Fr. Mike would address that. Thoughts?”

One person responded, “That’s what they could understand 3,500 years ago. You can’t read the Bible with a 21st Century lens.” I’ve heard that argument so many times, but I just don’t understand it. From a Christian perspective, if it’s wrong it’s because God says it’s wrong; so if it is wrong in 21st century, it had to be wrong in all time.

I took a slightly different argument in my response, though:

God is not just condoning this. He’s not looking down from heaven and saying, “Well, they’re stoning people now. That’s wrong. I’ll take care of that, but it will take time because they’re so backward now. By the 21st century they’ll have outgrown this.” He commanded it. It was his instruction. There are other ways to kill that they could have easily understood. They would understand, “Hey, don’t stone people. It’s brutal. It’s awful. To execute them, here are some herbs you mix in water. It’s painless and nearly instant.”

At this point, there are lots of likes for the response to my question, little acknowledgment of the content of what I asked. And I get if: I’m asking questions that challenge comfortable belief. I’m asking questions about one of the many things that led me away from belief. I can understand if no one wants to touch it.

The Inevitable Move

Tuesday 23 February 2021

A few days ago, Fr. Mike, on day 50 of his Bible in a Year podcast read Exodus 37 and 38 as well as Leviticus 26. The passages in Exodus all had to do with sacrificial offerings, but the chapter from Leviticus was, in many ways, the most troubling passage in the whole Bible so far. It is, in short, a list of the punishments the god of Old Testament will mete out on Israel if they abandon the proper worship of him, but it presents such a conditional love, which bears all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship that I don’t see how someone can read these chapters and not absolutely cringe.

It begins with a promise of what will happen if they do remain faithful:

“If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall last to the time of vintage, and the vintage shall last to the time for sowing; and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land securely. And I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid; and I will remove evil beasts from the land, and the sword shall not go through your land. And you shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. (Leviticus 26.3-7)

One might question whether this god would be upset to discover that people were worshiping him because they want all the benefits, but this supposedly omniscient being should know that and perhaps work that into the passage. “You must honestly love me and worship me.” Something like that. Still, that’s a trivial point compared to what happens later in the chapter.

By verse 14 it turns quite troubling:

“But if you will not hearken to me, and will not do all these commandments, if you spurn my statutes, and if your soul abhors my ordinances, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant, I will do this to you: I will appoint over you sudden terror, consumption and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away. (Leviticus 26.14-16)

Fr. Mike, in his commentary, explains, “There are consequences for actions. […] He hands them over because he loves them.” If this doesn’t call Israel back to their god, Fr. Mike explains, then their god will let more stuff happen to them until they do turn back to him. “The whole point of this is not punishment,” Fr. Mike assures us. “The whole point of this is rescue.” This is the first problematic idea, and it hits at one of the biggest issues I’ve had with Christianity for some time now. “Rescue” suggests the following:

  • Force A
  • affects entity X
  • and entity Y somehow stops force A by
    • getting rid of force A,
    • removing entity X from the effects of force A, or
    • mitigating the effects of force A.

Within all of this is the idea that force A is separate from entity X doing the rescuing. If I’m beating my son and then stop beating him, I’m not rescuing him. If I’m holding my daughter’s head underwater and then stop holding her head underwater, I’m not rescuing her. It’s only a rescue if someone or something else is doing it, and I somehow stop it.

The problem with Christianity is simple: this god is the one doing the beating; this god is the one holding heads underwater. How so? Simple: Christians frame all this “rescue” as a rescue from the consequences of sin. But the god of Christianity defined sin. He designed the consequences of sin (and everything else) by creating the world as he did. He’s ultimately the victimizer and the savior. That’s not rescuing. That’s a sick relationship.

Putting that aside, though, it’s disturbing to look at the consequences listed in Leviticus, through verse 45:

  • I will bring more plagues upon you, sevenfold as many as your sins.
    This is not a consequence. This is God responding to one’s actions, and with a sort of severity that might even be rare in the mafia.
  • I will let loose the wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number, so that your ways shall become desolate.
    Who is really paying the price if the children are getting devoured by wild beasts? And what kind of relationship does this inspire? We’re just cowering in fear of what this being might do to us.
  • I will walk contrary to you in fury, and chastise you myself sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.
    What!? God here is saying he will, in fury, bring such desolation that the Israelites will turn to cannibalism. Will he be like with Pharaoh in Egypt? Remember: several times Pharaoh agreed to let the Israelites go, but according to Exodus, “God hardened his heart” so that he would change his mind. Is God going to harden the hearts of the Israelites to make them turn to cannibalism, or will things just get so bad that they won’t feel they have any choice? (And when would a parent ever really feel that way?)
  • And I will devastate the land, so that your enemies who settle in it shall be astonished at it.
    The implication earlier is that Israel’s enemies will do all this destroying, but here it seems to indicate that God doing it. After all, the enemies come and are astonished, presumably at the brutality which has swept through the land.
  • And as for those of you that are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues.
    Again, God does this, not the enemies. He seems to be suggesting that he’ll make them such cowards that they’ll be eradicated.

How does Fr. Mike explain all this? He makes the move I’ve been waiting for him to make the whole time, really the only move he can make: The fact that it doesn’t seem right is our fault. “We just need to trust God and understand that there is an answer to all these questions,” he argues:

This is the discipline of a father, and this is so important to us. You know, when we approach scripture, and we don’t trust God, we see these things and go, “Wow, that’s crazy. I’m done with this. Day 50, that’s it. I’m out.” But when we approach the word of God, and we have that spirit of trust where it’s like, “Okay, if I don’t understand this, it must be me that doesn’t understand this.”

If I begin to be suspicious of God, and I say, “Wait, let me pause. God is a good dad. And while I don’t understand what he’s doing here or not doing there, I have to look at him, look at life, look at myself through the lens of ‘Okay, God is a good dad.’ So why would a good Dad allow these punishments to come upon those who are disobedient?” Well, because, like any good dad, like any good parent, I want more for you than just your comfort. I want more for you than for you to just go about your life and do whatever it is you want to do. I want the best for you.

So this is God, who is the good dad. And he says, “I want the absolute best for my children, so if they refuse to walk in my ways and walk contrary to me, here’s the consequences. Because I want to bring them back to my heart.”

But how do we know that this god is a “good dad,” as Fr. Mike suggests? It hits at the very heart of the question of theism: how do we know anything about this supposed being? All Christians claim to know about him comes from three sources:

  1. Personal experiences with what we call the divine.
  2. What the church teaches about this being (and here I have in mind the Catholic idea that the Bible and the church are equal authorities).
  3. What the Bible says about this thing we call the divine.

Personal experiences are just that: personal. If you have a warm feeling in your heart, that’s all you know. To attribute it to the Holy Spirit or anything else is interpretation and therefore highly subjective. In this sense, the believer is putting faith in herself and her interpretation of her inner experience. The other two sources, though, inform that faith.

What the church says about its god is just what other people say about, and so ultimately the believer is putting her faith in these other people.

The Bible is just a book. Nothing more, nothing less. If believers purport it to come from the hand of their god, there should be evidence of some sort in the book itself. The safest way to approach it, then, is to look at the Bible and ask, “What sort of god is presented in its pages?” From this reading in Leviticus, it seems a stretch to say that this being is in any sense “good.” He’s vindictive, envious, and petty at best and ghastly, wretched, and unspeakably cruel at worst.

So where does Fr. Mike get this “good dad” stuff? Simple: it’s his working preconception. He’s making assumptions about the Bible before he reads the Bible, and he’s suggesting believers do the same. And to be fair, what else are they going to do? If they’re committed to his idea that their god is good, they have to approach it with that assumption, and no one really wants to worship an evil god. In addition, if they were raised in the church, they were taught that their god is a good and loving god long before they can read the Bible for themselves and see all these terrors.

It is here that the true horror of the situation enters, for it is here that believers being to look like spouses in an abusive relationship. Take what Fr. Mike said about his god and reframe it: imagine that Fr. Mike is an abused wife and his god is the husband:

If I begin to be suspicious of my husband, and I say, “Wait, let me pause. My husband is a good husband. And while I don’t understand what he’s doing here [with all the unspeakable abuse mentioned earlier] or not doing there, I have to look at him, look at life, look at myself through the lens of ‘Okay, my husband is a good a good husband.’ So why would a good husband allow these punishments me? It must be because I am disobedient.” Well, because, like any good husband, he wants more for me than just my comfort. He wants more for me than for me to just go about my life and do whatever it is I want to do. He wants the best for me.

That is classic victim-blaming. Worse: it’s victim self-blame. “My husband beats me because I deserve it. It’s for a greater good, and if I don’t understand that, it’s just because I’m not as smart as he is.”

If any of our friends spoke this way, we would encourage her to go to a shelter immediately with her children. But Christians simply stay in this relationship. They believe they deserve it because of Original Sin and their own short-comings. How many times have I heard Christians talk about how wretched they are? “Amazing grace, that saved a wretch like me.”

Most Christians would respond, I think, by saying, “That’s the Old Covenant. Look at how beautiful the New Covenant is! That’s where I draw my faith. Jesus saved us from all of that!” Yet the response to this is so simple that even a child can make it — and has. “But that’s the same god!” These are not different entities. The Christian doctrine of the trinity paints them into a corner, and they fail to see that it’s happened. In doing so, it makes the relationship even more toxic.

I, for one, got out of that relationship, and I feel so much better for it.

Blasphemy

Wednesday 17 February 2021

“I listened to Fr. Mike already,” I told K this morning. I listened to the Bible in a Year podcast while making lunch and breakfast. It’s the best time for me to listen to it: K is taking a shower, and usually I’m alone.

“Was it interesting?”

“Well, more killing, killing, killing.”

Today, Fr. Mike covered Leviticus 24, and verses 10-16, in particular, stood out to me:

Now an Israelite woman’s son, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the people of Israel; and the Israelite woman’s son and a man of Israel quarreled in the camp, and the Israelite woman’s son blasphemed the Name, and cursed. And they brought him to Moses. His mother’s name was Shelo′mith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan. And they put him in custody, till the will of the Lord should be declared to them.

And the Lord said to Moses, “Bring out of the camp him who cursed; and let all who heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him.  And say to the people of Israel, Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. He who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him; the sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.

It struck me that this is a particularly tricky passage because there’s no set definition for blasphemy. Sure, the Israelites would have codified some definition of blasphemy, but ultimately, it’s a relative thing. Just look at the definition the Oxford dictionary provides: “the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things; profane talk.” Sacrilege is simply profane talk: treating something that is sacred as if it were not. If that’s the case, then even highly religious people commit blasphemy all the time — in someone’s eyes. It seems that if God wanted to make sure that people weren’t getting stoned for saying “gosh,” which is really a euphemism for “God,” that this ultimate punishment was saved for at least a more heavy-handed approach, like calling someone a God-damned idiot. (Would that be blasphemy? I was just using the term to quote a hypothetical person in a hypothetical situation — but is that blasphemy?)

 

Forever Throughout Your Generations

Tuesday 16 February 2021

Today, Fr. Mike went through Exodus 32 and Leviticus 23. The passage in Exodus deals with the golden calf that the Israelites started worshiping. Fr. Mike also pointed out that this is where the Levitical priesthood is born, in verses 25-29:

And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose (for Aaron had let them break loose, to their shame among their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me.” And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together to him. And he said to them, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Put every man his sword on his side, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.’” And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men. And Moses said, “Today you have ordained yourselves[a] for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, that he may bestow a blessing upon you this day.”

Adoration of the Golden Calf, by Nicolas Poussin

So what made the tribe of Levi so special that priests could come only from them? They slaughtered a bunch of me who were stupid enough to worship a damn cow that they themselves had made. I mean, it’s no secret where the cow came from. The chapter begins with a command from the people: “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron, and said to him, ‘Up, make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.'” These idiots see the idol being made and then turn right around and credit it with their deliverance from Egypt. They’re simple people at best. They’ll literally worship just about anything. God should have had pity on their stupidity, but instead, he had Moses kill a bunch of them.

At first, God wants to kill them all, but Moses talks him down from that ledge:

But Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does thy wrath burn hot against thy people, whom thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou didst swear by thine own self, and didst say to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it for ever.’” And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people.

It’s amusing that the way Moses talks God out of killing them is by appealing to God’s pride. “I mean, look — you’re going to seem foolish if you deliver all these people from Egypt and then just kill them.” Strangely enough, though God never changes according to the Bible and never does evil (also according to the Bible), he “repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people.”

Now how does Fr. Mike deal with these difficulties? Simple — he doesn’t. He talks about how we like to make God into an idol that we can control. We put him in our pocket and then take him out when times are tough. That’s a fair enough assessment, I think, but it doesn’t really deal with the weirdness of the passages he read for us today.

The other passage today was Leviticus 23, which deals with the feast days God wants people to celebrate. “These are the appointed festivals of the Lord, the holy convocations, which you shall celebrate at the time appointed for them” (verse 4). Obviously, Christmas and Easter aren’t in there, but a whole bunch of feasts that I grew up celebrating are, and I grew up celebrating them for a very simple reason: the Bible says to do so, and nowhere in the New Testament does it say to stop celebrating them.

Indeed, the passages requiring them are quite specific that these are ordained for all time:

  • Verse 14 is about the offering of First Fruits: “You shall eat no bread or parched grain or fresh ears until that very day, until you have brought the offering of your God: it is a statute forever throughout your generations in all your settlements.”
  • Verse 21 is about the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost): “This is a statute forever in all your settlements throughout your generations.”
  • Verse 31 is about Atonement: “You shall do no work: it is a statute forever throughout your generations in all your settlements.”
  • Verse 41 is about the Feast of Tabernacles (Booths): “You shall keep it as a festival to the Lord seven days in the year; you shall keep it in the seventh month as a statute forever throughout your generations.”

Recall Zachariah 14:16 from a few days ago: “Then every one that survives of all the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of booths.” It seems pretty clear that God is ordaining these celebrations for all times and all people. Why don’t most Christians celebrate them anymore?

Fr. Mike, of course, did not deal with that. And I can’t really blame him: this is “The Bible in a Year” podcast, not “The Bible in a Year for Skeptics” podcast. But it does illustrate one tendency I’ve noticed about believers. Those tricky parts, those troubling parts — they don’t see them. Even when they’re there in front of them, they don’t see them.

“God is mysterious,” and it’s all taken care of.

More Silence

Saturday 13 February 2021

Earlier, Fr. Mike explained that the reason Christians are to follow some of the Old Testament commands and disregard others is a question of audience. Some were meant to be only for Israel while others are clearly meant for everyone. He tried to elaborate it with an example about homosexuality in the Bible in which he pointed out that the text points out that the nations surrounding Israel “defiled” themselves in this way (I guess by showing tolerance to the gay community) and that Israel was not to do the same. Thus, Fr. Mike contended, it was clearly meant for those other nations as well. That’s how he explained away the command not to wear clothes of mixed fabrics but insisted that the prohibitions against homosexuality were still binding.

Alright, so let’s take that as a given for the sake of argument. I don’t think the point stands: I think it’s just a bunch of verbal sleight-of-hand (I know — horribly mixed metaphor). There’s nothing in the text that explicitly even suggests that some of these laws are binding for all people and some are not. Most Christians today don’t keep the OT feasts like the Feast of Tabernacles (also known as the Feast of Booths) even though Zechariah 14:16 states, “Then every one that survives of all the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of booths.” If anything seems directed toward all people, this surely is. By Fr. Mike’s logic, then, Christians should still be keeping at least observe the Feast of Tabernacles/Booths. Be all that selective-application-of-a-dubious-hermeneutic as it might be, let’s just take for the sake of argument that Fr. Mike’s interpretative principle is sound. What do we make of today’s reading, then?

Leviticus 20 is a brutal chapter. It lists the penalties for various infractions of the law. Most commonly, the penalty is death, and that death, most commonly, is by — guess! bet you’ll never guess it right! — stoning.

It starts out with a fairly disturbing command: “The Lord said to Moses,  ‘Say to the people of Israel, Any man of the people of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, who gives any of his children to Molech shall be put to death; the people of the land shall stone him with stones'” (verses 1 and 2). This giving of children to Molech was always explained as child sacrifice. So it’s disturbing that child sacrifice is such an issue (or potential issue) that right out of the gate, the first penalty deals with this. We might think, “Well, that’s good. At least this god has the children’s good in mind.” That reassuring thought disappears as soon as we read verse three, though: “‘I myself will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, defiling my sanctuary and profaning my holy name.'” So it’s not that they committed this awful cruelty to children, it’s not that they betrayed their responsibilities as parents, it’s not that they tortured children — no, it’s all about this god. Burning children is bad because it profane’s this god’s name. That’s just sick.

From that auspicious start, we have a whole litany of death:

  • In verse 9, we’re instructed to kill incorrigible children: “For every one who curses his father or his mother shall be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother, his blood is upon him.”
  • In verse 10, we’re instructed to stone adulterers: “If a man commits adultery with the wife of[a] his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.”
  • Verses 11 and 12 as well as 14 through 21 deal with the penalty for various forms of incest and beastiality. Death, of course.
  • Verse 27 deals with those who supposedly talk to the dead: “A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them.”

As a side note, many people have demonstrated that this “talking to the dead” nonsense is just that — it’s cold reading. Derren Brown has walked into a room and convinced people he was talking to the dead just after saying to the camera, “I’m going to go in there and make them think I’m talking to the dead, but I’ll be doing no such thing.”

It’s verse 13, though, that stands out when juxtaposed to what Fr. Mike said earlier: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.” This is a clear condemnation of homosexuality. The question is this: if the prohibition of homosexuality is to be interpreted as universal, why shouldn’t the punishment be likewise?

Verses 22 through 24, though, is even more interesting, for it seems to demolish Fr. Mike’s whole distinction between universal and non-universal application of the Old Testmant law:

“You shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and do them; that the land where I am bringing you to dwell may not vomit you out. And you shall not walk in the customs of the nation which I am casting out before you; for they did all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. But I have said to you, ‘You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey.’ I am the Lord your God, who have separated you from the peoples.”

Fr. Mike argued that the earlier condemnation of homosexuality was universal because it was set in opposition to what the surrounding nations tolerated, but these verses do the exact same thing for all God’s commands.

So what does Fr. Mike in his post-reading reflection say about all this brutality? How does Fr. Mike deal with the verse that seems not just to undermine his earlier argument but to demolish it completely? Simple: he says nothing. He instead focuses on the other reading for the day, Exodus 27 and 28, which deal with the priestly garments, and he talks about his own experiences wearing modern priestly garments.

It’s not a problem if you don’t acknowledge it…

Emissions and Lapidation

Tuesday 9 February 2021

“That can be a very challenging, challenging reading,” Fr. Mike begins today’s commentary, which I take to mean something like, “It’s really tough to explain away these passages that seem so barbaric or seem so weirdly obsessed with relatively unimportant things. They seem to challenge the very goodness and wisdom of the god we worship.” The reading was Exodus 22 and Leviticus 15, and he says that the Exodus reading seems to be more commonsensical.

The first part of the chapter has to do with the laws of restitution — things like what to do if your bull gores another animal. That type of thing. Fr. Mike discusses these laws fairly quickly, and he’s probably right: they are fairly commonsensical in a way. These passages, Fr. Mike explains are “revealing something about God’s heart.” These are “the principles according to justice.”

What he says not a word about are the instructions in the latter half of the chapter, particularly the first set of so-called social and religious laws:

“If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed, and lies with her, he shall give the marriage present for her, and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equivalent to the marriage present for virgins.

“You shall not permit a sorceress to live.

“Whoever lies with a beast shall be put to death.

“Whoever sacrifices to any god, save to the Lord only, shall be utterly destroyed.” (Exodus 22 16-20)

We’re to stone incorrigible children. We’re to stone witches. We’re to stone those who change religions. Stoning is such a brutal, barbaric punishment that the fact that not only does this god justify it (“I’d rather you not do it, but I guess if you do it in these situations it’s alright”) but simply commands it — that thought alone disqualifies this god of anything other than contempt from right-thinking people, from people who have a modicum of empathy and decency.

These are, remember, the “principles according to justice” instead of vengeance; this god is all about making sure the punishment fits the crime. So apparently, taking your child out, burying him to the waist, and bludgeoning him to death with stones is a just punishment. Stoning is appropriate for the imaginary crime of sorcery. And just as we see in Islam, the punishment for leaving the faith is — you guessed it — stoning.

Remember, too, that these things, according to Fr. Mike, “reveal something about God’s heart.” What it reveals to me is simple: this is not a just god; this is not a decent god.

But it is the god presented in the Bible, so all this behavior must be justified. We have to explain away this barbarity somehow. How does Fr. Mike justify it? Simple: he just doesn’t comment about it at all. Not a word about any of the commands to stone anyone. Not one word.

He does go into detail about the passage in Leviticus, which is what all we’re to do regarding menstruating women and semen-spilling men. It reads like this:

“And if a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening. And every garment and every skin on which the semen comes shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the evening. If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the evening. (Lev. 15.16-18)

This is what the creator of the universe, the ground of all being, is concerned with: what to do after a wet dream.

Fr. Mike explains it this way: “The bodily emissions are important why? Because life is in the blood. They’re important because they refer to very intrinsic and necessary parts of our relationships.” But why would there be rules about this? Fr. Mike explains,

[It] is because the body is sacred. The emissions of the body refer to life but also because this particular kind of emissions of the body have to do with sex, have to do with reproduction, have to do with relationships. […] There’s some kind of guidance, some kind of restraint again placed upon people when a) they are engaged in sexual acts with one another, and b) they’re in community with each other. And this is just part of the genius of God’s word. God’s word is saying “we’re going to show restrait.” And that restraint is not for restraint’s sake alone and also not like “oh, gross!” — that’s not what uncleanness means. Uncleanness simple means whether this is an issue of blood, an issue of seman, whaterver this is, those are things that can bring forth life. But because they bring forth life, we have to be careful around them. This is something that’s so important for us to rediscover in the twenty-first century that because there are things so connected to life we need to be careful around them.

What does that even mean? Why would we “be careful”? In what sense would we “be careful”? Is he talking about being careful with sex? I guess that’s what he means, but the Levitical passages aren’t solely about sex; they’re about menstruation and simply ejaculation (not necessarily during coitus). It all just becomes a big confusing bundle of squishy words that don’t seem to mean anything.

I feel like he’s just providing an answer that he knows, consciously or unconsciously, is vague but will communicate enough to reassure believers who are troubled by this passage. They might not even understand it, but it gives them something to calm their worries about this passage. I can even hear someone saying something like this, then appending it with, “I’m not sure I explained it right. Fr. Mike does it better. You should just listen to the podcast.”

Header image is a still from the film The Stoning of Soraya M.

Slavery in the Bible

Monday 8 February 2021

K asked me to listen along with her has she goes through Fr. Mike Schmitz’s podcast The Bible in a Year. I’ve been eager to see how Fr. Mike deals with the more troubling parts of the Bible, and today, he hit Exodus 21, which deals with how to treat slaves:

“Now these are the ordinances which you shall set before them. When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for life.

“When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt faithlessly with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money. (Ex 21.1-11)

Fr. Mike explains it this way: it’s a difficult passage, but it’s important to understand Old Testament slavery in the proper context:

He’s not revealing himself to a people who knows who he is. […] He’s not revealing himself to a people who, for lack of a better term, are civilized. He’s revealing himself to a people who are familiar with a kind of Wild West justice. He’s revealing himself to a people who have a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong but don’t necessarily know how to pursue what’s right and what’s wrong in a way that’s absolutely just and fair. […] He’s teaching them, “I am a god of justice, a god who does hear the cry of the poor.”

Yet Fr. Mike contends that because slavery was so common in the ancient world, God had to take baby steps with them. First of all, slavery then wasn’t what we think of slavery. It was more like indentured servitude. So it’s slavery, but not slavery slavery. Next, he contends that God had to teach the Israelites that you can’t just do anything you want to your slaves. They’re human beings. That’s all fine and good, I guess, but it seems to me that that’s a pretty basic step, a pretty small step. Add to it the dimension of sexual slavery (“If she does not please her master”) and the thought of selling one’s daughter into this sexual slavery — it’s just astounding that someone can justify this.

More problematic is the realization that, if God was just taking these “baby steps,” we would expect to find an outright prohibition of slavery somewhere later in the Bible. After all, Christians are fond of explaining that Jesus did away with all that Old Testament stuff when he instituted the New Testament. And it seems to have caught on: Paul writes in Galatians 3.28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Surely that’s the next step implied by this baby-steps argument.

It’s hard, then, to understand why Paul himself would contradict himself and walk back this argument in Ephesians 6.5-8

Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good any one does, he will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.

Even more troubling is the whole letter to Philemon, in which Paul returns a slave to his master In verses 12-18, he writes,

I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel; but I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own free will.

Perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother, especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account.

Here would be a perfect chance to condemn and prohibit slavery. Here would be the perfect location to take that final step started with those baby steps in the Old Testament. Here would be the place to say something like this:

I am not sending him back to you. I would have been glad to keep him with me, but I gave him the choice to stay or to go, and he, being a free man not just in Christ but because slavery is itself vile and immoral, chose to leave. I preferred to do nothing without your consent, but because he has his own rights and liberty, I told him to go his own way.

Perhaps this is why he was parted from you, that you might realize how vile slavery is and repent of this evil. Understand me now: there is no place in the body of Christ of slavery of any kind, of any shape, of any definition. So if you consider me your partner, receive this news as you would receive me. If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, he paid it off long ago.

There. I fixed it.

Belief

Friday 19 August 2005

There’s something fascinating about the character of Barabbas in the Bible. He is the ultimate Christian type for all humanity, for Jesus literally dies for him according to the Gospels. Though the tradition is recorded nowhere outside the Bible, the Gospels tell us that it was the custom to release one prisoner around Passover time, and the crowds (who through the centuries become simply “Jews”) demand Barabbas be released and Jesus crucified.

Par Lagerkvist wrote a novella in the 1950’s about Barabbas after the crucifixion, about his desire to believe, to convert to Christianity, but his inability to go through with it. He sees Jesus crucified; he’s at the tomb at Easter (though of course he doesn’t see the resurrection, simply the empty tomb afterwards), and yet he still doesn’t believe.

It’s the curse of modern times — a will to believe and yet an inability to do so. Winifred Galligher writes of this in Working on God. The modern solution, Rabbi Burton Visotzky tells Galligher, is a fight:

[Belief] may be the battle of your life, but emotionally and intellectually, it could also be the most exhilarating one you’ve ever engaged in. Whether you experience God’s reality or are just intellectually intrigued by the idea, God can be a very real force in peoples’ lives – spiritual, emotional, supportive – that almost no other system can offer. But you must gird yourself for a fight and know that you’re going to have to try to reconcile very difficult things. Or at least hold them in suspension and bounce them back and forth and get tired. There’s no quick fix, but we have the benefit of drawing on thousands of years of religious thinking. You can’t learn it over a weekend. It’s an engagement for the rest of your life. (261)

More so than during Kierkegaard’s life, it boils down, for some, to a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. Evolutionary theory and the general advances of some sciences make belief unbelievable, but for some there’s always an intellectual draw toward the idea of a great Something More.

Barabbas probably believed in a Something More. He was, after all, a first-century Jew and by many accounts, a Zealot, hoping an overthrow of Roman control over Jerusalem would hasten the Messiah’s return. What Langerkvist’s Barabbas is struggling for is not a believe in God, but a belief that he himself saw God in the flesh, however oxymoronically that might have seemed then, or still seem now. Langerkvist’s Barabbas then is a parable of someone who is having trouble trusting a first hand experience of what others called the divine.

If it was that difficult for him, think how much more so it must be for us, separated 20 centuries from the historical object of faith.

“I want to believe.” That seems to be the cry of many in the twenty-first century. William James argued that that very will to believe was sufficient in some situations, namely those like religion which cannot be concluded on purely rational grounds.

Why believe, though? There are those of us who are torn, who sometimes think it would be wonderful to fall on their knees in thankful prayer but mostly think religion is an antiquated relic that will pass with time. It’s the experiential factor that is most unnerving for such folk:

Let’s not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church here. The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there. The physical experience of being in a crowd of largely humble people, heads bowed, murmuring prayers, stories told in stained-glass windows … (Interview with Bono, from U2)

Seeing others people’s faith used to make me shake my head in disbelief. “How can people be so gullible, so naïve?” I used to think. But the older I get, the more fascinating it is, especially hearing the echo of five hundred people reciting the creed that’s been the backbone of Christian belief for centuries.

Mindless repetition for some, but looking at some folks’ faces, it’s easy to see the depth of belief there.

Sola Scriptura

Wednesday 7 July 2004

Having been raised a Protestant and now marrying a Catholic, I’ve been thinking about the nothing of “sola scriptura.”

The facts about sola scriptura as I see them:

  1. The Gospels were probably written by and large after Paul’s epistles. Paul no where makes mention of the Gospels. Therefore, any of Paul’s passages that are taken as proof of sola scriptura cannot be referring to the Gospels.
  2. Paul’s letters were not collected into anything canonical during his lifetime, nor were the other epistles. They were circulated from church to church. Therefore, any of Paul’s passages that are used to prove sola scriptura also cannot be referring to any of the pastoral epistles.
  3. The Gospels are purportedly reporting what Jesus said — in theory (and in faith), they report what happened before either Paul’s epistles or the Gospels were written. Therefore, anything in the Gospels taken as proof of sola scriptura cannot be applied to the New Testament.
  4. The recognition for the need of an authorized list of New Testament books (i.e., canonization) did not emerge until the middle of the second century. The Old Testament canon, however, was handed down from Judaism. That, combined with the above points, means any reference in the New Testament to “Scripture” is a reference to the Old Testament.
  5. Because of lack of canonized testimony about Jesus, early Christians based their faith primarily on oral traditions and the Old Testament.

Does this justify the Roman Catholic position on tradition? Certainly not. But it does make headway in showing the Protestant notion of sola scriptura is not Biblically based, nor logical.
Sola scriptura is even more troubling when we think about all the extra-Biblical beliefs and practices that Protestants engage in:

  1. Christmas
  2. Easter
  3. Sunday worship
  4. The Trinity
  5. Prohibition of polygamy
  6. The use of the cross as a Christian symbol
  7. Rejection of the Jewish festivals

The Trinity is a special case, because Protestants argue that the Bible does teach that there is a Trinity, it just doesn’t use that term. But Armstrongism, Mormonism, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses show that such a conclusion doesn’t necessarily have to follow — not to mention all the early heresies.

Circumcision and the Bible, Part 2

Friday 19 March 2004

Suddenly spring arrives in full force. The snow has just about all disappeared—all that remains is the big mountains of it. Birds are singing outside, and I’d forgotten how the first birds of spring sound. I just lay in bed this morning for a little while listening to them.

Returning to the quote from Romans above: “The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker.” When I read that, I think, “You know, Armstrongites have a point: it wasn’t just all love this love that.” And further I wonder if Christians (Catholics included) don’t just pick and choose the things they want to obey.

The problem is in the Bible itself, for after having made such a big deal out of keeping the law, Paul writes in Romans:

Do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to men who know the law—that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives? For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man. So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God (7.1–3).

This is the kind of stuff that the new WCG points out to the old Armstrongites and says, “See, the law doesn’t count now!” And yet the author of this had just finished going on and on about the law. So the problems arise from people trying to interpret a faulty book that contradicts itself at every turn.

Later, we find this:

What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “Do not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead.

Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.

So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.

Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

All I can say is, “What the hell is he trying to say?!” Paul is supposes to be this erudite but this is just nonsense. “Through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful?” Has he personified sin, like he personifies death sometimes? That’s like saying, “So that black might become utterly black.”

I swear, I try to read the Bible with an open mind, I try not to take preconceptions to it, but it continually shows itself to be nonsense.