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Miracles and Belief

Thursday 9 September 2021

A priest in a local parish recently included in his homily a quote that appears to be a variant of something Thomas Aquinas said. The priest phrased it thusly: “For those who don’t believe, no miracle is enough; for those who believe, no miracle is necessary.” Aquinas’s quote is a little different: “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The order is different, but the idea is the same.

The quote has a certain rhetorical symmetry to it, a certain parallel structure that makes it resonate in believers’ minds. That symmetry makes it more memorable, and that memorableness combined with its emotional resonance means it will stick.

The quote will seem clever as well. In believers’ view, it encapsulates both the weakness of the skeptic’s position and the strength of the believer’s. It creates a simple juxtaposition that both validates their own position and invalidates the position of opponents. In short, it’s the perfect rhetorical flourish believers can take home with them and use when talking to or about skeptics.

Like many rhetorical constructions, however, this one ultimately fails because of its oversimplification of both sides of the structure. From the skeptic’s point of view, it represents neither the skeptic’s position nor the believer’s position accurately. It is filled with generalizations and question-begging most believers would not notice.

The first part of this quote deals with skeptics. The assertion is that no miraculous event could convince the skeptic. There is some degree of truth to that. Were someone to rise from the dead, for example, the skeptic’s first response would not be, “Oh, this is possible proof of God’s existence.” Rather, she would begin looking for natural explanations. Even if no natural explanation were obvious, the skeptic would not default to a supernatural explanation. Rather, the skeptic would simply say, “We don’t know.” So in that sense, the assertion is correct: it’s doubtful that anything so puzzling could happen that a skeptic would move beyond a simple “I don’t know” into a theistic explanation based on the supernatural suspension of natural laws.

Believers, though, already primed for belief, eagerly accept as miraculous anything they can’t understand. It’s the argument from incredulity, which could be framed thusly: “I don’t understand how this could happen, therefore God must have done it.” Much creationist theorizing that attempts to refute the clear evidence of evolution lies along these lines.

This is no to say theists are not willing to admit ignorance. Indeed, when pressed on contradictions in their faith, the fall-back position is often simple: “God is a mystery.”

“Why would a loving god allow such suffering among children who can gain nothing from it and who simply suffer?” the skeptic asks.

“I don’t really know. I just know God has a plan, and that this is somehow part of that plan,” the believer responds.

The second element of the quote in question that we need to examine is the nature of miracles: A miracle is the suspension of natural laws. Yet because it is is it a suspension of natural laws, there’s no way to test a miracle to prove that it is a miracle. All of our knowledge is bound up in the natural laws that govern the universe. The suspension of those laws in order to create a miracle would be indistinguishable from a new law or principle we have yet to discover, and as miracles are one-time events, there’s no way we could test it to prove that it was not, in fact, some bizarre quantum event but instead a miracle. So in that sense, this assertion is correct: because skeptics generally deny the possibility of miracles, it would not even be an option.

Yet if the purpose of miracles was to convince skeptics, an omniscient god would know exactly what it would take to convince a skeptic. The Christian god’s very characteristics make this merely a question of will: if this god exists and it wants a skeptic to believe, it knows what it would take and would merely need to do this. The fact that it doesn’t suggests — again, if it exists — that it chooses not to, that it doesn’t want to.

The quote from the believer’s side is quite disingenuous, but it’s not immediately obvious. It states that “for those who believe, no miracle is necessary.” This suggests that miracles are secondary to some other method of conviction. But if we’re discussing Christianity (as the priest obviously was and as Aquinas was), the entire religion is based on faith in a central miracle: the resurrection of an executed first-century Jew. So in fact, the quote has it exactly backward: the central tenant of the Christian belief system is a miracle.

When discussing why they believe in this miracle, Christians point to accounts of the event in the New Testament and to personal experiences they claim to have had with “the risen Christ.” In order to accept the accounts in the New Testament, one has to have a certain degree of confidence in the accuracy of the New Testament’s accounts, and given the fact that there is not a single eye-witness account in the whole collection of books but instead multiple second- and third-hand accounts decades after the event, most skeptics find the Biblical evidence weak at best.  On the other hand, to accept the authenticity of a believer’s accounts of personal inner experiences with Jesus, skeptics must necessarily accept that believer’s interpretation of that inner event. No one would doubt that the believer had that moment of clarity, that experience of warmth and love that they claim. However, just because a believer had that experience doesn’t mean that experience came from some god or other. Believers are often looking for reasons to believe: they’re looking for miracles large and small. They’re seeking these quasi-mystical experiences with their god. Since they’re looking for them, they often find them. As Augustine of Hippo said, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

Yet a believer is likely to protest that such an analysis is going too far. “It’s about skeptics’ calls for miracles to aid in belief now. ‘God, give me a miracle so I believe!’ skeptics proclaim, but this quote is suggesting that’s not necessary for believers.” Skeptics are skeptical, though, not because there are no miracles today; we’re skeptical because we find the evidence for the source of any potential miracles lacking. To look at an event, proclaim it a miracle, then use that as evidence for a god is question-begging: it assumes the god exists in the first place. It works backward to an unwarranted assumption. Skeptics see things that believers proclaim to be miracles and say, “Now hold on — there’s probably another way to explain that phenomenon.” And if there’s not, skeptics will simply say, “We don’t know how to explain it.”

In the end, the quote is just as much an indictment of believers’ question-begging as it is of skeptics’ lack of faith.

Yoga Fears

Tuesday 17 August 2021

I’m still following a couple of Bible in a Year podcast groups on social media, and the other day I saw this post:

Hi. I was wondering If someone can tell me if practicing yoga goes against the Catholic religion? If you are doing it for stretching and relaxation purposes ? Thanks. I met a woman in a store that heard me mention yoga and went off on how that’s like devil worshipping.

I remember encountering such concerns when I was a kid. Everything seemed a potential link to the Dark One: popular music, popular films, popular anything. The devil, it seemed, was always lurking just around the corner, always waiting for us to slip up so he could slip in. Yoga was among these worries.

Not everyone was having it, though:

You would think the church would worry about important things…and I don’t think yoga and keeping your body healthy and breathing are much of a problem.

Every now and then, I see a kindred spirit on these message boards, someone who thinks, “Hold on — that doesn’t make sense,” and then goes ahead an says it.

How many people are actually like that, though? I’m fairly sure that thought comes into plenty of people’s minds and they simply disregard it or even banish it as being a trick of the devil.

Some people in the message stream, though, seemed to be of two minds, or to have changed their mind:

Yoga has become so mainstream and it seems so innocent. I did it for years. Then I learned how it was occult and stopped.

“It seems so innocent.” That is how the devil lures you in: he seems so innocent and then, boom! He’s got you!

I find myself wondering whether these folks see the contradiction in their thinking. On one hand, they’re always saying that “the Lord’s got this” and “I have no fear because I trust in God.” Yet moments latter, they’re hyperventilating about how the devil can sneak in unawares and possess your soul.

At this point, an authority figure — a church deacon — stepped in and shared his thoughts:

As a deacon in the church and someone who has been specifically trained and has done deliverance ministry within the confines of the church, while i can’t go into detail, practicing yoga like Ouija boards, like believing in horoscopes telling the future, like tarot cards, like hypnotism, like spiritualism, like seances etc. is like opening a crack into the evil one’s domain.

Specifically to yoga, the poses emulate the postures of Hindu gods, the mantras can be prayers to the pagan gods, etc.. While. the rationale of intent is used as a reason, I. E. That it depends upon the intent, when the guard is down, inadvertent openings occur. While you likely won’t find a definitive statement from Rome, I believe it safe to say that avoiding a potential issue is practicing safe spirituality. It is best practice to avoid the near occasion of evil. there are alternatives. Often seen as new age which should be avoided.

The things he lists as potential entry points for a demonic spirit just waiting for a chance, for a moment when everyone’s guard is down, deserve some scrutiny.

Ouija boards appeared in the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until World War I that spiritualists began claiming that they could use the boards to contact the dead. Scientific inquiry has determined that participants are moving the planchet through ideomotor responses, which are all involuntary. In other words, it’s not spirits doing the moving; it’s the participants themselves.

Next the deacon listed “believing in horoscopes.” Other than just making you look gullible, I’m not sure how believing in the vaguely written horoscopes so-calls psychics create can in any way open you up to demonic possession.

Derren Brown, the English mentalist, has shown how these horoscopes are vague nonsense by giving readings to different people and providing them with the exact same horoscopic predictions. They were all of different astrological signs and had all had in-depth conversations with Brown, but they all felt that the reading and prediction that followed was eerily accurate even though it was the same one for each and every one of them.

The skeptic James Randi once wrote horoscopes for a newspaper by taking old horoscopic predictions from other newspapers and simply scrambling them.

The same thoughts apply to tarot cards as to horoscopes, so I won’t rehash that.

Hypnotism, more than anything else, shows the weakness of the brain to manipulation than it shows any sort of spiritual danger. In an odd way, then, it counts against another element of these conservative Christians’ belief, that of creationism. A brain that can so easily be manipulated does not seem to be the creation of an omnipotent being, but Christians have an easy out for this: the Fall corrupted everything. Press that issue with questions (How exactly? What is the mechanism that this mythical disobedience led to physical changes in humans and the planet itself?) and many will simply resort to, “I don’t know how, I just have faith in God’s word, and that’s what God’s word says.” Point out that actually the Bible says nothing about the so-called Fall leading to a deterioration, a spoiling of the physical world and that that, therefore, is mere interpretation and you’ll likely see that this person doesn’t even understand the objection and will simply reiterate earlier points. It’s easy to see why: opening up to such doubts is more dangerous than opening up to potential demonic possession, because doubts lead to visible consequences (people leaving churches) where as demonic possession — not so much.

The deacon next mentioned “spiritualists,” which I assum he means those who claim they can talk to the dead. People like James Randi and Derren Brown have so completely and thoroughly debunked this whole practice, this whole industry, that it’s shocking anyone still thinks these spiritualists are talking to the dead. In fact, they are doing nothing more than cold reading.

Seances were nothing more than parlor tricks of the late nineteenth century, and those conducting seances were hucksters and con artists. The bumps, thumps, and noises were manipulations, and the levitation was nothing more than common performance tricks.

So science, logic, and common sense have shown every concern the deacon raised to be, in fact, nonexistent, or worse, a hoax.

Next, the deacon explained that “While. the rationale of intent is used as a reason, I. E. That it depends upon the intent, when the guard is down, inadvertent openings occur.” I have so many questions about this.

First of all, what is this guard he’s talking about? It would have to be some kind of spiritual guard since we’re talking about spiritual issues. (Never mind the fact that a consciousness without a physical brain is, as far as science has determined thus far, impossible, thus rendering the whole existence of any spiritual being, good or bad, impossible.) If we don’t even know what it is, how can we be sure it is up or down?

Second, what are these openings he’s talking about? If it’s all spiritual to begin with, there are no “openings” or “closings” because those are descriptions of physical things, places physical objects can slip through other physical objects. A spirit doesn’t need an opening. Even in the New Testament, the resurrected Jesus walks through walls and such. What is this opening?

Third, how can these things be on purpose or inadvertent if we don’t even know what they are or how to control them?

This leads to the most troubling question: what kind of god, who loves his followers and wants them to be safe, would allow such inadvertent openings to exist? Is it out of his control? It also calls into question the supposed benevolence of such a being. It seems like he’s saying, “Oops — you let your guard down. I know you didn’t realize you’d done it, but that’s how these things go. I’m just going to let this demon slip on in and control you.”

Of course, the whole idea of demonic possession in the twenty first century is laughable. It’s oddly telling that only Christian believers get possessed and not atheists.

I’m sure most Christians would simply reply, “Well of course they get possessed: they just don’t realize it or even believe in it, so they’re not going to do anything about it.” Indeed, evangelical podcasters and broadcasters regularly declare that this person or that person is, in fact, demon possessed.

Finally, someone just asked point blank:

I may be dumb, but why in the world would that go against our religion.

I guess this individual hadn’t read the deacon’s detailed response, but another member gladly and succinctly explained it:

because of the yoga positions are honoring Hindu Gods

You can only prod a skeptic so long before he responds: I had to join the conversation.

Just what do you think, [name redacted], being in those positions does? Doesn’t intent matter? If one is not doing it in order to honor the Hindu gods, is one actually honoring those gods? It seems odd to think that getting into position X with the motivation of strengthening certain muscles would cause harm just because someone else gets into position X with the motivation of honoring some non-existent god.

Another participant tried to explain it this way:

sometimes our subconscious leads us into places WE don’t need to go so I’m just suggesting you watch the women of Grace video and I have a different opinion but mine is lead by our GOD so I’m trusting HIM. I respect each person opinion as well

I replied,

So getting into these positions will somehow trick our subconscious, which will then subvert our conscious intent and make us unconsciously worship these gods? I’m not trying to sound snarky — I just don’t understand.

The other participant simply pointed out that it was not her job to convince me and that I need to turn this over prayerfully to God for guidance. Reason had broken down. Logic had disappeared. Faith had entered.

My ability to hold back ever diminishing, I got a little ridiculous:

What if I am playing with my son, wrestling around, being silly, and one of us accidentally strikes one of these poses? If intent doesn’t matter, then I could’ve accidentally opened some demonic gateway just by playing with my son. Does that make sense? It doesn’t to me.

It seems like a childish objection, but in fact, it’s a serious concern if these Christians are right about yoga. If intent doesn’t matter, then getting into one of these compromising positions accidentally should be a major concern.

The opposite, though, is another concern: what about non-Christians making the sign of the cross? Does this have some kind of inadvertent effect? Is God just waiting for us to slip up and slide a little grace in just like the devil is waiting for us to slip up and take our souls?

I suspect the deacon, were I to ask him these questions, would not have a ready answer, or he would not have an answer that, in turn, raises more logical issues. Believers see this as getting carried away. “You can always find a loophole, some kind of ‘what if’ question,” they might respond. They might call it a juvenile objection as our parish priest once did on his blog when discussing the problem of pain. They’ll likely tell you that they’re praying for you. But they will all eventually reach this point, where there’s no rational response to the objection.

In the past, I avoided all this by simply not asking the questions to begin with. I was, quite honestly, scared to ask those questions because I knew there were no answers, and I knew the doubts such questions would bring could swamp what little bit of faith I had. I ignored it, and I suspect I’m not the only one who does that. No, I don’t merely suspect; I know. Statistically speaking, it must be the case for some percentage of believers.

God of the Gaps, Again

Wednesday 28 July 2021

The pastor of K’s parish tweeted a link to “Has quantum physics smashed the Enlightenment deception?” by John Moran with the comment, “Reality is Rubbery.” I clicked through thinking, “Great — another ‘God of the Gaps’ article,” but hoping that I might be wrong. I wasn’t.

The article begins,

Forget Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker and the other high-profile God-denying “clever” boys. It is time for the broader implications of the 20th-century physics revolution, often described as quantum mechanics, to again be debated seriously and out in the “town square,” not just the backrooms of academia or in “deferring to the expert” interviews and documentaries.

The critical word there is “implications.” I’m not sure what Moran is suggesting here. At its heart, it’s simple: “Quantum mechanics is so weirdly different from the physics of our everyday reality that there must be implications for the nature of our everyday reality.” But must there be? There must be if we’ve already nurtured for millennia a belief in the supernatural, but all “quantum mechanics is weird” implies is “quantum mechanics is weird.”

Whatever these implications are in Moran’s mind, though, should be “debated seriously and out in the ‘town square,’ not just the backrooms of academia or in ‘deferring to the expert’ interviews and documentaries.” Part of the reason we “defer to experts” is because they are just that: they’ve forgotten more about their specialization than we laypeople even begin to understand. So when the people who actually work in quantum mechanics say, “No sorry — your implications that you want to discuss are based on misunderstandings of the quantum world,” as they do, we can just dismiss them. Who wants to defer to experts? After all, we’re seeing the benefits of not deferring to experts in the way covid is ravaging the conservative Christian anti-vaxers.

What does Moran say these implications are, though? To introduce them, he begins with a quote from a video by Leonard Susskind

It is hard to understand. Our neural wiring was not built for quantum mechanics. It was not built for higher dimensions. It was not built for thinking about curved space-time. It was built for classical physics. It was built for rocks and stones and all the ordinary objects and it was built for three-dimensional space. And that’s not quite good enough for us to be able to visualize and internalize the ideas of quantum mechanics and general relativity and so forth. …that can be extremely frustrating when trying to explain to the outside world. The outside world, by and large, has not had that experience of going through the rewiring process of converting their minds into something that can deal with five dimensions, 10 dimensions, or the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle or whatever it happens to be. And so the best we can do is to use analogies, metaphors.

Moran jumps on this:

Metaphor? So quantum physics has brought science full circle, back to the world of religion and the story telling methods of Jesus Christ and other religious figures.

Where quantum physics challenges everything, including those who arrogantly dismiss things like spirituality, is that it basically tells us two things:

  1. There might not be such a thing as an objective material object; and
  2. Consciousness has to be fundamental.

Now, let’s be clear. This new science does not prove the existence of God or anything else of that nature. But, it does shatter the arrogant certainty of those who think science is all you need and has killed off the spiritual. Through quantum physics we were again reminded of just how much we don’t know, especially about the mystery of the universe and the atomic world. In fact, we were not even close. This new quantum world was nothing like what scientists had envisaged prior to its discovery.

Why Moran gets so excited about Susskind using the word “metaphor” is confusing: does he not think that we use metaphor for anything other than religious ideas? After all, when we’re examining the quantum world, we’re looking at something so different from what we’re used to that we have to ground it in something we are used to — that’s what metaphor does. The use of metaphors does not equate scientists with theologians. This is an important distinction because scientists study the thing they study; theologians, unable to study gods directly, only study what other theologians have said. Scientists base their ideas on evidence; theologians’ try to do that, but their only evidence is ancient and anonymous manuscripts — again, studying what others have said about gods rather than studying the gods themselves. If, of course, we could study the gods themselves, there would be fewer atheists. Theologians would reply, “If we could study God, he wouldn’t be God,” but for one thing, that doesn’t necessarily follow. It’s based on the presupposition that gods must be so far beyond us that we can’t interact on their plane of existence. That very conveniently explains why there is no evidence for gods. For another, any god worth its salt could easily manifest itself regularly for study and confirmation of its existence. I do that with my own children daily; it’s too bad gods don’t do that with their children.

From there, Moran goes into a layman’s analysis of quantum theory brought about by this quote from Andrew Klavan’s article “Can We Believe?” subtitled “A personal reflection on why we shouldn’t abandon the faith that has nourished Western civilization.”

And is science still moving away from that Christian outlook, or has its trajectory begun to change? It may have once seemed reasonable to assume that the clockwork world uncovered by Isaac Newton would inexorably lead us to atheism, but those clockwork certainties have themselves dissolved as science advanced. Quantum physics has raised mind-boggling questions about the role of consciousness in the creation of reality. And the virtual impossibility of an accidental universe precisely fine-tuned to the maintenance of life has scientists scrambling for “reasonable” explanations.

Like Pinker, some try to explain these mysteries away. For example, they’ve concocted a wholly unprovable theory that we are in a multiverse. There are infinite universes, they say, and this one just happens to be the one that acts as if it were spoken into being by a gigantic invisible Jew! Others bruit about the idea that we live in a computer simulation—a tacit admission of faith, though it may be faith in a god who looks like the nerd you beat up in high school.

In any case, scientists used to accuse religious people of inventing a “God of the Gaps”—that is, using religion to explain away what science had not yet uncovered. But multiverses and simulations seem very much like a Science of the Gaps, jerry-rigged nothings designed to circumvent the simplest explanation for the reality we know.

The problem with Klavan’s thinking here is simple: he doesn’t realize that these conjectures are just that. No one is making dogmatic proclamations about multiverses or computer simulations. Why? Because there is no evidence or at least not enough evidence. Science is free to do what religion can never do: reject ideas it itself has created when evidence to the contrary appears. Indeed that is what science is all about.

It might seem ironic, though, that Klavan himself brings up the “God of the Gaps” fallacy in this article that amounts, in short, to the latest installment in the “God of the Gaps” theory since his whole idea here is nothing more than that. “Quantum theory is spooky and weird, and it’s outside our understanding now: therefore, God.” But irony is when the unexpected happens, and I’ve come to expect “God of the Gaps” theorizing in any apologetic piece, so far from being ironic, it is instead expected.

It is the Enlightenment Narrative that creates this worship of reason, not reason itself. In fact, most of the scientific arguments against the existence of God are circular and self-proving. They pit advanced scientific thinkers against simple, literalist religious believers. They dismiss error and mischief committed in the name of science—the Holocaust, atom bombs, climate change—but amberize error and mischief committed in the name of faith—“the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion,” as Pinker has it.

By assuming that the spiritual realm is a fantasy, they irrationally dismiss our experience of it. Our brains perceive the smell of coffee, yet no one argues that coffee isn’t real. But when the same brain perceives the immaterial—morality, the self, or God—it is presumed to be spinning fantasies. Coming from those who worship reason, this is lousy reasoning.

There are just so many issues with this line of thinking here that I don’t even know where to start: with the false equivocation, with the question-begging, or with the general lack of experience this short passage exhibits.

To begin with, equating “the Holocaust, atom bombs, [and] climate change” is a curious mix. Certainly, some Nazis promoted pseudo-scientific reasoning for their antisemitism, but a far amount of it was good old-fashioned Christian antisemitism: the Jews reject the Christ, and so that is at the heart of their malevolence. The atom bomb is an unquestionably evil application of science so I’ll give him that. Climate change, though? I’m not even sure what he’s suggesting here. Is he saying that climate change was brought about by science? Well, it certainly was enabled by it, but our voracious appetites for convenience that science facilitated seem more responsible for climate change than the science itself. On the other hand, is he suggesting that climate change is a hoax that science is perpetuating on the world? That would seem more in line with the article’s source, City Journal, which is an unabashedly right/nearly-hard-right publication.

Klavan then equates, for all intents and purposes, the smell of coffee with God. “Our brains perceive the smell of coffee, yet no one argues that coffee isn’t real,” he writes, and I just scratch my head on that one. When my brain perceives the smell of coffee, I assume that there is coffee somewhere around because in my own experience, that odor has always been associated with coffee. However, if it’s terribly important to me to prove that there’s coffee, I can search for it. I can find evidence that the smell I’m encountering is indeed coming from coffee. It’s worth noting, however, that just because my brain perceives the smell of coffee there is coffee somewhere. I want to scream at Klavan, “Good grief, man, have you never encountered Scratch-And-Sniff stickers?!” We can fool our brain into thinking there’s coffee when in fact it’s not there. That’s why we investigate and examine and confirm. The smell of coffee is a bad example, though: we do this all the time when we think we smell something burning.

Klavan then equates smelling coffee with perceiving “the immaterial” such as “morality, the self, of God” in a perfect example of question-begging. No one suggests that people who say they are perceiving “the immaterial” are not having some sort of cognitive experience. Instead, skeptics are simply pointing out that what we think might be an experience of God isn’t necessarily that. We can fool people into thinking they smell coffee; atheists simply suggest that the mind is fooling itself into thinking it’s experiencing God.

It’s important to point out here that attaching the label “God” to any such experience depends on prior exposure to the idea that a god exists. If no one believed in a god, would we deduce it exists simply from these experiences? Scientifically illiterate people might; scientifically literate people probably wouldn’t. So this is a strange kind of cultural question-begging: the idea of a god was already in place; these experiences simply provide another hook on which to hang it.

Klavan concludes his article thusly:

Pinker credits Kant with naming the Enlightenment Age, but ironically, it is Kant who provided a plausible foundation for the faith that he believed was the only guarantor of morality. His Critique of Pure Reason proposed an update of Plato’s form theory, suggesting that the phenomenal world we see and understand is but the emanation of a noumenal world of things-as-they-are, an immaterial plane we cannot fully know.

In this scenario, we can think of all material being as a sort of language that imperfectly expresses an idea. Every aspect of language is physical: the brain sparks, the tongue speaks, the air is stirred, the ear hears. But the idea expressed by that language has no physical existence whatsoever. It simply is. And whether the idea is “two plus two equal four” or “I love you” or “slavery is wrong,” it is true or false, regardless of whether we perceive the truth or falsehood of it.

This, as I see it, is the very essence of Christianity. It is the religion of the Word. For Christians, the model, of course, is Jesus, the perfect Word that is the thing itself. But each of us is made in that image, continually expressing in flesh some aspect of the maker’s mind. This is why Jesus speaks in parables—not just to communicate their meaning but also to assert the validity of their mechanism. In the act of understanding a parable, we are forced to acknowledge that physical interactions—the welcoming home of a prodigal son, say—speak to us about immaterial things like love and forgiveness.

To acknowledge that our lives are parables for spiritual truths may entail a belief in the extraordinary, but it is how we all live, whether we confess that belief or not. We all know that the words “two plus two” express the human version of a truth both immaterial and universal. We likewise know that we are not just flesh-bags of chemicals but that our bodies imperfectly express the idea of ourselves. We know that whether we strangle a child or give a beggar bread, we take physical actions that convey moral meaning. We know that this morality does not change when we don’t perceive it. In ancient civilizations, where everyone, including slaves, considered slavery moral, it was immoral still. They simply hadn’t discovered that truth yet, just as they hadn’t figured out how to make an automobile, though all the materials and principles were there.

To begin with, the suggestion that an idea doesn’t have a physical correspondence only works with abstract things like morality and love. Two plus two equal four is simple: take two items; set two more beside them; count them. There. I don’t even know what Klavan is suggesting using that idea. “I love you” is harder to prove physically: we can’t scan brains and say, “Look — see that? That’s love.” Yet. All evidence points to the fact that our consciousness is bound in our brain, so it’s not unreasonable to think that we will indeed be able to do something similar in the future. It’s more “God of the Gaps” in action. “Slavery is wrong” is tricky because morality is tricky. Yet morality is very fluid at the same time. The Bible itself endorses slavery, and nowhere in scripture does Jesus or anyone else condemn the owning of other people. Indeed, it seems to suggest the opposite: in 1 Peter, we see an appalling command: “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh” (1 Peter 2.18). The book of Philemon is almost as bad:

I am sending [Onesimus, your slave]—who is my very heart—back to you. I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel. But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever—no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord. (Philemon 12-16)

Here Paul could have said, “Slavery is wrong.” Here he could have said, “I am not sending him back because I have no authority to do so. He is a free human being with his own will.” But he sends him back and suggests that, since Onsemus is a Christian too, perhaps Philemon should treat him a little better.

Many proponents of slavery used the Bible to endorse the position so maybe this wasn’t the best moral to use in trying to suggest that morality implies a god.

From there, though, Klavan makes a hard, awkward turn to Christianity. He’s essentially saying, “Words often don’t have physical referents in the real world, and Christianity calls Jesus ‘the Word,’ so it’s likely true.” It’s a hard sell, completely out of the blue, completely illogical, for anyone other than a Christian who already accepts all this. Of course, given the fact that it’s a conservative source, Klavan is justified in assuming that most of the readers already accept these presuppositions, but the ideas themselves make very little sense without those presuppositions, which we skeptics reject. This, then, is still another example of question-begging.

The idea that Jesus spoke in parables in order to make the connection between language and ideas that have no physical referent is just speculation like scientists’ speculations about multiverses, so I’m not even going to deal with it.

Finally, there’s this: “In ancient civilizations, where everyone, including slaves, considered slavery moral, it was immoral still. They simply hadn’t discovered that truth yet, just as they hadn’t figured out how to make an automobile, though all the materials and principles were there.” Funny: if there was a god that felt that slavery is immoral and he wrote a book, it’s ironic that he didn’t say as much in that book but left it for us to discover while untold millions suffer in slavery.

Social Media Theology

Wednesday 2 June 2021

I’m scrolling through a social media group dedicated to the Bible in a Year program with Fr. Mike when I see a post that took me aback:

This seems to be a parody caption put under a Family Circus cartoon. I suspect this because:

  1. Family Circus is a fairly pro-Christian cartoon, and this particular cartoon is pointing out the circular logic and near-absurdity of the Christian idea of salvation and
  2. It seems like the font just doesn’t fit the rest of the cartoon.

I recall when I expressed my own doubts how I was attacked and lambasted when, instead of accepting the offered explanations serenely, I replied the rebuttals I’d thought of long ago.

Michel, as if on cue, enters with a classic ad hominem argument.

I try to keep quiet, but I can’t: “An ad hominem argument from an apologist is always effective.”

Yet one person doesn’t see it that way:

How to interpret this? A misunderstanding or the dawning of doubt? Probably the former. But I was curious how they would respond to this ineloquent way of explaining a weird little knot of contradiction that lies at the heart of Christianity, all complicated further by the doctrine of the trinity.

The basic idea is this: Christianity teaches that Jesus had to die in order to make humanity right with God somehow. Through the “stain of Original Sin,” humans are separated from God, and to bridge this separation required a sacrifice. But only a pure and unblemished sacrifice would do the trick because God is completely holy. So God sent “his only begotten son” down to die a horrid death he didn’t deserve because he lived a perfect and sinless life, thus serving as the sacrifice that makes all good with God. God did this because he loves humanity and wants humans to spend eternity with him, but the sinful nature of humans prevents this. He’s perfect; we’re not. He can’t be around the imperfect, so there must be some way of atoning for those imperfections. (I probably didn’t explain that well because there are a million different interpretations on what exactly Jesus’s sacrifice accomplishes depending on the denomination of the apologist. I know for a fact that I mixed and matched several different explanations of what Jesus’s sacrifice, in the eyes of believers, really does, but that’s kind of the point. They can’t even agree on what’s going on here.)

The first problem with this comes when we consider the supposed omnipotence of God. If God is all-powerful, why not just forgive and welcome everyone back into the fold? Why all this song and dance about Jesus? What’s more, if you don’t believe this and accept it, it’s back to square one with you: you’ll remain forever separated from God, destined for the eternal firy torments of hell. (Never mind for a moment the painfully obvious question: why would a being who is even vaguely decent let alone completely benevolent like Christians teach their god is send anyone to eternal punishment for anything?)

The biggest problem comes when we mix the trinity into all this. Because God and Jesus are the same entity (as well as the Holy Spirit — never mind how that seems to make no sense in and of itself), we can replace all those instances of “Jesus” with the more generic “God.” That shows the absurdity of it clearly. God is doing the sending and is sent. God is doing the condemning and the restitution. God is sending God to die to satisfy God’s demand of punishment for humanity’s disobedience of God. What kind of sense does that make at all? Skip all the middle man stuff and just forgive humanity.

That’s what the cartoon is highlighting. The poster’s comment of “I’ve wondered about this too” as well as Ashely’s admission that she “never thought of it that way” with a smiley face indicates that the circular logic breaks through to others’ thinking for just a brief moment.

Others jump in quickly, though, trying to explain why Jesus had, in Christian theology, to die.

Elisa’s contention is that Jesus could only “break” (not sure what that means) “the punishment for sin” by dying because “He is God, holy and perfect with no sin.” Yet this doesn’t get at the heart of the objection in the cartoon, which is that an omnipotent God shouldn’t have to go through all this rigamarole to forgive people: if he’s omnipotent, he just forgives them. End of story. This suggests that Elisa doesn’t really grasp the underlying objection.

Others’ explanations show the same lack of understanding:

They all turn back to the same explanation I butchered above. Sin separates us. God loves us. God wants to bridge that gap. So on and so forth.

It is at this point that I jump in:

Granted, it’s not “leading me out of the church.” It and countless other objections have already done that. I just don’t want to sound like an aggressive outsider. I want to see how they’ll respond.

Bishop Barron’s sermon that Jan links to just reiterates how God is love and that’s why he died for us. It doesn’t answer the question of why he couldn’t just forgive outright.

Jullian rightly points out that “this is not how the Catholic Church understands salvation.” He correctly admits that it’s “a caricature.” But that’s the point. Caricatures by design highlight the absurdity of something to bring it in sharp relief. To make it stand out.

What’s more interesting about Jullian’s response is that “most people here aren’t priests or theologians” who would be “able to answer such a central question properly.” That raises an objection in and of itself. Why would an omnipotent god create such a convoluted system of salvation that only a specialist with years of theological study behind him (and remember that theologians don’t really study God but simply study what other men have said about God) could answer?

Finally, Margaret calls a spade a spade:

Mary-Ann, the post author, quickly reassures everyone (and likely herself) of her undying faith

Finally, Dan tries to explain everything:

Dan’s first objection is in using the formulation “Why did God have to.” He didn’t even answer what’s behind the question: the notion is that without doing this, we can’t be with God. If that’s the case, and God wanted humans to be with him, then God did indeed have to do this.

Dan’s second objection comes from the confusion this creates regarding the trinity: it “collapses it down to a bizarre argument with ones [sic] self.” That is the point. In doing so, it highlights the absurdity of the doctrine of the trinity.

Dan’s third objection is with “just to.” I think that’s meant to highlight the fact that, if God is omnipotent, he should be able just to forgive humans our foibles and move on. It’s another reflection of the first objection, in other words.

He ends with Scott Hahn’s assertion that “Jesus paid a debt He didn’t owe because we owed a debt we couldn’t pay.” And we’re right back where we started.

All this simply confirms what I’ve come to realize over the last couple of years: most believers don’t seem to understand what’s at the heart of most skeptics’ objection to Christianity. Whether this is an inability to understand it because of their blind faith or an unwillingness to try because of a fear of the consequences, I don’t know. Of course, there are other explanations, and it’s likely the case that for most believers, it’s a mix of any and all of them.

But I see these problems. And I can’t unsee them.

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 End

Sunday 21 March 2021

Every now and then, I learn something so profound that it marks a significant change in my thinking. The last two days have constituted such a change. I listened to Josh Clark’s podcast The End of the World, and I can’t remember anything having a more profound effect on me. Not the realization that I doubted the existence of God; not the change I made from being very left-leaning to being right-leaning and the return to the left I seem to be experiencing now; not the knowledge that I was going to be a parent.

The podcast deals with how the world might end, and by that it means how humanity might end. The world itself might continue on but humanity might not. And the podcast begins with an odd question: given the size of the universe, the number of galaxies it contains, and the number of stars in those galaxies, the universe should be absolutely teeming with life. We’re talking about billions upon billions of galaxies each with billions of stars. Even if the odds of developing intelligent life were a 1-in-100-billion, there should be almost countless examples in the universe. So why have we found no sign of them? That’s the Fermi paradox, and it is the material for the first couple of episodes. The fact that we see no signs of intelligent life anywhere has one of two explanations:

  1. It exists, and we simply haven’t found it.
  2. It doesn’t exist currently, and we alone constitute all the intelligent life in the universe.

Option one is the less interesting of the two, but Clark convincingly illustrates that it’s unlikely. It’s the second option that is terrifying, because it breaks into two options itself:

  1. There never was any other intelligent life — we’re it.
  2. There was once intelligent life somewhere in the universe, but it no longer exists.

Thinking about option two leads us to question what could have happened to them? Presumably, they advanced at least as far as we have, and presumably, they would have advanced further if they could, spreading out into the cosmos and colonizing their solar system, their galaxy, significant portions of the universe itself. That they didn’t suggests that they never existed (back to option one) or that they met an insurmountable obstacle that resulted in the end of their existence. This is known as the Great Filter — in this case, the thing that prevented a given alien species from colonizing beyond its original planet.

What does all of this have to do with the end of the world? Simple: due to the technologies we have developed now, we are almost certainly about to pass through our own Great Filter. There are so many threats to the continued existence of humanity that it seems inevitable that one of them will catch us by the ankle, so to speak, and drag us back down to primordial sludge (or nothingness). Clark covers several of them, including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and physics experiments, but in my mind (and in Clark’s as well, I believe), the greatest risk comes from artificial intelligence, though biotech is not far behind.

The risk from artificial intelligence is not a Terminator- or Matrix-style war between robots and humans. It’s something much more subtle. Imagine, for example, that a paperclip factory hires a programmer to create a program to maximize paperclip production. The programmer creates algorithms that have the freedom to make their own decisions about how to go about the productivity improvements. Its goal is simple: create more paperclips. Should it attain super-intelligence, it could wreck the world in its effort to make more paperclips. It takes over other computers in order to increase its computational capacity to make more paperclips. It develops machines that make machines that make machines that make machines to improve paperclip production. Eventually, it learns how to create nanotechnology that can actually manipulate things at an atomic level. It can then literally begin the process of turning everything into paperclips, manipulating atoms to transform everything into aluminum to make paperclips — everything, including us. It then launches probes into space and eventually turns the whole universe into paperclips.

It’s hyperbolic and a little silly, but it gets at the heart of the concern: once AI achieves super-intelligence, it will be to us as Einstein is to an earthworm. There are no guarantees that it will have any concern with us at all. After all, could we expect Einstein to spend his tremendous intellect and life worrying about the happiness of every earthworm? So we have to figure out a way to program these things in a way that they have morals compatible with ours.

The biotech and physics experiment risks are equally fascinating, but it was about this point in the podcast (this would have been episode five out of eight) that I began thinking of how any one of these might be our Great Filter — the thing that we run up against which destroys us — in terms that Clark never mentioned: the impact of religion on all of this. Most believers would not take this seriously at all because they already are convinced that there’s intelligent life out there, and it’s responsible for our existence and has a plan for us. That plan doesn’t include us destroying ourselves, so they would be unlikely to take this situation seriously. “Eradicate ourselves from the earth? Come on — Jesus will return before that could ever happen.” God would never let the pinnacle of his creation destroy itself entirely. This is in part why so many Christians don’t take global warming seriously (and after listening to this series, I’m of the mind that global warming, while a threat, is at least not an existential threat to all humanity).

This itself could be the Great Filter: time after time, intelligent life has arisen that evolves tremendous intelligence at the same time it holds radically superstitious ideas. At the point when the species has developed the technology capable of destroying itself, it harbors the superstitious lack of wisdom to know how to handle those technologies, and they destroy themselves.

Much of Clark’s podcast was on the foundation of Nick Bostrom’s work. He’s been thinking along these lines for a long time:

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.

 

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.

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.

Predictions

Sunday 7 February 2021

Back on October 3, my favorite cult leader, David Pack, predicted a definitive date for the return of Jesus. It would happen before October 13. It’s now February.

Oops.

Earlier this month, though, he set a new date. During last week’s sermon, he made a few assertions:

  • It’s a perfect picture…only the whole thing crashes if Christ doesn’t come this Friday.
  • God streamed this concluding list through my mind without notes or the Bible.
  • It’s a divine act, if all these prophecies are at stake, would God let me mess up? He had to just stream it into me!
  • Sabat 24, is this Friday night. May we now see Christ, the kingdom, all the New Testament saints, and all Israel [resurrected] in just over 4 days. If it’s wrong then you now understand why I kinda thought I was on to something. (Banned by HWA)

Well, it’s now Sunday. What do we make of that? Was Pack wrong? Of course not. He sent out a memo late Friday night:

We have received numerous emails from the field expressing your amazement and excitement about what is upon us. Brethren here at Headquarters are right there with you!

As we enter the Sabbath, understand there is a case for Christ coming this side of midnight (Headquarters time). But the case grows stronger after midnight. And the most powerful case of all, with literally dozens of reasons just reviewed by 15 ministers at Headquarters, indicates Christ comes late in the day on the Sabbath tomorrow. So strong is this case, it appears virtually impossible that anything happens tonight. But do not stop watching! It is important to Mr. Pack that all of you remain on the same page we are, hence this brief update.

Rest assured, Christ coming later on the Sabbath in no way violates the intricate mathematical relationships between the key dates we have studied in God’s Plan.

We look forward to seeing you very soon!

Banned by HWA

Notice his phrasing: “As we enter the Sabbath, understand there is a case for Christ coming this side of midnight (Headquarters time). But the case grows stronger after midnight.” Using “the case grows” indicates that Pack is watching and praying, watching and reading the Bible, watching and meditating, and even now, at this last moment, things are becoming clearer: his timing might have been off by just a few hours. How do clear-headed, skeptical observers interpret this? “The day I predicted Jesus’s return is drawing to a close and, holy shit! He’s not here yet!”

He says, “Rest assured, Christ coming later on the Sabbath in no way violates the intricate mathematical relationships between the key dates we have studied in God’s Plan.” What he wants his followers to hear is simple: “This is complicated stuff, brethren. It’s taken my years to understand this! It’s math!” What we skeptis hear: “Please don’t leave my church and take your money with you when this turns out wrong! Please! I’m not qualified to do anything else. How will I make my money? How will I afford my enormous house?”

Of course, it’s written as if Pack himself isn’t saying this: “It is important to Mr. Pack…” But is there any doubt really?

Then, yesterday afternoon, they posted this:

While it is a discussion beyond the scope of a short update, bear in mind the Sabbath has not ended in the far west. The math and science do not break! In fact, many principles and verses show we must reach the far end of the Sabbath as it exists worldwide—all the way through the time zones of the western islands of the Pacific.

More than a dozen Headquarters ministers who just met discussed this again thoroughly and none can see a way out of tonight. Believe us when we say that we have tried! If there is more to see, God will certainly reveal it. Any details would be passed along in the coming days.

Again, keep watching. Our wait cannot be long!

And now it’s Sunday. And what?

Why do people continue with him? It’s simple — the sunken cost fallacy. Once you’ve invested so much in an idea, it’s all but impossible to give that idea up.

Cutting

Sunday 15 November 2020

Tonight, I spent a fair amount of time going through photos from the last year to create our yearbook. It’s a simple process: go to Lightroom; create a new collection with all flagged pictures from the year; begin deleting pictures. I started out with 1800; I’m down to 330 now.

It’s a good way to get an overview of the year. We had dozens of pictures of the family playing games (Sorry, Monopoly, hearts, etc.); we had dozens of pictures in the park going for walks; we had dozens of pictures of E and me exploring in our creek. How many nearly-identical pictures does one need?

Random Thoughts About Today’s Mass Reading

Today’s gospel reading was the famous parable of the talents:

Jesus told his disciples this parable: “A man going on a journey called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents; to another, two; to a third, one–to each according to his ability. Then he went away. Immediately the one who received five talents went and traded with them, and made another five. Likewise, the one who received two made another two. But the man who received one went off and dug a hole in the ground and buried his master’s money.

“After a long time the master of those servants came back and settled accounts with them. The one who had received five talents came forward bringing the additional five. He said, ‘Master, you gave me five talents. See, I have made five more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ Then the one who had received two talents also came forward and said, ‘Master, you gave me two talents. See, I have made two more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ Then the one who had received the one talent came forward and said, ‘Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter; so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.’ His master said to him in reply, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I did not plant and gather where I did not scatter? Should you not then have put my money in the bank so that I could have got it back with interest on my return? Now then! Take the talent from him and give it to the one with ten. For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.'”

I noticed a few things about this parable that I’d never seen before: first, the master leaves all these things and then “he went away.” There’s nothing in the text that indicates the master expected the servants to do anything with the money. Perhaps that’s implied, but it’s not explicitly stated that the master expected any growth on his investment or that it even is an investment.

Second, I find it entirely reasonable that the third servant hides the money. What if he invested it and lost it? Wouldn’t the master be even angrier then?

Third, what’s all this stuff about “harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter”? Just what are the master’s expectations? What kind of a man is this? He doesn’t seem very reasonable at all.

Finally, there’s the disturbing ending: why the severe punishment?

I know, I know — it’s a parable. It’s not really about the money at all but it’s about an individual’s talents. At least that’s how everyone has always interpreted it. That leads to a realization I’ve had recently: why did Jesus speak in parables? If his goal is to transmit information, metaphor and parable are not the most effective, efficient means of doing that.

Politics, As Always

Confirmation Bias

Thursday 12 November 2020

What does it take to change a “Stop the Steal” Trump supporter’s mind about the election? What about an outside opinion, reported in the Wall Street Journal?

A team of international observers invited by the Trump administration has issued a preliminary report giving high marks to the conduct of last week’s elections–and it criticizes President Trump for making baseless allegations that the outcome resulted from systematic fraud. (Source)

But see, it’s not so easy for Trump supporters who reject the election results. They’re predominately Evangelicals. They read the Left Behind series as history written in advance. They believe in an antichrist — probably the pope — who will literally perform miracles. They think that all the world will bow down and worship this man. They won’t see this as confirmation that the election is fair; they’ll see this as proof that it’s an international conspiracy. This culminates, they believe, in the creation of a one-world government that will strip America of its sovereignty as part of the coming tribulation.

They won’t see this as confirmation that the election is fair; they’ll see this as proof that it’s an international conspiracy. They will see this as part of the grand prophetic end of the world.

You can’t reason with that. It’s a faith as strong as any other, as strong as their faith that God will somehow deal with the coronavirus (those who believe it’s real, that is) and pray for it despite evidence to the contrary. Nothing counts against that faith. If someone goes through the pandemic without falling ill, it was through God’s grace. If someone falls ill but doesn’t become overly sick, it’s due to God’s mercy. If someone falls deathly ill and has lasting complications, it’s God’s grace that he didn’t die. And if someone falls ill and dies, it’s God’s mercy because he’s gone home to the Lord. Nothing counts as evidence against that kind of faith. If nothing counts against it, if there is no way to falsify it, it’s not a rational belief but merely a warm feeling.

Transfer that to the election: these Evangelicals see conspiracy everywhere. It’s in the DNA of their religion. To forsake that is to forsake their very faith.

Misunderstanding

Sunday 11 October 2020

When creationists try to present the “lie of evolution” in an attempt to debunk it, we can often see clearly that the creationists don’t even understand evolutionary theory.

“Who’s going to make who look like an idiot?” Given the fact that you just clearly showed that you don’t have a clue how evolution works, you’ve already made an idiot of yourself.

They’re positively quixotic.

Exempt

Sunday 20 September 2020

Churches are exempt from paying taxes; political organizations are not. All too often, though, the former morph into the latter, and it’s for that reason that many of us feel that churches should not enjoy tax-exempt status. Usually, priests and pastors couch these statements in less obviously political language. It fools no one, and of course, the congregants generally support that language and their perceived right to say it in an organization that pays no taxes — it’s seen as first amendment rights.

So to be present when blatantly political speech takes place in the context of prayer makes someone who holds the above views quite irate.

Today, we went to mass at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a church that we’ve attended a few times, and probably would attend more often given the difficulty of signing up for one of the available slots at our parish’s reduced-capacity masses. But I for one will not set foot in that building again after the blood-boiling nonsense I heard today. During the general intercessions, when it came time for the priest to add his intentions, he prayed for Trump and his pick for the Supreme Court position. I really wanted to walk out at that point, but I remained. It wasn’t as if he were thanking his god — which I put in lower-case, for it seems to be the god of political power — for the death of Ginsberg; he was merely supporting the hypocrisy of the right. Given the historical hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that a priest would promote and praise political hypocrisy in the name of maintaining power.

As the mass was ending, though, during the time just before the benediction when the priest usually makes announcements, he launched into another political speech about the importance of the Supreme Court nomination. I’d had enough. I walked out.

Day 77: First Day in Conestee in Rainbows

Sunday 31 May 2020

First Day in Conestee

We’ve been waiting for our favorite park to open for weeks now. It seemed to us that going for a walk in the park should be something that lends itself rather naturally to social distancing. Certainly, you have to be aware of where everyone is and perhaps not go at the pace you would normally walk, but those are small concerns that mature people can keep in mind and in action relatively easily. But the city kept the parks closed.

Today, they were open, so we went for a walk in the morning when it was likely to be less crowded. We kept our distance from everyone and behaved as model citizens.

The kids were just glad to get out and do something. Perhaps they were also glad to see other faces — I know I was.

But I’ve had concerns about this opening up of South Carolina. I don’t get the impression that everyone else is being as careful as we are. And the numbers prove it. Earlier this week, we had a day with 300+ new cases — the highest we’d ever had. Then we had a couple of more days in the 200s or high 100s range, then yesterday we saw that the number jumped up again. Today, there were 312, but there was also an addendum about yesterday’s count:

154 cases that should have been reported in yesterday’s positive case counts were not updated from suspected to confirmed cases in our database by the time yesterday’s news release was issued. An additional quality check of yesterday’s positive case numbers revealed the omission of these cases in the daily reporting total. The corrected total of positive cases for yesterday (May 30) has been updated to 420. (Source)

So we’ve gone from having no single day with more than about 280 to having a day with over 400. Just about two weeks after restrictions were eased. Which is to say that I’m afraid people’s stupidity (“This has all blown over — back to normal”) will cause a spike that will undo all we sacrificed over the last months.

In Rainbows

When Noah and the survivors emerged from the ark after God had wiped out all of humanity except them, there would have likely been some consternation: what if God decides to do this again and this time, we don’t make the cut? It seems God wanted to assuage exactly those fears:

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds,  I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” (Genesis 9.8-16)

A skeptic like me has a lot of issues with this passage. Well, there are a lot of issues about the whole story of Noah and the ark, not the least of which is God deciding to wipe out all of humanity instead of, say, coming down and teaching them how they’re making bad choices, like a parent would do. Perhaps a spanking of some sort if we want to get Victorian. Then there’s the question of getting all the species in the boat, the inexperience of Noah as a shipwright — just problems all over the place.

But just these few verses offer a couple of big issues: first, why does God need reminding? “I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant” not “you will see it and remember the everlasting covenant,” though I guess that’s implied. But I suppose we could work out some literary way to get around that.

What we can’t get around is the simple fact that text here seems to suggest that there was never a rainbow before this event: “Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds” certainly hints at this. So you see the opening: “You mean to tell me that the lingering droplets of water in the sky that act as a prism and break the sunlight into its various colors — an act of physics — never happened before this?” Rainbows are not mysteries: we know exactly how they form, and I would imagine that meteorological sciences have gotten to the point that they can list several conditions that need to exist before a storm that will set in action a chain of events that will end in said rainbow.

Apologists who take the Bible literally have to deal with this. How to do so? I suppose they could suggest that, yes, God altered the laws of physics at that moment. But a more common explanation is a little more baffling: it had never rained before the deluge, apologist suggest. Mists and dew and the like were enough to water the flora of the Earth.

I mentioned this to K: she raised her eyebrows. “That’s the first time I ever heard of that.” I suspect it’s an Evangelical (i.e., American Christianity) attempt at explaining an obvious problem with the Biblical text in such a way that allows believers to continue interpreting it literally, word-for-word.

I first heard that argument when I was a kid. I want to say, “It struck me as strange even then,” but I don’t really recall. I remember hearing it, so it made some kind of impression on me, and it stuck in the back of my head as another example of some of the odd contortions literalists bend themselves into in order to continue interpreting the Bible literally.

I heard it again tonight. Or rather, overheard it. I wasn’t involved in the conversation, just listening from the fringes. “I mean, God created the world so perfectly that they didn’t even need rain — just a mist was enough,” the apologist explained.

It was one of those times that I really wanted to jump into a conversation but knew that there would be no point. Neither of us would budge from our view.

Day 61: Fear, Faith, and Fun

Friday 15 May 2020

Fear and Faith

Imagine fear nestled into anxiety burrowed into terror, and all of that is supposed, in the end, to be a source of great joy. “In my beginning is my end” T. S. Eliot wrote, but for some evangelical Christians, it might be reworded, “In my anxiety is my comfort,” for they view their everyday reality through an apocalyptic lens. They post things like this on social media:

The single comment “Scary” reveals the paradox at the heart of this line of thinking.

On the one hand, there is a sense of terror at what’s coming. Such believers look at the Bible as a roadmap for the future, seeing all sorts of ideas that, to those of us on the outside looking in, seem patently ridiculous. They see a coming world-engulfing violent cataclysm that will wipe out wide swaths of humanity and subject the survivors to near-slavery under the rule of some world-dominating ruler known simply The Beast, who will rule in what they call The Tribulation. During this time, there will be mass executions of believers and worldwide oppression.

At this point, the vision starts fracturing. What will happen to Christians, to good Bible-believing Christians who saw all this coming and gave themselves over to the Lord long ago? Some suggest that these poor Christians will have to go through all this; others (most) believe firmly that they’ll all be whisked away to heaven before all this — the rapture.

I grew up being taught that, like the rapture, God would supernaturally protect all his faithful Christians from this onslaught of literal hell on earth, but instead of being taken away into heaven, we would escape to a location of protection, which got the name the Place of Safety. Our religious leader conjectured it would be in Petra, Jordan. There we would spend the three-and-a-half years that the devil, through his Beast, would rule and torment the world, emerging at the end when Jesus returns to put the devil in his place and us in charge of rebuilding the world. Sounds crazy — but not any crazier than being whisked away like the Left Behind book series narrates.

Whatever the belief, though, these groups have one thing in common: the believers — the right-believing faithful — will be saved. This, then, should be a time of joy for such Christians. The end is almost here, and because they believed the right things all these times, they won’t have to endure the horrors coming.

So why the fear? Just look at the thoughts that follow the original “Scary” comment:

These poor folks are genuinely scared about Bill Gates’s supposed plans to use this pandemic and the resulting vaccine, which they fear will be mandatory (which it should be), to implant chips into them.

There is an amusing irony in all this, though:

Such a strange mix of confusion, and it’s driving thousands upon thousands to outright terror.

There is, of course, one thing that these fear-stricken Christians can do: they can pray about it.

Yet what is the effectiveness of this prayer? This verse from the Bible promises that “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray” that God “will heal their land.” If that doesn’t sound like a promise from omnipotence that is directly applicable to our current situation, I don’t know what does.

But we’ve tried this before:

These Christians will point out that there are conditions: the petitioners must “turn from their wicked ways” before this promise will be fulfilled, so that’s probably the problem: America is still aborting pregnancies, fornicating, and tolerating homosexuality (the three biggies), so God is just waiting for that to stop.

On March 30 televangelist Kenneth Copeland must have decided he would not wait for the stubborn, God-hating Americans to repent and simply “exercised judgment” on the pandemic, thus ending it:

But four days later, he realized he had to try again:

And yet it’s still not over.

Here’s where another layer of anxiety enters: these poor souls must be wracking their brains and souls trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong. So it seems to me that this type of Christianity does not relieve anxiety but only heightens it. Instead of these beliefs calming you, they add another layer of anxiety when one’s prayer’s and petitions are either ignored or answered in the negative, and the natural response is to blame oneself: “God promised. I must have done something wrong.”

So by the time we get to this level, we have the following fears, some conscious and some less so.

  1. The end of the world is literally around the corner. If I’m right with God, I’ll be spared. Am I right with God?
  2. Even if I’m right with God, my interpretation of end-time prophecy might be a little wrong and Jesus might not return until after the tribulation. So if I go through this horror, how will I know I’ll be spared in the end?
  3. I know God doesn’t always answer prayers, but his Word says he will if I repent and pray, so if I or someone close to me becomes infected, I’ll pray, but it might not be his will.
  4. And even if it is his will, I might have done something wrong. Or my country might be doing something wrong.

For something that’s supposed to bring comfort, that’s an awful lot of sources of anxiety.

In a sense, these folks have a right to their anxiety. The First Amendment guarantees that right. But some of these anxiety-inducing conspiracy theories have long-reaching effects. They lead people to reject science for religious-based superstition:

Conspiracy theories have been around for ages, and fundamentalist Evangelical Christians have often been particularly willing to believe them. After all, their whole religion is a conspiracy theory: the devil is constantly trying to get humans to do his bidding unknowingly. The group I grew up in went so far as to call itself the only group of true Christians in the world: the rest of the “so-called” Christians were actually worshipping a Satan-created replacement Christianity. These “so-called Christians” were, for all intents and purposes, worshiping the devil himself. But even among the milder, less cultish groups, there is a sense of conspiracy. Indeed, this conspiracy goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when the devil tried to usurp God’s control over humanity.

I’m certainly not the only one to notice this similarity:

Arthur Jones, the director of the documentary film Feels Good Man, which tells the story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential election, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an evangelical-Christian family in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew then, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the country, are deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack “all of its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies.” Jones went on: “I think the same kind of person would all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and start feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and make sense. If you are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he’s been married multiple times, he’s clearly a sinner. But you are trying to find a way that he is somehow part of God’s plan.”

So we’re at the point that we’re all living in different realities. The Atlantic has an article about this now: “The Prophecies of Q,” aptly summarized, “American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.”

The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.

Would could imagine a scenario in which a prankster began something like Q and then it quickly gets out of hand. The prankster tries to step forward and point out that he began it all. “Look, I have evidence!” He could have even had the foresight to record everything he did on video and through screen-recording software, yet that wouldn’t be enough once the conspiracy had gained a life of its own. One can only imagine what such a prankster would feel as he watched his creation ravage reasonable — a modern Frankenstein, with the conspiracy theory being his unnamed monster.

Yet Frankenstein could reason with his creation, and in fact did attempt to talk to him. Conspiracy theories are like memes: they’re elements of the brain that are belong to no one and are somewhat self-replicating. In short, there’s no reasoning with a conspiracy theory, and there’s little ability to talk to a believer in one:

Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Q frequently rails against legitimate sources of information as fake. Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.

There’s no reasoning with them because they often don’t even see themselves as conspiracy theorists:

“Some of the people who follow Q would consider themselves to be conspiracy theorists,” [David] Hayes[,  one of the best-known QAnon evangelists on the planet] says in the video. “I do not consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist. I consider myself to be a Q researcher. I don’t have anything against people who like to follow conspiracies. That’s their thing. It’s not my thing.”

So in the end, it’s hard not to be at least somewhat depressed about all this, and that in turn tends to make me just a little pessimistic about our future as a species — yet again. I can help our children develop the critical thinking skills (the painfully basic critical thinking skills) to avoid falling into this trap themselves, but that’s two in a nation of millions. These ideas are gaining momentum, and the alternative cultures they spawn are growing.

Fun

The Boy and I went out exploring again today. He had to try his new gumboots. I warned him about deep water: “If the water goes over the top of the boot, your foot will be permanently soaked.” He stepped in water that was too deep. One foot got soaked. We laughed quite a while about the squishing sounds coming from his boot.

Day 49: Honking Adventure

Sunday 3 May 2020

Today was a somewhat low-key day. We went for a walk or two; we did a little work around the house; K led an in-house Mass substitute for the kids. But overall, it was a very lazy day.

In the morning, I took E on a walk with the dog. Well, I was planning on going alone, but he tagged along anyway. I was glad to have him.

“I want to hear the car honking!” he proclaimed, so we went back to the neighborhood where I’d heard it last week.

“Why do they do that?” he asked.

Why indeed. What’s the point of all those “amens” and “hallelujahs”? I think it has to do with social bonding. It’s like Catholics kneeling and standing and praying together, like Miloszcz said. I wanted to say, “It makes them feel good,” but I didn’t. And it probably isn’t all that simple, either.

Clover’s new ball

After the walk, I took care of a couple of little tasks left over from yesterday. I use construction adhesive to connect the landscaping timbers on which I mounted the composter to solid concrete blocks to give it a bit more weight. I wanted to make sure that, if when another flood washes through the backyard, the composter will stay put. (I also set it behind two trees, which will help break the flow of the water.) I used the rest of the adhesives on the fire pit, gluing pairs of bricks together to make it a little more solid but not completely permanent. (To be sure, I have no idea how long the adhesive can handle the heat in the fire pit before failing, so it might have been a waste of time. Still, I didn’t have anything else to do with the remaining adhesive.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes, and her face, as she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

He looks up toward the heavens, and we know what will happen: he will see something; he will hear something; he will have some revelation. What’s startling is the narrator’s take on this:

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature.

From a modern perspective, what’s most interesting is the little side comment in the opening lines: “in those days.” Were the people of Hawthorne’s day any different? Are we any different? After all, it was the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet that led 39 people to take their own lives.

Which is a volleyball, much to L’s delight

It’s really one of the many God-of-the-gaps situations: we don’t understand this, therefore God. At some point, earthquakes or comets were the antecedents, the “this” which we don’t understand. Science comes along, explains it, closes one gap, and believers searching for evidence of God’s existence move on to other gaps. The complexity of DNA and the seeming impossibility of cosmology are the biggest gaps now, and they will not likely be closed for some time. Will science ever unravel those mysteries? I don’t know. I’m not worried about it. As someone put it, I would rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question.

Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the colored, magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness.

This problem is at the heart of all religious revelation: Joseph Smith discovered the plates that he translated into the Book of Mormon all by himself; Muhammed received his revelation alone, in a cave; Moses saw the burning bush all by himself; Mary was all by herself when the angel appeared. These revelations that started large religions later developed ways to deal with the problem that Hawthorne mentions (there were individuals who signed affidavits that they had seen Smith’s golden plates in person, for example). The smaller revelations, which lead to smaller followings, don’t: David Koresh alone heard God’s voice. At that point, short of working miracles, how do such people convince followers?

But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate!

Some people go further than this: David Pack, leader of a little sect of a few hundred to a couple of thousand followers, literally sees himself prophesied in the Bible. As such, he says things like “I have to be the most hated man on the planet,” which he claims in one of his sermons.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

So it’s remarkable to me that Nathaniel Hawthrone, writing The Scarlet Letter 170 years ago, created such commentary. And I wonder what he would have to say about contemporary Evangelical worship, with its rock-concert feels and amen-ing. And what he would have thought about nearly-sequestered worshippers replacing it with claxons.

First fire in new firepit