The Questioning Christian

Jim Jones's lover thought he was God

From a NY Times on-line piece about Jim Jones, who led some 900 followers to their deaths by cyanide suicide in Jonestown, Guyana:

Ms. O’Shea joined the Peoples Temple as a secretary in 1971, when she was 19. She said she eventually became Mr. Jones’s confidante and lover; “I thought he was God,” she said. “I thought God had picked me to be a mate.”

Rick Perry and the efficacy of prayer

Um, not really ....

Some Sarah Palin supporters are akin to biblical inerrantists - James McGrath

I'm beginning to be a fan of Dr. James McGrath. His recent post on the Christian Century blog, Inerrancy of the Bible and Sarah Palin, addressed those who would rewrite history when it doesn't fit their preconceived notions. He was on the money in this passage:

I suggested recently that one of the most fundamental elements of Christianity is repentance – acknowledging we were wrong and making efforts to be less wrong in the future. And one can see a faithful expression of this core Christian conviction in the history of Liberal Protestantism and its role in developing and embracing the tools of critical study of the Bible, and the integration of new scientific knowledge.

Admitting the Bible was wrong, admitting Jesus was wrong, when the evidence points in that direction, is not a denial of the Christian faith, but an expression of one of its most basic tenets: the fallibility of human beings and the resulting need to be open to correction.

(Links omitted.) I made a couple of comments in the discussion following his post.

It's been said that we're all entitled to our own opinions, but we're not entitled to our own facts. Fidelity to the First Commandment dictates that we live in the world God wrought, not in a 'world' that we create in our imaginations -- and inerrantists of all kinds are guilty of violating that corollary.

Was Paul's real goal to expand the definition of "Jew"?

In a blog posting, Dr. James F. McGrath argues that in Romans, Paul was "advocating the inclusion of uncircumcised Gentiles in Judaism, the elimination for all intents and purposes of the Jew/Gentile distinction, to be replaced simply by a multi-ethnic Israel on the one hand, and those who refused to be a part of it on the other." It's a worthwhile read.

After bin Laden's death, a made-up quote from MLK Jr.; what does that suggest about the Gospel of John?

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, after doing some Google searching, is pretty sure that a quote attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, is a fake:

Shortly after I posted my piece on feeling curiously un-thrilled about Bin Laden's death, the following quote came across my twitter feed:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I admire the sentiment. But something about it just strikes me as off, like that great Marx quote about the housing bubble that didn't appear anywhere in Das Kapital.

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

Like the Marx quote, it's a bit too a propos. What "thousands" would King have been talking about? In which enemy's death was he supposed to be rejoicing?

UPDATE: Getting in on the fun, Drew Grant at Salon.com asks, "Why did Penn Jillette create a fake [MLK] quote yesterday?"

So apparently there are people who think it's OK to put words in the mouth (so to speak) of an historical figure, presumably for greater authority.

Surely this sort of thing could never, ever have happened in the early church, right? Surely (for example) the author of the Fourth Gospel couldn't possibly have put words in Jesus' mouth decades after the fact?

Um, except that we already have compelling evidence that this sort of thing did indeed happen. Consider Paul's warning to his readers about forged letters circulating in his name, in 2 Thessalonians 1-2:

Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us — whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter ... [Emphasis added]

As someone else has pointed out (Bart Ehrman, maybe?), there are two possibilities:

• if 2 Thessalonians was in fact written by Paul, then Paul himself is warning his readers about forged letters bearing his name; presumably he didn't issue that warning for no reason;
• on the other hand, if 2 Thessalonians was not written by Paul, then that epistle is itself a forgery, Q.E.D.

So this apparently-bogus quotation from Dr. King gives us still more reason to conclude that respectful agnosticism is the appropriate view to take of Scripture.

 

Related posts:

• Synoptic Christians versus John Christians: A Critique
• Evaluating scriptural evidence

Tweeting more than posting

I'm doing almost no religion-related writing these days; what little I am doing is taking the form of short tweets on Twitter on account @dctoedt. I've set up a sidebar widget at right to show the latest tweets. (UPDATE: I've consolidated my Twitter accounts; all my tweeting is now done @dctoedt.)

Puritans were pretty cool after all?

This NY Times piece suggests that the Puritans weren't the pinched theocrats Nathaniel Hawthorne made them out to be.

Why American government works better when neither party completely controls it

Here's an intriguing analysis from Jonathan Rauch that seems to explain a lot about the current state of U.S. politics. He says, in a nutshell, that things get bad when one party is in control not only of the White House but also of both houses of Congress. That's because the majority party's legislators know they can count on a steady diet of obstructionism from the minority party. That in turn means the majority has to placate its own hard-liners to have a hope of getting anything done, resulting in legislation that's more extreme than the country as a whole would like — that is, when the majority is able to enact any legislation at all.

... Today, almost all Democrats are to the left of all Republicans. The result is that the system behaves very differently when one party is in control than when they share.

So differently, in fact, that you can fairly say that the country has one Constitution with two distinct modes of operation.

In Mode 1 — unified government — the minority party in Washington, shut out of power, has every incentive to make the majority’s life difficult, and does so. Its partisans, with no stake in whether anything gets done in Washington, [DCT comment: and worried about drawing a primary challenge in the next election cycle from their party's radical wing] treat the government as if it were under control of an invading army.

The majority, lacking support from the out-of-power party, must govern on its own, which requires holding on to every element of its coalition, which means governing from the center of its party instead of the center of the country.

In other words, Democrats, when in total control, have little choice but to govern from the left. Republicans, who are even more conservative than Democrats are liberal, govern from the right. Policy is driven toward the edges, instead of the middle. ...

In Mode 2 — divided government — the dynamic is reversed. Both parties, responsible for governing, have a stake in success. Forced to negotiate and compromise, they drag policy toward the center, allowing moderates to feel represented instead of ignored.

Most important, the country itself becomes more governable and meaningful laws stand a likelier chance of passage, because neither side can easily blame the other for whatever is wrong and because any major legislation needs support from both parties to pass.

Jonathan Rauch, Divided We Thrive, NY Times, Nov. 6, 2010 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

The Gospel according to the XKCD comic

The justly-famous techie comic xkcd.com has one today that ties in nicely with evidence-based theology:

 

Morals without God? (NY Times blog post)

A good read, by biologist Frans B. M. de Waal

"But they're working on that ...."

My wife and I were talking while walking the dog this morning. I'd made the comment that 60 was the new 40; she said there are still a lot of ways aging can and does kill you, like Alzheimer's (her mother died of it).

I responded "but they're working on that."

Then it dawned on me: These days, an integral part of our mental framework is the dollop of optimism that comes with "they're working on that."

I wonder whether people 100 years ago had the same feeling.

Related:  NPR Planet Money podast, Would You Rather be Rich in 1900, or Middle-Class Now?; see also the discussion of that podcast at Hacker News.

No, there weren't 27 people killed at UT Austin

From the Distortions Happen department:  My daughter was one of the many students locked down at the University of Texas at Austin this morning.  Shortly afterwards, she emailed to let everyone know she was OK (she was several blocks from where the gunman was), and said they'd heard 27 people were killed.  No one was killed except the gunman, who turned his weapon on himself, so I wonder where in the world the students got that information?  

Atheists and agnostics are the most knowledgeable about religion - Pew survey

This isn't a huge surprise: In the United States, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable than Christians about religion, says the Los Angeles Times, followed very closely by Jews and Mormons. Why would that be? The Times quotes a Pew researcher:

American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.

"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."

Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education.

The New York Times's article has a more-acerbic quote from an atheist:

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

(For more data on educational levels of different categories of believers, see an earlier Pew survey.)

Solar cells on cell-phone towers in developing nations may help save lives by powering vaccine refrigerators

See 'Off-grid' cellphone towers could save lives, by Harvey Rubin and Alice Conant.

Networking lessons from the Gospel of Luke

(Adapted from a comment I made to someone else's posting at Hacker News:) When I've been at business events where I don't know anyone, I don't even bother trying to introduce myself to the "important" folks. (Cf. Luke 14.7-11.) I seem to have enjoyed such events the most when I've looked around for people in the same boat as I; introduced myself; and asked them about themselves. I'll interject bits of my own story when appropriate, but I try to keep the conversation focused mostly on the other person. After a few minutes, I'll smile and say, "hey, it's been great talking to you," maybe swap business cards, and move on - rinse, repeat. 

If I can play matchmaker and help get multiple new acquaintances talking to each other, so much the better.

Some open-ended questions I've found useful: How did you end up at X company? What got you into X field? What challenges do you see ahead for X field?

I figure life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie; if I keep going to these events, and keep focusing on making others feel welcome and included (even if only by me), then in due course I'll end up getting to know the movers and shakers.

Oops ...

Dear readers who get notified of new posts by email:  In my post on the GOP Pledge to America, I clicked "Publish" too soon (I meant to click "Preview").  Please read the complete post.

The GOP Pledge to America: Abolishing "traffic laws"?

Give the GOP credit:  In offering the 2010 version of their 1994 Contract with America, dubbed the "Pledge to America," at least they're being clear about what they'd do if they regained control of Congress.  (I found a draft of the Pledge at Scribd and am working through its 21 pages.)   Some of the GOP proposals make sense; others, I'm not at all so sure about. 

The Pledge talks about cutting through job-killing government red tape. But if there's one thing we know about people of all stripes, it's that they can focus single-mindedly on the pursuit of what they want; they'd much prefer not to have to think about the possible side effects of their actions. (Economists call these side effects externalities.) That goes for two-year-olds, for tycoons, and for everyone in between.

Rodney Clapp put it well a couple of years ago in The Christian Century: "The theological rationale for the necessity (and the potential nobility) of government can be summarized in two words: original sin. Each and every person and institution is prone to self-deception and destructive self-interest. ... There is no such thing as sufficient self-regulation on Wall Street, on Main Street, in our churches or anywhere else. ..." (Emphasis added.)

It'd be wonderful if we didn't need traffic laws, and every driver could relentlessly put the pedal to the metal to get to her destination, oblivious to everything around her. But that would have been a bad idea even in the days of Model Ts and two-lane gravel roads; it'd be disastrous in this day of SUVs and high-speed interstate freeways (not to mention giant tractor-trailer truck rigs).

The "road" we share is both more crowded and more complex. It seems pretty silly to insist that the simple "traffic laws" of yesteryear are all we need.

Related posts:

• Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect
• Financial regulations can be like fire safety rules

Can disbelief be reconciled with worship?

Last week a reader sent me a Facebook message expressing hope that I hadn't discontinued this blog, saying, "Goyim for God, indeed!" I take the liberty of quoting from [his or her] reply to my response:

... I'm a lifelong [denomination member] recently transplanted to a small [location] town where my only church option is St. [XX] Episcopal ....

But talk about culture shock! Worship is a constant barrage of words that I either don't believe or that offend me (it will take some time), and I'm struggling with Book of Common Prayer on the one hand and the apparent absence of any normative common wisdom on the other. I say the first line of the Nicene Creed and am then silent. [Me too - DCT.] ... Yet the people are dear, the rector--rather conservative theologically--is masterful at pastoring, and I am chipping away at a niche for myself. Still longing for the Goyim for God!

... I am deeply concerned about the future of Christianity if all the laity sees is fundamentalism, megachurch me-ism, or 4th century theology. Where is panentheism in the pulpits? Where is there talk of process--or of anything other than Jesus as the biological son of God? We're doing a decent job of whaling away at social issues, but what about theology? What can a layperson do (other than write a highly articulate blog)? I gather you have found a way to be comfortable with worship. How do you do that?

Truth to tell, I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with traditional Christian corporate worship. Except when I have blood-drive duty every eight weeks, I haven't been to church at our parish in over a year.  (My ever-supportive wife and I visited a couple of other nearby parishes, but she decided she didn't want to switch, for reasons I completely understand. So now she goes alone, and I'm not sufficiently motivated to become a regular at another parish on my own.)

Why have I stopped going to church? Because over the past 10 years or so, our parish has become far too Jesus-centered for comfort. As junior clergy have moved on, they've been replaced by evangelicals; all of our parish's recent calls have been products of Nashotah House or Trinity School for Ministry, two bastions of orthodox ideology. The sermons, the hymns, the Sunday school lessons all seemed to focus mainly on Jesus as (supposedly) God become man, who defeated once and for all the sin of the world and who would soon return in triumph — all of which are notions that, in my humble judgment, simply cannot be reconciled with the evidence of what God actually wrought in this world, as opposed to what some people imagine he did.

I remain convinced that belief in a Creator of some kind is eminently defensible, and that the Summary of the Law — paraphrased slightly — is the key to a happy life.  I admire and respect Jesus for his commitment to both, even at the cost of his life. I still love and respect my friends at our parish, many of whom have said they miss me on Sundays. I can't rule out that it's I, not they, who is totally missing the point (but I don't think that's the case). 

Still, I squirm when preachers and laity act as though there's no room in the church for any point of view that doesn't square with what I can only judge to be sheer speculation. In the end, that's what caused me to stay away from church, at least at our parish.

I've toyed with the idea of asking some of my like-minded parishioner friends if they'd be interested in starting a Goyim for God study group that meets somewhere for Morning- or Evening Prayer (minus the Gloria Patri and the Phos Hilaron) and Sunday brunch or dinner, either in lieu of or in addition to the Sunday service at church. Maybe someday we can give that a shot and see how it might work.

World-renowned computer programmer Linus Torvalds becomes U.S. citizen - why it matters

See the oh-by-the-way comment in this posting by the world-renowned Finnish computer programmer Linus Torvalds, mentioning that he became a U.S. citizen last week (hat tip: Hacker News).

It's been said before: It seems that "foreigners" want to become Americans far more than the other way around, which suggests that as a nation we must not be doing that badly.

XKCD on atheists

Big government is a necessary counterweight to big business, says The Christian Century

A mantra I've stressed in this blog is that the First Commandment calls us to face the facts, to live in the real world wrought by the Creator and not in some fantasy land of our own making.

One of the facts that must be faced is that people just don't always do what they're "supposed" to do. Perhaps as a side effect of natural selection, we can be relentlessly single-minded in our pursuit of what we want, to the point of inflicting harm on ourselves and others. This relentlessness can be seen in all areas of life, not least in some of the upper reaches of the business world.

Apropos of that, recently The Christian Century's editors nicely summed up why my politics have become a bit more liberal and a bit less laissez-faire than they used to be:

The Tea Party movement represents an effort to undo the 20th-century consensus of corporate liberalism, according to which Big Government is the necessary counterweight to Big Business, an arrangement that has offered a modicum of protection to the public while maintaining a stable political and economic environment for business.

Individual resistance to Big Anything is understandable. But in directing their libertarian passions at government alone, Tea Party activists fail to grasp the complexities and scale of modern life.

None of the major political challenges of our time—health care, environmental dangers, social security, the globalization of the economy and the immense power of banks and companies that become "too big to fail"—is addressed by the Tea Party's antitax, antigovernment ideology.

Tea Party's strange brew, The Christian Century, July 13, 2010, p. 7 (emphasis and extra paraagraphing added).

Mozart effect turns out to have been an urban-legend distortion of the original science

From the Distortions Desk:  NPR explains this morning that the so-called Mozart effect is actually an urban legend, a distortion of the much-more-limited research results reported by a scientist in 1993.

“… people are rather cavalier about the facts”

Over the years various posts in the "Distortions" category of this blog have linked to the famous Snopes.com Web site, which specializes in checking out urban legends and the like. This past Sunday the NY Times profiled the site and its founders, a married couple, who now make a living from the site's ad­ver­tis­ing revenues.

(It's ironic that the Times published the piece on Easter Sunday, which commemorates an event that, as longtime readers know, I strongly suspect was just such an urban legend, a story mutation arising from Jesus' disciples' efforts to make sense of the catastrophic events they'd just witnessed, and the fact that his body was no longer where it had been put on Friday night, and the fact that some of his followers concluded that they had seen him alive.)

Here's an excerpt:

The popularity of Snopes — it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.

After 14 years, they seem to have concluded that people are rather cavalier about the facts.

* * *

“People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again,” Mr. Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to think, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Mrs. Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine flu vaccines.

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

(Emphasis added.)

Read the rest.

May your delusions be benign and your compulsions useful - Scott Adams, author of Dilbert

From Crazy or Disciplined? at Scott Adams's blog; he's the author of the Dilbert comic strip:

A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren't real. And that's the best case scenario. ...

[¶¶]

The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.

It's a worthwhile read.

Episcopal bishops should shut up about politics, says liberal scholar Walter Russell Mead

Liberal foreign policy scholar Walter Russell Mead, whose father is an Episcopal priest, excoriates the Episcopal Church's hierarchy for dabbling in politics while failing at their basic work:

There’s nothing like Lent for reflecting on the sins of other people; I thought I’d start at the top — with the bishops of my own church.

As the Episcopal church along with the other mainline Protestant denominations diminishes, we don’t have to look far to see bishops and leaders who are largely failing in their core assign­ments: to tend to the health and promote the growth of the congregations in their area.

Yet even as we have fewer and fewer effective and successful leaders, we have no shortage of political, ‘prophetic’ bishops. When they can, they meet with world leaders and jet off to exotic locales to bring peace and fight for justice. When they can’t do that, they sign statements of concern, issue reports and other­wise tug on the skirts of an indifferent public seeking attention for their political views. * * *

. . . Trivial and predictable are not news, and the political stands that the mainline clergy take are almost always both.

A statement by an Episcopal bishop will not change one mind or one vote; at least in all my years in the pews I’ve never met a single Episcopalian who said that the opinion of a bishop does or should have the slightest influence on how Episcopalians vote and if the churchgoers aren’t paying attention to the bishops I can’t imagine anyone else is.

I’m not urging the bishops to change their politics. I’m urging them to shut up. More precisely, I’m urging them to base their ministry on a clearer understanding of their situation and their role.

Let me nail some cyber-theses to the virtual door.

1. Nobody cares what you think while your tiny church is falling apart. * * *

... [W]hy, exactly, would any sane person today pay attention to the political pronouncements of an Episcopal bishop? Episcopalians are a tiny minority of the population and the church long ago lost its social power and cachet. The Episcopal church today is in the worst condition it has been since the aftermath of the Revolution; its clergy has visibly failed to keep the church together or prevent its ongoing decline. I’m afraid that the penchant to make political pronouncements proceeds less from a true prophetic vocation than from a nostalgia for a time when it mattered what Episcopal bishops thought.

In any case, there is nothing more ridiculous than a proprietor of a failing concern who officiously lectures everyone else on how to manage their affairs. Please, for the sake of what remains of the dignity of your office, give it a rest. * * *

3. In the contemporary world the job of the clergy isn’t to provide political leadership. It is to help laypeople grow into better, wiser political leaders. * * *

... The job of a bishop isn’t to make statements about the minimum wage or the Iraq war. It’s to help the clergy in his or her diocese form communities that produce dynamic, committed and intelligent laypeople who will shape political debates on these and many other matters.

A bishop isn’t here to inject Christian values into public policy debates; a bishop is here to inject mature, thoughtful and committed Christians into public life.

The Diocese of Long Island shouldn’t be taking stands on the minimum wage; it should be producing people who transform the life of the region at every level of engagement.

If the bishops were already doing this pretty well I would be much more tolerant of their occasional ventures into public debate. But it’s as plain as day that en masse the American bishops are catastrophically failing at that core task — as indeed are their colleagues in the other mainline denominations.

In the parlous state of today’s Episcopal church, every dime a diocese spends and every minute of a bishop’s working day needs to be focused on local congregations. The church is melting before their eyes and many bishops seem to be passively watching it happen; at most they hope to manage decline as smoothly as possible.

Sunday Jeremiad: Petty Prophets of the Blue Beast, at The American Interest, Feb. 21, 2010 (bold-faced emphasis edited, extra paragraphing added; hat tip: Stand Firm in Faith - I must have signed up for their email updates at some point, because I don't read their blog).