“PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.”
Ambrose Bierce
“PRAYER, n. Hour upon hour of brown-nosing to nobody.”
Nom dePlume
"When my way grows drear, precious Lord linger near/When my light is almost gone, Hear my cry, hear my call."
Gospel lyrics
I continue to marvel at how religion gets such a wide berth of undeserved respect in the media. It's like politics in the old Soviet Union, which I visited in the 60s: we're all SO happy, and we LOVE the Party. That's all you would see in the media. It's the same with religion. It’s so good for you!
A photo in the newspaper (Chicago Tribune, 12/2/07) shows a gospel choir of Black people getting into the Christmas spirit, praising Jesus in song. I just absorbed the picture for a while, trying to figure out what was happening. And without reading the article, I got the message.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
On religion, drugs, and the question of whether Moses was stoned
"Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure."
Ambrose Bierce
"This story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple, by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up."
Thomas Paine
From Israel comes the kind of "duh!" enlightenment that confirms what we all knew: religion and drugs go together like a horse and carriage.
An Israeli researcher claimed evidence that “Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments,” saw the burning bush, and so forth.
The professor, Benny Shanon, writing in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy, gets his premise right but his conclusion wrong.
Ambrose Bierce
"This story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple, by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up."
Thomas Paine
From Israel comes the kind of "duh!" enlightenment that confirms what we all knew: religion and drugs go together like a horse and carriage.
An Israeli researcher claimed evidence that “Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments,” saw the burning bush, and so forth.
The professor, Benny Shanon, writing in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy, gets his premise right but his conclusion wrong.
Contribution to Blogswarm against Theocracy: Religion, politics, and the Vortex of Evil
"When kings and other autocrats believe that they are doing God's bidding, there is inevitably a great deal of suffering and death."
Nom DePlume
Evil, once largely a religious word, has come into play in the world of politics.
Ronald Reagan gave it a boost with his moral condemnation of the USSR. Now, Muslim fanatics are “evildoers.” In fact, there’s an Axis of Evil (shame on the speechwriter who made up this non-existent justification for war and militarism!) – very different countries who do not consider themselves allies.
But those countries all think America is evil. Can there be any consistency in the application of this powerful word?
Nom DePlume
Evil, once largely a religious word, has come into play in the world of politics.
Ronald Reagan gave it a boost with his moral condemnation of the USSR. Now, Muslim fanatics are “evildoers.” In fact, there’s an Axis of Evil (shame on the speechwriter who made up this non-existent justification for war and militarism!) – very different countries who do not consider themselves allies.
But those countries all think America is evil. Can there be any consistency in the application of this powerful word?
Bless America? Damn America? What’s God got to do with it?
“The good or ill of man lies within his own will.”
Epictetus
As a linguist, I’m probably more aware than most people that words are just words and that it is people who give them their inflammatory power. That’s what’s happening with God damn America, the three words uttered by a Black preacher, heard out of context, that shook white America – or a large portion of it, anyway – to its very core.
As a linguist and Humanist, I find so many things that are wrong or laughable about this situation that it’s hard to know where to begin.
Epictetus
As a linguist, I’m probably more aware than most people that words are just words and that it is people who give them their inflammatory power. That’s what’s happening with God damn America, the three words uttered by a Black preacher, heard out of context, that shook white America – or a large portion of it, anyway – to its very core.
As a linguist and Humanist, I find so many things that are wrong or laughable about this situation that it’s hard to know where to begin.
"Diluting" one's Jewishness: Max Feinberg's Nazi eugenics
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
Tennessee Williams
All religions are equally offensive, inasmuch as they cultivate fantasy, but in some respects, some are worse than others.
Islam leads the pack in fanaticism and violence, a title once held by Christians not too long ago.
But today Christianity is notable for the fear of hell that it inspires. It has, to my knowledge, no positive incentives like those 72 virgins promised to the suicide bombers.
I indict Judaism, not for its violence (though it has its share of fanatics) not for fanaticism or fear of the afterlife -- quite the opposite, in fact, since there is very little talk of heaven or hell in Judaism (though some Jews cling to the notion of a "world to come").
A lot of stuff
So Jews are made to do a lot of what George Carlin called "stuff," all for no payoff! Four sets of dishes – milk/meat for Passover/rest of year. A significant crockery burden! Thus, Judaism, in its proposed input/output ratio, is inferior to the other two Abrahamic religions.
Tennessee Williams
All religions are equally offensive, inasmuch as they cultivate fantasy, but in some respects, some are worse than others.
Islam leads the pack in fanaticism and violence, a title once held by Christians not too long ago.
But today Christianity is notable for the fear of hell that it inspires. It has, to my knowledge, no positive incentives like those 72 virgins promised to the suicide bombers.
I indict Judaism, not for its violence (though it has its share of fanatics) not for fanaticism or fear of the afterlife -- quite the opposite, in fact, since there is very little talk of heaven or hell in Judaism (though some Jews cling to the notion of a "world to come").
A lot of stuff
So Jews are made to do a lot of what George Carlin called "stuff," all for no payoff! Four sets of dishes – milk/meat for Passover/rest of year. A significant crockery burden! Thus, Judaism, in its proposed input/output ratio, is inferior to the other two Abrahamic religions.
Question for believers: And then what?
"An inch away, total darkness."
Zen saying
"Prepare for tomorrow by doing your best today."
Life's Little Instruction Calendar, Volume V
Now that we're about to celebrate the first appearance of the Christian demigod, whose Second Coming is eagarly awaited by millions, it's worth remembering that religion trafficks in the future: apocalypses, Judgment Days, Armageddon, rapture, end-times, Paradise, Valhalla, Messiahs, etc. It's always about something that's going to happen, must happen, and thus must be prepared for by every means, from asceticism to suicide.
That's why, as a friend recently pointed out, you can "and then what?" believers into a brick wall.
Zen saying
"Prepare for tomorrow by doing your best today."
Life's Little Instruction Calendar, Volume V
Now that we're about to celebrate the first appearance of the Christian demigod, whose Second Coming is eagarly awaited by millions, it's worth remembering that religion trafficks in the future: apocalypses, Judgment Days, Armageddon, rapture, end-times, Paradise, Valhalla, Messiahs, etc. It's always about something that's going to happen, must happen, and thus must be prepared for by every means, from asceticism to suicide.
That's why, as a friend recently pointed out, you can "and then what?" believers into a brick wall.
A Walk on the Wild Side: A Peek at Fundie Disdain and Fury.
I happened upon a chabad (Judaism, of the aggressively fundamentalist kind) website and read many of the recent posts, most of them highly emotional. I think it's helpful for secular humanists, from time to time, to get a look at fundamentalists' mentality, test the depth of their convictions, and experience the intensity of their hostility toward anyone who believes otherwise.
The posts express relative degrees of antagonism toward marrying outside the Jewish religion. At one extreme are those who equate intermarriage with the Holocaust, inasmuch as, according to their cockamamie demographics and genetics, the marrying of a gentile precludes the birth of untold generations of Jews, thus achieving the same result as the Nazis' Final Solution. (The site moderator does not agree, fortunately.)
I will not dignify this comparison with any discussion, except to say the Holocaust was the darkest moment in human history, and nothing -- repeat NOTHING --can be compared to it, actually or metaphorically.
But yes, some of those folks do believe that intermarriage is the moral equivalent of The Holocaust.
The posts express relative degrees of antagonism toward marrying outside the Jewish religion. At one extreme are those who equate intermarriage with the Holocaust, inasmuch as, according to their cockamamie demographics and genetics, the marrying of a gentile precludes the birth of untold generations of Jews, thus achieving the same result as the Nazis' Final Solution. (The site moderator does not agree, fortunately.)
I will not dignify this comparison with any discussion, except to say the Holocaust was the darkest moment in human history, and nothing -- repeat NOTHING --can be compared to it, actually or metaphorically.
But yes, some of those folks do believe that intermarriage is the moral equivalent of The Holocaust.
The Deadly Mix of Religion and Militarism
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, for secular humanists, are: Religion, Politics, Militarism, and Marketing. All represent the triumph of Unreason. All require unquestioning groupthink. All compete for our souls. Today's rant is concerned only with the first three, which have the power to destroy us.
An article in the Chicago Tribune of May 25, 2009 reports on the use of Biblical verses as prefaces to the government's 2003 intelligence reports, as approved by Rumsfeld: "the hawkish use of Scripture at the nation's highest levels has prompted many faithful to ask whether Americans lost their lives in Iraq defending democracy or fighting a religious crusade."
Of course, moderate Jews and Christian deplore such use of Scripture. They speak of peace and tolerance. That's the problem with holy books. They can mean whatever you want them to. The violent fanatics think their interpretation of the sacred texts is just as valid.
All of this comes soon after a very disturbing article in a recent issue of Harper's Magazine, describing the increasing religiosity, particularly the Christianizing, of America's military, most especially the Air Force. Cadets have been harassed and beaten for being atheists. I cannot think of a more obscenely un-American act.
An article in the Chicago Tribune of May 25, 2009 reports on the use of Biblical verses as prefaces to the government's 2003 intelligence reports, as approved by Rumsfeld: "the hawkish use of Scripture at the nation's highest levels has prompted many faithful to ask whether Americans lost their lives in Iraq defending democracy or fighting a religious crusade."
Of course, moderate Jews and Christian deplore such use of Scripture. They speak of peace and tolerance. That's the problem with holy books. They can mean whatever you want them to. The violent fanatics think their interpretation of the sacred texts is just as valid.
All of this comes soon after a very disturbing article in a recent issue of Harper's Magazine, describing the increasing religiosity, particularly the Christianizing, of America's military, most especially the Air Force. Cadets have been harassed and beaten for being atheists. I cannot think of a more obscenely un-American act.
How Many Kinds of Jews are There -- Really?
"If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, whay warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?"
Percy Bysshe Shelley
After decades of Jew-watching, I have found that all Jews fall into one of three categories. Not the traditional ones. The labels mean little (even among Orthodox we find doubters); my categories are based on behavior as evidence of internal mental states.
(1) The true believers -- perhaps the majority of those called Orthodox, but you can find them in any denomination. They really believe it. They exist in an alternate, phantasmagorical reality in which the events of the Torah actually happened. The truth of these events, the reality of these characters -- they're part of the true believers' subjective world, as real as the automobiles and computers in their objective world.
In the case of the Orthodox, and many Conservatives, the zealousness with which they observe their countless commandments and try to out-Jew each other in doing so -- these indicate both obsessive compulsive behavior and mass-hypnotic, group-reinforced flight from reality. They reveal an astonishing level of mind control and groupthink -- the level that's usually associated with a cult. But then, a cult is just a religion you don't like.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
After decades of Jew-watching, I have found that all Jews fall into one of three categories. Not the traditional ones. The labels mean little (even among Orthodox we find doubters); my categories are based on behavior as evidence of internal mental states.
(1) The true believers -- perhaps the majority of those called Orthodox, but you can find them in any denomination. They really believe it. They exist in an alternate, phantasmagorical reality in which the events of the Torah actually happened. The truth of these events, the reality of these characters -- they're part of the true believers' subjective world, as real as the automobiles and computers in their objective world.
In the case of the Orthodox, and many Conservatives, the zealousness with which they observe their countless commandments and try to out-Jew each other in doing so -- these indicate both obsessive compulsive behavior and mass-hypnotic, group-reinforced flight from reality. They reveal an astonishing level of mind control and groupthink -- the level that's usually associated with a cult. But then, a cult is just a religion you don't like.
Holy Places: Restored Religious House of Fantasy Recalls Bad Old Days of Belief
"Civilization will not attain its perfection, until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."
Emile Zola
The title of the post is a hypothetical headline from an alternate universe. Here in the pious Midwest, the restoration of Chicago's cavernous Holy Name Cathedral is front-page news (Chicago Tribune, July 30, 2009) and clearly a cause for rejoicing. "This is what the church is supposed to look like," according to pastor Dan Mayall.
Magicalizing
Indeed. Religious people are very big on magicalizing earthly things. Their deities never actually appear, so they magicalize a long list of real items. Magic rituals, magic texts, magic appearances of religious figures in food or the knots of a door, magic artifacts, and especially magic places. All of Saudi Arabia considers itself a magic place upon which unbelievers cannot tread. It has two super-magic cities.
No, it's just a pile of sand, sitting, unfortunately, on an ocean of oil.
The Israeli tourist industry is driven by what was "supposed to have" happened (right, like they have the actual slab that Jesus was laid out on -- how gullible can people be?)...as the so-called Holy Land, despite the perpetual violence and threat of violence, is annually inundated with pilgrims in search of the magical places associated with their stories -- where Christ was buried, where Abraham did this or that.
Emile Zola
The title of the post is a hypothetical headline from an alternate universe. Here in the pious Midwest, the restoration of Chicago's cavernous Holy Name Cathedral is front-page news (Chicago Tribune, July 30, 2009) and clearly a cause for rejoicing. "This is what the church is supposed to look like," according to pastor Dan Mayall.
Magicalizing
Indeed. Religious people are very big on magicalizing earthly things. Their deities never actually appear, so they magicalize a long list of real items. Magic rituals, magic texts, magic appearances of religious figures in food or the knots of a door, magic artifacts, and especially magic places. All of Saudi Arabia considers itself a magic place upon which unbelievers cannot tread. It has two super-magic cities.
No, it's just a pile of sand, sitting, unfortunately, on an ocean of oil.
The Israeli tourist industry is driven by what was "supposed to have" happened (right, like they have the actual slab that Jesus was laid out on -- how gullible can people be?)...as the so-called Holy Land, despite the perpetual violence and threat of violence, is annually inundated with pilgrims in search of the magical places associated with their stories -- where Christ was buried, where Abraham did this or that.
If Religion Is a Mental Illness, Let's Treat It
"When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out."
Frank Sinatra
The idea that religious belief and practice constitute a form of mental illness goes all the way back to Freud and Marx, but nobody seems to do anything about it, even as the evidence continues to pile up. Hearing voices, believing in the reality of imaginary people, places and impossible stories that are demonstrably false...these are the signs of a diseased mind, as is readily obvious from even the most informal descriptions of schizophrenia and psychosis.
Similarly, the repetitive practice of religious ritual -- in psychological terms, the obsessive compulsive disorder that mitigates the anxiety caused by never knowing when one's actions will appease the deity -- is also a mental illness. A newspaper article on OCD (Chicago Tribune, August 3, 2009) lists, under "Common obsessions," "fear of violating religious rules"; under "Common compulsions," there is "preoccupation with religious observances."
Frank Sinatra
The idea that religious belief and practice constitute a form of mental illness goes all the way back to Freud and Marx, but nobody seems to do anything about it, even as the evidence continues to pile up. Hearing voices, believing in the reality of imaginary people, places and impossible stories that are demonstrably false...these are the signs of a diseased mind, as is readily obvious from even the most informal descriptions of schizophrenia and psychosis.
Similarly, the repetitive practice of religious ritual -- in psychological terms, the obsessive compulsive disorder that mitigates the anxiety caused by never knowing when one's actions will appease the deity -- is also a mental illness. A newspaper article on OCD (Chicago Tribune, August 3, 2009) lists, under "Common obsessions," "fear of violating religious rules"; under "Common compulsions," there is "preoccupation with religious observances."
End urban violence? End the drug war!
"War is the health of the state.''
Randolph Bourne
CNN and the Chicago Sun-Times are doing stories on Chicago's deadly streets. It's time once again to remember the main reason why the streets are so deadly, why there is so much gun violence, why brave police officers and little children die every day: the war on drugs.
Randolph Bourne
CNN and the Chicago Sun-Times are doing stories on Chicago's deadly streets. It's time once again to remember the main reason why the streets are so deadly, why there is so much gun violence, why brave police officers and little children die every day: the war on drugs.
Shedding of the burden of God
"I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere."
Fran Lebowitz
A bit of history is made today, as a "Good Without God" billboard appears in Chicago, and other cities as well, paid for by a coalition of secular groups. The news story in the Trib (self-serving commercial: The Jewish Atheist is honored to be one of the few blogs listed in the newspaper's "The Seeker" religious section) drew literally hundreds of comments, as hard-core believers on both sides vented their spleen. It was fun to watch the religious folks trot out the same tired nonsensical arguments and squall like babies at the questioning of their magical world.
Good. I am heartily in favor of anything that brings atheists together and openly questions the fantasies of smug believers, as rational humans have occasionally been able to do since ancient times, usually not without getting tortured or incinerated for their doubt.
But atheism now has its own billboard, if only for a few weeks, while billboards spewing religious BS litter this beautiful land of ours. I wish it were the other way round. I think a life without God, prayer, and obsessing over the Bible is a much better life! I should know --- that’s how I’ve lived.
Over the centuries, God has gotten excellent PR and marketing. When the times required it, the Torah God was supplemented with a nicer God. As humans evolved, so did their concept of God. I wonder if there’s a connection.
But God’s dark side is still on record, and a lot of people believe in it, because it panders to their darker instincts – to exclude, to persecute, even to destroy the Other, the unbeliever.
Many people just walk away from this kind of – and often all forms of – organized religion and quietly live their lives as secular humanists. Unfortunately, this is no longer enough. Religious fanatics and fundamentalists are now empowered to destroy whole societies.
Pushing back - hard
Two consistent themes in my writings have been outreach and conversion. I admire the brilliant works of Dawkins, Dennett and Harris, but I can't help wondering how much of it is “us talking to us.”
We must somehow muster our considerable intellectual firepower and focus it on the actual rollback of the influence and prestige of religion in public life. Otherwise we will be engulfed by orthodoxy’s relentless advance.
We’ve got to be better marketers, better evangelicals. Specifically: We should stop arguing that God doesn't exist -- assume he doesn’t -- and show the benefits of adopting this point of view.
What does it mean to shed the burden of God?
Fran Lebowitz
A bit of history is made today, as a "Good Without God" billboard appears in Chicago, and other cities as well, paid for by a coalition of secular groups. The news story in the Trib (self-serving commercial: The Jewish Atheist is honored to be one of the few blogs listed in the newspaper's "The Seeker" religious section) drew literally hundreds of comments, as hard-core believers on both sides vented their spleen. It was fun to watch the religious folks trot out the same tired nonsensical arguments and squall like babies at the questioning of their magical world.
Good. I am heartily in favor of anything that brings atheists together and openly questions the fantasies of smug believers, as rational humans have occasionally been able to do since ancient times, usually not without getting tortured or incinerated for their doubt.
But atheism now has its own billboard, if only for a few weeks, while billboards spewing religious BS litter this beautiful land of ours. I wish it were the other way round. I think a life without God, prayer, and obsessing over the Bible is a much better life! I should know --- that’s how I’ve lived.
Over the centuries, God has gotten excellent PR and marketing. When the times required it, the Torah God was supplemented with a nicer God. As humans evolved, so did their concept of God. I wonder if there’s a connection.
But God’s dark side is still on record, and a lot of people believe in it, because it panders to their darker instincts – to exclude, to persecute, even to destroy the Other, the unbeliever.
Many people just walk away from this kind of – and often all forms of – organized religion and quietly live their lives as secular humanists. Unfortunately, this is no longer enough. Religious fanatics and fundamentalists are now empowered to destroy whole societies.
Pushing back - hard
Two consistent themes in my writings have been outreach and conversion. I admire the brilliant works of Dawkins, Dennett and Harris, but I can't help wondering how much of it is “us talking to us.”
We must somehow muster our considerable intellectual firepower and focus it on the actual rollback of the influence and prestige of religion in public life. Otherwise we will be engulfed by orthodoxy’s relentless advance.
We’ve got to be better marketers, better evangelicals. Specifically: We should stop arguing that God doesn't exist -- assume he doesn’t -- and show the benefits of adopting this point of view.
What does it mean to shed the burden of God?
Follow-up: Allah and all gods are impotent or out to lunch
"So if, as I have shown, gods not not have a human appearance, and if, as you firmly believe, the are unlike anything in the heavens, why do you hesitate to deny that they exist? You lose your nerve, and it is wise of you to do so, though your fear on this account is not of the people but of the gods themselves."
Cicero
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The last post ended with the statement that America's leaders do not understand the threat from Islam because they don't know how serious and fanatic these people are.
Gets worse
I'd give it a rest, but things took a turn for the worse in Iraq, with two horrific bombings (suicide, I suppose, with 72 virgins waiting), a high-level American official resigning over the Afghan war, and, as if to add emphasis to the point I was making, two local men are arrested in connection with a plot to commit violence against Danes responsible FIVE YEARS AGO for drawing the Prophet Mohammed in cartoon form. But it was merely their act of labeling that provoked violence. Or was it something about the pictures -- perhaps also an element of dimly-sensed perceived truth: maybe we really are a bunch of ignorant suicidal psychotics? There had to be something that set them off, or else any pic would do. Maybe there was an original taboo supposed representation that you're not supposed to copy. Where do all the pictures on the Internet come from?
The freedom to draw a picture
So FIVE YEARS LATER, people would plot to kill those who committed what they consider a capital offense...and what we in the West take for granted: the freedom to draw a picture.
How many times must it be explained to Muslims: It is YOU who have to obey and respect your religion. WE do not.
Why the middlemen?
And if your god is so powerful, how come he needs the middlemen to to all the talking for him? Why can't he just broadcast to every mind at once? That would be impressive and convincing.
More important, why does God, Allah, or whoever need so many middlemen to do his persecuting, torturing and killing for him? Is he impotent? Or just out to lunch for a few millennia? Because he sure did wreak havoc in the early parts of the Bible, torching Aaron's two sons, dealing out plagues and horrors of all kinds, opening up the earth to swallow up rebels, and much more. He's certainly settled down a lot.
I recall Penn and Teller wearing metal helmets with lightning rods, the better to guide the divine violence they were asking God to show. Imagine that -- they'd stake their lives on God's existence. Nothing happened.
An unused weapon
I deeply regret that we do not use religion as a psychological weapon against our enemies. Openly desecrate their Quran. Have soldiers do it right in front of detainees. No need to waterboard. No need to lay a finger on them. Cover their walls with ALL kinds of pictures of Mohammed. Photoshop him on a surfboard, in a strip club.
But no, America won't do that. We do not torture. Besides, messing with their religion means they'd start desecrating Bibles, and we don't want that. In a war between religions (our military is overwhelmingly Christian), religion is off-limits.
Cicero
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The last post ended with the statement that America's leaders do not understand the threat from Islam because they don't know how serious and fanatic these people are.
Gets worse
I'd give it a rest, but things took a turn for the worse in Iraq, with two horrific bombings (suicide, I suppose, with 72 virgins waiting), a high-level American official resigning over the Afghan war, and, as if to add emphasis to the point I was making, two local men are arrested in connection with a plot to commit violence against Danes responsible FIVE YEARS AGO for drawing the Prophet Mohammed in cartoon form. But it was merely their act of labeling that provoked violence. Or was it something about the pictures -- perhaps also an element of dimly-sensed perceived truth: maybe we really are a bunch of ignorant suicidal psychotics? There had to be something that set them off, or else any pic would do. Maybe there was an original taboo supposed representation that you're not supposed to copy. Where do all the pictures on the Internet come from?
The freedom to draw a picture
So FIVE YEARS LATER, people would plot to kill those who committed what they consider a capital offense...and what we in the West take for granted: the freedom to draw a picture.
How many times must it be explained to Muslims: It is YOU who have to obey and respect your religion. WE do not.
Why the middlemen?
And if your god is so powerful, how come he needs the middlemen to to all the talking for him? Why can't he just broadcast to every mind at once? That would be impressive and convincing.
More important, why does God, Allah, or whoever need so many middlemen to do his persecuting, torturing and killing for him? Is he impotent? Or just out to lunch for a few millennia? Because he sure did wreak havoc in the early parts of the Bible, torching Aaron's two sons, dealing out plagues and horrors of all kinds, opening up the earth to swallow up rebels, and much more. He's certainly settled down a lot.
I recall Penn and Teller wearing metal helmets with lightning rods, the better to guide the divine violence they were asking God to show. Imagine that -- they'd stake their lives on God's existence. Nothing happened.
An unused weapon
I deeply regret that we do not use religion as a psychological weapon against our enemies. Openly desecrate their Quran. Have soldiers do it right in front of detainees. No need to waterboard. No need to lay a finger on them. Cover their walls with ALL kinds of pictures of Mohammed. Photoshop him on a surfboard, in a strip club.
But no, America won't do that. We do not torture. Besides, messing with their religion means they'd start desecrating Bibles, and we don't want that. In a war between religions (our military is overwhelmingly Christian), religion is off-limits.
Desecration of Quran; Pix of the Prophet Mohammed
"Afghans rally on rumors of desecration of Quran."
Chicago Tribune, 10/26/09
I am incensed. Outraged. Not about the stupid Quran. About the Afghans. A photo shows a crowd of shouting men, hands in the air, with a few rabble-rousers on a raised platform at the center. There's a banner in Arabic. On the same day, 14 American died for these people.
Bogus and creepy
This whole desecration thing is so bogus, creepy, and frightening that I hardly know where to begin.
First of all, Americans in the the military are probably EXQUISITELY careful about how they treat this primitive piece of trash. The article notes that "the protest shows how easily religious sensitivities can be stirred up..."
A merry old time
Indeed. The religious leaders have these poor sheep on a hair-trigger. Let's have a protest, one of them says. Sure, the others agree, great idea, need to keep 'em stoked up, take their minds off how crappy their lives are. OK, Habib, you're in charge of putting together the effigy of Obama. Omar, you and your gang get the rumors started. Let's target the 26th of this month. OK, go!
Yes, they had a merry old time that day, burning Obama in effigy, neglecting their families, their livelihoods (if they had one), and every other really important part of their lives to come out and protest a rumored desecration of their magic book. It would be nice if they had proof of desecration, but religious people -- and this is religion's greatest danger -- don't need proof. So they just took the guy's word for it and headed off to the protest.
What is desecration?
What actually is desecration of the Quran? Did Americans wipe their asses with it, clean latrines with it, blow their noses on it, or just make fun of it? None of the above, I'm sure. Islam is out of bounds in the war on Islamic fanaticism, which is too bad, because we'll never really defeat them until we go after the poisonous root of the craziness, which is their religion itself.
But almost anything could qualify as desecration in the eyes of the offendee. There are many ways to desecrate a symbol, provided the symbol has power. I could do obscene things with a Superman comic, but nobody would come after my head. The Quran has no more truth (and far less entertainment value) than a Superman comic, but it has power.
Religious magical power
That power has been embedded in the brains of human beings for centuries -- and not just Muslims, of course. Every religion relies heavily on magic things, books, pictures, places, and trinkets. You should see Jews kiss, raise aloft, and otherwise revere their holy scroll; they do everything but hump it.
But Islam is unique in its danger to the world. Of the other major Western religions, Christianity and Judaism have grown up somewhat and turned away from violence and martyrdom. Islam has not.
And please don't tell me what a peace-loving religion it is. You can find anything you want in their barbaric holy book. As Sam Harris points out, it is religious moderates who validate the fanatics, because they work from the same holy book. No matter how much they disavow them, the moderates are the fanatics' enablers.
Desecrating...what?
Finally, the Quran itself. What is it that we are so upset about desecrating? Not much, really. With so much wisdom all over the world, to declare that you can find ALL truth in one place -- one messed-up, incoherent, fantasy-based collection of mediaeval rambling -- is to deny all progress that humanity has made in the last 1,000 years. I find it deeply disturbing that so much of humanity is mired in the Middle Ages.
And even more disturbing that they can hold too-nice Westerners hostage with their violent temper tantrums. A Dutch filmmaker is murdered for offending Muslims. Cartoonists who dare to portray their precious Prophet (not such a great guy in real life, bit of a child-molester, I'm told) are rewarded with mass riots. Salman Rushdie spends years of his life fearing a death curse.
Pix of The Prophet
What is the big deal with pix of the Prophet? Christians get a lot of mileage out of religious art. They portray all their magic figures, in every medium, over and over, plus every saint from Anthony to Zinthonius (I made that up), even though nobody knows what they really looked like. Jesus, if he existed, looked more like Yassir Arafat than any of the countless WASP representations. The Muslims don't get it. Humble, stupid believers LIKE to see what they're being told to believe in. Isn't it more effective to burn an effigy of Obama than just to cuss him out?
I'd run a picture of the Prophet, if I had a reliable one. But nobody really knows, so if I showed a picture of Daffy Duck and labeled it "The Prophet Mohammed," would that count?
OK, enough humor. Fourteen Americans died on the same day as Afghans burned our President in effigy because of a rumor that something bad was done to their childish holy book, with its hatred of infidels.
As an American, I resent every cent and drop of blood wasted to help these people build a nation, which they have been unable to do for a thousand years. A new poll shows 46% of Afghans think their country is moving in the right direction, if by "right direction," we mean tribal 1500. Some are willing to engage the Taliban in negotiations.
Fine, let 'em. Without us. If any local country, if any Muslim country cared, they'd be sending soldiers to die (recommended by Mondale in Out of Iraq). But no, they don't give a shit, Americans can die. I'd love to see non-local Muslim peacekeeping forces -- would Egyptians and Iraqis really shoot each other?
Eight more Americans died the next day. Over 900 in Afghanistan alone, thousands more in Iraq. For every death, three or four "wounded" -- horrible, limb-destroying wounds; new kinds of head wounds and brain injuries.
Obama and every member of Congress should be required to view EACH WEEK's coffins, while they dither over policy.
As a humanist, I consider it darkly significant that over a billion people believe that a man rode up to heaven on a horse -- and quite a few are willing to defend those fantasies with violence and murder. They are unwilling to share the world with the rest of us. They are locked in the murky phantasmagoric imaginings of an earlier time -- and are unwilling and unlikely to emerge. Currently Muslims are involved in at least half a dozen armed conflicts worldwide. In Iraq, two SECTS can't even get along. Nowhere from Nigeria to Iran (possible exceptions: Turkey and Indonesia) have they been able to build anything resembling a liberal democratic society.
Terrorism
Historically, terrorism is a kind of asymmetric warfare in which people try to get invaders to leave their country (as Jews did to the British in Palestine). In Afghanistan, most of the new deaths and injuries are coming from roadside bombs. They've found they don't have to engage us militarily at all. For maybe $50 they can build a device that will blow up a Humvee and kill or permanently disable everyone inside. For the terrorists it's an exceedingly cheap form of warfare. For America, not so cheap. The best way to prevent terrorist attacks on America is to get the hell out of their countries and let them settle their own affairs, if they can.
Otherwise, it's only a matter of time till they get their hands on plutonium or smallpox and wreak havoc once again. Remember, they don't mind dying, as long as they take a lot of us with them. I know, a lot of Americans think that if the US withdraws from a war it started, then America "loses." Well, we've already lost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in a repeat of Vietnam, this time in two countries. The longer we stay on their land, the sooner the next 9/11 will be.
Clearly, American policymakers do not appreciate the adversary. "Desecration" of their worthless holy book is the least of our offenses. Merely being a non-Muslim is our death sentence.
Chicago Tribune, 10/26/09
I am incensed. Outraged. Not about the stupid Quran. About the Afghans. A photo shows a crowd of shouting men, hands in the air, with a few rabble-rousers on a raised platform at the center. There's a banner in Arabic. On the same day, 14 American died for these people.
Bogus and creepy
This whole desecration thing is so bogus, creepy, and frightening that I hardly know where to begin.
First of all, Americans in the the military are probably EXQUISITELY careful about how they treat this primitive piece of trash. The article notes that "the protest shows how easily religious sensitivities can be stirred up..."
A merry old time
Indeed. The religious leaders have these poor sheep on a hair-trigger. Let's have a protest, one of them says. Sure, the others agree, great idea, need to keep 'em stoked up, take their minds off how crappy their lives are. OK, Habib, you're in charge of putting together the effigy of Obama. Omar, you and your gang get the rumors started. Let's target the 26th of this month. OK, go!
Yes, they had a merry old time that day, burning Obama in effigy, neglecting their families, their livelihoods (if they had one), and every other really important part of their lives to come out and protest a rumored desecration of their magic book. It would be nice if they had proof of desecration, but religious people -- and this is religion's greatest danger -- don't need proof. So they just took the guy's word for it and headed off to the protest.
What is desecration?
What actually is desecration of the Quran? Did Americans wipe their asses with it, clean latrines with it, blow their noses on it, or just make fun of it? None of the above, I'm sure. Islam is out of bounds in the war on Islamic fanaticism, which is too bad, because we'll never really defeat them until we go after the poisonous root of the craziness, which is their religion itself.
But almost anything could qualify as desecration in the eyes of the offendee. There are many ways to desecrate a symbol, provided the symbol has power. I could do obscene things with a Superman comic, but nobody would come after my head. The Quran has no more truth (and far less entertainment value) than a Superman comic, but it has power.
Religious magical power
That power has been embedded in the brains of human beings for centuries -- and not just Muslims, of course. Every religion relies heavily on magic things, books, pictures, places, and trinkets. You should see Jews kiss, raise aloft, and otherwise revere their holy scroll; they do everything but hump it.
But Islam is unique in its danger to the world. Of the other major Western religions, Christianity and Judaism have grown up somewhat and turned away from violence and martyrdom. Islam has not.
And please don't tell me what a peace-loving religion it is. You can find anything you want in their barbaric holy book. As Sam Harris points out, it is religious moderates who validate the fanatics, because they work from the same holy book. No matter how much they disavow them, the moderates are the fanatics' enablers.
Desecrating...what?
Finally, the Quran itself. What is it that we are so upset about desecrating? Not much, really. With so much wisdom all over the world, to declare that you can find ALL truth in one place -- one messed-up, incoherent, fantasy-based collection of mediaeval rambling -- is to deny all progress that humanity has made in the last 1,000 years. I find it deeply disturbing that so much of humanity is mired in the Middle Ages.
And even more disturbing that they can hold too-nice Westerners hostage with their violent temper tantrums. A Dutch filmmaker is murdered for offending Muslims. Cartoonists who dare to portray their precious Prophet (not such a great guy in real life, bit of a child-molester, I'm told) are rewarded with mass riots. Salman Rushdie spends years of his life fearing a death curse.
Pix of The Prophet
What is the big deal with pix of the Prophet? Christians get a lot of mileage out of religious art. They portray all their magic figures, in every medium, over and over, plus every saint from Anthony to Zinthonius (I made that up), even though nobody knows what they really looked like. Jesus, if he existed, looked more like Yassir Arafat than any of the countless WASP representations. The Muslims don't get it. Humble, stupid believers LIKE to see what they're being told to believe in. Isn't it more effective to burn an effigy of Obama than just to cuss him out?
I'd run a picture of the Prophet, if I had a reliable one. But nobody really knows, so if I showed a picture of Daffy Duck and labeled it "The Prophet Mohammed," would that count?
OK, enough humor. Fourteen Americans died on the same day as Afghans burned our President in effigy because of a rumor that something bad was done to their childish holy book, with its hatred of infidels.
As an American, I resent every cent and drop of blood wasted to help these people build a nation, which they have been unable to do for a thousand years. A new poll shows 46% of Afghans think their country is moving in the right direction, if by "right direction," we mean tribal 1500. Some are willing to engage the Taliban in negotiations.
Fine, let 'em. Without us. If any local country, if any Muslim country cared, they'd be sending soldiers to die (recommended by Mondale in Out of Iraq). But no, they don't give a shit, Americans can die. I'd love to see non-local Muslim peacekeeping forces -- would Egyptians and Iraqis really shoot each other?
Eight more Americans died the next day. Over 900 in Afghanistan alone, thousands more in Iraq. For every death, three or four "wounded" -- horrible, limb-destroying wounds; new kinds of head wounds and brain injuries.
Obama and every member of Congress should be required to view EACH WEEK's coffins, while they dither over policy.
As a humanist, I consider it darkly significant that over a billion people believe that a man rode up to heaven on a horse -- and quite a few are willing to defend those fantasies with violence and murder. They are unwilling to share the world with the rest of us. They are locked in the murky phantasmagoric imaginings of an earlier time -- and are unwilling and unlikely to emerge. Currently Muslims are involved in at least half a dozen armed conflicts worldwide. In Iraq, two SECTS can't even get along. Nowhere from Nigeria to Iran (possible exceptions: Turkey and Indonesia) have they been able to build anything resembling a liberal democratic society.
Terrorism
Historically, terrorism is a kind of asymmetric warfare in which people try to get invaders to leave their country (as Jews did to the British in Palestine). In Afghanistan, most of the new deaths and injuries are coming from roadside bombs. They've found they don't have to engage us militarily at all. For maybe $50 they can build a device that will blow up a Humvee and kill or permanently disable everyone inside. For the terrorists it's an exceedingly cheap form of warfare. For America, not so cheap. The best way to prevent terrorist attacks on America is to get the hell out of their countries and let them settle their own affairs, if they can.
Otherwise, it's only a matter of time till they get their hands on plutonium or smallpox and wreak havoc once again. Remember, they don't mind dying, as long as they take a lot of us with them. I know, a lot of Americans think that if the US withdraws from a war it started, then America "loses." Well, we've already lost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in a repeat of Vietnam, this time in two countries. The longer we stay on their land, the sooner the next 9/11 will be.
Clearly, American policymakers do not appreciate the adversary. "Desecration" of their worthless holy book is the least of our offenses. Merely being a non-Muslim is our death sentence.
Why the Blog (and the book)
WHY I WROTE THE BOOK (An Atheist Reads the Torah)
REASON IN RETREAT: THE CHALLENGE TO HUMANISTS
The last time I checked amazon.com, there were 6900 books on the Torah – why another? And why the blog?
Several reasons:
(1) To provide a counter argument—a small but determined piece of resistance – to the explosive growth of religiosity, superstition, and public piety during my lifetime.
“I’m not saying that.”
I was always a secular humanist. When they put “under God” in the Pledge, I said to myself , “I’m not saying that.” I was 12.
Religious belief has always been a strong force in American life (“in God we trust” on all our money and as the motto of my alma mater, Brown), and there have been several attempts to formally make this a Christian country. Even now, people are trying to rewrite American history to portray it all as the story of the emergence of a Christian nation.
All God, all the time
Since that moment 50 years ago when I first articulated, if only to myself, my atheism/secular humanism, I have witnessed a disturbing growth in public piety and religiosity (i.e., the self conscious, smug, proclamation of and gratuitous talk about religion, as opposed to actual good behavior).
I have witnessed the resurgence of orthodoxy and fundamentalism. I have seen the outbreak of a war on science and evolution. According to a Chicago Tribune report of a 2004 CBS poll, "55% of Americans believe that God created humans in [their] present form and only 13% claim to believe in evolution" (from Sarah Igo, The Averaged American).
And of course, I live in the time of September 11, and of the religiously motivated atrocities that preceded and followed it.
I find this all very dismaying. I was fortunate to have a classical/liberal/secular-humanistic education, during which I learned the methods and mentalities that characterize Western civilization, science, and learning.
I could see no reason at the time why these ideals would not triumph, and I left college quite optimistic – and quite unprepared for what happened.
What happened was what the world got a lot more religious.
All God, all the time
Today, 95% of people say they believe in God, and similarly impressive percentages believe in Heaven, Hell, Satan, and angels. Athletes and other performers thank Jesus for their victories, as if he were an invisible friend giving them an edge over the competition. You can actually go on the Internet and buy porcelain figurines of the robed Jesus helping someone with his golf swing and improving other sports abilities.
Not that long ago, politicians were expected to be churchgoers, but little more. Today they wear their religion on their sleeve and proclaim it at every opportunity. Jesus is Bush’s favorite philosopher? Does he even know any others?
Political and religious authority: a dangerous mix
When politicians get religious, it’s not a good sign. The current merging of Republicans and Christians (some 40% of the party's base consists of Evangenlicals) is extremely worrisome. History proves that when politicians think they have divine approval, when state power is melded with and reinforced by religious authority, there is invariably a whole lot of death and destruction.
Religiosity rampant
Today, the progress of science – the unraveling of the incredible mysteries of the DNA and the universe – is encountering stiff opposition from ideas like creationism and intelligent design. Entire institutes, organizations and foundations exist just to prove that a particular creation myth, the one in the Book of Genesis – one of maybe a thousand such myths throughout the world – is true.
But all creation myths have the same truth value – zero, since none of them is based on anything resembling evidence.
Today, the book marketplace is crowded with frightening works concerning Biblical prophecies about the end of the world, which has been frequently predicted but which, as you might’ve noticed, has not yet happened.
People went crazy in the year 2000, just as they went crazy in the year 1000. The world didn’t end, and computers didn’t crash. But that doesn’t mean the end-times aren’t coming, and a lot of people are getting ready – and scaring the hell out of each other and the rest of us as well.
It's nothing more than the elevation to unquestionable truth of a single piece of writing, which is in turn nothing more than the ramblings of an ancient writer with a vivid imagination or a good memory for legend, or perhaps both (and perhaps hallucinogenic drugs as well...who knows?).
Technology and religious fanaticism
And today, we don’t just have religious fanaticism – we have easily exportable and technologically leverageable religious fanaticism.
In the old days, if you were a religious true believer, spreading your orthodoxy was a major hassle. You had to get on your horse, gather other fanatics, seek out unbelievers, hack them to pieces...maybe it was satisfying in its own up-close-and-personal way, but it was highly labor- and resource-intensive.
Today, 19 people with box cutters can board airplanes and wreak havoc, all out of religious fanaticism. And I don’t even want to think about cyber-terrorism.
These developments, coupled with the flowing together of religious power with government/state power, which is happening, paradoxically, in some of the more backward areas of the world like the Middle East, as well as in some of the most developed, like the United States...means that today’s resurgence of religiosity and religious orthodoxy is not just an academic or doctrinal matter – it is a stark threat to our very existence on earth.
As I mentioned earlier, when governments believe that God is on their side, it is usually very bad news for human beings.
The ideals of Greek/Roman Humanism, Classical Jeffersonian Liberalism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment – the only ways in which humans have made progress, since prayer and worship yield nothing except job security for clerics – have not triumphed.
Quite the opposite. They don’t even get a fair hearing today. I see the world drifting backward, into the darkness. And one of the forces driving it backwards is religious orthodoxy.
Humanist ideas and ideals
So that’s one reason why I wrote the book – to explain the ideals of humanism and to show how they would be applied to a subject about which people feel very strongly, i.e., the Bible – and the Torah in particular.... and by doing so, to make other people feel better about secular humanists...and to make help secular humanists feel better about themselves, by defining themselves in terms of positive ideals.
I believe there are many closet secular humanists out there – and they are one of the key audiences for this book. All they need is the intellectual ammunition. And that is what I mean to give them.
(2) Not the devil
A second reason why I wrote the book...and this sort of follows from the first, is to put a more positive face on secular humanism...and give other secular humanists the intellectual tools to do the same.
When you think of the animosity and exclusion that homosexuals faced 50 or 100 years ago, it’s not too far-fetched to say that secular humanism is the new homosexuality.
To fundamentalists, secular people are...well, the devil. Atheists have no God, therefore no morality. I’ve heard this charge repeated over and over until I am really tired of it.
I just heard it repeated again by someone who should know better but is cognitively incapable of knowing better, namely an Orthodox rabbi writing a column in the Providence Journal.
He repeated the cliche – which is untrue at best and libelous at worst – that dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong are products of atheism.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Tyrants deify themselves and the state. They have nothing to do with secular humanism.
Good without God
For way too long, secular humanists have been vilified as lacking in morality or in lacking a basis for morality. Nothing could be further from the truth. You do not need God in order to be good and in fact some very God-fearing people are, as we all know, very bad.
The second word in the title of my book is “atheist.” But in the subtitle you find the phrase “secular humanist.” I very quickly switch from one to the other, because I want the secular humanist point of view to be positive. I want secular humanists to understand that they have something to be for, not merely against.
Humanists stand FOR something.
What’s so important about “a-theism” anyway? As Rabbi Wine asks, Why not classify religions as humanistic/ahumanistic? Since the only beings who practice religion are humans, isn’t that just as important a division, if not more so, than theistic/atheist?
Some regions, such as Buddhism, are inherently atheistic or nontheistic. Buddhism is humanistic as well. Likewise, Secular Humanistic Judaism is both nontheistic and humanistic.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are mixed. They are humanistic when they promote humanistic values, such as tolerance, nonviolence, the value and autonomy of human beings, charity, courage, compassion, honesty, and so on.
But they are decidedly ahumanistic when they practice exclusion, intolerance, oppression of women, discrimination, persecution, violence, ancestor worship, the submission of human beings to divine authority, and the mindless, unquestioning veneration of ancient texts.
Crusades and Inquisitions
Secular humanists have nothing to apologize for. We do not start Crusades, we do not conduct Inquisitions, we do not torture and burn people who disagree with us. We don’t kill people over the meaning of ancient texts.
And, on a kinder, gentler level, we do not force our religion into the faces and lives of others by putting our ideals on parade insisting that politicians all adhere to them...or by staging in-your-face public celebrations of our values.
Can you imagine a baseball player, after hitting a winning homerun, saying, after the game, “Well, that was a great triumph for human beings -- for me, the thousands of hours I’ve practiced...and the great advice from my coaches, not to mention the encouragement of the fans. I want to say, right here and now, that God and Jesus had nothing to do with it.”
(3) What does the Torah really say?
A third reason why I wrote the book was that I’ve had long had misgivings about the Torah and what it said.
I had grown accustomed to seeing books of Torah commentary with the square of text in the middle and everyone’s thoughts arranged around it. But I had never thought much about how people got from the original text to the commentary.
I began to focus on this question after 30 years spent in the theoretical study and practical application of linguistic principles, though never to religious texts. And the reason I re-focused on the issue had to do with the fourth reason for writing the book:
(4) The direct provocation of a single individual. He was the grain of sand in my oyster. The match to my haystack.
I became familiar with the philosophy of Humanistic Judaism at the Birmingham Temple (MI), where the Torah was kept in a library. It came as something of a shock to me to encounter a humanistic temple in Deerfield (IL) where the Torah was actually in front of the congregation in its own little modernistic Ark – and was actually read from on occasion.
This was the case when we first affiliated with Temple Beth Or in the mid-90s. We eventually left and came back when there was a new Rabbi. He was not of a secular humanistic bent when it came to the Torah. Quite the opposite.
He was a Humanist convert from Conservatism. His schtick was that he didn’t believe in God, but regarded Torah a “core resource,” the source of much wisdom. He considered the persona of God to be an exemplar for human conduct – and said as much from the pulpit. He had – and has – his followers.
I didn’t believe either of these propositions, but since I hadn’t read the Torah, I didn’t know for sure.
I realized that I had to read the Torah in its entirety. And I committed myself to the project. I was determined to find out the truth: Is the document relevant and insightful to modern people? Is the persona of God worthy of admiration?
I went in with no prejudices one way or the other. If the answers to these questions had been yes, I would have written no book, and there would be no blog.
But there are about 6900 books on the Torah, and as far as I know, not one of them answers the above two questions the way I do: no and no.
There really is not much there. The Torah doesn’t have much to say to us on matters of morality and good living – why would it? It’s from the ninth century B.C.E. Its God, despite a few benevolent moments, is a vicious, vindictive tyrant.
The authoritative version of what the Torah really says (as far as we know)
I selected the Jewish Publication Society translation, which is both recent and authoritative. Although I have a doctorate in linguistics, I’m just a beginner in Bible-text studies. It was important for me early on to establish the scholarly credentials of the translation I was using. As an academic, I was able to do this.
Sure enough, the JPS version turned out to be highly authoritative, benefiting from the work of many scholars over a long period, repeatedly revised and refined. I checked with an eminent rabbinical authority anyway...and the individual confirmed that this was indeed the authoritative version.
Later I acquired, as a backup reference, Gunther Plaut’s The Torah: A Modern Commentary... and found that he began with the very same translation.
Although I don’t recommend that you make the same 440-page slog of a journey through the JPS Torah, I will tell you that I encountered some surprises, which I will be happy to pass on to you.
Torah surprises
It came as something of a surprise to me that the Torah is selectively read, and that there is a great deal of subject matter that is never mentioned in Sunday school or uttered from rabbinical pulpits.
There is, for instance, a story in the book of Genesis (Ch. 34) about the rape of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, by the sons of a local chieftain. Her brothers take revenge by convincing the rapist’s kin (the Hamites) to be circumcised, then killing them while they’re recovering from the surgery!
As Mr. T. might say, I pity the fool who gets this passage for his/her bar/bat mitzva!
More importantly, there are long passages that vilify and predict the direst consequences for those who stray from God’s commandments (e.g., by becoming secular humanists).
One such passage (in Deut., Ch. 28) goes on for 52 verses and states at one point that the sinners’ plight will be so awful that women suffering from starvation will eat their own afterbirth! The amount of space and attention devoted to – not to mention the richly detailed grotesqueness of – these punishments far exceeds, in terms of quantity of text, God’s better moments, and I find the curses to be some of the most eloquent writing in the Torah.
Adam and Eve: what it really says
I also discovered last some of the best-known stories don’t quite say what we are told they say. The Genesis account of Adam and Eve says nothing about sin, sex, redemption, or the fall of man. The serpent doesn’t even tempt Eve directly. What exactly is the offense supposedly committed by Adam and Eve?
Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 17 says, “but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not yield to it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.” In Chapter 3, “the serpent said to the woman, ‘you are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad.’”
So this is the problem: aside from the threat to their lives, Adam and Eve are not to acquire moral discernment. Apparently that is to be left to God.
Tower of Babel: what it really says
There’s a similar distortion in the telling of the story of the Tower of Babel. Again, according to tradition, human arrogance is punished. What was the nature of this arrogance?
Genesis 11:5 tells us that “the Lord said, ’If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to do nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.’”
Arrogance? Or aspirations? If we look at the words of the text, it becomes clear that it is human aspirations that give God a problem.
Spin
Most important of all, I discovered spin. Spin is a particular kind of speech and writing about the Torah and the rest of the Bible.
It does not explain or elucidate, unlike commentary that provides archaeological or historical background, or perhaps alternate translations, to help readers better understand a piece of Torah content.
No, this is commentary whose production resembles a cotton candy machine, spinning out long gauzy interpretations of what the Torah writers really meant to say, reinterpreting, translating, inserting metaphors, and often just making things up. Plus, a lot of quoting out of context.
All in all, it adds up to what I call “rabbinical spin,” the process of transforming the simple (and often well-meaning) Torah text into a document of profound relevance.
So... in addition to all the other motivating factors for writing the book, there was the discovery of this massive and long-standing intellectual con game – the selective quoting, the quoting out of context, all the other “interpretive” strategies that constitute rabbinical spin – which I am eager to expose.
WHAT'S IN THE BOOK
Now that you know the reasons why I wrote the book, you’ll understand why I have included the content that I have included.
The first chapter lays out the difference between translation and inference, between translating a text and spinning it.
This chapter also includes an appendix that explains why the JPS version is the magnificent work of scholarship that it is. There’s also an appendix of “Torah FAQs” – since I found that most people don’t know the basic facts, among which are that the Torah is not the Bible and none of the events in the Torah actually happened or have any historical basis.
In the second chapter I actually analyze and dissect a learned rabbi’s statements about what the Torah says. I identify the places where he departs from Torah content or simple paraphrase...and inserts passages from elsewhere in the Torah or starts creating his own metaphors, cross-cultural allusions, and made-up “interpretations” simply fashioned from whole cloth.
The third chapter is a Torah summary. No spin. Just what it says.
The next two chapters deal with the Torah’s morality (unimpressive) and the persona of God (more often than not, the CEO from hell).
The concluding chapter explains why it really matters – how the humanistic interpretation of the Torah is actually an example of humanistic values in practice, whereas the traditional treatment is a denial of these values.
WHO IS THE AUDIENCE?
Not true believers, unless they are open to humanist conversion (described below).
True unbelievers, although a small minority of the population, will now have a rational, plausible, philosophically and scientifically consistent way of looking at the Torah. It’s okay to believe that none of the events in the Torah actually happened. Instead, historical and archaeological data tell us quite a bit about the early history of the Jews, and it is there, not the Torah, that we find the true beginnings of our people.
But by far my main target audience is the vast mass of potential doubters who are sitting in synagogues and churches (or not sitting in synagogues and churches) thinking that they simply cannot accept the traditional program...yet not knowing what the alternative might be.
Here’s a litmus test: if prayer makes you uncomfortable, embarrassed, just a little bit humiliated, you are probably a secular humanist, and you will find the book interesting and informative.
HUMANIST OUTREACH
In the blog I propose the outreach of secular humanism to potential adherents -- and even to opponents. For a very long time, secular humanists have been talking to no one but each other. But I am convinced that we must begin talking to others, else we – and perhaps the world itself -- may not survive.
We are not the devil. We are not immoral. At our best, we practice the same values as religious people, minus all the prayer, ritual, superstition, veneration of ancient texts and general God-baggage.
Life is hard enough as it is, and a lot of us find it simpler and more integrated this way, not wasting one moment worrying (or pretending to worry) about what God wants, meant, or has decreed.
Can we convince others of the benefits of secular humanism and its reason/reality-orientation? Can we provide a counterweight to the gigantic religious pendulum? Can we convince others that to shed God, mythology, and ritual is actually a great liberation of the spirit? Our very survival may depend on the answer.
This outreach involves religious concepts like humanistic or revelation, humanist conversion, and humanistic salvation, all of which have meaning and can be explained to people who want to think about secular humanism in religious terms.
To stem the tide of ignorance and superstition, to help reason get back on its feet and make a case for itself: these are the purposes to which I’ve dedicated my book, my blog – and the rest of my life.
___________
REASON IN RETREAT: THE CHALLENGE TO HUMANISTS
The last time I checked amazon.com, there were 6900 books on the Torah – why another? And why the blog?
Several reasons:
(1) To provide a counter argument—a small but determined piece of resistance – to the explosive growth of religiosity, superstition, and public piety during my lifetime.
“I’m not saying that.”
I was always a secular humanist. When they put “under God” in the Pledge, I said to myself , “I’m not saying that.” I was 12.
Religious belief has always been a strong force in American life (“in God we trust” on all our money and as the motto of my alma mater, Brown), and there have been several attempts to formally make this a Christian country. Even now, people are trying to rewrite American history to portray it all as the story of the emergence of a Christian nation.
All God, all the time
Since that moment 50 years ago when I first articulated, if only to myself, my atheism/secular humanism, I have witnessed a disturbing growth in public piety and religiosity (i.e., the self conscious, smug, proclamation of and gratuitous talk about religion, as opposed to actual good behavior).
I have witnessed the resurgence of orthodoxy and fundamentalism. I have seen the outbreak of a war on science and evolution. According to a Chicago Tribune report of a 2004 CBS poll, "55% of Americans believe that God created humans in [their] present form and only 13% claim to believe in evolution" (from Sarah Igo, The Averaged American).
And of course, I live in the time of September 11, and of the religiously motivated atrocities that preceded and followed it.
I find this all very dismaying. I was fortunate to have a classical/liberal/secular-humanistic education, during which I learned the methods and mentalities that characterize Western civilization, science, and learning.
I could see no reason at the time why these ideals would not triumph, and I left college quite optimistic – and quite unprepared for what happened.
What happened was what the world got a lot more religious.
All God, all the time
Today, 95% of people say they believe in God, and similarly impressive percentages believe in Heaven, Hell, Satan, and angels. Athletes and other performers thank Jesus for their victories, as if he were an invisible friend giving them an edge over the competition. You can actually go on the Internet and buy porcelain figurines of the robed Jesus helping someone with his golf swing and improving other sports abilities.
Not that long ago, politicians were expected to be churchgoers, but little more. Today they wear their religion on their sleeve and proclaim it at every opportunity. Jesus is Bush’s favorite philosopher? Does he even know any others?
Political and religious authority: a dangerous mix
When politicians get religious, it’s not a good sign. The current merging of Republicans and Christians (some 40% of the party's base consists of Evangenlicals) is extremely worrisome. History proves that when politicians think they have divine approval, when state power is melded with and reinforced by religious authority, there is invariably a whole lot of death and destruction.
Religiosity rampant
Today, the progress of science – the unraveling of the incredible mysteries of the DNA and the universe – is encountering stiff opposition from ideas like creationism and intelligent design. Entire institutes, organizations and foundations exist just to prove that a particular creation myth, the one in the Book of Genesis – one of maybe a thousand such myths throughout the world – is true.
But all creation myths have the same truth value – zero, since none of them is based on anything resembling evidence.
Today, the book marketplace is crowded with frightening works concerning Biblical prophecies about the end of the world, which has been frequently predicted but which, as you might’ve noticed, has not yet happened.
People went crazy in the year 2000, just as they went crazy in the year 1000. The world didn’t end, and computers didn’t crash. But that doesn’t mean the end-times aren’t coming, and a lot of people are getting ready – and scaring the hell out of each other and the rest of us as well.
It's nothing more than the elevation to unquestionable truth of a single piece of writing, which is in turn nothing more than the ramblings of an ancient writer with a vivid imagination or a good memory for legend, or perhaps both (and perhaps hallucinogenic drugs as well...who knows?).
Technology and religious fanaticism
And today, we don’t just have religious fanaticism – we have easily exportable and technologically leverageable religious fanaticism.
In the old days, if you were a religious true believer, spreading your orthodoxy was a major hassle. You had to get on your horse, gather other fanatics, seek out unbelievers, hack them to pieces...maybe it was satisfying in its own up-close-and-personal way, but it was highly labor- and resource-intensive.
Today, 19 people with box cutters can board airplanes and wreak havoc, all out of religious fanaticism. And I don’t even want to think about cyber-terrorism.
These developments, coupled with the flowing together of religious power with government/state power, which is happening, paradoxically, in some of the more backward areas of the world like the Middle East, as well as in some of the most developed, like the United States...means that today’s resurgence of religiosity and religious orthodoxy is not just an academic or doctrinal matter – it is a stark threat to our very existence on earth.
As I mentioned earlier, when governments believe that God is on their side, it is usually very bad news for human beings.
The ideals of Greek/Roman Humanism, Classical Jeffersonian Liberalism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment – the only ways in which humans have made progress, since prayer and worship yield nothing except job security for clerics – have not triumphed.
Quite the opposite. They don’t even get a fair hearing today. I see the world drifting backward, into the darkness. And one of the forces driving it backwards is religious orthodoxy.
Humanist ideas and ideals
So that’s one reason why I wrote the book – to explain the ideals of humanism and to show how they would be applied to a subject about which people feel very strongly, i.e., the Bible – and the Torah in particular.... and by doing so, to make other people feel better about secular humanists...and to make help secular humanists feel better about themselves, by defining themselves in terms of positive ideals.
I believe there are many closet secular humanists out there – and they are one of the key audiences for this book. All they need is the intellectual ammunition. And that is what I mean to give them.
(2) Not the devil
A second reason why I wrote the book...and this sort of follows from the first, is to put a more positive face on secular humanism...and give other secular humanists the intellectual tools to do the same.
When you think of the animosity and exclusion that homosexuals faced 50 or 100 years ago, it’s not too far-fetched to say that secular humanism is the new homosexuality.
To fundamentalists, secular people are...well, the devil. Atheists have no God, therefore no morality. I’ve heard this charge repeated over and over until I am really tired of it.
I just heard it repeated again by someone who should know better but is cognitively incapable of knowing better, namely an Orthodox rabbi writing a column in the Providence Journal.
He repeated the cliche – which is untrue at best and libelous at worst – that dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong are products of atheism.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Tyrants deify themselves and the state. They have nothing to do with secular humanism.
Good without God
For way too long, secular humanists have been vilified as lacking in morality or in lacking a basis for morality. Nothing could be further from the truth. You do not need God in order to be good and in fact some very God-fearing people are, as we all know, very bad.
The second word in the title of my book is “atheist.” But in the subtitle you find the phrase “secular humanist.” I very quickly switch from one to the other, because I want the secular humanist point of view to be positive. I want secular humanists to understand that they have something to be for, not merely against.
Humanists stand FOR something.
What’s so important about “a-theism” anyway? As Rabbi Wine asks, Why not classify religions as humanistic/ahumanistic? Since the only beings who practice religion are humans, isn’t that just as important a division, if not more so, than theistic/atheist?
Some regions, such as Buddhism, are inherently atheistic or nontheistic. Buddhism is humanistic as well. Likewise, Secular Humanistic Judaism is both nontheistic and humanistic.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are mixed. They are humanistic when they promote humanistic values, such as tolerance, nonviolence, the value and autonomy of human beings, charity, courage, compassion, honesty, and so on.
But they are decidedly ahumanistic when they practice exclusion, intolerance, oppression of women, discrimination, persecution, violence, ancestor worship, the submission of human beings to divine authority, and the mindless, unquestioning veneration of ancient texts.
Crusades and Inquisitions
Secular humanists have nothing to apologize for. We do not start Crusades, we do not conduct Inquisitions, we do not torture and burn people who disagree with us. We don’t kill people over the meaning of ancient texts.
And, on a kinder, gentler level, we do not force our religion into the faces and lives of others by putting our ideals on parade insisting that politicians all adhere to them...or by staging in-your-face public celebrations of our values.
Can you imagine a baseball player, after hitting a winning homerun, saying, after the game, “Well, that was a great triumph for human beings -- for me, the thousands of hours I’ve practiced...and the great advice from my coaches, not to mention the encouragement of the fans. I want to say, right here and now, that God and Jesus had nothing to do with it.”
(3) What does the Torah really say?
A third reason why I wrote the book was that I’ve had long had misgivings about the Torah and what it said.
I had grown accustomed to seeing books of Torah commentary with the square of text in the middle and everyone’s thoughts arranged around it. But I had never thought much about how people got from the original text to the commentary.
I began to focus on this question after 30 years spent in the theoretical study and practical application of linguistic principles, though never to religious texts. And the reason I re-focused on the issue had to do with the fourth reason for writing the book:
(4) The direct provocation of a single individual. He was the grain of sand in my oyster. The match to my haystack.
I became familiar with the philosophy of Humanistic Judaism at the Birmingham Temple (MI), where the Torah was kept in a library. It came as something of a shock to me to encounter a humanistic temple in Deerfield (IL) where the Torah was actually in front of the congregation in its own little modernistic Ark – and was actually read from on occasion.
This was the case when we first affiliated with Temple Beth Or in the mid-90s. We eventually left and came back when there was a new Rabbi. He was not of a secular humanistic bent when it came to the Torah. Quite the opposite.
He was a Humanist convert from Conservatism. His schtick was that he didn’t believe in God, but regarded Torah a “core resource,” the source of much wisdom. He considered the persona of God to be an exemplar for human conduct – and said as much from the pulpit. He had – and has – his followers.
I didn’t believe either of these propositions, but since I hadn’t read the Torah, I didn’t know for sure.
I realized that I had to read the Torah in its entirety. And I committed myself to the project. I was determined to find out the truth: Is the document relevant and insightful to modern people? Is the persona of God worthy of admiration?
I went in with no prejudices one way or the other. If the answers to these questions had been yes, I would have written no book, and there would be no blog.
But there are about 6900 books on the Torah, and as far as I know, not one of them answers the above two questions the way I do: no and no.
There really is not much there. The Torah doesn’t have much to say to us on matters of morality and good living – why would it? It’s from the ninth century B.C.E. Its God, despite a few benevolent moments, is a vicious, vindictive tyrant.
The authoritative version of what the Torah really says (as far as we know)
I selected the Jewish Publication Society translation, which is both recent and authoritative. Although I have a doctorate in linguistics, I’m just a beginner in Bible-text studies. It was important for me early on to establish the scholarly credentials of the translation I was using. As an academic, I was able to do this.
Sure enough, the JPS version turned out to be highly authoritative, benefiting from the work of many scholars over a long period, repeatedly revised and refined. I checked with an eminent rabbinical authority anyway...and the individual confirmed that this was indeed the authoritative version.
Later I acquired, as a backup reference, Gunther Plaut’s The Torah: A Modern Commentary... and found that he began with the very same translation.
Although I don’t recommend that you make the same 440-page slog of a journey through the JPS Torah, I will tell you that I encountered some surprises, which I will be happy to pass on to you.
Torah surprises
It came as something of a surprise to me that the Torah is selectively read, and that there is a great deal of subject matter that is never mentioned in Sunday school or uttered from rabbinical pulpits.
There is, for instance, a story in the book of Genesis (Ch. 34) about the rape of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, by the sons of a local chieftain. Her brothers take revenge by convincing the rapist’s kin (the Hamites) to be circumcised, then killing them while they’re recovering from the surgery!
As Mr. T. might say, I pity the fool who gets this passage for his/her bar/bat mitzva!
More importantly, there are long passages that vilify and predict the direst consequences for those who stray from God’s commandments (e.g., by becoming secular humanists).
One such passage (in Deut., Ch. 28) goes on for 52 verses and states at one point that the sinners’ plight will be so awful that women suffering from starvation will eat their own afterbirth! The amount of space and attention devoted to – not to mention the richly detailed grotesqueness of – these punishments far exceeds, in terms of quantity of text, God’s better moments, and I find the curses to be some of the most eloquent writing in the Torah.
Adam and Eve: what it really says
I also discovered last some of the best-known stories don’t quite say what we are told they say. The Genesis account of Adam and Eve says nothing about sin, sex, redemption, or the fall of man. The serpent doesn’t even tempt Eve directly. What exactly is the offense supposedly committed by Adam and Eve?
Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 17 says, “but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not yield to it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.” In Chapter 3, “the serpent said to the woman, ‘you are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad.’”
So this is the problem: aside from the threat to their lives, Adam and Eve are not to acquire moral discernment. Apparently that is to be left to God.
Tower of Babel: what it really says
There’s a similar distortion in the telling of the story of the Tower of Babel. Again, according to tradition, human arrogance is punished. What was the nature of this arrogance?
Genesis 11:5 tells us that “the Lord said, ’If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to do nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.’”
Arrogance? Or aspirations? If we look at the words of the text, it becomes clear that it is human aspirations that give God a problem.
Spin
Most important of all, I discovered spin. Spin is a particular kind of speech and writing about the Torah and the rest of the Bible.
It does not explain or elucidate, unlike commentary that provides archaeological or historical background, or perhaps alternate translations, to help readers better understand a piece of Torah content.
No, this is commentary whose production resembles a cotton candy machine, spinning out long gauzy interpretations of what the Torah writers really meant to say, reinterpreting, translating, inserting metaphors, and often just making things up. Plus, a lot of quoting out of context.
All in all, it adds up to what I call “rabbinical spin,” the process of transforming the simple (and often well-meaning) Torah text into a document of profound relevance.
So... in addition to all the other motivating factors for writing the book, there was the discovery of this massive and long-standing intellectual con game – the selective quoting, the quoting out of context, all the other “interpretive” strategies that constitute rabbinical spin – which I am eager to expose.
WHAT'S IN THE BOOK
Now that you know the reasons why I wrote the book, you’ll understand why I have included the content that I have included.
The first chapter lays out the difference between translation and inference, between translating a text and spinning it.
This chapter also includes an appendix that explains why the JPS version is the magnificent work of scholarship that it is. There’s also an appendix of “Torah FAQs” – since I found that most people don’t know the basic facts, among which are that the Torah is not the Bible and none of the events in the Torah actually happened or have any historical basis.
In the second chapter I actually analyze and dissect a learned rabbi’s statements about what the Torah says. I identify the places where he departs from Torah content or simple paraphrase...and inserts passages from elsewhere in the Torah or starts creating his own metaphors, cross-cultural allusions, and made-up “interpretations” simply fashioned from whole cloth.
The third chapter is a Torah summary. No spin. Just what it says.
The next two chapters deal with the Torah’s morality (unimpressive) and the persona of God (more often than not, the CEO from hell).
The concluding chapter explains why it really matters – how the humanistic interpretation of the Torah is actually an example of humanistic values in practice, whereas the traditional treatment is a denial of these values.
WHO IS THE AUDIENCE?
Not true believers, unless they are open to humanist conversion (described below).
True unbelievers, although a small minority of the population, will now have a rational, plausible, philosophically and scientifically consistent way of looking at the Torah. It’s okay to believe that none of the events in the Torah actually happened. Instead, historical and archaeological data tell us quite a bit about the early history of the Jews, and it is there, not the Torah, that we find the true beginnings of our people.
But by far my main target audience is the vast mass of potential doubters who are sitting in synagogues and churches (or not sitting in synagogues and churches) thinking that they simply cannot accept the traditional program...yet not knowing what the alternative might be.
Here’s a litmus test: if prayer makes you uncomfortable, embarrassed, just a little bit humiliated, you are probably a secular humanist, and you will find the book interesting and informative.
HUMANIST OUTREACH
In the blog I propose the outreach of secular humanism to potential adherents -- and even to opponents. For a very long time, secular humanists have been talking to no one but each other. But I am convinced that we must begin talking to others, else we – and perhaps the world itself -- may not survive.
We are not the devil. We are not immoral. At our best, we practice the same values as religious people, minus all the prayer, ritual, superstition, veneration of ancient texts and general God-baggage.
Life is hard enough as it is, and a lot of us find it simpler and more integrated this way, not wasting one moment worrying (or pretending to worry) about what God wants, meant, or has decreed.
Can we convince others of the benefits of secular humanism and its reason/reality-orientation? Can we provide a counterweight to the gigantic religious pendulum? Can we convince others that to shed God, mythology, and ritual is actually a great liberation of the spirit? Our very survival may depend on the answer.
This outreach involves religious concepts like humanistic or revelation, humanist conversion, and humanistic salvation, all of which have meaning and can be explained to people who want to think about secular humanism in religious terms.
To stem the tide of ignorance and superstition, to help reason get back on its feet and make a case for itself: these are the purposes to which I’ve dedicated my book, my blog – and the rest of my life.
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